The platform at Mangaluru Central was crowded with farewells that evening, and through the crush walked a woman in a pale jasmine sari, holding a small travelling bag in one hand and a paper cup of tea in the other.
Her name was Ambika. She was thirty-one years old. She had her mother's long black hair pinned loosely at her neck, small gold jhumka earrings, a small red bindi, and the kind of quiet face that did not draw attention at first glance but stayed with anyone who looked at it twice. She wore very little jewellery. She did not need to. There was something about her — a softness around the eyes, perhaps, or the way she held her shoulders — that made strangers, even at a railway station, glance at her a moment longer than they meant to.
The 7:42 train to Bangalore had been delayed by an hour. She had walked the length of the platform twice already, and was on her third tired round when she heard a voice she had not expected to hear that evening.
"Ambika."
She stopped.
For a moment, she could not place the voice. And then, with a small, sharp turn of recognition somewhere inside her chest, she did.
It was Sachin. Her husband.
Her ex-husband.
She turned slowly. He was sitting on a wooden bench between two pillars, a folded newspaper in his lap, his leather satchel at his feet. He was thirty-three now, a little thinner than she remembered, his hair shorter, his face the same. He had seen her in the same instant she had seen him.
"Sachin."
He stood up. He did not walk toward her. He stayed beside the bench, holding himself still, as if he was not yet sure whether the woman in front of him would speak again or simply walk past.
"Will you sit?" he said, pointing at the bench. "The train is delayed by an hour. I saw the board."
She sat.
"How are you, Ambika?"
She noticed it at once. He had called her Ambika. Not Amby — the small, soft name he had used every day for three years of their marriage. He had stopped himself, somewhere between his throat and his mouth, and had given her the full name instead. The careful name. The name strangers use.
Something flickered across her face. He saw it. He looked down at his hands.
"I am well, Sachin. And you?"
"Well enough."
A small silence settled between them. He looked at her properly for the first time.
"You haven't changed."
"I have, Sachin. I have changed in every way."
He did not answer.
They had met at twenty-five, the two of them, through common friends in Bangalore — at a friend's wedding where the sangeet had run too long and the air had grown loud and warm. They had been introduced by the bride's cousin. They had spoken for an hour. By the end of that hour, they had discovered that they were from the same coastal town, that they had attended the same temple festivals as children without ever meeting, and that they shared the small particular griefs of bright only children whose families had taught them how to succeed but not how to be loved.
Three years they had courted. They had read poetry together. They had quarrelled and forgiven each other in the slow, serious way of two people who had not yet learned that quarrelling and forgiving are the work of love, not the failure of it. They had married at twenty-eight, in a small ceremony in Mangaluru, on a coral-pink afternoon.
And that, somehow, was where the trouble had begun.
Loving someone in the evening, when the day is over and the conversation is easy, is one thing. Loving the same person in the morning — when the kettle is whistling and the floor is cold and someone has forgotten to bring in the milk — is another thing altogether. They had not known the difference. Nobody had told them.
He had grown formal. She had grown silent. He had begun to expect the small kindnesses she had once offered freely. She had begun to wait for the small attentions he had once offered without being asked. And each of them, slowly, had begun to assume that the other would always be there.
Assumption, as the older women of their families could have told them, is the rust that quietly eats the iron of a marriage.
They had separated at thirty. There had been a single long evening at the dining table when they had agreed, with a terrible polite courtesy, that they had become strangers more quickly than either of them had been willing to admit, and that perhaps a season apart might bring back what closeness had taken away.
The season had stretched into two years.
"Sachin," she said now, on the bench at Mangaluru Central, while a man in a green vest sold guavas to the bench behind them. "May I ask you something?"
"Ask."
"In these two years — was there anyone else?"
He did not look away.
"There was. A year ago. A colleague at the bank. She was kind. She was patient with me in a way I had stopped being patient with you. We saw each other for perhaps three months. I ended it, Ambika, because she had committed the only mistake I could not forgive. She was a good woman, and she was not you."
"And you, Ambika? Was there anyone?"
"There was. A doctor my parents introduced me to, six months ago. A good man. Gentle. He played the veena, badly and very earnestly. He proposed to me on the fourth meeting."
"And?"
"I said no."
"Why?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"Because, Sachin, when I looked at him, I did not see the man I had dreamt of when I was younger. I did not see the man with whom I had once imagined a whole life. He was kind. He was suitable. But the man I had loved — the man I had wanted to grow old beside — was not in him. He was not in any of them. He has been, all this time, sitting on a bench at a railway station in Mangaluru, reading a newspaper he is not really reading."
Sachin did not answer. He looked away. He looked back. He looked away again.
A long silence sat between them.
It was Ambika who broke it.
"Sachin. I want to tell you something. And I am only telling you because if I don't tell you tonight, I don't think I shall have the courage to tell you any other night."
"Tell me."
"In these two years, I have understood one thing. The problem between us was not that we stopped loving each other. The problem was that we stopped doing the work of loving each other. We assumed. We thought the love would tend itself, like a tulsi plant in the courtyard, asking nothing of us but an occasional glance."
"We were wrong, Sachin. Love is not a tulsi plant. Love is a kitchen. It must be tended every morning — even when you are tired, even when the day has been a bad one, even when the milk has not yet come."
He listened to her without interrupting. When she had finished, he reached across the bench, slowly, and he took her hand.
"I have understood something too, Ambika. I have spent two years being praised by people who do not really know me. And the only voice that ever truly knew me was the voice I sat across from at breakfast and forgot to listen to. I would rather quarrel with you about the rasam every morning than be at peace with anyone else in any other kitchen."
"Sachin —"
"Will you come back, Ambika? Not tonight. Not because the train is delayed. But in a week, perhaps, when both our hearts have steadied. Will you come back, and this time will we both promise — out loud, so that we cannot later pretend we never said it — that a marriage is not a thing one is given, but a thing one builds, every morning, with the small bricks of attention?"
She did not answer at once.
She set down her paper cup of tea, which had grown quite cold. She looked at him for a long moment.
And then, in the same quiet voice she had used at the registrar's office four years ago, when she had been asked whether she took this man, she said:
"I do, Sachin. I do."
Somewhere in the distance, the 7:42 to Bangalore sounded its arriving horn. Neither of them stood up. They had, in the same moment, decided that the train could go to Bangalore without them.
They sat on that bench long after the train had gone. They drank a second cup of tea each — paid for by Sachin, although the vendor, seeing the unhurried tenderness of their reunion, charged him only for one. They spoke of small things and of large. Of who had married. Of whose mother had passed. Of what each had thought the other was doing at certain hours of certain days. They laughed twice. She wept once, briefly, into a corner of her pale jasmine sari.
At a quarter past ten that night, they walked out of the station together. He carried her travelling bag. She carried, in her free hand, the folded newspaper he had not been reading. They did not catch the next train. They caught, instead, an auto-rickshaw to a small coffee house on Light House Hill Road — a place that had been there during their courtship, that was still there, and that, like certain other things, had been patiently waiting for them to remember it.
— The End (and their beginning, again) —