23-01-2026, 07:35 AM
Part 1:
The blue glare of the laptop screen was the only light in the living room, painting Kriti’s exhausted face in a harsh, spectral hue. She hadn’t even bothered to change out of her pharmacy uniform; the faint, sterile smell of rubbing alcohol and cheap floor cleaner still clung to her sleeves, a stubborn perfume of her double shifts. Staring at the online banking portal, she performed her grim weekly ritual—a kind of financial autopsy where she tried to force the math of their survival to make sense.
Her cursor hovered over the "Pay Now" button for the electricity bill. If she paid it today, they would be eighty rupees short for groceries until Tuesday. If she delayed the internet payment, she risked losing the connection she needed for the freelance transcription work she did in the dead of night. The apartment was silent, save for the rhythmic, judgmental hum of the refrigerator and the cooling dal Shikhar had left on the stove before disappearing again—a silence that felt less like peace and more like a held breath, waiting for the next disaster to strike.
Kriti rubbed her temples, her fingers pressing into the throb behind her eyes. The screen flickered, the red text taunting her: Insufficient funds. Again.
She closed her eyes, and for a moment, the sterile blue light was replaced by the golden haze of a memory ten years old. It felt like looking at a different life through the wrong end of a telescope—tiny, distant, and impossibly bright.
Back then, she had been a creature of silence, a shy girl from a modest family who navigated the college corridors with her head down, hoping to remain invisible. Shikhar had been the opposite. He was a gravitational force, the kind of young man who seemed to have sunlight caught in his skin, charming professors and peers with an easy, careless grace. She remembered the terror and the thrill of him noticing her, the way he had gently dismantled her walls brick by brick. He hadn't just loved her; he had invented a version of her that could speak, that could laugh loudly, that could believe she was the only girl in the room. He was her first love, her first rebellion, her first everything
.
Five years of university had dissolved like sugar in water, sweet and fleeting. By graduation, "Kriti and Shikhar" was a single entity. He had taken the shy girl and given her a spine of steel, while he soared. He graduated at the top of his class, landing a senior role at YugaPharma straight out of the gate. It was the kind of job parents bragged about at weddings—prestigious, high-paying, secure. When they married, it felt less like a leap of faith and more like a coronation.
For three years, their life had the glossy sheen of a movie. Shikhar climbed the corporate ladder two rungs at a time. They bought a sprawling apartment with a balcony that overlooked the city lights; she had a walk-in closet, a car, and a husband who looked at the world as something he was destined to own.
Then, the ground vanished.
The news broke on a Tuesday. YugaPharma wasn’t just failing; it was rotting. The scandal involving unethical clinical trials and bribery dominated the news cycle for weeks, stripping the company down to the studs. The shutdown was swift, brutal, and total. Shikhar didn't just lose a job; he lost his identity. The confidence that had once been his armor shattered, leaving behind a man terrified of his own reflection.
The decline was not a cliff, but a slow, suffocating slide. First came the silence, then the whiskey. He started disappearing into the neon buzz of bars, coming home with liquor on his breath and apologies that grew thinner every time. In two years, the lavish apartment was sold to pay debts. The savings account was drained by online poker sites and desperate bets. The man who had once promised her the world had become a stranger who couldn't even meet her gaze across their second-hand dining table.
Kriti opened her eyes, the golden memory dissolving back into the stark reality of the blinking cursor. She had endured it all—the shame, the downsizing, the nights spent waiting for a key to turn in the lock. She had loved him through the wreckage because she believed the man she met in college was still in there, buried under the debris of his ego.
But tonight, staring at the red deficit on the screen, the feeling in her chest wasn't just exhaustion. It was a dull, heavy ache—the specific pain of a heart that had been stretched too thin, too many times, and was finally beginning to fray.
She closed the laptop with a sharp click, the sound echoing in the empty kitchen like a gunshot. The screen’s blue light died, plunging the room back into the dim amber of the single overhead bulb. She pushed the computer aside and walked to the stove, her movements mechanical, driven by a hunger she didn’t quite feel.
