Chapter 1: Buri Shuruaat (Bad Beginning)

Five minutes ago, it had been a normal Friday morning. Five minutes ago, Nandini Deshmukh had been standing at the front door with her keys in one hand and her jute bag in the other, ready to walk to the community kitchen for her morning shift, ready to spend four hours sorting dal packets and arguing with Kamala Tai about whether the rice should be basmati or kolam (it was always kolam, because basmati was for weddings and this was a foodbank, not a shaadi hall, but Kamala Tai believed that poor people deserved fragrant rice and who was Nandini to argue with that particular brand of moral certainty?).

Five minutes ago, she'd been a woman with a plan. Now she was a woman with a problem.

The problem was standing in her hallway in her pyjamas, and the problem's name was Leela.

"Baba's been thrown out."

Nandini's mouth formed the shape that mouths form when the brain has received information it cannot process — not an O exactly, more of an O that collapsed into a question mark, the kind of expression that actors practice for hours and real people achieve in a fraction of a second when their Friday morning detonates.

"He's been... what?"

"Arundhati has locked him out. Changed all the locks. He can't get back in."

"But it's his house. He bought it. His name is on the papers. How can she lock him out of his own house?"

Leela shrugged. The shrug of a twenty-six-year-old who has grown up watching her parents' marriage implode in slow motion and has developed the particular emotional shielding of a child who learned early that adult problems are not solvable by children, only survivable.

"She has, though. He called me at six this morning. He's sitting on a suitcase in the driveway."

"Sitting on a — " Nandini stopped. She was experiencing something she hadn't felt in years, something that tasted like Diwali chakli — crispy on the outside, satisfying in a way you don't want to admit, and gone before you can feel guilty about enjoying it. The feeling was: schadenfreude. Pure, unadulterated, delicious schadenfreude.

Chirag Joshi, her ex-husband of twenty years, the man who had once suggested she move to a hotel when he'd forced her out of their family home in Koregaon Park — Chirag Joshi was sitting on a suitcase in his own driveway because his girlfriend had locked him out. The irony was so thick you could spread it on a chapati.

She was so engrossed in the delicious mathematics of his predicament — karma plus time equals Arundhati's locks — that Leela's next question sailed past her like an auto-rickshaw in the wrong lane.

"I'd completely understand if you said no. I mean, he doesn't deserve any sympathy. He really doesn't. But he's got nowhere to go. He could stay at a hotel, I suppose—"

"A hotel, yes." Nandini was still performing internal calculations. Twenty years ago, Chirag had suggested a hotel. Rather smugly, as she recalled. With the particular smugness of a man who believes he is being generous when he is actually being cruel.

"But the thing is, I'd have to go with him. To the hotel. Because I'm worried he might—"

This was when Nandini stopped calculating and started listening. Something in Leela's voice — a crack, a hesitation, the sound of a daughter who is scared for her father even though her father doesn't deserve her fear — pulled Nandini out of her schadenfreude and into the present.

"Worried he might what?"

"Do something stupid. He's been... different lately. Really down. Not eating. Drinking too much. And now this."

The schadenfreude cooled. Not disappeared — Nandini was honest enough to admit it was still there, circling like a vulture that has spotted carrion but is waiting for the appropriate moment to land — but it cooled, because Leela's face was doing the thing. The thing where her eyes went wide and her jaw tightened and she looked, for a fleeting second, like the eight-year-old who had stood in the hallway of the Koregaon Park house and watched her mother pack a suitcase and not understood why.

"Can't he go to his parents? Joshi Kaku and Kaka will take him in."

"He won't go to them. You know what they're like."

Nandini knew. Chirag's parents were the kind of people who measured love in conditions and approval in increments. They would take him in, but they would also take the opportunity to remind him that they'd warned him about Arundhati, about the divorce, about everything, and Chirag — whatever his many, many faults — had always been a man who would rather sleep on a suitcase than endure an I-told-you-so from his mother. In this, and possibly only in this, Nandini could relate.

Leela was already turning toward the stairs. "Can I use your small trolley bag for my things?"

