**CHAPTER 4 - APNI HOON**
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The dhoop reached him at five forty-three.
He had been awake since five-fifteen — sleep had been a negotiation rather than a certainty for years now — lying in the grey space between waking and thinking when the smell arrived. Faint first, then fuller, travelling through the old house’s walls with the unhurried certainty of something that had always known the way.
He lay still.
Yesterday he had gotten up. Had gone downstairs, stood in the kitchen doorway, been given a cup of chai he hadn’t asked for, and asked her something that had needed asking for six years. All of it necessary. All of it also — his presence in her morning. His footsteps in her space before she had chosen to share it.
Today he stayed where he was.
He lay on his back in the grey early light and let the smell of the dhoop reach him and be what it was — her morning, her ritual, her reclaiming of something left untended for six years — and he did not go downstairs. This was what he could give her. This small, invisible thing. The morning hours. The kitchen. The entire ground floor to herself. The particular quality of aloneness a person needs when they are putting themselves back together in a place that once took them apart.
He lay still and gave her the morning.
-----
Tulsi sat at the kitchen table with both hands around her cup.
She had not gone to the balcony today. The morning was cooler, the sky through the window a softer grey, and she had simply sat at the table instead — the old wooden table with its familiar grain. She had sat here ten thousand times. She sat at it now with a particular quality of attention, a noticing of what the body already knew.
The dhoop smell had followed her down, or she had carried it. Either way it was here — faint and present, the smell of the prayer corner she had tended this morning the same way she had tended it yesterday.
She drank her chai.
The house was quiet around her. Not the quiet of absence but the quiet of presence held in suspension — all those people and their lives and their complications temporarily stilled, and in the middle of it she sat alone with her cup and the dining room light and the particular peace of a woman who had learned, over six years of solitude, that being alone is not the same thing as being lonely.
She was, for this hour, simply herself. Not Maa, not bahu, not the woman who had come back. Just Tulsi, in her home, in the early morning, with her chai.
She closed her eyes for a moment.
-----
She heard them before she saw them.
Small feet on the stairs — the effortful deliberateness of someone whose legs are not quite long enough for each step. Slow at first, careful. Then, as the kitchen light reached the bottom of the staircase, faster — the speed of a child who has identified something interesting and is moving toward it with the complete confidence of someone who has not yet learned that interesting things sometimes require permission.
Tulsi set her cup down.
Timsy appeared in the doorway. Yellow pyjamas twisted from sleep. Hair wild, one side flattened. In one hand, held against her chest with the casual importance of something that goes everywhere, a small stuffed elephant, grey and worn at the ears. She stood and looked at the dining room— the light, the smell, the cup on the table — and then her eyes found Tulsi and her face did the thing that five-year-old faces do when they find exactly what they were looking for without knowing they were looking for it.
*Baa!*
Not a greeting. A statement of arrival.
Tulsi’s arms opened. Timsy crossed the dining room in four steps and climbed into her lap with the physical confidence of a child who expects no resistance — settling herself in with small efficient adjustments, the stuffed elephant tucked between them, her head finding Tulsi’s shoulder with the unerring accuracy of someone who knows this geography.
Tulsi held her. The warm weight of her, the smell of a small child just woken — sleep-warm, slightly dusty. She said nothing. Just held her, the way she had held all of them in this kitchen over the years, at various early mornings — that particular quality of morning-holding that is quieter than all other holding, less performed, just the body’s simple comfort in the presence of someone small and trusting.
Timsy (tilting her head up): Aap yahan ho.
Tulsi: Haan. Main yahan hoon.
Timsy considered this. Apparently satisfactory. She settled back against Tulsi’s shoulder and looked at the cup.
Timsy: Woh kya hai?
Tulsi: Chai.
Timsy: Main bhi peeyungi.
Tulsi (the corner of her mouth moving): Chai bachon ko nahi milti.
Timsy (without missing a beat): Main bacha nahi hoon.
Tulsi: Toh kya ho?
Timsy (with complete seriousness): Main Timsy hoon.
