Grandmother, Who, Me?

Grandmother, Who, Me?

Chapter 28: The Village Life

Rajan’s POV

The village morning began the same way every day now.

Rooster first. Then the distant temple bell. Then the soft sound of my wife moving in the kitchen, the faint chime of her anklets, the smell of filter coffee and something frying in oil. I lay on the wooden cot for a few extra minutes listening to it, the same way a man listens to proof that his life is still intact.

I knew the truth.

I had been paid. The woman who shared my bed and my name had once been a man. Every document, every photograph, every piece of jewellery on her body was part of an elaborate lie built by a pregnant girl in the city and a scientist who treated people like clay. None of it was real in the way ordinary marriages are real.

None of that mattered anymore.

I loved this life.

We had a proper house, tiled roof, two rooms, a small courtyard with a tulsi plant, a bathroom with a real door. Good food appeared on the table without me having to beg or steal. Clean clothes. A soft mattress. And every single night, without fail, my wife opened her legs for me so that the strange machine inside her would stay quiet for another day. I took her slowly or roughly, from the front or from behind, and she never refused. Afterwards she would lie still, breathing hard, the old thali still resting between her breasts, and I would fall asleep with my hand on her soft waist.

She did not like this life. I could see it in the way her shoulders stayed tense, in the quiet way she stared at the wall sometimes after we finished. But she played along. She cooked. She cleaned. She wore the saree and the thali and the tight toe rings without complaint. She answered when the neighbours called her “Lakshmi Amma.” She let me fuck her whenever the twenty-four hours were about to end. That was enough.

Something else had returned too.

I started teaching again.

It began with two village boys who needed help with mathematics for their tenth-standard exams. Then their friends came. Then a small tuition centre formed almost by itself on our veranda in the evenings. I sat on a low wooden stool with a slate and a piece of chalk, the same way I had twenty years ago, and the boys listened. Their parents began to greet me with respect. Someone called me “Master” again. The word landed in my chest like warm water.

It felt as if the life that had been stolen from me, the job, the dignity, the quiet order of a household had been given back. Only the wife was different. Softer. Quieter. More obedient than the woman who had once destroyed me. And somehow that made it better.

I wanted it to continue.

Deep in my heart, beneath the knowledge that everything was temporary and fake, I wanted this version of the world to stay exactly as it was.

One afternoon, while she was bathing, I walked into the small washing area behind the house. Her used clothes were in the plastic basin. I reached in and lifted a simple cotton panty, still slightly damp from her body. The soft, intimate scent rose immediately, warm skin, faint musk, the lingering trace of the rose talc she still used.

I held it to my face and breathed in.

My cock hardened so fast it almost hurt.

I stood there for a long time, the damp fabric pressed against my nose, the sounds of the village drifting over the wall, and felt the addiction settle deeper.

This smell.

This life.

Both of them.

I did not want either one to end.