After class, there was the ritual of the bench.
The bench was a concrete thing under a gulmohar tree in the small garden beside the clubhouse, positioned exactly in the shade at this time of morning and possessing the quality that good benches in housing societies always have — slightly away from the main path, sufficiently public to be appropriate, sufficiently private to be useful.
Nirmala sat on it because her feet hurt slightly and she was not yet ready to go back to a flat that would be as clean and quiet as she had left it. Vikram sat on it three minutes later for reasons that were, she suspected, not entirely different.
They sat in silence for a moment, watching the society wake up. The morning dog-walkers were on their rounds. The vegetable vendor was setting up his cart near the main gate. Two pigeons were having an argument about something on the roof of the parking shed.
"Your wife was in the class," Nirmala said. It was not a question. She had seen him watching Sunita with the sideways, too-careful attention of a husband monitoring a situation he hadn't quite admitted to himself he was monitoring.
"Yes," Vikram said.
"Has she been coming long?"
"Three weeks."
"She's quite good."
"Yes," he said. And then, after a pause, "She's been — very enthusiastic. About the class."
