In April, the gulmohar tree flowered.
This was its annual habit — the great orange flare of it every summer, the flowers that covered the bench and the path beneath and made the small garden of the society briefly spectacular in the way that things that bloom late bloom hard, having had longer to gather their resources.
Nirmala was on the bench with a notebook. She was writing a curriculum. Not for a school — she was not going back to a school, that was a chapter that had its proper end — but for an afternoon reading programme she had proposed to the society committee in February, which the committee had approved in March, and which was starting in two weeks in the same clubhouse where she had learned, five months ago, to count a roomful of people into a warm-up.
It was for the children of the domestic staff. The society had sixty-three families. Between them, the domestic workers had forty-seven children aged six to fourteen. Most of them were in municipal schools. All of them had more capacity than the municipal school system had time for. Nirmala had been a Class Six English teacher. She knew exactly what twelve-year-olds needed and how to give it to them, and she had thirty-one years of curriculum design in her head and two years of accumulated stillness to draw from and nothing else to do on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
Rekha had announced it in the ZUMBA QUEENS group. Mrs. Apte had sent twenty-three emojis. Someone had renamed the group ZUMBA QUEENS AND SOCIAL WORKERS 👑💃📚, which was unwieldy but not inaccurate.
Vikram sat down on the other end of the bench. He was holding two cups of chai from the vending machine that had been installed in the lobby in November — not good chai, but available chai, which was most of what you needed from a vending machine at this hour.
