A TuHir FF: Never Your Wife Again!! Ch 5 on pg 8: Kuch Toh Bacha Hai - Page 8

Originally posted by: luvumjht

B'ful update

Hey thank you!

But please do give me detailed reviews/feedback.

I’m nervous about the tissue scene. Hope it dint look cheap

It's so nice to read mihirs pov cause all the angst and longing ❤️

That was such a beautiful way of writing that tulsi is there yet he has no right to look or feel her presence. He has to be deliberately away, he can be present in the moment but can't participate. Even simply looking at her or replying to her is gone, which used to keep him going during noyona thing.

That used tissue part is beautiful and I liked mihir questioning himself if he has rights for it. If he's violating her and if he should do it

Timsy tulsi part is so pretty and so like child. I used ask for chai back in the day 🤣 the way tulsi bonded with her and the kids are sitting on her lap, no question nothing. Her preparing for paratha, even the way she's not hostile towards mitali. Is she trying to gauge mitali outside of ritik/other virani peoples eyes? I mean i can't see her being this neutral calm toward mitali who tortured ritik for years. And in this book almost like mitali does care for the kid, the way she went to her room and downstairs after not able to find her.

Mitali is probably wondering how to live in this house back with a woman she used to despite, who took noyonas place..she hates it but also she needs to secure her place. Good torture lol

So mihir packed the tiffin and he will again tomorrow as per tulsi's need. Good going, food is the way through heart and all that 🙏

Mihir akshay scene was so good. Mihir acknowledging angad's decision was right, how fitting vrinda is for his house and the upbringing of the kids.

Tulsi seeing mihirs efforts and filing it away. It will come handy when she decides to forgive him

Originally posted by: Phir_Mohabbat

It's so nice to read mihirs pov cause all the angst and longing ❤️

That was such a beautiful way of writing that tulsi is there yet he has no right to look or feel her presence. He has to be deliberately away, he can be present in the moment but can't participate. Even simply looking at her or replying to her is gone, which used to keep him going during noyona thing.

That used tissue part is beautiful and I liked mihir questioning himself if he has rights for it. If he's violating her and if he should do it

Timsy tulsi part is so pretty and so like child. I used ask for chai back in the day 🤣 the way tulsi bonded with her and the kids are sitting on her lap, no question nothing. Her preparing for paratha, even the way she's not hostile towards mitali. Is she trying to gauge mitali outside of ritik/other virani peoples eyes? I mean i can't see her being this neutral calm toward mitali who tortured ritik for years. And in this book almost like mitali does care for the kid, the way she went to her room and downstairs after not able to find her.

Mitali is probably wondering how to live in this house back with a woman she used to despite, who took noyonas place..she hates it but also she needs to secure her place. Good torture lol

So mihir packed the tiffin and he will again tomorrow as per tulsi's need. Good going, food is the way through heart and all that 🙏

Mihir akshay scene was so good. Mihir acknowledging angad's decision was right, how fitting vrinda is for his house and the upbringing of the kids.

Tulsi seeing mihirs efforts and filing it away. It will come handy when she decides to forgive him

hey thank you so much for this beautiful review! I’m so glad you are enjoying the story, especially Mihir’s yearning! Let him yearn for 10 more chapters! What say? Too less? Too much?

Thank you for saying that about the tissue scene! I was genuine afraid it would look creepy or cheap on Mihir!

About Mitali, yes tulsi is trying to read her by herself - she’s still unsure about how to deal with her, especially with Timsy in the picture!! Plus. Tulsi has too much on her plate (or maybe I as the writer have a lot other things to show) to deal with Mitali right now! Or maybe she’s trying to see what Mitali is without the constant company of her mom and Maasi! I do have a sequence with Mitali in mind but for that to happen, the story has to reach a certain point and a few other things have to kind of settle!!

Yes tulsi took care of him for 38 years! Now he can at least send her lunch whenever she can’t be home for lunch! Yes of course, the way to heart is through stomach!! So he’s definitely going right! The important thing is tulsi doesn’t reject it!!

gladly you liked Akshay Mihir and Vrinda Mihir scenes!!

