I reached at 8:05 because her message said pick, session ran.
She came out with the jacket still high. Sat in the front seat. Bag between her feet. The smell in the car was not only rubber and her soap. Whisky, faint. His detergent. Sex, if a son is willing to admit he knows the smell.
Aundh road. Signals. A florist pulling down a shutter.
I saw it at the turn near the university, when a bus light raked the cabin and she reached to change the vent. The jacket shifted. On the left side of her neck, above the collarbone, below the place a mother keeps decent, a mouth had been.
Not a mosquito. Not a blouse hook. A love bite, dark, wet-edged, unmistakable.
The wheel was suddenly too big for my hands.
“Maa.”
She looked at the road.
“Please thoda khayal rakho.” My voice came out low, almost gentle, which made it worse. “There are markings.”
She understood at once. I felt it go through her — the flinch, the swallow, the hand that rose and pulled the jacket and the hair together over the evidence. She did not speak. She did not insult me with mosquito or allergy or Anjali’s perfume. She sat in my passenger seat with another man’s bite on her throat and stared at the dark glass like a woman who has been caught by the only person she cannot bear to perform for.
I drove.
The house came up, innocent, tulsi, mango, Father’s Innova already home.
She opened the door before the engine died. Went straight down the passage. The bathroom lock clicked. The tap opened hard, full, a long roaring that was meant to be only water and was also a woman washing a birthday week off her skin before a husband woke enough to ask for tea.
I went to my room.
Closed the door.
Sat on the bed with the car keys still cutting my palm.
I did not follow her. I did not knock. I did not say Vivek’s name into the hall where Father could hear it and the roof could come down.
I sat in the dark and saw the mark again, and the way she had not spoken, and the way her legs had moved when she walked to the bathroom — careful, used, a little open, as if the body had been asked for more than a gym can ask, and had answered, and was still answering, even now, under our tap, in our house, while I, her son, did the only thing left that still looked like love.
I stayed in my room.
And I did not sleep.
The house had no men in it except me, and that was enough to make every clock sound louder.
Father had taken the early flight to Surat — a dealer, a godown delay, the kind of trip he announces while packing a white shirt as if Surat were still a village he could shout across. Sonam had left at seven in a black top I did not like and a laugh that was too bright, a friend’s birthday in Baner, don’t wait up. The Innova was gone. Her scooter was gone. Lata’s bucket was upside down in the courtyard. The mango tree scratched the wall like it wanted in.
I was in my room with the lamp on and a file I was not reading when the knock came.
Not on the main door. On mine.
Two knuckles. Soft. The knock she used when I was sixteen and had fever.
