**CH-7: Bees Din**
-----
Her usual morning routine done, Tulsi had rushed to the factory earlier than usual and en-route she had also wanted to buy cardamom when she saw it running low this morning. After reaching the factory, she’d ensured everything was going smoothly, the payment was cleared and basically Vaishnavi and the girls had everything under their control. So when she left for lunch, she’d decided to take rest of the day off from work.
She wanted to spend some time at home today. Plus an important task had come up! Without meaning to, it seemed she had neglected the wellbeing of Gautam too long! Not any more!
The video call connected at two twenty.
Nandini’s face appeared first — bright, slightly breathless, the particular energy of someone who has been waiting for this call and is not pretending otherwise. They had been to a party and had just returned! It was the weekend and she wasn’t sleepy despite it being past midnight. Behind her, the clean angles of their LA kitchen, moonlight coming through a window that looked out on a dark sky.
Nandini: Maa! Finally — Shobha, tum bhi ho!
Shobha (settling beside Tulsi on the sofa, waving): Haan haan, main bhi hoon. Aapka wait kar rahi thi main bhi, Bhabhi!
The three of them fell into the easy rhythm of women who know each other well — the kind of conversation that doesn’t need warming up because the warmth was already there, had been there across the decades and was now laced with a quiet satisfaction since Tulsi’s return, sustained through calls and messages and the particular relief of a daughter-in-law who had spent six years watching things go wrong from a careful distance and was now watching them, slowly, go right.
Karan appeared briefly in the background — caught sight of the screen, leaned in, waved with the enthusiasm of a man who has learned that his mother is home and finds this fact, twenty days in, still slightly miraculous.
Karan (grinning): Maa! Shobha!
Tulsi (warmly): Karan. Sab theek?
Karan: Bilkul. (to Nandini, already snatching the phone from him) Tum ko hi baat karni hai — acha baba ye lo. (To Tulsi) Maa main baad me aapko call karta hoon!
He disappeared. Nandini watched him go with an expression that contained several things at once — fondness, relief, the specific softness of a woman watching her husband be happy after a long time of watching him not be.
Nandini (turning back): Woh bahut khush hain maa. Aap wapas aayi hain toh — (she stopped, shook her head slightly) Aap jaanti hain.
Tulsi: Haan. Main jaanti hoon.
A small silence — the comfortable kind.
Shobha: kab rahe hain Aap log?
Nandini: Bacche university join karenge — August-September tak. Uske baad hum log plan kar rahe hain. Chhe se aath mahine mein pakka. (she looked at Tulsi directly) Main bahut time se aana chahti thi. Ab toh aur bhi —
Tulsi: Aao. Apne ghar - jo na jaane kab se tumhara intezaar kar raha hai.
Such a simple thing to say. Nandini received it the way such simple things are received when they have been waited for — quietly, completely.
They spoke for twenty minutes. The children, the university applications, a holiday Karan and Nandini had taken in December, Shobha’s children, the LA life which Nandini had still not made her peace with after eleven years. Ordinary things. The ordinary commerce of a family that was, slowly, remembering how to be one.
And then Nandini said — not abruptly, but in the way of someone who has been noticing something and has decided to say it:
Nandini: Maa— aap alag lag rahi hain aaj.
Tulsi: Alag?
Nandini: Haan. (she considered her words) Halki. (a pause) Pichli baar — teen din pehle jab baat hui — aap theek thi, sab sahi tha, lekin kuch tha jo — (she stopped, tried again) Aaj woh nahi hai. Kuch — kuch rakh diya hai aapne. Kahin.
The living room was quiet. Shobha glanced at Tulsi sideways — the glance of a daughter who has also noticed and has been waiting to see if anyone would say it.
Tulsi said nothing for a moment.
She sat with Nandini’s words — *halki* — and felt, with the specific surprise of someone who has been told something true they hadn’t fully formulated themselves, that it was accurate. She was lighter. She had woken lighter. Had moved through the morning lighter. Had sat in this living room lighter, had not once today made the deliberate effort of redirecting her attention, had not felt the familiar low-level tension of carefully managed distance.
