“He does not, though I do not intend to hide it from him,” Saroj Bala said.
“I will tell him this evening, plainly, that his daughter came to see her mother, and that I do not consider it any business of the lane’s gossip, nor any statement of loyalty for or against anyone’s pride.” She reached over and took her daughter’s hand.
“You are always welcome here, Kamala.
Whatever silence stands between the two houses, it was never meant to stand between you and me — I would not have wished that on you, whatever else I’ve decided about your brother’s future.
I am sorry if the year’s carefulness ever made you believe otherwise.” “I was afraid,” Kamala admitted, “that coming here too often, too openly, would look like I was choosing your household over Deba-da’s — as though loving you both properly required choosing between you, the way Arun and Uma have been made to choose, without ever being given a proper say in it.” “You should never have to choose,” Saroj Bala said, with a firmness that carried real conviction.
“Whatever pride has kept your father and Satyen apart this past year, it was never meant to reach into your marriage, or your right to your own mother’s company. Read the latest chapters at novelping(.)com.
I will speak to your father about it tonight, and I will make certain he understands the same.” — Kamala left the blue house as the evening light was just beginning to fade, crossing the twelve feet of shared ground back toward the rust-coloured gate with a lighter heart than she had carried in months — though the lightness came tangled, inevitably, with a fresh awareness of exactly how much careful, exhausting management the coming years would likely continue to require, so long as her father-in-law and her own father remained too proud, each of them, to be the one who finally crossed that same small distance himself.
She found Bidhu Ma waiting near the rust-coloured gate as she approached, and felt, for one brief, guilty moment, the full weight of what discovery might mean — until she saw, in her mother-in-law’s face, not suspicion or hurt, but something closer to quiet, weary understanding.
“You went to see your mother,” Bidhu Ma said.
It was not a question.
I’m sorry, if it troubles you — I didn’t mean to make it seem as though—” “It troubles me only in the sense that I wish I could visit Saroj-di myself, this very evening, and I know I cannot, not while my own husband and hers remain too stubborn to find their way back to each other.” Bidhu Ma reached out and touched Kamala’s cheek, gently, the way she had when Kamala was still a young girl learning to navigate this household’s particular warmth.
“Go and see her whenever you need to, my dear.
I will not stand in the way of a daughter’s love for her own mother, whatever else this whole terrible business has cost the rest of us.
Some things ought to remain untouched by our pride, even when the pride itself refuses to loosen its grip on everything else.” Kamala embraced her, grateful beyond words for the quiet grace of the permission, and went inside to find Debabrata — carrying with her, alongside the fresh ache of her mother’s guarded doubt and her own divided loyalty, a small, precious certainty that at least this one bridge, however carefully and secretly it needed to be maintained, would remain open to her for as long as the wider silence between the two houses continued to hold.
She did not yet know how many more years that wider silence would stretch on — nor how many more careful, guilt-ridden crossings of that same twelve feet of ground it would take, from all of them, before the whole lane finally found its way back to the ordinary, unremarkable closeness it had once taken so entirely for granted.