Yes all of these small things will accumulate into forgiveness!!

Thank you again 😁

Will try to post next chapter by tonight

Let mihir yearn and grovel forever lol.

Tulsi does have a lot in plate. Also she needs to speak with gautam

I hope ib this story we can see karan

Too many characters too deal with.. way too many relationships! I may not be able to do justice to all of them! Too difficult while keeping the focus on TuHir!

**CH-5: Kuch Toh Bacha Hai**

-----

The morning belonged to her.

This was simply how it was now — the hour before the household woke, the kitchen light, the chai, the prayer corner tended in the particular quiet of early morning. She had not announced it as hers. She had not needed to. The household had understood, the way households understand things that are not said, and arranged itself accordingly.

She sat at the kitchen table with both hands around her cup and watched the sky through the window move from grey to the first pale suggestion of gold and felt — with the simple, unexamined completeness of someone who has stopped being surprised by their own contentment — entirely at peace. If a part of her heart still ached with something she did not yet have a name for, she noted it, and set it aside. She had learned, over six years, the difference between things that needed examining immediately and things that could wait.

Fourteen days.

Fourteen days of this kitchen, this table, this cup, this light. Fourteen days of Baa’s room and Baa’s prayer corner and the particular quality of sleep that had returned to her here, in this narrow bed, in this house that had always known how to hold her. Fourteen days of the factory and Vaishnavi’s relief and the accounts coming back into order and the particular satisfaction of skilled work being done correctly. Fourteen days of her children — Ritik slowly, haltingly becoming more himself, Pari steady and present, Angad returning in the evenings with Vrinda and the children and the house filling with a noise and warmth it had not had in six years.

Fourteen days of learning, all over again, that she was — still, despite everything, fundamentally — all right.

She finished her chai. Rinsed the cup. Put it away.

Then she started planning the day’s menu as another part of her mind was already at the factory — there were orders to complete and deadlines to meet.

-----

The morning at Bandhej was the kind of morning she liked best — dense with work, requiring full attention, leaving no room for anything except the problem immediately in front of her. A large order from a Pune retailer needed finalising. Vaishnavi had three questions that had been waiting for her decision. The new batch of fabric had come in and needed checking against the sample before the dyers began.

She moved through all of it with the unhurried efficiency of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing and finds in that knowledge a specific, clean pleasure. This was hers. Every decision, every adjustment, every length of fabric held up to the light and assessed — 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.

At eleven Vaishnavi put a cup of chai on her desk without being asked and said: *Aap pehle jaisi ho gayi hain, Kaki.* Then looked slightly alarmed at having said it and began to retreat.

Tulsi looked up from her files. Looked at the factory floor through the glass partition — the workers at their frames, the bolts of fabric in their colours, the particular focused quiet of skilled hands doing careful work.

Then she picked up the cup and drank.

-----

She was home by two.

The house received her the way it had been receiving her for fourteen days — with the specific warmth of a place that has remembered how to be itself. Kamla at the counter. The smell of lunch still faintly in the air. Shobha’s voice from somewhere upstairs.

And from the sitting room — the sound of the television, low, and over it the considerably less low sound of two small people who had apparently decided that the sitting room was an acceptable venue for whatever was currently being disputed between them.

Tulsi set her bag down and went to the sitting room doorway.

Garima and Timsy. Garima on the floor holding a doll. Timsy on the sofa, her shoes off, her feet tucked under her, a glass of juice in hand and the expression of someone observing a situation with carefully maintained neutrality.

The dispute appeared to be about whether the doll was pretty enough or not. Garima’s position: cute, obviously — look at the way her pretty eyes were looking at you. Timsy’s position, delivered from the sofa with great composure: nah. She wasn’t fair like Barbie.

Garima (to the doorway, without looking up, apparently having registered her arrival through some peripheral awareness): Nani, ye doll cute hai na?

Tulsi (coming in, sitting in the armchair): Depend karta hai.

Garima: Kis par?

Tulsi: Is par ki tumhe kya cute lagta hai.

