Mornings in Bangalore are typically crisp and cool, but this morning there is a bit of warm sun and it streams through the grilled window, casting a shadow of bars that stretch underneath Latha and Muthu’s round glass-topped coffee table. The developer woman has her papers spread out over the glass, one page right on top of the plate of butter biscuits that Latha set out: sketches, floor plans, and photographs detailing what things could be like.
“You could have three bedrooms, even four,” the woman says. Right now, they have only two.
Latha’s fingers tug at a loose strand of wicker on the arm of the love seat. She is sitting next to Muthu on the well-worn pale green cushions, observing the woman across from her with great curiosity. The woman’s toenails are painted a shade of light blue that reminds Latha of the soap she uses when she does the laundry. She is wearing linen pants and a red cotton shirt, appropriately high-necked and pleasantly loose, with a stylish outward flare at the waist. One of her legs is crossed over the other, and the boldness of this shocks Latha. Not because she thinks women should not cross their legs. She believes that women can do anything. Her own daughter works, and she sees women working on the TV serials she watches. Latha is shocked because, for the first time, she is observing a woman at work—with the style, posture, and demeanor of a professional—right in front of her, in her home.
The woman directs her words towards Muthu, though it is Latha who actually owns No. 16 Model House Road. Binny left it to her when she died, not him.
“The living area will increase by fifty percent with most options,” the woman says, her English clean and crisp. “Remarkable what we can do.”
The developer’s proposal is simple: to demolish Latha’s beloved No. 16, and in its place erect a thoughtfully constructed, modern low-rise apartment building. Four stories. Four flats. All costs covered by the company. During the year it would take to construct the new building, the company would cover the cost of Latha and Muthu’s housing with a generous lump sum. At the end of it all, the bottom flat would go to Latha and Muthu, and the other three would go to the developer and be sold at a big profit.
It was a scheme happening all over Bangalore in various forms as the city’s tech industry grew at an explosive rate. Property values were higher than they had ever been, and housing was almost impossible to find. A few years ago, another developer had offered to buy their plot. Theirs was just a one-and-a-quarter-ground plot but that developer was willing to pay them three crores for it. They declined.
Today, the woman has four layouts for Latha and Muthu to choose from. Latha is partial to the smallest of the floor plans because it offers the most garden space. But she knows Muthu will disregard it.
While Muthu studies the plans, Latha continues to study the woman. Her hair is long, loose, and straight, cut unevenly in the front so that pieces of it touch her cheeks and chin. The unevenness appears to be intentional. She is in her early thirties, Latha thinks, based on her still-firm skin and the presence of a single visible gray hair that runs down from her side part. She is not wearing a thaali around her neck, or a ring, but that means nothing in Bangalore these days. Even Latha’s daughter, newly married, only wears her thaali when attending a wedding or some other family function.
“From the beginning, I have liked this one,” Muthu says. He points to a layout that appears to have an extra room jutting out the back.
From the beginning.
Muthu had wanted to take the deal after the first proposal, nearly ten months ago. The woman is the fourth person from the company to come to their home. Latha can’t help but wonder if the choice to send a woman this time was intentional. Was it possible that they knew it was Latha, not Muthu, who was delaying the decision?
The woman smells good. Not flowery or spicy, but like damp earth, that complex smell that emanates when rain hits soil. Latha wonders whether she uses an imported perfume.
“Good choice,” the woman says to Muthu. “The Bonus Room option. Our most spacious. It has the largest kitchen.” Then, finally, she looks at Latha. “What do you think? You have not said a thing.”
Under the woman’s gaze, Latha becomes conscious of her own physical presence. Her hair smells like coconut oil. It is not cut to different lengths. It is pulled back into a bun, and there are no purposeless wisps on her face. Half of her hair has gone white. Her toenails are unpainted. She is aware that she looks like a meek housewife in her old, wrinkled cotton sari. But still—has this woman really finally turned to her, only to ask her about the kitchen? After they had been sitting there for so long.