Tulsi laughed — a real laugh, quiet and entirely unperformed, the laugh of someone genuinely surprised into it — and pressed her lips briefly to the top of Timsy’s head.
Mihir heard Timsy’s steps going downstairs, then muffled voices and then Tulsi laughing so freely! It did things to his heart and mind that he wasn’t prepared for!! His mind went into a flashback.. At all the countless times he had heard that laughter before! And his heart felt both heavier and lighter at the same time!
Tulsi: Theek hai, Timsy. Thodi si chai milegi. Thandi karke.
Timsy watched with focused attention as Tulsi poured a small amount into a separate cup, added cold milk. The attention of a child monitoring a process to ensure correctness.
Timsy: Aur sugar?
Tulsi: Already hai.
Timsy: Kitni?
Tulsi: Ek spoon.
Timsy: Do spoon.
Tulsi: Ek.
Timsy looked at her — the look of a child assessing whether this is a negotiable position. It was not. Something in Tulsi’s expression communicated this without words.
Timsy accepted one spoonful.
-----
They sat together — Timsy in Tulsi’s lap, both hands around the small cup, the stuffed elephant propped against the sugar bowl in the position of a third party attending a meeting. Outside, the sky was beginning its gradual shift from grey to pale gold. The house was still quiet above.
Timsy drank her chai with the focused seriousness of someone performing an adult activity. Then —
Timsy: Baa, aap pehle yahan kyun nahi thi?
Tulsi (evenly): Main door thi. Ab aayi hoon.
Timsy: Door kahan?
Tulsi: Anjaar. Bahut sundar jagah hai.
Timsy: Anjaar mein kya hai?
Tulsi: Ek river hai. Bahut shant rehta hai wahan.
Timsy (processing): Aap wahaan akeli thi?
Tulsi: Nahi. Kaam tha. Log the.
Timsy: Kaunsa kaam?
Tulsi: Kapde banate hain hum. Bandhej. Jaanti ho?
Timsy: Nahi.
Tulsi: Ek din dikhaaungi.
Timsy thought about this. Drank some chai. Then, with the conversational pivot only five-year-olds can execute without warning:
Timsy: Papa ko aap bahut yaad aate the.
Silence.
Tulsi: Tumhe kisne bataya?
Timsy: Kisine nahi bataya. (simply, factually) Papa rote hain kabhi kabhi. Raat ko. Jab sochte hain ki main so gayi hoon. Aur jab mumma-papa ki fight hoti hai —
She stopped. Something moved across her small face — a child’s instinctive recognition that she has said something that changed the temperature of the room.
Tulsi’s arms tightened around her. Just slightly. She did not let it show anywhere else.
She sat with the image of Ritik crying alone at night — composure held all day, released only when he believed no one was watching. And Timsy absorbing those sounds through a closed door, filing them away in the patient, observant way that children file things they don’t yet have words for.
Tulsi (steadily): Papa bahut achhe hain.
Timsy: Haan. (the uncomplicated tone of obvious fact) Woh mujhe kahaani sunate hain. Mere baal banate hain. Mumma ko aata nahi. (a pause) Aur chips dete hain kabhi kabhi. Chupke se.
The corner of Tulsi’s mouth moved.
Tulsi: Chips nashte mein nahi hoti.
Timsy: Papa dete hain.
Tulsi: Papa galat karte hain.
Timsy (giving this serious consideration): Thodi si toh theek hai na.
Tulsi: Thodi si.
Timsy smiled — full, gap-toothed, entirely delighted — and settled more comfortably and picked up her cup again.
-----
Mitali appeared in the kitchen doorway twenty minutes later.
She hadn’t dressed. A nighty barely reaching mid-thigh, hair unbrushed, face carrying the blankness of someone propelled from sleep by the absence of something that should have been present. Her eyes went first to where Timsy should have been — the empty room upstairs — and found her here instead. In this kitchen. In this woman’s lap. Holding a small cup with both hands and looking completely, infuriatingly at ease.
Timsy (without turning, having identified the footsteps): Mumma, Baa ne mujhe chai di.
Mitali said nothing.
