He tells everyone that I looked up once in that room in Deoria. I did not. I was looking at his slippers. They were new, far too new, the strap still stiff across the foot, and I understood that this man had bought slippers for this one afternoon. That is how I knew he was as frightened as I was. There were eleven people in my uncle's front room and only two of us saying nothing. My mausi pinched my arm so hard that I had to speak, and what I said, the first words I ever said to Ramesh Chandra Verma, were: the tea is getting cold.

He hums while his hands are working. It is not a song, there is no tune in it, only a low sound that comes out of him the moment a spanner is in his hand. For fifty years I have known from the back room how difficult a repair was, because the humming dropped lower. When Neha was very small she believed the bicycles were making the sound. I never corrected her. Some things a child should be allowed to believe for a while.

He tells the story of the bangles as if I made some great sacrifice. It was not like that. My mother gave me those bangles on my wedding day and with them she gave me one sentence: gold is for the bad day, not for the arm. In 1983 the bad day came. I went to the goldsmith alone, without telling him, and came home and put the money in the tin. When he counted the tin that night he understood, and he said nothing. He went out into the dug-up street and came back with a quarter kilo of jalebi. We had eaten rice and salt for two weeks, and this man buys jalebi. I asked him if he had gone mad. He said: today we eat jalebi, tomorrow we think. That is the whole of Ramesh, in one sentence, and I have been married to it for fifty years.

When Neha was two she would take her father's spanners out of the box and lay them on the floor in a line, smallest to largest, perfectly, and then look up at us as if to say: see. Ramesh said, she will be an engineer. I said, she will be a nuisance. We were both right, and I have never been so glad to lose an argument by half.

My mother died in 1991 and I never told her about the bangles. I was ashamed of having sold what she had given me. I am seventy-two now, and I think she would have said only: good, that is what they were for. I am saying it here because my grandson asked me, on this telephone that writes things down, what I regret. So. Ma, I sold your bangles, and it saved us, and I am sorry I never told you, and I am not sorry I did it.

That everyone talks now, inside this telephone. Neha sends a photograph of her bridge. Aarav asks me things that nobody has asked me in seventy years. Myra sent a little heart to the page about the jalebi. My whole life I fed people, and not one of them asked what I was thinking while I did it. Now they ask. It is late. But they ask.