There was one other who waited too. He had grown in her belly, waiting. When he was born, he was waiting. He spent his childhood waiting, his face taking the form of the man-boy for whom he waited, as if Nature were compensating him for his fatherlessness.

The letters came, and they were written by him. But as the years went by, they were only an odd reflection of a boy she had once known, a lad she had once loved. There were four people now: the boy and girl who had shared a moment upon this earth, and the man and woman who had lived on to write about them. The letters spoke of memories that had glowed orange and red but then turned matte and gray. What did it matter ten, twenty years later, that they both admired that grove of figs where they had first lain together? That they both loved Masiji when they were children? That Ram would say Padma’s kajal, rimming her eyelashes, was so dark it turned his day into night? That she still wore her wedding bangles?

She became angry and did not know it. Her son would not have a sister, and she could not show she cared. Slowly the truth grew apparent, even to her. In the waning years of her beauty, when the full course of her life had been revealed, she took up with an older man, a good soul, an ex-soldier. For a few years, he was the companion she had not had. She realized such kindnesses could be allowed: pretended ignorance, averted eyes, doors left unlatched at the appropriate hour. Her aged aunt, at the moment of her discovery, said only that she too had spent a lifetime without a husband.

After thirty-five years, her Ram returned home. He arrived with no announcement, only a small suitcase that stood beside him on the doorstep. She thought it unfair that he would have known about his arrival a full month before she would, traveling toward her by ship and train and bus and rickshaw while she performed her daily routine—cooking, washing, helping their son’s wife care for a young boy and girl. Miracles were possible: the white men could depart, the nation could be cleaved in two, Ram could cross the threshold of the house that he had built but never seen.

When he entered, their son rose from his seat. Then, after Ram accounced his name, after Santosh realized who he was, he stooped and took the dust of his father’s feet; he was a Hindu child, after all. They embraced for the first time: her husband and her son. Ram gazed into Santosh’s eyes.