Chapter 7: Pune

The Deccan Queen takes three hours and ten minutes from Mumbai to Pune, which is enough time to rehearse seven different versions of the conversation I'm about to have with my son and reject all of them.

Version one: honest. "Karan, your father had an affair. That's why I filed for divorce. I didn't tell you because I was protecting him, which was: stupid, because protecting him meant you blamed me." This version is: accurate. This version is also: a grenade. And grenades don't discriminate — they destroy the thrower as much as the target.

Version two: gentle. "Karan, sometimes marriages end because both people grow in different directions. Your father and I simply grew apart." This version is: a lie wrapped in therapy-speak, the kind of sentence Dr. Mehra would approve of and that Karan would see through instantly because twenty-four-year-olds can smell: bullshit, even when — especially when — the bullshit is served with maternal tenderness.

Version three through seven: variations of the above, each more unsatisfying than the last, each discarded while the Deccan Queen passes through stations whose names I register without absorbing — Karjat, Lonavala, the tunnel section where the phone signal dies and I'm left alone with my reflection in the darkened window, the reflection of a fifty-year-old woman in a cotton kurta traveling to Pune to negotiate with a twenty-four-year-old who holds all the power because the power in parent-child relationships shifts, at some point, from the parent to the child, and the shifting is: irreversible.

The train smells of: samosa. Someone three seats ahead has opened a tiffin, and the smell of fried potatoes in pastry has colonised the entire coach with the efficiency of a Mumbai real estate developer — quickly, completely, without asking permission. The smell makes me hungry. The hunger is: inappropriate, because I'm supposed to be anxious, not hungry, and the co-existence of anxiety and hunger is one of the body's more confusing features. Your brain says: your son might reject you. Your stomach says: but samosa.

Pune station. I take an auto to Karan's apartment in Hinjewadi — the IT hub, the place where young engineers live in shared flats and order Swiggy and write code that does things I don't understand and call it: work. Karan's flat is on the seventh floor of a building that looks like every other building in Hinjewadi — concrete, recent, built with the architectural imagination of a tax return.

He opens the door.

He looks: different. Not physically — he's still tall (Harsh's height), still thin (my metabolism), still wearing the uniform of the Indian software engineer: t-shirt with some tech company's logo, joggers, bare feet. But different in the way that a face changes when the face has been: thinking. The thinking-face that young people develop when young people have been forced to confront something they don't want to confront, and the confrontation has left: marks. Not visible marks. Expression marks. The kind you see only if you've memorised the face, which I have, because I've been memorising Karan's face since the day it emerged from my body, wrinkled and screaming, twenty-four years ago in a Lucknow hospital.

"Hi, Ma."

"Hi, beta."

We stand in the doorway. The doorway that is: a threshold in every sense — the physical threshold between the hallway and his apartment, and the emotional threshold between estrangement and whatever comes next. Thresholds require: someone to step across first. I step.

The apartment is: clean. Surprisingly clean for a twenty-four-year-old living alone. (His flatmate has moved out, he'll explain later — some dispute about the electricity bill that Karan describes with the righteous indignation of a man who has discovered that principle is expensive.) The kitchen counter has: one plate, one cup, one spoon. The singular cutlery of a person who has not learned to cook for guests because he has not had guests because having guests requires: a life outside of work, and Karan's life outside of work is: small, the smallness being something I recognise because I had the same smallness in Lucknow, the smallness of a life defined by one relationship (his: work; mine: marriage) and everything else shrunk to fit around it.

"Chai?" he asks.

"Main banati hoon." I'll make it.

"Nahi, Ma. Main banaata hoon." No, Ma. I'll make it.

This is: the first surprise. Karan making chai. Karan, who in Lucknow had never entered the kitchen except to take food out of it, who had grown up in a house where the kitchen was: my domain, the domain that I'd defended and been trapped in simultaneously. Karan making chai means: Karan has learned. Karan living alone has taught Karan what living with me did not — that chai doesn't make itself, that someone has to boil the water and measure the leaves and add the cardamom and wait, and the waiting is: part of the making.

He makes chai. It's: not great. Too much water, not enough milk, the cardamom added too late (cardamom must go in with the water, not after — this being one of the fundamental principles of chai that I'd never taught him because I'd never imagined he'd need to make his own). But it's: his chai. Made with his hands in his kitchen in his apartment. And I drink it with the enthusiasm of a woman tasting: effort.