She hadn’t noticed until Nandini said it.
She noticed now.
Tulsi (evenly, after a moment): Kal thoda mushkil din tha. Aaj sab theek hai.
Nandini looked at her. The look of a woman who knows she is not being told the whole thing and has decided, wisely, not to push.
Nandini: Achha. (a small smile) Achha lag raha hai sunke.
They spoke for a few more minutes. Then Shobha reminded Tulsi of the time, and Tulsi reminded Nandini to send the children’s university details, and the call ended with the warmth with which it had begun.
The screen went dark.
Tulsi sat for a moment with the phone in her hand.
*Halki.*
She set it down. Got up. Picked up her bag.
Tulsi (to Shobha): Chalo.
-----
This morning, she had stopped to buy elaichi.
A small shop three lanes from the factory — she passed it every day, bought from the same man who knew her order without being told. He was happy to see his very old customer return.
She was already thinking about the afternoon, about Vaishnavi’s morning message regarding the Delhi inquiry, when she heard her name.
Voice: Arre — Tulsi aunty?
She turned.
A woman — mid-forties, pleasant-faced, slightly out of breath as though she had hurried to catch up. Familiar in the vague way of someone seen at social functions years ago, name not immediately accessible.
Woman: Main Monica— Monica Srivastava. Aap pehchana? Hum log teen-chaar baar mile hain — pehle. Damini ki friend hoon main!
Tulsi: Haan — haan, Monica. Bilkul pahchaana! Kaisi ho?
Monica (delighted, already talking): Kitne saalon mein mila hai aapko! Main sun rahi thi ki aap wapas aayi hain — bahut achha laga! (without pausing) Aaj mera aur Damini ka plan hai — chai peeyenge, Bandra me woh nayi jagah hai, bahut achi hai — bahut time ho gaya usse mile hue bhi! Aap sab theek hain? Gautam theek hain?
The question landed normally. Monica’s face was entirely open — the face of someone who does not know, has not been told, is simply asking the way one asks.
Tulsi (steadily): Sab theek hain. (a beat) Monica — tum Damini se kab mil rahi hain?
Monica: Chaar baje! Woh aa rahi hai directly — (she named the restaurant, chattering on) — bahut sundar jagah hai, aapko bhi jaana chahiye ek baar —
Tulsi smiled. Said the right things. Finished the transaction. Got into the auto.
She sat very still for a moment. She had no idea that Damini was in Mumbai!
Then she called up Shobha.
Tulsi: Aaj late afternoon free rehna. Ek kaam hai.
Something in her voice told Shobha that it was something big which could not be disclosed on phone.
Shobha: Okay mumma!
-----
They arrived at the restaurant at three fifty-five.
It was the kind of place that had large windows and pale wooden furniture and the self-conscious quietness of somewhere that considered itself tasteful. Not crowded — a Tuesday afternoon, a handful of tables occupied. Tulsi and Shobha took a table near the entrance, ordered nothing, waited.
Damini arrived at four-two.
She looked well — carefully, deliberately well, the appearance of a woman who has decided that looking well is a form of argument. She was scanning her phone as she came in, didn’t look up immediately, and then she did — and she saw them.
She stopped.
Three seconds — four — in which several things moved across her face. Surprise first, then calculation, then something harder.
Then she straightened. Looked at Tulsi directly — and what she chose to show was not hostility, not guilt, but a specific blankness. The blankness of a woman who has decided this encounter is beneath her engagement.
She took out her phone. Called someone.
Damini (into the phone, her voice perfectly controlled, not lowered): Monica — haan, main aa gayi. Sun, yahan thoda — familiar crowd hai. Aaj cancel karte hain — main tujhe call karti hoon, doosri jagah plan karte hain. Haan. Okay.
She ended the call. Put the phone away. Looked once more at Tulsi — not at Shobha, only at Tulsi — with the expression of someone making a statement without words.
Then she turned and walked out.
The restaurant door closed behind her.
Shobha (quietly, after a moment): Mumma..
Tulsi: Haan.
Shobha: Woh nahi sunegi. Abhi nahi.
