Chapter 3: Dinner and a Question
The dosas had gone cold on the plate, but neither of us had noticed. We ate in near silence, the kind that isn't empty but full, pressing against the eardrums like humidity before rain. The steel plates sat between us on the cement floor of the back veranda, and the bulb above flickered every few seconds, casting her face in alternating light and shadow. It made her look like two different people—one I knew and one I was still learning.
I tried not to look at her mouth when she chewed. I failed.
The jasmine somewhere in the backyard pumped its sweetness into the air, thick and almost cloying, mixing with the smell of coconut chutney and the kerosene from the lamp she'd lit when the power had flickered earlier. The village had gone quiet hours ago. Even the koel had finally shut up. Just the distant bark of a dog, the occasional creak of the house settling, and the soft sound of her breathing.
She sat with her legs folded to one side, her back against the wall, the kurti stretched across her thighs. The deep neckline had shifted again. I kept my eyes on my plate.
"You're not eating," she said.
"I'm eating."
"You're playing with it." She reached over and took a piece of dosa from my plate with her fingers, popped it into her mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. All without looking away from me. "See? Like that."
I laughed. It came out nervous. "I know how to eat, Mami."
"Do you?" She tilted her head. "Because you've been sitting there for twenty minutes with the same piece in your hand."
I put the piece down. Picked up another. Ate it. She watched the whole time, and when I was done, she smiled and looked away, out at the dark shapes of the coconut trees beyond the veranda railing. The bulb flickered again.
"Your uncle hates this veranda," she said. "Says it's too open. Too many mosquitoes. He wants to put glass windows and air conditioning." She laughed, low and short. "Like we're in Bangalore or something."
"You don't want that?"
"I want to feel the air." She stretched her arms above her head, and the kurti rode up, and I looked away too late. She didn't notice. Or she did and didn't care. "What's the point of living in a village if you're going to seal yourself in a box?"
I nodded like I understood. I didn't. I couldn't think past the way her collarbone caught the light.
She grew quiet after that. Not the tense kind of quiet from before, but something softer. Maybe tired. She pulled her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them, staring out at the dark. The jasmine kept pumping. The bulb kept flickering. I kept breathing, but barely.
"Kartik."
"Yeah."
"Can I ask you something?"
I turned to look at her. Her face was half-lit, half-dark, and her eyes were on me now, steady and unreadable. The kind of look that made you want to check if you'd left the stove on, even though you knew you hadn't.
"Anything," I said.
She didn't ask right away. She let the silence stretch, let it fill the space between us until it felt like a third person sitting on the veranda. Then she spoke, and her voice was quieter than I'd ever heard it.
"Have you ever wanted something you knew you shouldn't have?"
The words hit me somewhere below the ribs. I felt them travel up my spine, settle in my throat, block everything I might have said. My heart did something complicated. I opened my mouth, closed it. The bulb flickered. The jasmine smelled like it was laughing at me.
I could have pretended not to understand. Could have made a joke, changed the subject, asked her what she meant. But she was looking at me with those steady eyes, and I knew—the way you know things in your gut before your brain catches up—that she already knew the answer. That she had known for a while.
She didn't need me to say it.
She reached over and took my empty plate, stacking it on top of hers. Her fingers brushed mine, just barely, just enough to send a current up my arm that I felt in my teeth. She stood up in one motion, graceful as water, and looked down at me.
"Wash up before bed," she said. "You smell like the bus."
Then she walked inside, and I heard her bare feet on the floor, the clink of plates in the sink, the sound of water running. I stayed on the veranda, my back against the wall, staring at the place where she'd been sitting. The cement was still warm from her body.
The night stretched ahead of me, thick with things I couldn't name. The bulb flickered one last time, then steadied. Somewhere in the house, she started humming again, that same tune from this morning, the one I didn't recognize.
I stayed outside until the jasmine stopped smelling sweet and just smelled like dark.