A TuHir FF: Never Your Wife Again!! Ch-2 on Pg-3 - Page 3

Originally posted by: ElitePerfumer

I personally prefer to write a slow burn .. where small gestures carry forward the narrative and the reconciliation feels earned through 100s of small scenes rather than a few dramatic ones! First they both need to learn to co-exist with each other while maintaining distance! Especially Mihir!

Originally posted by: ElitePerfumer

It’s gonna take 10 chapters at least for them to start talking Normally! Another 5-10 to rebuild their relationship. A very slow burn! Also it will have subtle scenes rather than dramatic ones! I wonder how many people are going to be interested! Eccept you, no one has even said anything about the first chapter yet!

So I am very unsure but have this incessant creative bubble inside me that’s been imagining scenes after scenes to be incorporated in the future chapters!

Sounds good, slow burns are genuine to read!

This is really beautiful I could visualize the entire scene. Please do write more. Do continue this... Love love love the angst between them. So good

Originally posted by: TianaWrites

This is really beautiful I could visualize the entire scene. Please do write more. Do continue this... Love love love the angst between them. So good

Thank you so much! Yes I am working on next one!! Angst is all this FF is about

Originally posted by: ElitePerfumer

Thank you so much 😊

This is going to be a long ff if I get response. A slow burn.. reconciliation will feel earned!

exactly, Pari was the right person for the phone call

Woohoo! Love it. Sabko line pe le aaye Tulsi. Not just Mihir. Chachiya, bachhe, Mitali.. sab sab. As of now Shobha and Vrinda k alawa sab logose chidh hai muze 😃

I read it at night couldn't comment

You really captured the voice of characters. I can imagine tulsi saying noyona was the last nail in coffin, mihir had fcked up before her too. And now mihir was weak used that bacho k liye card.

Noyona is gone but mitali is here. I hope ritik throws divorce paper on her face, calls her loser and drag her out of house by hair 🤣

And it's good to see pari helping tulsi.

Writers probably will.take this route if not, I wish they do. You wrote such valid points and it should he mentioned

Angad vrinda will come back let's see how angad will react

Originally posted by: Phir_Mohabbat

I read it at night couldn't comment

You really captured the voice of characters. I can imagine tulsi saying noyona was the last nail in coffin, mihir had fcked up before her too. And now mihir was weak used that bacho k liye card.

Noyona is gone but mitali is here. I hope ritik throws divorce paper on her face, calls her loser and drag her out of house by hair 🤣

And it's good to see pari helping tulsi.

Writers probably will.take this route if not, I wish they do. You wrote such valid points and it should he mentioned

Angad vrinda will come back let's see how angad will react

thank you so much! It’s for reviews/comments like this that I wait!

I’m so glad I could convey what I wanted to and the characters come out fine!

I’m looking forward to writing a long angsty story with this FF, if the readers here actually like it!

Oh yes there’s 6 years of mess that Tulsi needs to clean! But this FF is more about TuHir than anyone else, even though they will hardly have any conventional scenes together for a long time!

Posting next chapter in a while! IF drives me really crazy during any post but posting a whole long chapter is an ordeal! So may take an hour, even if I start posting in 5 minutes 😢

Chapter 2: Ghar Wapsi

He had been watching them the entire time.

Ritik stood at the window of the inner sitting room, slightly apart from the rest of the family, his shoulder against the frame. He had not spoken since his mother and father had asked to be left alone. Neither had he moved. He stood and watched — the way a man watches something he cannot control and cannot look away from — as his parents stood together in the amber light of the outer lawn, two figures in a space that had once held them both as a matter of course and now held them like strangers trying to remember a language they had once shared fluently.

He could not hear them. He did not need to. He had watched his mother's face his whole life — had learned, the way children learn the faces that matter most to them, every modulation of her expression, every shift in the set of her shoulders, every particular quality of stillness that meant something specific. He knew what her stillness meant when she was thinking. He knew what it meant when she had decided. He knew what it meant when she was in pain.

He was watching now for a different stillness — the stillness that meant she was closing something.

When it came, he almost missed it. A barely perceptible shift. The way she turned her body — just slightly, just fractionally — not away from his father, not yet, but no longer quite toward him either. The conversation had reached its end. Whatever she had decided, she had decided.

And then she began to move.

