Page 29 of Mine before Dawn
Secrets never stayed buried in small towns.
They managed to slide beneath doors and seep through cracked windows. They travelled over garden fences and in knowing glances exchanged across shop counters.
By mutual agreement, James and Asha valiantly tried to pretend everything was the same. That was perhaps what doomed them in the end.
Because before, there had already been something between them—a tension which was almost palpable. James had never hidden the way he watched her.
The possessiveness in him had existed long before he first climbed those stairs in the dark.
It had shown itself in ugly little ways.
He still walked into the pub after work and searched for her with pale eyes, while coal and rain clung to his skin. He still laughed at the same bawdy jokes with the rest of the miners. He still drank at the same corner of the bar with the same men.
Asha still kept her eyes lowered when the customers got handsy. She kept her love bites hidden beneath high-necked dresses, like secret kisses she wanted to treasure.
She did not slow down one bit and James knew better than to offer to keep her. She still wiped tables and carried plates balanced carefully along her arm.
Nothing had changed and yet everything had.
Mavis noticed the tiny details with her eagle eyes. The missing button on James’s work shirt reappearing overnight, sewn back with neat dark thread instead of hanging loose for weeks as it usually would.
The stubborn stain on his shirt had disappeared. His clothes began to smell faintly of the soap Asha used.
There were no filthy jokes to the other men at the pub.
One of the women who had started working the odd shift made a comment to James.
“So that’s done then,” she muttered one evening while drying glasses.
James answered, but his tone was distracted as his eyes watched her serving the new lad at work. He did not realize the glass in his hand was close to cracking.
“What is?”
She only smirked and walked away.
Then there was the landlady.
Mrs. Burton had eyes like a hawk and the soul of a prison warden. She knew if a mouse let out a silent fart in her building.
At first, she merely watched Asha with a strange look in her eyes when she knocked on the door to collect the rent.
Then came the comments.
“Oh, you’re cheerful today.”
Or—
“Late night, dearie?”
Always with that thin little smile.
Asha learned not to respond. Just smile and hurry away.
But the real change came elsewhere.
Down the road from the pub sat the new Indian grocery shop she visited once or twice a week. It smelled of cardamom and onions and sacks of rice stacked to the ceiling. The owners had never been warm exactly though they hailed from the same part of India as her, but over time their youngest daughter, Shanti, had softened toward her.
The girl was perhaps sixteen, pretty and shy, with long plaited hair and keen to chat in the language they both knew. Sometimes she slipped Tanay pieces of jaggery when her mother was not looking.
