Just Ten Minutes

Chapter 1

Ranganathan came home a little after seven and lowered himself into his usual corner of the sofa without changing out of his work clothes. Dust from the construction site clung to the cuffs of his trousers, and a pale streak of dried cement ran along one sleeve where he had brushed against a wall sometime that afternoon. He picked up the television remote and began moving through the channels without really watching any of them. News, cricket, a serial, advertisements, another serial. Eventually he stopped on Sun TV. Rajinikanth appeared on screen in a suit, looking much less tired than Ranga felt. He leaned back and let the noise from the cheap TV speakers fill the room. His right knee had been bothering him for two weeks, his shoulders hurt, and he could still hear his contractor’s voice in his head complaining about a delayed concrete delivery as though Ranga personally controlled traffic, weather and the competence of his colleagues. He wanted just ten minutes to himself in which nobody asked him a question.

Manjulatha stopped at the entrance when she saw his shoes. They were lying exactly where he had kicked them off, half on the carpet, grey with construction dust and little clumps of dried mud. Only last week she had asked him, very specifically, to leave them outside. She had not shouted. She had told him she was tired of cleaning the same dirt every evening after spending the entire day cleaning everything else. He had nodded without looking away from his phone and said, “I heard you.” Looking at the shoes now, Manju considered leaving them where they were. Let him see the mess. Let him step over them tomorrow morning and discover that things did not magically clean themselves after he stopped paying attention. Then she looked at him. His head had sunk against the back of the sofa, the early grey in his hair flattened where his hard hat had sat all day, and even from across the room she could see the heaviness in his eyes. She picked up the shoes anyway and carried them through the kitchen to the washing area behind the house.

Manju turned on the tap and began rubbing the dried mud from the first shoe. A pain travelled from the centre of her palm to her elbow. It had started two months earlier and now appeared whenever she carried anything heavy. The doctor at the government clinic had told her to rest the wrist. Manju had laughed before realising he was serious. Rest it from what? Cooking? Washing? Carrying groceries? Plaiting Meera’s hair?

The doctor had given her a date for a follow-up. She had missed it on Tuesday after the school called about Meera’s unfinished work. Manju had written the new date on the calendar near the refrigerator, though she had not told Ranga. There never seemed to be a good time to tell him something that might become another expense.

A small hand tugged at the hem of her cotton saree. Meera stood behind her, quiet. The eight-year-old had changed out of her school uniform into an old yellow T-shirt and shorts, but her hair was still tied into the two uneven plaits Manju had made that morning. One ribbon had disappeared sometime during the day. “What happened, kanna?” Manju asked, turning Ranga’s shoe beneath the running water. Meera looked toward the kitchen before answering, as though what she was about to say might travel through the walls. “Tomorrow is the last day to pay for the school trip.” Manju remembered a notice coming home earlier that week. She had either placed it beside Ranga’s dinner plate or meant to. Lately those two things had become difficult to distinguish. “How much?” she asked. Meera hesitated just long enough to make Manju look up. “Two thousand rupees, Amma.” The shoe stopped moving in her hand.

“Two thousand?” Manju repeated. Meera nodded quickly and began explaining that it was a whole-day trip, that they were going to the science centre first, then a museum, then somewhere for lunch and finally some adventure place whose name she could not remember. Gunfire burst from the television in the living room. Meera flinched. Manju turned off the tap and asked if she had told Appa yet. Meera looked toward the house and shook her head. “Why?” Manju asked. Meera tugged the saree again and said, “You ask.” There was something about the request that made Manju study her more carefully. Ranga had never frightened his daughter in any obvious way. He had never hit her and rarely shouted directly at her. Yet Meera had begun approaching him as though she first needed to check the weather. “No,” Manju said gently. “It is your trip. You ask him.” When Meera quietly pleaded again, Manju dried her hands with the shawl of her saree and went inside with the child following a step behind her.

Ranga was still staring at the television. Manju called his name, and he answered without turning. “Meera wants to ask you something.” He lowered the volume and looked at his daughter. Meera stood near the edge of the sofa and began with the same cautious tone she had used outside. “Appa, tomorrow is the last day to pay for my school trip.” Ranga frowned. “Which trip?” Meera explained. “How much?” he asked. She took a breath. “Two thousand.” The change in his face lasted less than a second, but everyone saw it. His lips pressed together and his eyes dropped briefly toward the floor. “Two thousand rupees for one school trip?” he asked. Meera hurried through the itinerary again, adding details as though each one might make the number more reasonable. Ranga listened until she reached the adventure place she could not name, then picked up the remote and said, “No.”