He did not think. He did not plan. The window was still behind him when he was already at the door, and the door was still swinging when he was already in the outer lawn, and the words were already leaving him before he had any awareness of having formed them —

Ritik (his voice breaking as he ran toward her): Maa — aap aa rahi ho na? Bolo mujhe — aap aa rahi ho na? Main nahi reh paaoonga aapke bina, Maa — main —

He reached her. She had stopped walking. He stopped in front of her — and for a moment he simply stood there, this grown man, this son who had buried so much in the past months, who had learned to perform normalcy over a wound that had not once stopped bleeding — and something in him simply gave way.

He was crying. Not quietly. Not the contained, dignified tears that the past months had required of him. Crying the way he had not cried since he was a child in her arms, before he had learned that there were things too heavy to show, too painful to share — crying with the particular abandon of someone who has finally reached the person in whose presence the performance becomes unnecessary.

She caught him.

Not dramatically. Not with words. Her arms simply went around him — the automatic, absolute, unconditional movement of a mother whose child is in front of her and hurting — and she held him. She said nothing for a long moment. Just held him the way she had held him on that other night after he tried to end his life— the night that none of them spoke about directly but that every one of them carried — with the same steadiness, the same certainty that she was not going to let go.

The rest of the family had spilled out behind Ritik — Shobha, Pari, the Chachis, Parth, Dev, Saloni — and they stood in the outer lawn now, watching. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved to interrupt. There are moments that belong only to the people inside them, and everyone present understood instinctively that this was one of them.

Tulsi (quietly, her lips against his hair, the way she had spoken to him when he was small and the world had frightened him): Main hoon. Main yahan hoon.

Ritik (his voice muffled): Aap aaogi na? Ghar? Wapas?

She pulled back just enough to look at his face. She held it in her hands —his innocent eyes, his stubborn jaw, the way his mouth contorted when crying - and she looked at him.

Tulsi (steadily, clearly, without hesitation): Haan. Main aa rahi hoon.

The words fell into the evening air. Simple. Irreversible.

Ritik closed his eyes for a moment — the particular closure of someone receiving something they had not been certain would come. Then he nodded, once, and straightened, and wiped his face with the back of his hand with the slightly embarrassed efficiency of a man who has cried in front of people and is now recalibrating. His mother watched him with an expression that contained everything — love, pain, relief, the particular fierce protectiveness of a woman who knows exactly what her child has been through — and said nothing more, because nothing more was needed.

* * *

They walked together toward the door of Shanti Niketan.

The family fell in around them — not crowding, not performing reunion, just moving as a body moves when it has been fragmented for a long time and has suddenly, finally, found its centre again. Shobha was openly wiping her eyes. The Chachis walked close. Pari moved at Tulsi's other side, quiet and steady as she had been through the past ten days, as she had been through everything.

At the threshold, Gayatri stopped them.

Gayatri (her voice warm and slightly breathless, her eyes full): Ruko, Tulsi beta. Bas das minute. Shobha aur main — do kaam karna chahte hain. Pehle — yeh ghar Gangajal se paak karna chahiye. Noina ke har nishaan ko, har chhaaya ko mitaana hai is ghar se. Aur doosra — tumhara swagat karna chahiye vidhi se. Aarti utaarni hai.

A small, collective intake of breath from the family. The intention behind both gestures was pure — sixty years of this woman loving this family, condensed into ten minutes of ritual and devotion. Nobody missed that.

Tulsi looked at Gayatri Chachi for a moment — at the earnestness in her face, at the love that had motivated the suggestion — and when she spoke, her voice was gentle but absolutely certain.

Tulsi (quietly, looking at Gayatri and then at the house itself): Gangajal ki zaroorat nahi hai, Chachi. Yeh ghar Baa aur Bapuji ne banaya tha — apni mehnat se, apne pyaar se. Is ghar ki ek ek eent, ek ek deewar itni pavitra hai ki koi bhi apni presence se ise apavitra kar hi nahi sakta.

The words settled over everyone like something that had always been true and simply needed to be spoken aloud. Gayatri's eyes filled. She nodded — not in concession, but in the recognition of something deeper than what she had suggested.

Then, gently:

Tulsi (her voice warm, the faintest smile): Aur aarti — Chachi, aarti mehmaan ki hoti hai. Main mehmaan nahi hoon. Yeh mera ghar hai. Hamesha tha.

