**CH-3: Naya Savera**
She woke at five-thirty without an alarm.
Not with the jarring, disoriented waking of someone pulled too soon from too-light a sleep — but cleanly, completely, the way the body wakes when it has finally, after a long time, been allowed to rest properly. She lay still for a moment in the grey pre-dawn dark of Baa’s room and let the ceiling come to her. Let the room come to her. The wooden almirah. The small desk. The prayer corner, its diyas waiting.
Six years. She had not slept like that in six years.
She did not examine it. She simply noted it — the way you note something true — and got up.
-----
The prayer corner first.
She had thought about this last night and her hands now moved with the calm of someone doing something they had decided on. She found a small cloth in the almirah’s second drawer — Baa had always kept one there for exactly this purpose — and cleaned each diya carefully. The brass came up dull at first and then, with patient attention, began to glow. She filled them. Found the agarbatti in the small tin box on the shelf above — still there, still sealed, as though waiting — and lit the dhoop first, the way Baa had always done. Dhoop first, then diyas.
The smell bloomed immediately. That particular dense sweetness — not light, not delicate, but full and grounding, the smell of something ancient being renewed. It filled the room. It would, she knew, travel — old houses carried smell the way they carried sound, through their walls and their ceilings and their particular architecture of connected spaces. Up through the ceiling. Through the floors above. Into rooms that had not smelled this smell in a very long time.
She lit the diyas one by one.
The corner filled with small, steady flames. She stood before it with her hands folded — not performing prayer, just present, just still — and let the quiet of the early morning hold her.
*Dhanyawad,* she said. Simply. To everything at once.
-----
When she entered it, the kitchen was dark and cool.
She found the light switch without thinking — her hand going to exactly the right place on exactly the right wall with the automatic certainty of a body that had navigated this kitchen for thirty-eight years and had not forgotten a single thing. The light came on. The kitchen looked back at her — unchanged, familiar, slightly reorganized in the way kitchens reorganize themselves over six years of different hands managing them, but fundamentally the same. The same counter. She also noticed the newer designer containers at the other end marked coffee and sugar. And it didn’t really bother her!
She checked the place where she used to keep the ingredients for her tea. They were still there, even if slightly disorganized.
She put the water on.
-----
She heard him on the stairs before she heard anything else.
Not loudly — he had never been a loud mover, had always had the particular quietness of a tall man who had learned early to carry himself carefully in spaces full of people. But she had known the sound of his footsteps for thirty-eight years and six had not changed them. She did not turn. She continued measuring the chai patti with the small spoon — the same spoon, she noticed, slightly bent at the handle, that had always been bent at the handle — and waited.
He appeared in the kitchen doorway.
She felt him register her presence — the slight pause, the recalibration — and then he stepped back. Not away, just — to the side of the doorway. Waiting. She had not invited him in and he was not going to invite himself.
She appreciated this without showing it.
The water came to a boil. She added the chai patti. The smell of it joined the faint residual dhoop that had followed her down from the prayer corner, and the kitchen filled with both — agarbatti and chai, the two smells of early morning in this house for as long as anyone could remember.
She measured the ginger. Added it. Turned the flame down.
She was reaching for the second cup — the deliberate, considered reach of someone who has made a decision and is acting on it without ceremony — when she heard the second set of footsteps. Lighter, quicker. The footsteps of someone who has woken suddenly and is moving with the slight alarm of someone who fears they are late.
Kamla, their live-in maid, appeared in the kitchen doorway and stopped dead.
Her eyes went to Tulsi. Then to the stove. Then back to Tulsi. Her face arranged itself into the particular expression of someone bracing for impact — shoulders slightly raised, hands already moving toward the nearest cloth, a rag she was already holding pressed against her side as though Tulsi’s presence in the kitchen at this hour must mean something had gone wrong and she was already responsible for it.
Tulsi looked at her.
Kamla (her words tumbling out, her voice low and anxious): Maafi kar dijiye madam! hoon, — mujhe pehle uthna chahiye tha, aap ko itna nahi karna chahiye tha, main abhi —
She was already reaching for the pan handle. Tulsi gently moved it out of her reach. Not sharply. Just — a quiet redirection. The way you redirect a child who is about to touch something hot.
Tulsi (evenly, her voice warm in the particular way of someone who is not performing warmth but simply has it): Kamla. Ruko. (a beat) Main khud chai banana pasand karti hoon. Hamesha se. Tum thodi der baad uthna — theek hai.
Kamla stared at her.