This kitchen was a closet compared to the culinary theater of the home they had bought—and the home Shikhar had lost. The ceiling fan whirred overhead, its rhythm uneven, casting a lazy, lopsided shadow that pulsed against the chipped wall tiles. Kriti opened the lid of the pressure cooker, and steam curled up in a thin, ghostly tendril, carrying the scent of cumin and ginger. It was simple, familiar—the kind of comfort that didn’t cost money.
The only grace left in Shikhar was this: he could still coax magic out of the bare minimum. The dal was spiced perfectly—smoky, with a sharp underscore of garlic that made her mouth water despite her mood. She ladled the yellow lentils over the rice waiting in its pot. The first bite was warm and grounding. The act of eating felt like a small rebellion, a quiet refusal to let this night completely break her.
She was halfway through her meal when the front door creaked open.
Kriti didn’t look up. She didn't need to. She knew the cadence of his return—the hesitant shuffle, the pause on the threshold as if he were checking the atmospheric pressure of the room, bracing himself for a storm. The air in the kitchen instantly thickened, charged with the static of everything they weren't saying.
"Hey," he said finally.
His voice was rough. Not from drink, she noted with a clinician’s detachment. Just exhaustion.
Kriti didn't answer. She kept her eyes fixed on her plate, pushing a grain of rice around with her fork, studying the way it left a small trail of sauce. The silence stretched between them, thick and suffocating. She could feel his gaze burning into the back of her head, pleading for acknowledgment, but she refused to turn around. If she did, she might see something in his eyes—shame, or worse, hope—that would make her soften. And God, she was too tired to be soft.
The floorboards groaned as he took a step closer. "I made dal," he said, offering the fact like a peace treaty.
"I see that," she replied, her voice flat. She didn't look up.
"So... how was work?"
His voice was careful, tiptoeing. He moved toward the stove, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his faded jeans. The harsh kitchen light caught the shadow of stubble along his jaw, illuminating the hollows beneath his cheekbones that seemed carved by regret. Once, he had been the kind of man who wore a three-piece suit like a second skin, armor against the world. Now, in his frayed t-shirt, he looked like a man who had been slowly unraveling for years.
Kriti set her fork down with deliberate slowness. The metal clinked against the ceramic. "Same as always," she said, finally lifting her eyes to meet his. Her expression was a fortress. "Long. Tiring. Why are you asking?"
Shikhar hesitated, his fingers flexing inside his pockets, searching for words he couldn't find. "I just… wanted to know."
"Yeah..." she breathed out, a small, disappointed sound that wasn't quite a sigh. She looked away. "Where were you?"
"I went with Gopal Uncle. To help set up that new store opening on the main road."
He pulled a hand from his pocket and slowly slid a worn one-hundred rupee note across the table toward her. His eyes were downcast, focused intently on the Formica pattern, avoiding her gaze.
Kriti stared at the money. It sat there between them, a pathetic, crumpled thing. Then she looked at him. Her face remained unreadable, a mask of fatigue. "What's this for?" she asked, her voice low.
Shikhar swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing. "I thought maybe you could use it. For groceries or... whatever."
Kriti's fingers twitched on the table, a phantom instinct to grab what she could, but she didn't move. Instead, a short, humorless laugh escaped her throat. "You're giving me money now? After everything?"
He flinched as if she’d raised a hand. "Kriti, I—"
"Just one hundred rupees? For setting up an entire store?"
"I had to give some to Gopal Uncle," he said quickly, the words tumbling out in a rush, stumbling over each other like a man trying to navigate a minefield. "I borrowed money from him last week. To buy the vegetables for this week. And he gave me an advance for today's work, so I paid him back. I didn't want to keep the rest with me. I thought you could use it."
His voice dropped to a whisper on the last sentence.
Kriti stared at the note again. The edges were frayed and soft from being folded and unfolded, dirty from the hands it had passed through. She could feel the weight of his gaze on her, heavy with expectation. He was waiting for approval, or absolution. She didn’t know which was worse.
She pushed the money back toward him across the table. "Keep it."
Shikhar’s fingers curled around the note, but he didn’t move. He just stood there, holding the small, dirty piece of paper, while the ceiling fan clicked its uneven rhythm above them.
