“Maa.”
She waited, her back to me, shoulders held the way the gym had taught her.
I did not ask her to promise. I did not say Vivek’s name. I did not say I had sat in this room the night before and seen her walk to the bathroom with used legs and had not slept.
I said, “The coffee is cold.”
She nodded, as if that were an answer that could keep a house standing.
Then she went down the dark hall with the tray, the gown whispering, the mark on her throat trying to live under damp hair, and I heard her wash the cups in a kitchen that had already seen one fall.
I sat on my bed with the cold steel against my palm and the shape of her hand still on my face.
Outside, Surat was another city. Baner was music. Aundh was only our lane, and our tulsi, and a woman standing at a sink trying to be a mother again with the same body that had learned it was also something else.
I did not follow her.
I sat.
And the house, empty of everyone but us, held its breath around the talk we had finally put into the air, where it could not be taken back.
An hour is longer in a house that has already said too much.
I sat with the cold steel cup until the metal took my heat and gave me nothing back. Down the hall the tap had stopped. Her door had shut with the softness she uses when Father is home, even though Father was in Surat and Sonam was under someone else’s fairy lights. The fan in my room ticked. A dog barked two lanes away and then thought better of it.
I thought of the wet tile. The trial-room curtain. The café table I had passed and not stopped at. The neck in the bus light. The bathroom tap roaring. Coffee going cold on my desk while she said the wanting is mine.
Then I got up, because sitting had become another kind of cowardice.
Her door was not latched. A thin yellow line. I knocked with one knuckle, the way she had knocked on mine.
“Aai.”
A pause. Cloth. The sound of a phone being turned face-down.
“Come.”
She was on the bed that has always been theirs. The pale gown. Hair still damp. A pillow hugged to her stomach like she needed a witness that was not me. The lamp on her side was the only light. Father’s cupboard stood open an inch on his folded vests, Surat already missing him. The room smelled of her soap and of the talk we had left in mine, as if talk had a scent and had followed her.
She looked at me standing in her doorway and for a second she was only frightened. Not of Vivek. Of a son who had come back after an hour.
I did not sit on their bed. I stood at the foot of it, hands empty.
“Okay,” I said.
Her mouth opened. Nothing came.
“I agree.” The words felt too big for my throat and too small for what they were doing. “I can do that for you. I’m happy if you’re happy.”
Silence like a dropped plate that has not yet hit.
“Really,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“Arun. Look at me. Don’t say it to the cupboard.”
I looked at her. The mark on her throat had gone a duller colour under the lamp. Her eyes were swollen from the hour she had spent alone after the coffee. She looked like the woman who had fallen and the woman who had sat on a Baner counter and the woman who used to tie my shoelaces, and I had no clean place to put any of them.