He turned the volume back up. To him, the matter was settled. To Meera, it had barely begun. She remained standing there until Manju said his name again. Ranga looked over, already irritated. “What?”

“Talk to her at least.”

“I talked.”

“You said one word.”

Ranga gave the remote a small impatient shake. “What else is there to say?”

“Everyone is going, Appa.”

“There will be another trip.”

“Not like this one.”

“Not now, Meera.”

“Tomorrow is the last day.”

“I know.”

“Then why can’t I go?”

By the time she asked it, the question no longer sounded like a question about a field trip. Ranga rubbed the bridge of his nose and said, “Because I said no.” Manju told him to explain properly, and that was when something in him snapped. “Why must everything become a discussion?” he shouted. “Is there no value for my word in this house? If I say no, it’s a no. That’s it!”

Ranga had always kept the financial matters of the household close to his chest. He preferred money when it remained invisible, moving quietly beneath the surface of family life where nobody needed to think about it. But he could already see the numbers. The electricity bill folded inside his work bag was three weeks overdue and needed to be paid before the lights stopped switching on. Meera’s school fees were due in six days. The mechanic had looked at him that morning and told him the brake pads could survive another month if he was careful, but he should stop testing his luck. His mother’s medication. Groceries. Petrol. Two thousand rupees was not impossible, and that made it worse. Impossible amounts were easier to deny. You could just laugh and say no. Two thousand was the sort of amount that could always be found if you agreed that something else could become a problem. “Where am I supposed to get two thousand rupees tonight?” he said.

Meera lowered her eyes, and Manju’s expression hardened. Ranga knew immediately that he had said it badly, but he had never been good at catching words before they completed their damage. Meera said softly that everyone else’s parents had already paid. Ranga heard comparison, even though that was not her intention. She only meant to express her disappointment. “Good for everyone else’s parents,” he replied. Manju did not look away from him, but he was already defensive. “What? Should I print money?” Meera’s eyes filled. “I just wanted to go, Appa.” Ranga told her again that he had said no. Then Meera said it. “You always say no.”

Ranga turned toward her. “What?” Meera’s courage faltered, but not enough to stop her. She reminded him about the new sports shoes she had wanted the month before, the Barbie doll she wanted for her birthday that he had said could wait, the time she had asked him to come to the fancy dress competition at school and he had been working overtime. Ranga began answering each example individually because that was easier than answering what they collectively meant. She already had shoes. The Barbie doll was unnecessary because Meera barely played with the toys she already had. Work was work. Manju watched him miss the point several times before telling him, “It is not about the shoes.” Ranga looked at her sharply. “Then what is it about?” Manju had not planned to tell him that evening that the school office had called about the girl’s falling marks and unfinished work, but the argument had opened the door and now everything behind it seemed determined to come through. She told him. Ranga stared at Meera, then at his wife, and asked why he was only hearing about this now.

“I tried telling you,” Manju said.

“When?”

“Tuesday.”

“I came home at ten on Tuesday.”

“Exactly.”

The word landed badly. Ranga asked what that was supposed to mean, and Manju, already tired of having to phrase every frustration in a way that would not sound like an accusation, said, “It means you are never here.”

Ranga stood still. “I am not here because I am working.”

“I know you’re working.”

“Do you?”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make this about whether I appreciate you.”

“Because apparently nobody does.”

Meera slipped out of the room while they were speaking. Neither parent noticed. Manju told him that she appreciated what he did but that money was not the only thing the house needed. Ranga heard this as an accusation that the thing he was sacrificing most of himself to provide was somehow worthless. Manju heard his anger as proof that he had stopped listening to anything she said unless it sounded like praise. “She is struggling,” she told him. “And you don’t know because you’re not around enough to notice.” Ranga pointed toward the front door. He left the house before seven in the morning, he said, and came home after seven at night so Meera could go to that school. “And when you come home,” Manju replied, “you sit there.”

Ranga glanced toward the television. “I sit for ten minutes.”

“It is never ten minutes.”

“The school called me on Tuesday while I was waiting at the clinic,” Manju said. “I left before my appointment because Meera needed me. I came home, sat with her work, made dinner and waited until ten for you.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“When?”