Garima considered this, while Timsy looked kind of disappointed.

Timsy: Lekin Baa, ye toh itni fair bhi nahi hai!

Tulsi set her bag on the side table and looked at both of them properly.

Tulsi: Fair matlab?

Timsy (with the confidence of someone stating an obvious fact): Gori. Barbie jaisi. Barbie bahut cute hai.

Tulsi: Aur agar Barbie gori na hoti, toh cute nahi hoti?

Timsy considered this. The question had arrived from an unexpected direction and she was clearly reassessing.

Garima (still holding the doll, now slightly defensive on the doll’s behalf): Mujhe toh cute lagti hai.

Tulsi: Tumhe kyun cute lagti hai?

Garima: Kyunki — (she looked at the doll, searching) — kyunki woh muskura rahi hai. Aur uski aankhein badi hain. Aur mujhe yeh Vrinda mami ne di hai.

Tulsi: Haan. (she reached out and took the doll gently, turned her in her hands) Yeh muskura rahi hai. Aankein badi hain. Aur Vrinda mami ne di — toh ismein pyaar bhi hai. Kafi cute hai.

She handed the doll back to Garima. Then she looked at Timsy.

Tulsi: Abhi mujhe batao. Tumhari jo sabse achhi friend hai — school mein. Woh kaisi dikhti hai?

Timsy (surprised by the change of subject): Priya? Woh — (she thought about it) — kaali hai. Matlab dark. Aur uske baal ghunghraale hain.

Tulsi: Achha. Toh woh cute nahi hai?

Timsy (immediately, without thinking): Bahut cute hai! Woh bahut funny bhi hai. Aur woh mujhe lunch deti hai jab main apna lunch box bhool jaati hoon.

Tulsi: Toh uski cuteness kahan se aayi? Rang se? Ya kuch aur se?

Timsy’s mouth opened. Then closed. The machinery behind her eyes was visibly working.

Tulsi (quietly, not pressing — just continuing): Rang toh hum sab ko genes se mein milta hai, Timsy. Koi choose nahi karta. Koi gora ya fair paida hota hai, koi saanwla ya dark. Koi beech ka. Iska matlab yeh nahi ki koi zyaada sundar hai, koi kam. (a beat) Sundar hona bahut zyaada rang se nahi aata. Aata hai aankhon se — kaise dekhti ho duniya ko. Muskurahat se — sachchi wali, jo andar se aaye. Iss doll ki tarah — (she nodded at the doll in Garima’s hands) — jo muskura rahi hai bina kisi wajah ke. Woh nahi sochti main gori hoon ya nahi. Woh bas muskurati hai.

Garima looked down at the doll with renewed respect.

A silence in which Timsy appeared to be conducting a full internal revision.

Timsy (slowly, working it out): Toh — Priya cute hai kyunki woh funny hai aur mujhe lunch deti hai?

Tulsi: Aur kyunki woh tumhara khayal rakhti hai. Haan.

Timsy: Aur is doll ko Vrinda chachi ne diya isliye cute hai?

Garima (firmly): Aur kyunki woh muskurati hai.

Tulsi looked at both of them — Garima with the doll pressed to her chest, Timsy with the slowly arriving expression of someone arriving at a conclusion they had not expected to reach.

Tulsi: Aur tum dono?

They both looked at her.

Tulsi (simply, with complete seriousness): Mere liye? Duniya ki sabse sundar babies ho. Dono. Bina kisi doubt ke.

Garima smiled — the wide, unselfconscious smile of a child who has been told something true about themselves and has simply received it.

Timsy looked at her for a moment longer — the look of a child who is not entirely sure this isn’t diplomacy — and then, apparently deciding it wasn’t, smiled too.

The afternoon settled around them — warm, ordinary, entirely itself.

Lunch followed. Tulsi didn’t see Mihir in her peripheral vision at the dining table and didn’t make anything of it. It was quite usual for him to not come home for lunch when he had too much work at the office.

She rushed back to the factory soon after lunch.

-----

Mihir came home at four, just in time for Vrinda’s session.

