[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 45: The Empty House

Poroma's perspective

The first thing Poroma noticed was the silence.

Not on the first night. The first night she did not notice anything at all. She sat at the kitchen table where the process server had left the envelope, and she watched Didi fold Nupur's frocks into the blue suitcase, and Rajiv's little vests, and the stuffed elephant without which he would not sleep. She watched uncle from downstairs carry the cot out in two pieces, and she did not get up. Her body did not seem to belong to her.

At the door Nupur turned back and looked at her. Six years old, in her red cardigan, holding Didi's hand.

"Mamma, are you coming?"

Poroma opened her mouth and nothing came out.

"Mamma will come and see you very soon, shona," Didi said, in a voice Poroma had never heard her use before. Gentle with Nupur, and flat as stone where it touched Poroma. "Come. Papa is waiting."

The door closed. The Maruti's engine coughed twice in the lane and pulled away.

That was the first night.

The silence began on the second morning.

She woke at six, the way she had woken every morning for six years, because Rajiv woke at six and wanted her. She lay there waiting for his cry. It did not come. Her breasts, which had nearly stopped producing milk in the last few weeks, ached faintly with a memory of fullness.

She got up and walked to the children's room. The cot was gone. Four dents in the carpet where its legs had stood. A single sock under Nupur's bed. A crayon drawing still taped to the wall: a house, a sun, four stick figures holding hands. The tallest one had a moustache. The one next to it had long black hair and very large blue eyes, coloured so hard the crayon had torn the paper.

Poroma sat down on Nupur's bare mattress and did not move for a very long time.

She called Ranjeet eleven times that first day. Then twenty times the next. Then she stopped counting.

He never picked up. He sent one message, on the first day, and then nothing.

Speak to a lawyer. Not to me.

She called Rahul. Rahul had always picked up. Even at two in the morning, even when she called to shout at him, he picked up on the second ring with that low lazy voice. Missing me already, Mrs. Sen?

His phone rang and rang. On the third day it started going straight to a recorded message: The number you are calling is switched off.

She sent him WhatsApp messages. They delivered, a single grey tick, then two grey ticks. They never turned blue.

On the fourth day she understood that he had blocked her.

On the fifth day she drove to New Alipore.

She did not dress up. That was the first strange thing she noticed about herself. For nine months, every time she had driven to that building, she had spent an hour getting ready. The chiffon tied four inches below her navel, the way he liked. The backless blouses. No bra. The good perfume. Sindoor in her parting and the mangalsutra glittering between her breasts, because he liked that most of all, the married woman coming to him in her wifely ornaments. It had made her feel wicked and alive.

Today she drove in a faded cotton salwar kameez, the one she wore to clean the kitchen. She had not washed her hair. She had not looked in a mirror.

The guard at the gate was Mahmud. She remembered his face from the first time, the way his eyes had crawled over her bare midriff while he called upstairs, the smirk he and the other guard had exchanged.

He recognised her too. But he did not smirk this time.

"Madam," he said, coming out of his cabin. "Rahul Sir is not at home."

"I'll wait."

"Madam." He hesitated. Then he lowered his voice. "Sir has given instructions. Your name is not to be sent up. If you come, I am to say he is not here. If you insist, I am to call the society secretary." He looked away. "And the security officer, madam. He said security officer."

Poroma stared at him.

"He said that?"

"Yes, madam."

She stood there in the December sun in her old salwar kameez and felt something in her chest that she did not have a name for.

"Madam," Mahmud said, more quietly still. "Please forgive me for saying. You are a respectable lady. You have small children. Please go home."

A respectable lady. The guard who had ogled her nipples through her blouse was telling her she was a respectable lady, and he was saying it out of pity.

She got back into the car. She drove two streets away, parked under a krishnachura tree, and cried until her throat hurt.

Then, for the first time in nine months, she began to think.

Not about Rahul. About herself.

She thought about the first time she saw him, at the shoe shop, and how his eyes on her had felt like being touched. She thought about the messages that came after. Three weeks of jokes and attention and never one word that could be called improper. She thought about the story he had printed and brought to the Holi party, the one with her name and Ranjeet's name in it. "A big coincidence," he had said, and smiled at her over everyone's heads, and she had smiled back because she knew it wasn't one. She had known since Valentine's Day.

