my mother calls at 7pm

Every day. 7pm is when she finishes cooking and sits down, or sometimes while she's still standing at the stove, and she calls me and tells me about her day in the order it happened: morning, afternoon, the neighbor's daughter's news, what my father said that annoyed her, what he said that she found funny though she won't admit it was funny. I tell her about my day. Sometimes there isn't much. Sometimes I tell her about Suresh bhaiya's chai. She asks if I'm eating properly and I give the same answer I've given for five years, which is a version of yes that she accepts because she has to. She never says I love you. Nor do I. We have never once in our lives said it directly. The call is the thing itself. Thirty years ago I was inside her body. Now I live 1,400 kilometers away and we speak every day at seven o'clock and that's the sentence that contains all of it.