Ten minutes is not sleep. Ten minutes is a joke the body tells the mind.
I lay on my bed and counted the wood of their door as if counting could make it only wood. It did not. Every small sound on the other side — a drawer, a laugh cut short, the packet finding the mattress — went through the wall and sat on my chest. My friend. My mother. Her side room. The sentence would not stay in any respectable order. It kept rearranging itself until it was only heat and nausea and a restlessness that made the sheet feel like another person’s skin.
I got up.
The hall was dark. Their door was a closed mouth. I did not stop in front of it. If I stopped I would knock, and if I knocked I would become the child again, and I had already used up my childhood on that dining table.
I went up.
Our terrace is a square of rough kota and a water tank and the mango’s highest branches scratching the parapet like they want the news. Aundh at that hour is not silent. It is reduced — a dog, a distant gear-change on ITI Road, someone’s TV dying. December air, thin and clean, the kind that should help. It did not. I walked the edge twice. Lit nothing. My hands wanted the packet again, the weight of what I had signed for.
That was when I heard it.
Not from the lane. From below and to the left — our house feeding a sound upward through the old bones. A woman’s laugh. Short. Then another, lower, a man’s, trying to stay quiet and failing. Then the laugh became a shush, and the shush became a kiss I could not see yet and could still recognise, because a mouth on a mouth has a wet small sound that does not belong to a respectable bungalow.
There is a side strip of terrace outside their bathroom wall, the place Father dries his vests on a nylon line. Under the line, set high in the brick, the old ventilator. A rectangular jali. From inside it is only air. From outside, if a restless son is willing to be the kind of man he will hate in the morning, it is a frame.
I should have gone back down.
I went to the vests.
The nylon line touched my hair. I crouched. The jali was a grid of little dark squares and then, suddenly, yellow. Her lamp. Their lamp. A slice of the room I had stood in an hour ago, Father’s chair empty, the bed not empty.
They had not reached the ugly part yet.
They were still at the beginning, and the beginning was worse, because it was tender.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the gown, shawl already gone. He stood between her knees like a man who has been invited and still cannot believe the furniture. The packet was open beside her hip, a mess of foil and black polythene, the bottle upright like a small joke. She was not looking at the things. She was looking at his mouth.
He said something I did not catch. She laughed. That laugh. The one from the café window. The one I am not supposed to hear through brick.
“Shh,” she whispered, delighted, frightened. “Ghar aahe. Khali—”
“He went up, I think. I heard the stairs.”
She glanced at the door. Not at the jali. Nobody looks at a jali.
Then she pulled him down by the T-shirt and they kissed.
