04-09-2026, 06:44 PM
Chapter 24 (Continued) – Ten Minutes
30 November 2025 – Sunday Night
I had to move.
The kitchen window was further along, past a downpipe and a thicker cluster of leaves. The ground sloped. I went sideways, not straight, because straight would have taken me across a patch of open light from their dining-room bulb. A branch scbangd my forearm. I bit down on the sound. My chappal slipped once on wet soil and I grabbed the downpipe. The metal was cold and dirty. I stayed still until I was sure no face had come to any window.
The kitchen glass was smaller. The top was open two or three inches, enough for steam, enough for voices if a person was closer than they should be. The inner light was harder, whiter than the living room. I could not see the whole kitchen from the first place I found. The hob. A slice of fridge. No people.
I shifted again, lower, almost on one knee. A stone pressed into the bone. Something living moved in the bush to my right and then went still. I put my eye to the gap that the open window and the angle of the wall would allow.
They were there.
Ma’s back was against the wall beside the tall fridge. Not the cooking wall. The side wall, where a person standing at the hob would not be seen from the living-room doorway if the angle was right. Azad Sahab had her there. One of his hands was on her waist, flat, over the green blouse and the saree at the place where the cloth folded. The other hand held her left wrist up against the wall, above her head. The sleeveless blouse had lifted with the arm. The underside of her arm was bare. Her armpit was clean, the skin smooth in that white light. She has started shaving it regular, since she has started wearing sleeveless blouses.
His body boxed her in. Not fully pressed. Close enough that the box was clear.
His eyes were large in the way anger makes eyes large. Not shouting-anger. The other kind. The kind that had sat in our room after the dinner.
Her eyes were not angry. They were smaller. Sorry. Soft. The look she used when she wanted a mood to come down without giving the whole house away.
The open window carried their voices in pieces at first, then more clearly as my ear found the gap.
“—not into the room,” he was saying. The first words were already in the middle. I had missed the start because of the bushes. “Not while Ammi is sitting there with a plate. I will not walk my mother past that. You understand or not?”
“I understand.” Ma’s voice was low, breathy from the way her chest was held. “I never asked for the room. I said I would give the box and come back.”
“You said ten minutes to the boy.”
“It is already more than that.”
She tried to bring her raised arm down. He did not let it down at once. His thumb moved once against the inside of her wrist, then he eased the hold, not fully releasing.
“Azad Sahab. Please. He has only just started accepting this. Thursday he sat with me and said it properly. I don’t want to take advantage of that the same week and stay out like I have no house of my own. He will wait. He will look at the clock. I know my son.”
“If he accepted, then what is the fear.” His voice went up half a step and then he caught it, remembering the living room. “Accepted means accepted. Not accepted for tea and a steel box. You think I came up three floors tonight to only have food and chit chat?”
“Shhh. Azad Sahab, keep your voice down please. Ammi will hear otherwise”
“My voice is down. You are the one who brought me here with food for Ammi and then stood two feet away the whole evening as if I am some guest.”
Ma’s throat moved. The gold chain sat in the hollow of it.
“I have to go please,” she said. “It is already twenty - twenty five minutes. Maybe more. I told him ten.”
“Then tell him something else when you go up. You have told him many things these months. One more will not break the building.”
“That is not funny, Azad Sahab, please.”
“I am not trying to be funny.” He leaned in. The hand on her waist pulled her an inch off the wall and then put her back. “If the boy is such a problem tonight, we go to your flat. Send him to the kitchen. The room is small but we can manage in the living room. I have waited since celebration night. You know how many days that is.”
Ma’s face changed. The softness stayed, but something in the mouth tightened. She did not like that idea. I saw it clearly even from the dark. The same bed. The same folding table. The son told to wait in the corner, left to hear moans of his own mother. She shook her head once, small, firm.
“Please don’t be stupid Azad Sahab,” she said. “You know we can’t do that. Not there. Not with him in the house. I will not do that to him. Accepting is one thing. Asking him to go to kitchen is another. I am not that kind of a woman Azad Sahab, please try to understand.”
“Then which woman are you tonight. The one who wears what I buy and sits on the bed with her pallu falling, or the one who runs upstairs because a clock is moving.”
“Both,” she said, and the word came out tired. “I am both. You knew that when you came. I have a son. You have a mother in the next room. We are not two people in an empty house.”
He laughed once, short, without humour. The sound was small enough that Ammi would have taken it for a cough if she heard it at all.
