Abhay (which, remember, means ‘the fearless one’)

Mira has left the car (even though her child lock was on, she used the other rear door) and done something I cannot recognise at all. She’s run across the road, oblivious to the crazy different kinds of traffic, all the way to the main bus terminus opposite. She does all kinds of bold jumps and leaps at playgrounds and at her crèche and off all the furniture around the house, but never anything of this sort before. She knows vehicles and roads and car parks are off limits.

I’m right there watching but can’t follow since I’ve just started putting petrol in the car. We’re at a petrol pump directly across from Hazaribagh bus station. I’m yelling her name repeatedly and commanding her to return, but what is my voice against car horns and rickshaw horns and lorry horns and bus horns? Thankfully, she’s made it to the other side of the road, but then cuts straight across the open area of the bus station, where at least four different long-distance buses are moving in or out even as I watch in paralysed horror.

‘What in fuck’s name are my priorities?’ I’m thinking as I fling down the petrol hose and take off after my now-invisible daughter. How was I more concerned with wasting petrol or losing my place in the line rather than going after her? And now I can’t even see her, after I’ve crossed the road with great care (God knows how Mira managed to find the perfect gap to shoot across at this relentlessly busy chowk) and am looking, first all around the moving buses and then in the terminal where passengers are waiting, because they too are a hazard of a different sort. A four-year-old foreigner who speaks no Hindi and has been separated from her dad — where was she more at risk: out amid the giant vehicles that wouldn’t even be able to see her, or else among this crowd of strangers, deep within a poor, conflict-riven state of India? What multiple terrors had she plunged me into with this one dash across the road that had taken all of a minute?

When I cannot spot her in between the buses, I fight away my panic by forcing myself to focus on the passenger area, racing into the covered hall towards the ticket counters, looking all around me and shouting her name. After I’ve reached the other end, and once more checked if she’s outside, I retrace my steps and run back through the terminal in the desperate hope that I might have missed her, or else that she would have returned to the car.

An unknown number of indescribable minutes pass in which the only certainty I formulate is that if my daughter were found harmed in any way, I wouldn’t myself leave this bus station alive. By now, I’ve abandoned all method and order and have looked everywhere within the terminal three, four times. And everything inside me has started to cave and melt as it dawns that she is probably still alive since there hasn’t yet been an outcry, but already she could be anywhere. She could have easily been transported away on a bus, or else she might be tantalisingly close, still at the terminus, perhaps unable to yell out even though she can see me from a bus that’s about to leave.

I am nothing but shit and stench and urine when I finally realise someone nearby has been calling out. ‘Baba, Baba’ a voice has repeated at least four times before I whirl around and then understand I have to drop to my knees. Because Mira is watching me from two buses away, crouched under the second one right beside its rear right-hand wheels. The bus is stationary, but I can’t tell amid all the din whether its engine is on or not.

As I half-crawl, half-run, I wake up.

The only thing my dream — on the plane to Bangkok on Friday morning — got right was its reflection of my prejudices; that like Lena, I too had believed that Hazaribagh would most likely bring us harm.

Other than that, as a portent of danger, it was entirely inaccurate, not to mention late.

Harm came at the children’s playground in Ben Burn Park, in one of the safest zones of my ‘safer country’. And harm came from within, from the one place I hadn’t even thought to watch: Mira’s beating heart.

And I knew, despite all the venom I had spouted the afternoon before, that harm had come solely because I hadn’t thought to watch.