Gayatri made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sob and was entirely both. She reached out and pressed Tulsi's hand once, tightly, and then stepped aside.

* * *

What happened next, happened fast.

It was the word — pavitra. The mention of what needed to be purified. Something in Ritik — who had been standing at his mother's side, who had composed himself with visible effort, who had been listening — went very still.

The family saw it. The stillness before the motion. The particular quality of a person arriving at a decision that has been building for months and has suddenly found its moment.

And then he was gone — back through the door, taking the stairs two at a time, disappearing into the interior of the house with a purpose that left no room for anyone to follow or stop him.

Everyone looked at each other.

Then — from somewhere inside — the sound of a door being knocked on. Sharply. Insistently.

Ritik (from inside, his voice controlled but barely): Mitali. Darwaza kholo. Abhi.

A beat of silence. Then the sound of arguing — Mitali's voice, sharp and resistant — and then footsteps, and then Ritik appeared again at the top of the staircase visible through the open door, and Mitali was with him, and he had her wrist, and she was pulling against him with everything she had, her face a mask of fury and something else — something that looked, underneath the fury, remarkably like fear.

Mitali (hissing, resisting, her feet dragging): Chhodo mujhe — Ritik, yeh kya kar rahe ho, chhodo — yeh ghar meri bhi —

Ritik (pulling her forward, his jaw set): Chalo.

Tulsi had not yet crossed the threshold.

She was still standing at the door — that liminal space between outside and inside — when she saw them appear on the stairs. The sight hit her somewhere below thought, somewhere purely maternal and immediate, and her body was already moving before she had registered the decision to move. She crossed the threshold. Not ceremonially. Not consciously. She simply crossed it — one swift, unthinking step — because her son was on those stairs and something was wrong.

She reached the base of the staircase at the same moment Ritik reached the bottom, Mitali in tow. The family poured in behind her. Nobody had registered the moment she had crossed the threshold — they were all watching the staircase, the drama of Ritik and Mitali — except for one person.

Mihir had been standing outside the door, behind Tulsi, maintaining his distance. He had not entered the house with the family — had stood slightly apart, as though the threshold was not his to cross in this moment, as though it was hers first and he would follow only after.

He had watched her cross it.

Not the drama on the stairs. Her. The precise moment — the swift, unthinking step — when Tulsi returned to Shanti Niketan without even knowing she was doing it. He had seen it the way you see things that matter most: clearly, quietly, with no one around to share it with.

He followed her footsteps. Quietly. Almost reverently. As though the ground she had just walked across was different from the ground it had been a moment before.

* * *

Tulsi (firmly, stepping forward, her voice carrying the particular authority that required no volume): Ritik. Ruko.

He stopped. Something in that voice — the specific frequency of it, the one that had been stopping him since he was three years old — reached through everything else and landed.

Ritik (his chest heaving, his eyes blazing, but stopped): Maa, yeh —

Tulsi (evenly): Maine tumhe aise sikhaya tha kisi ke saath — aurat ke saath.. usse iss Tarah..?

A beat.

Ritik (his voice dropping, raw and controlled at once): Aurat. (a short, bitter sound) Woh aurat nahi hai, Maa. Zeher hai — Noina ki hi tarah. Woh bhi insaani bhesh mein zeher!

The word hung in the air. Nobody contradicted it. Nobody could.

Tulsi looked at him for a moment — at the pain beneath the fury, at the man who had had his life systematically dismantled by a woman who had used the same methods as the one who had just been expelled from this house — and her face was not without understanding. It was not without recognition. It was simply — steady.

Tulsi (quietly, turning to Mitali, and the quiet made it more absolute than any raised voice): Apne kamre mein jao.

Mitali looked at her.

It was not a short look. It was the look of a woman recalibrating — assessing this new presence, measuring it against what it meant for her own position, calculating what had just shifted and by how much. It was, beneath its surface, the look of someone who had just identified her primary obstacle.

Then she turned and went up the stairs without a word.

At the top, she paused — just briefly, just for a moment — and cast one glance back down. Poisonous. Measuring. Then she was gone.

* * *

Shobha, with the instinct of a woman who has soothed this family through years of crises, like only an elder daughter can do, spoke into the silence.