“Empty house. I own this building and I cannot take you ten steps to a bed because my mother’s knees are bad and your son has a clock. This is the life you have given me.”
“I have not given you a life to throw in my face.” Her raised hand, now free enough, came down and rested on his chest, not pushing, only there. “Don’t talk as if I trapped you. You called. You came. You sat in my house in front of him. I invited you because you were angry on the phone. I am standing here because Ammi told me to see what you want. What you want is not possible in the next five minutes, Azad Sahab. That is all I am saying.”
His jaw worked.
He looked at her mouth. Then at the place where the sleeveless blouse held her. Then back at her eyes.
“You think I am a boy you can calm with one hand on the chest.”
“I think you are angry because you missed me,” she said, quieter. “That I understand. I missed you also. But missing does not mean we do a wrong thing in the kitchen while your mother eats the food I packed. Let me go up. Tomorrow—”
“Tomorrow I am not asking.” The sentence came out flat. “Tomorrow I am coming. Afternoon. Before he comes from office. You will not go to the market. You will not sit with some story about the building watching. You will be in that room.”
Ma closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them the pity was still there, and under it a kind of surrender that was not complete and was not nothing.
“Don’t say it like revenge.”
“It is not revenge. It is days. You made the days. I sat with them.” His hand at her waist slid an inch higher, under the pallu, onto the blouse at the side of her ribs. She drew a breath and did not stop him. “I will make up for the waiting.”
“Azad Ss….”
“Say yes.”
She looked toward the kitchen door — the living room, Ammi, the plate. Then she looked back at him.
“Come in the afternoon,” she said. “Before he comes. We will have enough. Not the whole evening. That is what I can give tomorrow. Tonight I have to go back. I have to. Please”
The anger in his face did not leave in one piece. It changed shape. He used what was left of it. He pulled her off the wall in one movement and brought her against him so that her hands had nowhere ordinary to go. They went where they went — up, around his neck, the way a woman holds a man when she has stopped pretending the hold is accidental. Her bangles made a small sound against the collar of the pathani. The payal would have sounded too if I could have heard the floor.
From the window I saw the side of her face and the full line of his jaw.
She smiled.
Not a large smile. The small one she used when she wanted a storm to become weather. She let him touch where his hand wanted to touch. The waist. The place above it. The back, under the pallu, the bare skin along the blouse edge. Her body fitted to him in the white kitchen light as if the fridge and the hob and the smell of garlic from his failed mutton were not there.
“Don’t be angry now,” she whispered. I heard it because the window was open and because she had put the whisper near his ear and the wall sent it out. “I am here. I said yes for tomorrow. Don’t spoil the yes.”
“You said yes because I held you.”
“I said yes because it is true. I also cannot keep postponing you for the stairs and the neighbours. I only cannot do it tonight with Ammi ten steps away and Sunny upstairs looking probably waiting. You would not like it either if the positions were different.”
He made a sound that was not agreement and not refusal.
Then he kissed her.
There was no small beginning. His mouth landed on hers the way his hand had landed on her waist in our room — as if the permission was already old. Her head went back against the wall and then came forward again. For a second her eyes were open. Then they were not. The wrist he had held up earlier found the back of his neck. The other hand pressed into his shoulder.
It was not a doorway kiss. Not the controlled corner-of-the-mouth thing from Thursday when Ammi’s line of sight had been blocked. This was the kitchen version of the hotel. He turned her face with his thumb and took the kiss deeper. I saw her mouth open. I saw her give the angle he wanted. I saw the moment she stopped only receiving and started answering — her lips moving, her breath leaving through her nose, her body tightening and then softening against the pathani.
His hand at her ribs spread. The blouse pulled. The upper curve of her breast lifted against the green cloth and his fingers followed the cloth, not under it yet, close enough that the difference would not have mattered to anyone standing where I was standing. She made a small sound into his mouth. Not loud. Enough for the open window. Enough for me.
I held the downpipe so I would not lean into the glass.
The kiss broke once. A thin string of air. Their foreheads stayed close.
“You taste of my bad mutton,” he said, and the anger had gone thin enough to let a half-smile in.
“You should not have cooked,” she said against his mouth. “I told you.”
He kissed her again for that. Shorter. Then again, longer, as if the correction needed a reply. Her fingers were in the hair at the back of his head now. She let him enjoy it. That was the only word that fitted. She let him. And then she took some of it back for herself, rising a little on her feet, the payal doing their hidden work, the pallu slipping off the shoulder she had so carefully arranged for Ammi.