"Listen," Shikhar said finally. His voice was low, a rough rasp that scbangd against the silence. "I need to ask you something."
Kriti didn't look up. She focused intently on her plate, her fork creating meaningless patterns in the cooling yellow sauce. She watched the way the dal clung to the grains of rice, thick and congealed, refusing to meet his eyes. Even without looking, she could feel the tension radiating off him. She heard the soft squeak of his shoe on the linoleum as he shifted his weight, restless, like a man preparing for a fight.
Or maybe it was something else. Something worse.
"Kriti," he said again, softer this time, barely more than an exhale. "I need five hundred rupees."
The words hung in the air, suspended in the humidity of the small kitchen. Kriti’s fork froze mid-motion. The silence that followed wasn't empty; it was a physical thing, a tight wire strung between them, vibrating at a frequency that made her teeth ache.
Then, the wire snapped.
Kriti’s fork clattered onto the china, a sharp, violent sound that made Shikhar flinch. She pushed her chair back slowly, the wooden legs dragging against the floor with a high-pitched shriek that tore through the room.
"Five hundred rupees." Her voice was terrifyingly calm, a low rumble of thunder before the strike. "You come home, you slide me a hundred rupees like you’re some benevolent patron, and then—in the same breath—you ask for five hundred?"
She stood up, planting her palms flat on the table, leaning into the dead space between them. "For what, Shikhar? Tell me. Is it a new tip on a 'sure-thing' horse? A poker game with Gopal Uncle’s deadbeat cousins? Or is it just for the bottle, so you can spend another night passed out on the balcony while I sit here and try to figure out how to pay for our life?"
Her volume rose with every accusation, climbing the scale until she was shouting, her voice raw and ragged, bouncing off the tile walls. "I am so tired! I am tired of being the only adult here! I am tired of looking at that screen and seeing nothing! I am tired of coming home to this… this graveyard of your potential!"
Tears of pure, distilled fury blurred her vision, turning him into a watery smudge. "You think I don’t see you? You think I don’t know you’re drowning? Well, I’m drowning too! And I will not give you another rupee to pull me under with you. Not one. Do you understand me?"
He stood there, rooted to the spot, taking the verbal blows without raising his hands or his voice. He looked like a building that had already been condemned, just waiting for gravity to do the rest. When her words finally ran out, leaving her chest heaving and the room ringing, he spoke. The rage seemed to have drained his face of all color, leaving him grey.
"It’s not for a drink," he said. "It’s for a suit."
His voice was a flat, quiet ruin. "I have a job interview tomorrow. At SynthLabs. A real one. I need to rent a decent suit."
He looked at her then, his eyes desperate to catch hers, trying to anchor himself to her one last time. "If I get this, Kriti, things get back on track. I promise. You won’t have to look at that screen and see red ever again."
She stared at him, the white-hot heat of her anger cooling rapidly into something hard, brittle, and infinitely colder. A bitter laugh escaped her throat—a dry, hacking sound. "A suit. An interview. Do you think I’m stupid?"
"It’s the truth."
"You’ve had 'interviews' before," she spat, hooking her fingers into mocking air quotes, her voice dripping with a sarcasm that corroded the air between them. "They were just excuses to get out of the house, to feel important for a few hours before coming back empty-handed. Do you remember the 'sure-thing' at that biotech startup? Or the 'guaranteed offer' from your old colleague?"
She shook her head, a sharp, final movement. "I don’t believe you."
"This is different."
"It’s always different!" she screamed, the words ripping out of her throat. "The story is always different, Shikhar, but the ending is always the same! I’m done believing in your 'different.'"
He watched her for a long, agonizing moment. She saw the last flicker of light in his eyes—not anger, but hope—gutter out and die. His shoulders slumped, not in defeat, but in a profound, utter withdrawal. He looked small.
Without another word, he turned his back on her. She heard the soft, defeated shuffle of his feet on the floor, moving away from the light of the kitchen. Then came the quiet click of the bedroom door closing.
It wasn't a slam. It was a surrender.
