She peeks over my shoulder, grumbles. ‘But then you make the stove dirty. And I don’t like the burning smell.’
‘There are perks I get because I pay the rent,’ I say.
She rolls her eyes. ‘Keep showing off your money,’ she says. ‘I will move out next month.’
‘That’s what you said last month. And the month before that. I don’t need a two-bedroom. The only reason—’
She’s not listening to me any more. She picks up her cup and takes a sip. ‘It’s not good. You got the order wrong again.Yaar, why do you keep doing—’
‘I don’t like overboiled tea,’ I argue.
‘And yet you drink cup after cup at that gully shop,’ she says. ‘I think you do this on purpose. To annoy me.’
‘To drive you out of the house?’ I ask. ‘Could be one of the motives.’
She takes a sip and catches my gaze. ‘If you really wanted me out of the house,’ she says, her voice dropping low, ‘you would have gotten rid of me.’
I take a sip too.
‘You’ll do the laundry today?’ I ask. ‘If not, tell me now and I’ll do it. I don’t mind.’
‘No,’ she says, hands clasped around the cup. ‘I said I will, that means I will. This is the third time you have asked. I will do it, for sure.’
‘You say that about a lot of things, then I end up doing them. I don’t mind, but then you promise and don’t follow through. That’s what bothers me.’
‘The more you ask me, the more I don’t want to do it.’
Her phone lights up. She doesn’t check it. Mine buzzes too. It’s the group we had made once: Tejal, Sumrit, Aditi and me. ‘Live for Us’, Sumrit had named it cheekily. Humour is his go-to to deal with what happened. I have lost count of the number of times he has finished meeting me by slapping my back and saying, ‘Don’t kill yourself, bhai.’ Lately, Tejal has been doing that too. Soon there will be more messages in that group. It’s been twelve months since that day.
I’ll reply to everyone with a simple: Same old, same old.
What else can they do? What’s happened, has happened. They will send the text and forget about it. Everyone has their own lives. Your grief has no place in anyone else’s life. If there’s anything to learn from all this, it’s that life goes on.
I get a message. It’s Shilpi asking, ‘You okay?’
And I reply, ‘Of course I am.’ I don’t drag her into this. How can I? How will she even get it? She can’t.
We sip our tea in a silence that isn’t peaceful.
‘You think it was painless?’ she asks suddenly, not looking at me.
She’s fixated on this—whether their end was quick, happy, painless. I truly believe—and want to believe—that they were vaporized. A strange word. But everything gone in a second: memories, consciousness, body. Vaporized. Along with several others. Like a light switched off without a warning.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But I tell myself she died with the excitement of seeing me in her heart.’
‘Or sleepy,’ she says.
‘Maybe they were sleeping,’ I say.
‘Aren’t we both in an optimistic mood?’ she asks and shakes her head. ‘Vulgar to be optimistic on a day like today.’ She turns, opens the refrigerator. ‘I’m making toast. You want?’
‘Only if you’re using the toaster.’
‘No,’ she replies. ‘Tawa.’
‘I don’t want ghee.’
‘I’ll use butter.’
