She thought about the class that morning. She had managed the cha-cha step — not well, not with anything approaching Sunita Mehta's ease, but she had managed it without going in the wrong direction and without bumping into anyone. Freddy had said "There you go!" and clapped once and moved on, but the clap had landed in her chest somewhere and was still sitting there, small and warm.
She thought about Rajan. Not with the acute grief that had characterised the first year, not with the dull persistent ache of the second year, but with the specific and now-familiar texture of love that has lost its object and learned to exist anyway. He would have laughed at the yoga pants. He would have said "Nirmala, you look like a modern woman" in the tone he used for things that impressed him in ways he found difficult to compliment directly. He would have asked if the instructor was any good. He would have eaten the extra banana she had taken to carrying in her bag since the doctor's appointment and she would have pretended to be annoyed about it.
She missed him with the ordinary constancy of someone who has accepted a permanent absence. She was also — and this was the part she had been circling for weeks without being able to say it directly — also something more than the absence. She was still herself. Still present. Still a person who found things interesting and worth thinking about and worth doing.
She opened her laptop and wrote an email to Meghna. Not the carefully cheerful email she usually sent — Everything fine here, weather lovely, how is Ravi's project, kiss the children — but a real one. She wrote about the Zumba class. About the yoga pants. About the woman who was sixty-six and had a bad knee and was learning to shimmy. About a man named Vikram Mehta from 7C who had turned up to his wife's dance class in formal trousers and now sat on the bench after class and talked about bridges and migratory birds and whether systematic thinking was a gift or a limitation.
