The fan cut the sentence into pieces.
“Vivek looked.” She said his name like it hurt her teeth. “First as Atya. Then as a back that needed correcting. Then as a woman in tights who had a waist. I felt it. I am forty-seven, I am not stupid. I let the looking happen because my body had started to wake up in that gym and I was lonely in a way that does not show in a family photograph.”
“Papa—”
“Your father is in Surat selling pipes.” Her voice cracked, then steadied. “He is a good man. He sleeps at nine-thirty. He touches me like a habit that forgot it used to be a fire. I am not blaming him. I am telling you the room I was living in when another man put his hand on my hip and asked permission, and the permission felt like air.”
She wiped her cheek with her wrist, angry at the water.
“The first time, I went to his flat with cake like a fool. Birthday week. I told myself coffee. Salad. I stood in his kitchen and he said your name. He said you would kill him if you knew he had fucked your mother.” She did not flinch from the word. She put it on the tray beside the coffee, carefully. “And I heard your name in that sentence and I still did not leave. That is the part you should hate. Not the body. The fact that I heard my son and stayed.”
I had to stand up. The chair was too small. I went to the window and saw only our own courtyard, the tulsi, the dark.
“And after,” she said to my back. “The markings. I tried. Jacket. Hair. I still sat in your car with his mouth on my neck. Yesterday I went again. After the batch. I asked him. My body asked him. I am not going to use pretty language for you, Arun. I was desperate. Three days of teaching fractions with my thighs wet. That is the truth. It is ugly. It happened. More happened than the first day. Whisky. Things I did not know I would ask for. Then I came back to the gym so there would be a door you could pick me up from. Then you saw. Then I locked the bathroom and washed like washing could make me your mother again.”
I turned.
She looked smaller on my bed and also larger than the room. The gown had slipped from one shoulder. I saw the edge of another mark, older, yellowing, on the upper swell of her breast, and I looked away so hard my neck hurt.
“Why tell me,” I said. “Why not let me live with only the neck.”
“Because you already cannot.” She folded her hands in her lap, teacher, wife, the woman from the wet kitchen floor. “You have been watching since the trial room. Don’t look at me like that. I have known your eyes your whole life. You look at Sonam and you look away. You look at me and you stay one second longer. I am not asking you for that. I am saying I will not sit in this house and pretend you are blind while I walk around with another man’s hands still on my skin. That pretence will turn you into someone who hates me in silence. I would rather you hate me in this room, with coffee, while there is no one to hear.”
The cups had gone cold.
“Do you love him.”
The question came out of me like blood.
She thought. I saw her try to find a clean word and fail.
