This had generated thirty-one responses in forty minutes. Nirmala had watched the thread develop from her phone while drinking her morning tea with the specific mixed feeling of someone who is being discussed without being consulted and is finding the discussion more interesting than she had expected.
Yes he is very regular! Three times a week no exception!
Sunita must be happy he joined.
I heard Nirmala and him talk every day on the bench. Very sweet!
This last message, from Mrs. Apte, produced a flurry of response that Nirmala observed with the expression she had perfected over thirty-one years of teaching: absolutely no expression whatsoever.
She typed: We are both new to the class and comparing notes. Good morning everyone.
Rekha, who had known her for a decade, sent her a private message that said simply: ☕😏
Nirmala put her phone face-down and finished her tea.
The Vikram situation was, she acknowledged to herself, something. She was not sure what kind of something. She had been three years in the careful management of a life that did not include romantic expectation, and she had gotten good at the management — good enough that she sometimes forgot it was management and thought it was just how things were. The bench was pleasant. The conversations were the best conversations she'd had in longer than she wanted to calculate. He was funny in a way he was clearly unaware of — the dry, inadvertent humour of a very precise man encountering situations that resisted precision.
He was also very much married. This was a fact she kept front and present, like a well-positioned road sign. She had no interest in — she did not even complete the thought. She had no interest. She had interest in the friendship, which was real and good. The rest was a story other people were writing in a WhatsApp group.
That afternoon, Vikram knocked on the door of 4-F.
She opened it. He was in the corridor holding a steel container.
"Sunita made extra shrikhand," he said. "She said to bring it down."
Nirmala took the container. "Please thank her."
"She said—" He paused. "She said it's nice that you and I talk in the mornings. She said she worries that I've had nobody to talk to since I retired."
He said this with a neutrality that cost him something. Nirmala could see the small effort of it.
"She knows you well," Nirmala said.
"She knows me better than I know myself," he said. "Which I'm still not sure is a comfortable thing to know."
"It's a good thing," she said. "Even when it's uncomfortable."
He nodded. He stood in the corridor a moment longer. "Wednesday," he said.
"Wednesday," she agreed.