Shobha: Chai. Sabko chai chahiye — mumma, Aap baithiye main abhi —

The collective exhale that followed was almost audible. Yes. Chai. The specific solidity of a normal thing in an enormous evening.

Pari appeared briefly at Tulsi's side — pressed her hand once, met her eyes with a look that contained multitudes — and then slipped out through the front door without explanation, moving with the quiet purposefulness of someone who has somewhere specific to be. Everyone noticed. Nobody asked. This was Pari - no one knew what she was thinking at this moment or what impulse she was acting upon!

* * *

They sat in the main sitting room — the family arranged itself around Tulsi the way rooms arrange themselves around their source of light, naturally, without negotiation. Ritik beside her, close, his shoulder almost touching hers. Shobha at the table, pouring. Gayatri and Daksha Chachi on the divan across, watching Tulsi with an expression that was entirely love and entirely relief. Parth. Dev and Saloni. The children.

Tulsi held her chai and let it all wash over her — the voices, the warmth, the small ordinary sounds of this family being a family — and something in her that had been held very tightly for a very long time loosened, just fractionally, just enough.

At the edge of the room, near the doorway, Mihir stood.

Not outside. Inside. But at the margin — the particular position of a man who is present and knows the room is not quite his, not yet, and perhaps not in the way it once was. He held no cup. He spoke to no one. He simply stood and watched Tulsi be home — her hands around the cup, her voice quiet and warm as the family spoke around her — and whatever moved across his face in those minutes was visible to no one because everyone else was watching her.

After 6 years, it looked like a normal family to him! His family! With her at the center of it!

* * *

It was Gayatri Chachi who looked between them.

Just once. Just briefly. The glance of a woman who loves both of them and cannot quite suppress the hope that a day this large must surely also contain a complete restoration — that the equation being rewritten must ultimately resolve the way the old equation had. Her eyes went from Tulsi to Mihir and back to Tulsi with the particular warmth and particular wishfulness of someone who is already, in their heart, writing a different ending.

Tulsi saw it.

She set her cup down. When she spoke, her voice was quiet and warm and absolutely clear.

Tulsi: Main aayi hoon — apne ghar. Apne bachhon ke paas. In dono Chachiyon ke paas. (she paused, her eyes moving around the room — not performing, just ensuring she was understood) Aur usi rishte se. Usi haisiyat se. Sirf ek maa, sirf ek bahu! Koi doosra rishta nahi hai — ab nahi, aur aap logon mein se koi bhi uski ummeed na rakhe. Yeh meri guzaarish hai — meri sab se pehli. Please.

A silence.

Then Mihir, from the doorway — his voice low and without drama, in the tone of a man who has accepted a verdict and is telling everyone he has understood it:

Mihir: Sahi keh rahi hai. Hum sab ko yeh samajhna hoga — aur maanna hoga. (he looked at the family, not at Tulsi) Tulsi ne jo kaha hai, woh final hai. Koi koshish nahi — koi manipulation nahi, koi ummeed nahi. Woh yahan hai — yeh kaafi hai. Yeh bahut zyaada hai.

The family absorbed this. Gayatri looked at her hands. Daksha nodded slowly - she knew forgiveness wouldn’t be easy.. actually may never come, and she and Gayatri exchanged a glance — the glance of two women who have known this family long enough to recognize a real boundary when it is drawn — and said nothing more.

* * *

Half an hour after she had left, the front door opened.

Pari.

She was carrying things. A bag — recognizable, worn, the kind of bag that has been used so many times it has taken on the specific personality of its owner. A small stack of folded clothes. A few other items — a notebook, a shawl — arranged in her arms with the careful deliberateness of someone who has packed quickly but packed thoughtfully.

Everyone stared.

Shobha: Pari — yeh sab —?

Pari (quietly, setting the things down near the staircase, not quite meeting anyone's eyes): Main Angad bhaiya ke paas gayi thi. Chawl mein. Mumma ka saman lene.

The room went completely still. No one else had thought this!

Mihir went still at these words! Angad bhaiya ke paas. The confirmation that she knew where he was. That she had gone with that ease only siblings can share!! It seemed everyone except him was reconciled and in constant touch with Angad! It pierced his heart that his son - his pride, a part of his heart, this family's scion - expelled in a night of manufactured rage, living in a chawl for six years while his father had not known how to go to him, bring him back! .