"No, wait." The words came out before Nandini could stop them. Before the rational part of her brain — the part that had spent twenty years building a fortress of righteous anger, brick by careful brick, mortared with every slight and sealed with every memory of what Chirag Joshi had done to her — could intervene. "It's silly when we've got the room. He can stay here. For a while anyway. Until Vivek comes back from Bangalore."

The words hung in the air like dhoop smoke — visible, fragrant, impossible to take back.

This was a bad idea. The worst of ideas. Nandini knew this with the certainty of a woman who had survived twenty years of post-divorce warfare and had learned to trust her instincts the way a sailor trusts a barometer. Every instinct she had was saying: storm coming. Battens down. Seal the hatches. Do not, under any circumstances, let this man back into your house.

But she had said it. And Leela's face — the relief, the gratitude, the particular softness of a daughter who has just been shown that her mother is bigger than her grudges — had sealed it.

She chewed on her thumbnail. It was an unappealing habit that she wasn't normally guilty of — Nandini Deshmukh was not a nail-biter; she was a list-maker, a problem-solver, a woman who channelled stress into action rather than destruction — but suddenly she was biting her nails like a Class 10 student before board exams. Bad ideas bring bad consequences, and if assaulting her nails was the worst of it, she'd consider herself lucky. But she wasn't that naive. There was absolutely no way she was getting off that lightly.

What had she been thinking? What kind of insane, foolish, do-good sentiment had driven her to agree? The last thing she wanted in her life was her ex-husband. Correction: the last thing she wanted in her life at any time, ever, in any universe, including the ones where karma didn't exist and Arundhati hadn't installed bank-vault-grade locks, was her ex-husband. And yet. And yet here she was, about to let him stay under the same roof.

Not only that — she was going to collect him. Drive to Koregaon Park, pick him up off his suitcase, and bring him back here to Sadashiv Peth, because apparently Arundhati had also locked him out of his car. The car that Chirag had paid for. The car with his name on the RC book. Locked out of his house, locked out of his car, sitting on a suitcase in his own driveway like a character in a Marathi natak who has been written by a playwright with a grudge and a sense of irony.

Leela emerged fully dressed, pulling on her Kolhapuri chappals. "Are you sure about this, Aai? It's not too late to back out."

If only that were true. Sadly, it had been too late the minute Leela had said the words "Baba's been thrown out." In theory, Nandini could have said no. But the thought of Leela living in a hotel room with the man who could twist and turn anything and anyone to his advantage — the man who had once convinced Nandini that black was white and rain was sunshine and their marriage was fine when it was, in fact, on fire — was too much to contemplate. She'd agreed because she'd had no alternative. And because she'd been trying to prove to her daughter that, as a grown woman of fifty-three, she was above all the things she should be above.

Even if she wasn't.

So that was it. Fate sealed. She added a bad feeling to a bad idea and bad consequences. Bad things were ganging up on her like auto-rickshaws at Swargate — there was always another one, and it was always closer than you thought.

"Aai?"

"Hmm?"

"I said, are you sure?"

"Yes. I'm sure." She wasn't sure. She was the opposite of sure. She was the dictionary definition of unsure, standing in her own hallway in her house slippers, about to drive to Koregaon Park to pick up the man she'd spent two decades hating, because her daughter had asked and because a mother's love is the only force in the universe strong enough to override a woman's very justified grudge.

Through the window she saw Farhan coming back from his morning walk. He'd taken up walking six months ago — not running, because Farhan at sixty-one had declared running to be "a young man's punishment" — and he returned every morning looking like a man who had been mildly inconvenienced by fresh air. His kurta was damp at the collar. His sandals were dusty. He was stretching one calf against the compound wall with the expression of someone who was performing a favour for his body that his body had not requested.

She had to tell him. It was only right, seeing as he was the main man in her life, even if they lived in neighbouring houses rather than together in the same one. She caught him while he was still on the street, half-stretched, one hand on the wall.

"Is this really something you want to do?" he said, once she'd spilled the details. His voice was careful — the voice of a man who has learned that there are questions you ask your partner to understand and questions you ask to warn, and this was both.

"No, it isn't. But I feel like I'd be letting Leela down if I said no. It'll only be for a few days. A week at the most. I might have to spend more time at your place, though. Sorry."

