Chapter 19: Jasmines
Pari was already awake when Tulsi opened her eyes.
Not the awake of someone who had been lying there waiting — but the awake of someone who had slept properly, deeply, and had come up from it naturally, the way you do when your body has finished what it needed to do. She was on her phone, one arm behind her head, the morning light coming in at the angle it came in at this hour — flat, unhurried, February still doing what February did.
Tulsi watched her for a moment without speaking.
Pari felt it and looked over.
“Mumma.” The specific tone of someone who already knows how this conversation is going to go and has prepared accordingly. “Main bilkul theek hoon.”
Tulsi said nothing. Just looked at her — the color in her face, the ease in her posture, the way she was holding the phone without effort.
“Garima ko main sambhal leti hoon,” Pari continued. “Papa le aayenge usse waise bhi. Aur main usse taiyaar doongi school ke liye aur phir —” a small pause, calibrating — “main aaj se kaam pe jaaungi. Theek hai?”
Tulsi looked at her a moment longer.
“Aaj rest.”
“Mumma? Please—”
“Kal bhi rest.”
Pari opened her mouth.
“Okay, kal dekhenge,” Tulsi said. The tone that was not unkind and was also not a negotiation.
Pari looked at her. Then looked back at her phone with the expression of someone who has decided this particular hill is not worth it.
Tulsi sat up. Put her feet on the floor. Sat there for a moment in the particular stillness of early morning — the house not yet fully awake, the sounds of it still distant and unhurried.
Then she stood, and went.
-----
Her room was quiet when she entered — the particular quiet of a space that had been hers alone for weeks now, that had taken on her rhythm without her noticing. She freshened up, dressed for the day, and came to the kitchen.
The kaada went on first. Tulsi leaves, ginger, the other ingredients — the same sequence, the same proportions, the same unhurried attention. She had it reducing by the time the chai came to a boil. She strained both, set the cups on the small tray. Two cups.
She picked up the tray and went upstairs.
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Mihir’s door was ajar.
She pushed it open quietly with her shoulder, the tray balanced in both hands.
He was in the armchair — positioned at an angle that gave him both the window light and a clear sightline to the bed where Garima slept. Not incidentally. Deliberately. The phone in his hand, the news on the screen, but his body oriented toward the bed the way a person orients toward something they are keeping half their attention on regardless of what else they are doing.
He looked up when she came in.
She looked at him. He looked at her. A nod — his, then hers. The ease between them slowly returning - the particular ease of people who have been moving around each other long enough that the small courtesies have stopped requiring effort.
She set his cups on the side table within reach and straightened.
He kept his voice low, for Garima. “Pari kaisi hai?”
“Bilkul theek hai.” No qualification, no elaboration. The tone of someone reporting a fact they are satisfied with.
He nodded. Looked back briefly at Garima — still asleep, undisturbed — then at his cup.
She had already turned toward the door.
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Daksha was coming out of her room as Tulsi turned into the corridor.
“Jai Shree Krishna Chachi,” Tulsi wished as usual, already moving.
“Jai Shree Krishna Tulsi beta,” Daksha said warmly.
And that was all. But her eyes followed Tulsi for just a moment — the direction she had come from, the empty tray in her hands, the particular quality of her walk. Unhurried. Settled.
Daksha said nothing. Went downstairs as usual.
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The dining table was empty at this hour.
She set the tray down, pulled out her usual chair, and sat. The kaada first — both hands around the cup, the warmth of it, the familiar bitterness hitting the back of the throat the way it always did. Outside the kitchen window the garden was doing what it did at this hour — the light still finding its angle, the February morning not yet decided about itself.
Kamla was moving somewhere behind her, the sounds of the kitchen starting up. The pressure cooker. A tap. The particular clatter of the first vessels of the day.
Tulsi drank her kaada. Then her chai.
Alone. Unhurried.
The balcony was down the corridor . The tray, the kettle, the two cups, the chamomile at night — that was its own thing, its own rhythm. This was different. This was just her, and the morning, and the table that had held thirty-eight years of this family’s noise and was perfectly capable of holding one woman’s silence.
