A loud clanging of bells jolts Urmi awake. She had fallen into a heavy, dreamless sleep after dining on a packet of chocolate cream biscuits and a cup of jasmine-flavoured green tea that reminded her of a scented candle in her living room back home. The anti-anxiety pill helps her fall asleep quickly these days and makes her sleep for longer than usual. But the rude ringing sound rips through the membrane of her slumber, and she snaps into consciousness with a start. For a few moments, she is confused and disoriented. Her heart hammers in her chest, as if she has been running from something in her sleep. And then she remembers where she is and why. She checks the time on her mobile phone. It is a few minutes past five in the morning. She lies in bed, listening to the ringing bell. It is alarming, insistent—dang-dang, dang-dang, dang-dang, it goes, like a fire engine rushing towards a house in flames. Where on earth is it coming from, Urmi wonders. After some time, she gives up trying to hang on to her shredded sleep.Shuma Raha,The Sea Has The Answers,Niyogi Books Private Limited (June 2026).She gets out of bed and, walking over to the other side of the room, draws the curtains and looks out of the window. The bell stops ringing almost at once, as if silenced by the sight of this thin woman with desolate eyes. The clean morning air wafts in, bringing with it the scent of the sea. And suddenly, Urmi is overcome by the perfection of the moment—the gauzy blush of dawn, the sea a crinkled sheet of dark azure, the tiny fishing boats bobbing in the distance…’So beautiful,’ she says softly, feeling light, almost weightless, as if her soul has been freed from her body.She arrived here yesterday. Here, at Kinjalka, her house by the sea in a small town cradled in an indentation of the coastline that hugs the Bay of Bengal. Kinjalka. The name has been tolling in her mind for the last few days, calling to her, telling her to drop everything and come. And here she is at last. Kinjalka, the beloved playing field of her childhood. Kinjalka, with its sun-drenched sweep of memories.She had not thought of coming here at first. For all the fragility of her appearance—her slight figure, her fine-boned elegance, and her large, limpid, wide-set eyes—running away is not Urmi’s style. She looks younger than hwwer 43 years, and her oval face, with its high cheekbones and full lips, which carry the faintest hint of an overbite, could have been attractive— sexy even—had it not been for the bleakness of her expression. She looks frail, as if she were recovering from an illness, and there is a whiff of vulnerability about her that strikes you at once. In reality, though, Urmi has a core of toughness that she herself was perhaps never fully aware of. When the awful nightmare burst upon her on that blazing day in June, when she felt that her whole world had been blasted and shot out of existence, she had been determined not to be consumed by the calamity, determined not to fall through the sudden, horrifying breach in the sedate rhythm of her life. She would not give way, she told herself, and succumb to the disaster that had exploded in her face. But it became worse as the days went by. The publicity. The gossip. The endless flow of dirt unloading on the ruins of her certainties. She felt that she was going down under its weight, vanishing under a monstrous landfill of muck, and there would never be a way to stand up, reclaim calm and regain dignity.And then last week, more than a month after Shankar’s exposure as a workplace sex pest, Rima, her oldest and closest friend, came over to her house. ‘Why on earth have you kept your phone switched off?’ Rima demanded. ‘And you haven’t even been reading or answering my messages! I was really worried, yaar.’Urmi bit her lower lip and said nothing.Rima was a large, vigorous woman with a head full of furious grey locks. She looked several years older than Urmi, although they were the same age, but she had not let that fact get in the way of their friendship. Emotions such as envy rarely clouded Rima’s brisk, practical attitude to life. Besides, she considered herself luckier than most. She had a pliant husband who was an enormously successful lawyer at the Calcutta High Court, and two children, a boy and a girl, who meekly submitted to her tireless efforts to ensure that they would make it to a top-rung college, preferably in the US, after they passed out of school. Urmi knew that many of their common friends found Rima overbearing. Shankar, too, tended to give her a wide berth. But Urmi was fond of her. Rima had been holidaying in the hills near Manali when Shankar was outed. She came to know about it a day later, and immediately called Urmi to express her shock at the news and to make sure that she was all right. Naturally, she wanted to