[Paty@123]

It is the time to update plz

[Paty@123]

Plz update

[Lousy1995]

Hey guys!

I’m really sorry for being absent for such a long time and leaving this story without updates. I know some of you may have lost interest or moved on, and I take responsibility for that. Due to some personal reasons and other commitments, I had to take a break from writing.

But I’m finally getting back to it!

Starting Wednesday, the story will be updated regularly, with a new chapter every other day. I’ll do my best to stay consistent and finish the story as soon as possible without compromising its quality.

Thank you so much to everyone who has stayed patient and continued supporting the story despite the long wait. Your patience means a lot to me, and I truly appreciate every one of you.

Let’s pick up where we left off. See you all on Wednesday!

[Erotica erotica]

waiting for it...

[vk64]

Thanks for your reply

[Paty@123]

Waiting for Wednesday day plz,

[Raj_Rohan]

Dear author
U r making more delay in ur story

So please update.

We know ur busy. But try to keep one eye here.

[vk64]

PLZ update

[Paty@123]

I am waiting for today's update mem/ sir

[wxxxx]

update please

[jamanuram]

I think its from coming wednesday

[Paty@123]

Promise has been deviated, update plz sir/mem

[Lousy1995]

guys i am trying to update for the past 2 days , but its showing error . 403 forbidden . does anyone face the issue when clicking the new reply button ?

[Lousy1995]

Chapter 46 — The Empty House

The lane was silent as I walked. Not the peaceful silence of a sleeping village, but something harder, more absolute, as if the night itself had been emptied out. My footsteps sounded too loud on the packed earth, and twice I stopped walking just to hear something other than myself, some confirmation that the world still existed outside my own body.

It did not come. There were no dogs, no distant radio, no cough from a doorway. Only the wind moving through the coconut palms and the faint, sour smell of the canal that ran behind the houses on the eastern side of the lane.

Ravi's house stood at the end of the row, dark and shut. I stood in front of it for a while without moving, the key cold in my palm, the ridges of it pressing into my skin.

This was the house I had watched from the outside for weeks. The window on the left was the one I had crouched under, my knees aching in the damp earth, my eyes level with the sill. I knew the shape of that sill better than I knew my own face. I had worn grooves into the dirt beneath it with my heels.

Now the key was in my hand. Now I could walk in.

I put the key in the lock. It turned without resistance, which surprised me, though it should not have. The door was oiled and well fitted. Ravi did not tolerate things that stuck.

I stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind me, turning the lock, and the sound of it closing was the sound of a lid being put on something. The house enclosed me.

For a moment I just stood there in the dark, listening to my own breathing. The air smelled of them. Not strongly, not the way the air smells when people are in a room, but faintly, in the wood and the cushions and the corners. Ravi's hair oil. Something of Meena's soap. A trace of the incense they burned in the evenings.

And beneath all of it, some other smell that my body recognized before my mind did, and that recognition went through me like a hand closing.

They had come from here tonight. From this house, from this hall, from the room I was standing in. They had walked out of this door together and down the lane to my mother.

I leaned my back against the wall. It was cool through my shirt. I let my head fall back against it, and then my knees gave out, and I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor with my legs stretched out in front of me like a child.

Then the tears came.

They came without any warning and without any dignity. Not the hot, tight crying that comes from anger. Something looser and worse, something that came up from the base of my stomach and pulled everything out of me. My shoulders shook. My nose ran. My breath came in pieces. I pressed the heel of my hand against my mouth to hold the sound in, but it was not a house where anyone could hear me, so after a while I stopped bothering and let it be loud.

I did not know what I was crying for exactly. For Amma, naked on that cot with her arms around Ravi and Meena's mouth on her neck. For Appa, asleep under a tree with empty bottles around him, his own house lit up behind him with another man inside it. For the sixteen years of a marriage that had come to this. For the house I had grown up in, which now held a stranger's smell in its walls.

And for myself, most of all, though I hated admitting it. For the fact that I had been standing at a window while all of it happened, and that when Ravi had called me out of the dark and offered me a choice, I had said nothing. Not a word. He had put a key in my hand and I had taken it, and my mouth had stayed shut, and he had gone back inside and closed the door on me.

Weak. Silent. Unable to stop anything.

He had said it right to my face, and it had been true. That was the thing that broke me, in the end. Not the scene itself. The truth of it.

I sat on the floor of that house and cried until my ribs hurt.

I do not know how long it went on. Long enough that the floor grew warm under me. Long enough that my crying finally ran down to a slow leak and then stopped, leaving me hollow and clear-headed in a way that felt almost pleasant by comparison.

I wiped my face with my forearm and sat up straighter. My head ached. My throat felt scbangd.

