The roof leaked in one corner, and Rama fixed it before he unpacked anything else.
Not with the strength that could have torn the whole structure down and rebuilt it in an afternoon, with his hands, slow, deliberately clumsy in places, re-lashing bamboo the way he'd watched two men do it at the village well that morning, copying the knot without copying the ease. It took him most of the day. A man who genuinely needed to learn would have taken about that long.
Sekar caught him at it from the doorway, arms full of borrowed blankets, and said nothing, but something in the set of her shoulders eased at the sight of him working badly on purpose. She set the blankets down on the single sleeping platform and stood a moment in the doorway's fading light, taking in the room the way she took in everything now, cataloging what they had rather than what they'd lost.
"It's small," she said.
