I take the steep decline and turn left to enter the main road. I pass the bakery and it ignites memories of my time with her. The setting would be very similar to now, only that she would be behind me after having picked her up from her department. Even if it was open now, I don't think I could go in. The place means nothing without her. In the short time of being here in Trivandrum, the bakery holds our stories and our tastes. I have mentioned this before. It was brief. It didn’t justify what the place really means to us.

I am the kind who will eat anything and everything in this bakery. I love snacks and junk food. I might skip the spicy biscuits or something similar. I will be fully focused on the sweets and pastries. They draw my attention the moment I enter one. She is the kind who is choosy and has clear-cut preferences. She doesn’t like anything that is colored bright. This narrows it down to chocolate, which is her comfort flavor. To be honest, it has become hard to find good chocolate cakes or pastries. I like all kinds of flavors. After I started to try out the chocolate pastries of the bakeries in the city with her, I have come to realize which tastes good and which is not good. Some of them have a plasticky taste to them. It lingers in your mouth for a while. I wasn’t aware of it at first. She pointed it out to me. I tried with this new perspective and yes, there was a plasticky taste to it. I asked her what it was. She didn’t know, but it was something that turned her off. This wasn’t the chocolate flavor she liked. Sometimes the pastries are okay. Rarely do we find one that is interesting and gets her appreciation. If something makes the cut, it is heavenly. She knows what she wants and how it should be.

We look out for anything exciting being offered every time we are inside the bakery. Once we stumbled upon chocolate and caramel tart. I bought it without much hope. It turned out to be great. She gave her thumbs up. I liked it too. The chocolate was tasty and had a tinge of tartness to it. Thinking of it makes my mouth water. We buy it if it is on the display. Either they don't stock it up, or is in high demand and gets finished quickly.

In the sweets category, she has a clear-cut preference for a couple of varieties of a famous sweets. Rest she discards hastily. She hates milk sweets. If I buy one and ask her to have a taste, she would reject it with a gagging expression. She likes the savory things being offered in the shop. She is very fond of their spicy potato chips. It is one of our constant purchases once we are inside. She likes two varieties of cakes being sold. One is obviously the chocolate cake. The other is a ghee cake. She likes to have it with tea in the evening. Finally, there are the chocolates. She loves them. No matter what we purchase there will be a bar of chocolate to accompany the items. This is fixed. Lately, she has fallen in love with the Belgian Chocolate version of a popular chocolate.

We enter with the idea of buying a packet of bread but end up with a whole lot of other stuff. There have been times when we have checked out without having bought the thing we came for. That is how much this bakery means to us. The only thing that sometimes gets to my nerves is the time it takes to get things billed. There is only one person behind the counter and another one to bill it. If there are a couple of people inside who are buying things that are on display, then it will take some time to get them all boxed up and segregated. I think I have slowly come to terms with it. Once she felt the slight restlessness in my stance. She quickly held my hands and made me calm. I gave her a huge smile. It was my way of appreciating her innate ability to gauge my mood and respond accordingly.

We haven't found any other bakery in the vicinity that caters to our needs. I have visited a few on the road and a bit away from our route. Since I know her preferences one look into what they are offering is all I need to determine whether I need to visit it again or not. This doesn’t mean we don't visit any other bakeries. We can’t always go to this bakery. It is far from our home. There are a couple of good ones in Pongumoodu. They do have a couple of stuff that appeals to our taste. We get them while we are there.

I have a friend who is a baker. She makes all kinds of mouth-watering stuff and uploads them on her status on Instagram. Once when we met for a mutual friend's wedding she had brought a macaron made of a local Indian flavor. It was delicious. I have had the flavor in some of the cold refreshing drinks you get in the northern states of the country during the summer season. They call it thandai. The macaron was thandai-flavored. She had also made a cake with the same flavor, but it was finished off before we met. Seeing her make all this stuff made me wanna do something similar.

