I came like that.
Buried. Eyes on a photograph I would never see innocently again. Hands full of my mother’s breasts. Her ass gripping me through the pulse. She felt it and moaned as if the heat itself were a language, and she reached back and held me in so I could not escape the fact.
We stayed locked.
The frame looked at us.
She dropped her cheek to my pillow, still on her elbows, still full of me, and the wildness went down a degree, not away.
“Don’t take it out yet,” she whispered. “Let me feel my son go soft where he had no business being. And don’t you look at that photo like I didn’t say what I said. I said it. I was being a bitch. I was also being accurate. Both.”
The latch of my door was still unpressed.
Her ass was still against my hips.
On the wall, Sonam and I kept smiling in old Holi colour, and the room around the smile was no longer the room in which the picture had been hung.
She collapsed the way a body collapses when it has been used past language.
The tightness around me fluttered and gave. A small, helpless fart escaped her — raw, unladylike, the honest sound of a hole that had been opened and filled and forgotten how to be polite. She made a tiny wounded noise of embarrassment that was already half-asleep, muttered are ram, and then there was nothing. Her arms slid. Her cheek stayed on my pillow. She was out. Mouth open. Hair wrecked. My cock slipping from her as I eased back, a shine on her, a shine on me, the photograph still smiling at a scene it had not been invited to.
I sat on the edge of the bed until my hands remembered they could do ordinary work.
I cleaned her as much as a son can clean without waking a woman who has earned unconsciousness. A warm cloth. The worst of the gel. The inside of her thighs. She did not stir except to frown, like a child moved in a fever. I pulled my sheet up to her shoulder, then the quilt, tucking it the way she used to tuck me when the Aundh rain made the windows loud. I put a water bottle on the side table, cap loosened, within the reach of the hand that was curled under her cheek.
I did not sleep in that bed.
I went to the hall.
The sofa that has heard Father’s news and Sonam’s arguments took my shape. I lay there in a T-shirt and the knowledge that my room now contained my mother, a photograph, and a smell the morning would have to negotiate. The main latch was still locked from when I had locked Vivek out of the house. I stared at the dark dining table where a parcel had sat beside the fruit bowl, and I did not sleep so much as wait in a horizontal position.
Morning arrived like it had not been informed.
First the gate. Sonam’s scooter. The particular clumsy music of her helmet on the hook. She came in smelling of cake and someone else’s perfume, eyeliner wrecked, whispering shit it’s late to herself until she saw me on the sofa and froze.
“You slept here?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
She squinted. College-girl suspicion, not the truth. “Papa called. His return is evening flight. Aai?”
“Asleep.”
“Lucky.” She yawned, already moving toward her room, already becoming ordinary. “I’m dead. If Aai asks I was at Sneha’s. Which is true. Mostly.”