Mihir's face did something complicated.

He did not speak. He swallowed. He looked at the floor briefly, and then at the ceiling — a man rearranging himself after something has hit him that he expected and was not prepared for anyway.

Tulsi looked at the bag. Then at Pari. There was something in her eyes — gratitude, recognition of how much her daughter had changed, and also something quieter, something that registered the word Angad in her own body and filed it gently in the space marked: not tonight.

* * *

Mihir straightened. Found his practical footing — the footing of a man who can always find something to do when feeling something is too large.

Mihir (to Pari, his voice quiet and steady): Woh saman upar le jao — bedroom mein. Main apna saman wahan se shift kar leta hoon.

He said it simply. Without drama. In the manner of a man doing the correct and obvious thing — vacating the room that had once been theirs, returning it to her, not making it a gesture, just making it a fact.

The word landed differently on Tulsi.

Bedroom.

It moved through her the way certain words move — not in the mind first but in the body, in the specific place where memory lives below thought. That room. Its door. What she had seen on the other side of it — Noina's arms, Mihir's shoulders, the words I love you, Mihir spoken with a possession and a hunger that Tulsi had understood instantly and completely and had never been able to unknow.

She had not been back in that room. She did not intend to be. The idea of sleeping in that room — of closing her eyes in that darkness — was something her body refused before her mind had even fully formed the thought.

She went still.

Mihir saw it a moment too late. He was already parsing her stillness — the particular quality of it, so different from her thinking-stillness and her decided-stillness — and the comprehension moved across his face slowly, the way comprehension moves when it arrives carrying shame.

He understood. He knew what room that was to her now. He knew what she had seen. And he had named it without thinking, had offered it as though it were simply a room, as though rooms are ever simply rooms after what happens inside them.

He had nothing to offer in the silence that followed. No correction. No alternative that would undo the word. He stood with it.

Tulsi (quietly, evenly, with no drama and no explanation): Woh kamra tumhara hai. Main Baa ke kamre mein rahoongi.

No one spoke.

Ritik, after a beat:

Ritik: Par Maa — woh kamra toh bilkul seedha-saadha hai, hum use —

Tulsi (gently, looking at him, her voice leaving no space for negotiation without being unkind): Woh Baa ka kamra hai, Ritik. Jaisa hai, mere liye bilkul sahi hai.

Ritik subsided. He recognized, as her children always had, the specific timbre of a sentence that was complete.

In the corner, Gayatri and Daksha Chachi exchanged a glance.

Not surprise. Something older than surprise — recognition. The look of two women who had known Baa the longest, who knew what that room meant and what this house was built on, and who understood exactly what Tulsi was saying by choosing it. She was not taking a guest room. She was not finding a neutral space. She was going to the room of the woman who had loved her first and most unconditionally in this house — the room at the very foundation of Shanti Niketan.

Daksha nodded, almost imperceptibly. Gayatri looked at her hands again, and this time there was no wishfulness in it — only a moved and steady acceptance.

Mihir stood near the doorway. He had heard what Ritik said — had felt the same impulse, the same desire to offer something that might translate into a form of care she would accept — and he had heard Tulsi's answer. And he understood, beneath it, what he understood about all of it: that his gestures and his money and his attempts to provide were not what she needed from him, and perhaps not what she would take. And that this was simply and completely fair.

He said nothing. He stayed where he was.

* * *

The evening wound down the way the evenings of enormous days eventually do — not with ceremony, not with resolution, but simply with the accumulation of exhaustion and the gradual peeling away of people toward sleep. Good nights were said — numerous, warm, slightly prolonged in the way of a family that cannot quite bring itself to stop being in the same room after so long of not being.

Ritik was last. He held his mother for a moment at the base of the stairs — not the desperate grip of the outer lawn but something quieter, something that didn't need to hold on quite so hard because she was no longer in danger of leaving. He kissed her hand. He went up.

And then the house was still.

Pari had put her things in Baa's room earlier. The bag. The clothes. The notebook. The shawl. All of it waiting.

It was almost midnight.

Tulsi looked toward the half open door.

And entered it reverently. She closed the door behind her. Stood with her back to it for a moment — not leaning against it, not dramatically — just standing in the small space between the door and the rest of the room, in the particular stillness of someone who has just stepped out of a very long, very full day and into the first moment of genuine quiet.