The staring was not rudeness — it was genuine incomprehension. Six years of a different kind of morning had calibrated her to a different set of expectations entirely, and this — this quiet, this permission, this *ruko* spoken without an edge — did not fit the pattern her body had learned to brace for. The rag was still in her hands. She didn’t know what to do with it.
Tulsi (seeing the confusion, gently): Koi galti nahi hui. Jao, fresh ho jao. Nashta main sambhal leti hoon — aaj ke liye.
Kamla’s face did something complicated. Something that was not quite tears and not quite relief but contained both, sitting just below the surface of a woman who had learned over six years to keep her face very still. She nodded — a quick, slightly overwhelmed nod — and disappeared.
The kitchen was quiet again.
Tulsi strained the chai into two cups. She picked them both up and moved toward the balcony door — and as she passed th kitchen doorway where Mihir stood she set one cup on the small shelf just outside the kitchen. Within reach. Not handed to him. Not offered with any words or any look. Just — placed there, a fact, and then she was past him and walked on to the balcony with her own cup in both hands, facing the garden.
-----
He looked at the cup for a moment longer than he needed to.
Just a moment. The cup sitting on the shelf where she had placed it — not handed to him, not offered with any warmth, just set there within reach, the steam rising from it in the cool morning air. Such a small thing. Such a completely ordinary thing — a cup of chai — and yet his hand, when he reached for it, was not entirely steady.
He wrapped both palms around it.
The warmth of it travelled up through his hands and he stood there inside the doorway holding it the way a man holds something he had forgotten the temperature of.
He took the first sip.
It tasted exactly as it always had. Thirty-eight years of the same hands, the same proportion of things, the same unhurried attention — and six years of its absence — in a single cup.
He did not take a second sip immediately. He just stood with it.
Six years is a long time to wake up to tea prepared carelessly by maids!
He did not look toward the balcony. He looked at the cup and he felt everything that the cup contained and he kept all of it entirely to himself — because it was a cup of chai, and she had not meant it as anything more than that, and he knew the difference between what a thing is and what it means to the person receiving it, and he was not going to make her responsible for what this particular cup meant to him.
That was entirely his own business.
He took his cup and moved hesitantly to stand at the threshold of the balcony door. Inside, she outside. The doorway between them.
The morning was coming up slowly, the sky at that particular shade of grey-blue that exists only in the half hour before dawn properly breaks. The garden was still and dark below. She stood with her cup in both hands and looked at it and said nothing.
A silence.
He cleared his throat.
She did not turn. But the set of her shoulders told him she was listening.
Mihir (quietly, his voice low, the voice of a man choosing each word with the care of someone walking on uncertain ground): Kuch kehna tha.
Tulsi: Kaho.
Not an invitation. Not unwelcoming. Simply — permission, given once, without elaboration.
Another silence. He looked at his cup. Then at the garden where the light was beginning, very slowly, to change. Then —
Mihir: Angad ko — (he stopped. Started again, his voice lower) Bahut der ho gayi hai. Yeh main jaanta hoon. (a beat) Usse ghar wapas laana chahta hoon. Uski patni ko. Bachhon ko. (his voice dropped further, and what dropped with it was the last of whatever composure he had been maintaining around this particular subject) Main akela nahi —
He stopped. Did not finish.
He did not finish because finishing would require him to say *I cannot do this without you* and he did not have the right to say that yet, perhaps not ever. But she heard the unfinished sentence. She heard everything in it — the six years of not going, all the mornings the thought had come and been pushed back down, all the ways a man can know he is wrong and still not find the road to making it right without help.
The garden was getting lighter. Almost imperceptibly, but lighter.
Tulsi lifted her cup. Took a measured sip. Set it down on the balcony railing. A silence long enough that he felt the full weight of what he was asking — felt it settle on him the way it deserved to settle.
Then —
Tulsi: Kab jaana hai?
Three words. Flat, practical, without warmth or coldness. Just the question that accepted the task and nothing more — that closed the door around everything else he might have hoped to read into her answer.
Mihir (exhaling almost imperceptibly): Dus baje? Gyarah? Jo tumhe —
Tulsi: Das theek hai.
She turned back to the garden and picked up her cup.
He understood. He stepped back from the threshold, back into the kitchen, and stood at the counter for a moment with the second half of his chai and the faint smell of dhoop still in the air and the particular quality of a silence that is not empty but entirely, completely full.
He finished his chai standing alone at the counter.
She finished hers standing alone on the balcony.
