“I have thought of that evening more times than I could count, Bipin, in the years since.
I have rehearsed, in my own mind, a hundred different versions of what I might have said, had I only gone to your gate the following morning and asked your forgiveness properly, before either of our prides had the chance to harden into something neither of us knew how to undo.” “I have done the same,” Bipin Babu admitted.
“I have stood, more evenings than I care to count, at the edge of my own courtyard, looking toward your gate, working up the courage to cross those twelve feet of ground myself — and found, each time, that some old, stubborn part of me could not quite manage it, however much the rest of me wished otherwise.” “And now?” Satyen Babu asked, quietly.
“Now that circumstance has apparently seen fit to lock us both inside the same walls, whether either of us wished it or not — do you find the crossing any easier, Bipin, or does prison simply offer a rather more literal set of bars to hide behind?” Bipin Babu was quiet for a long moment, considering the question with real seriousness.
“I do not know,” he admitted finally.
“I know that I have missed you, Satyen, more than I have permitted myself to say aloud to almost anyone these past two years. New chapters come out on g.com first.
I know that watching you across that exercise yard, thinner and greyer than I remembered, filled me with a grief I had been carefully avoiding examining too closely for a very long time.
I do not know whether that is the same thing as knowing how to actually undo what was said and done that January evening — nor whether either of our households would find it so easy to forgive, even if the two of us managed it between ourselves.” “Perhaps,” Satyen Babu said, “the two of us managing it between ourselves would be a reasonable place to begin, whatever the households eventually decide to do with it.” It was not, in the end, a full reconciliation — not yet, not with two and a half years of accumulated hurt and pride still standing, in various forms, between both families, and not with the immediate, pressing realities of imprisonment, uncertain trial dates, and a war still grinding on around them leaving little room, in that particular hour, for anything so ambitious as fully resolving what had taken years to fracture.
But it was, both men understood, walking back to their separate cells at the end of that stolen hour, something genuinely new — the first real crack of light finding its way into a silence that had, until that particular afternoon, seemed as permanent and unbreakable as the prison walls surrounding them both.
— Word of the two men’s imprisonment reached both households within days of each arrest, carried, as always, through the lane’s efficient if imperfect gossip channels — and in each house, the news landed with a complicated mixture of fear and, unexpectedly, a kind of fierce, unified pride that neither family had felt on the other’s behalf in over two years.
“They’re both risking everything,” Uma said to Nasreen, some weeks into her father’s imprisonment, “for the very same cause, in the very same city, in the very same weeks — and they still can’t find their way back to speaking to each other, even now, even with everything else that’s happening around them.” “Do you think prison might change that?” Nasreen asked.
Uma considered the question for a long moment, some old, familiar ache resurfacing in her chest at the thought — the particular, complicated grief of missing a boy she had not been permitted to properly speak with in over two years, now compounded by fresh worry for a father she had not seen in weeks, held somewhere behind walls she could not reach.
“I want to believe it might.
I’ve wanted to believe that about a great many things, these past two and a half years, and I’ve learned, mostly, not to trust the wanting too far ahead of the actual evidence.” She folded another pamphlet, her hands finding the familiar, steadying motion that had carried her through so many difficult months already.
“But I suppose, if there’s any single thing in this whole terrible war that might finally shame two proud old men into remembering what actually matters, it’s watching each other stand up for the very same cause from inside the very same prison.
I only hope, whatever it teaches them, that it teaches them in time to mean something for the rest of us too.”