The silence Shikhar left behind was heavier than the shouting. It pressed against the walls, thick and accusatory. Kriti stood frozen, her palms still pressed flat into the cool Formica of the table, listening to the ghost of her own rage ringing in her ears. Then, the adrenaline abandoned her all at once—a sudden, violent vacuum that left her limbs weak and trembling. Her knees buckled, and she sank onto the worn sofa, its springs groaning in familiar, rusty protest.
The food sat forgotten on the table. The dal would be a cold, congealed mass by morning, a small tragedy she simply didn’t have the energy to prevent. She slumped forward, burying her face in her hands, her fingers digging into her hairline.
The tears came then—not the hot, explosive fury from before, but a quiet, desperate flood from a much deeper well. They seeped through her fingers, dampening her palms, a silent acknowledgment of a defeat that had been years in the making. She couldn’t do this anymore. The constant, brutal calculus of survival; the loneliness of a marriage that felt like a one-room prison; the exhausting, thankless work of loving a ghost. She felt like a balloon stretched so thin that the next breath of air would shatter her.
But then, unbidden, small details began to surface through the misery, stubborn and inconvenient.
The kitchen. It was clean. He’d washed the pressure cooker and left it upside down on the drying rack, positioned just so. The hundred-rupee note—it hadn't been a boast or a bribe, but a humble, almost shy restitution. And the timing: he’d come home straight after his work with Gopal Uncle, instead of disappearing into the neon haze of the night. He hadn’t smelled of cheap whisky or the stale smoke of a gambling den; he’d smelled of sweat and dust, the honest, pungent scent of actual labor.
And his eyes, just before he turned away. They hadn’t held their usual defensiveness, that shifting, theatrical guilt she knew so well. They’d just looked… stripped bare. Honest.
Was it possible? The thought was a fragile, dangerous thing, sharp enough to cut. Was the man who built me up finally trying to rebuild himself?
But her patience was a thread worn down to a single filament. One more pull, one more lie, and it would snap for good. She couldn’t hang her future on a 'maybe,' not when 'definitely' had already cost her everything.
A soft chime from her phone, abandoned on the arm of the sofa, sliced through the quiet. She wiped her face roughly with the heels of her hands, leaving damp, shiny streaks on her cheeks, and picked it up.
The screen’s glow illuminated her puffy, red eyes. She read the text. Her shoulders sank further, as if the pixels carried physical weight. A long, defeated sigh leaked out of her, the last of her fight leaving her body in a rush. She thought of the red numbers on the banking screen, the pending bill payment that would fail tomorrow, the hollow, echoing emptiness of her account.
Her thumbs moved slowly, punching out a short reply. The message sent with a quiet whoosh.
She sat there for another minute, gathering the scattered fragments of herself. Then, with a resolve that felt borrowed from someone else, she pushed herself up. She walked to her worn purse, hanging by the door. She dug past old receipts, a tangle of headphones, and a lone tube of lipstick she hadn’t worn in months, until her fingers brushed paper. She pulled out a single five-hundred rupee note. It was crisp—the last of her emergency cash, the "do not touch" money from her last paycheck.
The bedroom door was ajar. She pushed it open gently.
The room was dark, lit only by the streetlamp’s amber glow filtering through the thin, cheap curtains, casting long shadows across the floor. Shikhar was lying on his side, facing the wall, the sheet pulled up to his shoulders. His breathing was even, a rhythmic rise and fall, but she knew he wasn’t asleep. His posture was too still, too rigid with wakefulness.
She didn’t turn on the light. She moved quietly to his side of the bed, her socks sliding on the floor. His phone lay face-down on the cracked nightstand. With a trembling hand, she slipped the note underneath it, the pale green of the currency just visible against the dark wood—a seed planted in the dark.
“I’m going to Ma’s,” she said. Her voice was hoarse from crying but flat with finality. “I won’t be back for two days.”
There was a long pause. She could see the silhouette of his face against the pillow, the way he blinked. His eyes were open, staring at nothing.
“Ok,” he said. The word was barely a breath, fragile as glass.
She turned and left, closing the door softly behind her.
