“Then be careful,” Bidhu Ma said, taking his hand across the small table.
“Not simply of whatever danger these new circles of yours may eventually invite — but of what impatience, left too long unchecked, does to a friendship as old as the one you share with that man.
I have watched the two of you disagree about everything under that tree for twenty years, Satyen, and I have never once feared for what it might cost either of you.
I find myself beginning to fear it now, and I do not think I am imagining the change.” Satyen Babu had no immediate answer for that — only the quiet, uncomfortable recognition that his wife, as she so often did, had named a truth he had not yet been ready to name for himself.
— Beneath all of it — the district committee’s mutterings, Naren Mallik’s careful recruitment, the slow accumulation of a whole country’s argument finding its way, thread by thread, into two households that had once seemed entirely immune to it — Arun and Uma continued to hold onto the private, uncomplicated joy of their engagement with a fierceness that neither fully articulated, even to each other, but that both, in their own ways, clung to rather more tightly as the weeks went on.
“Do you ever feel it,” Uma asked him one evening, the two of them sitting together on the low wall in the gathering cold, “like there’s a whole storm building somewhere just past the edge of what we can actually see, and everyone keeps telling us, in one way or another, that we ought to be paying more attention to it than we are?” “I feel it,” Arun admitted. New chapters come out on NovelPing first.
“Provat all but told me outright, this week, that I’ll eventually be forced to choose a side, as though love were the sort of thing that came with a side attached to it at all.” “And what did you tell him?” “That I intend to belong to my own conscience.
Which felt like rather a fine thing to say, in the moment, though I confess I’ve spent every day since wondering whether it’s actually true, or whether I said it mostly because it sounded braver than admitting I don’t fully know what my own conscience will end up demanding of me, once the choosing actually arrives.” Uma considered this for a long moment, watching the darkening sky. Find the original chapter at novelping dot com.
“I don’t think anyone fully knows that,” she said finally, “until the moment actually arrives and makes them find out.
I only hope, whatever choosing eventually comes for either of us, that it doesn’t come at the cost of this.” She gestured, with a small, deliberate motion, at the space between them — the wall, the mango tree, the whole quiet, familiar world of the lane that had raised them both.
“I don’t think I could bear losing this for the sake of a side, Arun.
Not for Congress, not for the Forward Bloc, not for anything the newspapers currently consider important enough to divide two families over.” “Neither could I,” Arun said, and reached for her hand in the growing dark, holding it perhaps a little more tightly than the moment strictly required — as though, by the simple physical fact of holding on, he might somehow guard against the storm both of them could feel gathering, unmistakably now, somewhere just past the edge of what either could clearly see.
Neither of them yet knew how little time remained before that storm arrived in full — nor that it would come, in the end, not from Delhi, nor from Naren Mallik’s careful recruitment, nor from Provat Ganguly’s anxious warnings, but from something considerably closer to home, spoken aloud, in front of the whole gathered lane, within a matter of days.