She finished. Set the cup down.
Sat for just a moment longer.
Then stood, and went to get ready for the day.
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Breakfast came together the way it always did.
The children ate with the focused efficiency of people with places to be. Angad was on his phone between bites — Shobha said something to him about it, he put it face down without looking up. Ritik was talking to Pari about something to do with their kids’s school. Daksha chachi was telling Gayatri chachi about a movie she’d watched, Gayatri chachi listening with the patience of someone who had been hearing about Daksha chachi’s movie musings for over 60 years.
Garima ate her paratha in sections, methodically, the way she ate everything.
Tulsi had her plate, ate, answered what was asked of her.
At some point she looked at Mitali. “Aaj thoda jaldi nikalna hai.”
Mitali nodded. “Haan maa, main ready hoon.”
That was all.
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Plates cleared. Bags picked up. The house doing what it did every morning — dispersing, finding its separate rhythms for the day.
Tulsi picked up her bag from the corridor table and went.
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The factory floor had found its afternoon rhythm by the time Tulsi stepped away from the main floor and into the small corridor outside her office.
She called Pari.
It rang twice.
“Mumma.”
“Haan.” She leaned against the wall, one hand in her dupatta. “Khaaya kuch?”
“Haan. Kamla ne khilaya.”
“Theek se?”
“Theek se.” A small pause — the pause of someone who finds the question both unnecessary and not entirely unwelcome. “Aap bataiye. Kaam kaisa chal raha hai?”
“Chal raha hai.”
“Garima school se aa jaayegi thodi der mein —soch rahi thi Timsy aur Garima ko pick up karne jaaoon”
“Mitali ko leke jaana. Aaj tum drive mat karna.”
“Haan mumma, theek hai.” Pari knew this was non-negotiable.
A beat. The ordinary beat of a phone call between a mother and daughter when there is nothing wrong and nothing that needs saying and they are on the phone anyway.
“Main nikal jaaungi time pe,” Tulsi said.
“Haan Mumma. Aap dhyan rakhiye apna.”
She hung up.
Phone still in hand. Screen still lit.
The message came. Gautam had finally replied.
She read it once.
Then again.
“Don’t bother about me. You already have enough stepchildren and adopted children to worry about. Mujhe mere haal pe chhod dijiye.”
She didn’t move.
The corridor was empty. Somewhere on the floor behind her a machine was running, someone was giving an instruction, the ordinary sounds of the afternoon continuing without her.
Her grip on the phone tightened. Just slightly. Her eyes stayed on the screen a second too long — not reading anymore, just looking at where the words had been.
Then she put the phone in her bag. Wiped the single tear that had rolled down her cheek.
And went to her cabin.
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She was at her desk within the minute.
Files. Samples. The afternoon’s work exactly where she had left it.
Vaishnavi came in twenty minutes later with the Surat order copies — set them on the desk, started going through the quantities. Tulsi listened. Asked one question. Vaishnavi answered.
Then a pause that was a beat too long.
Vaishnavi glanced up.
Tulsi was looking at the papers. Correctly. Her finger on the right line. But something — something in the quality of her attention. The way it was being held in place rather than simply resting there.
Vaishnavi said nothing. Continued.
But she didn’t fully leave when they were done. Fussed briefly with the stack of files on the side table, straightened something that didn’t need straightening.
Vaishnavi set the files down and looked at her directly.
“Kaki.” Quietly. “Aap thak gayi hain kya? Ghar jaake aaram kijiye. Baaki main dekh loongi aaj ke liye.”
Tulsi looked up.
For a moment she just looked at her — Vaishnavi standing there, not overstepping, not probing, just offering the simplest thing available.
“Main theek hoon,” Tulsi said.
Vaishnavi held her gaze for just a second. Then nodded, picked up her own files, and went.
Tulsi looked back at the papers on her desk.
The afternoon continued.
-----
She was home by the usual time.
The corridor, the side table, her bag set down. She could hear the children somewhere — Garima’s voice, high and specific, narrating something to someone with great urgency. Angad’s laugh from the direction of the living room.
She went upstairs.
