Grandmother, Who, Me?

Grandmother, Who, Me?

Chapter 26: The Descent of the Real Amma

Shreya’s POV

It felt as if a genuine, old-fashioned mother-in-law had descended upon my house.

The soft, careful Attai who used to massage my feet and speak to me in gentle tones had vanished. In her place stood a sharp-tongued, judgmental woman who wore the same face and the same thali, yet felt completely foreign. It no longer felt like Satish playing a role. It felt like an original, traditional mother-in-law, the kind I had only ever seen in serials and whispered stories, had taken up permanent residence in my living room.

She treated me roughly.

She scolded me for the way I folded the sarees. She criticised the amount of salt in the sambar. She made me sweep the courtyard twice because “once is never enough for a proper house.” When I rested with my feet up because of the pregnancy swelling, she would stand over me with her hands on her wide hips and say, “In my time we worked until the seventh month without complaint. You modern girls are too soft.”

I still used the remote. The stimulations still worked; I could make her thighs press together and her breath catch whenever I wanted. But the remote no longer controlled *her*. The personality that now lived inside that body refused to soften. The loving mother-in-law I had created had turned into the very thing I once feared.

Worse, she had found an ally.

The neighbour mother-in-law, Meena’s mother, began visiting more often. The two of them would sit on our veranda with filter coffee, speaking in low, rapid Tamil, occasionally glancing in my direction. I could not hear every word, but I caught enough. They gossiped about daughters-in-law who thought too highly of themselves. They compared notes on how much work a pregnant woman should still be made to do. Once I clearly heard my own mother-in-law say,

“My son earns so well. This girl is basically a freeloader in his house. And she is an orphan, you know. Not a single sovereign of dowry. We accepted her out of kindness.”

The words landed like a slap.

She had also grown noticeably closer to Rajan. They ate together. She served him first with the easy familiarity of a long-married wife. Sometimes I saw them speaking quietly in the kitchen, her head slightly tilted toward him, his hand resting for a moment on her waist. The sight made something hot and ugly twist inside my chest.

He was still *my* husband underneath. The body might belong to Lakshmi now, but the man I had married was locked inside it. Watching that man grow comfortable with the father-in-law role, watching *my* Satish become another man’s wife in daily gesture and habit, filled me with a jealousy I had never expected to feel.

The fights became real.

I stopped answering softly. I started snapping back. We argued about groceries, about how much rest I was allowed, about whether the baby’s room should be painted before or after the seventh month. Classic mother-in-law and daughter-in-law battles, unfolding in my own house between me and the person who used to be the love of my life.

It was too real.

One evening, after another sharp exchange that left me breathing hard and her standing tall and unyielding in her saree, I sat alone in our bedroom with both hands on my belly. Anger pulsed behind my eyes. Jealousy sat bitter on my tongue. And underneath both, the old selfish hunger still whispered that I did not want to give up the family structure I had built.

I needed to do something.

A small, cold smile touched my lips.

If my mother-in-law wanted to play the evil Amma so convincingly… then I would remind her exactly who still held the power in this house.