Tulsi: Haan. (she looked at the closed door) Main jaanti hoon.
She sat for another moment. Not deflated — simply absorbing. Taking the measure of what she had seen in those three seconds before the blankness descended. The surprise had been genuine. Beneath the calculation there had been something — not softness, not yet, but something that was not pure indifference either.
That was enough. For now, that was enough.
She picked up her bag.
Tulsi (to Shobha, standing): Chalo. Wapas ghar chalte hain.
-----
She was on the call before she entered SN.
It was the Delhi inquiry — the Mehra Boutique conversion that Vaishnavi had been managing, which had now developed a complication. The boutique’s buyer wanted a customisation that sat at the edge of what Bandhej’s current production capacity could handle, and Vaishnavi, careful and competent as she was, had hit the boundary of her authority and stopped.
Tulsi (into the phone, walking): Unhone kaunsi cheez maangi hai specifically?
Vaishnavi: Woh dual-tone border chahte hain — lekin width unki apni spec mein hai, hamari standard se alag. Teen centimetre zyaada. Ek hi piece mein.
Tulsi: Frame adjustment hogi?
Vaishnavi: Haan — aur time bhi zyaada lagega per piece. Costing badh jaayegi.
Tulsi: Kitni?
Vaishnavi: Main estimate laga rahi thi — shayad eighteen to twenty percent.
Tulsi (without hesitation): Theek hai. Lekin unhe yeh straight nahi bolna. Pehle unse poochho — yeh customisation unke kis collection ke liye hai. Wedding line hai toh premium positioning already hai unki, cost absorb ho jaayegi. Agar regular line hai toh hum standard width mein ek alternative suggest karte hain jo unka vision bhi poora kare aur hamare frame mein bhi ho.
Vaishnavi: Aur agar woh insist karein original spec pe?
Tulsi: Toh do. Lekin order minimum quantity badhao — three hundred pieces se kam nahi. Volume se costing balance ho jaayegi aur unhe bhi value milegi. Relationship pehli baar ban rahi hai — ek baar achha kaam ho gaya toh woh wapas aayenge. Yeh pehla order investment hai, margin second order se nikalna hai.
A pause on the other end — Vaishnavi absorbing, recalibrating.
Vaishnavi: Haan. Haan, yeh sahi hai. Main call karti hoon unhe.
Tulsi: Aur Vaishnavi — jab baat karo, yeh mat batao ki tumne mujhse poochha. Tumhara decision hai yeh. Seedha bolo.
Vaishnavi (quietly, with something in her voice that was more than professional, almost reverence): Ji, Kaki.
Tulsi ended the call.
-----
She had not heard the gate.
She had not heard the car, or the footsteps on the path, or the particular sound of the front door opening with the specific weight of a man who has been out all day and is returning to a house he is still learning to come home to. She was too deep in the call — the particular focused absorption of someone solving a problem, her voice unhurried and precise, moving through the decision the way she moved through everything: without drama, without performance, simply with the accumulated knowledge of someone who had been paying attention for five and a half years.
Mihir stopped in the hallway.
He had intended to go straight upstairs. He had had a long day — meetings, calls, the continuing quiet management of Noina’s network damage, one particularly difficult conversation with a board member who had seen the circulating account and needed careful handling. He was tired in the specific way of sustained effort and he had wanted, simply, to go upstairs and sit for a moment in the quiet of his room.
He stopped because he heard her voice.
She was in the sitting room — he could see her through the half-open door, standing near the window, phone to her ear, her bag still on her shoulder as though she had just come in. Her back was partially to him. She did not know he was there.
He stood in the hallway and he listened.
Not to eavesdrop — or not only that. He stood because he had taken one step and then the words had reached him and he had not been able to move.
*Volume se costing balance ho jaayegi. Relationship pehli baar ban rahi hai — ek baar achha kaam ho gaya toh woh wapas aayenge. Yeh pehla order investment hai, margin second order se nikalna hai.*
He stood very still.
