# Sorrow The afternoon light was dying slowly through the windows of the old house. Samir sat in the drawing room, watching how the shadows crept across the floor like something alive, something patient. He had been sitting there for nearly two hours, perhaps longer—he had stopped counting time the way other men did. His mother would come downstairs soon. She always did at this hour. She would ask him if he had eaten, if he had slept well, if he needed anything. And he would answer her gently, as he always did, with words that meant nothing because there was nothing left in him to mean anything by. The house smelled of old wood and older memories. It was the smell of his childhood, of his father's tobacco, of his mother's lavender sachets placed in every drawer. It was the smell of time itself, he thought. Time had a smell—it smelled like this: faintly sweet, faintly bitter, faintly like something lost. He heard her footsteps on the stairs. They were slower now than they used to be. Everything about his mother had become slower, as if the weight of his grief had become her grief too, and it had pressed her down into the earth like a stone. "You're sitting in the dark again," she said. It was not a question. Samir did not turn to look at her. "The light was nice," he said. "I was watching it leave." She came and stood beside him, but she did not sit. She never sat anymore. It was as if she had forgotten how. "I made tea," she said. "You should have some. It will help." Nothing helps, Samir wanted to say. But he said instead, "Thank you, Amma." She placed her hand on his shoulder. Her hand was light—he could barely feel it—but it was there, and that was something. It was not much, but it was something, and in his life now, in this life that had become small and strange and full of nothing but the weight of one loss, something was all he had. "Riya called," his mother said. "From Delhi. She wanted to know how you were." Riya. His sister. His sister who had married and moved away, who had her own life now in a distant city, who was trying very hard to pretend that things could go on as they had before, that normalcy was still possible, that the world had not changed. "What did you tell her?" Samir asked. "That you were well. That you were resting. That you would call her soon." He nodded. He would not call her soon. He would not call her at all. What would he say? How could he explain to someone living in the brightness of a different city that here, in this house, in this room, there was a darkness so complete that it had almost become comfortable? That he was beginning to understand why people chose to stay in dark rooms, why they did not come out? The light was nearly gone now. Soon it would be evening, and then night, and then morning would come again with its false promises of newness. And he would sit here again, and his mother would worry, and Riya would call, and the world would turn, and nothing would change. "Amma," he said, finally turning to look at her. Her face was in shadow now, but he could see the lines around her eyes, the hollows in her cheeks. When had she become so thin? "Yes, beta?" "Do you think it gets better?" She did not answer at once. She stood there in the gathering darkness, and he could feel her struggling with an answer, searching for something true but not cruel, something honest but not unbearable. "I think," she said slowly, "that we learn to carry it differently. Not lighter. But differently. The way we learn to carry anything we must carry." He nodded, though he did not believe her. Or perhaps he believed her but found no comfort in it. What was the difference? The last of the light slipped away. In the darkness, they stood together—mother and son, two people bound by blood and by this new language of sorrow that they were learning to speak, slowly, word by word, in the silence between them. Outside, the evening was falling on the city, on the streets, on all the people moving through their lives as if the world had not irrevocably changed. But here, in this room, in this darkness, time had stopped. Or perhaps it had never stopped at all, and they were the ones who had stopped—frozen in amber like insects in a museum, preserved forever in the moment when everything became different, everything became impossible, and yet somehow, inexplicably, continued. His mother took her hand from his shoulder. "I will wait for you in the kitchen," she said. "When you want tea. Or anything else." "Thank you, Amma," he said. And she left him there in the dark, and he listened to her footsteps fade, and he was alone again with the sorrow that had become his companion, his weight, his breath—the only true thing left in a world of false light and false comfort. The night deepened. The house settled into its old sounds. And Samir sat in the darkness and waited for morning, which would come, as it always did, changing nothing, healing nothing, but coming all the same.