Aakriti Karun

There was a time I thought a great deal about our sink faucet. It was a sorry little thing—rusted in some places, stained in others. It sat in the space opposite our kitchen—the washbasin once white, now brown. It’d been touched with hands smeared with curry or paint or snot—and each interaction had left its scar, marked it in a way that was repulsive and pitiful. At one point the handle had gotten so dirty we started to grip it with a rag cloth when we washed our hands. No one wanted to be the one to do the gripping.