“Will that room extend into the back garden?” Latha asks. It takes her a moment too long to get the words out.
“Yes,” the woman says. Latha watches as the woman uncrosses her legs and recrosses them the other way. “But we understand the value of green space. There will be a small, shared garden. We can do a little planting for you, if you would like.”
A shared garden. If you would like. The words are eerily similar to what the doctor said all those years ago, when Latha was eleven weeks into her first pregnancy. “There is no heartbeat. There is a procedure we can do to expedite the matter, if you would like.” That doctor had been old and sloppily dressed, nothing like this woman. But they were alike in their thoughtlessness. Latha rarely thinks about the miscarriage, with two healthy children now, both grown. But she remembers how helpless she felt at the doctor’s words, and she feels the same now. Like there is nothing she can do to change her situation.
Latha points to the option with the smallest square footage and the biggest garden. The garden, shaped like a boxy L, is colored green on the paper. “What about this?”
“Too small,” Muthu says.
“Not a good choice,” the woman says. “The lump sum will be much lower.”
“We don’t want that one,” Muthu says.
“It shouldn’t even be an option,” the woman adds. “We want you to maximize your returns.”
“We have a big garden now,” Latha says.
“I suppose it is a compromise,” the woman says, her eyes locked on Latha’s. “You get something, you lose something.” She seems irritated, Latha thinks, and the irritation makes her look ugly, pinched, boyish.
“We understand,” Muthu says. He taps the layout he likes with his pen and smiles at Latha. “We are looking forward to our new flat.”
“Has this house always been in the family?” the woman asks Latha, and her tone becomes softer, as if she suddenly cares. “I grew up near the hockey stadium. I used to walk down this street on my way to school.”
“I am not from Bangalore,” Latha says. “We inherited this house from his aunt.”
“But you have the attachment,” she says. “I can tell.” She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear and smiles at Latha. She has switched to Tamil, using the formal you to show respect, yet Latha can tell that there is a lack of it.
“Most women are eager for a new kitchen and nice bathrooms. My mother included,” the developer continues, as if she herself is not a woman. “Did you raise your children here? I have two. A boy and a girl. Nine and ten.”
“We have two,” Latha says. For a moment, she feels more accomplished than the developer, since her children are already grown. “Also a boy and a girl. They want us to take the deal.”
Most of Latha and Muthu’s neighbors on Model House Road have already taken a deal. Some signed on with developers years ago, and were already living in comfortable modern flats. Latha visited one of them. It was nice—the tile floors looked easy to clean, as did the granite kitchen counters. There were outlets everywhere, and windows with mesh to keep the mosquitoes out. There were showers with decent water pressure, and a raised divider between the toilet and the shower to prevent the entire bathroom from getting wet.
None of this had been enough to convince Latha. She was accustomed to No. 16 and its minor inconveniences, even the tuft of yellow mold that grows under the kitchen faucet, which she scrapes off every three weeks with a spoon. Even the large crack that runs from one end of the hall to the other, through which a long line of black ants emerges, making their daily pilgrimage towards the kitchen—it gives her satisfaction to douse the ants with a thick coating of green Dettol, and wipe them up with a rag.
The woman uncrosses her legs and turns her attention back to Muthu.
“I do not wish to rush you, but we need a memorandum of understanding so I can draw up the paperwork,” she says. “Before GST starts.”
The Goods and Services Tax, also known as GST, had recently passed and would go into effect in thirty days.
“No more projects after that?” Muthu asks. His hands are in loose fists, rubbing against each other, a sign that he is worried.
The woman shakes her head. “An eighteen percent tax is too much. No new flats for a while. It is bad news for everyone. When we start again, the flats will be smaller. The lump sum will be less.”
“We can make our decision today,” Muthu says quickly. “Right?” he says to Latha. “We can even sign right now.”
“We need more time,” Latha says.