Pari’s door — a knock, a look inside. Pari was on the bed, propped up, a book in her lap. She looked up when Tulsi came in.
“Aa gayi aap.”
“Haan.” Tulsi came to her, palm to her forehead. The automatic gesture. Normal. Completely normal. She kept her hand there a moment anyway.
“Mumma.”
“Haan, haan.” She took her hand away. Looked her over — the colour, the ease. “Aaram kiya na aaj?”
“Haan.”
“Theek se?”
Pari gave her the look.
“Theek se,” Tulsi said, answering herself. She sat in the chair for a few minutes. Pari talked — something about Garima, something about a message from Nandini. Tulsi listened. Asked one or two things. The ordinary texture of coming home.
She didn’t stay long.
“Main freshen up kar ke aati hoon,” she said, and stood.
Pari watched her go.
Something — she couldn’t have said exactly what. Just something in the set of her mother’s shoulders. The way she moved through the room as she always did, the competence of it unchanged, but underneath —
Pari looked at her book.
Didn’t read it.
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Dinner was what it was.
The table, the food, the children, the usual overlapping currents of conversation. Everything that was supposed to be there was there.
But at some point — not all at once, one by one — they noticed. Mihir first. Then Shobha, mid-sentence, her eyes moving to Tulsi and staying a moment before returning to what she was saying. Angad noticed and said nothing. Ritik noticed and poured her water without being asked.
Tulsi ate. Answered what was asked. The functionality of it was perfect.
But she was slightly elsewhere. Not absent — present enough, attentive enough. Just a fraction inward. The way a room is different when one lamp is off.
No one said anything.
The meal finished. Plates cleared. The children dispersed in the way they dispersed — gradually, in ones and twos, the table returning to quiet.
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The kettle was already on the tray when she came to the balcony.
She sat. He poured. The chamomile rising in thin curls of steam in the February night air.
She took her cup. Looked out at the garden.
He looked at her.
Not long. Not obviously. Just — looked. The way he had learned to look at her these past weeks, with the peripheral attention of someone who has no rights over what he is observing and knows it.
Something was different. Not visible distress — nothing that could be pointed to, nothing that would hold up if named. Just the same quality Pari had felt in the set of her shoulders. The fraction of inwardness. The slight dimming.
He looked back at his cup.
The garden below. The night settled and cool. A dog somewhere in the distance.
He said, quietly:
“Tum theek ho?”
She didn’t answer immediately.
The pause was small. A few seconds only. But it was there.
“…Haan.”
He heard what was in it. The slight delay. The word doing its best.
He nodded. Looked at his cup. Did not ask what happened. Did not say *batana chaho toh.* Did not lean toward her or away from her.
Just — accepted it. Returned to the silence as if the silence were the right place to be and he had known this all along.
She looked at her cup.
He had noticed. He had asked. He had not pushed.
She didn’t examine it. Didn’t turn it over. Just — felt it land somewhere, quietly, and stay.
The chamomile cooled slowly in their cups.
The February night continued, indifferent and still.
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She woke before the alarm.
The room was the particular dark of very early morning — not night anymore, not yet day. She lay still for a moment, the way she sometimes did, letting herself come fully up from sleep before moving.
She sat on the edge of her bed for a moment after getting up. The room still dark. The house still quiet.
The message came back to her the way things come back in the early morning — unbidden, unhurried, with nowhere to hide from them.
*Don’t bother about me. You already have enough stepchildren and adopted children to worry about. Mujhe mere haal pe chhod dijiye.*
She sat with it.
Gautam. Her firstborn. The one she had carried first, loved first, learned to be a mother on. The one whose first cry she could still hear if she let herself. He had written those words and sent them and somewhere was living with having sent them.
She didn’t move for a moment.
Then she stood. Went to the bathroom. Watered the tulsi plant outside the front door, her hands cold in the early morning air.
And went to make the kaada and chai.
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The kaada went on first. The familiar sequence — tulsi leaves, ginger, the other ingredients measured without measuring, the way her hands had always known this. She stood at the stove and watched it reduce, the kitchen quiet around her, Kamla not yet in.
