In Kallupuzha, a village that appears on Google Maps only if you zoom in with suspicion, Maya began expanding her consciousness the week the mosquitoes became unionized.
She was thirty eight. Separated, not divorced, because divorce is paperwork but separation is performance art. Her partner who now sold organic jackfruit chips with startup enthusiasm, had once described her as “conceptual but not commercially viable.”
Maya used to paint. Or rather, she used to send paintings to galleries who responded with emails that began with “We regret to inform you” and ended with “Do stay connected.”
Connected to what. The WiFi barely worked.
Her house stood between a toddy shop and a tuition center called Galaxy Future Academy. Every evening the children chanted English grammar rules like devotional hymns, while drunk men debated geopolitics with the authority of retired.
Maya watched all this from her veranda like a failed deity.
After her seventh rejection that year, she stopped painting landscapes.
Instead, she began painting mosquitoes.
Huge canvases of mosquitoes, close ups so detailed you could see the moral confusion in their eyes.
She titled the series “Agents of Extraction.”
Her theory was simple. Mosquitoes were the most honest creatures in the village. They took blood directly.
She posted photos of the paintings online. Three likes. One from her cousin in Kodambakkam. One from a bot selling crypto. One from her ex partner.
She stared at the screen and whispered, “Synchronicity.”
The village health inspector visited her house after rumors spread that she was breeding mosquitoes for art.
He stood in her studio looking at a five foot canvas of a mosquito piercing human skin like a slow meditative ritual.
“Madam,” he said carefully, “this is not hygienic.”
Outside, women fetching water slowed down to eavesdrop. In Kerala privacy is a myth. Surveillance is a cultural sport.
The inspector suggested fumigation. Maya suggested existential inquiry. He left.
Maya began waking up at four thirty in the morning, not because she believed in productivity gurus, but that was when the village was calm. No tuition chants. Just the hum of insects and the distant cough of someone brushing their teeth.
She would sit under the mango tree and imagine her consciousness as a ceiling fan rotating but attached to something fixed.
What if I am not expanding, she wondered, but merely spinning.
She began writing in a notebook.
Rejection is a mosquito.
It drinks from the softest part of you.
But it cannot digest meaning.
She did not know if that was profound or just sleep deprivation.
One afternoon while buying fish, the vendor, a woman with arms stronger than most political ideologies, looked at her and said, “You paint?”
Maya blinked. “How do you know.”
“My son saw on Instagram. Big mosquito.”
Pause.
“I liked it.”
The fish vendor reached into her basket and handed Maya a small glistening sardine.
“Free. For art.”
That night Maya cried. Just a slow leaking, like monsoon through a cracked tile.
Synchronicity, she decided, was not cosmic alignment. It was one unexpected witness.
The village continued unchanged.
The tuition center expanded to include AI training for kids. The toddy shop installed LED lights. Her ex partner launched a podcast called Mindful Masculinity.
Maya kept painting.
But now the mosquitoes evolved.
The exhibition somewhere finally accepted her series because mosquitoes had become a public health trend.
At the opening people nodded at her work with intellectual hunger.
“So layered,” someone said.
“Yes,” Maya smiled, thinking of the fish vendor.
When she returned to Kallupuzha nothing had changed.
Except one thing.
Children from the tuition center began sketching insects in their notebooks instead of superheroes. The health inspector started wearing full sleeves. The fish vendor’s son asked her how to paint things that bite.
Maya realized expansion of consciousness is not fireworks.
It is contagion and persistent.
Like a mosquito.
One evening as the sun sank behind coconut trees, Maya stood in her veranda.
A mosquito landed on her arm.
She watched.
“Take what you need,” she whispered.
It pierced her skin.
She felt the sting. She felt the giving. She felt the strange intimacy of extraction.
For the first time in years she did not feel rejected.
She felt porous.
And somewhere in the village a child was drawing a mosquito with a mirror on its back, not knowing it was art or consciousness.
Cover: Jyothis Paravoor
