Verve People
Text by Akshaya Pillai
Unni R dreamt that he was in the wrong house. The bed felt unfamiliar and the window, tiny and too far away. When he woke up, he carried the confusion with him to the kitchen, where he threw open a window and let in whatever remained of the afternoon. While the water for his kattan kapi is boiling, Unni suppresses a yawn and stumbles for the record button, speaking into his phone: “In all my years of writing, it was the first time I had abandoned something. It was a period novel, and I was already 25 chapters in, but it just did not feel like the right time,” he says.
Balanced on the fence, my cell phone shudders, and Unni’s voice plays to an audience of trees. I am in my yard, repurposing an old window frame into a stake to save the turkey berry. “This year has been about abandoning things midway,” I…