He had been in business for forty years. He had sat across the table from some of the sharpest minds in the textile and manufacturing industries of India. He knew what it sounded like when someone understood how business actually worked — not the surface of it, not the vocabulary of it, but the underneath of it. The relationship logic. The long-game thinking. The specific intelligence of someone who knew that the first order was never about the first order.
He listened to the end of the call.
He listened to *yeh tumhara decision hai. Seedha bolo.*
He listened to the silence after she ended it.
And then something happened that he had not been prepared for — that arrived without warning, the way the truest things arrive, in the hallway of his own house on a Tuesday afternoon.
He thought of Noina.
Not with anger. Not with the carefully managed guilt he had carried for six years like a stone in his chest. With something colder and more devastating than either — with clarity. The specific, merciless clarity of a man seeing something he had been too close to see for a very long time.
Noina had impressed him. Close to seven years ago, he had been so impressed with that college friend who came back to his life after 40 years as a sophisticated and successful businessswoman. He remembered this — then remembered the precise texture of being impressed by her, in those early months when she had arrived at Shanti Niketan, merged their businesses and inserted herself into the business conversations and spoken in the easy, fluent English of someone educated abroad, used words like *synergy* and *market positioning* and *scalability* with the confident fluency of someone who knew what they meant.
He had been impressed.
He stood in the hallway now and he understood, with a clarity that felt like a physical blow, what he had actually been seeing. Surface. The vocabulary of competence without its substance. A woman who had learned to perform the language of business the way one learns to perform anything — carefully, for an audience, in the specific register most likely to impress. Underneath it — he had seen this, had always seen it, had chosen not to look at it — underneath it had been nothing. Six years of Virani Industries declining under her management. Six years of decisions that sounded strategic and were actually hollow. Six years of the language of competence without a single decision that demonstrated it.
And Ritik. He thought of Ritik — his sensitive, capable son — systematically made to feel he had no place in those rooms, no grasp of the business, no instinct worth trusting. Not because it was true. Because a woman performing competence needs someone nearby to look incompetent. He thought of where that slow, steady diminishment had eventually led his son, and the thought was not something he could hold for long.
And Tulsi.
Tulsi who had stood in this sitting room on the phone to her employee and spoken in Hindi, in her own plain unperformed voice, and in four exchanges had demonstrated more genuine business understanding than Noina had managed in six years.
Tulsi who had not been trying to impress anyone.
Tulsi who had been talking to Vaishnavi — just Vaishnavi, just her coworker who thought of her as more than her mother, just a problem that needed solving — with the complete, unself-conscious ease of someone who simply knew what she was doing.
He had chosen Noina’s performance over Tulsi’s substance.
The thought arrived and did not leave.
He had stood in boardrooms and offices and across dining tables from dozens of people over forty years and he had prided himself — had genuinely, quietly prided himself — on his ability to read people. To see past performance to capacity. To know the difference between someone who understood business and someone who only spoke its language.
And he had missed it. In his own house. With the woman he had known since childhood. He had been dazzled by English and sophistication and the particular performance of a woman who had studied him carefully and produced exactly what he would find impressive — and he had let that performance stand in for the real thing, because the real thing was standing three feet away in a cotton saree speaking Hindi and he had stopped seeing her.
He had stopped seeing her.
The hallway was very quiet.
From the sitting room — the small sounds of Tulsi putting her phone away, shifting her bag. In a moment she would move toward the kitchen, or the stairs, or she would sense him there the way she sometimes sensed things, and she would look up and he would have to arrange his face into something she could look at without it costing her anything.
He turned. Went up the stairs. Quietly.
He closed the door of his room behind him.
-----
He sat on the edge of the bed.
He did not know how long he sat there. Long enough for the light in the room to shift — the afternoon going out of it, the particular grey of early evening beginning at the window.
He put his face in his hands.
It came then — not quietly, not with the contained dignity that the past six years had required of him in every room of this house, in every conversation, in every careful managed moment of a man living with the consequences of the worst decisions of his life. It came the way things come when a room is finally empty and a door is finally closed and there is no one left to hold it together for.
He wept. Inconsolably. For a long time.
