I Was in Love With My Dead Brother’s Wife, and Every Evening in Colombo I Pretended I Wasn’t

The rice cooker clicked off at twenty to seven, and I was already at the window, pretending I was not listening for the gate.

This was my fourth year of pretending. I lived in the back room of our family house in Dehiwala, twenty minutes from the centre of Colombo when the traffic was kind, which it never was.

My brother Ruwan had built the upstairs rooms himself, one weekend at a time, before he died. His wife Sachini and their daughter lived up there now. I paid the electricity and the water.

She bought groceries from Keells on her way home. Nobody had ever written this arrangement down.

At ten past seven the gate scraped. Sachini came in with her work lanyard still around her neck and two plastic bags cutting red lines into her fingers. She worked the front desk at a dental clinic in Bambalapitiya, and she always smelled faintly of clove oil and bus.

Did you eat? she asked, as she did every night.

Not yet, I said. I had been ready for an hour.

She put the bags down and went straight for the Maliban cream crackers, eating three of them standing at the counter, looking at nothing. She was not hungry. She was just giving her hands a job.

I know this because I have watched her do it for four years, and I have never once said so.

Her daughter Senuri was at the table with a maths worksheet and a face like a closed door. She was nine. She had her father’s eyebrows, which made some evenings harder than others.

Uncle, is seven eights fifty-four? she asked.

Fifty-six, I said.

Mummy said fifty-four.

Mummy was tired, said Sachini, and she laughed. It was a short, surprised laugh, the kind that escapes before the person can stop it.

That laugh is the reason I am writing this.

People imagine that a thing like this starts with a look across a room or a hand that lingers. Mine started on an ordinary Wednesday, when I burned the dhal and she laughed at me from the doorway with her head tipped back.

I remember thinking: I have not heard that sound since the funeral. Then I thought: I want to hear it again. Then I spent four years making sure I could.

I am not a monster. I want that understood. I did not look at my brother’s wife and plot. I did the school pickups when her clinic ran late. I fixed the tap.

I sat with her on the stairs one night when she could not sleep, and we watched a video on her phone of Ruwan failing to park the van outside the house, cursing in two languages, and we laughed until she was crying and I was holding her shoulders, and then neither of us moved for a long time.

Nothing happened. I need people to know that, and I also need them to know it was not because nothing wanted to.

Three weeks ago, a recruiter in Dubai sent me

an email. A logistics firm in Jebel Ali needed someone with my experience. The salary was 6,800 dirhams a month.

In rupees, I would be earning more in a month than I currently earn in a quarter. I read it on my phone in the toilet at the office and sat there for ten minutes with my heart going.

I told my mother first. Amma was shelling peas on the back step, and she did not look up.

Go, she said. Go before it gets worse.

Before what gets worse?

She split a pod with her thumbnail. Dinesh. I am old, not blind.

We never spoke of it again.

She went on shelling peas. I stood there in the heat with the crows arguing over the neighbour’s mango tree, and I understood that my whole family had known for years and had decided, quietly, to let me be an idiot in peace.

This week the money started to make sense. I opened a spreadsheet and put in the rent I would pay in Dubai, the flight home twice a year, what I could send back each month.

Even with everything taken out, I could clear the loan on the house and put Senuri through a proper school. I could do more for them from far away than I could by sitting at the same dinner table, passing the fish curry and not touching a hand.

That was the honest argument. There was a dishonest one too. I could go because I could not stand to be this close and this far at once. I could go because I was tired of hurting myself every evening at ten past seven.

On Tuesday night I left the laptop open on the kitchen table. I would like to say it was an accident.

Sachini found it at midnight. I heard her come downstairs, and I heard her stop. Then the kettle went on, which is what she does when she is deciding something.

She sat across from me in the dark kitchen, both hands around a mug of Milo, and for a while we listened to the fridge hum.

Six thousand eight hundred, she said finally.

Dirhams.

I can count, Dinesh. She almost smiled. You should take it. It is good money.

I know.

Senuri will cry for a week. She turned the mug a quarter turn. I will cry for a week.

I waited. The clock above the stove said ten to one, and I could hear a PickMe tuk-tuk idling somewhere out on the road, its engine ticking.

But I want to say something, she said. And then you can go and I will never say it again.

Okay.

She looked at me, really looked, the way she had on the stairs that night. I have replayed her face a hundred times since, and I still cannot read it. It might have been love.

It might have been loneliness wearing love’s clothes. It might have been plain fear of being left with an empty house and a nine-year-old and a dead man’s eyebrows.

Stay, she said.

She did not say what she meant by it. She did not say as what. She stood, rinsed her mug, dried her hands on the cloth that hangs from the oven door, and went back upstairs, and I heard each step above my head until the bedroom door closed.

It is now almost three in the morning. The email from Dubai is open on my phone, and my thumb is over the button that says Accept offer. In the other window, a WhatsApp chat with her name at the top shows two grey ticks and nothing I have the courage to type.

If I go, I am a coward who ran from the one honest thing anyone has said to me in years. If I stay, I am a man who sits at his dead brother’s table and waits for a door to open that he has no right to knock on.

I have worked out both versions of myself, and I cannot stand either one.

The gate outside is quiet. Upstairs, a floorboard creaks, and I do not know if she is awake too.

Loving the wrong person does not feel like a mistake while you are doing it. It feels like the only thing in the house that is warm.