The Flat

So he stayed in Pune, and they went to Nagpur.

For the first year, he took the night bus every second Friday. Ten hours each way. He arrived at dawn with a bag of toys and a headache, and Yash, then a baby, would scream and reach for his grandmother. Ira would stand at the door with a solemn face and say, "Who are you?", and then laugh, and hide behind the curtain. Neha would make him tea.

They talked, in those first months, like polite strangers who had once been in love.

By the second year, it was once a month. By the third, once in two months.

The reasons were always good. A release. A quarter-end. A team member who had quit. His own health, once, when a fever kept him in bed for a week and he lay in the dark flat with his phone on his chest and no one to bring him water. He had called his mother. She had said, "Take rest, beta," and that had been all. It had not occurred to her that the fourth-floor flat was empty. It had not occurred to him to say so.

He had learned, by then, to be very good at being alone.

He cooked, badly, and then not at all. He ordered from the same tiny restaurant near his office, and the boy who delivered it knew his door by heart. He bought a small television, and never turned it on. He bought a cheap guitar, one evening, in a burst of something that felt almost like hope, and kept it in its case behind the door. It gathered a fine grey dust. He walked past it a thousand times and never once opened it.

The flat was very clean. That was the strange thing about it. Nothing was ever out of place, because nothing was ever used. The bed was made every morning, tight and square, and every night he lay on top of the blanket in his clothes and looked at the ceiling fan going round, and round, and round.

He kept a small framed photograph on the table by the bed. It was Ira and Yash on a beach in Goa, the last holiday they had all taken, before. The children were squinting into the sun and laughing, with their arms around each other. Neha had taken it. She was not in it. He had never had the heart to say that he wished she were.

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There were nights when it was very bad.

He did not tell anyone about them. There was no one to tell. His friends from college had scattered into their own crowded lives. His colleagues knew him as a man who never took leave and never complained. His parents belonged to a generation that did not have a word for it. His wife, he thought, would have said, You are exaggerating, and he could not have borne to hear it.

So on the bad nights, he simply lay in the dark, with the fan turning overhead, and let it come.

It came like a guest with no face. It sat at the end of the bed. It did not shout. It only said, softly, in a voice as reasonable as his own: What is the point? Who would notice? You are a salary. You are a signature on a form. You are the voice on the phone at ten o'clock, and the money on the first of the month. If you were not here, who would even know?

And once, on a night in the rainy season, when a client had shouted at him for forty minutes and his wife had not answered his call and the whole flat had seemed to lean in and press against his chest, the guest had said a different thing. It had said the thing that he never repeated, even in his own head. It had said it quietly, almost kindly, like an offer.

He lay very still.

Then his phone had lit up on the table.

It was a photograph. Ira had sent it, without a word, from her mother's phone. Yash asleep on the sofa with his mouth open and a stuffed elephant clamped under his chin. Under it, in an eleven-year-old's careful spelling: Yash is drooling. Goodnight Papa.

He looked at the picture for a long time. The rain drummed on the window. Slowly, very slowly, the thing at the end of the bed went quiet, and he found that he was crying, the first time in years, in long, silent, shaking breaths that he could not stop, and he held the phone against his chest like a small warm stone.

He did not say anything to anyone. In the morning he got up, and made the bed, and shaved, and went to work.

Two children, he told himself, in the lift, and the words were almost a prayer. I have two children. That is all I need to be relevant. That is all I need to stay.

It was not a lie. But it was not the whole truth, either. The whole truth was that he did not know how to say I am not all right to any living person, and that he had been not-all-right for so long that it had stopped being an event and become weather.

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What He Never Said Aloud

There was one call that Vivek waited for, and it was not the one that came at ten.

He waited for the other one. The one that would begin with his name, said softly, without any complaint behind it. Vivek. It is me. I was just thinking about you. He could hear it. He had heard it a thousand times, in the dark, in the fourth-floor flat, in the exact voice of the woman who had once laughed so loudly in a crowded marriage hall that strangers turned to smile.

He knew what it would do. He was an engineer; he understood how a small signal, sent at the right moment, could bring down a very large wall. One call. Ninety seconds. I am not calling about your mother. I am calling because the house is quiet without you. And every stone he had carried up that hill for six years would have rolled quietly off his back.

The call never came.

And he did not make it, either.

That was the part he could not forgive himself. Some nights he took the phone in his hand and found her name, and his thumb hovered over the green button, and something small and hard and ashamed rose in his chest and said: Why me? Why is it always me? I am the one who calls at ten. I am the one who sends the money on the first. I am the one who says sorry, even when I do not know for what. Let her call, this once. Let her be the one who bends.

He called it self-respect. He called it not chasing. He called it a lot of things, in the lift, in the shower, in the dark.

It was only later, on the bad nights, when the thing at the end of the bed had gone quiet and he lay awake looking at the ceiling fan, that he found its real name. It was ego. A small, shining, foolish thing, no bigger than a coin, and it had stood between two people who loved each other for six years like a wall built of a single sentence: You first.

He knew she was standing on the other side of it, with her thumb over his name. He was almost sure of it. She was proud, too. She was the proudest person he had ever loved, and that was one of the things he loved. Two people, six hundred kilometres apart, each waiting in the dark for the other to speak, each certain that the silence was the other's fault, and each too proud to be the first to drown it.

A phone call could end it, he thought. Only that. A phone call between two people who are angry can dissolve a dispute that ten years of silence have made into stone. It only requires that somebody stop being right.

And yet he lay there, night after night, being right.

He thought about love in those hours more than he had ever thought about it in his life. He decided that it was not a feeling, or not only. It was a series of small, unglamorous decisions to show up. To pick up. To be the first to soften. To ask how are you and stay for the answer. It was not the wedding hall, or the green sari, or the promise at the fire. It was the ordinary Tuesday when nobody was watching, when you set down your pride and dialled.

He thought about Neha's fights, and slowly, slowly, he began to understand them. They had never really been about a tin of masala, or a wedding card, or the order of two names. They were a woman standing at the edge of a great silence, throwing small stones into it to hear whether anything was still there. Look at me. See me. Choose me. Fight for me. And he, who was so good at solving problems, had answered every stone with a solution, and never once with an embrace.

He thought about his children, and it was the thought that hurt the most. That Ira was watching him, right now, from six hundred kilometres away, learning what a father is. That Yash would remember one day only this: a voice on a phone, four minutes long, at twenty to eleven. That they would grow up believing that love was something that lived in a small, warm rectangle in the hand, and went dark whenever you needed it.

He wanted so badly to hold them. To turn up at the school gate with no announcement and no laptop, and stand in the sun with all the other fathers. To carry Yash on his shoulders, to teach Ira to ride a bicycle, to be, just once, the sort of father that a child draws in a picture with the sun on his face. Not a father who provided. A father who was there.

Nobody, he thought, tells a man how alone it is to carry a family on his back and be told, at every step, that it is not enough. There is no word for it. A mother is allowed to be tired. A father is allowed to be a wall. He is supposed to stand in the rain so that no one else gets wet, and no one asks the wall whether it is cold. He must be strong; strong men do not say I am struggling. He must be present; present men do not sleep. He is the roof. And nobody, in the whole history of houses, has ever asked the roof whether it leaks.

He never said any of it aloud.

He was forty-one, and he was tired, and he was proud, and he was loved, and he was afraid of being loved a little too late.