He had been at the Virani Industries office since morning — a full day of the kind of work that leaves a man feeling like he has been carrying something heavy across difficult ground and has arrived somewhere without quite knowing how. The accounts were worse than he had understood. Ritik had warned him — had said as much, more than once, in the clipped frustrated way of a son who has been fighting alone and does not expect to be believed — and Mihir had thought he understood. He had not understood.

Because the Ranvijay problem he had known about, in the vague way you know about something you have been kept comfortable enough not to examine. What he had not known — what he was only now beginning to see clearly, layer by patient layer, each layer arriving with its own particular nausea — was that Ranvijay had not been working alone. The numbers didn’t allow for that conclusion. Noina had been in those accounts. Not carelessly, not incidentally — deliberately, over years, with the practiced patience of someone who had always known exactly what she was doing and had simply been waiting for long enough to do it undisturbed. Not just incompetent. Not just indifferent to what was being stolen under her watch. Complicit. Perhaps more than complicit.

He had sat in that office today and looked at the full picture for perhaps the first time, and what he felt was not quite rage — rage would have been simpler — but something colder and more exhausting. The understanding of exactly how comprehensively he had been used. And exactly what it had cost.

-----

A visibly tired Tulsi returned home at six and was immediately surrounded by two eager kids waiting for their Baa and Nani. She took them to the kitchen, made them sit on the counter and gave them juice, answering their numerous questions while starting dinner preparations. Kamla, who was helping, suddenly broke into a smile.

Tulsi: Kya hua Kamla? Muskura kyun rahi ho?

Kamla: Ye bachchiyaan aap ke saath kitni khil uthti hain madam. Sach bataoon toh aapke aane se ye ghar, ghar lagta hai madam.

Tulsi just smiled at that and kept working.

Dinner was almost ready when Mitali came downstairs.

This was notable because Mitali had, in the fourteen days since Tulsi’s return, developed an asymmetrical pattern — she mostly had Kamla bring her meals to her room. Sometimes she avoided the meals altogether, eating chips instead. Other times she came down when the food was on the table, ate in near-silence, and disappeared again. She had not initiated a conversation with anyone. She had not made a scene. She had simply been present in the way of a person who has made themselves as small as possible while remaining technically present, which was so completely unlike the Mitali that Ritik had described — the Mitali of ten thoughtless sentences before a thought had formed — that it was, in its own way, more unsettling than any outburst would have been.

Tonight she came down early.

She came into the kitchen while Tulsi was at the stove — Kamla had gone to put the children to bed on the floor above, Shobha was in the dining room laying the table, and the kitchen for a moment contained only the two of them. Mitali stood at the counter. Poured herself a glass of water. Drank it. Set the glass down.

Then:

Mitali: Timsy aaj kal khana nahi kha rahi theek se.

Said to the counter. Not to Tulsi. The tone of someone reporting a fact to the general air.

Tulsi (at the stove, not turning): Kya kha rahi hai?

Mitali: Kuch khaas nahi. (a pause) Aapke haath ka khaana zyaada pasand hai usse. Mera nahi khati jo healthy hai.

A beat. Mitali talking about healthy food was incongruous — she herself binged on chips all day and gave Timsy either packaged food or bland food made from ready-to-use packs with artificially added nutrients.

Tulsi turned the flame down. Turned slightly — not fully toward Mitali, just enough.

Tulsi: Bacche woh khate hain jo unhe achha lagta hai. Isme koi baat nahi.

Mitali looked at her glass.

Mitali: Haan. (something in her voice — not quite bitterness, not quite accusation, something that hadn’t fully decided what it was yet) Woh toh hai.

She picked up her glass. But she did not leave immediately. She stood at the counter a moment longer — not looking at Tulsi, not looking at anything in particular, her glass in both hands — and there was something in that standing, that particular quality of a person who has said the thing they came to say and now doesn’t quite know how to leave, that was entirely unlike the Mitali anyone had described. Not calculating. Not performing. Just — standing. A woman in a kitchen that wasn’t hers, in a house that was becoming less hers by the day, holding a glass of water with both hands.

