Equal

A year or two ago she had begun telling her son the things she used to tell her husband. Unlike her husband her son looks her in the eye when she is telling him things, and when he finds something she has said funny or interesting - an exchange at the shop or with the slow-motion watchman downstairs that she had waited to tell her family about - he smiles and laughs readily, his eyes locking with hers.

He is all of twelve years old, and untouched by the prejudices that never leave his father (not after making friends with the cosmopolitan, successful parent-couples at the boy's school; not after sitting down with her to watch snatches of the new Indian-English DVDs of Konkona Sen or Rahul Bose or Irrfan Khan that she brings home now and then, where the couples have lives in cities like theirs and they have balanced back-and-forth arguments). His prejudices don't leave him because his prejudices were bred - she sees this when she sees his family, when she sees her own family. But seeing doesn't make it hurt any less. Her son listens to her with interest when she tells him about catching up with her schoolfriend on the phone last night, then maintains his gaze as he tells her about who is on top in the IPL or the English Premier League. In doing so he treats her as a companion, an equal in a way that her husband never has, never did right from the beginning.

When the women in the building complain about "young boys and girls simply hanging around together", about how they sit in the coffee joints and stay back at class saying they are doing project-work and group-study but "who knows what they are really upto", she listens quietly - just as she does when her husband comes home some evenings and makes declarations about this or that. When her son prefers HBO and Friends to his father's fleeting exhortations to watch "good Indian programs", she does not mind, because in the HBO movies even though there are bedroom scenes unsuitable for children the man and woman always look each other in the eye, and the woman's voice when she is talking to the man is as steady and as confident as when the man talks to the woman. And when the apartment-ladies start substituting their own growing-up children for the ones they see mixing at the tables of Coffee Day - and that is where such discussions always lead - she thinks of her own son, in a few short years becoming old enough to be part of the groups of "boys and girls simply hanging around together": she pictures him at a table sitting with a group of soon-to-be adults, and when a girl is saying something he will look her in the eye and listen to her just as he does with his mother at home. Then she pictures him older (how will these pre-teen features, this innocence and softness play out on his face when it sets?), at a friend's house or office cafeteria meeting a young woman with whom he will discuss his days and dreams just as he would with any of his male friends.

From across the table he is telling them now about someone nicknamed Kaka, "the biggest transfer fee Ma in football history!" She glances at her husband - he woke up early to watch the World Cup football semifinals two years ago - but he is staring out the balcony sipping his tea. She turns back to her son as he continues telling them the football news, looks him in the eye, and hopes.