The fight was about the electricity bill. Again.

Rohan had left every light on in his room, the fan running, his laptop plugged in, and gone to college. Vikram noticed at seven in the morning before his first Teams call. He sent a message. Rohan didn’t reply. By evening, when Rohan came home dropping his bag on the sofa like it had personally offended him, Vikram was ready.

“Do you think money comes from the wall?” Vikram said, not looking up from his laptop.

“It was one fan, Papa.”

“It is never one fan. It is one fan, one light, one charger, one month, every month.”

Rohan picked up his bag, went to his room, and closed the door. Not a slam. Worse — a controlled, deliberate click that said everything a slam would have said, but with more dignity.

Vikram stared at his screen. A Jira ticket he had been ignoring all afternoon. He didn’t read a word of it.

Inside his room, Rohan sat on the bed and pulled up his notes. He had a unit test tomorrow. Economics. Supply, demand, cost curves. He read the same paragraph four times.

At nine-thirty, his mother knocked.

“Come eat.”

“Not hungry.”

She opened the door anyway, the way mothers do when they’ve already decided hunger is not the point. She left a plate of dal-chawal on his desk, said nothing, and walked out.

At ten-fifteen, Rohan heard his father’s chair scrape against the floor. The sound of the kitchen tap. The refrigerator opening. The usual sounds of his father’s late-night ritual — one glass of cold water before bed, every night, for as long as Rohan could remember.

Then. Silence.

Then, a soft knock. His door opened two inches.

“Your charger,” Vikram said. Just that. He placed Rohan’s phone charger on the desk beside the plate — the one Rohan had left in the drawing room — and walked back out without waiting for a response.

Rohan looked at the charger for a long time.

His phone was at four percent. He had not gone out to get the charger himself because that would have meant walking past his father, and neither of them was ready for that yet. His father had known. His father had brought it anyway.

He plugged in his phone. Pulled the plate of dal-chawal closer. Started eating.

The economics notes stopped making sense at midnight. He typed a message to his father: Cost curve chapter — can you explain the logic tomorrow morning?

He put the phone down and didn’t wait to see if Vikram would reply at that hour.

The reply came in forty seconds.

Yes. Wake me up.

Rohan lay back on his pillow and looked at the ceiling fan — switched off, for once — and the corner of his mouth did something that was not quite a smile and not quite not one either.

The argument was not resolved. It would come back, probably next week, probably about something equally small. But the charger was on the desk. The reply had come in forty seconds. Some things did not need to be said to be understood.