friday. 4:52 pm.
the flat smelled like three days of nobody cleaning it. priya stood in the doorway and catalogued the damage before she said a single word.
dal stain, old, gone brown on the carpet.
a laptop charger snaking across the floor like it had personal opinions about being unplugged.
a boy in duck pajamas horizontal on the sofa, one arm over his eyes, the trapdoor to whatever this family was hiding directly under him.
the red lehenga, still folded on the chair after — how long now. she didn't ask.
shubham opened the door wider. "priya—"
she walked past him. straight at the sofa.
gambhir lifted the arm off his eyes. looked up at a girl he had never met holding a duffel bag like it owed her money.
four seconds. neither of them blinked.
"you're gambhir."
"you're the sister."
"the flat's a mess."
"i offered to clean it. bhabhi said priorities."
"the dal's been there since when."
"tuesday. maybe wednesday. time is a construct right now."
"and the charger's still plugged in."
"i keep meaning to—"
"unplug it."
he unplugged it. immediately. without deciding to.
priya set her bag down. looked at him properly now — the pajamas, the stubble, the exact quality of a person who has been performing calm for other people since sunday.
"you're the one who forwarded it."
no anger in it. a fact, filed.
"i am never going to stop being that person," gambhir said. "just so you know. i've made peace with it. i'm the guy who sent the grenade to the family group."
"good. peace is efficient." she looked past him at the flat. "who's handling the elders' sleeping arrangement. who's hiding the ashtray before mama gets here. who's telling ma the fan doesn't work in this heat."
"...nobody?"
"then that's me and you. starting now." she was already opening the cabinet under the stove. "how much gas is left."
"enough," gambhir said.
"that's not an answer."
"...two days. maybe three if we're careful."
she made a mental note of it. visibly. the way she'd made a mental note of everything since she was eleven.
gambhir sat up properly for the first time since she'd walked in. looked at her the way a man looks at someone who has just done, in eleven seconds, what he has been failing to do since sunday.
"bhai," he said to shubham, without looking away from priya. "your sister is terrifying."
"she gets it from ma."
"can i say something," shubham tried.
"no," priya and gambhir said. together. without looking at him.
somewhere behind them, shubham realised two family fixers had just met, sized each other up, and formed a government he hadn't been consulted on.
"bhabhi's resting," gambhir added, quieter now. "she had a night."
"i know. i read the group chat." priya's jaw did something small. "i'll say hi. then bhai and i need five minutes."
she went to reshma first. sat on the arm of the sofa, said something too low for shubham to hear, got a tired half-smile back. reshma's head was bare, no scarf, and priya didn't flinch, not even for a blink. squeezed her hand once. didn't linger — priya never lingered on the thing that would actually break her.
then she looked at gambhir.
"distract her. i need my brother."
"copy that." gambhir was already turning, already loading a different face. "bhabhi. bhabhi. ma sent SEVENTEEN new forwards in the last hour, one of them is a haldi doodh recipe with background music, i need a co-pilot for this or i will not survive it alone—"
"always," reshma said, and shifted to make room on the sofa, and that was that.
5:10 pm. the kitchen.
priya shut the door most of the way. not all the way. enough.
shubham reached for the kettle out of habit. something to do with his hands.
"don't make chai," priya said. "you hover when you're avoiding something. bhabhi told me. you hover."
he put the kettle down.
"is she okay," priya said. "actually okay. i asked you that on tuesday. you didn't answer."
"i've been—"
"you didn't answer."
silence. the fan overhead did its usual half-effort turn.
"no," shubham said. finally. "she's not okay. she fainted last week. she's terrified of a doctor she's never met. she walked six hundred metres last night and had to stop and hold a wall. ma knows everything now and i'm—" his voice did something it hadn't done in front of priya since papa. "i'm so tired, priya. i don't know how to be the husband and the son and the — i don't know how to be anything right now."
he expected her to say something. the fixer thing. the sixteen-year-old thing.
she didn't.
she just stood there. arms crossed. not touching him. anchoring him by being solid and unmoved while he came apart three feet away, which was somehow worse than a hug and also exactly what he needed.
he cried.
not the movie kind. the ugly, silent, exhausted kind. shoulders doing the work, no sound, hand pressed flat against his own mouth like he could stuff it back in. his whole body doing the crying his voice wasn't allowed to.
she let him. counted, maybe, in her head. didn't rush it.
"i was ten," priya said. eventually. flat. not comforting-flat. fact-flat. "you were nineteen. you don't remember this because you were too busy becoming the provider, but i sat in a hospital corridor for six hours not knowing if papa was going to wake up, and nobody explained anything to me, and when he didn't wake up nobody explained that either. i know exactly what this feels like, zombie bhai. i've had a fifteen-year head start on you."
"are you okay," he said. rough voice, but he asked it back. first time in maybe a year he'd asked her that instead of the other way around.
priya's deadpan cracked for exactly one second.
"i've been lying to ankita for two months about why i keep leaving school early. told her it's board stress." she said it to the floor, not to him. "it's not board stress. i'm fine, bhai. ask me again never." beat. "anyway. this isn't about me."
it very obviously was, a little. he let her have it.
he wiped his face with his sleeve. didn't answer. couldn't.
"you don't have to be everything," she said. "you just have to be here on saturday. that's the whole job description."
"saturday." he laughed. wrong sound, half a sob still in it. "you don't know what's in saturday."
"i know ma's bringing a pressure cooker and knows the medicine costs. i know mama's coming for gambhir. that's enough to be going on with."
he didn't correct her.
that was the mistake.
for a second neither of them said anything. the fan turned. somewhere in the living room gambhir was doing a voice for one of ma's forwards, and reshma actually laughed — short, real, involuntary. both of them in the kitchen went still, listening, like it was proof of something working.
priya's eyes went to the counter. to his phone, screen still lit from whenever he'd last touched it, face-up next to the sugar tin.
she picked it up before he could stop her. not sneaky. just fast — the same speed she'd used on the gossip girls, on the ayushman bharat forms, on every problem she'd ever solved before anyone finished explaining it.
TechSolutions_USlast seen 11:58 pmno new messages
she scrolled up once. twice. read the last exchange properly — his half-sentence, then nothing. eleven days of messages before that, every four hours, like clockwork, like a machine that needed feeding. then it just stopped.
"shubham."
"give me that—"
"your only client's chat died at midnight and nobody's said a word since." she turned the screen so he could see it too, like he hadn't already memorised every pixel of it on the bridge. "i went through your mail this morning while you were asleep, looking for the azure hr number for a form. there's nothing from azure in there. not this month. not last month."
"priya—"
"you don't work at azure anymore." not a question this time. "do you."
he opened his mouth.
nothing came out that was a lie, and nothing came out that was the whole thing either, so nothing came out at all.
"how long," priya said. the kettle sat cold on the counter, exactly where he'd put it back down.
(Speaker: she didn't need a whiteboard for this one. some diagnoses don't require a medical degree, gambhir — just a sister who reads inboxes for a hobby. saturday's confession just moved itself up by one day, and nobody in that kitchen voted on it.)
Cliffhanger -> Priya knows. Twelve hours less runway than they had this morning. Zero income, one sister who doesn't bluff, and a Rajdhani still on schedule for Saturday. What does she do with it before Ma arrives?