The question silenced him.

“Before you leave? While you are shouting through the phone at someone from work? After you come home and ask for ten minutes?”

“What do you want me to do? Come home and start washing plates? Didn’t we agree that we are sharing these responsibilities?”

“I want you to come home and actually be here.”

“You think I don’t care?”

“That is not what I said.”

Ranga had no answer. Manju’s anger weakened as soon as the sentence left her. She was not trying to win. Winning would still leave her in the same house with the same exhausted husband and the same child who had learned to approach him carefully.

“You come home and ask for ten minutes,” she said. “I don’t even know where my ten minutes would begin.”

“So what should I do? Stop working? Sit at home?”

Manju closed her eyes.

“Why do you always make what I say ridiculous so you don’t have to hear it?”

“You have no idea what my days are like.”

“You have no idea what mine are like either,” she said.

Ranga picked up the work bag he had dropped near the sofa and said he was going back to the site. Manju asked when he had planned to tell her there was night work. He said it had come up that afternoon. She gave a short, tired laugh. “Of course. Things always come up when we finally need to talk.” He headed toward the door, and that was when she said the thing she wished she had phrased differently. “She doesn’t even know how to talk to you anymore.” Ranga stopped with one hand on the door. Manju went on before she could reconsider. “Did you see her? She wouldn’t even ask you about the trip alone. She doesn’t know which version of her dad she’s going to get.” Ranga’s face hardened. Manju told him Meera missed him. He looked insulted. “I’m standing right here.” Manju shook her head. “That is not what I mean.” He left without answering.

Chapter 2

For the first ten minutes of the drive, Ranga argued with his wife in his head. He produced better answers than the ones he had given at home and responded to accusations she had not actually made. Money is not the only thing this house needs. Easy to say when there was food in the kitchen. Easy to say when nobody from the school had called to chase unpaid fees. Easy to say when the lights turned on every time someone touched a switch. People only noticed money when there wasn’t enough of it. When there was enough, money disappeared into the background and transformed itself into rice, petrol, uniforms, medicine, gas cylinders and electricity. Nobody looked at those things and thought of love. They simply assumed that was what houses magically did.

At a traffic light, Ranga tightened his hands around the steering wheel and disliked himself for thinking this way. Manju had never asked for luxury. He knew that better than anyone. When they first married, they had rented a single room above a pharmacy, and Manju had cooked on a one-burner stove near the window while he sat cross-legged on the floor complaining about whichever supervisor had offended him that week. She had listened to every small humiliation at work and taken each one seriously. Sometimes they had eaten curd rice for dinner because there was no money for anything else, and somehow they had laughed more then. Ranga tried to remember the last time he had told Manju a story from work that was not about something going wrong. He could not.

His fuel warning light came on near the next junction. Ranga swore quietly and pulled into a petrol station, where he asked for five hundred rupees’ worth and then opened his wallet while the attendant filled the tank. One thousand four hundred and sixty rupees. He counted it twice. The number did not change. There was another eight hundred in the kitchen drawer at home. He knew because he had put it there. Meera’s two thousand rupees hovered annoyingly close to the amount he actually possessed. The attendant tapped the window, and after Ranga paid him, he noticed a folded sheet of paper protruding from beneath the passenger seat. He reached for it and opened it carefully.

It was one of Meera’s drawings. Three figures stood beneath an enormous blue sky. One wore a red saree and had black hair down to her waist. One was small and dressed in yellow. The third was broad and square, with black hair marked by a few grey strokes and hands so large they looked biologically impossible. Across the top, in Meera’s careful handwriting, were the words MY FAMILY. Ranga remembered when she had shown it to him. He had asked why she had drawn his hands like elephant ears. Meera had laughed and told him, “So you can hold me and Amma both.” He had forgotten the drawing entirely. Now he folded it along the existing crease and placed it inside the glove compartment, smoothing it once before closing the door.

The construction site felt different at night. During the day it was an ecosystem of drilling, reversing trucks, shouted instructions, clanging metal and radios playing songs nobody could hear properly. At night the unfinished building became almost peaceful. Bare columns rose into the darkness, plastic sheets moved gently in the warm air and the low hum of a generator filled the spaces where walls would eventually stand. Ranga checked in with the night supervisor, walked the ground floor twice and spent nearly forty minutes resolving a measurement problem that turned out to exist only because someone had been reading the wrong drawing. By half past nine he was sitting on an overturned bucket outside the site office, staring at the banking app on his phone.