The morning came up between them.
-----
By seven-thirty the household was stirring.
The family came down one by one — Ritik first, then Shobha, then the Chachis together, then Parth, then Dev and Saloni. The usual morning chaos of kids preparing for school while asking questions about why Baa or Nani was here.., where she’s staying here forever now and their unadulterated joy on being told yes!! That morning, it became Tulsi’s job to cajole the kids to go to school, promising she’ll be right here when they return!
The kitchen filled with the sounds and small negotiations of a family having breakfast together — who wanted what, where things were kept, the ordinary comfortable noise of people who know each other well enough to be entirely natural in the same space. Kamla had returned, recovered, and moved through the kitchen with a lightness that had not been there yesterday, her movements less braced, her face less carefully arranged.
Tulsi moved through it all with the ease of someone returning to a choreography they had once known by heart and find, to their own slight surprise, that the body still remembers. This station, this shelf, this particular order of things. Her hands knew the kitchen and the kitchen, it seemed, knew her back.
When it was time to sit, the family moved toward the dining table with the naturalness of long habit. Tulsi took her place. The others settled around her. There was the small warm noise of a family arranging itself — chairs pulled out, plates passed, the ordinary music of a shared meal.
Mihir appeared in the doorway. It was the first time in over 6 years that the family had gathered for a meal together! On their own! Happily!
He stood there for a moment — not dramatically, not with any performance of hesitation — just a man at a threshold, taking in the table, the family, the particular geography of where everyone had settled. His eyes moved, almost involuntarily, to his usual chair. The one he had sat in for thirty-eight years. The one beside —
Ritik looked up. His face opened with the uncomplicated warmth of a son who wants his father at the table, who wants the table to feel whole.
Ritik: Papa — aiye na.
He glanced at his father’s usual place, just the natural open gesture toward the chair, toward the family, the look saying “sit with us all”!
Mihir looked at the chair.
Then, quietly, without explanation, without drama, he walked to the far end of the table. The maximum possible distance on a table that had always been large. He pulled out a chair there and sat down.
Nobody said anything. Nobody asked. Ritik’s gesture hung in the air for just a moment — that open, hopeful glance — and then he looked away and reached for the chai and said nothing, because he understood, because he was his mother’s son and he had been learning to understand things without being told his whole life.
The breakfast continued. The family talked. Plates were passed. The ordinary warm noise of a shared meal filled the dining room of Shanti Niketan for the first time in six years — and at one end of the long table sat Tulsi, and at the other end sat Mihir, and between them the family moved and spoke and laughed and passed the dishes, and nobody named what was happening because nobody needed to.
It was enough that they were both there.
-----
It was during the breakfast hour — the family still at the table, the chai being refilled — that Tulsi passed through the front sitting room toward the veranda and stopped.
The front tulsi plant. She had registered it yesterday coming in. She stood at the veranda doorway now and looked at it properly in the full morning light. Dry brown stems. Withered, leafless, the soil cracked and pale — the particular deadness of something that had been watered occasionally and mechanically and without any real attention for a very long time.
She turned back to where Shobha was passing through.
Tulsi: Shobha — woh nursery, Ramji ki —agli gali me— abhi bhi hai na?
Shobha: Haan mumma hai. Bilkul hai.
Daksha and Gayatri exchanged a look. They had known this would be one of the very first tasks Tulsi would undertake!
Tulsi nodded, looking back at the dead plant
Tulsi: Nashte ke baad jaaungi. Naya paudha laana hoga.
Said simply — a task to be done, slotted into the morning in its proper place after the necessary things were finished. Then she went back to the table.
-----
From his new place at the dining table, Mihir had heard it.
He sat still for a moment after she had gone back inside. Then, without a word to anyone, without drawing attention, he went upstairs.
He came back down five minutes later carrying the pot.
His tulsi plant. The one from his bedroom window — six years of daily tending, and it showed. Full and green and carefully shaped, turned toward the light each morning, watered with the particular consistency of someone who has nothing else they are permitted to tend. He carried it downstairs and placed it on the side table in the living room. In plain view of the front door. In plain view of anyone moving between the kitchen and the veranda.
Then he went back to the far end of the breakfast table and sat down.
The family saw the pot. The family saw where it had come from and what it meant — that particular full-grown green plant that had lived on his window for six years, unmistakable in its health against the withered thing in the veranda beyond. Nobody said anything. Nobody asked. The wisdom of a family that recognizes a private communication and has the grace to stay entirely out of it.
