Let Her Handle It

Three days later the small charge was filed, and Reya learned what it cost to stand in a courthouse corridor and let her husband be kind to her.

That was the part no one warned you about, with a man like Vikram. He was not cruel in public. Cruelty would have been easier to bear. He was gracious. He came down the corridor in a soft grey suit, and when he saw her he slowed, and his whole face arranged itself into gentle, wounded concern. He said, low enough that only she could hear, "Reya. God. You look tired. Are you eating?"

Don't confront him, Nisha had said. Don't argue with his lawyers in a corridor. Let me handle it. So Reya said none of the true things clawing up her throat. She didn't have to pretend to be beaten. She was beaten, all the way down. Her eyes filled on their own, and she looked at the floor.

"I just want to see her more," she said, and her voice cracked. "That's all this is."

Vikram's face softened even more, which was the worst thing it could do. He believed her. She could see him believe her, see him file her away again as harmless, and it turned her stomach.

"I know you do," he said gently. "I want that too, when you're better. We all want the same thing here." Then his lawyer touched his elbow, and he drifted away, warm and reasonable, a good man being patient with a difficult woman. Two people waiting for the lift smiled at him as he passed.

His lawyer was a heavy, comfortable man named Deshpande. He wore good watches and never stopped smiling. When Nisha filed the affidavit charge, Deshpande actually laughed. Reya heard him. He leaned over to another lawyer in the corridor and said, not quietly, "You know what she's gone and filed? A false-affidavit complaint. Over the money forms." He shook his head, delighted. "They've got nothing, so they're counting his rupees. We'll have it thrown out or paid off by the end of the month." And the other lawyer laughed too, and the laughter landed on Reya where she stood. She did not have to work to look crushed. Deshpande was only saying out loud the thing she already knew.

The visit with Anaya was Thursday, and it was worse than the corridor.

Anaya came into the beige room in a dress Reya had never bought her, holding a new tablet, and she was polite the way you're polite to an aunt you don't see much. That was the thing that broke Reya a little more each week. Not tears. Not anger. Just this careful, coached politeness. This distance that Vikram was widening a little at a time.

"Hi, Mummy."

"Hi, my love." Reya got down on the floor with her. "Come, show me. What's on the tablet?"

For a while it was almost all right. Anaya showed her a game and laughed once, really laughed, the old laugh, and Reya memorised it, because she only had four hours and she had learned to store them. Then, in the careless way children hand you a knife, Anaya said, not looking up from the screen, "Daddy says you're taking him to a judge again because you're angry about money."

Reya's hands went still.

"Is that what Daddy said?"

"He said you're not well, and being not well makes people do things about money." Anaya frowned at the game. "He said I shouldn't worry, because he'll always look after me even when you can't." She looked up then, seven years old, trying to understand a thing far too big for her. "Are you not well, Mummy? You look okay to me."

And Reya, with a welfare officer three feet away writing notes, had one second to choose between defending herself to her own daughter and keeping her mouth shut.

"I'm okay, baby," she said softly. "I'm going to be okay. I promise." She did not say your father is a liar, though it was climbing up her throat. Every word she gave this child, Vikram would hear repeated back, and a fight through her daughter would only give him more proof of the angry, unwell woman. So she smiled, and asked about the game, and let Anaya believe, for one more week, that her mother might really be the sick one. It was the hardest thing she had ever done.

That night, alone in her one rented room, the doubt came for her, the way it always came at night.

Because what if the small thing was just that. Small, and nothing. What if she had traded four honest no's for one honest almost-nothing, and called it hope because she couldn't bear to have none. A fine. A joke in a corridor. Deshpande was right. Everyone was right. She was counting a rich man's rupees while he counted the days until he took her daughter to another city.

She had trusted a charming man once and lost her whole life. Now she was clinging to a cold one, and she wasn't even sure the cold one could do anything at all.

So on Friday, Reya did the one thing Nisha had told her not to do. She didn't argue, and she didn't confront anyone. She just followed. When Nisha left her office at eleven, walking fast with a slim folder under her arm, Reya followed three shops behind, telling herself she only wanted to see her lawyer do something, anything, that looked like fighting for her.

Nisha did not go to the courthouse. She did not go to a bank or a records office. She walked six minutes to a quiet café with a green awning, went inside, and sat down. Through the glass Reya watched a heavy, comfortable man in a very good watch stand to greet her. He smiled his endless smile, and shook her hand warmly.

It was Deshpande. Vikram's lawyer.

And Nisha, the one lawyer in the city who would touch her case, the one who had told her to trust her and let her handle it, sat down across from the enemy, and smiled back, and said something that made Deshpande laugh out loud. The two of them easy together, like people on the same side.