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

[Authorsunny]

Chapter 17 - Part 8

24 November 2025 – Monday evening

The door of the flat closed behind me with a soft, final sound. I lowered the cracker bags onto the floor near the almirah and stood still for a long moment, listening to the silence. Outside, distant bombs already cracked the air. Inside, the 10-by-12 room held only the smell of gunpowder that had travelled up with the packets and the older, fainter scent of the attar that had never fully left the curtains since the night of Laxmi Pujan.

My phone showed 6:12. She had said one and a half hours at most. Maybe less. I locked the screen and put the phone face down on the mattress.

The first ten minutes passed in ordinary restlessness. I arranged the long lari carefully on the folding table so it would not tangle. I moved the heavier packets of rockets and anaars against the wall. I drank water. Then I sat again and the thoughts that had been waiting since the car pulled away began to arrive in order.

They were in a hotel room by now. Or a guest house. Or whatever place near the signal he had meant when he spoke in that low voice. She had left with him wearing the soft peach chiffon and the sleeveless blouse with the wide scoop neck. She had left with the black lace still under it. She had left after letting his hand rest on her hip in the cracker market and after accepting meat from his fork at lunch and after hearing him talk about the lace while I sat three feet away.

I closed my eyes and the morning returned without permission.

The bathroom gap. The nighty coming off. Her standing there in only the grey panties, breasts heavy and free, nipples dark against the wheatish skin. The way she bent to put on the black lace bra, the soft flesh dropping into the cups, the practised twist of her hands behind her back. The moment she called me in to close the necklace and my fingers touched the warm skin at the nape of her neck while the thin straps of the new blouse left her shoulders bare. The open dbanging of the expensive peach saree in the middle of our own room, the material sliding over her hips, the wide neckline showing the black lace every time she raised her arms.

I had held the nail-polish bottle for her. I had watched her paint her toes and fingers in the exact shade of the saree. I had seen the full sequence. And then I had watched her sit in the front seat of his car and accept his eyes and his comments and his hands.

The heat started low in my stomach and moved downward. I tried to ignore it. I stood up, walked to the window, and looked down at the lane. Children were lighting sparklers. A man from the next building was setting up a row of small bombs along the compound wall. Ordinary celebration sounds. Ordinary festival lights. None of it matched the knowledge of where my mother was at that exact moment.

I returned to the bed. The phone still showed no message. 6:41.

I lay back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling fan. The thoughts refused to stay clean. They mixed the morning images with the afternoon ones — the way his hand had settled on her waist under the pallu in the mall, the under-table movement I had only been able to read through the change in her breathing, the crude sentence he had spoken near her ear about wanting to see the lace again later. Later was now. She was with him now. The blouse was probably already open. The thin straps were probably already down her arms. The black lace was probably already off.

I felt myself harden fully against the fabric of the new jeans she had made me buy that morning. The guilt arrived at the same time as the arousal, but it did not stop the arousal. It only sat beside it and watched.

I tried to think of something else — the bike, the office, the crackers waiting to be burst. Nothing held. The picture of her in the bathroom returned, clearer than before. The weight of her breasts when she bent forward. The way the black lace had cut into the soft skin of her shoulders. The sound of her voice when she asked me to close the clasp. Then the picture shifted, without my permission, to the same body in a different room, under different hands. His hands. The hands that had paid for the earrings and the red box and the crackers and the bike. The hands that had fed her on a celebration afternoon.

My own hand moved before I fully decided to let it. I opened the button of the jeans, pushed the fabric down, and took my erected dick of around 5 inches in my fist. The first stroke pulled a rough breath out of my throat. I closed my eyes tighter and let the images run.

I thought of the wide scoop neckline dipping forward when she sat on the jewellery store stool. I thought of his knuckles almost touching her jaw while he held the earrings up to her face. I thought of the moment in the restaurant when his shoulder had moved in that small rhythmic way and her thighs had pressed together under the chiffon. I thought of the black lace the way he had spoken about it. I imagined him repeating those words while he removed it. I imagined her answering in the same low voice she had used on the late-night kitchen call, the voice that said she missed the way he held her.

The guilt spoke clearly inside my head. *This is your mother. You are thinking about your mother’s breasts and your mother’s bra and your mother’s body under another man while she is actually with him.* The guilt did not make me stop. It only made the strokes harder and less controlled.

I came with my face turned into the pillow. The release was sharp and emptied and immediately dirty. I lay still for several minutes afterward, breathing against the cotton, the new jeans still open, the evidence of what I had done cooling on my stomach and the sheet.

The guilt arrived properly once the heat left. It sat on my chest like a physical weight. I had used the memory of her bare body — the body that had carried me, fed me, worked double shifts for me — to bring myself to orgasm while she was in a hotel room with the man who paid for our rent reduction and my bike. The knowledge was simple and ugly.

I got up, cleaned myself with tissues from the bathroom, washed my hands twice, and changed into an old pair of shorts. I stripped the top sheet, folded it into a tight bundle, and pushed it to the bottom of the small laundry pile in the corner so it would not be the first thing she saw when she returned. Then I sat on the bare mattress and put my head in my hands.

Outside, a long lari of crackers went off somewhere in the next lane, the sound rising and falling like a wave. I looked at the packets we had bought together. The long lari she had wanted to hang from the window was still coiled on the folding table. She had said we would light the first one together. She had linked her arm through mine in the market and spoken about the old days. And then she had left with him for a private room while the crackers waited upstairs for a mother-son celebration that was already compromised.

My phone remained silent. 7:19. Then 7:37. Then 8:21.

It was already more than 2 hours, whereas she said she won't take more than one and half hours. I thought about calling. My thumb hovered over her name. I did not press it. The last time she had gone to him she had not picked up immediately either. She would call when she was ready. Or she would simply walk through the door with the same calm face she had worn after the previous absences and tell me to light the diyas.

I lay back on the mattress again, this time on my side, facing the wall. The images tried to return — the black lace, the open blouse, the possibility of what her mouth had looked like when she took the kebab from his fork, the possibility of what her mouth looked like now. I pushed them away with more success than before. The guilt helped. So did the growing coldness in the room once the fan had been switched off.

At 9:03 the phone finally lit up with a message.

*Starting back. 20 minutes.*

I stared at the two words and the time estimate. No explanation. No softening. Just the practical information that she was on her way home to the son who had just used the memory of her body to make himself come and then hidden the sheet.

I got up, switched on the fairy lights along the grill, and began arranging the crackers near the door so we could carry them down quickly when she decided it was time. My hands moved steadily. My mind did not. The flat still smelled faintly of the morning’s nail polish and her perfume. Underneath those smells, or perhaps only inside my head, the heavier knowledge of the hotel room remained.

She would walk through the door soon.

She would look at the arranged crackers and smile the motherly smile.

She would ask if I had eaten anything.

And I would have to stand in the same small room with her, knowing what I had done with the images of her bare breasts and black lace while she had been with him, and knowing that she would never be told.

The twenty minutes began to pass.

I sat on the chair facing the door and waited.