Tulsi came through the sitting room twice more before she left for the nursery. She saw the pot both times — registered it completely, in that way she registered everything, without breaking stride or showing it on her face. She knew what it was. She knew what six years of tending a plant on a window meant. She knew what placing it here now meant.
Her hands continued their work.
-----
Nashta was done by nine.
She collected her bag, told Shobha she would be back within half an hour, and went out through the front gate toward the nursery on the next lane.
The side table was visible from the gate. The pot sat on it, green and full, waiting.
She walked to the nursery.
-----
She came back 25 minutes later carrying a small clay pot. A young tulsi plant — fresh, new, its leaves the particular bright green of something recently rooted, its soil dark and damp. She had not taken the first one available. She had chosen — had found one that was sturdy and well-shaped and full of the particular aliveness of something at the very beginning of its growth.
She came through the gate. She saw the pot on the side table through the open front door — saw it clearly, completely — and went directly to the large clay pot in the front veranda. Crouched beside it. Began to clear the dead plant with quiet efficiency. Her hands in the soil, making space.
She planted the new tulsi. Pressed the earth firm around its base with her palms. Stood back and looked at it for a moment — small and new and entirely itself in the old clay pot that had held so many seasons of this plant before.
Then she dusted her hands. Went inside to wash them.
She passed the side table. She did not pause at it. Did not look at it directly. She went to the kitchen sink, washed her hands, dried them, and went to her room to get ready to leave.
In the sitting room, behind his newspaper, Mihir heard her footsteps go to Baa’s - now her room. He set the newspaper down. He looked at his plant on the side table for a moment — its six years, its fullness, all the mornings it had stood on his window. Then he picked it up and carried it back upstairs without a word.
Back to his window. Where it belonged. Where it had always been.
-----
When Tulsi came back downstairs twenty minutes later, ready to leave, the side table was empty.
She did not pause at it. Did not look toward it. But in her peripheral vision she registered the empty surface, and somewhere in her — quietly, without drama — she registered what it meant. That he had understood. That he had taken it back without making it into something it didn’t need to be. No wounded display. No lingering of the pot in her path as a silent reproach.
He had understood and acted accordingly.
She went to check on the new plant in the front veranda before she left.
It stood in the late morning light — small and straight and green and entirely new.
Above, somewhere in the house, his plant was back on his window.
Same species. Entirely separate. Each in their own place.
She looked at the new plant for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Then she picked up her bag.
It was nearly ten. He was waiting.
-----
The car ride took forty minutes.
It was — as she had known it would be — largely silent. Not the silence of two people who have nothing to say but the silence of two people who have everything to say and no language yet for any of it. He drove. She sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the road ahead and did not perform ease she didn’t have.
Once, at a long signal, he said: *Kuch chahiye? Paani?*
She shook her head.
That was all.
The city moved past them — its traffic, its noise, its ordinary morning business entirely indifferent to what was happening inside the car — and they moved through it in their parallel silence and arrived.
-----
The chawl was in Kurla.
She navigated the last stretch with the ease of someone on familiar ground — knew which lane, knew which staircase, knew which step creaked. She did not explain her familiarity. He followed, and she felt him taking it in — the density of the lanes, the proximity of lives being lived close together, the particular texture of a neighbourhood that was nothing like the one they had come from. He had never been here. She had lived here. That gap did not need naming.
They reached the door on the second floor.
She knocked.
Footsteps inside — light, quick — and then the door opened.
Vrinda.
She was in a simple salwar kurta, her hair pulled back, a dish towel over one shoulder — mid-morning, mid-task, entirely and naturally herself in her own home. Her eyes went to Tulsi first and her face opened with the warmth of someone seeing a person they love. Then her gaze moved to the figure standing just behind Tulsi and —
She went very still.
Not frozen. Not distressed. The stillness of someone who has been waiting for a particular moment and has now, without quite being ready, arrived at it. Her eyes moved from Mihir’s face to Tulsi’s and back. Her expression was composed — entirely, deliberately composed — but Tulsi, who knew her, saw beneath it the particular steadiness of someone choosing, in real time, exactly who they are going to be.
Mihir was staring.
The understanding moved across his face in stages, each one arriving a fraction of a second after the last. *Vrinda, his physiotherapist is here. In this home. This is Angad’s home.* Then — complete, irreversible, carrying everything — the full arrival of it. The colour that left his face when it came.
He said nothing. There was nothing to say.
Vrinda (quietly, steadily, stepping back from the doorway): Aiye.