“We have a layout we like,” Muthu says.
“I can come back in the evening, if you need to discuss it,” the woman says as she stands up. “But that will be your last chance.”
Once again, she looks at Muthu when she speaks, as if Latha is no longer there. Latha decides the company did not send the woman to convince her, but to entice Muthu. The woman hands Muthu a business card. “I have one more appointment on your street, so I must excuse myself.”
It must be with Old Mr. Ravi, Latha thinks, though she knows the long-retired, widowed high court judge despises the developers even more than she does. He is the only other resident of Model House Road who still lives in his original home.
The woman picks up her leather tote and walks to the door. Latha watches her put on open-toe sandals with heels, so impractical for the unpaved stretches of Model House Road.
After the woman leaves, Muthu picks up the papers she left behind. He has the same large, thick hands he had thirty years ago, when the priest instructed Latha to take his hand and walk around the holy fire during their wedding ceremony in Chennai.
The morning after their wedding, she and Muthu took the Lalbagh Express to Bangalore. That was when she first saw the custard apple tree and Binny, who sat on the bench next to the tree waiting for them. Binny was Muthu’s aunt by marriage, a widow. Muthu had come to live with Binny and his uncle at No. 16 Model House Road when he moved to Bangalore for college. They had no children of their own, and offered him their spare room. He never left. They treated him like a surrogate son, and he soon realized that if he stayed around long enough, he might inherit the house.
Now Latha turns and walks through the doorway that leads into the hall.
“The timing is good for me. For us,” Muthu says. He trails her into the kitchen. “We can sign this evening, can’t we?”
He is a certified public accountant but has never done accounting work. He has spent his career as a mid-level cog at the Water Supply and Sewerage Board, supervising a dozen laborers and reporting to a line of five bosses, including the chairman of the agency. It is a reliable government job, with steady pay and the guarantee of a solid pension after retirement. In fact, it was his job that had appealed to Latha’s parents when they were looking for a husband for her, even though he grew up in Karnataka and spoke Tamil with a Kannada accent. Latha’s prettier twin sister had married into a wealthier family, right in Chennai. “At least he is stable,” her father had said to the marriage broker about Muthu. “For Latha, I think that will do.”
Soon, Muthu will start collecting his pension. Sixty is the mandatory retirement age, and his birthday is only three months away. As freedom approaches Latha observes that he walks with a lightness, a bounce to his step that he previously did not have. Of this, she is envious. After their daughter, Deepa, was born, Latha took care of the baby and the house. When Deepa was five, their son, Shiv, was born, and the work of caring for an infant started anew. Then Binny fell gravely ill, and Latha nursed her for two years, until she passed away. Eventually Muthu’s widowed mother came to live with them, and Latha took care of her, too. Though her children are grown, soon there will be a grandchild, dropped off daily. Deepa, who is currently pregnant, works for an American company called Accenture. Deepa’s salary is high but her hours are long and unpredictable. Latha’s job, if it can be called that, does not appear to come with the benefits of retirement.
“What are you thinking?” Muthu asks her. He is eating a piece of custard apple, plucked from the tree in front of their house. He puts a seed in her mouth, and she sucks the white, creamy, velvety flesh off it, inhaling its sweet aroma. She cannot tell him the truth, that she is thinking about him, comparing her life to his. He would not understand. In his mind, she knows, their lives are not separate. They had one life, and they had lived it together.
“The house,” she says.
She opens her mouth for another piece of apple. The fruit is ripe, and its juice spills over her tongue.
She knows he wants to take the money from the development company and travel for a year. He wants to go to Ooty and take a boat ride, climb a hill and feel the cool Nilgiri air blow on his face while they share a box of strawberries. She knows he still feels guilty about canceling the Ooty trip they were supposed to take after their wedding, and there are other places he wants to see now, too. The coffee estates in Coorg. Palaces in Rajasthan. He wants a picture of himself riding on a camel in the Thar Desert. They are not well-traveled people, having never ventured beyond the old temples within driving distance of Bangalore and Chennai. “I want to spend time with you,” he often says. “And see the country before we grow too old.”