For six years of wrong. The specific, comprehensive, irreversible wrongness of it.
He wept until there was nothing left. Until the room was fully dark and the house below had settled into its evening sounds and his face in his hands was simply a man sitting in the dark having finished something that had needed finishing for a very long time.
-----
Downstairs, Shobha paused at the bottom of the staircase.
She had heard nothing specific. Just — a quality of silence from upstairs that was different from the silence of an empty room. She stood for a moment, her hand on the banister, looking up.
Then Gayatri Chachi called her name from the kitchen and she went.
-----
Tulsi was in Baa’s room.
She had not heard anything. She had come in, changed, sat at Baa’s desk with the day sitting in her chest — Nandini’s *halki*, Damini’s deliberate back, the call with Vaishnavi, the auto ride home. A full day. A day that had given her things she didn’t yet know what to do with.
She looked at Baa’s photograph.
*Gautam*, she thought. Her first born. His face — not as he was now, wherever he was now, in whatever anger he was living in — but as he had been. The little baby he had been! The young boy who had returned to her already carrying the wound of abandonment, feeling unloved and unwanted by his own parents. How she wished she didn’t feel the need to address Aarti’s pain by letting her legally adopt a large piece of her heart! If only she had known what Kiran and Aarti would do to her tender baby! Gautam would probably never know but every single pain he ever went through in his life sat like a festering wound deep in Tulsi’s heart! She loved him so much! The boy she had loved fiercely and imperfectly, in the way you love the child who requires the most of you, the child who makes you work for every inch of trust.
He was not picking up her calls.
Damini had walked out of a restaurant rather than sit at the same table.
She did not know yet how bad it was. She knew it was bad.
She sat with this quietly. Not with despair — with the particular patience of a woman who had learned that some things could not be forced, only waited for. She had waited before. She could wait again.
She looked at Baa’s photograph for a long time.
*Ek ek karke*, she thought. *Sab theek ho jaayega. Ek ek karke.*
-----
Dinner that night was quieter than the previous evenings.
Mihir came down at the right time, sat in his place, ate his dinner. He had composed himself entirely — she would not have known, looking at him, that anything had happened in that room upstairs. He was simply himself: quiet, present, the careful version of himself that these twenty days had made.
But Shobha, passing him the roti, noticed that his eyes were slightly different. Not red — not visibly anything. Just — as though something had gone out of them that had been there before. Or perhaps something had come in.
She said nothing.
Tulsi, at her end of the table, spoke to Ritik about Timsy’s school, listened to Gayatri Chachi’s complaint about the dal, passed the achaar without being asked. The ordinary evening commerce of this household.
As the dinner was winding up, she got a call from Vaishnavi and moved a bit away from the dining table while drinking her water. A quick call later, she walked back to the table while her eyes were still glued to her phone, scanning some numbers sent by Vaishnavi.
Absentmindedly, putting her glass down she reached for the water and he reached for it at the same moment, while engrossed in a conversation with Ritik — their hands not touching, just arriving in the same space at the same instant! She withdrew hers first, and he poured, and set the glass within her reach without looking at her.
She picked it up.
Such a small thing. Such a completely ordinary thing.
She did not look at him. But she did not redirect herself away from him either. He was simply there, at his end of the table, and she let him be there, and the effort it didn’t cost her tonight was the measure of something she still wasn’t ready to name.
After dinner she helped Shobha in the kitchen. Went upstairs. Sat at Baa’s desk.
She looked at Baa’s photo.
*Halki*, Nandini had said.
She closed her eyes.
Yes, she thought. Yes. That.
-----
On the staircase, later, Mihir stopped.
As always.
The house was still. From her room — the particular quality of settled silence. A woman at rest.
He stood on the staircase and he was — not lighter. He would not be lighter for a long time. But he was different from this morning. Something had broken open in that room upstairs and broken open things, when they have fully broken, sometimes — sometimes — make space for something that had not been able to fit before.
He looked at the closed door of her room.
Twenty days.
He continued up.
----
Edited by ElitePerfumer - 12 hours ago
Mangal Lakshmi
Sports
Health and Fitness
2