Selvam found him there with a foil packet of parotta and chicken curry. He asked if Ranga had eaten. Ranga said he had eaten at home, although the smell immediately reminded him that his last meal had been lunch. Selvam did not question the lie. He sat down beside him, opened the packet and, after a few minutes, pushed it between them. “My wife packed too much,” he said. Ranga recognised Selvam’s white lie, but he tore off a piece of parotta anyway.

The numbers on his screen were uncomplicated. Electricity. School fees. Loan repayment. Groceries. Phone bill. His mother’s medicine. A payment for overtime was still pending from the previous month, but Ranga had learned not to spend money before it physically arrived. He moved numbers around with his thumb. If he delayed the electricity bill by another week, he could pay for Meera’s trip, but there would be a late charge and the school fees were due soon after. If he postponed replacing the brake pads, the two thousand became easy, but the mechanic’s warning returned to him. He could borrow from Selvam, but he had borrowed from him only two months earlier when Meera had needed blood tests for a fever. The debt had been repaid. The embarrassment had not.

A message farther down his phone caught his eye. It was from the shoe shop near the bus stand. Sir, your safety shoes are ready to collect at the depot. ₹1650. Ranga looked down at the pair on his feet. The sole of the left shoe had begun separating near the heel, and rainwater entered through the side whenever the site flooded. He had ordered the replacement pair three weeks ago and delayed collecting them because there was always something else. One thousand six hundred and fifty rupees. Almost enough for the trip. He smiled faintly at the absurdity of it all. All evening he had been looking for two thousand rupees and had discovered that his life was filled with amounts that were almost two thousand rupees.

Ranga considered leaving the shoes at the depot and using the money for the trip. Then he pressed the separating sole together with his fingers. Two weeks earlier, a nail had gone through another worker’s worn shoe and into his foot. The man had not returned to work yet.

This was the part nobody saw. The trip or the shoes. The electricity or the school fees.

He released the sole. Injuring himself would not create more money. It would only create another bill.

Selvam asked how Meera was doing. Ranga looked at him, surprised by the question. Selvam reminded him of the last time she had visited the site and spent an hour following workers around, nearly appointing herself project manager. Ranga smiled despite himself. “She is eight now,” he said. Selvam shook his head and said, “Fast.” Ranga did not answer. There had been a time when Meera fit from the bend of his elbow to his wrist. He remembered walking around their bedroom at three in the morning while she screamed for reasons neither parent could understand, singing old film songs badly until she finally surrendered against his chest. When she finally learned to speak, she used to wait near the door for him to come home and deliver a full report of her day: a three-legged dog she had seen, a girl who stole her pink coloured pencil, a cloud shaped like a fish she saw that evening. Ranga could not remember when those reports had stopped. It occurred to him that perhaps they had not stopped at all. Perhaps he had simply stopped being there at the right time to receive them.

His phone vibrated. Manju had sent a message asking whether he wanted dinner when he came home. Ranga typed No, deleted it, typed Yes, deleted that too, and finally sent, Don’t wait for me. Her reply arrived at once. Okay. He stared at the word until the screen dimmed. It should not have made him sad. Somehow it did.

Chapter 3

At home, Meera had refused dinner until Manju threatened to switch off the television for a week. Even then she ate only a little rice and curd before disappearing into her room. Manju found her lying on her stomach colouring a drawing with far more pressure than the paper required. A purple pencil moved angrily back and forth across what appeared to be a school bus. Every window contained a smiling face except one. Manju sat beside her and asked what she was drawing. Meera said, “Nothing.” When Manju touched her hair, she moved slightly away and said, “You told me to ask him.”

Manju could have defended Ranga. The sentences were ready. Your Appa works very hard. Your Appa pays for your school. Your Appa loves you. They were all true, but none of them answered what her daughter was actually saying. Instead Manju asked what she had wanted Ranga to say. Meera replied that she had wanted him to say yes. Manju told her to think beyond the trip.

After a long silence, Meera said, “Ananya’s father is coming as a parent volunteer.” Manju nodded. “He knows our teacher’s name.”

“Appa knows your teacher’s name.”

“What is it then?”

