Load-shedding is when Sen-babu and I play. The lights go, the lane turns black and honest, and he carries his board to my landing and we set the pieces by candle. He is eighty, perhaps more. He plays black and wins the endgame every time, patient as rust.
He talks while he plays. Small confessions, growing. A partnership cheated, forty years back. Then a man cheated. Then, one close night while the moths killed themselves on the flame, a man drowned in the Hooghly, made to look like jumping. He owed me nothing, Sen-babu said, sliding his bishop. I owed him everything. That is the worse debt. He did not know he was saying it to a face he should have known, if the dead teach their sons anything, which they do not.
My father wore a white dhuti and could not swim. I was six. I have spent thirty years finding which flat the old cheat retired to, learning chess so I would have a reason to sit across from him in the dark, learning patience from the same river that taught him.
Check, he said tonight, pleased, and reached for the glass of nimbu-pani I pour him every load-shedding, that he drinks without thinking, that he has drunk a little more of each night for a month.
I let him finish the game. He won, as he likes to. Then the power came back, sudden and cruel, and he blinked at me in the hard light as if for the first time, and I watched him begin, at last, to understand the board.