I stared at the frame because looking at Aparna was harder.
“I don’t—”
“Don’t do the respectable sentence.” She turned the chair, faced me, a small tired smile that was almost kind. “I am not asking you to confess a crime. I am telling you your mother noticed. Last night I used it because I wanted you to come and I wanted to be filthy and the wall gave me a weapon. That was ugly. I can say sorry for using your sister’s face as lubricant. I will not say sorry for seeing what I saw.”
The fan ticked.
“Does she know,” I asked.
“No.” Sharp. The first sharp thing. “And she will not know from me. And she will not know from you. That girl is doing an MBA and stealing my jackets and coming home with cake on her breath. She is not a toy in this room. Last night I was a dog in heat pointing at a photograph. Today I am Aai. Those two women have to live in one body. Help me keep them in separate hours.”
She leaned back, looked at the picture again, and the tease came back — not the wild bed-tease, a thinner, night-time one, the kind that tests whether a door is locked even when it is not.
“She has your mouth,” she said. “Not the shape. The way she hides it when she is guilty. And she has my chest, which is God’s sense of humour. You think I don’t see her in a tight kurti and then see you see it. I tease you now because the house is sleeping and because last night I already crossed every river. If I don’t say it dry, it will sit in the mattress and rot.”
“Don’t.”
“A little.” The smile widened, then softened. “Only talk. I am sore in a place I will not name in front of your school trophies. I did not come here to sit on you. I came because that frame is looking at me like a relative. So we discuss. You tell me if I imagined the extra second. I tell you I did not. We agree Sonam stays a person. We agree I was vicious. We agree you are not innocent. Then I go to my husband’s bed and lie down next to a man who sold pipes in Surat and I will smell of soap and you will look at that photo tomorrow and feel sick and also not take it down. That is the discussion.”
I said, after a long time, “You didn’t imagine it.”
She nodded once, as if a ledger had balanced on a bad number.
“And last night,” I said, “don’t use her like that again.”
“I won’t.” She stood. The nightdress fell straight. At the door she glanced at the frame, then at me, and the last tease was almost gentle, which was worse. “Even if, in some ugly corner, the thought is sitting in both of us. We don’t put it on her. We put it on me, if it has to sit somewhere. I am already the cupboard where this family hides things.”
She opened the door a crack. Hall dark. Their room dark. Sonam’s room a thin line of phone-glow under wood.
“No gym,” she reminded, quietly.
“I know.”
“Good night, Arun.”
“Good night, Maa.”
She went.
I lay down facing the wall that held the picture.
Sonam smiled in pink powder.
I did not take the nail out.
In the other room a tap ran a short time, a bottle cap turned — she had found the water I had left, or she had not, I would never ask — and then the house, which had decided to be normal in the morning, practised being normal in the dark, which is harder, and more honest.