His mouth left hers and went to the side of her throat, just above the chain. She tipped her head. The clean line of her neck was there for him in the white light. He did not suck long — but he stayed long enough that her hand tightened on his shoulder.
“Tomorrow,” he said into her skin. “Afternoon. I will come when Ammi sleeps. She sleeps after lunch. You keep the door ready.”
“Yes.”
“If the boy comes early—”
“He will not. Office is office. I will message you when I have packed the lunch for you and Ammi. Come after that.”
He lifted his head and looked at her as if checking whether the sentence had a hole in it. Then he kissed her once more, slower, almost like a seal on a paper. She took that one with her eyes closed and her mouth already soft.
When it ended she was breathing faster. So was he. The kitchen held them a second longer than it needed to.
Ma’s eyes went to the door again.
“We should go to the hall,” she said. The practical voice was returning, thin at the edges. “Ammi will think something is wrong with the gas. Or with you. I don’t want her to call.”
“Let her call.”
“Azad. Please. I came to give food. Let me look like I gave food.”
He did not move off her at once. His hand stayed at her waist as if the waist belonged in that grip. Then he stepped back half a step. She used the half step to pull the pallu up, to smooth the blouse where his hand had been, to bring her arm down from his neck. The armpit disappeared under the sleeveless cloth. The decent woman arranged herself over the woman who had just had her mouth opened against a fridge wall.
He watched her do it. The frustration was not gone. It had only been given a time: tomorrow, afternoon.
“Go,” he said. “Smile at her. Talk about the food. Then you can count your ten minutes on the stairs.”
She touched his wrist once, a small thank-you that was also a request to keep his face normal.
“Come,” she said.
They turned toward the living room.
I saw her take the first step away from the wall. I saw him follow, close enough that anyone coming the other way would have understood, far enough that Ammi would only see a son and a guest returning from the kitchen. The green saree moved. The black pathani moved.
That was all the window gave me before their bodies left the slice of light I had.
I stayed on the wet soil with the stone still in my knee and the downpipe in my hand, and listened to the faint change of their footsteps on tiles I could not see.
They were going back to the hall.
30 November 2025 – Sunday Night
I had to move.
The kitchen window was further along, past a downpipe and a thicker cluster of leaves. The ground sloped. I went sideways, not straight, because straight would have taken me across a patch of open light from their dining-room bulb. A branch scbangd my forearm. I bit down on the sound. My chappal slipped once on wet soil and I grabbed the downpipe. The metal was cold and dirty. I stayed still until I was sure no face had come to any window.
The kitchen glass was smaller. The top was open two or three inches, enough for steam, enough for voices if a person was closer than they should be. The inner light was harder, whiter than the living room. I could not see the whole kitchen from the first place I found. The hob. A slice of fridge. No people.
I shifted again, lower, almost on one knee. A stone pressed into the bone. Something living moved in the bush to my right and then went still. I put my eye to the gap that the open window and the angle of the wall would allow.
They were there.
Ma’s back was against the wall beside the tall fridge. Not the cooking wall. The side wall, where a person standing at the hob would not be seen from the living-room doorway if the angle was right. Azad Sahab had her there. One of his hands was on her waist, flat, over the green blouse and the saree at the place where the cloth folded. The other hand held her left wrist up against the wall, above her head. The sleeveless blouse had lifted with the arm. The underside of her arm was bare. Her armpit was clean, the skin smooth in that white light. She has started shaving it regular, since she has started wearing sleeveless blouses.
His body boxed her in. Not fully pressed. Close enough that the box was clear.
His eyes were large in the way anger makes eyes large. Not shouting-anger. The other kind. The kind that had sat in our room after the dinner.
Her eyes were not angry. They were smaller. Sorry. Soft. The look she used when she wanted a mood to come down without giving the whole house away.
The open window carried their voices in pieces at first, then more clearly as my ear found the gap.
“—not into the room,” he was saying. The first words were already in the middle. I had missed the start because of the bushes. “Not while Ammi is sitting there with a plate. I will not walk my mother past that. You understand or not?”
“I understand.” Ma’s voice was low, breathy from the way her chest was held. “I never asked for the room. I said I would give the box and come back.”
“You said ten minutes to the boy.”
“It is already more than that.”
