The Price of Air

When the water reached our door, Abbu said it was time.

Not time like dinner time or prayer time. The time. The kind that smells like panic and tastes like metal in your mouth. We had ten minutes. Maybe less. I packed the photo of Ammi, the gold bangle she left me, and my brother’s inhaler. I don’t know why. He died last year, but I still carry it like he might need it if he ever comes back.

The boats were docked where the market used to be. Last week, I bought tomatoes there. Today, a man in a red life vest stood on top of a fishing boat yelling prices like an auctioneer.

"Fifty thousand! Small boat! One family only!"

The water kept rising. Someone screamed behind me. A baby, or maybe someone old — sometimes you can't tell the difference in a flood.

A woman in a soaked shalwar kameez begged him. “Please. Just my daughter. Take her.”

He looked at the girl. Then the woman. Then at the notes in someone else’s hand.

“No money, no boat.”

He pushed off. The boat rocked gently, like it wasn’t carrying our sins.

Abbu didn’t say anything. He just sat down on a concrete step — what used to be the pharmacist's entrance — and looked at the sky like maybe he was waiting for God or rain or both.

“Should I sell the bangle?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Your mother gave you that. Keep it.”

“But we’ll drown.”

He looked around. “People are already drowning.”

Another boat came by, smaller. No life vests. No shouting. Just a boy, maybe fourteen, maybe fifteen, steering with a broken paddle.

“Can you take us?” I asked.

He looked at me. Then at Abbu. Then he said: “Got food?”

I opened my bag and showed him a packet of biscuits and the inhaler.

He shrugged. “Hop in.”

And that’s how we bought our lives — with stale glucose biscuits and a plastic inhaler that had already lost its breath.

Later, when the water turned the village into a reflection of the sky, and the bodies began to float past like forgotten laundry, I asked the boy why he helped us.

He didn’t answer right away. He just rowed.

Then, without looking at me, he said, “My mother didn’t have money either.”