So my mother had been out to see them already. She had been present at Mohon’s wedding; I’d been away, but of course she’d known Mohon since his birth, because we’d been born around the same time.

Twenty years—I settled back in my chair and said to Mohon:

“But I hear you want to leave that place now? Maybe move to Calcutta?” Mohon leaned forward and nodded his head thoughtfully. All that extra weight had magnified his mottled complexion, which had never been very clear, but there was a strange combination of the effects of aging and an almost untouched simplicity about him. In as polite a way as possible, he said:

“That’s right, re. It would be nice.” I knew, in fact, that that was why he’d come to Calcutta—not just for a holiday but to see if there might be an “opening,” any chance of leaving a landscape made intolerable by strife. But, of course, there was really no great possibility of there being one; opportunities were few.

I looked at him once or twice, and yet we made no eye contact. It was as if all our talk was a prevarication, a hedging about issues. It appeared the unspoken conversations of the last twenty years must now necessarily remain unspoken. He went on to tell me, absently lifting his glass of Fanta, how it would be difficult for him, with the particular background he had, the sort of job he’d been doing for the last ten years, and was now quite comfortable doing, to actually find an opening in Calcutta. The door to my room opened, and Anjali came out with our daughter Priya, whose hair was combed neatly above her forehead, yet untouched in this endangered interval of calm in the day.

Romola straightened a little and smoothed her pale blue salwaar kameez with her fingers.

“She just finished her bath,” said Anjali (who was wearing a light brown salwaar kameez herself), cheerfully announcing, in medias res, the progress of an episode that concerned us all. “Say hello to Mohon jethu and Romola mashi. Is it jethu or kaku?” she asked, looking at me, distracted. She looked pretty after the bath she herself had had, and the brown salwaar kameez was rather lovely. I looked at her and gave her a smile of recognition you sometimes give someone with whom you spend almost every hour of the day.

“Kaku,” said Mohon, ironically but gently; this was the first word he spoke to Anjali. “I narrowly missed being a jethu. He,” he tilted his head towards me, “was born just a month before me.” Said sardonically but kindly, as if he’d forgiven me for this.