The blue glare of the laptop screen was the only light in the living room, painting Kriti’s exhausted face in a harsh, spectral hue. She hadn’t even bothered to change out of her pharmacy uniform; the faint, sterile smell of rubbing alcohol and cheap floor cleaner still clung to her sleeves, a stubborn perfume of her double shifts. Staring at the online banking portal, she performed her grim weekly ritual—a kind of financial autopsy where she tried to force the math of their survival to make sense.
Her cursor hovered over the "Pay Now" button for the electricity bill. If she paid it today, they would be eighty rupees short for groceries until Tuesday. If she delayed the internet payment, she risked losing the connection she needed for the freelance transcription work she did in the dead of night. The apartment was silent, save for the rhythmic, judgmental hum of the refrigerator and the cooling dal Shikhar had left on the stove before disappearing again—a silence that felt less like peace and more like a held breath, waiting for the next disaster to strike.
Kriti rubbed her temples, her fingers pressing into the throb behind her eyes. The screen flickered, the red text taunting her: Insufficient funds. Again.
She closed her eyes, and for a moment, the sterile blue light was replaced by the golden haze of a memory ten years old. It felt like looking at a different life through the wrong end of a telescope—tiny, distant, and impossibly bright.
Back then, she had been a creature of silence, a shy girl from a modest family who navigated the college corridors with her head down, hoping to remain invisible. Shikhar had been the opposite. He was a gravitational force, the kind of young man who seemed to have sunlight caught in his skin, charming professors and peers with an easy, careless grace. She remembered the terror and the thrill of him noticing her, the way he had gently dismantled her walls brick by brick. He hadn't just loved her; he had invented a version of her that could speak, that could laugh loudly, that could believe she was the only girl in the room. He was her first love, her first rebellion, her first everything
.
Five years of university had dissolved like sugar in water, sweet and fleeting. By graduation, "Kriti and Shikhar" was a single entity. He had taken the shy girl and given her a spine of steel, while he soared. He graduated at the top of his class, landing a senior role at YugaPharma straight out of the gate. It was the kind of job parents bragged about at weddings—prestigious, high-paying, secure. When they married, it felt less like a leap of faith and more like a coronation.
For three years, their life had the glossy sheen of a movie. Shikhar climbed the corporate ladder two rungs at a time. They bought a sprawling apartment with a balcony that overlooked the city lights; she had a walk-in closet, a car, and a husband who looked at the world as something he was destined to own.
Then, the ground vanished.
The news broke on a Tuesday. YugaPharma wasn’t just failing; it was rotting. The scandal involving unethical clinical trials and bribery dominated the news cycle for weeks, stripping the company down to the studs. The shutdown was swift, brutal, and total. Shikhar didn't just lose a job; he lost his identity. The confidence that had once been his armor shattered, leaving behind a man terrified of his own reflection.
The decline was not a cliff, but a slow, suffocating slide. First came the silence, then the whiskey. He started disappearing into the neon buzz of bars, coming home with liquor on his breath and apologies that grew thinner every time. In two years, the lavish apartment was sold to pay debts. The savings account was drained by online poker sites and desperate bets. The man who had once promised her the world had become a stranger who couldn't even meet her gaze across their second-hand dining table.
Kriti opened her eyes, the golden memory dissolving back into the stark reality of the blinking cursor. She had endured it all—the shame, the downsizing, the nights spent waiting for a key to turn in the lock. She had loved him through the wreckage because she believed the man she met in college was still in there, buried under the debris of his ego.
But tonight, staring at the red deficit on the screen, the feeling in her chest wasn't just exhaustion. It was a dull, heavy ache—the specific pain of a heart that had been stretched too thin, too many times, and was finally beginning to fray.
She closed the laptop with a sharp click, the sound echoing in the empty kitchen like a gunshot. The screen’s blue light died, plunging the room back into the dim amber of the single overhead bulb. She pushed the computer aside and walked to the stove, her movements mechanical, driven by a hunger she didn’t quite feel.
