They argued as if the house were a market and shame a commodity with a price.
After the elders' meeting the house felt like a place in which decisions were being counted like coins. Men spoke of rites and honor in the same breath as they spoke of accounts and debts. It was practical language less of apology, more of calculation. Who pays what, who makes the gesture, who takes the blame these were the questions that had replaced easy talk.
Rashid paced the front room with a hand on his forehead, moving through his old ways of saying things. He would name a rite an engagement, a small recitation, a public blessing and then immediately convert it into cost: gifts, flowers, the price of bringing kinsmen from other towns. The very ordinariness of his arithmetic made the plan feel inevitable. For him, tradition was the ledger of the sensible: a stitch you sew so the house can keep being the house.
Rehaan measured differently. He spoke of honor as a reputation to be defended who must be soothed, which associations must be preserved, which business ties must be reminded why they once bent toward the family. He proposed carefully worded apologies sent privately to those who mattered. "We will show contrition where it counts," he said, as if contrition could be purchased in the right envelopes.
Others argued, quieter and sharper. "What do we actually owe?" an uncle asked, and the question landed like a knife. It was the hard question: not what does tradition demand, but what does real restitution look like? The room had no easy answer because their economy of comfort relied on being able to assign cost to things that are not costable: a night's laughter, a woman's dignity, the trust of neighbors. Men asked about flowers and deposits and guest lists because those are the currencies they understand.
Farid listened, his fingers folded on his knee. He did not accept the first easy answers. Sometimes his silence was strategy; sometimes it was the exhaustion of a man learning that a polite apology does not erase a life's bruise. In his quiet there was a new insistence: that whatever they offered should not be a mask for erasure. "We will not hand her away like a thing to be balanced in our books," he said once, not loudly but steady. The sentence had the weight of a door softly closing.
I sat with the small notebook in my lap and wrote while they spoke. My entries are spare: who proposed what, who counted money, which rites were suggested, who offered a public prayer as substitute for conversation. The ink keeps the arithmetic honest. When men speak of honor, it is easy to forget how that talk translates into someone else's life. Writing is my small correction.
They tried to find ways to make amends that would not ask the cousins themselves to change. A man proposed that the cousins learn humility through public service small tasks in the market to "teach responsibility." Another proposed sending the boys on a trip to an elder's house in another town where they would be schooled. It is the familiar plan: move the object and call it repair. The object is always the woman and the lessons are always the men's. The pattern is old and practiced.
The most insistent voices wanted a ceremony that would look like repair to the rest of the lane: a modest gathering, a public blessing, a small donation to a community cause. They wanted outward proof that the house had done what houses do when they must show decorum: they apologize, they give, they make a visible account. Visual proof comforts neighbors in the same way receipts comfort accountants.
I thought about cost in the way Tooba thinks about fabric: what will be strained if we pull here, what will fray if we push there. A ceremony can be a soft balm for some, but it can also be a kind of erasure if the town takes the surface for the thing itself. If the price of the house's comfort is my silence, then the rite is not repair: it is exchange. I will not be the currency.
Voices rose over who must "carry" the shame. Some said the cousins must take work that humbles them; others argued that family elders should shoulder penalties so the boys' futures remain intact. The argument revealed what the house feared most: not scandal, but loss of social capital. They believed they could manage consequences if they could allocate them carefully. They had always dealt with trouble by distributing it in ways that kept their own corners cushioned.
I listened for those who balked. There were small pauses when a man's hand trembled at the mention of a dowry or an engagement. There were curt nods where men pretended to accept plans they knew would not last. Those fissures were the things the notebook is good at noting: people's hesitations, the moments when their practiced certainty broke.
What most troubled me was how few asked, directly, "What does she want?" That single question would have dismantled their neat accounting. It would have required them to measure more than cost: to weigh consequence, autonomy, dignity. Asking that question would have rearranged their arithmetic into something that included me as a person rather than as an item to be smoothed.
When I finally spoke slowly, at the moment when the room had named everyone else's burden but not mine I did not raise my voice. I set the notebook on the table and folded my hands. "Do not make my life your sum," I said. The sentence was small and ordinary, but it landed in the way a simple balance does in a scale: it made the room shift. Faces fell into quiet. The men had not expected challenge that was not theatrical; they had expected consent or negotiation. My refusal re-centered the question.
Farid's look then was not of surprise so much as of relief. It was a relief that someone named the obvious. He reached for my hand under the table in a way that asked for steadiness. Not all furies are loud. Farid's coldness had become a firmness that would not be bought.
By evening the meeting dispersed without the tidy closure the elders hoped for. They had plans lists of rites, offers of small public acts, suggestions of exile in the form of travel but no seal. The arithmetic remained unsettled. The house would still try to trade, to assign costs and distribute consequences. That is the way of roofs that fear scandal. But I had placed my own measure into the record: my life is not a line item.
I recorded their proposals that night: the names they suggested for public blessings, the amounts they proposed for charity, the details of the trips they thought would "teach." Paper keeps track; paper keeps pressure honest. If they intend to substitute ceremony for change, the notebook will show it. If they intend to press me into a quiet that is not mine, the record will be witness.
Outside, the lane breathed in, then out. Neighbors wrapped their own small decisions in hushed generosity. The market sold a few more marigolds than usual. The house went on making lists as if lists could purchase solace. We will continue to place small questions where they cannot be ignored. They will count and recount their costs; we will count too, but differently: not in rupees and ribbons, but in time, presence, and the small freedoms they hope to compress.
The night closed without a currency settled. That is enough, for now. The house learned that not everything can be assigned. The ledger the men rely on has cracks. We will keep noting those cracks until their arithmetic changes.