“Bank?” he asked, which is his way of saying good morning to me.
“Bank,” I said.
Poha. Limbu. The smell that belongs to this house the way the tulsi belongs to the courtyard. Sonam wanted eggs. Mother made them. No lecture. That should have told me something was already loose in the day — she only skips the lecture when her mind is elsewhere.
I was late. I always am, in my head. She touched my sleeve as I passed, fingers warm from the kadhai, a habit from a version of me that no longer exists.
“Eat there also,” she said. “Not only coffee.”
I almost told her I love her. I did not. In our family we say it with tiffins and with silence and with showing up when a phone rings.
The phone rang at 11:27.
I was listening to a man with a factory and a fear of rain. My mobile lit with Papa’s name, and the room tilted a degree. Sanjay Deshpande does not call his son in a meeting for gossip.
“Your mother fell.”
Three words. Flat. The voice he uses for bounced cheques.
“Kitchen. Maid found her. Wrist. Hip. I am coming. You also leave.”
I do not remember standing. I remember the client’s mouth still moving. I remember the lift taking too long. I remember SB Road like a throat I could not swallow. Aundh came up in pieces — the signal near the university, the turn, the mango tree, the open gate, Lata’s face the colour of bad news.
And then her.
She was on the sofa in the same saree, as if the morning had not been allowed to change clothes. The pallu had slipped off her left shoulder. The bun was coming apart. A kitchen towel full of ice was pressed to her wrist by a hand that was trying not to shake. The fall had dragged the cotton tight across her hip. I saw the bruise already thinking about becoming a bruise — that first dark bloom under skin I have known my entire life and never been allowed to think of as skin.
Something in my chest went down a staircase without touching the steps.
“I slipped,” she said, almost angry. “The floor was wet. I told her—”
“Aai.”
I sat on my knees in front of the sofa like a boy. I have not sat like that since I was twelve. Up close she smelled of turmeric and her soap and the faint metal of fear. A strand of hair was stuck to her temple. Without asking I lifted it back. Her eyes came to mine, and for one naked second there was no teacher, no wife, no mother of two — only Aparna, forty-seven, on her own sofa, horrified that her body had betrayed the story she tells it every morning.
“Don’t look like that,” she whispered. “I am fine.”
She was not fine. The gown of the saree had ridden. I could see the shape of her thigh, the heavy grace of it, the place where woman meets bone, and I hated myself for seeing it now, like this, when she was hurt. Desire is a filthy word for what moved in me. It was not only that. It was terror. It was the child in me standing in a kitchen that had suddenly become capable of taking her. It was the man in me looking at the body that made me and finding it still — God help me — beautiful, and breakable in the same breath.
Sonam burst in with her lanyard slapping her chest, breath gone, and the three of us became a family again because someone had to drive.