She was not opposed to this, not exactly, but the thought of leaving home for a full year and coming back to a completely new flat—modern but gardenless—left her feeling deflated.
“I am looking forward to finally getting this settled today,” Muthu says. “I am adding Panchgani to our tour. I read about the waterfalls in the paper yesterday.”
“What about the children?”
“Shiv is working. We can visit him in Delhi. Deepa is married and working.”
“The baby?”
“She can hire a nanny. These days it is what people do,” he said. “And her mother-in-law will help.”
“Sixteen others will be living here,” Latha says. “Once we rebuild.” She takes a plastic cutting board out of the dish rack, its surface stained by the juices of vegetables over the years. “Imagine, all on this one plot.”
She peels the papery skin off a small red onion, and begins to chops it into tiny pieces. She blinks away her tears.
“Let me help you,” he says. “Don’t cry.”
She does not laugh at his joke but lets him take over the chopping while she begins washing the vegetables she will cook today: small round potatoes, slender purple brinjal, and elongated, lantern-like okra. It is Friday, so there will be chicken curry, too.
Muthu never used to help her cook, but as his retirement approaches, he seems eager to assist.
She uses a second cutting board and another knife to cube the eggplant, dropping each piece into a bowl of salted water so it does not turn brown.
“How would Binny feel about us turning this house into a tower of flats?” she asks him. She keeps her eyes towards her chopping and braces herself for his response.
“We owe her nothing,” he says. “Binny is dead.”
“Ssshh.”
Using that word, instead of gone, it was so callous. As long as No. 16 stood, Binny lived in it. Latha could feel her presence.
Binny’s real name was longer, an unusual name that Latha can never quite remember. Nobody had liked it, not even her parents, so she became Binny. There was never an honorific attached—no Binny Akka, or Binny Mami, or Binny Athai—just Binny, to children and adults alike. That first day when Latha arrived in Bangalore, she bent down to touch Binny’s feet, but Binny pulled her up by the shoulders, held on to her, and looked her in the eyes.
“None of those formalities in our house,” she said. “This is our house now.”
Latha stared back and took her first long look at Binny. She was not fair-skinned, nor was she beautiful. Her front teeth stuck out over her lips when she smiled. Her eyes were small, her cheekbones not high enough to have ever attracted much attention. But for an older woman, her cheeks themselves were plump, subtly dotted with sunspots. The whites of her eyes were white, free of the red veins that had already crept into Latha’s parents’ eyes by then. She looked carefree.
“You have asked me so many times,” Muthu says, interrupting Latha’s memories, his voice too loud. “And I have told you. The house belongs to us. This is our house.”
Latha loses her breath when he says our house. She puts down the knife and leaves a piece of eggplant to darken on the cutting board. She walks to the hall and sits on the love seat.
Muthu follows her out.
“What is it?” he asks worriedly. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Do you need water?”
“No.” He had managed all their affairs for so many years. Their bills. Their bank accounts. Their taxes. Everything. She just signed off when he needed her to.
“I brought you some anyway,” he says. He hands her a stainless-steel tumbler filled with water. “Have it.”
Her face feels flush and the tumbler is cool to the touch. She presses it to her cheek and then takes a sip. “Yes,” she says. “This is our house. That is exactly what I was thinking.”
Muthu sits down next to her, kisses her cheek, rubs her back and sings. “My Fair Lady, my fair lady, one a penny, two a penny, my fair lady.” He often serenaded her with this blending of two nursery rhymes when the children were young. It made Deepa and Shiv laugh and laugh.
“Stop,” Latha says. “Stop.”
She walks back to the kitchen. She fires up the gas stove with the butane lighter and waits for the cast-iron pan t0 get hot. Then she pours two spoons of oil into the pan, and adds in a pinch of mustard seeds and a handful of curry leaves. When the seeds sputter, Muthu wordlessly hands her the stainless-steel bowl filled with chopped onions and she adds them in.