She thought about how every single thing she had done in the last nine months, she had told herself she was doing because she had no choice. Because of the video. Because he would show it to Ranjeet. Because she was protecting her marriage.

And sitting in her car under the krishnachura tree, she made herself say the truth, out loud, for the first time.

"I wanted to."

Her voice sounded strange in the closed car.

"I wanted to. Not every time. But at the beginning. And for a long time after." She wiped her face with her dupatta. "He didn't make me. I wanted it, and the video was my excuse."

It did not make her feel better. But it made her feel, for a moment, like a person instead of a ghost.

On the eighth day there was a supervised visit.

It was at a family counselling centre in Lake Gardens, a room with bright plastic chairs and a box of donated toys and a social worker with a clipboard sitting in the corner. Didi brought the children. Ranjeet did not come.

Rajiv ran to her as soon as he saw her, and she caught him and buried her face in his neck and breathed him in. Baby powder and milk and the coconut oil Didi rubbed into his hair. He did not seem to know anything had happened. He showed her a new red car and made it go vroom up her arm.

Nupur did not run.

Nupur walked over slowly and stood in front of her, holding the edge of her cardigan, and looked at her mother's face very carefully, the way she looked at a page of her reading book when she wasn't sure of a word.

"Are you still angry, Mamma?"

"Angry?" Poroma's voice cracked. "Shona, I was never angry with you."

"You hit me," Nupur said. Not accusing. Just stating it, like the colour of the sky. "When the uncle was in your room and I knocked. You said I needed to be slapped."

The social worker's pen stopped moving.

Poroma could not speak. She reached out and touched her daughter's cheek, the left one, very gently, the way you touch a bruise to see if it still hurts.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "Mamma was very, very wrong. Mamma was bad. Not you. Never you."

Nupur considered this. Then she leaned in and gave her mother a quick, careful hug, and stepped back.

"Papa reads me the mongoose story now," she said. "He does the cobra's voice. It's very scary." She paused. "You can come and hear it if you want. But you have to ask Papa."

When the hour was over and Didi took them away, the social worker wrote for a long time on her clipboard. Poroma did not ask what she wrote.

On the ninth night she could not sleep, and she went to the almirah in their bedroom. The one with the locker inside, where she kept her jewellery and their property papers and Ranjeet's grandfather's watch.

At the very back, behind the velvet boxes, was a small grey pen drive in a padded envelope.

Rahul had given it to her in August, after the Bengali New Year party. "A copy," he had said, smiling. "So you can see what I see. So you never forget what you agreed to." And then he had kissed her forehead, like a father.

She had never watched it. She had been too afraid.

She sat on the edge of the bed, opened her laptop, and plugged it in.

There was one file. Fourteen minutes and thirty-one seconds long. The thumbnail showed a man's bedroom she knew very well, lit by one lamp, and a woman sitting on the edge of the bed in a black chiffon saree with the blouse already open.

The date in the file name was the fourteenth of February.

Poroma pressed play.

[Muralimm]

Finally you update the story man nice to see you

You adopt the story very well and the narration is brilliant

Waiting for the backend story of before holi

[Yours_bear_for]

This is a really great story but the wait between updates really sucks. You updated it after 2-3 months, please update it on regular basis and complete the story because you writing style is really amazing and you deserved to be appreciated. But, the wait really sucks author please it's my humble request update it soon otherwise no one will comment or read it

[shivanikaur2]

Hi, yes I agree. I got some negative feedbacks earlier, so I was taking some time to think how I should continue it. Please share your feedbacks. I have the next few updates ready and will post soon

[NovelMaster]

Super update when will next update posted.

[NovelMaster]

Show realistic consequences of adultery she had loose ranjeet and now show daughter grow up hate she big enough that time when get slap she knew her mother is a cheater , as of son he is small not idea happening but future find out why his sister and dad hate his mother, he also go distant to her if not cut connection. As for rahul friend loose job blacklist sabotage colleagues conuntry run check all those friend hold ranjeet that day also fired they did loose job. At end show poroma depressed loose everything don't know if she fall has she have narcissistic trait she blame other and situation not herself.

[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 46: Valentine's Night

Poroma's perspective

The camera had been placed on top of the wardrobe. She understood that in the first few seconds, from the angle. Looking down at the bed from high in one corner, the way a security camera looks down at a shop counter. She had never seen it. In nine months of coming to that room, she had never once looked up.

