After her parents’ fight, silence resumed its noxious reign of the house. Each of them more or less kept to themselves. Kavita thought of them and herself as trapped in a kind of prison, each in solitary confinement, always using different rooms at different times, their paths almost never intersecting. When their paths did cross, they never crossed for long. If they talked, they never talked about what needed to be said.

The thinking side of her asserted that she should engage them, draw them out of their caves of sorrow, get them to eat more and talk more and move more. But the feeling side of her could not bear to be in the same room with them for longer than a few minutes at a time. They were bounded by grief but also torn apart by it. Every time she looked into their wounded eyes, she knew their pain, and it was more than she could stand.

Her mother kept to her routine of napping on the floor of Sunil’s bedroom with his ashes tucked safely on his bed. Her father had finished his album project and moved on to checking out books on Buddhism from the library. Days earlier he even came home with a guide book about monastery tours in Dharamsala. Kavita didn’t ask about it. If he was planning his Great Escape, she didn’t want to know.

She cooked dal and rice or kitchari every few days or so in case her parents craved something other than toast and bananas and ginger tea. (Although she stocked those items too.) She herself never ate more than a few mouthfuls at a time. Got a strange sense of ecstasy from her hunger pangs, like a self-flagellating monk, because, just like the monk, she knew she deserved to suffer, that her suffering was an expression of love. With every hollow groan of her stomach it was as though she were paying off the debts that Anchor hissed in her ear, crumb by crumb, pound by pound. That week, she started cinching up her jeans with a belt.

To pass the time, she limped through long walks, smoked, texted Chi, brooded, denied her hunger pangs, emailed Chi, lost time in flashbacks, took scalding showers, ruminated, shopped for things she didn’t need online, left voicemails for Chi, thought of every big and small fight she’d ever had with Sunil, lost time in weeping, read obsessively about suicide and bereavement and trauma, lost more time in weeping, occasionally hit herself to decompress, slept (except at night), watched more Buffy than was healthy (especially at night).

All the while, she kept an open line of one-way communication with Sunil.

The one advantage of Nirav’s sparse visits was that she didn’t have to pretend to be cheerful or functional for long intervals. Most of the time, she was free to be haunted.