“I do not want us to make a rash decision,” she says.
“All I meant was Binny would want whatever is best for us,” Muthu says in a calm voice. “She would not want us to make a decision for her.” He fills the onion bowl with water from the sink tap, but Latha tells him to leave it. “Servant lady will be here soon,” she says. “Why bother?”
He turns her from the stove, and bends slightly at the knees to kiss her in the dip between her collarbone and neck. First on one side, then the other. His mustache hairs tickle her and she laughs and pulls away. He leans forward and kisses his way up to her lips, standing up straight as he does so. She relents and presses her lips back against his. She can smell the Pears soap on his skin.
“Is there time?” he asks.
Latha turns her back to him and shakes her head.
He sighs. “I need to go to the office, then,” he says. “See you in the evening.”
“I have not made my decision yet,” she says, though he has already left the kitchen.
After she finishes cooking everything but the chicken curry, she goes outside to take care of the plants. She waters the tree, picks two more custard apples, and then walks through the house, taking the metal can with her so she can water the plants in the back.
Binny had planted everything in the garden. The custard apple tree, the curry leaf, the mint, and the coriander, all in large pots in the back. She taught Latha how to harvest the curry leaves for cooking.
“Only take the big, dark ones. And chop them up when you cook. Your hair will stay black and thick if you eat them.”
Upstairs, on the rooftop, there is a jasmine vine growing in a long, rectangular clay pot. Latha carries a full can of water upstairs, along with crushed eggshells and the morning’s coffee grounds. She inhales. The jasmine flowers in Bangalore were smaller and stubbier than what Latha grew up with in Chennai, but the blooms were still fragrant.
“Sprinkle the shells and grounds right around the plant, like this.”
From the rooftop, Latha can see all of Model House Road. Originally, all the homes on Model House were identical. They were simple, practical homes, functional and flat-roofed, nothing like the Gothic bungalows with triangular gables on Alexandra Street, or the large homes on Richmond Road with powerful columns and arches. Built by the government in the late 1940s, the homes on Model House were distributed to high-performing, mid-level civil servants a few years before the last British troops left India. Binny’s father was among the lucky few to get one. The houses had been passed on to children or grandchildren, who otherwise could never have afforded property in central Bangalore.
The houses were basic, with concrete floors stained with red oxide, two small bedrooms, an indoor and outdoor bathroom, a compact kitchen, and a hall with just enough space for two couches, a TV, and a small dining table. Families made changes over the years, adding Western toilets, kitchen cabinetry, multispeed ceiling fans, and in the case of No. 16, built-in wardrobes selected by Latha. But from the outside, the houses looked the same for decades. No. 16 was distinguishable only because of its custard apple tree.
Now, except for No. 16 and Old Mr. Ravi’s house, all the plots have been converted into flats. Within the gates of the plots, Latha can see motorcycles, scooters, cars, and bicycles. So many people where there had once only been a family of four or six. The street is getting too loud these days, and polluted, she thinks. Too many horns. Too many rickshaws, picking up and dropping off visitors and schoolchildren. Even taking a short walk is suffocating.
They could move away, sell the property to developers and buy something in the outskirts of the city. Three crores they had been offered, after all. And that was two years ago. They could probably get more now. With half that money they could buy a plot of land with an entire coconut grove behind it. She could have a garden ten times the size of her current one. And there would be money left over. They could travel, maybe even go abroad, to Singapore or Malaysia. She could buy loads of presents for her grandbaby. But even as she has the fantasy, she knows it is not what she wants. Model House Road is a memory box of her life. A tiring life, but still her life. She picks a handful of jasmine blooms, bring them to her nose, and inhales—she has always found the scent both irresistible and cloying—and walks down the steps, back into the house.
