There was a crack in the corner of the house. It’s length matched a forearm at this point, deep enough to show the mud bricks underneath. It wound it’s way up under one of the bedroom windows, a sorry sight from the road. Kshitij, a dutiful nephew in law, offered to patch it for months.
He was denied.
“Uddyam will need something to do when he gets back.”
Those months lazed by, in the procession that Mina was well acquainted with, filled with details unimportant to the growing crag in the wall. The fields were planted, and the heat rose. The monsoon would come.
June 6th he was at the door. A man tired and old, finally finished with the long trip home on train and bus.
“You have work to do.”
The next morning the still-tired man went down to the river; not too long a walk, but one taken in blistering heat. He gathered clay-thick mud from the banks. As the evening closed, the first layer was on, the bricks again hidden, but the gap still visible. It would need a week to dry.
He slept like a dead man the second day. He made it to the couch the third and fourth, sipping tea as her silk Loom whirled. He let himself sweat.
The fifth day he sat out under the shade, sheltered from the briefest of drizzles. He greeted his nieces and nephew as they came home from their final day of school before break. They told him about some tales gleaned from the previous year. His appetite started to return, beyond the water he guzzled.
The sixth day he moved the couch. Now, with the door opened, he could stare over the road into the fields beyond. There was a rain – long, but light.
The seventh day he went to get into the river, gathered clay-thick mud from the banks. Strode back to the house, thunder in the distance.
Her husband appeared in the door frame, no lightning at his back, but the rolls of thunder getting closer. Bear and barrel-chested, drying clay up to his elbows, he stared at his wife on the couch, nursing her tea.
“The wall is done. Now I’m going to pop you like bubble wrap.”
Her smile widened, greedily, ready to find out just what he had thought up over the past months.
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