Manju hesitated. “Mrs Thomas?”

“That was last year.”

Manju laughed, but Meera did not.

She explained that Ananya’s father knew the names of her friends too. When he came to school, he talked to everyone. “Appa comes sometimes,” Manju said. Meera nodded. “Only when you are not free.”

Meera said it without anger. That made it harder. Manju told her that Appa worked because things cost money. Meera answered, “I know.” She said it so quickly that Manju stopped. “I know he works. Everybody says that.” To Meera, it had become a sentence adults used whenever children were supposed to stop wanting something. Manju asked if she thought her father did not love her. Meera stared at her drawing for a long time before saying, “I don’t know.”

The answer frightened Manju more than if Meera had cried. She wanted to correct her immediately, to fill the room with certainty. Instead she asked why. Meera said he was always angry. Manju insisted that he was not. “At home he is,” Meera replied. Then, perhaps trying to be fair, she added that he seemed angry at work too. Manju gave a short laugh, and Meera smiled for the first time since dinner. The smile disappeared quickly. “I don’t want you and Appa to fight,” she said.

“We don’t fight, kanna.”

“You do, when you think I’m sleeping.”

Manju looked down at her hands. There were things children were supposed to be unaware of because adults said them quietly. But the walls had failed them. Meera moved closer and rested against her. She said she missed when the three of them used to go out together. Manju remembered Sunday mornings years earlier when they did not own a car and took the bus into town. Ranga would complain about the heat, she would complain about his complaining, and they would buy one ice cream for Meera and another to share between themselves. At the time, Manju had believed those years were temporary, a difficult beginning they would one day look back on from an easier life. Sitting beside her daughter, she wondered when exactly the easier life was supposed to have arrived.

“I miss it too,” she admitted.

Chapter 4

Ranga came home a little after eleven. The living room lights were off, and his dinner sat on the table beneath another plate to keep the flies away. He noticed his work shoes near the entrance. Manju had washed them. They were not perfectly clean, but most of the construction dust was gone, and they had been placed neatly side by side against the wall. Ranga stood looking at them before moving into the house.

The house had its own night sounds. The refrigerator humming. A ceiling fan clicking faintly somewhere. Water dripping from the kitchen tap that needed a new washer. Ranga lifted the plate covering his dinner and found rice, rasam, beans and an omelette. Manju rarely made omelettes unless somebody specifically asked, and he had not. He covered the food again. He was no longer hungry.

As he walked toward the bedroom, he noticed yellow light spilling from Meera’s room into the hallway. Manju sat on the bed with Meera’s head resting in her lap. Ranga was about to enter when he heard his daughter’s voice.

“Amma?”

Manju answered softly.

“Does Appa like coming home?”

Ranga stopped with one hand against the door frame. A tear escaped before he could stop it and landed on the edge of the frame.

Inside, Manju took a moment to answer. “Of course he does.”

“Then why is he always angry when he comes?”

“He isn’t always angry.”

“At home he is.”

Manju said he was not angry with her, only worried.

“About what?” Meera asked.

Manju hesitated before saying, “Money.”

“So he is angry because I asked for money?”

Manju tried to explain that adults sometimes carried many things in their heads at once. Meera pointed out that Amma also carried many things in her head and did not behave the same way.

Ranga lowered his eyes to the drop darkening the wood. He studied it the way he studied a crack in a new wall, looking for where it had started.

“When Appa is at work, he wants to come home,” Meera said. “When he is home, he wants everybody to leave him alone.”

She was describing the father she knew.

Manju told her that Appa loved her very much.

“How do you know that?”

Ranga found himself waiting for the answer with the same desperation as Meera. He needed Manju to produce evidence so obvious that the question would disappear. Manju began with the stories adults always told children, stories from before memory.

“When you were inside Amma’s belly, Appa put his hand here every day and prayed that you would be born healthy.”

She reminded Meera of the nights Ranga had walked around with her after breastfeeding, trying to make her burp. The fever that had kept him awake for several nights. The things he had done when she was too small to know.

Meera listened and then said, “You always tell me things from when I was a baby.”

“Because you don’t remember them.”

“Exactly.”

The word reached the hallway.

