Awkward is too small a word. It was a whole climate. Three people and a dining table and Father’s chair empty and Sonam’s helmet missing from the hook and a silicone shape sitting next to the fruit bowl like it had always lived there.
He did not come closer. I did not close the box. She stood between us in the shawl, throat marked, mouth slightly open, a woman watching the two houses of her life occupy the same tiles.
A scooter passed on ITI Road. Someone else’s ordinary night.
She broke it because she has always broken silences in this family — tea, a joke, a plate, a sentence that lets men breathe.
“Bas.” Her voice was thin, then it found the teacher. “Bas. Don’t stand like the police have come. Come inside. Let’s sit in my room.”
My room. Their room. The bed with Surat still folded in the cupboard.
Vivek looked at me. Not Atya’s son. Not the boy from the society steps. The man who had heard okay two hours ago and was now holding lubricant in his mother’s house.
I put the things back in the packet. Not neatly. My hands did not want a skill for this. I held it out. He took it. Our fingers did not touch.
She walked first, down the passage she had walked with a bruise eleven days after a fall, the same walls, a different hour. At her door she turned.
“Arun. Beta.” The beta was a mercy and a dismissal braided together. “You may go to sleep. Or… whatever you want. You don’t have to stand here. You already did the hard thing.”
Vivek moved then.
He came to me in the passage, the packet under one arm, and he put the other arm around me. A hug. Brief. Hard. The smell of his soap and her gym and the December night on his jacket. His palm landed on my back the way it used to after a lost cricket match.
“Thank you,” he said into my shoulder, low, only for me. “You are the best bro. I mean it. I won’t… I won’t make this ugly for the house. I swear.”
I did not hug him back properly. My hand lifted and fell on his shoulder once, a dead small pat, because the body remembers childhood even when the mind is standing in a ruin.
“Careful,” I said, the same word I had given her. “She fell once. Don’t you be the second floor.”
“I won’t.”
She was waiting in the yellow rectangle of the bedroom. The lamp. The bed. Father’s ring-space empty on the side table.
Vivek let me go.
They walked in.
He first, packet against his hip. She after, shawl tight, not looking at me when she passed, her fingers brushing the doorframe the way they brush the wall when the hip used to speak.
The door did not slam.
It closed with that same softness she uses for sleeping husbands.
I stood in the passage until I heard the latch.
Then I went to my room, as I had been told, as I had agreed, as a son who had said okay and had signed for a parcel and had been hugged by the man now on the other side of that wood.
I sat on my bed.
I did not put on the fan.
Through the wall there was only the first murmur of voices — hers, his — too low to be words, too alive to be sleep.
I lay down facing the window.
And I left them the house.
