“Really,” I said again. “I’m not going to play father. I’m not going to play priest. You told me the body is asking. I heard you. If this is what… if this is what keeps you from that floor in your head, then okay. I’m with you.”
Her face did the dangerous thing. It hoped.
Then I put the rest down, because I am still the boy who packs her physiotherapy notes under a fridge magnet.
“But please be careful.” My voice went low, practical, almost angry with practicality. “Use condoms. All of it. I don’t want you in some clinic with a story about a toilet seat. I don’t want you hurt. Not the hip. Not anything else. He is thirty. He lifts. You are not glass, you said so. Still. Careful.”
For a moment she only stared.
Then the fear cracked, and something else came through — not gratitude exactly. A flash of the woman from the gym mirror. A tease she had no right to use in this room and used anyway, because the hour had already burned the rulebook.
“Oh,” she said, very softly. “Okay, big boy.”
“Maa.”
“Condoms. Safety. My son is giving me a lecture with his ears red.” The smile was small and terrible and fond. “And the hurt.” She looked down at the pillow, then up, honest in the way that had already ruined the evening once. “Maybe me getting a bit hurt makes me feel good. I hope you understand. Not broken. Not the fall kind. The other kind. The kind I asked for. If you are going to support, support that also. Don’t support only the pretty half.”
I shut my eyes. The fan. Father’s vests. Sonam’s empty room across the hall.
“Ohh, come on, Maa.”
The sentence came out like a groan and a laugh and a plea. I sounded twenty-seven and twelve at once.
She got off the bed.
I should have stepped back. I did not. She came around the footboard in that gown and she was suddenly close enough that I could see the separate silver threads in her hair. She rose on her feet and kissed my cheek.
One side. Warm mouth. Dry. The kiss a mother gives at a railway station.
Then the other cheek, a half-second longer, as if the first had not been enough to seal a pact this ugly and this tender.
She did not kiss my mouth. The line held, thin as hair.
When she lowered herself I could smell her soap and, under it, nothing of him. She had washed. The marks had not.
“If you really agree,” she said, still close, still looking up at me, “if you are not going to wake up at four and take it back — can I call him now.”
The room shrank.
“Now.”
“He is at home. I checked an hour ago. I did not call. I sat here. You came. You said okay. If the okay is real, let me hear his voice from this house once, with you knowing, so I don’t have to keep splitting into two women every time a door opens.”
I did not answer.
Five minutes is a long time to stand at the foot of your parents’ bed while your mother waits to phone the man who has had her on a rug.
I counted in stupid things. The flight time to Surat. The signal at Baner. The glass door of Forge. Condoms in a drawer I have never seen. The word big boy. The word hurt. The tulsi in the dark. Sonam’s cake photo. My own face in the black window, watching me become the person who would say yes.