"So there are some benefits to him being here, then?" He kissed her cheek, his skin still clammy from the walk, leaving a damp patch that smelled of Cinthol soap and morning.

Nandini wiped her face. "Eww. Sweaty."

"Just think of the good all this walking is doing me." His eyes crinkled — the crinkle that was either amusement or concern and was usually both. "Do you want me to come over when you get back?"

"Yes, please. He'll be slightly less unpleasant if you're around."

She noticed Leela waiting on the front step. Hopefully she hadn't heard. Leela knew what Chirag was like — she'd grown up in the crossfire — so there was no need to worry on that count. But Nandini didn't want her daughter to hear that she'd only agreed for her sake. Then again, Leela wasn't stupid. She'd probably worked that out before she'd even come downstairs.

They were in the car — the Maruti Swift, blue, seven years old, the car that Nandini had bought with her own money after the divorce, the car that represented every rupee of independence she'd clawed back from the wreckage of her marriage — and on their way before Leela spoke.

"I know this is going to be really hard for you, Aai. I don't suppose it helps, but I'm properly dreading it."

"It does help. Thank you, baby. We'll get through it if we stick together."

"Is that code for, if we don't let him manipulate us?"

Nandini didn't answer. Instead: "And we've got Farhan next door. We can always escape to his if it gets too much."

"Farhan Uncle is so sweet."

Sweet? Nandini could think of many words to describe Farhan Shaikh — talented, patient, occasionally infuriating, capable of staring at a wall for forty minutes and calling it "thinking" — but sweet was not among them. Although in Leela's eyes, any man over sixty who didn't shout, drink excessively, or make his wife cry was automatically classified as sweet. The bar was underground.

Leela pulled out her phone. "Just letting Baba know we're almost there." She swiped, tapped, paused. "Do you think you and Farhan Uncle will get married sometime?"

Nandini nearly missed the signal at Karve Road. She slammed the brake and they both jerked forward, the seatbelt catching, the car behind honking with the righteous fury of a Pune driver who has been mildly delayed.

"I have no idea. It's not something we talk about. Or even think about."

"Really? We talk about it sometimes."

"We? Who's we?"

"Me and Vivek. We think Farhan Uncle would be a good step-father. I mean, he basically is already. Kiran thinks so too."

"You've discussed this with Kiran?"

"It comes up. On WhatsApp."

Kiran — Nandini's self-proclaimed daughter-from-another-mother, her former housemate, the market girl turned literature student who was currently somewhere in Southeast Asia discovering herself — was apparently still registering her views on Nandini and Farhan's relationship status from across international borders.

"I'd have thought you'd have more interesting things to discuss."

"We do. But there's a lull occasionally."

"I see. Nice to know we're available whenever there's a lull."

The traffic was lighter than usual — it was that brief morning window between the school rush and the office rush when Pune briefly pretends to be a civilised city — and they reached Koregaon Park in reasonable time.

"Almost at the crime scene," Nandini said, attempting levity. "Brace yourself."

But it was in vain. The humour was draining from both of them as they turned into Chirag's lane — the tree-lined lane with the German Bakery at the corner and the yoga studio opposite, the lane where Chirag had bought a flat five years ago with Arundhati's encouragement and his own money, the lane that represented the second act of his life, the act that was now, apparently, over.

By the time they reached his building, the humour was completely gone.

"Oh my God," Leela said.

Nandini couldn't blame her. Because in the middle of the driveway, sitting on top of an upturned VIP suitcase, surrounded by plastic bags and cardboard boxes, wearing yesterday's clothes and the expression of a man who has been evicted from his own life and hasn't yet decided whether to be angry or ashamed, was Chirag Joshi.

He looked terrible. He looked like a man who had slept badly and eaten worse and drunk too much and sat on a suitcase for an hour and a half waiting for rescue. His hair — once his vanity, the thick black hair that he'd maintained with coconut oil and denial well into his fifties — was unwashed and sticking up at angles that suggested either despair or a strong wind. His shirt was untucked. One chappal was broken.

