She sat, closer than the cushion wanted. Off-white knee against my bare knee. Winter at the grill. Kadhi still in the walls.
Then she started talking about the fantasy as if it were a chapter we had to mark with red pen.
“The actresses first,” she said. “That part is easy. I can live with that. Anushka, Ulka, Tamannaah, Sonarika — those are pictures. Those are the folder. I am not jealous of a folder. I am—” she searched, found a crooked smile — “I am strangely proud, like a fool, that my son’s hunger has taste. Tamannaah I understand. That is a body a person admits. Ulka in a bathroom mirror is specific. You have thought about that more than once. All right. That is a man. I can put that in the same box as Nidhi’s hotel.”
The smile died when she reached the hall.
“The friends,” she said. “That is different. Those boys have drunk water from my steel glasses. I have told them kaka is sleeping, keep the volume down. You want to take the Namaste off them and put their hands on my waist. On her. Ten, fifteen. That number is not passion, Arun, that is a crowd. A crowd in this hall would smell of shoes and deodorant and panic. You did not fantasise a lover. You fantasised an audience that participates. That is why it hit me. Not because it is big. Because it is our gate.”
She looked at Father’s empty chair.
“Sonam.” The name came out careful now, as if Hyderabad might hear. “You heard me put her in a chair to watch. You put her on the floor to be had. Don’t mix the two and call them the same sickness. Mine was cruelty. Yours is… appetite with her face on it. I used her photograph as a sentence while you were in me. You used her whole body as the last act of a stolen day. I am shocked because I created a door and you walked through it carrying fifteen men.”
Her knee pressed harder.
“And still,” she whispered, “when you said you would watch Johnny Sins on me in the house where I pack poha — my chut answered before my motherhood did. That is the part I want to wash and cannot. You watching. Not even doing. Watching me be used by a man who does not know my name, on these tiles, with the tulsi outside. I keep seeing the lamp. I keep seeing your face from where I am lying. That picture is going to sit in me. I am angry at you for giving it. I am angry at me for keeping it.”
She rubbed her palm once, slowly, along her own thigh, over the cotton, not hiding the purpose, not finishing it.
“You said you would come from looking before touching. That is the sentence of a boy who stood at a jali. That is the sentence of a man who signed for a parcel and then tucked corners. I believe you. That is what makes me horny and what makes me want to slap you. You have made yourself the audience of your own house. Tomorrow, in the rules, you forget. Tonight you will not. Neither will I.”
The news ticker crawled. Something about rain in another state.
She turned her face to mine. Close enough that the nightdress and the old T-shirt were only cloth.
“If that day were real,” she said, very low, “do you know which piece I would hate in the morning and which piece I would replay. I would hate the crowd. I would hate your friends’ mouths saying Aunty while they did the opposite. I would hate that I put Sonam in your head deep enough for this. I would replay you on this sofa. I would replay the watching. I would replay being lifted by a stranger’s porn body in my own hall with my son’s eyes on me like a hand. That replay would ruin school days. I am telling you before you apologise, because if you apologise I will have to pretend I am only shocked, and I am not only shocked.”
