The bathroom door of my room opened ten minutes later.
Aparna came out in one of my old shirts. I had not given it to her. She had found it. Hair tied. Face washed. The walk was careful and she made it look like stiffness from the gym. She saw Sonam’s helmet, saw me on the sofa, and the woman of the photograph-talk went back inside her skin as if a drawer had closed.
“Tea,” she said.
Tea happened. Poha happened. Sonam ate standing, talking about the birthday, about a boy who had been stupid, about an assignment. Mother said hn and put the plate in the sink and don’t take my black dupatta. I sat at the table and drank from a cup that did not shake. When Sonam went to shower, the kitchen became a different room for eight seconds.
“No gym,” she said, not looking at me, stirring sugar that did not need stirring. “From now. I will message him. Rest. School. This house. If I walk into that glass door tomorrow I will not come out as your mother.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t say okay like last night’s okay. This one is simpler.”
“Okay,” I said anyway.
Her phone lit. She typed in the pantry. I did not read it. I heard the particular silence after a message that ends a habit. Then she put the phone face-down next to the cooker, and Sonam came back in a towel turban asking where the hair serum was, and the house performed normal the way a house performs religion — by repetition, by volume, by not looking at the sofa where a son had waited for dawn.
Father’s flight landed after dark. Innova in the porch. Metal smell. Surat stories at the table. She served him two polis and listened. I asked about the dealer. Sonam showed him a photo of the cake. He grunted at all of it, washed his feet, and took the news into their room — the room with the flowered spare sheet she had already changed again in the afternoon, corners perfect, window open, no jali-story left on the ticking.
Their door closed.
I lay in my room. The photograph on the wall was still the photograph. I had not taken it down. Taking it down would have been a confession to the nail.
A little after ten there was a knuckle on my wood.
She came in without the gown this time. Nighted, a cotton nightdress, decent enough that if Sonam opened her door the world would still stand. She shut mine. She did not lock it. She sat on my desk chair, looked at the frame, and exhaled through her nose.
“So,” she said.
I sat on the bed.
“So.”
“Last night I said things about that picture while you were in me.” Her eyes stayed on Holi colour, on Sonam’s smiling mouth, on my old hand at a sister’s waist. “In the morning I thought I would come here and say I was only being a bitch in heat. That would be half true. I was being a bitch in heat. The other half is I have had eyes in this house longer than you have had a lock.”
She was not whispering like shame. She was talking like the coffee night, inventory.
“You look at her.” Not a question. “Not like Vivek looks at me. Not even like you look at me. A sideways look. A second too long when she lifts her hair. When that kurti got wet in that photo you stood in the hall with your ears red and I saw it and I put more colour on her face so I would have something to do with my hands. I did not say anything because saying it would have made it a thing, and she was still becoming a woman and you were still my good boy.”