-----
The inside of the chawl home was small and entirely alive.
That was the first thing — not the smallness but the aliveness of it. The particular warmth of a space that has been made into a home by two people who chose each other deliberately and have lived their choice with full intention every day since. Children’s drawings on one wall, taped carefully and displayed with the seriousness that small children’s art deserves. A shelf of books. A photograph —
Mihir’s eyes found the photograph.
Angad and Vrinda. Their wedding. Simple, unposed, full of something so genuinely real that it was almost difficult to look at directly. A wedding that had happened in this chawl while Mihir was in that house. A wedding nobody from Shanti Niketan had attended and Tulsi had just arrived as the ceremonies had just concluded (and seeing her there had led him to think in a fit of rage that she’d been behind everything, he thought with a wince). A wedding that had happened anyway — without them, without his blessing, without any of the things a son should have had — and had clearly, unmistakably, been full of the bliss of a couple in love regardless.
He stood in the middle of the small room and looked at his son’s wedding photograph and something in his face simply — stopped. The particular stopping of a man whose defenses have been reached and passed without ceremony.
Angad came in from the inner room.
He stopped when he saw his father.
He had known though he had been out when Pari came to collect Tulsi’s stuff — Ritik had called, the news had traveled — and he had told himself he was prepared. He was not entirely prepared. Six years of distance does not prepare you for the particular reality of your father standing in your home for the first time, looking at your wedding photograph, looking like that.
Father and son looked at each other across the small room.
Angad (his voice carefully level, giving nothing away that he wasn’t ready to give): Papa?
Then Mihir crossed the distance in a few quick steps and Angad’s defenses gave way, and he folded into his father’s embrace—the same refuge he had sought since boyhood. Both dissolving into tears that had been suppressed too long!
At length, they sat. Vrinda brought water — moving with the quiet efficiency of a woman managing a difficult situation through sheer competence, not drawing attention to the management of it. She set the glasses down and sat beside Angad. Her hand not on his — just beside him. Present.
The silence established itself.
Then Angad looked at his mother. Not his father.
Angad: maa, aap Shanti Niketan wapas chali gayi ho. (a beat, his voice careful) Mujhe khushi hai, Maa. Sachchi khushi hai. Lekin — (he stopped. Looked at his hands, then back up, and his eyes were not angry — they were something more difficult than angry, more honest) Aap keh rahi ho wapas aao. Main kis ghar mein wapas aaunga? Aap wahan hain — Papa wahan hain — aur aap dono ke beech jo hai woh —
He didn’t finish. Everyone in the room knew what lived in that unfinished sentence.
The room held it.
Tulsi looked at her son for a long moment. Then she leaned forward slightly — not dramatically, just closing the distance by a fraction — and when she spoke her voice was entirely direct.
Tulsi: Angad. Seedha baat karta hai tu — toh main bhi seedha bolti hoon. (a beat) Main SN isliye nahi aayi ki kuch sulajh gaya tumhare Papa aur mere beech. Kuch nahi suljha. Woh — (she glanced briefly, just briefly, at Mihir, then back) — woh alag baat hai. Alag waqt ki baat hai. Shayad. (she looked steadily at Angad) Main aayi kyunki woh ghar mera hai. Baa aur Bapuji ka ghar. Tumhara ghar. Hum sab ka ghar . (her voice settled into something absolute) Meri shaanti kisi aur baat ke suljhne par depend nahi karti ab. Main theek hoon. Apne terms par jee rahi hoon. Aur kisi bhi majboori me nahi gayi apne ghar wapas!
Angad looked at his mother the way he had looked at her his whole life when he was trying to determine whether she was giving him the full truth or the version of it she had decided he needed. He had always been able to tell the difference.
He found the full truth.
He exhaled — long and slow — and something in his shoulders came down fractionally.
Then he looked at his father.
Mihir had been sitting quietly through all of it. Had not interrupted. Had not tried to build his case. Had simply been present with what was being said and let it land on him the way it deserved to land. Now, under his son’s gaze, he did not look away.
He looked around the room once more — the drawings, the photograph, the books, the small sturdy evidence of a life his son had built with his own hands after being expelled from his father’s house in a night of manufactured rage. He looked at all of it. Then he looked at Angad.
Mihir (very quietly, no speech in him, just the bare fact of it): Maine.. Bahut galat kiya. (a beat) Tumhare saath bhi. (he looked at Vrinda then, directly, for the first time — and what was in his face was not rehearsed, just present and true) Vrinda — tumhare saath bhi , beta.
