Grandmother, Who, Me?

Grandmother, Who, Me?

Chapter 21: The Question on the Bed

Rajan’s POV

Something had changed in my wife.

In the first weeks she had been nervous, almost frightened, always staying close to the young pregnant woman she called her daughter-in-law. She moved carefully, spoke little, and flinched at unexpected touches. I had accepted it. A woman forced into a strange new life could be forgiven for silence.

Now the silence was different.

She still barely spoke to me, but the quality of her quiet had shifted. Sudden small jerks ran through her body at odd moments, a quick tightening of the shoulders, a sharp intake of breath, her thighs pressing together hard under the saree as if something invisible had touched her. When the daughter-in-law was in the room, my wife kept more distance than before. The easy, almost clinging closeness they once shared had cooled into something careful and strained.

At night the changes were clearer.

We shared the guest room completely now. Her entire wardrobe, every saree, every blouse, every soft set of underclothes, had been moved into the cupboard beside mine. We lived as a married couple was expected to live. She still slept on her side of the bed, still kept her body turned slightly away, still answered my few questions with the shortest possible words. But in the dark I could feel the heat coming off her skin. She sweated heavily, the cotton nighty clinging to her back and the deep valley between her heavy breasts. Sometimes her breathing grew uneven, almost restless, as if her body wanted something it could not name. Once or twice her hand had drifted across the sheet toward me before she pulled it back as if burned.

I had begun to like her.

That was the part that surprised me most.

My real wife, the one who had destroyed me twenty years ago, had been sharp-tongued and demanding. This woman was the opposite. She cooked without being asked. She kept the house in quiet order. She wore the old thali every single hour of the day and night; I never saw her remove it even to bathe. When she served me food she still placed the first plate in front of me the way a traditional wife should. There was a soft, tired dignity in the way she moved that I found myself watching more and more.

She was wonderful in the small, daily ways my first wife had never been.

And yet the doubts had started to gather.

The sudden jerks. The way she sometimes looked at her own hands as if they belonged to a stranger. The careful way she avoided mirrors when she thought no one was watching. The faint, almost masculine tension that still lived behind her soft new face when she believed herself unobserved.

Tonight the house was quiet. The daughter-in-law had gone to bed early. I sat on the edge of our mattress and waited until my wife finished changing into her nighty. When she turned to lie down, I reached out and gently took her soft hand.

She froze.

I guided her to sit opposite me on the bed, our knees almost touching. The only light came from the small bedside lamp. It caught the gold of the thali resting in her cleavage and the faint sheen of sweat still on her collarbones.

I kept my voice low and even.

“You are a man, right?”

The question hung in the warm air between us.

I did not raise my voice. I did not accuse. I simply looked at the woman who wore my thali and waited for the answer that would decide what kind of husband I was going to be from this night forward.