She found him in the kitchen at five-thirty AM.
This was not acceptable. Five-thirty AM was her time — had been her time since law school, when she had discovered that the two hours before the world woke up were the only two hours that belonged entirely to her. No calls, no consultants, no party workers with urgent things that were never as urgent as they believed. Just chai and her notes and the specific quality of a city that was still gathering itself before the demands of the day began.
He was at the counter. He had made coffee — not chai, coffee, which already told her something — and he was reading something on his phone with the concentrated focus of a man whose first two hours also belonged to him and who was not accustomed to sharing them.
He looked up when she came in. Neither of them spoke for a moment. He was wearing a plain white kurta and track pants, which was the most human she had seen him look since the courtroom, where he had been polished and deliberate. At five-thirty AM, with the kitchen light and his reading glasses on, he looked more like a person and less like a candidate, and she did not find this useful information.
"You're up early," he said. His voice in the early morning was different — lower, less managed, the specific voice of someone who had not yet installed the day's professional register.
"I'm always up at five-thirty," she said. "This is my hour."
"Mine too," he said. He picked up his coffee and moved to the far side of the kitchen table, which was a gesture she understood: making space, not vacating. She noted this and the noting annoyed her because it meant he was already communicating in the specific language of people who are learning to coexist in a limited space, and she had not agreed to learn that language.
She made chai. The process of making chai in a strange kitchen was its own small navigation — where things were, which stove knob was which, where the person who lived here had put the strainer. She had been the person who lived here, for six weeks, and she knew where everything was, and he was using things from a different arrangement because he had apparently unpacked his own supplies last night. His coffee things were on the right side of the counter. Her chai things were on the left. She did not comment on this.