At a quarter to eleven, the servant woman arrives to wash the dishes, and to mop and sweep the floors. She is a short, dark woman, muscular at the arms and lean at the stomach.
“How are you?” Latha asks, though she does not want to know.
“Why do you even ask?” the servant woman says. She tucks the end of her sari pallu in at her waist and knots her braid into a bun before turning on the tap. “Life goes on.”
“All of our lives go on,” Latha says.
Latha hurriedly pours herself a glass of milk from the pot on the stove, worried that if she does not leave the kitchen quickly the woman will trap her into a conversation. To the milk, she adds a spoon of Haldiram’s rose syrup, bright pink and sticky, and stirs it vigorously. Then she adds in a half spoon of sugar and stirs again.
“Scrub the dishes properly today, will you?” Latha says to the servant. “Yesterday, I found dried sambar sticking to the edges of the pot.”
Latha goes out back and sits on the rattan easy chair by the potted plants. She allows herself this rose milk break every day, both because she enjoys the sweet, frothy drink, and to keep away from the servant woman, who speaks too frequently of her alcoholic husband who has cancer. The disease, the servant woman likes to say, “spreads like a vine.” Latha is empathetic but weary. She believes that the woman’s husband has cancer, but wonders how he has managed to keep drinking so much through the ordeal.
Latha looks at her phone. One of Muthu’s cousins who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been digitizing family photos and sending them to everyone on WhatsApp. Today, Latha receives one. It is of herself, with Binny, laughing, sitting behind the house exactly where Latha is right now. Binny on the rattan chair, Latha on the step beside her. She looks at the photo more closely and realizes that she is the only one laughing in the photo. Binny’s hands are in the air and she looks like she’s having fun, but she is not laughing. She is talking, surely saying something that Latha finds amusing.
“You and Binny. 1997. Looking happy. Not long before her death,” Muthu’s cousin writes.
“What should I do, Binny?” Latha says out loud.
Her phone rings. The photo disappears from her screen, and Muthu’s mustached image appears.
“How are you feeling?” he asks. “I was so worried this morning.”
“It was nothing,” she says, annoyed that he is calling during her break. He should know better. “I am perfectly fine.”
After the servant woman leaves, Latha inspects the pots, pleased that after the scolding they seem to have been scrubbed vigorously. Latha has a quick lunch and then empties the clothes from the washing machine into a blue plastic bucket, and hangs them up to dry in the back. She makes the chicken curry. It is Binny’s recipe that she follows, not her mother’s, because that is the one Muthu likes. She uses the mixie to blend raw ginger, garlic, and onion into a paste and then cooks the paste in a pan on low heat, taking extra care not to let anything burn. To this, she adds chopped tomatoes and cubed pieces of chicken thighs. Regardless of what happened in the morning, she wants Muthu to at least enjoy the chicken.
Binny also taught Latha how to cook the specialties of Karnataka, things Muthu loved but Latha had never heard of before moving to Bangalore. Flatbread made of sorghum flour, cucumber dosas, and bisi bele baath made with freshly ground coriander, cumin, and fenugreek seeds. When she cooked, Binny liked to tune into Radio Ceylon and sing along to film songs.
“Dance with me,” Binny said one day, when a jazzy number from the latest hit Tamil film came on.
As the music played, Binny threw her hands up, ladle still in one hand, and slid across the kitchen floor into the dining area, pretending to be the actress in the movie.
“Dance!” she insisted.
Latha tried, but her arms felt floppy, her legs stiff.
“She went to my school,” Latha said. “This actress.”
“She must be so dramatic, something special.”
“No different from the rest of us.”
Binny smiled at this, and handed Latha a cloth to wipe the counter.
“That says more about you than her,” Binny said. “There. The bisi bele baath is ready. We just need to add roasted peanuts and chopped cilantro. We can enjoy the rest of the afternoon. Where shall we go? What shall we do? A matinee? Ulsoor Lake?”
