Page 25 of All Our Evenings

She looked at me, touched my cheek. “You are a good son,” she said. “Every mother should be so lucky.”

I kissed her hand. “Please come out,” I said.

“Don’t you worry about me. It is a parent’s job to worry about their child, not the child’s.”

I stood up, put out my hand to help her up, but she shook her head. She held her palms together as if praying, then covered her face and swept her hands away.

“Don’t you say anything to that beautiful girl,” she said, sitting up.

“Ma, I’ll simply tell her that I changed my mind. She’ll understand.”

“No!” she said. “Don’t you dare.”

I must have looked confused.

“You are marrying Ruhee,” she said. “Listen to me, Arjun. I want you to take Ruhee and go and meet Her. Invite Her. Tell Her to come to the wedding. Make it so that she does come Arjun, I want her there.”

Only she didn’t say Her. She said that thing.

We had to wait a week or so until Ruhee was off rotation. I asked that she not tell her parents about Gita Miss. It’ll look bad, they’ll disapprove.

“I wasn’t going to, Arjun,” she said. “Families are complicated. I understand.”

It occurred to me that Ruhee liked my mother, and was doing this for her, not for me or for my father.

I couldn’t believe it when I saw it, but Gita Miss still lived in the same apartment. The same compound wall, the same gates, the same life. Only everything was aged, here and there on the building’s façade there were cracks from the foundation settling. They were filled in with cement but not painted over.

On the stoop, before ringing the doorbell, Ruhee and I looked at each other. I don’t know what I wanted to say to her. The last time I was in this exact place it had been with Ganesh. I didn’t need to go to the roof, I knew the surrounding area had developed; there was a timber mill, shops, newer apartment buildings, stretching far beyond the railway tracks. But I still saw the view in my head, the stream and boulders, the open sky, the lone eagle skimming air. My god, this is terrific!

There began a ringing silence in my ears. Ruhee said something and rang the doorbell again, but it came to me muffled as if I were underwater. I reached out to hold Ruhee’s hand, but before I could, Gita Miss answered the door.

What had remained the same about Gita Miss was her sweetness. I didn’t know what else to call that quality. Sweetness and such distance. She welcomed us inside, she and Ruhee exchanged pleasantries, but I didn’t really hear it because of the silence, the loud, ringing silence filling my ears, for the second time in my life. It was so loud it felt like there was something burning, splitting away skin from bone, in both my ears.

I avoided looking directly at her, kept my eyes a few inches above her head. She said hello, how nice it was to see me after all these years. How tall I am. How handsome. How much I resembled my father.

The last time I heard her voice was the night Ganesh was discovered in the woods behind the Red House. It was late, and my father was with her. I rang their phone and asked to speak to him. Maybe I was shivering so badly I was incoherent. I had to repeat myself, and in her eagerness to be helpful she made me repeat everything thrice, asked that I tell her what the matter was; she’d help, let me help. Only when I stubbornly said the same thing again and again: I need to speak to my father did she finally wake him up. Those few minutes might have made all the difference in the world. Who knows? Who else did I have to call?

We went inside, but I didn’t notice the apartment. We sat at the kitchen table. The ringing in my ears.

“Would you like some almond milk, Arjun?” Gita Miss said. “You always used to like it when you were young.”

When I looked at Gita Miss’ face, her pale, heart-shaped face, her thin sweaters and her long skirts, all I wanted to do was close my fingers around her small throat, choke the life out of her. I would really do it, I didn’t even care that Ruhee was there.

Only once before had I experienced such intense, uncontrollable hatred. But unlike the last time, it passed.

What reason did I have to despise her? She’d shown nothing but kindness towards me. Gita Miss had cared for me all these years, I realized. She cared and she remembered such little things.

I said yes, and she went to the fridge and brought out two bottles of chilled Vijaya Dairy almond-flavored milk.

We sat at the same kitchen table. Ruhee and I were on one side, Gita Miss across from us. A gentle pitter-patter rain began falling against the windowpanes, like it did in someplace blissful. I felt like crying. How long had it been since I felt like crying? This clenching feeling inside my stomach, my ears thudding, the back of my throat tight, the nerves in my neck straining to keep everything together. The pitter-patter rain. God! This is terrific. All the memories came up. The sweetness of water in my mouth, the pitter-patter rain. I took the handkerchief Gita Miss handed me and wiped my tears. They kept running down my cheeks and I kept wiping them away.

It was so wonderful. I could have stayed like that forever.

IX

The Red House

It hadn’t been Ganesh’s idea to have sex in the Red House. I knew that.