"Happy. The way you were in Goa. And I—" He looked at his tea. "I was not happy in the same way. I was retired and I was not sure what to do with myself and you were going to a class three times a week and singing in the kitchen and I had not made you sing in the kitchen in a very long time."
The silence was longer now.
"Vikram," Sunita said. Not with anger. With something much more complicated. "Freddy is a thirty-four-year-old man from Goa who teaches Zumba and is very good at his job and has absolutely no interest in me beyond keeping my heart rate in the appropriate zone for a woman of my age."
"I know that now."
"I was happy," she said, "because for the first time in three years of your retirement I had something that was mine. You were retired. You retired and you were home all the time and you had opinions about how I made the chai and how I organised the refrigerator and — Vikram, you are a very good man and I love you, but you organised my spice rack by height instead of frequency of use and I had to put everything back."
He looked at her. He thought about the spice rack. He thought about the year since retirement. He thought about Nirmala's words: less like someone waiting for retirement to be over.
"I've been difficult," he said.
