“Oh, she was very happy, but then just now she began asking for her mother,” said my mother. Ritu looked not all there, as if she’d done something wrong; but not overtly repentant. Really, there was nothing to indicate, in the way this family looked, that they’d been living in Tezpur, surrounded by troubles, for the last ten years—Ritu, indeed, had been born there; they could have been from anywhere else, a city suburb.

One thing Mohon remembered from the past was my mother’s cooking.

“There never was any comparison! Whenever we used to visit you in Bombay,” said Mohon, thinking of the verandah overlooking the sea, “we’d really look forward to mashi’s food. Especially the chicken.”

“Tell me, re,” I said suddenly, asking him what I’d been thinking of asking him for some time, “what about the weight? How did it happen?”

“This,” he said, as if it were self-evident what “this” was, “happened over the last two or three years, re. I slipped and fell and fractured my ankle, and the bone’s never healed properly.” He smiled and shook his head slightly. “I’ve had two operations. But no exercise since then. Otherwise,” he turned to Anjali, “I used to be almost as thin as this guy.”

Later, after about twenty minutes, when he said he wanted to go the toilet, I noticed he walked with a small limp. At one point I’d ask him, “Where did you fall?” thinking of the hilly slopes of Assam, but he’d surprise me by saying, “Bombay. When we went there in ’ninety-seven.” When he came back, and we talked until lunch, we avoided looking at each other, as if there was something that couldn’t be said between us. It was something very minor, elusive, but it wouldn’t go away. It could be the differences that had come about in our respective ways of life, our different degrees of success, that were now embarrassing both of us. Or it could be the two small incidents that had occurred those twenty years ago, when we’d spent two nights with each other, talking, when one thing led to another and culminated the way such things do, in a mixture of embarrassment and a cheery, practical resolve to brush it aside. At that time, we didn’t think our actions would have any consequences, and of course they didn’t. What remained was like the smell of smoke, nothing we could hang on to, but something that wouldn’t go away, no more of an impediment except to keep us from looking directly at each other. In the end, it had had nothing to do with our sexuality; it had been one of those nameless animal impulses common to boys, something between pity and terror; twenty years later, it left you with nothing to build on, but it was there.