I stared at her bare feet so I would not have to stare at her eyes.
“Midnight,” I said. “Everybody folds. Friends go back to their wives and their shifts and their decent Aunty-voices. The actors go back to the internet. Sonam wakes in Hyderabad with an AC-ache. You wake in your bed. I wake knowing I used my one theft to turn this family into a film set and I sat in the audience like a king and a dog. That is mine. Not a honeymoon either. A theatre. I steal the day to look.”
The lamp hummed.
She sat very still in the off-white cotton, the faded flower, the open throat, the palm on her stomach that had not moved.
Outside, the dog two lanes away barked once and thought better of it.
Inside, my fantasy sat down next to hers, and the sofa, which had already held wet and landlines and four old girlfriends, held this also — Anushka, Ulka, Tamannaah, Sonarika, a dozen boys who knew our gate, a man from a website, a sister in a city that forgets, a mother who does not, and a son who had finally said the last picture out loud.
For a few seconds she only looked at me as if I had opened the wrong cupboard in my own house.
Shock first. It showed in the way her shoulders went back, in the small retreat of her mouth, in the teacher arriving to take attendance of a room that had too many people in it for a hall this size. Johnny Sins on these tiles. Sonam on Father’s chair. Boys who had said Namaste with their shoes in our courtyard. Her. Me on the sofa, watching. I saw her count them. I saw the count fail.
Then the other thing arrived, and it did not wait for permission.
The nightdress told on her before her voice did. Breath gone shallow. The faded blue flower lifting faster. Her thighs, which had been set like a decent woman’s, pressed once and stayed pressed. She laughed, a short disbelieving sound, and immediately put her fingers to her lips as if she could push the laugh back in.
“You—” she started, and had no ending.
She stood up. The cotton fell straight and still hid nothing useful. She walked as far as the mute television, turned, walked back, did not sit. The lamp caught the wet at her lower lashes that was not crying yet, only overload.
“Shocked,” she said, to help herself, to help me. “I am shocked. I asked for the real one and you gave me a film set in my own hall. My daughter. Your friends. Men from the internet who have never eaten in this kitchen. And you on this sofa like God. That is a sick picture, Arun. That is a sick, detailed, living picture.”
Her hand went to her throat, then dropped, then went to the back of the sofa near my shoulder, gripping.
“And I am wet from it,” she said, furious at the accuracy. “Equally. Don’t look away. If you can say Johnny Sins you can hear this. My body did not wait to take a moral position. It heard Sonam’s name and the dining table and the lift you stole from my day and put into yours, and it went. Same cloth sticking. Same stomach. Shock in the head, filth in the nightdress. Both. I will not tidy that up for your guilt.”
