My heart tightened.
“Our house?”
“Yes. I never sold it.”
I stared at him.
I had thought the house was gone. Sold after I left for college. Buried under apartments or shops.
“It is still there?”
“Locked. Maintained by a caretaker. I could not live in it. Could not sell it.”
He looked at Kaveri.
“Your room is still there too.”
Kaveri covered her mouth.
Her room.
Small, near the kitchen, with one window facing the tulsi plant.
I used to sneak in there after nightmares.
She would pretend to scold me, then make space on her thin mattress.
Papa pushed the envelope toward me.
“I have transferred the house to your name.”
I did not touch it.
“Why?”
“Because your mother wanted it to be yours. And because if you allow it, I want part of it to become what it should have been after she died.”
“What?”
He looked at Kaveri again.
“A place where women like her are not thrown out when families finish using their love.”
The room went utterly still.
Kaveri whispered, “Sir…”
“I know,” he said. “It does not repair what I did. Nothing does.”
I looked at the red sweater.
At the letters.
At Kaveri’s cracked hands.
At my father’s bent shoulders.
At the investors who had come to discuss expansion and were now watching a different kind of foundation being laid.
For years, I had built a company because I thought success would fill the room where childhood loss lived.
It had not.
But perhaps it could open the door.
I picked up the envelope.
“We will call it Molu House,” I said.
Kaveri gasped softly.
My father began to cry.
I had never seen him cry.
Not at Maa’s funeral.
Not when I left home.
Not even when I stopped calling.
Now he cried because a name from my childhood had survived all the adults who failed it.
Kaveri shook her head through tears.
“No, no. Too much.”
I held her hand.