The room was dark. She had not yet reached for the switch. She stood in the dark and let her eyes adjust and let the room come to her gradually — its shapes, its dimensions, the specific quality of its darkness which was different from any other darkness in this house because it was this room’s darkness and she had known it.

She found the switch. Turned it on.

The room filled with the soft yellow light of the old lamp on the bedside table — not the overhead light, she hadn’t turned on the overhead light, her hand had gone to the bedside lamp switch with the automatic certainty of someone who knows a room’s geography in their bones. She stood and looked.

It was exactly as it had been.

Not preserved artificially — not the eerie stillness of a room that has been sealed and untouched as a memorial. But simply — unchanged. The way things are when nobody has had a particular reason to change them and the thought of changing them has felt, every time it arose, somehow wrong. The single bed against the wall — Baa’s bed, narrow and firm, the kind of bed a woman of Baa’s generation had slept in her whole life without complaint because comfort was not the point, rest was the point. The wooden almirah in the corner, dark with age, its brass handles worn smooth. The small desk that Baa had used for her correspondence — letters written by hand to relatives near and far, a practice she had maintained until her eyesight made it impossible. The prayer corner — small, in the far corner of the room, a low wooden platform with its brass diyas and its framed images and the faint residual smell of agarbatti that had been burning in this corner for so many years that it had become part of the room itself, inseparable from the wood and the walls and the air.

Tulsi stood in the middle of the room and looked at all of it.

The almirah. She remembered standing at that almirah as a new bride — the first weeks of her marriage, and Baa opening it and showing her where things were kept. Not as a lesson. As an invitation. *Yeh ghar Tera hai.* Said simply and warmly in the way only baa could say!

She had not known then how rare that was. How much it would mean.

She walked to the bed. Sat on its edge.

The mattress was familiar under her — not comfortable in the way a new mattress is comfortable, but familiar in the way that the body knows the specific give and resistance of a surface it has sat on many times before. How many times had she sat on this bed? How many conversations had happened here — she and Baa in the late evenings, Baa’s hand sometimes on hers, or not touching at all, just sitting, just talking, the particular ease of two people who have nothing to prove to each other and therefore nothing to perform.

She sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands in her lap and looked at the prayer corner.

The brass diyas had not been lit in some time — she could tell, the wicks were dry, the oil long since evaporated. The images were slightly dusty. The whole corner had the slightly forlorn quality of something that has been tended with love for a long time and has then, through nobody’s fault, been left without tending. Not neglected out of carelessness. Just — the person who tended it was gone and nobody else had quite known how to take it up.

She would tend it.

Not tonight — tonight she was too tired and too full of everything that had happened. But tomorrow morning. She would clean the corner and fill the diyas and light them the way Baa had lit them every morning of her life in this room for as long as anyone could remember.

That would be her first act in this room tomorrow. Not unpacking. Not arranging. Lighting the diyas in Baa’s prayer corner.

She sat with this for a moment.

Then she looked at the walls.

There was a photograph on the wall beside the almirah — she had seen it a hundred times and yet found herself looking at it now with a freshness, an attention, that familiarity usually prevents. Baa and Bapuji, young — younger than Tulsi was now, younger than she had ever seen them in life, the photograph black and white and slightly faded at the edges. Baa was looking at the camera with that expression she had — the one that was not quite a smile but contained all the warmth of a smile without needing to perform it. Bapuji beside her, his hand not touching her but close, the particular proximity of two people who know each other’s bodies completely and don’t need to demonstrate it.

They had built this house. They had built this family. They had built — with their choices and their values and their daily, unspectacular, completely unconditional love for each other and for everyone in their orbit — the foundation on which everything else had been built.

And the foundation had held.

Even through everything. Even through six years of what had happened in the rooms above this one. Even through the withered plant in the veranda and the factory on the edge of closing and the marriages manufactured from violation and all of it — the foundation had held. Baa and Bapuji’s house. Their pavitrata. Exactly as she had said at the threshold.

She looked at Baa’s face in the photograph.

*Main aa gayi, Baa,* she said.

Very quietly. Just above a whisper. The way you speak to someone who is not there and whom you need anyway.

The room held the words.