They went to Cubbon Park that day, and rode on the children’s train that went around the park. Latha was embarrassed to be on the ride without a child, but Binny yelped with glee, either unaware or unconcerned that others were watching. Afterwards, Binny bought two tall glasses of fresh sugarcane juice from the stand by the children’s train.
“Drink, no?” she said. She gulped the juice, and gestured towards Latha to do the same.
“There are so many flies on the press,” Latha said.
“If we get sick tomorrow, we will worry about it then.”
Then she took Latha to Commercial Street, where hundreds of tiny shops were packed on either side of the single narrow road. She pointed to a shop selling Kashmiri shawls. “I’d buy you that red one,” she whispered. “But then he would find out we were here.”
Another day, they went to M. G. Road and ate vegetable sandwiches at Koshy’s, and drank filter coffee at India Coffeehouse. They never told Muthu about the excursions.
“Absolutely no need,” Binny said.
On one occasion, Binny even arranged for Latha to travel to Chennai alone, to attend a cousin’s wedding. Muthu had said he was too busy to drop her off, so Binny put Latha on the morning train after he left for work. Latha, after having a delightful time at the wedding, returned to Bangalore by the night train. A red-faced Muthu met her at the station, and snatched her travel bag from her hands.
The fun with Binny lasted two years, until Latha became pregnant with Deepa. Once there was a baby, there was no time, and Muthu’s eyes grew more watchful, even more protective than before. After Deepa, there was Shiv, and then Binny fell ill.
At three o’clock, Latha goes for her daily walk. She considers going beyond Model House Road today. She could, if she wanted to. Nobody was there to stop her, just like nobody had stopped Binny. But Latha decides against it. There is no need. Two times up and down the road was enough. Her doctor said she was healthy for her age.
On the walk, she meets Old Mr. Ravi. The grumpy widower has fluffy white eyebrows and no hair, and though he is sound of mind, he walks around the neighborhood in his black gown as if he is about to speak in court. He is eighty or so, as Binny would be if she were alive. Like Binny, Mr. Ravi had moved to Model House Road as a child.
“How are you?” Mr. Ravi asks Latha. He uses a cane to walk. “Are they still after you?”
“Yes,” Latha says. Then she surprises herself by saying, “This time, we are doing it.”
“Our houses are all we have.”
“But new plumbing. Modern interiors. Are you not tempted? All at no cost.”
“No cost,” he says in his scratchy voice. He shakes his head. “No cost?”
Then he walks on, faster than usual, as if Latha’s words have attacked him.
She heads home, looking into the windows of the flats she passes. She admits to herself that she wants the new kitchen, and the new bathroom, and the nice finishes. She could live without the mold and ants. She pauses in front of Mr. Ravi’s house. The walls are dirty. Much of the green paint has flaked off, and the house has a sorry, terminally ill look to it. There are shingles missing from the roof. During monsoon season, surely there were leaks.
Back in No. 16, Latha sits on the bed in Binny’s room. They kept calling it Binny’s room, and Binny’s bed, even after it became Deepa’s room, and Deepa’s bed. At the very end Binny spent long hours in the bed, reading short stories in old copies of Kumudam, her favorite pages creased with tiny triangles at the corners. Visitors dropped by with sweets and books, stayed a short while, and left. Latha attended to them, serving snacks and tea or coffee. But most of the time, while the kids were in school and Muthu was at work, she and Binny were alone.
“Because you’re here, I don’t need to be,” Binny said to Latha one day, as she lay in bed. Latha was pressing her calves. “You cannot imagine my relief.”
“You mean to take care of Muthu and the kids?” Latha asked.
“No,” Binny said. “For the house. I left the house to you. You mustn’t tell Muthu.”
“You are joking,” Latha said. She stopped pressing Binny’s legs. “This house?”
“The only one I have. You think I cannot see what your husband is up to? Binny this. Binny that. He has had his eye on this house since he moved in.”