Ranga thought of all the evidence he had assumed spoke for him. The night Meera had a fever of forty degrees and he sat in a hospital corridor praying to every version of God he knew. The Deepavali he worked because overtime paid double and used the money to buy her first bicycle. The mornings he left while she was asleep and the nights he returned after she had gone to bed. School fees, medicine, birthday dresses, the cracked phone he kept using because replacing it felt wasteful. The fish curry he claimed not to like when there was only enough for Manju and Meera. The safety shoes he had not collected. The two thousand rupees he had spent the entire evening trying to manufacture out of nothing.

He had believed love was visible because the evidence was everywhere. Standing outside Meera’s room, he understood how little of that evidence she had actually seen.

She had not watched him move money from one bill to another. She had not seen him at the pharmacy counter working out how many days of his mother’s tablets he could afford. She did not know he sometimes declined the tea that was served at work during the breaks because twenty rupees was twenty rupees. When he said, “I don’t need anything,” she had no reason to hear the second half of the sentence: because there isn’t enough for me too.

All Meera saw was the man who came home tired. The man who answered without looking up. The man who said no.

Chapter 5

Ranga felt something loosen inside him, though it did not feel pleasant. It was possible, he realised, to love someone with your whole life and still leave them unsure whether they were loved. The discovery felt unfair at first. Then he understood that perhaps the unfairness went both ways.

Manju looked toward the doorway and saw him standing there. Their eyes met. For a moment Ranga felt ashamed to have been caught listening. He expected her to look angry. She did not. She simply told Meera to sleep, kissed her forehead and walked into the hallway. When she reached Ranga, she took the work bag from his hand. “You didn’t eat,” she said. He shook his head. “Food is there.” He said he knew. Manju glanced toward Meera’s room and said, “Go.”

Ranga looked at her. “Go where?”

“Inside, idiot,” Manju said, smiling through her eyes rather than her face.

Despite everything, his mouth almost smiled.

Meera had turned toward the wall by the time he entered. Ranga knew she was awake because sleeping children did not become completely motionless when their fathers walked into rooms. He sat on the edge of the bed, and the mattress dipped beneath his weight. The yellow walls looked different from there. He had painted them himself before Meera was born because he and Manju had not known whether they were having a boy or girl, and Ranga had declared yellow to be “neutral and cheerful.” The work had taken him three days because he refused to admit he did not know how to paint corners. Faint streaks still remained near the ceiling.

He looked around. Crayon drawings covered one wall. A timetable had been taped crookedly above the desk. Stickers decorated the cupboard despite his repeated instruction that stickers were not to be placed on furniture because they were hard to clean. A small shelf held books, school trophies and a clay elephant with one ear missing. Ranga picked it up and asked what happened. From beneath the blanket, Meera said it fell. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked. Meera replied, “You would say I should be careful.” Ranga put the elephant back on the shelf.

He had spent most of the evening imagining what he should say to Manju. Now, sitting less than three feet from his daughter, he could not find the words. Eventually he said her name. Meera did not move. “I know you’re awake, you just spoke to me.” Still nothing. Ranga considered his options and said, “If you’re sleeping, tomorrow I’ll tell Amma not to make your favourite egg sandwich.” Meera turned around immediately. “That’s not fair.” Ranga nodded. “Good. Awake.”

The smallest smile passed across her face and vanished. Ranga rested his hands on his knees. “I cannot pay the two thousand tomorrow,” he said. Meera looked disappointed, though not surprised. “I know.”

“I checked everything,” he said. “I cannot do it this week.”

“Okay.”

“But I will come to school with you tomorrow and ask whether they can wait one more day, until Friday.”

Meera looked at him. “Will they say yes?”

“I don’t know.”

Ranga swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

Meera’s face changed.

The word sounded unusual in his mouth. Ranga was not a man who apologised easily, not because he believed himself incapable of being wrong but because apologies felt unfinished. Once spoken, they invited conversations, and conversations required words he did not always possess. Still, he forced himself. “I’m sorry I spoke badly. And I’m sorry I made you feel bad for asking.”

“You didn’t mean it, right?”

“No. But I still said it.”

Meera accepted this. She began pulling at a loose thread on the blanket. After a moment she asked if he had been angry at her. Ranga said no. She reminded him that he had looked angry. He admitted he had been angry, but not at her. “Then at what?” she asked.

Ranga stared at his hands. The skin around his fingers had cracked from cement and heat, and a small cut crossed one knuckle. He tried to explain that sometimes when she asked for something and he could not give it to her, he felt bad. The word was inadequate, but he could not think of one that did not sound too complicated. Meera thought about this. “So you get angry?” she asked.