come and see her after she returned to Kolkata, but Urmi did not wish to meet anyone at the time. So she took to calling her every day to find out how Urmi was holding up, what Shankar was saying by way of denying the allegations, and whether his assertions were believable. ‘I suppose there’s no doubt now that he is guilty,’ she remarked, after a few more women came forward with sexual harassment charges against him. ‘You, of course, are a trusting innocent, but he managed to pull the wool over my eyes! Honestly, I can’t believe it even now! Just shows that you can never tell with men!’Urmi usually received these observations in silence. However, when she switched off her phone altogether, Rima decided to come over and tackle her in person. ‘Listen, babes, you need to stop brooding and hiding from everything and everyone,’ Rima said. ‘Have you seen yourself in the mirror lately? If you were thin before, you are skeletal now. You look like a ghost! Come on, let’s go out for a bit. You got to snap out of it—it’s been over a month! How long are you going to let this thing get on top of you? Chalo, let’s go and have lunch somewhere and talk, haan? You have to resume normal life, babes.’The weather had broken a couple of weeks ago. The intolerable heat had lifted, and now it rained almost every day. Urmi tried to tell her friend that it was too wet to step out, but Rima would have none of it. She took her to one of those restaurants on Park Street where neither of them had been in years, and which, despite many refurbishments, managed to look dreary and dated. With the clairvoyance born of their long friendship, Rima had figured that Urmi would perhaps agree to go there, rather than to any of their usual haunts, such as the clubs or the coffee shops, where they were likely to find people they knew. Slightly bemused by nostalgia—the eatery was one they used to frequent when they were in college—they sat in uncomfortable red plush chairs, attended by an enthusiastic, ill-trained waiter who placed the cutlery askew and slopped water on the table while pouring it into the glass. Urmi, who was particular about the way she was served at restaurants, did not seem to notice, or if she did, did not seem to care.‘Look, you got to get a hold on yourself. However awful this is, it’s not the end of the world,’ Rima said, digging into her devilled crab with hungry relish. ‘Women deal with unfaithful husbands all the time. Although, I admit this is different. The molestation and harassment part makes it much worse. Still, you can and you will get through this.’Urmi smiled palely and nibbled on a bit of the salad that she had ordered. The medley of arugula, olives and feta cheese was the doughty old eatery’s stab at hipness, but they had not got it quite right.‘Why not take a break, haan?’ Rima said. ‘Why not go away somewhere for a few days?’‘Go away? You mean, run away from this disaster?’‘It’s not running away, babes,’ Rima said firmly. ‘It’s called taking a break. Get out of town for a bit. Things have a way of sorting themselves out in the end. Just go and give yourself a holiday.’‘I’ll think about it,’ Urmi said.‘Hey, think about it right now! You don’t want to have a breakdown, do you? In fact, you could be having one already. My god, you certainly look like it! Listen, go to that seaside place of yours. Just stay there for a while. It’ll do you good and take your mind off all this rubbish.’‘Rubbish’ was Rima’s go-to word for anything unpleasant.The idea of fleeing from all this rubbish, as Rima put it, had not occurred to Urmi. She had contemplated some steps, of course. Some drastic steps too, for she had quickly gone from shocked disbelief at the charges against Shankar to a sort of icy certainty that they were mostly true. But a holiday? An escape? No, not once in the last hellish month had the thought crossed her mind. Sitting in that freezing restaurant (you always got more than your money’s worth of air-conditioning there), as the carpet stank faintly of must and the rain bucketed down from a grim sky outside, Urmi suppressed a small shiver. A holiday, a going away, a break…spending a few days in her sunny seaside home which she inherited after her father died …Yes, I could go to Kinjalka, she thought. It would be a relief to turn my back on this sordid mess. She wondered why she had not thought of it before. Kinjalka would be the perfect getaway, the perfect place to go and rest her head for a few days. Or maybe a few weeks. Or even a month. Now that the idea was taking hold, it was warming her, as though a small flame of happiness had lit up somewhere inside her. Suddenly, she found that she did not want to put a date to her return. She would see how it went. She would play it by the ear. She would go to Kinjalka and find succour in its wide, wind-blown arms.