Chapter 3: The auto
The auto’s vinyl seat was cracked and hot, leaching the day’s stored heat into Priya’s spine. It smelled of decades—stale chai, sun-bleached plastic, the driver’s sweat. A garlanded god danced sickeningly from the rearview to the chaotic percussion of potholes. Rohan had wedged their single suitcase between them, a flimsy barricade.
He hadn’t looked her in the eye since Howrah.
“Jain Dharamshala, Bara Bazar,” Rohan said to the driver, his voice raised over a wailing film song from the tinny radio.
“Long drive, sahib. Traffic is madness.” The driver spat a stream of red paan out the window, then launched them into the river of traffic with a neck-snapping lurch.
Kolkata assaulted her. It wasn’t Mumbai’s vertical rush; it was a lateral squeeze, a pressing desperation of crumbling colonial facades and gleaming billboards. The air, thick and humming, carried the cloying sweetness of mishti doi from a street cart, immediately undercut by the sharp tang of open drains. Priya focused on a faded poster for sewing machines, its corners flapping in the diesel breeze. Anything to avoid looking at Rohan’s profile, set like stone beside her.
“The meeting is at three,” he said, staring straight ahead. The conversation was a business memo. “We can check in, freshen up, review the numbers one more time.”
“Numbers,” Priya echoed, the word hollow. Her palm still itched with the ghost of his hand guiding it on the touchpad. Her side tingled where his arm had pressed. The compartment’s intimate dark felt like a shared secret she hadn’t agreed to keep.
“Yes, Ma. The numbers. The reason we’re here.” His tone was tight, a rubber band stretched to snapping. “To save the business. To pay for Dad’s treatment. Remember?”
She flinched. “Don’t speak to me like I’m a fool.”
“Then act like you’re on this trip to work, and not….” He trailed off, jaw clenching.
“Not what?”
He shook his head, said nothing. The accusation hung in the thick air, worse for being unspoken.
The auto swerved violently to avoid a wandering cow, throwing Priya sideways. Her shoulder slammed into the suitcase, then into Rohan’s. The contact was jarring, electric. She righted herself instantly, as if scalded. He grabbed the handle above the door, his knuckles white.
“Sorry,” the driver yelled, not sounding sorry at all.
Silence again, deeper now. The film song changed to a mournful, romantic duet. It felt like a taunt.
“It was an accident on the train,” Priya said suddenly, the words rushing out. She needed to carve it in stone, make it ordinary. “A bump. It meant nothing.”
Rohan turned his head slowly. For the first time that day, he looked directly at her. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, but in them she saw a startling clarity, a painful adult knowledge that stripped her of her maternal armor.
“I know what it was,” he said quietly, the noise of the city fading behind his words. “Do you?”
She couldn’t hold his gaze. She looked down at her hands, at the wedding bangles that hadn’t left her wrist in thirty-three years. Symbols of a life, of a man lying frail in a Mumbai hospital bed. She felt them as a physical weight.
“I am your mother,” she whispered, but it sounded like a question.
He didn’t reply. He just kept looking at her until she felt utterly transparent, until the heat in the auto felt sourced from her own shame. He finally turned back to the window. “This is it,” he said flatly.
The auto jerked to a halt before a soot-stained building of old yellow brick. Jain Dharamshala was inscribed in Hindi and English above a heavy wooden door. The relative quiet here was a shock, broken only by the distant blare of a ship’s horn on the Hooghly.
Rohan paid the driver, hauled out the suitcase. He moved with a stiff, efficient grace. “I booked two single rooms. Adjacent.” He didn’t offer to let her check. He just shouldered the bag and walked inside, leaving her to follow.
The lobby was dark, cool, smelling of marble polish and silence. An elderly manager with thick glasses handed Rohan two old-fashioned keys on brass fobs. “No non-vegetarian food. No noise after ten. No guests in rooms.”
The instructions felt like a judgment.
The hallway was narrow, lit by a single, flickering tube light. Their footsteps echoed. Room 7 for her. Room 8 for him. He stopped at her door, inserted the key, and pushed it open. He placed her small overnight bag inside the threshold but didn’t cross it.
The room was Spartan: a single cot, a wooden table, a ceiling fan with dangling pull-cord. A window overlooking a narrow light-well. It felt like a cell.
“One hour,” Rohan said, still in the hallway. “Then we go over the presentation. Final time.”
He turned to his own door, a few feet away. The space between them felt charged, a canyon.
Priya stepped into her room, the cool of the floor tiles seeping through her sandals. She heard the solid thunk of his door closing, the definitive turn of his lock. The sounds were final. She stood there, in the center of the bare room, the city’s hum a distant thing.
She looked at the empty cot. She looked at the suitcase, their shared one, now in her room. She thought of her husband’s thin hand in hers, the papery skin, the trust in his foggy eyes. She thought of the graph on the laptop, the red downward line. She thought of the jolt of the train, the shocking warmth of an accidental touch, and the devastating, unspoken thing in her son’s eyes in the auto.
A tremor started deep within her, a vibration as fundamental as the train’s rhythm had been. It wasn’t about the accident. It was about the aftermath. The knowing.
She had one hour. One hour before she had to sit beside him again, in another closed room, and pretend all she saw were numbers.