[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 45: The Empty House

Poroma's perspective

The first thing Poroma noticed was the silence.

Not on the first night. The first night she did not notice anything at all. She sat at the kitchen table where the process server had left the envelope, and she watched Didi fold Nupur's frocks into the blue suitcase, and Rajiv's little vests, and the stuffed elephant without which he would not sleep. She watched uncle from downstairs carry the cot out in two pieces, and she did not get up. Her body did not seem to belong to her.

At the door Nupur turned back and looked at her. Six years old, in her red cardigan, holding Didi's hand.

"Mamma, are you coming?"

Poroma opened her mouth and nothing came out.

"Mamma will come and see you very soon, shona," Didi said, in a voice Poroma had never heard her use before. Gentle with Nupur, and flat as stone where it touched Poroma. "Come. Papa is waiting."

The door closed. The Maruti's engine coughed twice in the lane and pulled away.

That was the first night.

The silence began on the second morning.

She woke at six, the way she had woken every morning for six years, because Rajiv woke at six and wanted her. She lay there waiting for his cry. It did not come. Her breasts, which had nearly stopped producing milk in the last few weeks, ached faintly with a memory of fullness.

She got up and walked to the children's room. The cot was gone. Four dents in the carpet where its legs had stood. A single sock under Nupur's bed. A crayon drawing still taped to the wall: a house, a sun, four stick figures holding hands. The tallest one had a moustache. The one next to it had long black hair and very large blue eyes, coloured so hard the crayon had torn the paper.

Poroma sat down on Nupur's bare mattress and did not move for a very long time.

She called Ranjeet eleven times that first day. Then twenty times the next. Then she stopped counting.

He never picked up. He sent one message, on the first day, and then nothing.

Speak to a lawyer. Not to me.

She called Rahul. Rahul had always picked up. Even at two in the morning, even when she called to shout at him, he picked up on the second ring with that low lazy voice. Missing me already, Mrs. Sen?

His phone rang and rang. On the third day it started going straight to a recorded message: The number you are calling is switched off.

She sent him WhatsApp messages. They delivered, a single grey tick, then two grey ticks. They never turned blue.

On the fourth day she understood that he had blocked her.

On the fifth day she drove to New Alipore.

She did not dress up. That was the first strange thing she noticed about herself. For nine months, every time she had driven to that building, she had spent an hour getting ready. The chiffon tied four inches below her navel, the way he liked. The backless blouses. No bra. The good perfume. Sindoor in her parting and the mangalsutra glittering between her breasts, because he liked that most of all, the married woman coming to him in her wifely ornaments. It had made her feel wicked and alive.

Today she drove in a faded cotton salwar kameez, the one she wore to clean the kitchen. She had not washed her hair. She had not looked in a mirror.

The guard at the gate was Mahmud. She remembered his face from the first time, the way his eyes had crawled over her bare midriff while he called upstairs, the smirk he and the other guard had exchanged.

He recognised her too. But he did not smirk this time.

"Madam," he said, coming out of his cabin. "Rahul Sir is not at home."

"I'll wait."

"Madam." He hesitated. Then he lowered his voice. "Sir has given instructions. Your name is not to be sent up. If you come, I am to say he is not here. If you insist, I am to call the society secretary." He looked away. "And the security officer, madam. He said security officer."

Poroma stared at him.

"He said that?"

"Yes, madam."

She stood there in the December sun in her old salwar kameez and felt something in her chest that she did not have a name for.

"Madam," Mahmud said, more quietly still. "Please forgive me for saying. You are a respectable lady. You have small children. Please go home."

A respectable lady. The guard who had ogled her nipples through her blouse was telling her she was a respectable lady, and he was saying it out of pity.

She got back into the car. She drove two streets away, parked under a krishnachura tree, and cried until her throat hurt.

Then, for the first time in nine months, she began to think.

Not about Rahul. About herself.

She thought about the first time she saw him, at the shoe shop, and how his eyes on her had felt like being touched. She thought about the messages that came after. Three weeks of jokes and attention and never one word that could be called improper. She thought about the story he had printed and brought to the Holi party, the one with her name and Ranjeet's name in it. "A big coincidence," he had said, and smiled at her over everyone's heads, and she had smiled back because she knew it wasn't one. She had known since Valentine's Day.

She thought about how every single thing she had done in the last nine months, she had told herself she was doing because she had no choice. Because of the video. Because he would show it to Ranjeet. Because she was protecting her marriage.

And sitting in her car under the krishnachura tree, she made herself say the truth, out loud, for the first time.

"I wanted to."

Her voice sounded strange in the closed car.

"I wanted to. Not every time. But at the beginning. And for a long time after." She wiped her face with her dupatta. "He didn't make me. I wanted it, and the video was my excuse."

It did not make her feel better. But it made her feel, for a moment, like a person instead of a ghost.

On the eighth day there was a supervised visit.

It was at a family counselling centre in Lake Gardens, a room with bright plastic chairs and a box of donated toys and a social worker with a clipboard sitting in the corner. Didi brought the children. Ranjeet did not come.

Rajiv ran to her as soon as he saw her, and she caught him and buried her face in his neck and breathed him in. Baby powder and milk and the coconut oil Didi rubbed into his hair. He did not seem to know anything had happened. He showed her a new red car and made it go vroom up her arm.

Nupur did not run.

Nupur walked over slowly and stood in front of her, holding the edge of her cardigan, and looked at her mother's face very carefully, the way she looked at a page of her reading book when she wasn't sure of a word.

"Are you still angry, Mamma?"

"Angry?" Poroma's voice cracked. "Shona, I was never angry with you."

"You hit me," Nupur said. Not accusing. Just stating it, like the colour of the sky. "When the uncle was in your room and I knocked. You said I needed to be slapped."

The social worker's pen stopped moving.

Poroma could not speak. She reached out and touched her daughter's cheek, the left one, very gently, the way you touch a bruise to see if it still hurts.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "Mamma was very, very wrong. Mamma was bad. Not you. Never you."

Nupur considered this. Then she leaned in and gave her mother a quick, careful hug, and stepped back.

"Papa reads me the mongoose story now," she said. "He does the cobra's voice. It's very scary." She paused. "You can come and hear it if you want. But you have to ask Papa."

When the hour was over and Didi took them away, the social worker wrote for a long time on her clipboard. Poroma did not ask what she wrote.

On the ninth night she could not sleep, and she went to the almirah in their bedroom. The one with the locker inside, where she kept her jewellery and their property papers and Ranjeet's grandfather's watch.

At the very back, behind the velvet boxes, was a small grey pen drive in a padded envelope.

Rahul had given it to her in August, after the Bengali New Year party. "A copy," he had said, smiling. "So you can see what I see. So you never forget what you agreed to." And then he had kissed her forehead, like a father.

She had never watched it. She had been too afraid.

She sat on the edge of the bed, opened her laptop, and plugged it in.

There was one file. Fourteen minutes and thirty-one seconds long. The thumbnail showed a man's bedroom she knew very well, lit by one lamp, and a woman sitting on the edge of the bed in a black chiffon saree with the blouse already open.

The date in the file name was the fourteenth of February.

Poroma pressed play.