*Bahut der ho gayi. Main jaanti hoon.* She paused. Looked at Baa’s expression in the photograph — that not-quite-smile that contained all warmth without performing it. *Aur main jaanti hoon ki aap kehti — der aayi par durust aayi. Aap hamesha yahi kehti thi.*

She smiled slightly. The first real smile of the evening — small, private, unperformed, the smile of someone remembering something beloved.

*Main wohi hoon, Baa. Wohi Tulsi. Bas thodi alag. Thodi zyaada — *(she paused, finding the word)* — thodi zyaada khud hoon. Khud ki hoon. Yeh aapko achha lagta, mujhe pata hai. Aap hamesha chahti thi ki main sirf apne liye bhi kuch rakkhoon.*

The room was quiet around her. The old house made its small nighttime sounds — settling, breathing, the sounds of a structure that has stood for decades and knows how to hold itself through the night.

*Mihir ne bedroom offer kiya,* she said after a while. Her voice was still quiet but something in it had changed — become more careful, the way voices become careful around things that are not yet safe to look at directly. *Uski niyat sahi thi. Woh jaanta nahi — woh nahi jaanta ki woh kamra ab mere liye kya hai. Main nahi batayungi. Abhi nahi.* A pause. *Shayad kabhi nahi.*

She looked at the photograph.

She sat with this for a moment. Then — with the deliberateness of someone choosing to put something down rather than carry it further tonight —

*Main abhi nahi sochungi yeh sab. Bahut ho gaya aaj.*

She got up from the bed. Went to the almirah — opened it, the brass handle worn smooth under her palm, the door swinging with the slight creak she remembered, the smell of the inside of it reaching her immediately. Old wood and the particular mustiness of fabric stored for a long time and underneath both of those things something she could not name except that it was Baa’s.

Someone had kept a spare set of linen in here. She found it on the second shelf — neatly folded, slightly stiff from storage, the kind of plain white cotton that Baa had always preferred. She took it out and made the bed with the quiet efficiency of someone who does not need to think about making a bed because making a bed is simply something the hands know how to do.

The movements were calming. The tucking of corners. The smoothing of the sheet. Small, concrete, physical actions that did not require anything except the hands and a certain patience.

She changed into her night clothes. Put her things on the desk — her phone, her book, the few items she had brought in. Not unpacking — that was for tomorrow. Just the essentials. Just what tonight required.

She turned off the bedside lamp.

The room went dark.

She lay down on Baa’s bed, in Baa’s room, in her house, and looked at the ceiling in the dark.

She was very tired. The tiredness of an enormous day — the outer lawn, the threshold, the chai, Mihir’s offer, her children’s arms around her, the family’s faces, all of it accumulated in her body as a weight that was not unpleasant, that was in fact the weight of something real and present and hers.

She had done it.

She was here.

In Baa’s room, in her house, on her terms, as herself.

Not his wife. Not the woman who had dissolved herself into this household for thirty-eight years without knowing. Not the Tulsi who had stood in a doorway with photographs falling from her hands.

Herself.

She lay in the dark and listened to the house around her. The old sounds of it — familiar, unchanged, the specific vocabulary of this particular structure that she had learned so long ago it was simply part of her. Then, first, outside her door, then on the stairs, she heard footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. The weight of them unmistakable — she had known the sound of his footsteps for thirty-eight years, had known them in this house on these floors, and six years had not changed the way they sounded or the way her body registered them.

He was walking to his room. He would naturally have to pass outside her door to get to the stairs which then led to their, no, his bedroom.

He passed — she knew when he was level with her door, could feel it in the way the house carried sound, the particular moment when the footsteps were closest. Did he just pause? Yes, but for an almost imperceptible second! Then he walked on! He did not linger. She had not expected him to linger. He walked past and the footsteps continued and then faded and then — silence.

The house settled.

She lay in Baa’s bed in the dark and the house was quiet around her and somewhere above her he was in his room with his plant and his thoughts and all the things he carried alone, as she carried hers alone, as they had been carrying everything alone for six years and were now carrying in the same house, separately, parallel, the distance between them measured in floors and staircases and everything that had been said and everything that had not.

She closed her eyes.

*dhanyawad, Baa,* she said to the dark. Very quietly. *Is kamre ke liye. Hamesha.*

The room held the words the way it had always held everything — without judgment, without condition, with the simple unconditional warmth of a space that had been made by love and had never forgotten how to hold it.

She slept.