"Acchi hai," I say. It's good.

"Jhooth mat bol, Ma. Pani jaisi hai." Don't lie, Ma. It's like water.

I laugh. He almost laughs. The "almost" being: the distance between us, measured in: one incomplete laugh, one swallowed smile, one glance that starts warm and then corrects itself to: neutral. The neutral that angry sons maintain because angry sons have decided that warmth is: surrender, and surrender is: what the other side wants.

We sit. His sofa is: IKEA. The specific IKEA sofa that every Hinjewadi flat contains — grey fabric, adequate cushioning, purchased online with the same care one applies to ordering: socks. We sit at opposite ends. The distance between us is: exactly right. Not too close (which would force intimacy neither of us is ready for) and not too far (which would formalise the conversation into something diplomatic rather than familial).

"Flat kyun becha?" he asks. Why did you sell the flat?

This is why I'm here. Not for chai, not for the Deccan Queen scenery, not for a tour of Hinjewadi's architectural monotony. This question. The question my son needs answered.

I choose version eight — the version I hadn't rehearsed, the version that arrives only when you're sitting on an IKEA sofa drinking bad chai across from the person you love most in the world and the rehearsed versions feel like: costumes that don't fit.

"Kyunki woh ghar nahi tha. Woh ek role tha. Aur jab role khatam hua — divorce ke baad — toh woh jagah mujhe yaad dilati thi ki main kaun thi. Aur main woh insaan nahi rehna chahti."

Because it wasn't a home. It was a role. And when the role ended — after the divorce — the place reminded me of who I was. And I don't want to be that person anymore.

Silence. Not the phone-silence of our last call — the comfortable-enough silence of two people sitting in the same room, processing.

"Pitaji kehte hain ki tumne sab kuch tod diya." Dad says you destroyed everything.

"Pitaji ko — apni version batane ka haq hai. Meri version alag hai." Your father has the right to his version. My version is different.

"Toh bata." Then tell me.

And here is where I make the decision. The decision that I'd been avoiding for eight months, that I'd discussed with Dr. Mehra, that I'd run through seven versions on the Deccan Queen. The decision to tell my son the truth — not the full truth (the full truth includes details that a son should not carry about his father) but the essential truth. The truth that says: I didn't leave because I was bored. I didn't leave because I wanted freedom. I left because staying was: destroying me, and the destroying was slow enough that I almost didn't notice until there was almost nothing left to save.

I tell him. Not about the affair (that stays locked). But about the years. The years of "theek hai." The years of shrinking. The years of making dal and attending kitty parties and smiling at dinner parties and losing, piece by piece, the woman I'd been before Harsh — the woman who'd worked in advertising in Mumbai, who'd had opinions and ambitions and a laugh that came from somewhere real, before twenty-seven years of "theek hai" had relocated that laugh to somewhere: unreachable.

Karan listens. The listening of a young man who is hearing something he didn't want to hear but needed to hear, the needed-hearing being: the first step toward understanding, which is: the first step toward forgiveness, which is: a journey that takes longer than one afternoon in Hinjewadi but has to start: somewhere.

"Main nahi jaanta tha," he says finally. I didn't know.

"Maine nahi bataya." I didn't tell you.

"Kyun nahi?" Why not?

"Kyunki tu Harsh ka beta bhi hai. Aur main nahi chahti thi ki tu apne Pitaji ko woh nazar se dekhe." Because you're Harsh's son too. And I didn't want you to look at your father that way.

He puts down his chai cup. The cup makes a sound on the glass table — a small sound, the sound of ceramic on glass, but in the quiet of this apartment the sound is: loud. The sound of something being put down. The sound of something being: released.

"Main sorry hoon, Ma." I'm sorry, Ma.

"Tujhe sorry bolne ki zaroorat nahi hai." You don't need to say sorry.

"Hai. Zaroorat hai. Chhe hafte phone nahi uthaya. Tujhe akele chhod diya. Mumbai mein. Nayi jagah mein. Akele." I do. Six weeks without picking up the phone. Left you alone. In Mumbai. New city. Alone.

I reach across the IKEA sofa. The reach being: a bridge. My hand on his hand. His hand is: large now, the hand of a man, not the hand of the baby whose first steps I'd witnessed on a marble floor in Lucknow. But the skin is the same. The warmth is the same. The son is the same.

"Main theek hoon," I say. And for the first time in eight months, I mean it.