“Sometimes.”

“That’s dumb.”

Ranga looked at her.

Meera drew the blanket toward her chin. “Sorry.”

He considered it, then nodded. “It is a little dumb.”

This time the smile stayed longer.

Ranga took a breath. He told her he had thought she knew. Meera asked what she was supposed to know, and three simple words rose into his throat. He had said them before, certainly. When she was very small. On birthdays. Perhaps when she was sick. But he could not remember the last ordinary day on which he had said them without circumstance forcing them out.

Instead he said, “That I’m trying.”

Meera looked at him. “I know you’re trying, Appa.”

The immediacy of it hurt more than accusation would have.

Ranga looked away. “Then why…” He stopped. He could not bring himself to ask why she had needed to know whether he liked coming home.

Meera understood anyway. “You don’t talk to me.”

“I am talking now.”

“Because Amma made you.”

“She didn’t make me.”

“She told you to come inside.”

Ranga narrowed his eyes. “You saw?”

“I heard.”

For the first time that day, they laughed together.

The laughter left behind an easier silence. Meera sat up and announced that Ananya’s father knew her teacher’s name. Ranga was confused, then realised he was being tested. “Of course I know your teacher’s name.”

“What is it?”

Ranga opened his mouth. Nothing came.

Meera crossed her arms.

“Mrs Lakshmi?”

“No.”

“Mrs Priya?”

“No.”

“Why do you have so many teachers?”

“I have one.”

Ranga rubbed his forehead and admitted defeat. “What is her name?”

“Mrs Fernandes.”

“Fernandes. Yes. I knew.”

“You did not.”

“I remembered when you said it.”

Meera laughed, and the sound made Ranga aware of how long it had been since he made her laugh. He asked what subject she liked now. She said science. He asked what had happened to maths. She said maths was boring. Ranga looked offended and told her maths could not be boring, only teachers could be boring. Meera informed him that Mrs Fernandes taught maths too. “Then don’t tell her I said that,” he replied.

They spoke for another few minutes about things Ranga should already have known. Her best friend was no longer Ananya but Kavya, though she and Ananya were still friends. She hated bananas now. Her favourite thing at school was science lab day. She had been moved to the second row because Mrs Fernandes said she talked too much when she sat at the back. Ranga listened with the uncomfortable feeling that he was talking to his own daughter as if they were meeting for the first time.

Somewhere in the house, Manju moved plates in the kitchen. Ranga looked toward the doorway and said, “Your mother is very angry with me.”

“She is always angry with you.”

“Thank you.”

“Because you leave your shoes everywhere.”

Ranga stared at her. “So both of you have discussed my shoes?”

“Amma talks to herself.”

“About me?”

“Mostly.”

He laughed softly. He could picture Manju in the kitchen muttering complaints to nobody, and the image was funny until he realised how often she must have done it because he was not there to hear them. “I’ll keep them outside tomorrow,” he said.

“You said that last week.”

His daughter was merciless.

Ranga nodded solemnly. “Then tomorrow I will actually do it.”

Chapter 6

Meera lay back down. After a moment she asked, “Appa, can we go somewhere Sunday?”

His first instinct was to think of work. He was supposed to cover another colleague’s shift on Sunday, and the overtime would help with the electricity bill, the brake pads and perhaps even make the next two thousand rupees less dangerous. We’ll see rose naturally to his lips. It was the phrase he had used for years whenever he was afraid to make a promise he might not keep. This time he swallowed it.

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Very useful.”

“Anywhere.”

Ranga considered it. “Beach?”

Meera rolled her eyes. “Always beach.”

“Beach is free.”

He heard himself as soon as he said it and waited for disappointment.

Instead Meera laughed. “Okay. Beach.”

“Sunday.”

“Promise?”

Ranga hesitated. Promises frightened him more than expenses because money could sometimes be found. Time could disappear completely. Still, he held out his little finger.

Meera stared at it. “Appa, I’m not five.”

“Then no promise.”

She immediately hooked her finger around his. “Promise.”

“Promise.”

Before he could become clever and find a reason to delay, Ranga took out his phone and messaged the colleague whose Sunday shift he had agreed to cover. He asked whether they could find someone else to cover it or exchange for another day. There was no reply yet.