I attempted my hand at making a sourdough batter when I was quarantined for a fortnight in my home following my return after the second lockdown. Since I had nothing to do for the entire day, I decided to take the first steps toward becoming a home baker. To make a sourdough batter you need to make the culture first. This required the mixing of flour and water in definite proportions for quite some days. It resulted in the production of yeast in the culture that would then go on to make the bread. I contacted my baker friend. She was also up for it. We both started it. Every twenty-four hours the culture had to be fed with flour. It had to be weighed first, a portion of it has to be discarded away and then an equal amount of flour and water should be added to the culture mix, stirred, and kept away.

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I kept on with this for a week. We decided to share our results. My culture didn’t come out as expected. Her did. It was all bubbly and ready for use. I felt a bit disappointed. I didn’t know where I had gone wrong. I combed through the internet to find an explanation for it and the proper way to do it. All of them said there was a chance that it might just not work, that it might take more than a week or two for the desired results to come. A lot depended on the surrounding environment. You were essentially making your own culture of yeast to be used for making your sourdough.

I tried to salvage it in the next few days, but that didn’t work. It just wouldn’t rise as it should. Finally, I gave up on it because my quarantine was coming to an end and I had plans to go and meet my friends. Then a lot of things happened and I had to drop the idea completely. I threw away the culture I had stashed away in the fridge. It was turning bad. I wanted it to work, wanted to bake my own bread. Maybe some other time. I haven't given up on it though. I have plans to get back into it. I mean I had. Now the plans have changed - to find my Anna, figure out this disappearance, and meet a fellow human being.

It might come across as if I am not thinking about my parents or my kith and kin. I am. In fact, I am thinking of what to do to confirm their presence. Without any mode of communication, I am totally in the dark. The only thing left for me to do is to drive all the way to my hometown and check for them physically. This is the only thing doable. When it comes to my brother, he is in Bangalore. It is quite far, a very long drive, spanning more than 12 hours and 700 kilometers. If I leave the city it will be to my hometown. Along the way, I can check on my maternal grandparents, uncle and aunt, and her parents and sister. Once in my hometown, I can find out if my kith and kin are present. I am thinking of leaving for it tomorrow itself. But I feel I need to be in Trivandrum to figure out the cause and to find out my wife. Since she has disappeared from her hospital I don't think there is any way in which she could have left the city.

The thought of finding her in one of our houses is impossible. A small part of me wishes it to come true. At least I will have her back.

Regarding my friends, I am concerned about them. I haven't met a few of them in years. There were some opportunities recently that I missed out on. It makes me feel bad. It makes me curse myself for not cashing in on the opportunity when it was presented. The mindset that life is a long journey spanning from your birth to your death and there will be opportunities to meet your near and dear ones in the future is actually pointless. I realized it today. I wish I knew this before. It would have helped me create more memories, which I can hold on to in dark times.

How do we come to know if we are seeing someone for the last time? How? There is this song by Nickelback (I forgot the name) in which the protagonist after surviving a crash can see a large number floating on top of people's heads. He can’t make heads or tails of it initially. He figures it out when he sees an incident showing how the number becomes zero when you pass away. He then sees someone's number reducing drastically. He is crossing the road and a vehicle is about to hit him. He jumps in and saves the person. From then on, he can’t see the numbers. Instead, the person who gets saved starts seeing them. I loved the video. I had seen it a long time ago. I loved the concept. I don’t know how I would take it if it happens to me. But it was interesting.

Essentially, we can never know. But if we somehow came to know, what would we do? We might try to stop it, or postpone it. Will that be of any help? Death is around the corner. It will surely come and claim its victim when the time comes. According to popular fiction, if we try to stop or postpone it, what we are doing might be the reason for death. Maybe it is our actions that lead to it. If that is the case then the bigger question that arises is do we have free will?

Are we all a code written in perfect order whose actions and thoughts have been simulated and are being tested out as a beta program or something? Can it serve as the answer to the phenomenon that has just occurred here? Can it be that the program has been reset? Or was everyone supposed to disappear, but then something happened and I am left out?

Oh dear, this sounds very much like the Matrix. God, I love that movie. But I seriously hate it now. Shit! My head is spinning from all these thoughts. This is too much to handle.

I shake it off and focus on the road ahead. I have reached Ulloor Junction. Only a few minutes' drive to Pongumoodu junction. I will be reaching ahead of time. I hope I get something out of this endeavor. I don't know what to expect. I am keeping an open mind. I have to.