"That's very specific."
"I am a very specific woman."
He looked at her for a long time. She looked back. Thirty-four years of marriage has its own language — made up of silences and specific looks and the understanding of what is being said beneath what is being said — and they had always been fluent in it, even when they had forgotten they were speaking it.
"Sunita," he said. "You seemed like Goa. You really did."
She looked at him and her expression shifted. "You noticed," she said quietly. "That's something."
"I always notice. I'm just—"
"I know," she said. "You're working on it."
Below them in the garden, the very slow badminton game had produced, somehow, a spectacular rally. The two old men looked equally surprised. They kept playing.