This kitchen was a closet compared to the culinary theater of the home they had bought—and the home Shikhar had lost. The ceiling fan whirred overhead, its rhythm uneven, casting a lazy, lopsided shadow that pulsed against the chipped wall tiles. Kriti opened the lid of the pressure cooker, and steam curled up in a thin, ghostly tendril, carrying the scent of cumin and ginger. It was simple, familiar—the kind of comfort that didn’t cost money.
The only grace left in Shikhar was this: he could still coax magic out of the bare minimum. The dal was spiced perfectly—smoky, with a sharp underscore of garlic that made her mouth water despite her mood. She ladled the yellow lentils over the rice waiting in its pot. The first bite was warm and grounding. The act of eating felt like a small rebellion, a quiet refusal to let this night completely break her.
She was halfway through her meal when the front door creaked open.
Kriti didn’t look up. She didn't need to. She knew the cadence of his return—the hesitant shuffle, the pause on the threshold as if he were checking the atmospheric pressure of the room, bracing himself for a storm. The air in the kitchen instantly thickened, charged with the static of everything they weren't saying.
"Hey," he said finally.
His voice was rough. Not from drink, she noted with a clinician’s detachment. Just exhaustion.
Kriti didn't answer. She kept her eyes fixed on her plate, pushing a grain of rice around with her fork, studying the way it left a small trail of sauce. The silence stretched between them, thick and suffocating. She could feel his gaze burning into the back of her head, pleading for acknowledgment, but she refused to turn around. If she did, she might see something in his eyes—shame, or worse, hope—that would make her soften. And God, she was too tired to be soft.
The floorboards groaned as he took a step closer. "I made dal," he said, offering the fact like a peace treaty.
"I see that," she replied, her voice flat. She didn't look up.
"So... how was work?"
His voice was careful, tiptoeing. He moved toward the stove, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his faded jeans. The harsh kitchen light caught the shadow of stubble along his jaw, illuminating the hollows beneath his cheekbones that seemed carved by regret. Once, he had been the kind of man who wore a three-piece suit like a second skin, armor against the world. Now, in his frayed t-shirt, he looked like a man who had been slowly unraveling for years.
Kriti set her fork down with deliberate slowness. The metal clinked against the ceramic. "Same as always," she said, finally lifting her eyes to meet his. Her expression was a fortress. "Long. Tiring. Why are you asking?"
Shikhar hesitated, his fingers flexing inside his pockets, searching for words he couldn't find. "I just… wanted to know."
"Yeah..." she breathed out, a small, disappointed sound that wasn't quite a sigh. She looked away. "Where were you?"
"I went with Gopal Uncle. To help set up that new store opening on the main road."
He pulled a hand from his pocket and slowly slid a worn one-hundred rupee note across the table toward her. His eyes were downcast, focused intently on the Formica pattern, avoiding her gaze.
Kriti stared at the money. It sat there between them, a pathetic, crumpled thing. Then she looked at him. Her face remained unreadable, a mask of fatigue. "What's this for?" she asked, her voice low.
Shikhar swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing. "I thought maybe you could use it. For groceries or... whatever."
Kriti's fingers twitched on the table, a phantom instinct to grab what she could, but she didn't move. Instead, a short, humorless laugh escaped her throat. "You're giving me money now? After everything?"
He flinched as if she’d raised a hand. "Kriti, I—"
"Just one hundred rupees? For setting up an entire store?"
"I had to give some to Gopal Uncle," he said quickly, the words tumbling out in a rush, stumbling over each other like a man trying to navigate a minefield. "I borrowed money from him last week. To buy the vegetables for this week. And he gave me an advance for today's work, so I paid him back. I didn't want to keep the rest with me. I thought you could use it."
His voice dropped to a whisper on the last sentence.
Kriti stared at the note again. The edges were frayed and soft from being folded and unfolded, dirty from the hands it had passed through. She could feel the weight of his gaze on her, heavy with expectation. He was waiting for approval, or absolution. She didn’t know which was worse.
She pushed the money back toward him across the table. "Keep it."
Shikhar’s fingers curled around the note, but he didn’t move. He just stood there, holding the small, dirty piece of paper, while the ceiling fan clicked its uneven rhythm above them.