The word came without calculation. Simply the word that was accurate and he said it.
Mihir (continuing, his voice low): Woh cheque — (he stopped. Shook his head once, slightly — the gesture of a man dismissing his own inadequacy as insufficient even to name) Maafi maangna kaafi nahi hoga. Yeh main jaanta hoon. Lekin mere paas abhi sirf yahi hai. Aur woh — woh main maang raha hoon. Tum dono se.
The room was very quiet.
Vrinda looked at him. Her eyes were bright — not with tears exactly, but with the particular brightness of someone who has been carrying something for a long time and is now, in this moment, being seen carrying it. She held his gaze for a moment — the gaze of a woman who treated this man week after week knowing everything and said nothing and came back anyway — and then:
Vrinda (steadily, entirely herself): Aap mere liye bilkul mere pita jaise hi hi hain — papa (she paused, and what crossed her face was the plain truth of something she had known for weeks and was now saying in his presence for the first time) — aur Maine hamesha aapko waise hi dekha. sirf ek pita ki hi tarah!
Mihir looked at her. Understanding, perhaps for the first time with full clarity, exactly what it had cost her to come to his house day after day — to treat him with care and professionalism and warmth, to say in her heart *he is like my own father* — while carrying what he had done to her on the first day of her marriage. Understanding what it means when someone gives you more grace than you have earned and asks for nothing in return.
He nodded. Once.
He did not trust his voice.
-----
It was Angad who broke the silence.
He looked at Vrinda. Something passed between them — the wordless exchange of two people who have already discussed this and are confirming, in real time, that the decision still holds. Vrinda gave the smallest nod.
Angad (to his parents, quietly, with the weight of a decision not made lightly): Hum aayenge. (a beat, then practical and deliberate — the tone of a man managing logistics because it is easier than managing the emotion directly) Kuch din mein. Main jo job karta hoon woh log mujh par kaafi depend karte hain papa.. aur jab tak unhe koi aur nahi milta (Mihir looked up at the responsible, considerate person his son had become, his eyes shining with pride) aur Bachhon ka school transfer.. aur bachchon ko samjhana hoga ye transition..
Tulsi: Koi jaldi nahi hai.
Angad looked at her. The ghost of something — not quite a smile but the thing that lives in the neighbourhood of smiles — crossed his face.
Mihir (looking around again): Bachche? Dikh nahi rahe?
Vrinda: school gaye hain.. (then she observes the wishful look he gives and says smoothly) Aap ko pictures dikhati hoon.
Over the next few minutes, Mihir was treated to his grandchildren’s pics and he now knew their names, that they were twins and a few of their likes.
-----
They left an hour later.
At the door Vrinda touched Tulsi’s feet and then Mihir’s feet.. both blessed her wholeheartedly — and just before leaving Tulsi warmly held her hand with her own and they looked at each other. Everything between them had already been said in months of shared mornings in this small kitchen, in the evenings when Vrinda had simply sat beside her and been present. None of it needed repeating now.
In the lane below, Mihir waited by the car. Tulsi came down the stairs and they walked the last stretch and got in.
The drive back was silent — but differently silent than the drive there. Not the tight careful silence of two people bracing for what lay ahead. Something that had been held very tightly in both of them had, in the small room upstairs, been allowed to release just fractionally — not dissolved, not resolved, just loosened, the way a knot loosens when the tension that has been holding it finally, slightly, slackens.
They did not speak of what had happened.
They drove back through the city and did not need to.
-----
Lunch was on the table when they returned.
The family had waited — not formally, not with any announcement, just in the way families wait when two of their members have been somewhere important together and returning is its own kind of moment. The table was set. The food was ready. People took their places with the ease of a household that has been doing this its whole life.
Mihir sat at the far end.
No hesitation this time, no pause at the doorway — he simply went to his end of the table and sat down, and the family arranged itself between them, and the meal began. Roti passed down one side. Dal from the other. The ordinary warm commerce of a shared table. If the distance between the two ends of it was noticed — and it was noticed, it was always noticed — nobody named it, because by now everyone understood that this was simply how things were, that this was Mihir’s way of saying something that did not need to be said aloud.
Tulsi ate and spoke to the Chachis and listened to Ritik and did not look toward the far end.
He ate and listened and did not speak unless spoken to and did not look toward her end.
Between them, the family was whole.
-----
She left for the factory at two-thirty.