On the screen, a woman sat on the edge of Rahul's bed.

It took Poroma a moment to recognise herself. The black chiffon saree from Valentine's night, the one she had bought for that party especially. Her hair coming loose from its clip. The halter-neck blouse already untied at the back and hanging open at the front, her breasts half out of it. Her lipstick smeared. Her face flushed and soft and dazed, like a woman who has been crying, or drinking, or something else.

She had told Ranjeet, in their bed, that it had all happened in the car. That they had been in the car near the Victoria Memorial for nearly an hour.

It had not been an hour. It had been twenty minutes.

She remembered those twenty minutes better than she remembered her wedding.

He had parked under the trees on the Queen's Way side, where the streetlights didn't reach, and switched off the engine, and for a moment neither of them said anything. Then he reached across without asking and pulled the knot at the back of her neck, and the halter blouse fell open, and the cold air from the AC touched her bare breasts.

"Rahul. Someone will see."

"Let them."

He pulled her across the gearstick towards him and bent his head and took her nipple into his mouth, and she gasped so loudly she clapped her own hand over her mouth. He sucked hard, rolling the other nipple between his finger and thumb, and she felt it in her womb, a hot pulling ache she had not felt in years. Her hand found his thigh, then moved up, and she felt him through his jeans, a long hard ridge of him pressing against the denim. She squeezed it. She had never in her life touched a man there who was not her husband, and her hand would not stop.

He pushed the chiffon up over her knees, bunching it at her waist, and his hand slid up the inside of her thigh. She was so wet that her panties were soaked through. He laughed softly into her breast when he felt it.

"All this," he said. "Just from the drive."

"Shut up."

He pulled the panties aside and pushed two fingers into her, all the way, without any gentleness, and she bucked against the car seat with a noise that was nearly a scream. He fucked her with his fingers, fast and deep, his thumb rubbing her clit in hard tight circles, his mouth going from one breast to the other, and she spread her legs as wide as the footwell would let her and rode his hand. She came in under three minutes. She came with her forehead pressed against his shoulder and her nails in his arm and her thighs clamped around his wrist, her whole cunt pulsing around his fingers. He did not stop. He kept going until she came again, harder, gasping his name, juice running down into his palm and onto the leather seat, with the gate lights of the Memorial blurring through the windscreen.

Afterwards he took his hand out of her and held his wet fingers up in front of her face. Then he put them in her mouth. She sucked them clean without being told.

Then he started the engine again, and drove her to the party, and walked her in through the side gate past the swimming pool, so that people saw her there. So they remember you arrived, he had said. And then, forty minutes later, while everyone was busy at the bar, he had walked her out again through the same gate to his car, and driven her to New Alipore.

The hour had been here. In this room. She had lied to Ranjeet even in her full confession, and she had not even noticed she was doing it.

On the screen, Rahul came into the frame from the bathroom. He had taken off his shirt. He stood in front of her, very tall, and she looked up at him the way she had never once looked up at Ranjeet. Hungry, and frightened, and grateful.

"Your phone," he said.

On the screen, she held it out to him. He switched it off and dropped it on the bedside table.

"He'll call," she said. Her own voice, small and husky on the laptop's tinny speakers.

"Let him. You'll tell him it died. Sutapa will tell him she was with you in the garden the whole time."

"Sutapa knows?"

"Sutapa knows what I tell her." He knelt down in front of her, between her knees, and slid both hands up under the chiffon. "Stop thinking about him. You've thought about him for ten years. Tonight think about yourself."

Poroma on the bed closed her eyes and let her knees fall open.

Poroma on the laptop watched her own thighs part for him and felt her stomach turn over, and something lower down tighten at the same time, and hated herself for both.

He undressed her slowly, the way he always did the first time with anything. The blouse first, sliding it off her shoulders, letting it drop behind her on the bed. He held her breasts in both hands, weighing them, squeezing, and she heard herself make a little sound. They were heavy and full that night, tight and aching. Rajiv had been feeding less, and she had not expressed before the party.

He squeezed again, harder, and a bead of milk welled up at her left nipple and ran down the curve of her breast.

"You're leaking," he said, sounding pleased.

"Don't—"

He put his mouth on her left nipple and sucked, and on the screen her head fell back and her hand went to the back of his head and held him there.