She tried to bring her raised arm down. He did not let it down at once. His thumb moved once against the inside of her wrist, then he eased the hold, not fully releasing.
“Azad Sahab. Please. He has only just started accepting this. Thursday he sat with me and said it properly. I don’t want to take advantage of that the same week and stay out like I have no house of my own. He will wait. He will look at the clock. I know my son.”
“If he accepted, then what is the fear.” His voice went up half a step and then he caught it, remembering the living room. “Accepted means accepted. Not accepted for tea and a steel box. You think I came up three floors tonight to only have food and chit chat?”
“Shhh. Azad Sahab, keep your voice down please. Ammi will hear otherwise”
“My voice is down. You are the one who brought me here with food for Ammi and then stood two feet away the whole evening as if I am some guest.”
Ma’s throat moved. The gold chain sat in the hollow of it.
“I have to go please,” she said. “It is already twenty - twenty five minutes. Maybe more. I told him ten.”
“Then tell him something else when you go up. You have told him many things these months. One more will not break the building.”
“That is not funny, Azad Sahab, please.”
“I am not trying to be funny.” He leaned in. The hand on her waist pulled her an inch off the wall and then put her back. “If the boy is such a problem tonight, we go to your flat. Send him to the kitchen. The room is small but we can manage in the living room. I have waited since celebration night. You know how many days that is.”
Ma’s face changed. The softness stayed, but something in the mouth tightened. She did not like that idea. I saw it clearly even from the dark. The same bed. The same folding table. The son told to wait in the corner, left to hear moans of his own mother. She shook her head once, small, firm.
“Please don’t be stupid Azad Sahab,” she said. “You know we can’t do that. Not there. Not with him in the house. I will not do that to him. Accepting is one thing. Asking him to go to kitchen is another. I am not that kind of a woman Azad Sahab, please try to understand.”
“Then which woman are you tonight. The one who wears what I buy and sits on the bed with her pallu falling, or the one who runs upstairs because a clock is moving.”
“Both,” she said, and the word came out tired. “I am both. You knew that when you came. I have a son. You have a mother in the next room. We are not two people in an empty house.”
He laughed once, short, without humour. The sound was small enough that Ammi would have taken it for a cough if she heard it at all.
“Empty house. I own this building and I cannot take you ten steps to a bed because my mother’s knees are bad and your son has a clock. This is the life you have given me.”
“I have not given you a life to throw in my face.” Her raised hand, now free enough, came down and rested on his chest, not pushing, only there. “Don’t talk as if I trapped you. You called. You came. You sat in my house in front of him. I invited you because you were angry on the phone. I am standing here because Ammi told me to see what you want. What you want is not possible in the next five minutes, Azad Sahab. That is all I am saying.”
His jaw worked.
He looked at her mouth. Then at the place where the sleeveless blouse held her. Then back at her eyes.
“You think I am a boy you can calm with one hand on the chest.”
“I think you are angry because you missed me,” she said, quieter. “That I understand. I missed you also. But missing does not mean we do a wrong thing in the kitchen while your mother eats the food I packed. Let me go up. Tomorrow—”
“Tomorrow I am not asking.” The sentence came out flat. “Tomorrow I am coming. Afternoon. Before he comes from office. You will not go to the market. You will not sit with some story about the building watching. You will be in that room.”
Ma closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them the pity was still there, and under it a kind of surrender that was not complete and was not nothing.
“Don’t say it like revenge.”
“It is not revenge. It is days. You made the days. I sat with them.” His hand at her waist slid an inch higher, under the pallu, onto the blouse at the side of her ribs. She drew a breath and did not stop him. “I will make up for the waiting.”
“Azad Ss….”
“Say yes.”
She looked toward the kitchen door — the living room, Ammi, the plate. Then she looked back at him.
“Come in the afternoon,” she said. “Before he comes. We will have enough. Not the whole evening. That is what I can give tomorrow. Tonight I have to go back. I have to. Please”
The anger in his face did not leave in one piece. It changed shape. He used what was left of it. He pulled her off the wall in one movement and brought her against him so that her hands had nowhere ordinary to go. They went where they went — up, around his neck, the way a woman holds a man when she has stopped pretending the hold is accidental. Her bangles made a small sound against the collar of the pathani. The payal would have sounded too if I could have heard the floor.
From the window I saw the side of her face and the full line of his jaw.
She smiled.
