Anima enters the gate of Home and takes a deep breath before moving into the house. She climbs the steps to the veranda and enters the spacious living room where shadows have begun to slither in from the corners. A slanting beam of weak light falls across the floor from the doorway. Ai sits in that beam, with motes dancing around her. She senses Anima's coming but does not look her way. Anima puts a hand on her shoulder. The shoulder does not respond. Anima walks through to the back veranda, down four steps to the bathroom. She washes her hands and feet and turns into the kitchen. She takes a bottle of water from the fridge and drinks straight from it in big gulps. ‘You still won’t drink from a glass, will you?’ Ai is standing behind her. Anima smiles to herself at having provoked a reaction. She lifts the covers of the two pots on the cooking platform. There's methi in besan and plain dal. Next to it is a small bowl of peanut chutney and next to that a large bowl of sheera. She’d have seen two pots less if Ai had expected her, not Ashesh.

‘Plain dal because he likes it with rice, ghee and lemon. He said he’d come.’ Ai sighs with deep pain. They sit facing each other at the table. Ai does not look at her when she speaks. Anima gazes at her refined features. Her once-clear skin is now slightly blemished. A few hairs have sprouted at the corners of her thin-lipped mouth. Her neck is all hollows and bird bones. She is sixty-nine. ‘Why didn’t he come?’

Anima says work. If she overstresses the word, a stormy argument will follow. The messenger of bad tidings must learn to preserve her neck.

‘Work is a convenient excuse when there's no genuine reason.’ Ai is angry. ‘Of course, even if he had come, he’d have sat around like a clam. I put so much thought into deciding what to cook for him. I make things that he likes. But will he ever say the food's nice? Never. When he's been and gone my mind's like a cyclone. Why is he like that? Am I his enemy? Is it because I forbade him from marrying that Mussalman girl? Does he still hold that against me after all these years? He should have ignored me. He had Anna's support.’

‘Has Mrs Karnik sent my banana flour? I’ve clean run out.’