Then she left.

Tulsi stood at the stove for a moment after she had gone. The dal was simmering. The kitchen smelled of ghee and jeera and the particular warmth of a meal almost ready.

She turned the flame back up.

Mitali was not wrong — Timsy did prefer Tulsi’s cooking. This was simply a fact, the uncomplicated preference of a five-year-old who had found something she liked. It was not a strategy. It was not a campaign. It was a child eating what tasted good to her.

But Mitali standing at that counter with both hands around her glass, with that quality of not knowing how to leave —

Tulsi filed it. In the place where she kept things that were not yet anything but might become something.

Then she called everyone for dinner.

-----

Mihir did not come home for dinner.

This had not happened before. In fourteen days he had been at the table every evening — at his end, quiet, present, eating what was served and speaking when spoken to and maintaining with complete consistency the careful arithmetic of his position in this household.

At eight Ritik checked his phone. *Papa ki ek meeting thi aaj. Shayad late ho gaye.* At eight-thirty Shobha put his portion aside and covered it. At nine the family dispersed in the usual way — the younger ones upstairs, the Chachis to their room, Ritik pausing at the base of the stairs to press a kiss to Tulsi’s hand before going up, as he did every night now, as though the gesture were simply part of the house’s grammar.

Tulsi went to her room.

She changed — not fully, she was tired, she loosened the saree and left it, undid her hair from its braid and left it loose across her shoulder. She had papers to look over before sleeping — the Pune order finalised today, she wanted to check the numbers one more time. She sat at Baa’s desk with the papers in front of her and the bedside lamp on and worked through them slowly, methodically, the way she did everything.

Outside the window the house was quiet. The city beyond it doing what cities do at midnight — not sleeping exactly, just quieter, its particular nighttime register.

She finished the papers. Stacked them. Set them aside.

She reached for the water jug on the bedside table.

Empty.

She had forgotten to fill it before sitting down. She looked at it for a moment — the small domestic failure of an empty jug — then got up, picked it up, and opened the door.

-----

On the way to the kitchen, she noticed something. The dining room light was on.

She registered this the way you register something unexpected at midnight — a half-second of recalibration before understanding arrived.

He was at the table.

Not the far end. His old place — the place he had sat for thirty-eight years, before the new arithmetic of their living arrangements had moved him. He had come home late — his jacket still on, loosened at the collar — and there was the particular quality about him of a man who has been somewhere effortful for a very long time and has arrived home and sat down before he had quite finished arriving. Food in front of him, barely touched. He was eating slowly, the way you eat when you are too tired to taste anything.

He hadn’t heard her.

Tulsi did not stop walking.

She came through the kitchen doorway and moved toward the sink with the same unhurried continuity of someone doing a simple task, because she was doing a simple task. Stopping would make it a thing and it was not a thing — he had simply sat at the wrong end of the table in exhaustion and she had simply come for water.

She set the jug under the tap. Turned it on.

In her peripheral vision she could see the table. She was not looking at it directly. She was looking at the running water, at the jug filling, at the ordinary sight of water in a dark kitchen at midnight.

The jug was nearly full.

And then — in the way that the body notices things it has been trained for decades to notice — she registered the absence. Something not there that should have been there. She didn’t turn her head. She didn’t examine it consciously. But the knowledge arrived anyway with the quiet certainty of something her hands knew better than her mind did.

No water glass on the table.

She turned off the tap.

She set the jug on the counter.

She took a glass from the cabinet — the right cabinet, the right shelf, without looking — and filled it. Then she walked to the table. Not toward him exactly. Toward the place beside him where the glass had always gone — that specific spot, slightly to the right of the plate, exactly within reach — and she set it down.

Her eyes were on the glass. Not on him.

She was already turning to go back for the jug when it happened.

He had reached for something — the salt, perhaps, or turned to say something, she would never be entirely sure — and the movement and her turning happened at the same moment and something went the wrong way and he inhaled wrong and then he was coughing. The abrupt, slightly helpless coughing of someone caught between a breath and a swallow, the kind that doesn’t resolve immediately, the kind that requires a moment.

