“They know what I told them. They are angry. They are coming to lunch anyway. You will not explain anything on this field. You will ask about exams and trains like you started to, because they are still your sisters and they are still in the middle of a semester. You don’t get to make this only about last night. Evening we talk. If they say stop, it stops.”
Sanjay: “Understood.”
Vivek: “Akriti—”
“Evening,” Akriti said, and the name Bhaiya did not come out of her mouth. Not yet. The absence was loud.
Sonam looked at Raja.
“Bhaiya.” It cost her. “If you pity me I will never forgive you.”
“I won’t,” Raja said, and his voice was unsteady enough to be honest.
They left the maidan together because leaving separately would have been another kind of scene.
Lunch was a packed place near the road, fans, steel plates, too much noise to be private and just enough noise to hide a silence. They squeezed into a corner table. Menus. Water. Sanjay poured for Puja and then for Sonam and Akriti without making a ceremony of it.
For a while the only safe road was the one they had been on before the fence.
Sanjay, to Puja, then to both girls, as if he could put a roof back on the day:
“When is the last paper. Who is booking the return. If the train is waitlisted we should look at the other one now, not on the platform.”
Puja listed dates. Sonam added the eighteenth again. Akriti said she could not do the night bus with a practical the next morning. Vivek asked which station was less of a mess. Raja asked if Sonam needed money in her account before the exam or after, and Sonam stared at him, then said, “After. Don’t you dare do it like an apology.”
“It’s not an apology. It’s a transfer. You’ve taken it before.”
“That was different.”
“I know.”
The food came. Nobody tasted it properly. Akriti broke a piece of roti and did not eat it. Sonam put extra pickle on Vivek’s plate out of habit and then froze, as if habit had betrayed her. Puja kept talking into the holes—Diwali sweets, who would reach home first, which cousin would ask stupid questions—until the table could bear the sound of plates again.
Toward the end Akriti looked at Vivek and used the word, tired, testing it.
“Bhaiya. Pass the water.”
He passed it. He did not touch her fingers on purpose.
Sonam, quieter, to Raja:
“Bhaiya. Evening. You will listen more than you talk.”
“I will.”
Sanjay paid. Puja argued and lost. Outside, the heat came back. Patna moved around them as if six people had not just rearranged a family on a bench.
Puja stood in the shade of the shop and said it once, for all of them.
“Evening. My place or yours, Sonam. No more surprise truths. We talk about stopping. We talk about what last night was. We talk about whether Bhaiya still means anything you want to keep.”
Sonam nodded, eyes still too bright.
Akriti put her sunglasses back on.
“Evening. If I don’t come, I don’t come.”
“You’ll come,” Puja said, not as a command. As a hope she did not deserve.
The three sisters went one way down the pavement.
The three brothers went the other, back toward the auto stand, lunch sitting heavy, last night sitting heavier, and the evening already waiting to decide what the word Bhaiya was allowed to mean after a truth like that.
