A Breath of Fresh Air Read Online Free

of chili powder, a dash of fenugreek seeds, and some oil to the raw mangoes and mixed them together with my hand. I opened the gourds carefully to put the stuffing inside.
    “Is Komal still at home?” I asked, because I couldn’t hear the television in the drawing room. Komal always turned on the television, which she called her “only true companion.”
    “She left for Mala’s house,” Sandeep said.
    Mala was our neighbor. Her husband was a salesman and he often went out of town. Komal spent most of her evenings and Sundays with Mala when Mala’s husband was away. It was how it worked. Widows and housewives gossiped to pass the time: one to forget she didn’t have a husband and the other to remember she had one even though he was hardly around.
    “Komal’s giving you a hard time, isn’t she?”
    I shook my head. I didn’t want him to feel guilty for being a good older brother.
    “It’s just a bad day.” I liberally poured peanut oil on a flat cooking pan, which used to be nonstick a long time ago.
    “Something happened at school?” Sandeep asked.
    I didn’t know what to say, or even if I should say anything. I didn’t like having secrets from Sandeep. He was my husband, but that was a secondary title. He was my friend first. When the oil sizzled, I carefully added three gourds, one after the other, to the frying pan, all the while knowing that Sandeep was waiting for a response. He was attuned to me; he knew something was wrong and I did owe him an explanation.
    “I met Prakash today.”
    The words clashed with the air around us with the same sizzle as the gourds when they were added to the hot oil. I had to jerk my hand away as the oil splattered a little.
    It was not enough of an explanation. One didn’t say something like that without something else bolstering it. It was like serving plain rice without curry for dinner.
    I still couldn’t face Sandeep; I didn’t want to see what he was thinking. Sandeep had never told me how he felt about Prakash, even though I asked him numerous times. I told him what had happened in Bhopal, in my previous marriage, and he had listened sympathetically, but he hadn’t passed judgment on Prakash. That was another thing I loved about Sandeep; he never came to a conclusion without knowing all the facts. He only knew my side of the story, he told me, and even though he was sorry about what happened, he couldn’t think of Prakash as the villain. I remember him telling me that after what I had been through, I had to have the desire to blame someone. He understood that and hoped I would not give in to it. Sometimes life just took painful, unexpected turns and mortals had to accept them.
    “He is posted to the Defense Staff College at Wellington,” I added, as I rolled the gourds in the frying pan with a metal spatula. “I met him at the market . . . with his wife.”
    I didn’t hear Sandeep move, so I was surprised when I felt his hand on my shoulder. He turned me around to look into my eyes. I escaped his gaze, staring at the rim of his brown plastic glasses.
    “Is something wrong?” he asked calmly, as if I owed my turbulent emotions to more than seeing Prakash.
    “I don’t know,” I said honestly.
    He smiled and kissed me on the forehead. I think he was about to say something more but there was a noise from our son’s room. Sandeep touched my cheek and left to check on Amar.
    I washed some rice and put it along with some water into the small pressure cooker. I put the cooker on the gas stove and brought out yesterday’s dal from the fridge. I heated it on midflame on the stove and tried to make sense of what I was feeling.
    Sandeep had asked if something was wrong, and something was. I just didn’t know what. It could be several things, I decided. I could be disturbed because Prakash was married, or that he didn’t want to introduce me to his wife, or that Sandeep didn’t seem to be shaken at all by my news.
    There were times when I wished I could say or