She remembered the feeling exactly. The pull of it, deep in her chest, down through her belly and between her legs, the sting and then the rush of the milk letting down into a man's mouth for the first time in her life. Ranjeet had never. She had never let him. She had told him it was for the baby. That night she did not say anything about the baby. She held Rahul's head to her breast and arched her back to push more of herself into his mouth and moved her hips against nothing and moaned. He drank from her. She could see his throat moving on the screen. When the left one was soft he moved to the right and did it again, and milk ran out of the corner of his mouth and down her belly, and she whimpered and rubbed her thighs together and begged him not to stop.

When he lifted his head his mouth was wet and shining. He kissed her with it, and she tasted her own milk on his tongue, sweet and thin, and on the screen she pulled him closer.

He stood up and unbuckled his jeans and pushed them down with his underwear. She had felt him through the cloth in the car, but this was the first time she saw him, and the woman on the screen stared. Poroma remembered that too. The size of him, thick and dark and already hard, curving up from a nest of black hair, the head swollen and shining at the tip, his heavy balls hanging low. Bigger than Ranjeet. Not grotesquely, not the monster she had described to Ranjeet later in her lies and her games. But longer and thicker, and arrogant somehow, the way all of him was arrogant.

"Touch it," he said.

On the screen, her hand came up slowly and closed around him. Her fingers did not quite meet. She stroked him once, carefully, as if he might break, and he laughed softly.

"Not like a wife," he said. "Like you want it."

She tightened her grip and stroked him again, harder, the whole length, from the root to the tip, and he hissed through his teeth, and she looked up at him with an expression Poroma had never seen on her own face. Triumphant.

"Now your mouth," he said.

Ten years of marriage, and she had done that for Ranjeet perhaps four times, quickly, in the dark, and had brushed her teeth afterwards. On the screen she did not hesitate. She leaned forward on the edge of the bed and licked the drop of fluid off the tip of him, and then opened her mouth wide and took the head of him in. Her lips stretched around him. Her lipstick left a dark red ring on his shaft. He put one hand in her hair and pushed, slowly, and she took more, and more, until he hit the back of her throat and she gagged and her eyes watered and she pulled back, coughing, a string of spit hanging from her lip to the head of his cock.

"Again," he said.

She did it again. She did it until she found the rhythm, her hand wrapped around the base of him, her head bobbing, her cheeks hollowing. She could hear the wet sounds of it on the laptop now, loud and obscene in the silent house, and her own muffled moans around him. On the screen her free hand had gone down between her own legs, under the bunched-up saree, and she was touching herself while she sucked him. She had no memory of doing that. But there it was.

He let her go on for a long time. Then he pulled her off him by the hair, gently, and looked down at her wet red mouth.

"Good girl," he said.

And on the screen she smiled.

He laid her back across the bed and pulled the saree away from her hips in one long unwinding movement, and then the petticoat, and her panties with it, still damp from the car. She was bare. She had shaved that afternoon, for the first time in her life, in the bathroom at home with Ranjeet's razor, telling herself it was just for herself, just to feel different.

"For me?" he asked, running his thumb over her smooth mound and down, parting her lips, showing her to the room.

"For me," she said.

"Liar."

He put his mouth on her.

Ranjeet had offered so many times and she had always refused. It's dirty. It's humiliating for you. On the screen she grabbed the bedsheet in both fists and arched off the bed with a cry that made Poroma, watching, reach out and turn down the volume without thinking, as though someone in the empty house might hear.

He ate her for a long time. He did what he did at the Holi party, what he would do to her a hundred times afterwards. He licked her slowly from bottom to top with the flat of his tongue, over and over, then sucked her clit between his lips and flicked it until her thighs shook against his ears. He pushed his tongue inside her. He slid two fingers in and curled them up, pressing at the place inside her that Ranjeet had never found, and sucked at the same time, and her whole body went rigid. He took her right up to the edge and then stopped. Pulled away, and waited, watching her face, while she gasped and cursed and pushed her hips up at his mouth, her cunt clenching on nothing. Then he started again. And stopped again. On the screen she was begging within five minutes. Please. Rahul, please. Please let me. Please let me come. She had her hands on the back of his head trying to force his mouth back onto her. And he lifted his head and smiled up at her over her own heaving belly, his chin wet, and said, "Not yet. First we talk."