Her hand picked up the glass of water she had just set down and held it toward him.

Automatic. Unhesitating. The gesture of someone who has done this exact thing — sat beside this person, handed him water in exactly this way — more times than could be counted.

And her other hand — the one that wasn’t holding the glass —

Went to his shoulder.

Flat-palmed, between the shoulder blade and the base of his neck, the particular pressure that was not a pat and not a rub but something between the two, the specific something that her hand had always known to do when he was choking or coughing or in any minor physical distress. Not a thought. Not a decision. Thirty-eight years, bypassing everything.

He took the glass.

And she became aware of her hand.

Not suddenly — no jolt, no sharp intake of breath. Just a gradual, arriving awareness, the way you become aware of something that has already been happening for a moment. Her hand on his shoulder. The warmth of him through the jacket fabric. The specific geography of that shoulder that her palm apparently still knew without being told.

Her hand went still.

One second. Perhaps less.

Then it withdrew — not snatched, not jerked, just quietly removed, the way you remove something that was never meant to be seen. She straightened. The glass was in his hand now. The coughing was subsiding.

She turned back toward the counter.

He did not look at her.

She could feel that he was not looking at her — the specific quality of a person arranging their attention very carefully in another direction — and she was grateful for it the way she was grateful for things she did not intend to be grateful to him for.

She picked up the jug. It was full. She had already filled it.

She had no reason to still be in the kitchen.

Mihir (quietly, to the table, not to her): Khaana thanda ho gaya tha. Garam kiya. (a beat) Bahut der ho gayi aaj.

Tulsi (already moving toward the door, her voice entirely even): Haan.

One word. Neither warm nor cold.

She went.

-----

The bedroom door closed behind her.

She set the jug on the bedside table. Stood for a moment in the middle of the room without sitting, without doing anything, just standing in the dark with the particular stillness of someone who is very carefully not thinking about something.

Then she sat on the edge of Baa’s bed.

Her right hand — the one that had gone to his shoulder — was in her lap. She looked at it. Not dramatically. Just looked at it the way you look at a hand that has done something without consulting you.

Thirty-eight years.

They lived in the hands apparently. All those years, all those ordinary evenings, all those unremarkable moments of two people existing in the same space with the unconscious ease of long habit — they didn’t live in the mind, which she had spent six years carefully reorganising. They lived somewhere the reorganisation hadn’t reached. In the specific knowledge of her palm. In the automatic geometry of where the water glass went. In the particular pressure between a shoulder blade and the base of a neck that her hand had apparently never forgotten and apparently had no intention of forgetting.

She had not meant to do it.

That was the plain truth and she looked at it plainly — alone in a dark room, no one to perform for. She had not meant to. She had been half-asleep and he had been coughing and her hand had simply gone where it had always gone, governed by something older and deeper than intention.

It meant nothing about what she had decided.

She was clear on this. What she had decided in the outer lawn remained what she had decided. A hand on a shoulder at midnight changed none of it. The body’s memory was not the same thing as the heart’s choice.

And yet.

*Kuch toh bacha hai*, said something in her that she did not entirely have words for. Not love — she had never stopped loving him and had never pretended otherwise, even to herself. Not forgiveness — that was a different territory, a longer road. Something smaller than both of those things and in some ways more unsettling. The simple, stubborn, inconvenient fact that her hand still knew his shoulder. That thirty-eight years had left that knowledge in her body without asking permission and had not removed it when she left and had not removed it in six years of absence and apparently had not removed it now.

She looked at Baa’s photograph in the dark.

*Main jaanti hoon, Baa*, she said. Very quietly. *Main jaanti hoon ki yeh kuch nahi badlata. Bas —* she paused, *— bas thoda ajeeb lagta hai. Apne hi haath se.*

The room held the words.

She lay down. Looked at the ceiling.

She would not make anything of it tonight. She was tired, it was late, and the examination would yield nothing she didn’t already know. Her hand had gone to his shoulder. She had removed it. The water glass was where it had always gone. These were the facts.

She closed her eyes.

