Raja: “Which subject.”
“The one I hate.” She almost smiled, then didn’t. “Don’t offer to explain it tonight.”
Vivek asked Akriti about the practical, about whether the lab list was actually done. Akriti answered in short lines. Yes. No. Warden is a witch. Train still not booked.
The boys sat for ten minutes like guests.
Then the room became too small for six pairs of knees, and Puja flicked her fingers toward the rest of the flat.
“It’s one hall and a cupboard. Don’t get lost. Don’t open anything that looks like a life.”
They stood because sitting had become a performance.
The flat was ordinary. A shelf of books with college stickers still on the spines. Sanjay took down a physics guide that had Puja’s name in the first page in older handwriting, then put it back as if the name had burned. Raja found a stack of notes under a register. Vivek picked up a mug with a cracked handle and set it down.
General conversation followed them from shelf to shelf.
Sonam, chewing: “Bhaiya, that red book is Akriti’s. If you lose her page she’ll file an FIR.”
Akriti: “It’s not a holy book. It’s accounts.”
Raja opened it anyway, saw a attendance table, closed it.
“You write like a teacher.”
“I write like a person who gets marked absent for breathing.”
They drifted to the bed because there were not enough chairs. The mattress dipped. Sanjay stayed at the foot. Raja near the pillow that was not his. Vivek stood until Puja said, “Vivek, if you stand you look like a raid. Sit.”
He sat.
That was when Raja’s heel knocked the laundry basket.
Plastic. Half full. A towel. A pair of jeans. Then colour. Lace that had been washed and not yet put away. A black bra hooked over the rim like it had tried to climb out. Another bra, paler, still holding the shape of whoever had taken it off. Panties twisted with a sock, worn, waiting for a bucket.
The three of them saw it in the same second.
They looked at each other.
Not a joke. Not a plan. Just the same hit behind the eyes: cloth that had been on Sonam, on Akriti, on Puja, ordinary as homework, and their heads from the bench rushing back in without permission.
Sanjay looked away first. He pushed the basket under the bed-edge with his foot, gentle, as if hiding it could hide the thought.
Raja’s throat moved.
Vivek stared at a crack in the wall.
Puja had seen the look. She did not spare them.
“It’s laundry, not a museum. Eat is over. Wash your faces if you need to. Then you sit properly.”
The plates went into the sink. Nobody let the girls wash alone; Sanjay ran the tap, Raja stacked, Vivek dried a plate and almost dropped it. Cold drinks came out of a bucket of water because the fridge was small—three bottles, then six, caps twisting, fizz too loud in the quiet.
They sat.
Bed and floor and the one chair. Caps between fingers. The evening Puja had promised.
Sonam spoke first, because waiting had started to feel like drowning.
“You want to know how it started. Not last night. Before.”
Raja nodded. He did not say her name like a customer. He said nothing, which was better.