The chai after. Four cups on the tray.
She picked it up and went to the balcony.
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The balcony door was already open.
He was standing with his back against the railing as usual— the garden below still in the early half-light.
She came out. He took the tray, she shut the balcony door behind her. He set the tray in the center of the table between them.
She sat.
Looked out at the garden.
And then she saw them.
Three, maybe four jasmine flowers. On her side of the small table, slightly to the right. Not arranged. Not presented. Just — placed. The way you place something when the placing itself is the thing you want to say.
Her eyes went to them.
Stayed.
Once. Then again. Then a third time, briefly, the way your eyes return to something when you have told them not to.
Something moved across her face — not quite a smile, not quite anything that could be named. It lived just underneath. It had no business being as visible as it was.
She took a sip of her kaada. Looked at the garden. The February morning arriving at the edges of the sky, unhurried, the way it always arrived.
Mihir looked at his cup.
He did not look at her.
But he had seen it. The smile - in her eyes, rather than on her lips.
She finished her kaada. Then took her time with the chai. Finished it and set the cup back into the tray.
Sat another minute. The garden, the morning, the silence between them that had learned — slowly, incrementally, over these weeks — to hold things without spilling them.
Then she stood.
Picked up the jasmines — without pausing, without looking at them directly, without a word — and carried them with her.
The balcony door settled behind her.
Mihir sat with the tray and the empty space on the table and the February morning coming fully in over the garden.
He didn’t move for a long moment.
-----
She closed the door behind her.
The room settled around her — the particular quiet of it, the morning light not yet fully decided, coming in at the angle it came in at this hour. She stood just inside the door for a moment without moving.
The jasmines were still in her hand. Without realizing, she brought them to her nose and took in their smell.
Then she looked down at them. The stems cool between her fingers. The fragrance immediate, the way jasmine always was, not unfolding but simply — present. She had always loved this fragrance. Already there before you reach for it.
She moved to the table. Set the flowers down.
Stood looking at them.
*Why did I take them.*
Not quite a question. More the shape of one — the way certain things present themselves in the early morning when the day hasn’t yet required you to be useful and your mind moves at its own pace through its own rooms.
She could have left them on the table between the chairs. He hadn’t even let her see when he placed them nor looked directly at her when she noticed them. Hadn’t waited. Hadn’t said anything that required a response or a gesture or — anything. They were just there when she sat down, slightly to the right, placed the way you place something when the placing is the only language you are permitting yourself.
She could have left them.
She hadn’t.
She sat on the edge of the bed. Looked at the flowers on the table.
*Will it last.*
The thought arrived without drama. The most important questions always arrived like this — not loudly, just persistently. Just — always there when she turned around.
She had asked this question before. In different forms, in different rooms, across different years. She had asked it in the early months of their marriage when she had first understood what kind of man she had married — the largeness of him, the warmth of him, and underneath both of those things the specific carelessness of someone who had never been required to look closely at what his choices cost other people. She had asked it after Mandira. She had asked it after Noina.
She was asking it again now.
And this time — the honest answer was not what it had been before.
She thought about the day of the crisis at Bandhej. The morning the attack on Bandhej had spread through three WhatsApp groups before she had even known it was coming. The seven phone calls he had already made by the time she walked out the front gate of Shantiniketan. The clients held. The source traced. The fires contained — all of it, before eleven o’clock, while she had been drinking her chai at the dining table thinking about the Pune order.
And then — the factory. Him in his suit at four o’clock, folder in hand, standing in the reception area waiting for her. The statement. Two pages, precise, formal, entirely professional. Her name — *founder and director of Bandhej* — without once referencing her personal relationship to him. The last paragraph: *The business speaks for itself. So does its founder.*
He had written that. In his own hand. And then held the folder out to her and said — *kuch change karna ho toh.*
As if it were her document. As if she were the one granting approval.
And the walk away. The back turned — deliberately, because turning around would make it a moment she’d have to respond to. *Bandhej tumhara hai, Tulsi. Aaj bhi. Kal bhi. Mera naam kisi kagaz par hone se woh mera nahi ho jaata.*
Said to the door. Not to her face. Because he had learned, somewhere in these weeks, that the greatest thing he could give her was the freedom to receive something without having to do anything with it.
