The girls went first.
Sonam did not hug Raja again. Akriti touched Vivek’s sleeve and took the touch back. Puja looked at Sanjay as if she wanted to say Bhaiya and decided the word needed the evening first. Then the three of them were swallowed by the pavement, sunglasses, kurta, Puja’s too-straight back.
The brothers stayed.
Gandhi Maidan opened around them. Same grass. Same vendors. Same kite still stuck in the tree. The bench they took was not the one under the girls’ tree. Farther. Facing the field, so they would not be caught staring down the path.
For a long time nobody used last night’s vocabulary.
Raja sat with his elbows on his knees.
“We don’t repeat any of that to anyone. Not a friend. Not a joke. Not after whisky.”
Vivek nodded.
“If Akriti doesn’t come in the evening, we don’t go looking like debt collectors.”
Sanjay watched a boy chase a balloon that was not his.
“We take care of them. That is the only sentence that gets to be bigger than us. Puja. Sonam. Akriti. Whatever they decide about the work, we don’t get to decide it for them in a group chat.”
Raja: “And we take care of each other. If one of us starts talking like he owns a secret, the other two shut him up.”
Vivek: “If one of us starts hating himself so much he becomes useless, the other two don’t let him disappear.”
Sanjay held out a hand, awkward, not a ceremony, just something to hold onto.
“Forget what we can forget. Forgive what we can forgive. Last night happened. Lunch happened. Evening will happen or it won’t. Until then we are their brothers. That part we don’t drop.”
They shook on it like men who needed the contact more than the poetry.
Then they went silent.
The maidan filled the silence for them. A couple arguing near the fence. A man selling chana. A child falling, getting up, not crying. Office people cutting across the grass because the pavement was slow. Normal Patna, which felt obscene after a table where nobody had tasted the food.
Raja was the one who broke.
He said it to the field, not to their faces.
“I can’t forget last night with Puja.”
Vivek’s jaw moved.
Sanjay did not look away from the balloon boy.
Raja kept going, quieter, ashamed and not stopping.
“I keep seeing her on that bed. The way she laughed. The way she told us to use our hands. I sat through lunch calling Sonam my sister with my mouth and Puja is still in my head with nothing on. I shook on forget and forgive. I meant the telling. I didn’t mean my memory.”
Vivek let out a breath that sounded like it hurt.
“Sonam.” He said the name like a confession. “I know I’m supposed to only see the kurta and the exam on the eighteenth. I keep seeing her from the phone. I can imagine her nude even when she is standing there asking about trains. I imagined it while she called me nothing and then when she said Bhaiya for water I still—” He stopped. Started again. “She’s hot. I hate that I said that. It’s still true.”
Sanjay’s voice came last, flat, honest.
“I imagined Sonam. I imagined Akriti. Both. Dressed on that bench I could still see them with nothing on. Walk, talk, pickle on the plate, and my head would not stop taking the clothes off. Puja I don’t have to imagine. The other two I had already been given, and now I’ve sat with them as family and the pictures won’t get out.”