This was the part. Poroma's hand had gone cold on the touchpad. She knew what was coming now. She had known for ten months, in the part of her mind she never allowed herself to visit.

On the screen, Rahul lay down on his side next to her, propped on one elbow. His fingers moved lazily between her legs, sliding up and down through her wetness, circling her clit, just enough to keep her where she was, not enough to let her fall. His cock lay hard and heavy against her hip.

"Holi," he said. "Sutapa and Dilip's place. Five weeks from now."

"I know."

"I want you there."

"Ranjeet will be there."

"I want him there." His fingers slid inside her and she gasped. "I'm going to bring something to the party. A story. About a woman called Poroma and her husband Ranjeet. A game at a party. Ten minutes. If the man can make her say fuck me in ten minutes, she belongs to him for an hour."

She laughed breathlessly on the screen. "You're mad."

"I wrote it for you. I've been sending you pieces of it for a month."

"I know. I read them." Her hips were moving on his hand. "In the bathroom. At night. While he slept. I touched myself reading them."

"I know you did." He curled his fingers, and she cried out. "So. I bring the story. We argue about it in front of everyone. You're stubborn. Everyone knows you're stubborn. You say no woman would break in ten minutes. I say you would. You take the bet."

"In front of everyone." Her voice had gone very soft. "In front of him."

"In front of him. That's the point, Poroma. Think about it." He leaned down and spoke right against her ear, and the camera on the wardrobe caught every word. "If you just come to me, you're a cheating wife. If I win you in a game in front of him, in front of all of them, if he watches you fight and fight and lose, then it isn't your fault. Then you're the poor wife who was too proud and got tricked. He'll be angry. He'll be humiliated. But he'll forgive you. Because he'll have seen you fight."

On the screen, Poroma was silent for a long moment. Her hips had stopped moving.

Then she said it.

"I'll fight you," she whispered. "Nine minutes. Maybe nine and a half. I'll make it look real. I'll make him believe it. And then I'll say it."

Rahul smiled. "Louder."

"I'll fight you so he sees me fight." Her voice was steadier now. Clear. The voice she used when she had decided something, the voice she had used to tell her father she was marrying a boy from Behala. "And then I'll lose. I'll scream it so everyone hears. And he'll forgive me, because he loves me, and he'll never know I chose it."

"Sutapa will hold the stopwatch," Rahul said. "She'll be slow to start it. That'll give us time."

"Fine."

"Say you want it, Poroma."

"I want it." Her hand came down and covered his where it was buried between her legs and pressed it harder against her. "I want you to win me. In front of him. I want it more than I've ever wanted anything."

"Then say it now. Practise."

She turned her face to his, her blue eyes enormous, and said it, the two words she would scream five weeks later in Sutapa's bedroom with her husband outside the window.

"Fuck me."

He rolled on top of her then. He did not put on a condom. Not that night. That had come later, after the Holi party, when she had made her rules and pretended to herself that rules made it different.

On the screen she reached down between them and took hold of him herself and guided the head of him to her opening. He rubbed it up and down through her wetness, teasing, and she lifted her hips and wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him into her with her heels. The sound she made as he pushed in, slow and deep, stretching her open inch by inch, was a sound Poroma did not know her body could make. He was so thick that she felt every ridge of him going in. When he was all the way inside, his balls pressed against her, he stopped and held still and let her feel how full she was.

"Tell me," he said.

"Bigger," she gasped. "You're bigger. He's never— I've never felt—"

"Say his name."

"Ranjeet's never filled me like this."

He pulled almost all the way out and slammed back in, and she screamed.

She watched the man's broad back move on top of her. She watched her own hands slide down it and grip his buttocks and pull him deeper. She watched her own face over his shoulder, eyes open, staring straight up at the ceiling, at the corner where the camera was. Not seeing it. Not seeing anything.

He fucked her slowly at first and then not slowly. He hooked her knees over his arms and folded her nearly in half and drove down into her, hard and fast, the slap of his hips on her thighs loud on the laptop, the wet sound of him going in and out of her. The bed creaked and knocked against the wall. Her breasts shook with every thrust and leaked onto both their chests, milk and sweat smeared between them. Her mangalsutra had slid round to the back of her neck and the gold pendant bounced against the pillow. She was saying things on the screen, a stream of them, Bengali and English mixed. Harder. Don't stop. Fuck me, fuck me, I'm yours. Things she had never said aloud in her life.