She sat with this.
His words to the kids on the first day of this month, *Are you ashamed of eating from her money? Because I am not.* The words she had overheard.
Then she thought about the interview.
She had watched it alone in Baa’s room, in the quiet of the late night, with the water jug empty and her hands still. She had watched him look at the interviewer — not performing, not managing — and say the things he said.
*She left because I gave her no other dignified option. That is the accurate version of events. That is the only version I will confirm.*
On national television. Unprompted. With the specific flatness of someone stating what is simply, already, settled.
*Whatever she is, whatever she feels, whatever she chooses to give or withhold — she has earned that right completely. I spent thirty-eight years not understanding the value of what I had. I am not in a position to have opinions about how she responds to that.*
And then — quieter, something stripped back in it:
*She’s doing it because that is who she is. Because she has never in her life taken without giving. Because she wouldn’t know how. The world would be considerably better if more people operated that way.*
He had placed her above himself. Not as performance. Not as strategy. As the simple statement of a man who has looked at something clearly and is reporting what he sees.
And the *our*. She had not missed it then, and she did not miss it now. *Our house. Our family.* Six years of separation and it was still *our* — said without thinking, said the way you say things that are simply true, that have never stopped being true regardless of what the years between them had contained.
She looked at the jasmine on the table.
*What happens when things go back to normal.*
The thought sat down beside her the way it always sat — the uninvited guest who has been before and knows the house.
Right now he was like this. Careful. Restrained. But right now she was also — this. Not his. Not returned. Still at a distance that required him to earn rather than assume. What happened when that distance closed. What happened when there was nothing left to earn.
Would the patterns come back.
She didn’t finish the thought. She had carried this question for weeks, turned it over every way available to her, and she had not found an answer that satisfied her — because there was no answer that could be found in advance. That was the specific difficulty of it. The evidence of who he was now was real. The patterns of who he had been were also real. And she was sixty-four years old and she understood, in the way you understand things at sixty-four that you cannot understand at thirty, that people were not either changed or unchanged. They were both simultaneously. The question was never *has this person changed* — the question was always *what do I do with all of them at once.*
She had not yet answered that question.
She was not going to answer it this morning.
She looked at her hands in her lap.
Love was never the question. She had known this for a long time — longer than she had been willing to say it clearly, even to herself. He had loved her across forty-four years and the loving had never been the wound. And underneath even that — the quieter knowledge, the one she had been carrying without examining it — that their true happiness, his and hers both, had always seemed to find its way back to each other. That too had never changed. Not in six years. Not in all the years before.
She sat with this. The honesty of it. The weight of it.
And then, almost without intending to — rising from somewhere below the thought, below the question, from the place where things were not yet language:
“Baa…”
The way she always thought about Baa - in joy, in grief, and in moments like these when her thoughts would not settle into sense.
The word barely formed. More breath than sound.
She didn’t look up.
The room was the same. The light the same. The jasmine on the table, the morning outside the window, the sounds of the house beginning to wake below her.
And yet.
She felt it before she understood it. The shift in the quality of the room’s stillness — not sound, not movement. Just — a presence where there had been absence. The way a room changes when someone enters it even before you turn to look.
She turned to look.
Baa was there.
Not entering. Not arriving. Simply — present, the way she had always been present, as if the room had always contained her and Tulsi had only now remembered to look in the right place. The same face. The same stillness that had never been the stillness of someone who had nothing to say, but always the stillness of someone who was waiting for you to be ready to hear it. And at the corner of her eyes — that faint, almost mischievous softness. The look of someone who has been watching you think for a long time and finds what you have been thinking both correct and slightly beside the point.
Tulsi didn’t speak.
Baa looked at her — the full, unhurried look of someone who has seen you at every age you have ever been and is seeing all of them at once.
Then, gently. Almost warmly. The tone of someone who already knows the answer and is asking anyway because you need to hear yourself say it:
“Mihir ne ek baar phir tera dil jeet liya haina?”