Not a large smile. The small one she used when she wanted a storm to become weather. She let him touch where his hand wanted to touch. The waist. The place above it. The back, under the pallu, the bare skin along the blouse edge. Her body fitted to him in the white kitchen light as if the fridge and the hob and the smell of garlic from his failed mutton were not there.
“Don’t be angry now,” she whispered. I heard it because the window was open and because she had put the whisper near his ear and the wall sent it out. “I am here. I said yes for tomorrow. Don’t spoil the yes.”
“You said yes because I held you.”
“I said yes because it is true. I also cannot keep postponing you for the stairs and the neighbours. I only cannot do it tonight with Ammi ten steps away and Sunny upstairs looking probably waiting. You would not like it either if the positions were different.”
He made a sound that was not agreement and not refusal.
Then he kissed her.
There was no small beginning. His mouth landed on hers the way his hand had landed on her waist in our room — as if the permission was already old. Her head went back against the wall and then came forward again. For a second her eyes were open. Then they were not. The wrist he had held up earlier found the back of his neck. The other hand pressed into his shoulder.
It was not a doorway kiss. Not the controlled corner-of-the-mouth thing from Thursday when Ammi’s line of sight had been blocked. This was the kitchen version of the hotel. He turned her face with his thumb and took the kiss deeper. I saw her mouth open. I saw her give the angle he wanted. I saw the moment she stopped only receiving and started answering — her lips moving, her breath leaving through her nose, her body tightening and then softening against the pathani.
His hand at her ribs spread. The blouse pulled. The upper curve of her breast lifted against the green cloth and his fingers followed the cloth, not under it yet, close enough that the difference would not have mattered to anyone standing where I was standing. She made a small sound into his mouth. Not loud. Enough for the open window. Enough for me.
I held the downpipe so I would not lean into the glass.
The kiss broke once. A thin string of air. Their foreheads stayed close.
“You taste of my bad mutton,” he said, and the anger had gone thin enough to let a half-smile in.
“You should not have cooked,” she said against his mouth. “I told you.”
He kissed her again for that. Shorter. Then again, longer, as if the correction needed a reply. Her fingers were in the hair at the back of his head now. She let him enjoy it. That was the only word that fitted. She let him. And then she took some of it back for herself, rising a little on her feet, the payal doing their hidden work, the pallu slipping off the shoulder she had so carefully arranged for Ammi.
His mouth left hers and went to the side of her throat, just above the chain. She tipped her head. The clean line of her neck was there for him in the white light. He did not suck long — but he stayed long enough that her hand tightened on his shoulder.
“Tomorrow,” he said into her skin. “Afternoon. I will come when Ammi sleeps. She sleeps after lunch. You keep the door ready.”
“Yes.”
“If the boy comes early—”
“He will not. Office is office. I will message you when I have packed the lunch for you and Ammi. Come after that.”
He lifted his head and looked at her as if checking whether the sentence had a hole in it. Then he kissed her once more, slower, almost like a seal on a paper. She took that one with her eyes closed and her mouth already soft.
When it ended she was breathing faster. So was he. The kitchen held them a second longer than it needed to.
Ma’s eyes went to the door again.
“We should go to the hall,” she said. The practical voice was returning, thin at the edges. “Ammi will think something is wrong with the gas. Or with you. I don’t want her to call.”
“Let her call.”
“Azad. Please. I came to give food. Let me look like I gave food.”
He did not move off her at once. His hand stayed at her waist as if the waist belonged in that grip. Then he stepped back half a step. She used the half step to pull the pallu up, to smooth the blouse where his hand had been, to bring her arm down from his neck. The armpit disappeared under the sleeveless cloth. The decent woman arranged herself over the woman who had just had her mouth opened against a fridge wall.
He watched her do it. The frustration was not gone. It had only been given a time: tomorrow, afternoon.
“Go,” he said. “Smile at her. Talk about the food. Then you can count your ten minutes on the stairs.”
She touched his wrist once, a small thank-you that was also a request to keep his face normal.
“Come,” she said.
They turned toward the living room.
I saw her take the first step away from the wall. I saw him follow, close enough that anyone coming the other way would have understood, far enough that Ammi would only see a son and a guest returning from the kitchen. The green saree moved. The black pathani moved.
That was all the window gave me before their bodies left the slice of light I had.
I stayed on the wet soil with the stone still in my knee and the downpipe in my hand, and listened to the faint change of their footsteps on tiles I could not see.
They were going back to the hall.
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