“But what is mine is his,” Latha said. She started pressing Binny’s calves again. “How does it matter?”
Binny laughed.
“You may not think it matters now, but it will. Save it and use it when you need to,” she said. Then she commanded, “That’s enough. You rest.”
When Binny died and Latha and Muthu read the will together, he was shocked and she feigned shock. For a few days, he was sullen. Then, over breakfast one morning, he said, “I suppose it does not matter. We are as one.”
And indeed, it had not mattered. For twenty years, they had not spoken of it. For twenty years, it had been forgotten.
When Muthu gets home from the office, Latha is sitting on the cane love seat, watching a Tamil serial, folding the laundry. She mutes it, but turns on the subtitles so she can continue to follow along.
“The developer will be here soon to collect the paperwork,” Muthu says. He holds up a small cardboard box with twine around it. “I brought malai sondesh from K. C. Das so we can celebrate!”
“If you bring the plans to me, I will show you what I decided,” Latha says calmly. She keeps folding the clothes.
“Show me? What is wrong with you?” He seems amused. He goes to the TV cabinet and opens the drawer where he put the papers that morning. He hands her the floor plan he likes. She does not take it.
“Not this one?”
“No.”
“This one?” He tries to hand her another.
She wills herself to hold her body still, to keep breathing in and out. She shakes her head.
She raises her right hand and points to the plan with the smallest square footage. The one that preserves the tree. The one with the L-shaped garden.
“I know you love the garden,” Muthu says sweetly. “But it is no bigger than our house now. You know that.”
“It will have the upgrades we need,” she says.
“Come on, let’s take care of this and enjoy our sweets.”
“I have decided.”
“Ridiculous,” he says. He had been leaning on his left foot, but she sees him shift and plant both feet firmly on the ground. “Think about what you are saying.”
“I have.”
“Latha,” he says.
He looks at her. She looks at him. She sees the recognition in his eyes. She could be happy with that. Just that.
But this is her house. This one time, she has power. She feels something wicked zip through her body. It is a feeling Muthu must have had for years. Not in his workplace, where he was a cog. But at home, with her and Deepa and Shiv.
This was what Binny had meant. It was not about the house, it was about the feeling that owning the house gave Binny. The same winning feeling, Latha thinks, that the developer woman must have each time she makes a deal. The jolt of strength that Deepa feels at Accenture, when she is supervising a project. This is Latha’s chance to know this feeling, to quietly hold it close.
“Are you really going to do this?” Muthu asks.
It occurs to Latha that Muthu’s choice is truly the better one. They do not need a large garden. A small one would be fine. A larger flat is better for when the kids visit. For when they have grandchildren. The bigger lump sum would let them travel in luxury. She wants that. She wants to travel. She considers changing her mind, compromising. But she also wants the custard apple tree. She wants the plants in the back. A place to drink rose milk. Even if it means choosing impractically.
“I am sure,” she says.
“Disgusting.”
Muthu lets out a wordless shout, as if he is in physical pain.
“I’m going for a walk around the lake. You sign the papers yourself.”
“I made Binny’s chicken curry for you,” Latha says, as he turns to leave the house. She swallows. “It turned out well.”
“I cannot stop you from doing this,” he says, pausing in the doorway. “But do not expect me to be happy. Enjoy the sweets.”
She had thought it would break her. That she would collapse. But the moment he leaves, her shoulders drop, a tension is released, and there are soft, silent tears. She reaches for the end of her sari’s pallu and wipes away the wetness. Then she exhales into the cloth. The heat of her own breath warms her face.
When the developer woman arrives, Latha tells her which plan she has selected.
“Are you sure? Should we wait for your husband? I know I said today, but I can come tomorrow.”
“Two signatures of mine are all you need, yes?”
Latha signs carefully, in neat block letters, her pen pressing hard against the paper on the glass table The box of sondesh sits on the table between them, unopened. The first time Latha signs, her hand wavers a bit, but her second signature is steady and sure.