Nirmala came home from the Friday class and stood in front of the bathroom mirror in her teal yoga pants and did something she had not done in a very long time.
She looked at herself. Not the quick functional look of someone checking if their hair was presentable before going out, not the critical inventory of her face that she sometimes conducted with a kind of resigned professionalism. A real look. The kind that you give to something you are trying to actually see rather than simply assess.
She was fifty-eight years old. There were facts about this that were not going to change. The grey in her hair that she had stopped dyeing two years ago because there had seemed no point at the time. The lines at the corners of her eyes that were, she had decided, earned rather than unfortunate. The way her face had settled into something that was no longer the face of a young woman but was still, undeniably, her face — the specific Nirmala-ness of it, which had survived thirty-one years of Class Six English and three years of widowhood and fifty-eight years of being in the world.
