The Price of Time. A Novel By Dipjyoti Sharma Chapter 5

 

The Price of Time. A Novel By Dipjyoti Sharma Chapter 4

ACT TWO

The Fire and the Family

Chapter 5: When the Building Talks, the City Listens

 

Shivaji Park — Bandra — February 2020

It was Annapurna Bhen who first used the word 'affair.'

She did not say it directly, because she was not a direct woman, she was a strategic one. She said it to Mrs. Kulkarni, who said it to her cousin who lived in Bandra, who said it to someone at the temple in Dadar, who happened to know a woman who supplied vegetables to the Malhotra household in Bandra West.

The information arrived at the Malhotra household on a Thursday afternoon, delivered by no one, carried by everyone, the way information always travels in Mumbai: through the vast invisible web of people who know people.

Sunita Malhotra heard it first. She heard it from the vegetable supplier and she kept her face perfectly still and finished selecting the coriander and paid and came inside and sat at the kitchen table for thirty minutes.

Then she called her son.

Sunita: "Come home for dinner tonight. Don't be late."

Arjun: "Ma, I have—"

Sunita: "Come home for dinner."

He knew that voice. He came home for dinner.

 

~ ~ ~

 

His father was not at dinner. His father was at a supplier meeting and would not be back until ten. This, Arjun understood immediately, was deliberate. His mother had arranged this conversation for two, not three.

They ate. His mother served dal and sabzi and rice with the same quiet care she brought to all domestic things, and she said nothing until the plates were almost empty.

Sunita: "Tell me about the architect lady."

He put down his spoon.

Arjun: "Ma—"

Sunita: "I am your mother. Don't 'Ma' me like you're buying time. Tell me."

He told her. Not everything — not the Diwali balcony, not what he had said — but the shape of it. That he had been spending time with her. That she was unlike anyone he had met. That he respected her and he was— he used the word 'fond,' which was so inadequate that even saying it made him feel dishonest.

His mother listened with the attention she always gave him, which was the best attention he had ever known. She did not interrupt. She did not flinch.

Sunita: "She's fifty."

Arjun: "Yes."

Sunita: "She's older than me."

Arjun: "By two years."

Sunita: "And she's a widow."

Arjun: "Yes."

His mother was quiet. Outside, the Bandra traffic moved, indifferent.

Sunita: "Do you know what your father will do?"

Arjun: "Yes."

Sunita: "Do you know what the families will say? What Kavya's in-laws will say? Kavya's marriage is three months old, Arjun. Three months. And her brother is—"

Arjun: "Ma, nothing has happened. We talk. We—"

Sunita: "Arjun. I am not a fool. I know what 'we talk' means when someone's voice changes the way yours did the moment I said her name."

He was silent.

Sunita: "Tell me honestly. Do you love this woman?"

He looked at his mother. His mother who was forty-eight and who had been married to a difficult man for twenty-five years with a grace that he had understood, only recently, was not submission but an act of continuous, complicated love.

Arjun: "I don't know yet. But I know I could. I know she is — she's the only person I've met who makes me feel like who I actually am is enough."

His mother's face did something complicated. He saw something move through it — recognition, or grief, or something that was both.

Sunita: "That is a very dangerous thing to feel about a person."

Arjun: "I know."

Sunita: "You father will try to end this."

Arjun: "I know."

Sunita: "And I—" she stopped. "I want you to be happy, beta. I have always wanted that. But happy is not simple. It doesn't come without—" she gestured at the walls, at the house, at everything they both understood the walls contained. "It doesn't come without cost."

She cleared the plates. The conversation was over. He went to his room and sat on his bed and looked at his phone and then put it down and picked up a pen and wrote, and what he wrote was very good, though he could not have said why until much later.

To be Continued .......................

 Read the Previous Chapters 

The Price of Time. A Novel By Dipjyoti Sharma Chapter 1


The Price of Time. A Novel By Dipjyoti Sharma Chapter 2


The Price of Time. A Novel By Dipjyoti Sharma Chapter 3

The Price of Time. A Novel By Dipjyoti Sharma Chapter 4


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