Part 16 of 17 · 2 minOnly Sitting

Nanna's shift was eight to nine in the evening, and for the first four days he sat in the chair opposite her and looked at his phone.

Ammamma did not mind. She was folding.

On the fifth day the phone was face down on the arm of the chair, and on the eighth day he did not bring it out at all, and somewhere in the second week he started talking — about the office, about a man called Rao who was making his life difficult, about a decision he could not make.

She could not follow a word of it. That was the point. It was the first hour in eleven months in which nobody had needed him to solve anything.

He said things in that hour that he had not said to his wife.

And Ammamma folded, and nodded, and every so often said "Mm," in exactly the right place, because a woman who has listened to men complain for fifty-one years does not need to understand the content to know where the Mm goes.

On a Thursday in the fourth week he came home late, badly, at nine-forty, having missed it.

She was still sitting up.

"Amma, sleep," he said. "It is late."

"He has not come," said Ammamma. "I am waiting."

"Who has not come?"

She looked at him. Something in her face was working very hard on a problem and not getting anywhere with it, and then it cleared, and she smiled and said:

"You have come."

She said her husband's name. He had been dead for nine years.

Nanna stood in the doorway of that room for a moment. Then he came in and sat down in the chair opposite her and said:

"Yes. I have come. Sorry I am late."

"It is all right."

"Have you eaten?"

"I will eat when you eat," she said, which is what she had said to that man every night for forty-one years.

So he ate at ten o'clock at night, in front of his mother-in-law, being somebody else.

Amma watched from the kitchen door and did not go in.