Ten days. The work had been sitting for ten days while she had been doing what needed to be done — and it had needed to be done, she did not regret a moment of it, but the fabric orders did not regret themselves and the accounts did not update themselves and the girls who ran the business alongside her had been managing with admirable patience and she owed them her presence.
She told no one where she was going except Shobha. She took her bag and her files and left.
When the family noticed her absence and were informed by Shobha, they took a while to process it! But once they did, they were all happy for the woman their bahu and mother had become!
The factory was forty minutes away by auto. She spent those forty minutes with her files in her lap, not thinking about the morning, not thinking about Angad’s face or Vrinda’s eyes or Mihir at the far end of the lunch table — just reading numbers, just returning to the part of herself that had been built quietly and steadily over six years and was entirely her own. The part that needed nobody’s permission and answered to nobody’s grief.
It was, she realized somewhere on that auto ride, a relief. Not an escape — she was not running from anything. Just — a relief. The particular relief of a woman who has more than one room inside herself and is allowed to move between them.
She was at the factory until five.
-----
She heard them before she saw them.
Coming through the front door, her bag over her shoulder, the early evening light behind her — she heard voices from the direction of the room on the other side of the staircase from what was her room now Not the professional quiet of a session in progress but something looser, warmer — the particular sound of a conversation between two people who have found, over weeks of sessions, an ease with each other that has nothing to do with physiotherapy. His voice. Vrinda’s voice. A laugh — his, low and genuine, the kind of laugh she had not heard from him in — she did not complete the thought.
She set her bag down in the entrance and stood for a moment.
Then she went to the kitchen for water.
-----
Vrinda came out ten minutes later, bag over her shoulder, moving with her usual composed purposefulness toward the front door. She paused when she saw Tulsi in the kitchen doorway — and something crossed her face, warm and quick and slightly complicated.
Tulsi: Session ho gaya?
Vrinda: Haan. (a beat, and her eyes said several things simultaneously) Woh — theek hain. Bahut better ho gaye hain.
They looked at each other for a moment. The look of two women who are talking about physiotherapy and not talking about physiotherapy simultaneously.
Vrinda touched Tulsi’s hand briefly — just a press, just a second — and moved toward the door.
She was almost at the threshold when —
Mihir: Vrinda.
He had appeared in the sitting room doorway. He looked at Vrinda first — then, as though he had not intended to but could not help it, at Tulsi.
Vrinda paused, her hand on the door.
Mihir: Dinner tak rukogi please beta? Angad ko bhi phone kar dete hain— (he glanced at Tulsi briefly, then back to Vrinda) — Bachhon ko bhi le aaye. (a beat, and his voice dropped into something quieter, something that was not a request to Vrinda at all but something he was saying in the only direction he was currently able to say it) Bahut der ho gayi hai. Unhe dekhna chahta hoon.
Vrinda looked at him. Then at Tulsi.
Tulsi said nothing. She was looking at the counter. But she did not say no — and in this house, in this new careful language they were all learning to speak, that was its own kind of answer.
Vrinda: Main call karti hoon unhe.
And she stayed back .. spending time in the kitchen with Tulsi who started dinner preparations. A while later, Ritik came home, having brought Timsy from school! Ritik was pleased to see vrinda and they exchanged warm greetings!
Timsy had already seen Tulsi in the house in the morning and had relished the breakfast made by her! Now she ran to Tulsi, “baa”! Tulsi took her in her arms and asked about her day indulgently, patiently answering her questions.
Then Timsy said pointing towards Vrinda: Baa, ye Kaun hain?
Tulsi again patiently explained that it was her chachi and that she would get to meet her chachu too in some time along with a brother and sister! That got her so excited that she refused to go when Ritik came to take her to their room to change out of her uniform until Vrinda cajoled her! Next to join them in the kitchen were Pari and Garima! Garima was already attached to her Nani so it was Garima who took the place which Timsy had just vacated - Tulsi’s lap!
-----
Angad came at seven, the children tumbling in ahead of him with the complete indifference to atmosphere that only small children can manage — immediately interested in everything, immediately loud, immediately and entirely themselves.
Mihir stood in the sitting room doorway and looked at his grandchildren for the first time.
He did not speak. He did not move immediately. He simply stood and looked — at their faces, their energy, the particular way they moved through a new space with total confidence — and something in him that had been very tightly held for a very long time simply came undone, quietly and completely, without any drama at all.
Akshay— curious, fearless — looked up at him from the middle of the sitting room.