Nandini parked. She did not get out. She sat behind the wheel and looked at the man she'd once married, the man she'd once loved with the consuming, all-destroying love of a twenty-two-year-old Marathi girl who believed that marriage was forever and husbands were trustworthy and love was enough. She looked at him sitting on his suitcase with his broken chappal and his unwashed hair, and she felt — what?

Not satisfaction. She'd expected satisfaction, had been looking forward to it the way you look forward to the last episode of a show where the villain finally gets what's coming. But satisfaction wasn't what arrived. What arrived was something older, something more complicated, something that tasted like cold chai — still recognisable but not what you wanted.

Pity. She felt pity. And she hated herself for it, because Chirag Joshi did not deserve her pity. He deserved his suitcase and his broken chappal and his locked-out car and every single consequence of every single decision he'd ever made. But pity doesn't care about deserving. Pity just arrives, uninvited, like a relative during festival season, and sits in your living room and refuses to leave.

Leela was out of the car before Nandini could stop her, marching toward the building entrance with the particular determination of a daughter on a mission. She tried the main door — locked. She tried the intercom — no answer. She banged on the door with her fist.

"Open up, Arundhati."

Nothing.

She banged harder. "I said open up."

The letterbox flap lifted. A piece of paper slid out, folded once, and landed on the step. Leela picked it up, read it, and tutted — the tut of a generation that has been raised on confrontation and finds passive-aggression personally offensive.

"What does it say?" Chirag had risen from his suitcase and was standing behind Leela, peering over her shoulder with the posture of a man who has lost control of his own narrative.

"'Go away or I'll call the police.'" Leela bent down and shouted through the letterbox: "You've literally stolen my father's flat, so I don't think you're in a position to threaten anyone."

"I'll file a domestic abuse complaint!" Arundhati's voice came through the letterbox — tinny, furious, and slightly muffled, as if she was shouting from behind a barricade, which she probably was.

Leela stood up and looked at Chirag. Her eyes were wide — the wrong kind of wide. The kind that says: is this true?

"That's rubbish," Chirag said quickly. "Complete rubbish. If anything, it's the other way round." He tried to laugh. The laugh failed — it came out as a cough, or possibly a sob, or possibly just the sound of a man who has run out of ways to explain himself.

Nandini was at his side. She'd gotten out of the car without deciding to, the way your body sometimes makes decisions your brain hasn't authorised. "She's not going to let you in. We might as well load up the car."

She pulled Leela away gently. "Come on. We'll figure it out when we're home."

They filled the boot of the Swift with Chirag's possessions — three suitcases, two cardboard boxes (labelled in Arundhati's handwriting: CHIRAG'S THINGS and MORE OF CHIRAG'S THINGS, which had the energy of a woman who had been planning this with the same organisational skill she apparently lacked for grocery lists), a laptop bag, and a plastic bag containing what appeared to be shoes and a framed photograph.

Leela opened the front passenger door. "You okay in the back, Baba?" The narrowed eyes dared him to object.

Chirag took the hint. He mumbled agreement and folded himself into the back seat of the Maruti Swift, between a box of his clothes and a bag of his shoes, the cramped posture of a man who has gone from a three-BHK flat in Koregaon Park to the backseat of his ex-wife's car in the space of one morning.

As they drove away, Nandini saw him take one last look at the building. His building. His flat. His five years of pretending that Arundhati was a reasonable person and that the second act of his life was going to be better than the first.

She wanted to feel victorious. She tried to feel victorious. The score, after all, was now even: twenty years ago, he'd forced her out. Today, he was being driven back in — to her house, her territory, her terms.

But victory wasn't what she felt. What she felt was the particular heaviness of a woman who has just made a decision that she knows, with the bone-deep certainty of a Pune matriarch who has seen everything and trusted nothing, is going to change everything.

The car turned onto Sadashiv Peth Road. Chirag was silent in the back. Leela was texting Vivek. Nandini drove. The sun was doing what Pune sun does in October — arriving late, burning bright, pretending it hadn't kept everyone waiting.

A bad beginning. The worst of beginnings. But the beginning, she'd later understand, of something she hadn't expected: the long, slow, painful, necessary work of forgiveness.

She just didn't know it yet.