VOLUME ONE — AWAKENING
CHAPTER FIVE
New Delhi — June 9, 2002 — afternoon
His parents' house was a twenty-minute walk from the apartment, through lanes he had known since childhood and whose every turn he could have navigated without light.
He had walked them in both directions more times than he could count — toward the house when he was younger and it was the only direction that mattered, away from it when he was older and the distance between who he was and who he was becoming had required physical expression. He walked them now with the particular attention of a man returning to a place he had been away from for longer than the calendar showed.
The house was on the third floor of a building that his father had lived in since before Aman was born. It had two bedrooms, a kitchen that Sunita Sharma had organised with the thoroughness of someone who understood that the kitchen was not a room but a system, and a small balcony off the main room that looked out over a lane where a peepal tree had been growing for forty years and had reached the second-floor windows and shown no intention of stopping.
He rang the bell at two in the afternoon.
—
His mother opened the door.
She was wearing a cotton salwar she wore on Sundays when there was no reason to dress for anything in particular. Her hair was pulled back. There was flour on her left forearm from whatever she had been making. She looked at him for a moment — just a moment, a beat longer than the standard look of a mother seeing a son she had not seen for a week — and then she stepped back to let him in.
Come, she said. I made aloo paratha.
He came in.
The house smelled the way it always smelled: dal on the stove, a faint trace of the incense his mother lit in the morning, the particular wood-and-dust smell of old furniture that had been cleaned faithfully for years without ever quite losing the history accumulated in its grain. He stood in the main room for a moment and let this settle around him.
I had forgotten this, he thought. Or not forgotten. I had stopped noticing it.
He sat down.
—
Aarti was at the dining table with her Class 12 boards preparation spread across half of it in a system that looked disordered from a distance and was, on closer inspection, its own kind of order.
She was sixteen and studying with the contained urgency of someone who understood the stakes without needing to be reminded of them. Three textbooks open simultaneously. One notebook with two different colours of ink. A timetable on a sheet of paper weighted down at the corner with a steel tumbler. She looked up when Aman came in, assessed him in the rapid way of a sibling who has been sharing proximity with someone since childhood and has developed efficient systems for reading them, and returned to her textbook.
She said, without looking up: Bhaiya, you look different.
Aman said: boards are in March?
Aarti said: February. Don't change the subject.
He said: which subject?
Accounts, she said, with the tone of someone who found accounts personally offensive but had made her peace with the necessity. Then: seriously. You look different.
He said: same as always.
She looked at him again. Longer this time. Then she shook her head slightly — the gesture of someone filing a question for later rather than abandoning it — and returned to her notebook.
—
Diya was on the balcony with a drawing she was making in a notebook she used for things that were not homework.
She was thirteen and at an age where she treated most of the world with a cheerful seriousness, as if everything was worth paying attention to but nothing was worth losing one's composure over. She heard Aman come through the main room and appeared in the balcony doorway with the drawing held behind her back, which meant she was not ready to show it yet but wanted to acknowledge that she had seen him.
She said: Ranjit from my class says his cousin saw a leopard near Tughlaqabad. I don't believe him.
Aman considered this. He said: probably a large dog.
Diya said: that's what I said. She seemed pleased to have this confirmed by an independent source. She went back to the balcony, satisfied.
He could hear her talking to herself quietly as she drew, a running commentary on whatever she was making, the way she had always worked through problems — aloud, iteratively, cheerfully unself-conscious about the fact that nobody was listening.
She will be fine, he thought. Whatever happens, she will be fine. She has always known how to be in the world without requiring the world to behave differently.
—
His mother brought the parathas to the table without being asked and sat across from him while he ate.
She did not sit with the posture of someone waiting to say something. She sat the way she always sat when one of her children was eating — present, available, not filling the space with words but not absent from it either. Sunita Sharma had the quality, which Aman had understood better with each year of his previous life, of being able to occupy a room without claiming it. She was there. She watched. She noticed things she did not always speak about, filed them in a place he could never locate, and retrieved them at moments he consistently failed to anticipate.
He was halfway through the second paratha when she said, in the tone of someone mentioning the weather: you've decided something.
He looked at her.
Not a question. She had not phrased it as a question. She had phrased it as an observation delivered to the person most likely to be able to confirm or deny it.
He said: I've started a small business. A cyber café in GK-1. I'm taking a bank loan for the setup.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she said: when did you decide this?
He said: recently.
She said: and college?
He said: college also. Both.
She was quiet for a moment, processing this with the patience of someone who had learned that the first response to unexpected information was rarely the most useful one. Then she said: does Ramesh know?
Aman said: I'll tell him.
She nodded. She refilled his glass of water without comment. He ate the rest of the paratha.
—
The look came as he was putting on his chappals at the door.
He had been there two hours. Aarti had finished one chapter and started another and briefly emerged from the dining table to ask him a question about a depreciation formula that he answered correctly before she had finished stating it, which made her narrow her eyes at him in a way that suggested this had been noted and would be revisited. Diya had shown him the drawing — a map of their neighbourhood with small illustrations at the significant points, the peepal tree carefully detailed, the provision store labelled in capital letters, a small leopard-shaped creature near Tughlaqabad that was clearly a large dog — and had talked about it for eleven minutes with the thoroughness of a person presenting work they had thought about carefully. He had listened to all eleven minutes.
His father had not come home. Ramesh Sharma worked half-days on Sundays when there was a backlog, which there usually was. Aman had not expected him. He would tell him separately, and that conversation would be its own thing.
He was standing at the door, one chappal on, when his mother came from the kitchen.
She looked at him in a way she had not looked at him before — or rather, in a way she had always been capable of and had not deployed until now. Not a mother assessing whether her son was eating properly or sleeping enough. Something longer-ranged than that. The look of a woman who had been watching someone she loved for eighteen years and had just noticed that the person in front of her was carrying something she did not recognise and had not been there last week.
She did not say anything about it.
She said: take the other paratha. I wrapped it.
She handed him a small packet wrapped in a cloth.
He took it. He said: I'll come next Sunday.
She said: come before Sunday. Come when you can.
He said he would. He went down the stairs. At the bottom he turned briefly — not a planned turn, something his body did without consulting him — and looked up.
She was still in the doorway. One hand on the frame, in the way people hold onto things they are not certain are still there. She was not calling after him. She was simply watching him go, which was something she had always done, which he had never thought about until now.
He turned and walked back toward the apartment.
In his left hand was the paratha she had wrapped, still warm through the cloth.
He ate it on the way home. He did not think about why this felt important. Some things did not require examination to be true.
End of Chapter Five
Next: Chapter Six — GK-1