Akshay: Aap Kaun ho?
A beat.
Mihir (very quietly, crouching down to their level, his voice not entirely steady): Main — (he paused. The word was right there. It had always been right there, waiting for this moment) — main tumhara dadu hoon
Madhvi: aur mere bhi?
Mihir (suppressing a laugh that came unexpectedly): haan tumhara bhi
The children considered this information with the serious thoroughness of a small person receiving an important fact. Then, apparently satisfied, moved on to investigate the bookshelf.
Mihir stayed crouched for a moment after the child had gone. Just a moment. Then he straightened.
Angad was watching him from the doorway. His face was — complicated. The face of a son watching his father receive something that should have been his years ago, feeling the loss of those years and the relief of this moment simultaneously, not knowing which one to feel first.
Tulsi was in the kitchen. She had heard all of it — the child’s question, Mihir’s answer, the particular quality of the silence after. She stood at the counter for a moment with her hands still.
Then she went back to what she was doing. There was dinner to finish.
The house came alive with the particular choas that’s characteristic of 4 small kids playing together and running around!
-----
They ate at eight.
The table was full in a way it had not been full since before any of this — Angad and Vrinda, the children between them, the Chachis, Ritik with Timsy , pari with Garima, Shobha, Dev and Saloni, Parth. The noise of it was enormous and entirely welcome. The children required things — more roti, different sabzi, explanations of why they had to eat their dal — and the adults organized themselves around these requirements with the instinctive efficiency of a family that knows how to be a family.
Mihir sat at his end. Tulsi sat at hers.
Between them, across the length of the table, the family moved and talked and fed the children and argued cheerfully about nothing important and laughed at things that weren’t that funny and were in fact very funny — and the table was full and warm and loud and alive.
At one point one of the children — bored with sitting, immune to consequence — climbed down from their chair and walked the full length of the table to where Tulsi sat and climbed into her lap without asking, because small children do not ask, and settled there with the complete confidence of someone who has identified the right place to be. All the rest 3 followed!
Tulsi’s arms went around them automatically. The way her arms had always gone around children — automatically, absolutely, without thought. Her lap somehow had room for all of them at the same time!
From the far end of the table, Mihir watched.
He did not look away. He watched all his grandchildren in Tulsi’s arms and he watched Tulsi’s face — the particular softness that came into it, the particular quality of ease, the way she became most completely herself when there was a child that needed her — and whatever moved through him in that moment he kept entirely to himself, the way he had learned to keep things, the way he was learning to keep more things, the way this new life in this house was going to require him to keep a great many things entirely and permanently to himself.
He reached for the roti.
He ate his dinner.
The table was full and warm and loud and alive around him, and that was — for tonight, for this first evening — more than he had any right to ask for.
It was enough.
-----
Later, after Angad and Vrinda and the children had gone — the children carried out half-asleep, protesting drowsily — after the table had been cleared and the kitchen put right and the family had dispersed toward sleep one by one, the house settled into its nighttime quiet.
Tulsi stood in the front veranda for a moment before going in.
The new tulsi plant in its pot, small and straight in the dark. She touched one leaf lightly — just with a fingertip, just for a moment — then went inside.
She passed through the sitting room. Through the entrance hall! Towards Baa’s room. But her eyes darted up to the master bedroom. She could see a thin line of light from the top of the door — he was still awake, or had fallen asleep with the light on, she did not know and it was not hers to know.
She went to Baa’s room. Closed the door behind her. Stood in the dark for a moment the way she had stood last night, letting the room come to her.
Then she found the bedside lamp. Turned it on.
The prayer corner — its diyas burnt down now to their bases, the dhoop long since finished, the faint residual smell of it still in the air. She would refill everything tomorrow morning. It was the first thing she would do.
She changed. Made the bed with the same quiet efficiency as the night before. Put her things on the desk.
She turned off the lamp.
She lay down in Baa’s bed in the dark and looked at the ceiling.
She was tired in the specific, clean way of a day that has been full — not heavy, not unresolved, just full. The Angad visit. The factory. The dinner. The children in her lap. All of it.
The house around her was quiet. Old familiar sounds — the settling of its walls, its particular nighttime vocabulary that she had known for thirty-eight years and had not forgotten.
Somewhere above, his light was on or off. She did not know. She did not need to know.
*Ek din,* she said to the dark. To Baa. To herself. *Ek din ho gaya.*
The room held the words.
She closed her eyes.
She slept.
Edited by ElitePerfumer - 4 hours ago
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