She came with a long broken wail, her heels drumming on the backs of his thighs, her cunt squeezing him so hard he grunted. He did not stop. He kept going through it, and then he pulled out and flipped her over onto her hands and knees like she weighed nothing, and took her from behind, one hand twisted in her hair pulling her head back, the other gripping her hip. On the screen her face was turned towards the camera now, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut, her breasts swinging under her, dripping onto the sheet. He spanked her once, hard, and she cried out and pushed back onto him for more. He reached around and rubbed her clit while he pounded into her and she came again almost at once, clawing at the sheets, sobbing his name into the mattress.

He turned her onto her back again for the end. He wanted to see her face. He put his hand on her throat, not squeezing, just holding, and fucked her in long brutal strokes, looking down into her eyes, and she held his gaze and wrapped her legs around him and said, "Inside. Come inside me. I want it."

When he finally came, he drove into her to the hilt and held there, groaning into her neck, his whole body shuddering, and she felt it on the screen as clearly as she had felt it that night, the hot pulse of him deep inside her, again and again, filling her. She held him and stroked his hair and laughed, a low drunk happy laugh, with his weight crushing her into the mattress and his seed in her womb.

When he pulled out of her she lay with her legs open, too spent to close them, and on the screen Poroma could see him running out of her onto Rahul's sheets.

He looked down at it, satisfied. Then he lifted his head and looked straight up at the camera. And winked.

The file ended.

Poroma sat on the edge of her own marital bed in the empty house with the laptop on her knees and did not move.

She had always told herself the video was a threat because of the sex. Because Ranjeet would see her naked under another man, see her moaning, see her body doing things it never did for him.

But Ranjeet knew about the sex. He had stood outside the bedroom window at the Holi party and watched it. She had told him about Mandarmoni, about Rahul's flat, about the hickeys and the blowjobs and the nights. She had described it all to him in their own bed, sometimes to hurt him, sometimes to arouse him, sometimes just because she couldn't stop talking about it. Rahul could have sent Ranjeet a hundred videos of her naked and it would have changed nothing.

That was not why she had obeyed Rahul for nine months.

She had obeyed him because of seventy seconds in the middle of this file. I'll fight you so he sees me fight.

Everything Ranjeet had forgiven her for, he had forgiven because he believed she had been tricked. He had said it to her on the first night she came back from Mandarmoni, standing in the hall with his packed suitcase by the door. You're correct there. You fought. And she had cried and held him and let him believe it, and built every day of the last nine months on top of that lie, the way you build a house on a filled-in pond.

The Holi party had not been her defeat. She had not been defeated at all. She had planned it, in this bed, with another man's fingers inside her, five weeks in advance.

The real defeat was this. Sitting alone in the dark watching herself, and finally understanding that there was no version of the story in which she was the victim. She had told herself for nine months that she was protecting her marriage. She had been protecting this. The lie that let her keep both.

Outside, a dog barked somewhere in the lane, and then stopped.

Poroma closed the laptop very gently, as if it might wake someone. Then she went into the bathroom and was sick.

Her phone buzzed at 2:14 in the morning, while she was sitting on the cold bathroom floor with her back against the tiles.

An unknown number. A WhatsApp message.

You've watched it, haven't you. I can always tell. — R

A second message came before she could move.

Let's talk about what happens to it next. Tomorrow. I'll call you at noon. Pick up this time, Mrs. Sen.

[சிவா முருகன்]

I’ve just started reading your story. I’ll read it completely and share my thoughts with you.

[Yesudoss]

Nice update

[சிவா முருகன்]

I have read about two pages of the first part so far. I’m reading it during my free time. Whatever I’ve read so far is superb!

[deepdick]

[Muralimm]

The back end happened story writing is really awesome man it's really good

When the marriage is done the story ends there but the update you posted before holi party it's really nice

Waiting for next

[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 47: Rahul's Last Card

Poroma's perspective

He called at noon exactly. Rahul was always punctual when he wanted something.

Poroma had been sitting by the phone since ten, showered and dressed, her hair tied back tight. She had not slept. Some time before dawn, on the bathroom floor, she had done something she had never once done in nine months of his calls. She had gone into her phone's settings and switched on automatic call recording.

She let it ring three times. Then she picked up.

"Good girl," Rahul said.

