"Still working on the curriculum?"
"The poetry section. I can't decide if I'm setting the bar too high."
"Set it high," he said. "They'll rise to it or they won't and you'll adjust. But set it high first."
She looked at him. "Is that engineering?"
"That's thirty-five years of watching people perform at the level of what they're expected to perform at. Which means the expectation is the structure."
She wrote something in the notebook. He sat with his chai and looked at the gulmohar flowers on the path.
He had, since October, done the following things: learned to make decent upma, because he had reorganised the spice rack and felt it was only fair to use it regularly; joined the society's senior engineering consultation group, which advised on the maintenance of the common infrastructure and was, to his private delight, genuinely useful; called his son Preethi every Sunday and twice more during the week, once for no reason except to say he had been thinking about a conversation they had had five years ago; and learned, imperfectly and with significant effort, to tell Sunita things while they were happening rather than after they had passed.
He had also continued the Zumba class, which Sunita had greeted with a particular quality of satisfaction that she had the grace not to make too evident.
His hip movement was, six months on, what Freddy called "expressive." This was not the same as correct, but it was better than what it had been, and it was recognisably Vikram — the precise footwork, the slightly contained quality of the upper body, the occasional moment when something relaxed and the whole thing opened up, like a door finally finding its proper frame.
"How's Sunita's knee?" Nirmala asked. Sunita had twisted it slightly in January and had been doing modified versions of the class for six weeks.
"Back to full strength. She did the full routine yesterday. She was very pleased." A pause. "She said she was pleased. I said it showed. She said, 'You noticed.' As if it were unusual." He looked at the gulmohar. "I'm working on being the kind of person for whom it is not unusual."
"That's the work," Nirmala said. "It's always the work."
She was, six months on, also working on things. She was working on calling her children with news rather than only with reassurance. She was working on accepting the Wednesday dinners that Rekha kept proposing and she kept finding reasons to decline. She was working on the difference between the solitude she had learned to be comfortable with and the isolation she sometimes mistook it for. These were not the same thing, and the distinction required maintenance.