She looked at her daughter — settled, warm, entirely unbothered — and then at Tulsi, who met her gaze with the expression that was not warmth and not coldness but simply level. The expression of a woman who is not performing anything, not asking for anything, present in her own kitchen with her grandchild in her lap at six in the morning.
Then Tulsi, reaching for the kettle:
Tulsi: Mitali. Chai logi?
Simple. Normal. The automatic courtesy of this household — someone arrives in the dining room, you offer chai. Not an olive branch. Not forgiveness. Simply what you said.
Several things moved across Mitali’s face — instinctive hostility, calculation, the specific deflation of someone braced for a confrontation that isn’t coming. Then Timsy turned around in Tulsi’s lap and looked at her mother.
Timsy: Mumma, chai lo. Bahut achhi hai. Baa ne thandi ki thi meri.
Mitali looked at her daughter’s face — open, happy, completely at home — and something in her expression shifted. Not softening. Just something going out of it. Some of the bracing.
She came in. Sat at the far end of the table — not close, not engaged, maintaining her distance with the deliberateness of someone who will accept the chai but will not let the acceptance mean anything.
Tulsi poured. Set the cup within reach. Turned back to Timsy, who had moved on to the matter of parathas — had she been promised parathas? She felt certain she had been promised parathas — aloo ones, specifically, because those were obviously the best —
Mitali sat at the far end of the table with her chai.
She didn’t drink it immediately. She sat with her hands around it and watched her daughter in Tulsi Virani’s lap, talking about parathas with the energy of someone for whom this was the most important topic currently in existence. Tulsi listening, responding, her hands already moving to begin the preparations because apparently the conversation had indeed concluded in Timsy’s favour.
Outside the window the sky had shifted fully — pale gold at the edges, the city beginning its morning. Soon the others would come down. Soon the household would become the household.
Timsy (to nobody in particular, with great satisfaction): Aaj achha din hai.
Neither adult responded.
But Mitali, at the far end of the table, looked into her cup.
And did not disagree.
-----
Tulsi left for the factory at nine-thirty.
At the door she paused to give Kamla the day’s instructions — dal at ten, sabzi already cut in the fridge, fresh rotis, no rice today. Then, almost as an afterthought: *Timsy ke liye thoda meetha rakhna. Lunch box mein — aamras hai fridge mein.*
Kamla nodded with the attentiveness of someone who has recalibrated to a household that has, overnight, become a different kind of place.
Tulsi picked up her bag and left.
-----
She was at her desk by ten.
Through the glass partition she could see the factory floor — workers at their frames, the particular focused quiet of skilled hands doing careful work, bolts of fabric in their colours stacked along the far wall. The sight settled something in her the way it always did. This business was hers. Built from nothing, or not from nothing — built from six years of learning what she was capable of when the only person she had to answer to was herself.
Ten days of neglect had generated a specific quantity of chaos. She addressed it with the systematic efficiency of someone who knows exactly where to begin. Emails. Pending order confirmations. The accounts Vaishnavi had flagged — Vaishnavi who greeted her return with the barely-concealed relief of someone who has been holding something together through sheer determination and is very glad to hand it back.
She worked without stopping.
-----
Ritik appeared in her office doorway at one-fifteen.
This was not unusual — he handled logistics from the Virani Industries side and came by most afternoons. What was different was what he had in his hand. The old blue tiffin carrier, slightly dented on one side from some long-ago fall that nobody could now recall. He came in without ceremony, set it on the corner of her desk among the files, and said:
Ritik: Maa, lunch kha lo. Main factory check karke aata hoon.
Then he turned to go.
Tulsi looked at the tiffin. Then at her son’s deliberately retreating back — the back of a man who has completed a task and is leaving before it can be examined.
She did not call him back.
She sat for a moment after he had gone. Then she opened it.
Dal. Sabzi — the one she would have preferred between the two cooked today. Two rotis wrapped separately to keep them soft. And at the bottom, a small steel container. She opened it. Mango pulp — fresh, pressed, the deep orange of Alphonso in season.
She sat with the open tiffin in front of her and looked at it.
