My mother and the landlord (Slow burn, long read)

[Authorsunny]

Chapter 15.5 continued

I stayed inside for the first hour. The compact room felt larger without her and at the same time more oppressive. Every object carried the memory of the previous night’s voice — the kitchen counter where she had leaned, the glass she had drunk water from, the bed where she had returned and lain down as if nothing had been said. I tried to watch something on the laptop. The screen remained unlocked but unused. After some time I went downstairs and sat on the new bike for a while, engine off, helmet in my lap. The watchman nodded at me. Two children from the building ran past with cheap sparklers already in their hands. The evening air smelled of far-off smoke and incense.

I climbed back up at six-forty. The flat was exactly as she had left it. I heated the curd rice, ate a little, and then washed the plate. By seven-fifteen the waiting had become physical — a tightness across the shoulders, a restlessness that kept me moving between the chair and the window. I stood at the grill and looked down at the lane. Every white car that turned the corner made my breath catch for a second and then release when it was not his.

She returned at eight-fifty.

I heard the key in the lock and stepped away from the window before the door opened. She came in carrying nothing except her handbag. Her hair was slightly less neat than when she had left. The lipstick was gone. The black kurti looked a little softer, as if it had been worn through movement and then smoothed down again. There was a faint, different warmth on her skin — not only her usual perfume, but something denser, closer, the scent of another person’s soap or aftershave that had transferred in closeness.

She closed the door, dropped the handbag on the chair, and looked at me with a calm, slightly tired expression.

“You ate?”

“A little.”

“Good.”

She went to the kitchen corner and drank two full glasses of water without stopping. When she put the glass down she stood with both hands on the counter for a moment, her back to me. The kurti had ridden up slightly at the back. The jeans sat low enough to show a thin strip of skin from the side slit. She reached back and adjusted the kurti with one hand, an automatic gesture, then turned.

“The traffic was bad coming back,” she said. “I thought I would be earlier.”

I did not ask where she had been. She did not offer. The silence between those two facts was deliberate and heavy.

She moved past me to the bathroom. This time she closed the door fully. I heard the tap run for a long time. When she came out she had changed into the old nighty again. Her face looked freshly washed. The black kurti and jeans were folded over her arm. She placed them on the chair and then sat on the bed with a long breath.

“Come. Sit. You have been walking around the house like a ghost.”

I sat on the chair. She looked at me directly, the same steady gaze she had used on the morning after the neck mark.

Then I mentioned “You were gone almost three hours.”

“Yes. And now I am home. We have the temple ready, the lights ready, the house clean. Tomorrow the festival continues. I want us to light the diyas together in the evening. Can we do that without the heavy face?”

The request was soft. The expectation underneath it was not.

I nodded once. She watched me for another few seconds, then reached out and switched on the fairy lights along the grill. The small blue-white points filled the room again. In that light the faint colour on her cheeks and the slightly fuller look of her mouth became more noticeable. She had the appearance of a woman who had been thoroughly kissed and had then washed her face and returned to her ordinary night.

She lay down on her side of the bed and pulled the sheet up to her waist.

“Sleep early tonight,” she said. “Tomorrow will be long. Pooja, crackers, people, noise. We both need rest.”

I switched off the main light and lay down on my side. The fairy lights remained on, casting their slow patterns across the ceiling and the far wall. Ma’s breathing took longer than usual to settle. Once, in the dark, she shifted and the nighty made a soft sound against the sheet. The scent that was not only hers still hung faintly in the air between us.

I stared at the ceiling and replayed the day in order — the cleaning of the temple corner, the ordinary lunch, the moment she took out the black kurti, the three hours of absence, the way she had looked when she returned. The late-night call had not been only words. It had arranged an evening. She had kept the arrangement. She had prepared herself according to his preference. She had gone. She had come back carrying the quiet physical evidence of the meeting on her skin and in the softened state of her mouth.

The festival lights glowed along the grill.

The idols sat clean in their corner.

And in the same small flat my mother lay only a few feet away, freshly returned from the man she had admitted she missed, while the celebration night continued outside as if nothing in the house had shifted at all.