"Listen," Shikhar said finally. His voice was low, a rough rasp that scbangd against the silence. "I need to ask you something."
Kriti didn't look up. She focused intently on her plate, her fork creating meaningless patterns in the cooling yellow sauce. She watched the way the dal clung to the grains of rice, thick and congealed, refusing to meet his eyes. Even without looking, she could feel the tension radiating off him. She heard the soft squeak of his shoe on the linoleum as he shifted his weight, restless, like a man preparing for a fight.
Or maybe it was something else. Something worse.
"Kriti," he said again, softer this time, barely more than an exhale. "I need five hundred rupees."
The words hung in the air, suspended in the humidity of the small kitchen. Kriti’s fork froze mid-motion. The silence that followed wasn't empty; it was a physical thing, a tight wire strung between them, vibrating at a frequency that made her teeth ache.
Then, the wire snapped.
Kriti’s fork clattered onto the china, a sharp, violent sound that made Shikhar flinch. She pushed her chair back slowly, the wooden legs dragging against the floor with a high-pitched shriek that tore through the room.
"Five hundred rupees." Her voice was terrifyingly calm, a low rumble of thunder before the strike. "You come home, you slide me a hundred rupees like you’re some benevolent patron, and then—in the same breath—you ask for five hundred?"
She stood up, planting her palms flat on the table, leaning into the dead space between them. "For what, Shikhar? Tell me. Is it a new tip on a 'sure-thing' horse? A poker game with Gopal Uncle’s deadbeat cousins? Or is it just for the bottle, so you can spend another night passed out on the balcony while I sit here and try to figure out how to pay for our life?"
Her volume rose with every accusation, climbing the scale until she was shouting, her voice raw and ragged, bouncing off the tile walls. "I am so tired! I am tired of being the only adult here! I am tired of looking at that screen and seeing nothing! I am tired of coming home to this… this graveyard of your potential!"
Tears of pure, distilled fury blurred her vision, turning him into a watery smudge. "You think I don’t see you? You think I don’t know you’re drowning? Well, I’m drowning too! And I will not give you another rupee to pull me under with you. Not one. Do you understand me?"
He stood there, rooted to the spot, taking the verbal blows without raising his hands or his voice. He looked like a building that had already been condemned, just waiting for gravity to do the rest. When her words finally ran out, leaving her chest heaving and the room ringing, he spoke. The rage seemed to have drained his face of all color, leaving him grey.
"It’s not for a drink," he said. "It’s for a suit."
His voice was a flat, quiet ruin. "I have a job interview tomorrow. At SynthLabs. A real one. I need to rent a decent suit."
He looked at her then, his eyes desperate to catch hers, trying to anchor himself to her one last time. "If I get this, Kriti, things get back on track. I promise. You won’t have to look at that screen and see red ever again."
She stared at him, the white-hot heat of her anger cooling rapidly into something hard, brittle, and infinitely colder. A bitter laugh escaped her throat—a dry, hacking sound. "A suit. An interview. Do you think I’m stupid?"
"It’s the truth."
"You’ve had 'interviews' before," she spat, hooking her fingers into mocking air quotes, her voice dripping with a sarcasm that corroded the air between them. "They were just excuses to get out of the house, to feel important for a few hours before coming back empty-handed. Do you remember the 'sure-thing' at that biotech startup? Or the 'guaranteed offer' from your old colleague?"
She shook her head, a sharp, final movement. "I don’t believe you."
"This is different."
"It’s always different!" she screamed, the words ripping out of her throat. "The story is always different, Shikhar, but the ending is always the same! I’m done believing in your 'different.'"
He watched her for a long, agonizing moment. She saw the last flicker of light in his eyes—not anger, but hope—gutter out and die. His shoulders slumped, not in defeat, but in a profound, utter withdrawal. He looked small.
Without another word, he turned his back on her. She heard the soft, defeated shuffle of his feet on the floor, moving away from the light of the kitchen. Then came the quiet click of the bedroom door closing.
It wasn't a slam. It was a surrender.
