I still hear the cooker.
That is the thing about our house. Even when I am on the tenth floor of the bank with a glass wall behind me and Pune burning white outside, some part of me is still in Aundh, listening for the second whistle. It means she is there. It means the kitchen is hers. It means the day has a centre.
My name is Arun, and I have spent twenty-seven years pretending I do not notice the centre.
Thursday began like every other Thursday that wants to trick you. Light through the mango leaves. Dust on the compound wall. Father’s Innova already coughing in the porch because Sanjay Deshpande does not believe a business opens itself. I was in the upstairs bathroom with foam on my jaw and the radio in the hall playing some old Lata song Mother still hums without knowing she is humming.
Downstairs, Sonam swore at her hair.
I stood in the passage a moment longer than a brother should and watched her in the hallway mirror. Twenty-three. MBA. Wine kurti she had no business filling like that. The cloth held her the way cloth holds a secret — the high, full weight of her chest, the dip of her waist, the sudden honest flare of her hips. Her hair was still open, a black river down her back, and when she lifted both arms to tie it the kurti climbed and I saw the warm line of her stomach, soft, living, and I looked away the way I have trained myself to look away since she stopped being a child and became this.
“Don’t start,” she said, without turning.
“I didn’t—”
“You always don’t.” She smiled at herself, then at my reflection, and for a second she was only my sister again, the girl who used to steal my cricket bat. Then she pulled the kurti down and the woman came back.
In the kitchen, Mother.
Aparna.
I do not know when I started using her name in my head. Aai is for the voice. Aparna is for the rest of her — the woman the house keeps trying to reduce to tea and tiffins and a school ID.
She stood at the stove in a cotton saree the colour of wet earth after a small rain. Forty-seven. Five-four. Honey skin that holds light instead of bouncing it. The bun was already in, two silver threads she would not pull, as if she had made a private treaty with time. When she turned with the kadhai, the pallu slipped a finger’s width and I saw the blouse do its work — the heavy, still-high shape of her breasts, the tight draw of the waist, the long curve down to hips that have no right to look like that after two children and twenty years of this house. She used to dance. I remember the society hall, the ghungroo in a plastic box, the way her body knew a beat before the music did. She never stopped having that body. She only stopped showing the city. At home the saree is a kind of lie and a kind of truth together. It covers her. It also follows her.
She saw me seeing.
Mothers always do.
“Breakfast is getting cold,” she said, and her voice was ordinary, which is how she hides a thousand things.
Father was already at the table. Sixty-seven. Oil in the grey hair. Gold ring. The belly of a man who has eaten other men’s delays. He tore a chapati with both hands like the chapati had insulted him.
