“She has a night shift…. Why don’t you come home? ..... Say something romantic….” His fifteen-year-old daughter overheard his conversation. She wondered whose call was so important to her father that he had left immediately for the roof in the middle of helping her with her calculus exercises. She had followed him secretly to the roof.  She tried to hide and was listening to the conversation his father was having for a little longer when she heard footsteps approaching. She lay low, afraid and leaning against the ladder, with her eyes closed until she felt something. She opened her eyes to find her father’s arm around her shoulder. Her father was saying, “Sanu, why did you come up here? Be careful on the stairs, will you? They’re slippery at this time of the year.” Sanu was agitated. Her father just a little while ago had been on the phone repeating the word ‘romantic’ over and over again to someone Sanu didn’t know and now, he was playing so cool. “I know right, Father? I’m not a kid anymore,” she shot back. Just then, small raindrops started hitting her and she buried her face into her palms.

Sanu’s mother worked as a senior nurse in a hospital 10 kilometres from home. And the worst part was that she usually had night shifts. Sanu missed her mother every night. No matter how tall we get, how fat we become or how old we grow, having a mother’s warmth beside one is the most wonderful thing, ever. That night, Sanu couldn’t sleep. She missed her mother more than she usually did. She looked at the watch her father had gifted her on her fourteenth birthday; 12:39 am, it read. Then, she heard a knock on the main door. “At this hour of night?” Sanu thought. Her parents’ room’s door squeaked open. Her father, she could see, was opening the main door to let someone enter. Sanu couldn’t exactly make out who the person was, but the jingling of bangles made it obvious to her that it was a woman. “Oh, it must be mother”, Sanu thought, happily. She

woke up, only to hear a voice

say, “Is your daughter asleep?” And of course it wasn’t her mother’s voice.

Sanu trembled. She pulled the blanket over her eyes and listened as Father led the woman-she-didn’t-know into the bedroom. Sanu may have been young, but she was intelligent and mature enough to know this wasn’t right. She could tell her father was making a mistake. She could tell that the woman could be a threat to her family. She closed her eyes to try to remember her beautiful mother and somehow fell asleep. She woke up in the morning and to find her father preparing breakfast in the kitchen, alone. “Where’s mother?” she asked immediately. “She’s even working in the morning today. She said she’ll be home this afternoon.” She looked around but the lady from last night was already gone.

 She waited the whole morning for her father to say something about the woman he had led inside their house the night before. She felt she ought to know who came to her parents’ bedroom when her mother wasn’t at home, and at that hour of night too! But her father didn’t utter a word. At school, she wouldn’t concentrate. Actually, she couldn’t! She returned home to find her mother sitting and watching some news on television. She hugged her mother so tight that it startled her and she said, “Are you okay?” Sanu nodded her head in response.

After that day, Sanu’s father would head for the roof more and more often and talk on his phone, for like couple of hours, to the woman, obviously. Since her mother had night shifts regularly these days he had grown more irresponsible. He wouldn’t help her with her homework, and she nearly failed calculus. All of these things added more worries to Sanu’s life.

She decided she couldn’t take this anymore. Her father had responsibilities and he could not run away from them like a child. “He has no right to destroy our lives and build his with some whore out there,” she thought.

The next morning, the news headlines read:

“A suicide or a murder?”

“Did the MD of Bhandari Enterprises jump off his four-storeyed apartment?”

“A cliff would have been better,” said a Mr Shrestha.

Sanu sat on a hospital bed beside her mother: her face was blue, and without reaction, her eyes dim, without light. She tried to ignore the media personnel

and the reporters around her bed pestering her with hundreds of questions.

“Did you know your father was about to commit a suicide?”

“Was there anybody else in the house except you and your father when this happened?”

“Where were you when your father jumped off the roof?”

“Did anyone push him from the roof?”

“Stupid reporters,” she thought. But she didn’t say anything.

She remembered the conversation she had secretly heard from her parents’ room the night the woman had come to their house.

“You must kill her.”

“Are you out of your mind? Wouldn’t divorce be easy?”

“What if she keeps on reaching out to you after you get separated? I couldn’t bear that.”

“So, what do you want me to do? You want me to be a murderer? A wife murderer?”

“Yes! Won’t you do that for me? For us?”

Nobody had spoken. Silence had prevailed. Sanu had pressed her ears to the door but could hear nothing. She had gone back to her bed, fearing for her mother. She loved her mother and couldn’t bear anything happening to her.

And today in her hospital bed, Sanu closed her eyes and pictured the night she and her father had had that discussion on the rooftop. The night her father died. She heard herself saying, “I’ll kill you before you lay hands on my mother. How dare you cheat on such a beautiful wife for some stupid woman you met at the bar or somewhere else?” Her brain pictured her father begging for mercy and falling off the roof straight to the ground, his cell phone falling quicker than him. She hated her father’s cell phone more than she hated him.

When she opened her eyes, she found the reporter’s eyes staring at her and anticipating an answer from her. But she wouldn’t speak. Instead, she looked at both of her hands—they had pushed her father off the roof, and she thought, “You’ve done quite a pretty job.” The watch her father had gifted her lay on a small table beside her bed. It read: 12:39 pm.