His voice was the same. Low, amused, intimate, as though they were still lying in bed together. Hearing it, her body did something she could not stop: a small involuntary clench low in her stomach, the old Pavlovian answer to that voice. She hated it. She closed her eyes and let it pass.

"How did you know I'd watched it?" she said.

He laughed. "I didn't. You just told me." A pause. "You never watched it before, did you? Nine months. You never had the courage."

She said nothing.

"So now you've seen yourself. How was it? You look good on camera, Poroma. I've always said so."

"What do you want, Rahul?"

"Straight to business." He sounded pleased. "All right. I'll be straight with you too. I imagine you know I'm having a bad month."

"I know you're not answering your phone. I know you told your guard to call the security officer if I came."

"That was for your protection. There are people watching me just now. Lawyers. It wouldn't have looked good, a married woman crying at my gate." His voice cooled a degree. "Your husband has been busy. Did you know that?"

"Ranjeet doesn't tell me anything. He hasn't spoken to me in nine days."

"Then let me tell you. Your wimp of a husband went over Patel's head and wrote to Mumbai. He's accused me of logging into his email and changing his contracts. He went crying to Gupta. Gupta's written to the MD. There's a Compliance team flown in from head office going through fourteen months of my expenses with a magnifying glass, and Patel isn't taking my calls either." He breathed out. "I've been suspended pending inquiry. Since Monday. The same Monday your papers came, actually. Funny, no?"

Poroma sat very still.

Ranjeet had done that. Quiet, careful Ranjeet, who had sent his contracts to Rahul for approval for months without a word of complaint. Who she had told, in their own living room, that maybe he really had made mistakes. That Rahul was only trying to help.

"Did you do it?" she asked. "Change his contracts?"

Rahul was silent for a moment. Then he laughed again, softly.

"Does it matter now?"

It did. It mattered more than anything. Because if Rahul had done it, then he had been working to destroy Ranjeet from the day he walked into the Kolkata office, months before he ever met her at the shoe shop. And she had been sitting in her living room with her blouse open, feeding her son, telling her husband the man who was destroying him was a good man.

"What do you want?" she said again.

"Here's what's going to happen," Rahul said. "Your husband is going to write another email to Compliance. A short one. He's going to say that he's remembered something. That during the period in question, he voluntarily gave me his email password, so that I could review and correct his contracts directly while he was travelling. On the boss's instructions. And that the changes I made were improvements, which he approved, and he simply forgot. That he regrets the confusion and withdraws his complaint."

Poroma felt something cold move down her spine.

"That would make it legal," she said slowly. "What you did."

"It would make it a misunderstanding. And then Gupta's letter is just an unhappy client, and unhappy clients get a discount and go away. And then I come back to work, and Patel stops avoiding me, and everyone forgets." His voice warmed again, coaxing. "And then I delete the file. All copies. I'll even let you watch me do it. And I'll never call you again. You'll never see me again, unless you want to."

"And if he won't?"

"Then I'll send it to him." Very simply. "The whole thing. Not just the sex. He's seen enough of that, I know. The part where you tell me how you'll fight me for nine minutes so he'll forgive you. The part where you tell me you want it more than you've ever wanted anything." A pause. "He loved you because he thought you were tricked, Poroma. Don't you want him to keep thinking that?"

She could not breathe.

"And then I'll send it to that judge," Rahul continued, as calmly as a man reading a menu. "Chakraborty. A mother who plans her own public humiliation to deceive her husband. I don't think your supervised visits survive that, do you? And then—" he let it hang for a moment "—I think your father might like a copy. The Commander. He always said Ranjeet wasn't good enough for you, didn't he? You told me that. In this bed, actually. He'd be interested to see what you turned out to be good enough for."

"You wouldn't send it to my father."

"I won't need to," Rahul said gently. "Because you're going to go to your husband and make him write that email. You've always been able to make him do things, Poroma. You made him accept me. You made him say thank you for it. You'll find a way."

"How long do I have?"

"The Compliance hearing is a week from Friday. The email has to be in before that." His tone changed again, became almost tender. "I'm not a monster, Poroma. I was good to you. You were happy with me. Weren't you happy?"

She thought of the room on the laptop screen. The camera on top of the wardrobe. The wink.

"You filmed me without my knowledge," she said. "In your bedroom. On the first night."

"I filmed us. It was beautiful. I wanted to keep it."

