The story they tell here says that the river was formed when the god who made everything squeezed it from his wet hair. I want to believe in this but you scoff; you are the builder and I am the dreamer, you remind me. Here beside the river where our reflections part, a little boy sells flowers and a stick of incense. The incense won’t light in the wind, but the flowers you throw into the water drift away like small boats while we watch. Then we walk across the swaying bridge with our fingers unglued to the room where we sleep facing opposite directions. In the morning I wake to the sound of hammers and follow a map down dusty roads wet with spit. I pass a row of mules with satchels on their backs. A man tosses bricks up to the ledge of a gutted building, its insides full of iron poles and stones in crooked piles. At a gravel road where a machine spits cement, I walk uphill to a doctor named after a god who cleans out my gut with ghee. The doctor says that I was born with fire and confidence but warns that I should not be overly confident with men. He tells me to drink from the river for good luck and I do. After the sun sets I walk back to our guesthouse alone and still thirsty. I pass men with flashlights sawing wood and welding metal. They shout words I do not recognise; I move by them slowly as if underwater. At the door of our room I am full of stomach ache, a sickness I cannot cough up. I long for the tool belt that you left behind – tools which do not belong to me. You tell me I am my own doctor, my own builder, my own passage home. It is direction I lack, and my own dreams. I have put all my watery confidence in the god who would show me how to carve out my insides. How to use a pair of pliers to shape the holes. How to snap off the ends that do not belong. How to measure the straightness of a thing. How to knock down old walls. But the hammer is weighty and my grip is thin. My fingers greasy and wet. The key slips before the lock clicks open. Then I lose the map. The last thing that falls is your trowel, its blade the shape of a heart.