She was quiet.
“He was good,” she added, as if fairness were a god. “In his time he was good. Thick. Slow when I asked. Rough when I asked that also. He liked my breasts from behind while I held the headboard. He liked when I spoke Marathi in his ear. He does not like that anymore because he does not hear it anymore. Do not hate him for the silence. Hate the years, if you need to hate.”
My room held all of it. Fergusson. The lecturer’s son. The storeroom. Father’s ring. Vivek’s plug. My own spend that had been on her face twenty minutes earlier.
She turned her head on my shoulder.
“This,” she said, meaning the hand in the other room, meaning the sheet over our laps, meaning the talk, “is not me making you Papa. And it is not me making you Vivek. I don’t have a name for it. If you want it to stop at a hand and a history, it stops. If you want to sleep, I will go back to the flowered sheet and face the cupboard alone. You have already been more son than I deserved tonight.”
The window was still dark.
Surat was still another city.
Baner was still a bike.
I sat with her naked shoulder against my shirt and her stories cooling in the air, and the house, for a little while, was only this room, and the truth that a gentleman can clean a bed and still come on his mother’s skin, and then listen to how his father used to love her, and not know which of those facts was the one that would keep him awake.
Nobody slept.
The sheet over our laps became a joke. Her shoulder stayed bare against my shirt. The window stayed dark. Surat did not call. Sonam did not send another cake. The house had run out of decent reasons to close its eyes.
She picked at a thread on my bed.
“You watch, right.”
I knew what she meant before the rest arrived.
“Porn.” She said it like poha, like a household word that had been hiding in the cupboard. “Don’t make that face. You are twenty-seven, you have a door that locks, you have a hand. I am sitting here with your taste still in the memory of my skin. Show me the collection.”
“No.”
“Arun.”
“That’s— Maa, that’s not—”
“I have taken your friend in my mouth in the next room. You have come on my face. Now you will be shy about a folder.” She turned, the sheet sliding to her waist, breasts free in the lamp of my childhood. “Please. I want to see what my son’s hunger looks like when it is not looking at me. Then I will know where I stand.”
I said no again.
She asked again. Not teacher. Not queen. Worse. Soft. Beta, dikhav. Ek da. I will not laugh. I will not tell Papa I saw your ugly internet. Please. Her forehead against my shoulder. Her hand on my chest, not going lower, only waiting. The third please had a laugh in it. The fourth did not.
I opened the laptop because a fifth would have been a different kind of cowardice.
The folder was not ugly. It was ordinary and therefore worse. Saved things. A mix I had never had to explain — gym bodies, older women, a few clips I had told myself were only type, the type being a waist and a heavy chest and a mouth that said please. I did not look at her while the first thumbnail lit the screen. She looked at the screen, then at me, and something like recognition passed over her face and did not become a joke.