He started to stand, but Meera’s hand remained around his finger. Ranga looked down. She did not ask him to stay. He did not ask whether she wanted him to. He sat again.

After a while Meera moved closer and rested her head against his arm. Ranga stayed very still, as if a sudden movement might remind her that she had grown too old for this. There had been a time when she leaned against him every day. He had forgotten the weight of her head and how warm she was, how completely she trusted whatever she rested against to remain where it was.

When Ranga looked toward the doorway, Manju was standing there holding his dinner plate. She carried it awkwardly in her left hand, supporting the edge with her forearm. He noticed the way she avoided bending her right wrist. She had changed out of her saree and tied her hair loosely behind her head. The yellow bedroom light fell across half her face. For a moment nobody spoke. Then Ranga looked at the plate and asked why she had brought it there. “Because you didn’t eat,” she said. He told her he was coming. Manju looked at the clock. “You said that twenty minutes ago.”

Meera lifted her head. “Amma, Appa doesn’t know Mrs Fernandes’ name.”

Manju looked at him. “Your class teacher?”

Ranga pointed accusingly at his wife. “You also didn’t know.”

“I knew.”

“You said Mrs Thomas, Amma,” Meera gasped.

“Thomas was last year, no?” Ranga said.

“Both of you are terrible.”

Something passed between Ranga and Manju. Not forgiveness. Not yet. There were still bills on the table, shoes by the door and nine years of small resentments that would not disappear because of one conversation in a yellow room. Ranga would still forget things. Manju would still become tired of reminding him. Meera would go to school the next morning and watch other children hand in money for a trip she might still be unable to attend. Nothing had been solved.

Manju placed the dinner plate beside him and turned to leave. Ranga reached for her left hand.

She looked down at their hands and then at him.

“I heard you,” he said.

Manju glanced at Meera. “You were standing outside. I know.”

“Not that. Before I left.”

She waited.

“Money is not the only thing this house needs.”

“That doesn’t mean everything is fine,” Manju said.

“I know.”

He loosened his grip on her hand.

“Sit,” he said.

“I have things to do.”

“Ten minutes.”

Manju almost laughed. Ten minutes had been what he asked from them for years. Ten minutes before dinner. Ten minutes before homework. Ten minutes before listening. This time, he was asking her to stay.

She glanced at Meera, who had already moved toward the wall to make space.

Then Manju sat.

The bed was too small for the three of them. Ranga’s bad knee hung awkwardly over the edge, Manju complained that Meera’s foot was digging into her thigh, and Meera insisted she needed the entire pillow despite possessing the smallest head in the family. They argued about this for several minutes before becoming quiet.

Meera’s breathing eventually began to slow, her head growing heavier against Ranga’s arm. He looked down at her and waited until he was certain she had fallen asleep before leaning over and pressing a quiet kiss to her forehead. She did not move. Manju watched him from the other side of the bed, and when Ranga looked up, he found her already looking at him. There was still tiredness between them, still the remains of the afternoon’s argument and all the things neither of them had properly apologised for, but for once neither seemed interested in continuing it.

Ranga reached across Meera and slipped two fingers beneath Manju’s chin, gently drawing her closer. Manju gave him the smallest questioning look, but she did not pull away. He kissed her softly on the lips. It lasted only a moment.

Between them, one of Meera’s eyes slowly opened.

She watched her parents for barely a second. Ranga began to pull away from Manju, and before he could notice her looking, Meera squeezed her eye shut again and tucked herself deeper beneath the blanket, pressing herself against her father’s side as though she had been asleep the entire time.

A tiny smile appeared at the corner of her mouth before she managed to hide that too.

Ranga noticed none of it. He only settled back against the wall, Manju a little closer to him now than she had been before, and rested his hand over his daughter’s shoulder.

For Meera, however, the house felt a little different when she fell asleep for real.

The movie in the living room had ended long ago, and the Sun TV news had begun playing faintly in the background. The house was still.

Ranga looked at his wife on one side and his daughter on the other. He did not say that he loved them. The words were still unnatural, and perhaps undoing nine years of habit required more than one evening.

But when Manju reached for the dinner plate, he told her to leave it.

So he remained there long after his leg went numb and the rice beside him became cold.

Sometimes love had to do more than keep the lights on.

Sometimes it had to sit beside you in that very light.