Adultery Defeat of Poroma Continued

[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 40: The Last Normal Evening

I did not tell Poroma what was coming. I went home that Friday and I sat at the dinner table with my family exactly as I had every evening for eight years and I let everything be normal for the last time.

The Aya had made fish curry and rice. Nupur had been at college and had opinions about seventeen different things that had happened there, delivered in her characteristic rapid fire style that required nodding and occasional sounds of agreement rather than actual responses. Rajiv was in his high chair with fish dal on his tray and in his hair and on one ear and making exploratory sounds about the physics of food dropping.

Poroma was lighter than she had been in months. The confession had loosened something in her. She believed we were finding our way back to each other. She touched my hand twice during dinner. She helped Nupur with the stubborn fish bones in her portion. She fed Rajiv his last few spoonfuls with patient coaxing.

I watched her.

I thought about the girl I had met at twenty two at Presidency College who had looked at me from across the corridor with those impossible ice blue eyes and smiled like she had already decided something about me. The girl who had told her Navy officer father that she was going to marry a middle class boy from Behala regardless of his opinion and had meant every word of it. The woman who had carried two babies and breastfed both and managed a household and been the most constant and certain thing in my life for a decade.

And I thought about the nanny cam footage. Nupur's face after the slap. The quiet automatic way Poroma had walked away from her crying child to go straighten her blouse.

Those two images could not coexist with each other in the same marriage.

After dinner I put both children to bed myself. I read Nupur the mongoose chapter she had been waiting for. She fell asleep before the cobra got his just punishment and I tucked the book under the pillow so she would find it in the morning. I sat with Rajiv in the dim light of his room with his small sleeping weight against my arm until I was certain he was down for the night.

I stood in the hallway between their two rooms for a long time.

Then I went to the spare room and locked the door and lay in the dark and waited for Monday.