Two days before my grandmother left us for a heavenly abode, I was told by my mother that she was only being taken for a CT scan, which meant nothing to me at the time so I mistook it for a City Scan of some sort and let this idea lodge in a neglected shelf of my brain, unquestioned. Which led me to imagine this machine as a flying craft, a cold metal moon lowering itself over her body to survey it. I thought that’s what grown-ups did: call in spaceships to check the diverse topography of a person. I whole-heartedly believed that each and every living being was a city—of course it was—with tiny citizens expending their puny, nugatory lives under the ribs. Sweeping the long corridors of veins, keeping shop in the hollows behind the knees, dipping their feet in the trickling rivulets of sweat and tears. The head was probably where the minuscule administration situated itself wherein organisms in stiff business suits sat at their designated places lit by desk lamps, and regulated hormones the way officials draft trivial laws. Prior to this news, I had been sleeping by my grandmother’s side for over a month. We had been sharing our prayers and dreams under the hazy roof of the mosquito net. She had been an incessant storyteller, and I—small, devout without meaning to be—had been listening to her wise words in the way holy bells of temples witness sins and desires that travel in whispers, brief as moth wings, their existence spanned only in the sacred space between bowed heads and folded hands. My meals had become pious with the sweet granules of Nakuldana she had been saving for me after offering some to the gods. In her presence, there was no curfew on watching TV, and I could watch as many cartoons as I wanted, even the ones in which strange ships hovered above the swaying cornfield looking for cows to beam into the dense granite stretch of the sky. In which a herd of cows moved only to reveal that the blotches on their coats were not patterns but pocket-sized portals to a patchy dimension. In which all of them, then, collectively vanished in a blink, prolly into one of the shimmering shapes. Those nights, dwindling and glowing, were gifts to me and to all the imagined cities, big and small, I had wandered in my dreams, and that my hands slowly unwrapped in the darkness of what followed. The day she was taken to the hospital for the scan, we were asked to take all her jewelry off—ear drops, nose pin, bangles—whatever little remained of the last clink of faith that she had carefully stored in the museum of her body. As the naïve hope settled in the shore of my eyes, I cupped her face in my palms, forming the orbit of an earnest promise of her return that was destined to break since its inception. Only I didn’t know. I didn’t yet know how a city goes dim one window at a time, unbeknown to the kid—this poor nano-scopic child—who must be trying to forge his future in a tiny neighbourhood flourished beneath my grandmother’s rotting toenail, watching from the doorway that the city-lights are going out for good, thinking that the brightest of stars still owed him one merciful blink at the least.