The silence Shikhar left behind was heavier than the shouting. It pressed against the walls, thick and accusatory. Kriti stood frozen, her palms still pressed flat into the cool Formica of the table, listening to the ghost of her own rage ringing in her ears. Then, the adrenaline abandoned her all at once—a sudden, violent vacuum that left her limbs weak and trembling. Her knees buckled, and she sank onto the worn sofa, its springs groaning in familiar, rusty protest.
The food sat forgotten on the table. The dal would be a cold, congealed mass by morning, a small tragedy she simply didn’t have the energy to prevent. She slumped forward, burying her face in her hands, her fingers digging into her hairline.
The tears came then—not the hot, explosive fury from before, but a quiet, desperate flood from a much deeper well. They seeped through her fingers, dampening her palms, a silent acknowledgment of a defeat that had been years in the making. She couldn’t do this anymore. The constant, brutal calculus of survival; the loneliness of a marriage that felt like a one-room prison; the exhausting, thankless work of loving a ghost. She felt like a balloon stretched so thin that the next breath of air would shatter her.
But then, unbidden, small details began to surface through the misery, stubborn and inconvenient.
The kitchen. It was clean. He’d washed the pressure cooker and left it upside down on the drying rack, positioned just so. The hundred-rupee note—it hadn't been a boast or a bribe, but a humble, almost shy restitution. And the timing: he’d come home straight after his work with Gopal Uncle, instead of disappearing into the neon haze of the night. He hadn’t smelled of cheap whisky or the stale smoke of a gambling den; he’d smelled of sweat and dust, the honest, pungent scent of actual labor.
And his eyes, just before he turned away. They hadn’t held their usual defensiveness, that shifting, theatrical guilt she knew so well. They’d just looked… stripped bare. Honest.
Was it possible? The thought was a fragile, dangerous thing, sharp enough to cut. Was the man who built me up finally trying to rebuild himself?
But her patience was a thread worn down to a single filament. One more pull, one more lie, and it would snap for good. She couldn’t hang her future on a 'maybe,' not when 'definitely' had already cost her everything.
A soft chime from her phone, abandoned on the arm of the sofa, sliced through the quiet. She wiped her face roughly with the heels of her hands, leaving damp, shiny streaks on her cheeks, and picked it up.
The screen’s glow illuminated her puffy, red eyes. She read the text. Her shoulders sank further, as if the pixels carried physical weight. A long, defeated sigh leaked out of her, the last of her fight leaving her body in a rush. She thought of the red numbers on the banking screen, the pending bill payment that would fail tomorrow, the hollow, echoing emptiness of her account.
Her thumbs moved slowly, punching out a short reply. The message sent with a quiet whoosh.
She sat there for another minute, gathering the scattered fragments of herself. Then, with a resolve that felt borrowed from someone else, she pushed herself up. She walked to her worn purse, hanging by the door. She dug past old receipts, a tangle of headphones, and a lone tube of lipstick she hadn’t worn in months, until her fingers brushed paper. She pulled out a single five-hundred rupee note. It was crisp—the last of her emergency cash, the "do not touch" money from her last paycheck.
The bedroom door was ajar. She pushed it open gently.
The room was dark, lit only by the streetlamp’s amber glow filtering through the thin, cheap curtains, casting long shadows across the floor. Shikhar was lying on his side, facing the wall, the sheet pulled up to his shoulders. His breathing was even, a rhythmic rise and fall, but she knew he wasn’t asleep. His posture was too still, too rigid with wakefulness.
She didn’t turn on the light. She moved quietly to his side of the bed, her socks sliding on the floor. His phone lay face-down on the cracked nightstand. With a trembling hand, she slipped the note underneath it, the pale green of the currency just visible against the dark wood—a seed planted in the dark.
“I’m going to Ma’s,” she said. Her voice was hoarse from crying but flat with finality. “I won’t be back for two days.”
There was a long pause. She could see the silhouette of his face against the pillow, the way he blinked. His eyes were open, staring at nothing.
“Ok,” he said. The word was barely a breath, fragile as glass.
She turned and left, closing the door softly behind her.


![[+]](https://xossipy.com/themes/sharepoint/collapse_collapsed.png)
