Family

The right moment kept not arriving.

Her father had been making chai since six-thirty — a twenty-minute process involving the exact pressure on the ginger, the particular order of adding milk, a routine so unchanged in thirty years that Nandini could have done it with her eyes closed. She sat at the dining table with her phone face-down and watched him from the kitchen doorway and thought: not yet, not now, let him finish the chai first.

The tea had gone a little cold before Saket finally started talking.

He had been quiet for a while — the particular kind of quiet that his wife Arti recognised, the kind that meant something was sitting just below the surface, deciding whether to come up. Mia was on the floor with her drawing book, not really drawing, just waiting. She was ten and she had learned that when her father got this look, the story that followed was usually worth waiting for.