He had told Kamla. Specifically. With the knowledge of a man who had watched her for thirty-eight years — that she would not stop for lunch on her own, that she needed the rotis kept soft, that the one thing that would make her actually eat rather than pick was something sweet at the end. He had thought about all of this, said nothing to her, and sent it through their son.
She was not going to make anything of it.
She moved the files aside. Cleared a small space. Ate her lunch.
The quantity of the dal was exactly right — she noted this involuntarily, without wanting to, the way you note things about people you have known for thirty-eight years. The rotis were soft. She ate everything. The mango pulp last, slowly, the way she always ate something sweet.
When she was done she stacked the containers neatly, latched the carrier shut, set it back on the corner of the desk.
Then she pulled her files back and went back to work.
-----
Ritik came back an hour later.
He appeared in the doorway, looked at the tiffin, looked at his mother — bent over her files, pen in hand — and came in quietly and picked it up.
Tulsi (without looking up): Kamla ko bol dena — kal se thodi kam dal bheje. Thoda heavy ho gaya thi aaj.
A pause.
Ritik stood with the tiffin in his hand. His face did the thing it did when he was containing something — that particular compression around his jaw she had learned to read when he was twelve.
Ritik: Ji, Maa. Bol dunga.
He turned to go.
Tulsi (still not looking up): Aur Ritik.
He stopped.
Her pen had not moved.
Tulsi: Thank you.
One beat.
She turned the page and continued reading. Ritik stood in the doorway one moment longer — the empty tiffin in his hand, she had eaten everything, every single thing — and then he went.
-----
Mihir was in the sitting room when Ritik came back.
He heard the front door. Heard the tiffin being set in the kitchen — that specific clatter of steel on counter. He did not get up.
Ritik came into the sitting room doorway and stopped. They looked at each other across the room, father and son, with everything unsaid between them that was going to stay unsaid.
Ritik: Thodi zyaada thi dal aaj. Kal se thodi kam bhejna.
Something moved across Mihir’s face. Just briefly.
Mihir: Theek hai.
Ritik nodded. Turned to go.
Mihir: Ritik.
He stopped.
Mihir: Kha liya usne?
Ritik looked at his father. At the specific quality of that question — its careful ordinariness, the enormous thing it wasn’t saying.
Ritik: Sab kuch. (a beat) Khaali tha sab. Aur unhone Thank you kaha.
Mihir looked back at his newspaper.
Mihir: Achha.
Ritik left. Mihir sat with his newspaper in his lap and did not read it. Outside the window the afternoon light was going amber and low.
She would be home soon.
-----
The days found their shape gradually, the way days do when a household is rebuilding — not through any single decision but through the accumulation of small repeated things until the small repeated things become, simply, *how it is.*
Vrinda came every afternoon at four.
What was new was the knowing.
She came through the gate on the third day after the exposure and Gayatri Chachi, crossing the sitting room, stopped and looked at her — really looked, with the expression of a woman reassembling everything she thought she knew about a person she had seen a hundred times and finding, in the reassembly, that the person had been extraordinary all along without anyone noticing.
Vrinda met her gaze. Steady. Unhurried.
Gayatri Chachi said: *Beti.*
Just that. Then stepped aside.
Vrinda touched her feet before going upstairs. After that the household simply extended itself around her the way it extended itself around people it had decided to claim — Daksha Chachi keeping chai ready at four, Shobha including her in the dinner count without being asked, Parth treating her exactly as he always had, which turned out, without anyone planning it, to be exactly right.
And Mihir — treated by these hands for months, who had made conversation about his leg and his sleep compliance while she folded everything she knew and was into the smallest possible space and went on treating him anyway — navigated those first sessions after the knowing with the difficulty of a man who has too much to say and has correctly determined that the physiotherapy room is not the place to say it.
He lay still. She worked. The room held what it held.
Once, midway through the leg rotation, he said quietly — not looking at her:
Mihir: Tum bahut zyaada achi ho. Mujhse bahut zyaada.
Vrinda was quiet for a moment. Her hands continued.
Vrinda: Aap mere papa hain. Papa se achi toh hona hi tha.
He didn’t respond. She didn’t require him to.