"You told Sutapa to delay the stopwatch. On the video. You say it."

"Poroma." A note of impatience now. "You're trying to be clever and you're not built for it. Yes, it's on the video. Everything is on the video. That's what makes it valuable. Do you think I'm worried about Sutapa? Sutapa does what she's told."

"Not any more," Poroma said, before she could stop herself.

There was a short silence on the line.

"What does that mean?"

She had not meant to say it. She had heard, through Didi, from the uncle downstairs, from somewhere, that Sutapa had been seen at the Ballygunge flat. She did not know what it meant. She only knew that the world had been moving for nine days and she had not been part of it.

"Nothing," she said. "It means nothing."

"Then don't say it." His voice was quiet and flat now, the voice he had used once in his flat when she had refused him and he had pinned her wrists above her head. "A week from Friday, Poroma. Don't make me do something we'll both regret."

The line went dead.

She sat for a long time with the phone in her lap.

Then she opened the call recordings folder. There it was. Unknown number, 12:00, 11 min 47 sec. She played the first ten seconds to make sure. Good girl. His voice filled the empty kitchen, and she switched it off quickly and sat shaking.

She did not know much about the law. But she knew what she had just heard. A man demanding that her husband lie in a corporate investigation, or he would release an intimate video of her made without her consent. To her husband, to a judge, to her father.

She thought about Fatima, the lawyer, whose name was on the custody papers. The notice under the IT Act that Fatima had sent to Rahul's address, which Rahul had obviously received, because he had said lawyers.

She thought about doing what Rahul asked. Going to Ballygunge. Knocking on the door. Ranjeet opening it, and her standing there, and saying: Please. Write this email. For me. For us. And Ranjeet, who had always done what she asked in the end, looking at her with those tired brown eyes.

Except he would not. She knew that now, the way she knew the colour of her own children's eyes. Whatever had happened to Ranjeet in the last nine months, the gym and the running and the fighting classes and whatever had made him go over Patel's head to Mumbai, he was not the man who would write that email any more. Not for her. Not for anyone.

And even if he would, she realised, she would not ask him.

That was the strange part. She sat at the kitchen table and turned the thought over, and it held. She would not ask him. Not because she was afraid he would refuse. Because she had asked him for enough. She had asked him to forgive her for a game she had rigged. She had asked him to accept her lover. She had asked him to say thank you for it. She had asked and asked for ten months, and taken and taken, and every single thing she had taken had been built on the lie in that file.

She was not going to ask him for one more thing.

Which left only one thing. The thing she had been running from since four o'clock that morning on the bathroom floor.

Ranjeet would see the video. One way or another. Rahul would send it, or a court would order it produced, or it would come out at the hearing. The only question left was who would tell him what was on it.

Rahul, gloating, in an email with an attachment.

Or her.

Poroma looked at the crayon drawing she had brought down from Nupur's room and propped against the sugar jar. Four stick figures. The tall one with the moustache. The one with the huge blue eyes coloured so hard the paper had torn.

She was not ready. She did not know if she would ever be ready. She did not even know how to begin.

But she knew who she needed first.

She scrolled through her contacts to a name she had not called in almost a year. Not since the last argument, about the Aya, about the baby's weaning, about everything. Her mother had said you're not yourself, Poromita, something is wrong with you. And she had hung up on her.

Ma.

She pressed it before she could change her mind.

It rang twice. Then a voice she had known all her life, crisp and surprised and instantly alert, the voice of a woman who had spent forty years in hospital corridors being woken by bad news.

"Poromita? What's happened? Are the children—"

"The children are fine, Ma." Her voice broke on the second word, and then she could not stop it. "Ma. I've done something terrible. Something really terrible. And I don't know how to fix it. I need you. Please. Can you come?"

There was a silence on the line, and then her mother said, very quietly, "Your father and I will be on the first flight from Vizag tomorrow morning."

[Muralimm]

Is she realises now what is good !

Are they both too gather again?

This is really interesting man

[Gilmalover]

Very good

[deepdick]

good build up

[Runer]

Good update. Waiting for next

[prshma]

Poroma and Rahul should face devastating consequences as payback for their unscrupolous and immoral acts. Let these two bastards rot in hell.

Btw, excellent narration. Eagerly waiting for the next updates. Please post them asap.

[Runer]

Next update

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