It was the kind of afternoon where the light made the kitchen feel underwater. Maya was at the table with her math homework spread out in front of her, and the window above the sink — the small one that faced the wall of the neighbor’s house and was therefore, by Maya’s reckoning, the most useless window in the world — was blue.
Not blue like sky. Blue like a swimming pool seen from underneath. Blue like the way her grandmother’s sari looked in old photographs. Blue, in a way windows weren’t supposed to be.
She blinked. The window stayed blue.
Maya got up slowly, the way you do when you don’t want to scare an animal, and walked to the sink. The blue wasn’t paint. It wasn’t a curtain. When she pressed her face close she could see through it — but what she saw on the other side was not the neighbor’s wall.
It was their kitchen.
It was their kitchen, but tomorrow.
⁂
She knew it was tomorrow because tomorrow was Saturday and on Saturdays her father made dosas, and through the blue window she could see her father at the stove, flipping a dosa, while her mother stood at the table holding a letter and crying in a way that was very quiet and very tired.
Maya had never seen her mother cry like that.
She stood at the sink for a long time. The light moved. The figures in the window did not change — her mother kept holding the letter, her father kept not turning around — as if the moment was a photograph someone had taken, very still, very blue.
She thought about the future the way some people think about weather. As something that arrived, and that you put on a coat for, and that you did not get to choose. She had never thought of it as something you could look at.
She wondered, then, if knowing was the same as deciding. If she walked away from the window now, would tomorrow still happen? Would the letter still come? Would her mother still cry the quiet, tired cry? Or did the looking make it real?
Maya thought about this for a while.
Then she did the thing she did not expect to do, which was: she picked up her math homework, walked into the living room, and sat down with her back to the kitchen. She did her math problems. She did them slowly, and she did not look up.
Saturday came anyway. The letter came anyway. Her mother cried, very quietly, very tired. Her father made dosas and didn’t turn around.
And Maya, sitting at the table, watching the both of them — she found, to her own surprise, that she had already decided what she would do. She had decided yesterday, with her back to the kitchen, doing math. She had decided that whatever the letter said, she would be the one to ask her mother about it first.
So she did.
And her mother, looking up, was so surprised that she laughed before she cried again, and pulled Maya close, and the kitchen, in the ordinary afternoon light, was not blue at all. It was just a kitchen. It was just a Saturday. It was just the small, hard, beautiful business of a family beginning to talk about a thing they had not yet known how to say.
Maya never saw the blue window again. She didn’t need to.
end