But after the session, when she was packing her bag and he was sitting up slowly — that careful movement of a leg still healing — he looked at her with an expression she had not seen him direct at her before. Not gratitude exactly. Older than gratitude. The expression of a man looking at someone who has given him something he had no right to ask for and never asked for and received anyway.
Mihir (quietly): Angad ne achha kiya.
Vrinda looked up from her bag.
Mihir: Haan. (something almost like a smile, the first she had seen from him that reached his eyes) Us raat jab woh bhaaga — maine socha bahut kuch. Galat socha. Lekin ek cheez sahi nikli. Woh apni pasand ke liye bhaaga — aur uski pasand sahi thi.
Vrinda looked at him for a moment. Then, steadily:
Vrinda: Woh hamesha kehte hain — ghar ki neev toh aap hi hain. Bura nahi lagta unhe kisi baat ka. Kabhi nahi laga.
Mihir nodded once. Looked at the window. The late afternoon light shifting, the garden going quiet.
Mihir: Aur tum?
Vrinda: Main? (a small pause, honest and unhurried) Mujhe bhi.
He nodded again. Said nothing more. But when she left that day she touched his feet as she always did — and this time his blessing came differently, with both hands, held a moment longer than usual. The blessing of a man who means it from a place he had not previously been able to access.
-----
When the session ended Vrinda came downstairs and the evening shifted — because on the days Angad brought the children, the house changed register entirely the moment they came through the gate.
Akshay first, always. Madhvi behind him, slightly more considered, pausing to look at the house the way a person looks at something they are quietly deciding about.
By the third visit Akshay had mapped every interesting corner of the ground floor and ranked them in order. The kitchen was first — because Baa was usually there and Baa’s kitchen produced things. The garden was second because of a wall that could theoretically be climbed if no adults were watching. The sitting room was third because of the bookshelf’s lower shelf, which had old volumes with pictures.
Madhvi had found the prayer corner.
She had stood in the doorway of Baa’s room on the second visit and looked at it with the serious attention of a small child encountering something that felt important without knowing why. Tulsi had found her there, crouched beside her, explained in her simple unhurried way what each diya was for. Madhvi had listened carefully.
Madhvi: Meri bhi ek hogi?
Tulsi lit a small diya, placed it in her cupped hands, helped her set it in the corner. Madhvi watched it burn for a long time after that, with the specific stillness of a child who has found something that belongs to her without knowing it was missing.
-----
Mihir watched his grandchildren the way a man watches something he is only just being permitted to see.
He did not insert himself. Did not perform grandfather. Was simply present — and if they came to him, he was there, and if they didn’t, he watched from the appropriate distance and was grateful for what that distance allowed.
Akshay came to him on the fourth visit.
Simply arrived at Mihir’s chair with an old illustrated Panchatantra from the lower shelf and placed it in his lap without preamble. *Yeh padhke sunao.* Then climbed into the adjacent chair — not onto his lap, but close enough to see the pictures — and settled in with the expectation of someone who has issued an instruction and is monitoring for correct execution.
Mihir opened the book.
The spine cracked slightly. The pages were slightly yellowed, the illustrations the old kind — flat colours, expressive faces, the particular charm of a visual language designed for children decades before either of them was born. He found the first story. Began to read.
Akshay’s finger landed on an illustration. *Yeh kaun hai?*
Mihir told him. Akshay absorbed this, considered it, found the next illustration. *Aur yeh?*
*Yeh sher hai. Jaanwar ka raja.*
Akshay looked at the lion with the critical attention of someone cross-referencing this claim against existing lion knowledge. Apparently it checked out. He settled back.
Mihir read on. His voice fell into the rhythm of it — the old cadences of stories he had read to his own children once, in this same room, with this same book possibly, in a life that felt simultaneously very near and very far away. Akshay beside him, warm and entirely present, asking questions at the precise moments that questions needed asking and falling silent at the precise moments that silence was correct, as though he had been listening to stories his whole life and knew their grammar.
He was five. But he was listening with his whole body, leaning slightly toward the book, and there was something in that lean — that unconscious, unperformed tilt toward a story being told by a voice he had already, in four visits, decided to trust — that undid Mihir in ways he could not have predicted and would not have admitted to anyone.
