Two Different Decades

Suman made the decision she had not been able to make on the whole drive over, and she made it the way her son made everything: by doing the true thing because the false thing had run out.

She took the small grey notebook out of her bag and put it on the desk between them.

The room went very still.

“He took it to keep it safe,” Suman said. “He saw it open on your desk and he thought someone would read it. So he put it in his bag to protect it. He is seven, so he put it next to his report card, and it came home, and I opened it thinking it was yours to me, the note, the school note.” She made herself keep going, past the place where she would normally have stopped and smoothed it over. “And then I saw it was you. And I kept reading. I read all of it. I read it twice. I had no right, and I did it anyway, and I am not going to sit here and pretend I didn’t, because my son would know, and he would ask me why, and I would not have a good answer, and I am tired of not having good answers for that boy.”

Ms. Dhillon did not move. Her whole self was on the desk in a grey cover, and it had been read, by the one parent she had put last out of a fear she now, finally, understood.

“Which parts,” she said. Very quietly.

“The ironing,” said Suman.

And that was all she had to say, because Ms. Dhillon’s face did the rest, and Suman’s face answered it, and the two of them sat in the little pool of desk light, the teacher who had ironed herself smooth and the mother who was still ironing, one wrinkle a day, forever, and neither of them said the other thing, the whole thing, because it did not need saying. It was the same thing. It had always been the same thing. It had just been standing in two different decades.

“My mother kept a front room for guests,” said Ms. Dhillon, finally, “who never…”

“Who never came,” said Suman. “Yes. I have that room. It is very clean.”

They almost smiled. It was not quite a smile. It was the thing that stands where a smile goes when the smile would cost too much.

“I don’t know how to teach him,” Ms. Dhillon said. “That’s the truth. I know how to teach the others. I teach them to sit still and hand things in on time and become smooth, because that’s what I know, that’s what I am, I’m the smoothest person in this building.” She looked at the notebook, at her own handwriting. “And every day he comes in un-smooth, and asks me why, and I don’t have a single answer that isn’t just the ironing talking. He’s going to get hurt. Boys like that get hurt. I want to protect him and the only tool I have is the thing that would ruin him.”

“I know,” said Suman. “I iron his clothes every morning so the town can’t see us. And he goes out and tells the town everything anyway, in a pressed shirt.” She let out a breath that had a laugh somewhere far down inside it. “We are doing the same job, you and I. We are both standing in front of that boy with an iron, and we are both, thank God, too slow to catch him.”

Ms. Dhillon laughed. It surprised her. It was the first honest sound she had made across that desk in a year of desks.

They talked for a while after that, not about marks. Two women who had made themselves small and neat and safe in a cold country, discovering, one small chair apart, that they had each spent years believing they were the only one who had done it.

At the end Suman stood, and buttoned the coat she had never taken off, though she buttoned it more slowly than she had come in.

“He’ll want the notebook back for you,” she said. “He’s very proud of guarding it. He doesn’t know he failed. Please don’t tell him he failed. He’s been trying so hard to be careful lately. It’s new for him, and it’s sweet, and I’d rather not spoil it.”

“I won’t,” said Ms. Dhillon. “Tell him he did the whole job.”

Suman stopped, her hand on the door. “That’s what his father says.”

“His father’s right, then.”

In the hall, Kabir was still sitting, still not reading, still touching nothing, a boy holding perfectly still in the exact centre of a thing he had set in motion and would never be told about.

“Are you finished fighting?” he asked.

“We weren’t fighting,” said Suman.

“You were in there a long time. That’s usually fighting.”

“Sometimes,” said his mother, taking his hand, “it takes a long time not to fight.” And she led him out into the cold and the dark and the parking lot, past the window of the room where a young woman sat alone with her whole self returned to her, reading, for the first time, what she had written, as though someone else had written it, and finding that she could bear it after all.