Sleep took longer than usual.

-----

He sat at the table for a long time after she left.

The water glass in his hand — still holding it, he realised. He set it down. The small sound of glass on wood in the quiet dining room.

He looked at the table.

The food was in front of him, more or less uneaten. He was no longer hungry. He was not sure he had been hungry when he sat down. He had come home late and heated the food because it was there and sitting was easier than going upstairs and he had sat at the wrong end of the table because he had not been paying attention, because he was exhausted, because the wrong end was the end his body still considered the right end after forty-four years.

And then she had come in.

He had heard her before he saw her — the soft sound of her door, her footsteps in the corridor, the particular way she moved at midnight when she thought the house was empty. He had gone very still. Not deliberately — he had simply gone still the way you go still when something you have been carefully not hoping for walks into the room and you are afraid that any movement will end it. She had come in with her saree loosened and her hair undone — the particular version of her that only late nights produced, the one she had never performed for anyone — and something in him had simply gone very quiet, the way it went quiet in the presence of things that were not meant for him but were impossible not to feel.

She had not stopped. Had not acknowledged him beyond the acknowledgment of continuing to walk. And he had sat and watched her at the sink from the corner of his eye and had not said anything, had not moved, had tried to occupy as little of the dining room as possible while simultaneously being unable to be anywhere else.

And then she had set down the water glass.

In that spot. That specific spot — slightly to the right of the plate, exactly within reach — the spot so particular to her way of doing this, so entirely and only hers, that for a moment he had simply looked at it. The glass in its place. In *the* place. As though no time had passed.

And then he had been coughing. He didn’t know what had happened — he had turned, or breathed wrong, or something — and then the glass was in front of him, held toward him by her hand, and he had taken it and —

Her hand on his shoulder.

He sat with the memory of it now in the empty dining room. Flat-palmed, between the shoulder blade and the base of his neck. The specific pressure that was not a pat. That was something without a name except the name of thirty-eight years.

It had lasted perhaps one second.

He would ration it out for weeks.

He knew this about himself with the clear-eyed honesty of a man who has learned, in fourteen days, exactly what he is capable of and exactly what he is reduced to. He knew precisely what he would do with that one second — how many times he would return to it in the grey space between sleeping and waking, how completely it would belong only to him. A man in his situation learned to live on very small things. This was not a small thing. This was —

He did not finish the thought.

She had not meant to.

He knew this. He had no illusions. The hand had gone where the hand had always gone, and the moment she had become aware of it she had removed it — quietly, without drama — and then she had taken the jug and gone. It had not been for him.

And yet it had happened. And his shoulder still held the memory of it, the specific warmth of her palm through the jacket fabric, the particular geography of a touch that had known him for thirty-eight years and had not forgotten the map.

*Kuch toh bacha hai.*

He did not know what to do with this knowledge except sit with it in the empty dining room in the dark. The food uneaten. The water glass she had placed and he had taken. The house quiet above and below.

After a long time he got up. Took his plate to the kitchen counter, covered it. Put the glass in the sink. Turned off the kitchen and dining room light.

He stood for a moment in the dark before going to the stairs.

The table just visible in the ambient light from the window — his chair at his old end, her chair at her end, his new place at the table, the long expanse between. The table that had been full earlier, with all of them — and was now just a table in the dark with two chairs at opposite ends and the faint memory of a water glass set down in a specific place by a hand that still remembered.

He went upstairs.

Halfway — as always — he stopped.

From her room below: silence. The particular dense silence of someone awake in the dark, not moving.

He stood on the staircase between her world and his. They were awake in the dark on their separate floors and neither of them was sleeping and both of them knew the other wasn’t sleeping and neither of them would say so.

He stood there perhaps a breath longer than usual.

Then he continued up.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Nice to see a tulsi timsy scene.It was so cute.Mitali did not say anything. But I think she will happy that tulsi is bonding well with Timsy. Because tulsi will look after Timsy and mitali doesn't have to do anything.mihir saying that Angad's choice was right was nice.Nice scene on mihir vrinda and mihir akshay.