*Phir kya hua, dadu?*
The word arrived in the middle of the story, casually, as though it had always been there. Akshay’s eyes were on the page, his finger already moving to the next illustration. He had not looked up. He had not announced anything. The word had simply arrived the way a child uses a word when it has become, somewhere in the quiet interior process of a five-year-old, simply accurate.
Mihir stopped reading.
One beat — no more — and then he continued from where he had left off.
*Phir sher ne socha —*
His voice was completely steady. The story continued. Akshay’s finger moved. The lamp was warm and yellow and the old book was open between them and outside the window the garden was going dark.
He read until the chapter ended. Then the next one, because Akshay’s *aur?* admitted no argument. By the time Tulsi appeared in the doorway to call them for dinner, they were three chapters in and Akshay had climbed — at some point between the mongoose and the crow — from the adjacent chair into Mihir’s lap without either of them appearing to register that this had happened.
Tulsi stood in the doorway.
Mihir’s voice reading the old story. Akshay’s weight in his lap, his finger on the page. The yellow lamp. The cracked spine.
She watched a moment longer than she needed to. Then went back to the kitchen without calling them.
Dinner could wait five minutes.
-----
What Tulsi noticed about Mihir she noticed the way she noticed everything — without directing her attention toward it, without welcoming the information. It arrived anyway because thirty-eight years of knowing a person does not stop operating simply because you have decided it should.
She noticed he was never where she was going.
Not through absence — he was present at every meal, every evening. But there was a quality to his presence that had been calibrated. He did not appear in the kitchen in the early morning. He did not find reasons to be in whatever room she was working in. When their paths would naturally have crossed, she would find, on arriving, that he had recently been there and was currently not.
No pointed quality to it. No performance. The withdrawal of a man who has examined the terms and is trying, in the most concrete way available to him, to honour them.
She noted this. Did not acknowledge it, did not soften toward him for it, did not adjust anything she was doing.
But somewhere — in the part of her that had always been a fair witness even when fairness cost her something — she filed it in the place where she kept things that were true about people regardless of whether she wanted them to be.
He was trying.
Not toward any particular outcome. Just trying to be in this house in a way that did not cost her anything she hadn’t chosen to give.
She noted this. And returned to her work.
-----
The nights were the hardest for him and the most entirely his own.
Eleven days.
He had thought — in the abstract, in the months before it happened — that having her back under the same roof would bring some form of relief. Not happiness, he hadn’t permitted himself that word. Not reconciliation, he had no right to that word. But relief. The distance between them measured in rooms and staircases rather than cities and years.
He had been wrong.
Having her here was a different kind of torture — infinitely preferable to her absence, and also, in ways he hadn’t anticipated, infinitely harder to bear. Because absence had been its own terrible anaesthetic. Six years of not seeing her had built a certain numbness, a protective layer of not-having that the body (or was it heart?)eventually learned to metabolise. Grief, sustained long enough, becomes its own equilibrium.
Eleven days had destroyed that equilibrium completely.
Now he knew exactly how she took her chai — a little less sugar, both hands around the cup in the morning. Now he knew the sound of her footsteps on the downstairs floor. Now he knew the particular quality of silence that settled over the kitchen after she had been in it — fuller somehow, as though the room remembered her. Now he knew, again, what it was to hear her voice before he had prepared himself for it — and the sound of it arriving at the top of the staircase hitting him somewhere below the sternum with a precision that never diminished no matter how many mornings it happened.
His world had narrowed to a set of carefully rationed things. The sound of her in the kitchen before the household woke. The back of her head at the dining table. The way she stood in the garden sometimes in the evenings — not pacing, not thinking visibly, just standing the way Baa used to, looking at nothing in particular. The way she spoke to Ritik, who was slowly beginning to unfold in her presence the way a plant unfolds toward light. These small, unglamorous, devastating things. And some mornings he even managed to feel something close to gratitude for them.
-----
Tonight had been a good evening, by the household’s standards.
