What were you doing? Why are you looking away? What are you thinking? In the days after the funeral, she feels her children’s eyes dog her every step, every thought. It is unnerving, this constant scrutiny. Meera has felt near invisible all these years; an apparition who glided through the house and their lives, cooking, cleaning, sorting laundry and helping with the children’s home projects. She, who in her head told herself off for being such a doormat, there and not there, doesn’t enjoy the consciousness they now endow her with. Questions. Puzzlement. Reproof. Curiosity. Fear. Meera is stung by the forked tongue of each glance. When she leaves home, it asks, where are you going? When she returns, she is greeted with, where were you? When the phone rings, it demands, what is it about? When she smiles, it queries, why are you smiling? When she lets her features settle into a mask, it nags, what are you thinking of? They, she notices, never use the word ‘who’! To accept the possibility of a who in her life would be closing the door on their father, they think.