Tulsi inhaled.
“Baa.” Quiet. Steady. The steadiness of someone holding themselves to something. “Aapka Mihir hamesha yehi toh karta hai. Pehle dil jeetta hai.” A pause — the next words arriving from somewhere that still carried all the years they covered. “Phir todta hai.”
A beat.
“Aur iss baar…” Her voice quieter now, the extreme vulnerability in it surprising even her. “Main jhel nahi paaoongi, Baa. Agar phir kuch hua toh.”
Baa didn’t flinch. Didn’t soften immediately. Just — received it. The way she had always received difficult things. Fully. Without looking away.
The silence held for a moment.
Then:
“Mera Mihir…”
A pause. Deliberate. The pause of someone placing a word exactly where they intend it to land.
“Ya tera Mihir?”
Tulsi inhaled.
The question was not a small one. She had known Baa long enough to know that her small questions were never small.
*Mera Mihir.* The one Baa had raised, had loved, had made her peace with across all his failures and all his capacities. The one who was Baa’s — with all the unconditional architecture of a grandmother’s love, all the protection that implied.
*Tera Mihir.* The one who had failed her repeatedly throughout thirty eight years of their married life. The one who had moved on without a thought about what the failures had cost her.
But also, the one who had placed jasmine flowers slightly to the right of her cup at six in the morning without a word. The one who had asked her permission — *kya main yeh kar sakta hoon* — before putting his name beside hers on a crisis day when he had already done everything else without asking. The one who had said *bandhej tumhara hai, aaj bhi, kal bhi* to a door, to her back, because turning around would have made it a gift she’d have to return. The one who had said *she left because I gave her no other dignified option* on national television as if it were simply, already, the only true thing available to be said. The one who had said *our house* and *our family* — six years later, still *our*, as if the years had changed everything about the shape of things and nothing about their ownership. The one who had named each and every failure of his, repeated his own worst words without flinching on the balcony not so long ago.
Were they the same man.
Or had she been, all this time, refusing to understand that they had always been the same man — and that she now had to decide what to do with all of him. Not the version she could forgive. Not the version she couldn’t. All of him. At once.
She didn’t answer.
Baa watched her. Not pressing. Just — present.
Then, quietly. Simply. The way she said things that didn’t need decoration:
“Dukh ke darr se hum khushiyon se muh nahi pher sakte, beta.”
Tulsi looked at her.
Something in her chest — not loosening exactly. Not resolving. Something more complicated than either. The feeling of a question that has been asked so many times it has worn a groove in you, and someone has finally said — not the answer, but something true about the asking itself.
A beat.
“Woh ab tera sammaan karta hai, Tulsi.” Softly. Not as argument. As observation — the observation of someone who has been watching for a long time. “Pyaar se bhi zyaada.”
Tulsi’s eyes dropped.
To the table.
To the jasmine.
When she looked up —
Baa was gone.
No movement. No farewell. Just — the room again, exactly as it had been. The light at its angle. The sounds of the house above. The jasmine on the table, stems slightly damp from the morning.
Tulsi sat very still.
Then she stood. Went to the small shelf near the window. Took the glass she kept there. Went to the bathroom. Filled it halfway.
Came back.
Picked up the jasmine.
Placed the flowers in the glass. Adjusted them once — not arranging, just settling. The way you settle something you intend to keep.
Stood looking at them for a moment.
Not smiling.
But not turning away either.
The morning continued outside her window, unhurried and mild. Somewhere above her the house was fully waking now — Kamla’s footsteps, and distantly, Garima’s voice already announcing something to someone with the urgency only a child can bring to an ordinary morning.
Tulsi looked at the jasmine one more time.
Then she turned, picked up her things, and went to face the day.
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Note: Chapter 19 has been sitting with me for a while — I hope it landed the way it was meant to. If it moved you, confused you, or made you feel something you weren’t expecting, I’d love to hear it in the comments. Reviews and feedback are a great way to keep motivating me.
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Itti Si Khushi Sab TV
O Humnava Tum Dena Saath Mera
Anupamaa
Cricket
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