Angad had been over for dinner. Ritik had laughed, genuinely, for the first time in what felt like months — something Parth had said, something silly, and Ritik’s laugh had arrived suddenly and surprised even Ritik — and Tulsi had looked up from her plate at the sound of it with something in her face so private and so complete that Mihir had had to look away.
Toward the end of the meal, in the warmth of some laughter he could no longer remember the cause of, Tulsi had reached for her glass of water, taken a sip, and then — one of those unconsidered gestures a person makes a hundred times without awareness — reached for the tissue folded at the edge of her plate and pressed it briefly to her lips.
One second. Not even one second.
He had seen it happen. Had looked away immediately, the way he always did when he noticed something he felt he had no right to notice.
The family dispersed in the usual way — chairs pushing back, the younger ones carrying plates to the kitchen, the gradual movement back into individual orbits. He stood up too, walking a few steps and then somehow glanced at the table after the others had gone. The dining room had been mostly cleared. What remained was the ordinary debris of a finished meal — and the tissue, still folded at the edge of where her plate had been.
He noticed it the way he had trained himself not to notice things about her — peripherally, without turning his head. Then he reached out and picked it up.
He held it between his fingers and felt, with a clarity that was almost violent, the full absurdity and the full truth of what he was doing. Both simultaneously. He was a sixty-something year old man, head of the Virani family, sitting alone at his dining table holding a used tissue — and he was also a man who had loved one woman his entire life and lost her and had her back in the same house under terms that meant she was more unreachable now than when she had been in another city, and this small discarded unconsidered thing was the only thing in this house that she had left within his reach today without meaning to.
He brought it to his lips.
Not quickly. With the slow deliberateness of a man doing something he has fully chosen to do.
He closed his eyes.
For a moment — just a moment — he allowed himself to exist somewhere other than where he was. Not a specific memory. A quality of feeling. The feeling of not having to ration himself. Of not measuring every word and every glance. Of being simply, unconstrainedly — hers.
He had been hers since before he had words for it. She had been woven into the fabric of who he was at a level so fundamental that the six years without her had not removed the weaving — they had only made the absence of it visible, the way you only see the shape of something clearly once it’s no longer there.
Then, with the cold precision of something that had been waiting just behind the moment:
*Did I just violate her?*
He lowered his hand. Set the tissue on the table. Looked at it.
She didn’t know. She would never know. No boundary had been crossed that she could feel or name. The tissue was something she had discarded, already relinquished.
And yet.
He thought about Tulsi’s face when she had said — *pyaar hona kaafi nahi hota. Izzat bhi chahiye.* He thought about the precision with which she had drawn the lines of her return — what she was willing to give, what she was not, what belonged to her and what she would not relinquish. He thought about how much of these eleven days had been Tulsi quietly, consistently maintaining the integrity of those lines.
She had worked very hard to be exactly as she was. To remain whole, and hers, and uncompromised.
And he had — in her absence, without her knowledge — reached for the faint trace of her she had left behind without knowing.
Was that a trespass against the dignity of what she was trying to be here? Not because she would ever know. But because *he* knew. And he had decided, in the outer lawn eleven days ago, to be the kind of man who held himself to the standard of her dignity even when she wasn’t watching. Especially when she wasn’t watching. Because the Mihir who had failed her had been the Mihir who only behaved well when it was visible.
He sat with both things simultaneously. The tenderness of what he had done and the discomfort of questioning it. He did not try to resolve them into one feeling. They were both true.
Perhaps this was part of what it meant to love her the way he needed to learn to love her — with full accountability, even for the things she would never know, even for the things that had touched no one but himself.
He left the tissue where it was. Didn’t take it — that felt wrong in one direction. Didn’t throw it away — that felt wrong in another. He simply left it on the white tablecloth, in the place where her plate had been.
Let the servant take it in the morning.
He turned off the dining room light and walked to the staircase.
Halfway up — as he always did now, as he had done every night for eleven nights — he stopped. Stood still. Listened to the house.
From Baa’s room below — very faintly, through the closed door: nothing. Silence. The particular silence of someone awake and not moving.
He stood on the staircase between her world and his and listened to that silence.
Then he continued up.
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