Aparna was quiet after that one. A mother’s quiet. Then the teacher again, filthy and precise.
“When you go down on a woman, do you do it to be kind or because it makes you hard.”
“Both.”
“With me.”
“You know with you.”
She let that sit. The clock did its cheap work.
I heard my own voice before I had finished deciding to use it.
“Was Vivek really that good.”
It came out flatter than the lift deserved. Flatter than the dining-table confession. A son’s question trying to wear a man’s casualness and failing.
She paused.
Not long. Long enough that I heard the fridge, the dog two lanes away, my own pulse in the wrist that had spotted her bar that morning.
She did not look at the mute television.
She looked at the dark window, as if Baner might be visible if she applied enough memory.
“If I imagine him now,” she said, very evenly, “I’ll go wet.”
No smile.
No beta focus.
The sentence just arrived and sat on the sofa between the two glasses, honest as a stain, and she did not wipe it, and she did not apologise for the body that had said it, and she picked up her water and drank as if thirst were the only decent thing left in the room.
The sentence did not evaporate.
It sat on the sofa between the two glasses and changed the temperature of the hall by a degree you could not blame on the weather.
December in Aundh is a dry cold that comes in under doors. The front grill was locked. Beyond it the tulsi was a black shape, the mango a bigger one, ITI Road reduced to an occasional gear-change. Inside, only the lamp near Father’s chair — yellow, cheap, the same lamp that had watched news and physiotherapy and a parcel. The television faced us on mute: a cook on a studio set silently turning paneer, colours washing the tiles and then dying at our feet. The home bench waited in the unlit half of the hall like a piece of honesty nobody wanted to sit on. From the kitchen, a faint leftover of kadhi and dish-soap. The clock on the wall made the small plastic sound it has made since I was in school.
She was in the cotton nightdress she wears when the house is only family — off-white, thin from years of washing, a faded blue flower near the left shoulder. No gown over it. No bindi. Hair taken down after dinner, still holding the bend of the afternoon bun, silver threads catching the lamp when she moved. The cloth had gone a little transparent where her knee lifted on the sofa; the dark of her thigh showed and did not pretend it was an accident. Her feet were bare, one tucked under her, the other on the cold tile, toenails unpainted. The nightdress’s neck sat low enough that when she reached for the glass I saw the inner slope of her breast and the faint remaining ghost of a mouth that was not mine.
I was in an old bank-event T-shirt, grey, stretched at the collar, and black shorts I sleep in. No socks. Gym-calluses on my palms from spotting her that morning. I had not changed after dinner; I had only washed my hands. I sat at the other end of the same sofa, a full cushion between us that was not really a cushion so much as a last piece of furniture doing moral work. My knee pointed at the mute paneer. Hers pointed at me.
