The City Son by Samrat Upadhyay

longer answer questions from his teachers. He sounds almost like his father: “Um … aah …  tyo  …  yo  …  yahan .” His classmates laugh. At home he answers in monosyllables to Sanmaya and Mahesh Uncle. These days Apsara mostly stays cooped up inside her room. Sanmaya has to take her food on a tray upstairs and sometimes leave it outside her door, like in a hotel. Some days Apsara pulls the tray into her room, and some days it sits outside, the food turning stale. Every now and then Tarun picks up the tray from outside the door and carries it into her room. At other times, when it strikes her fancy, she opens the door. One time she opened the door and talked to him rapidly about something she did with her aunt when she was a child, something about the sewing of leaves to make plates for a festival.
    Today as he takes the tray into her room, she launches into a description of her childhood picnic, how it was on a hill with a breathtaking view of the mountains. “The mountains looked gorgeous enough to be swallowed,” she said. Sanmaya must have persuaded her to take a bath recently because her hair is combed and oiled. “How do you swallow mountains, Ma?” the boy asks. She laughs. She names her friends who were there: Sarita, Sunita, Bonita,this ta, that ta. The food: pulao, khasi ko masu, kerau ko achar, koreko mula , roasted corn.
    “Let’s have that picnic right here,” Tarun says, and she nods. “Aaan garnus,” he commands, then inserts his fingers full of rice and dal and tarkari into her open mouth. There’s someone standing at the door. Mahesh Uncle. He’s back home early today. “Fabulous,” he says.
    “We’re having a picnic,” Apsara says, then thinks of something and stops eating. Mahesh Uncle leaves, and it takes the boy a while to coax her back to the picnic.
    Tarun doesn’t go to Bangemudha for a week, then two. Finally after skipping two Saturdays, he goes. When he opens the door and enters, there’s no one in the house. Normally his father would be on the bed; Amit and Sumit would be around somewhere, Amit sulking, Sumit smiling. But today there’s an air of stillness. Somehow the noises of the street have also become muted. Tarun stands quietly by the door.
    Didi emerges from the kitchen. She looks younger, perhaps because of the hair cascading on her shoulders—he’s never seen her hair down before—but also because, Tarun realizes with a start, her lips are red. She has lipstick on. And her eyes look darker because she has put kohl around them. The way she’s wearing her dhoti, it looks different, not loose but tightly wrapped around her hips. The boy becomes transfixed. She stops a few feet away from him. “You finally remembered me.”
    Tarun’s throat is so tight that he doesn’t know what sound will leap out if he speaks.
    “So, how does it feel to abandon your mother like this?”
    Tarun is crying now.
    “And what made you remember me today?”
    Tarun is shaking his head, blubbering. He has no excuse. It is all his fault.
    “And what do you want from me today?” she asks.
    Her words pierce him, and he crumples to the ground, on his knees, his hands clasped together in front of his chest. “Please, Didi.”
    She comes close to him and stands a few inches away. She’s breathing heavily. “Stand up,” she says. He does. He’s afraid of meeting her eyes, but he can’t help himself, so he lifts his gaze. Her eyes are big and shiny and filled with something that seems to want to swallow him.
    Her fingers reach out and grab his chin, rougher than usual. “Let me see this man’s face.” She inspects it, and when he makes a gesture to move closer to her, she steps back a few inches and says, “No, you can’t touch me.”
    His eyes fill up again.
    “If you want to touch me,” she says, “you have to prove yourself again.”
    He lets her stroke his face, rub her hand behind his ears. The loose end of her dhoti falls from her chest, exposing a brightly