Nirmala looked at him. She read the sentence behind the sentence. She was fifty-eight and had been a teacher and a wife and a mother and she had spent thirty-five years listening to what people said in order to understand what they meant, which was not always the same thing. She let the sentence sit in the air between them without commenting on it, which was, she had found, usually the right call.
"Why did you join?" he asked after a moment, which she recognized as a redirect.
"Doctor's orders. Exercise. I've been walking to the milk booth every morning and telling myself it counts, which it doesn't." She paused. "And Rekha."
"Rekha Joshi is a force of nature," he said.
"She's a one-woman public health initiative."
He made a small sound that was, she recognised, an almost-laugh. "You used to teach?"
"Thirty-one years. English, Class Six. Retired two years ago."
"Do you miss it?"
She considered the question honestly rather than giving the automatic answer. "I miss the children. Not the correcting of notebooks at ten PM. Not the parents who thought their child's failure to understand Shakespeare was my personal failing." A pause. "I miss having somewhere to be every morning."
He nodded slowly. "Civil engineer. Thirty-five years. Retired last year."
"Do you miss it?"
"I miss the problem-solving," he said. "I miss having a problem that had a correct answer. Those exist less in retirement."
Nirmala looked at the gulmohar tree, which had dropped some of its orange flowers on the bench between them. She thought this was a reasonably accurate description of the condition of being retired — surrounded by problems for which the engineering answer did not apply.
"Will you come again?" she asked.
"Wednesday," he said. Not with great enthusiasm. With the particular resignation of a man who has committed to something and intends to see it through.
"Me too," she said.
She gathered her bag and stood up. He stood up too — the old-fashioned courtesy of a man of his generation, which she noticed without commenting on.
"Nirmala," he said.
She turned.
"Do you know how long it normally takes before it — gets easier?"
She looked at him. He was asking about the dancing but also, she understood, about something else entirely — the question underneath the question was larger and more complicated and was not really about Zumba at all.
"I think," she said carefully, "it varies."
He nodded, as if this were the most useful answer she could have given. Then they went their separate ways across the society garden, toward their separate flats, toward their separate mornings.
