“No,” she said at last. “Not the way I loved your father when I was twenty-four and he put a bindi on me after the pheras. Not the way I love you. Not even the way I love this house. It is the body. It is being seen. It is a man who says may I and then does not treat me like glass. It is three months of becoming strong and then wanting the strength used. If you need it to be love so you can call me a fool, call me a fool. If you need it to be only sex so you can call me cheap, do that also. I am both. I am your mother who fell on a wet tile and I am a woman who went back to a flat because her chut would not shut up. I am saying that word in your room so you understand I am not going to hide behind it just happened like a girl in a serial.”
Silence, again. A scooter far away. Sonam’s laugh in some other Baner, Father asleep in some Surat lodge with his ring on the side table.
“What do you want from me,” I said.
“Nothing you cannot give.” She stood. The gown fell straight. She was shaking. “I do not want your blessing. I do not want you to drive me to his door. I do not want you to tell Papa in the morning and end this family because your hurt is holy. I want—” her voice thinned, became the voice from the sofa the day she fell — “I want you to know I know what I have done to you. You picked me up. You saw. You said maa, khayal rakho like you were still my boy and also like you were a man who had been slapped. I heard both. I am sorry for the slap. I am not going to insult you by saying I am sorry for the wanting. The wanting is mine. It is the first thing in years that has been only mine.”
She came to the desk, took my cold cup, and put it in my hands because she cannot speak to a child without feeding him.
“Drink. You have not eaten properly since yesterday. I saw the plate.”
I did not drink.
“Will you stop.”
She looked at my mouth, my eyes, the window, the bed, the whole small country of a son’s room.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “If I say yes I may be lying. If I say no I am a monster in front of you. The body is still asking. I came here with coffee instead of going there tonight. That is all the virtue I have in the account today.”
She reached up.
I thought she would touch the mark.
She touched my face instead. Dry palm. The same hand that used to check fever. The same hand that had held a bar on her shoulders while Vivek set her hips. She held my jaw for one second, as if to confirm I was still made of her, and then she took the hand back as if the skin had become complicated.
“I am still your mother,” she said. “That did not get fucked out of me. If you believe nothing else, believe that. The rest is a mess I made and I am standing in it.”
She picked up her own cup, untouched, and the tray.
At the door she paused, the way she had paused after the fall, the way she pauses when a kitchen behind her has become a person.
“If Sonam comes home early,” she said, very quietly, “this conversation never happened. If Papa calls, I am asleep. If you cannot look at me in the morning, look at the cooker. I will understand.”
