‘Beta, don’t worry,’ he shuffled forwards, grabbing the Tupperware from her and emptying it into his food bin. ‘Gone! Out of sight, out of mind.’ But Rohini had already started making her way over to the sink.
‘Uh-ruh-ruh!’ She vocalized her disgust, just as Naina used to do. ‘How long have these plates been sitting here, Papa? This is so unhygienic! You’ll get all those ants back again – they love this hot, hot weather.’
‘Rohini, please, beta, just go and sit down and I will make you chai.’
‘Papa, no! I need to wash this all up. You think I come here just for chai? I come here to look after you. If only Mummy could see you now.’
Mukesh knew that last sentence came only from her frustration, but nonetheless it hurt. He’d noticed how over the past year, Rohini only ever mentioned ‘Mummy’ to berate him, to tell him he was living in a pigsty.
He was too tired for this, too tired to argue back. Instead, he wandered to the living room and slumped himself down, trying to tune out Rohini’s frequent grunts and groans as she found cracks in the cupboard door （‘I told you I could get someone round to fix this! This is almost a brand-new kitchen, you can’t have it looking scruffy like this, Papa!’） and boxes and boxes of mung beans in the fridge （‘Papa, this is very unhealthy if this is all you eat! I know Mummy always used to say good for fibre, but you must eat a balanced diet, Papa, like the doctor told you!’） and three empty cartons of his favourite packet chai in the recycling （‘Papa! You’ll rot what’s left of your teeth and these are not good for your diabetes! Mummy said only for special occasions, Papa, I have shown you how to make it from scratch’）。
He wished more than anything that – rather than suffering creaking joints and ailing eyesight – he’d started losing his hearing first. In his family, where each of his daughters liked to talk a thousand decibels louder than the average human, that would have been particularly useful.
‘What are you reading, darling?’ Mukesh asked Priya, as Rohini roamed the house, searching from top to bottom, like a sniffer dog, on the lookout for the next thing to complain about. The living room was deadly silent.
‘Little Women, Dada,’ she replied, her eyes remaining fixed on the page. ‘It was one Ba recommended to me. She said she read it when she was a very little girl. Dad bought it for me last week.’
‘I haven’t heard of it,’ Mukesh said, honestly, but he made a mental note – now that he was a library member, he could and should pay attention to these things …
‘It’s a very famous book, Dada. Everyone knows it,’ she said, still not looking up, but her eyebrows were arched in a mock-accusatory, surprised frown.
‘What is it about?’ Mukesh asked, a little nervously – remembering her words from the other day: ‘You don’t get books, Dada … You just don’t care!’
‘Shhh, Dada, I’m trying to read it. I’ll tell you another day,’ Priya snapped in a sweet kind of way, and Mukesh did as he was told. Naina used to be a bit like that when she was reading too – maybe one day he’d understand.
He remembered evenings, when the children had gone to bed, he’d be reading the newspaper beside Naina, who was leafing through the pages of her book at breakneck speed. He’d try to engage her in conversation, looking over, waiting for her to realize he was watching her.
‘Mukesh, what are you doing? You know I am concentrating,’ she would reprimand, smiling all the same.
‘I just wanted to read something to you from the paper. It is very interesting.’
‘Mukesh, I am just getting to the good bit. Shh,’ she would say. She was always getting to the good bit. At first, Mukesh thought that perhaps books had good bits every two or three pages, and then he started to wonder whether it was just an excuse.
He would watch her, tucked up in her blue and white nightie, her reading glasses with large frames resting neatly on her nose, and her black hair pulled back into a small bun at the back of her head. He could see her in his mind’s eye at 20, at 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, too. The same ritual, the same response. For a moment, he felt like Henry, from The Time Traveler’s Wife, flying through the decades to visit Naina in all those moments of her life.
At the time, he had never wondered where she went when she was within the pages of her book. He just loved seeing the concentration on her face. Sometimes she would smile, just slightly, from the corner of her mouth. Other times she would throw her head back and chuckle, creasing her eyes, and tapping Mukesh on the shoulder as though he was in on the joke. At the time, seeing how happy she was had been enough. But now she was gone, he wished he’d tried harder to be with her in every single moment.