"Aditya," she said. She used his first name. She had been using his last name for seventeen days and the first name came out now without her deciding to use it, which told her something about the state of the evening's filters.
He went very still. The stillness of someone who had heard something and was processing it.
"This is difficult," she said. She said it honestly, which was the only register she had left at this time of night after a powercut after seventeen days. "This situation. It's more difficult than it was supposed to be."
"Yes," he said. He said it without elaborating, which meant he understood exactly what she meant and was not going to pretend otherwise.
"There's an election in fourteen days," she said.
"Yes," he said. Same tone.
"And we're on opposite sides of it," she said.
"Yes," he said. And then, after a pause: "That's all true."
She looked at him. He looked at her. The candle between them was exactly where it was and neither of them was doing anything about the four feet of table between them and the specific quality of the room and the specific quality of the seventeen days preceding this moment, and both of them were aware of all of it, and neither of them moved.
Because they were two intelligent people who understood the situation completely and had fourteen days left and an election between them, and those facts were real and remained real regardless of the candlelight and the quiet and what was accumulating in the room.
"Good night," she said. She picked up her phone — seventy-two percent now, the battery pack had been generous — and stood up.
"Good night," he said.
She went to her room. She lay on the bed in the dark. Outside, Lucknow was dark in the section outage, and inside the flat there was one candle in the living room and two people in their respective rooms who were, she was certain, both doing the same thing: not sleeping, thinking about the fourteen days, thinking about what the fourteen days were going to require of them.
She thought about it for a long time. Then she made a decision. The decision was: the election first. Everything else in its correct order. She was a lawyer. She understood about priorities and she understood about the correct sequence of things. The election was first.
She was very clear about this decision. She was also very clear, in the honest registration of a person who was done performing self-deception, that the decision was going to be difficult to keep.
