In The Stars' Brilliance — Part Two
By Georgina Kamsika
Mehtab sips chai between yawns. Her calendar marks time in stripes of black. Eight thick bands since her launch. Eight long years of spaceflight followed by two months camped in a barely adequate mobile habitat. Time is different here. The days are longer. The air in her habitat has been recycled more than once. She can’t imagine what it will be like in six months or a year. If she makes it that long.
She checks the data packet. Superluminal communications mean the information is only a few hours old. Pandemics, famine, flooding, droughts: not really news and nothing specifically for her. No messages. Nothing from ISRO. Ever since Mehtab’s planet, a moon of Kepler-47d, was rejected as uninhabitable, she’d been ignored. Survival of the human race must necessarily eclipse the loneliness of a single astronaut on a failed planet. Still no word from Lakini. No message of a safe landing. No love letter for a cold night.
Mehtab opens a photo archive. Her parents stand together, proud, waving. But gaunt, sick, and now long dead. A photo of her extended family that had emigrated to England, paler, sadder, but still so proud. She wondered if they’d died or left the planet.
She flicks to a photo of Lakini: she’s laughing, despite one of Mehtab’s awful jokes. Fine lines crinkle Lakini’s smiling face, her teeth uneven but gleaming white. Entire galaxies hide within the love in those eyes.
As the world died around them, Lakini never believed they could fail. Even with beggars’ cries growing louder and whispered discussions of water and food echoing through thin walls, Lakini’s optimism shone, effervescent as the tonic water they sipped to forget their own hunger.
On legs long like an antelope’s, Lakini strode through rioting crowds on her daily mission. Her smile duelled the sun for brilliance when, on her return, she presented a single aubergine or a handful of okra, two-handed like a hero. The second she arrived, the noise would start: a constant stream of chatter and laughter. Lakini: always the loud one.
Mehtab nicknamed her kaua, her crow, as noisy as the storytelling of crows judging their brethren on Park Street. Noisy, but never judgmental, Lakini forever weaving a raucous patter, exuding such unbridled joy that even taciturn Mehtab would be caught up in the conversation. But now Mehtab barely speaks at all. Who is there to speak to?
“We were too in love to think death had any hold on us.” Mehtab’s voice sounds loud to her own ears, unfamiliar in this silence. She presses a kiss to her fingers and touches the photo. There’s so much she would say now, if only she could.
Georgina Kamsika is a speculative fiction writer born in Yorkshire, England, to Anglo-Indian immigrant parents and has spent most of her life explaining her English first name, Polish surname and South Asian features. She graduated from the Clarion West workshop in 2012, was the UNESCO Cities of Literature Writer for Wonju in 2022.
As a second-generation immigrant, her work often utilises the speculative element to examine power structures that are mirrored in the real world, touching on issues of race, class, and gender. She can be found at kamsika.com and @GKamsika on most socials.
Copyright © 2025 Georgina Kamsika