“Does it matter which, Ma, if the work itself is worth doing regardless?” “It matters,” Bidhu Ma said, “because a cause chosen for the right reasons sustains a person for a lifetime, while a cause chosen only to outrun grief tends to burn through a person a great deal faster than either lasts.” She reached over and took her daughter’s hand, gently stilling the restless motion of sorting papers.
“I am not asking you to stop, Uma.
I am only asking you to be honest with yourself about what you’re actually running from, so that when the running eventually stops — and it will stop, eventually, whatever it currently feels like — you have something left standing underneath it, rather than simply exhaustion.” Uma had no easy answer for that, and sat for a long while afterward in a silence that carried, for the first time in months, something closer to genuine reflection than simple, well-worn anger.
— It was Debabrata and Kamala, navigating the delicate, uncomfortable middle ground of a household that had been split by its own parents’ quarrel while remaining, in law and in love, entirely undivided themselves, who found the year’s slow, grinding adjustment perhaps hardest of anyone not directly heartbroken by it.
“I feel as though I’m required to grieve two things at once,” Kamala admitted to her husband one evening, “and I’m not permitted to properly grieve either. Get faster updates on g.com.
I miss my mother’s easy visits to this house, the way she used to come simply to sit with your mother over tea, the way the two of them used to plan things together as though there were no difference at all between one household’s concerns and the other’s.
And I miss watching Arun and Uma happy, the way they were happy before all this, in a way I don’t think either of them will ever quite manage to be again, even if our parents eventually find their way back to speaking.” “Do you think they will?” Debabrata asked.
“Find their way back?” Kamala considered the question for a long moment, watching the darkened window that looked out, from their small room, toward the blue gate she could just make out in the distance, closed as it had been closed every evening for the better part of a year now.
“I don’t know,” she admitted finally.
“I want to believe it, Deba-da, more than I’ve wanted almost anything else in my life. New chapters come out on g.com first.
But I watch our parents each week, and I see two people who both privately regret what happened, and neither of whom seems capable of being the one who takes the first step toward mending it.
I don’t know how long two proud people can go on wanting reconciliation privately while refusing, publicly, to be the ones who ask for it.” She was quiet for a moment longer.
“I only know that every month this goes on, the distance between the two gates seems to grow a little wider, even though the actual ground between them hasn’t moved an inch.” Debabrata drew her closer, offering what comfort he could, though he had, by that point, no more confident an answer to offer than she did — only the same quiet, uncertain hope that had carried both of them, and Arun, and Uma, through nearly a full year now of a silence none of them had chosen, and none of them yet knew how to end.
Outside, in the cold autumn dark, the mango tree stood as it always had, its bare branches holding no answers of its own — only the patient, indifferent weight of time passing, one closed gate and one quiet evening at a time, across a distance that would, before it was finally bridged again, come to measure not months but years.