“Form will go to hell without me.”
“I will live,” she said, and the ghost of the café almost rose, and she killed it.
He pushed his feet into the courtyard’s old place and told me, not her, “I meant the other line that night. Not the leaving. She is rare. Don’t you also leave her tied to a night and walk out for a batch.”
“I won’t.”
The bike took Baner back.
She closed the gate herself.
In the hall she stood with her hand on the iron.
“If he calls the school again.”
“He won’t.”
“If he does.”
“Then I will go to Forge.”
She looked at me. The lift was still in the room somewhere, a height above a counter we could not see. My eyebrows had learned to stay down.
“Come,” she said. “The bar is still on the floor. If we don’t lift something after that tea the tea will sit in the chest.”
We lifted.
She counted under her breath.
When she lost the count once, only once, I saw her mouth remember air and arms and an entering that had left the floor behind.
“Beta,” she said, without looking, and the steel in my hands was suddenly just steel.
“Focus.”
I focused.
The phone on the cupboard stayed dark. Hyderabad and Banaras stayed other cities. The third cup cooled in the sink, and the house, which had heard too much at one table, went back to iron and silence and the kind of peace that is also a debt.
Dinner was thin without Father’s second poli and Sonam’s noise. Khichdi. Kadhi. She ate standing at the counter for a while, then sat. The home bench sat in the dark hall like a guest who had learned manners. The third cup from the afternoon was already washed.
We did not mention the landline.
We did not mention the lift.
We took the plates to the sink and the house became the hour it always becomes when Banaras and Hyderabad are other people’s weather — two people, the television on mute, the clock in the hall doing its cheap work.
She was the one who opened the other door.
“You have not told me,” she said, wiping the same plate twice, “about the girls.”
I laughed because the alternative was to stand up.
“Maa.”
“Don’t Maa me after this week.” She put the plate in the rack and came to the sofa with two glasses of water, as if water would keep the talk from catching fire. “Girlfriend. Sex life. You know mine now in more detail than a doctor. You don’t get to be a locked cupboard. Talk.”
“There isn’t a speech.”
“Then give me the list.”
I gave her the list.
Not because I wanted to. Because she had sat on a dining chair and described being entered in the air in front of the man who had done it, and then told me to focus, and a son who has heard that cannot protect a few college nights like they are temple jewellery.
There had been three, if I was honest, and a fourth that was only a night.
First, Sneha, second year, the one with the scooter and the perfume that stayed in my helmet. We did it for the first time in her aunt’s empty flat in Kothrud, on a mattress on the floor, both of us shaking. I came too fast. She laughed into my neck and said it was all right and then it was not all right because I went soft with shame. Two months. She liked to be on top because she did not trust my weight. She would not let me go down on her for weeks; she said it was dirty. When she finally let me, she came so quietly I thought I had hurt her. She broke it because her mother found an SMS.