The sadness was still there, sitting in my chest like a stone, but now there was something else underneath it. Something that had been growing the whole time, quietly, while I was busy weeping.

Suspicion.

Not the soft, vague unease I had been carrying around for days. Something harder than that now, with an edge to it. Something that wanted to be worked on.

I thought about Meena. The way she had stood in our hall with her arms folded and said, You seem less nervous than before, Akka. The way she had said, She is not stopping either of us. Not one of us. The way she had said it with pleasure in her voice, like someone watching a performance they had paid for and found worth the money.

Then I thought about the other thing. The thing I had seen three nights in a row through their bedroom window, and the fourth night too.

Ravi, going down on her for as long as it took. Patient, thorough, working her with his mouth until she came, and came again, holding his hair and pushing up against his face. Then, only then, climbing up and putting it in her. Deep, steady, long. And then, every single time, at the exact moment he was about to finish, pulling out.

Every time.

And Meena lying there afterwards with his seed cooling on her stomach, breathing hard, calm, not saying a word about it.

A woman who wants a child does not let her husband pull out of her without a word. Not once, not four times in a row. She grabs his hips. She says stay. She says don't. She says put it inside.

Meena said nothing.

If the whole thing was really about a baby, none of it added up. So either the story was wrong, or the story was a lie, and I had been carrying a suspicion about that for long enough now that it had started to feel less like a suspicion and more like a fact I had not yet proved.

Well. Here I was. In their house. With nobody to stop me.

I got up off the floor.

I started with the hall, because it was nearest and because I had no method yet, only an appetite. The hall was the front room, the one they brought people into. There was a wooden bench along one wall with a folded blanket on it. There was a shelf with a few brass items and a framed picture of some god. There was a small cupboard in the corner.

I opened the cupboard first. Cooking vessels, a tin of rice, three packets of lentils, a bottle of coconut oil, a box of matches. Ordinary. I went through it all anyway, lifting the rice tin, feeling behind the lentils, and found nothing except a rusted screw and a dried-up piece of ginger.

The bench had a lid. Inside were two spare bed sheets and a mosquito net, folded and smelling of storage. Nothing.

The shelf, when I lifted the brass items one by one, had nothing behind them except dust and a dead cockroach.

I stood back in the middle of the hall and looked around, and the ordinariness of it began to annoy me. Everything was in its place. Everything was clean and sensible and had a reason for being where it was. It was the house of a careful man. And careful men did not leave things lying out.

The bedroom, then.

I went in. The door was already open. The oil lamp they had left behind was guttering low on the shelf, so I took it up and held it, and the small flame moved with my hand and threw the shadows around in a way that made the room seem to breathe.

The cot first. I pulled the sheet back and ran my hands under the mattress, along the frame, between the boards. A couple of coins. A button. Nothing else.

Then the clothes. Ravi's shirts were hanging from a rope strung across one corner. I went through the pockets of each one, and found a bus ticket, a torn piece of paper with a number written on it, and a matchbox with three matches left.

The number meant nothing to me. I looked at it a long time and then put it back where I had found it, because a man notices when his pockets have been emptied.

His lungis were folded on a low stool. I shook each one out. A rupee coin fell out of the third. Nothing else.

Then the shelf above his cot. A comb. A tin of hair oil. A small mirror. A folded towel. A safety razor. I moved them all, one at a time, and felt along the back edge of the shelf with my fingers, and found a thin layer of grease and nothing more.

Nowhere yet. Nothing yet.

I stood in the middle of the room with the lamp in my hand, and the flame shook, and my own heart was going faster than it should have been, and I was starting to feel foolish. A house full of ordinary things and a boy in it looking for a secret because he could not sleep.

Meena's wardrobe stood against the far wall.

It was a proper wooden one, dark, with two doors and a brass latch. Old, but well kept. Her sarees, I knew, were in there. I had seen her take one out of it once, through the window.

I put the lamp down on the floor beside it and opened the right-hand door.

Her sarees were folded in a stack, cream and green and maroon, the smells of them rising out at me. I lifted them out in armfuls and set them on the cot, feeling between the folds as I went, and it was in the third armful that my fingers touched something that was not cloth.

Paper.

A folder, pushed flat against the back wall of the wardrobe behind the sarees. Brown card, tied with a black thread. Thin.

I pulled it out and my hands had gone cold.

I sat down on the floor with my back against the wardrobe, put the folder in my lap, and worked the thread loose with fingers that were not quite obeying me.

Inside were medical papers.

I had seen papers like these before. There had been a health camp in the village the previous year, and the men who ran it had handed out forms, and I had carried some of them from house to house for a small payment. Reports with letterheads and stamps and rows of figures. Reports with the doctor's signature at the bottom in a fast, slanted hand.

The first sheet said, in English at the top, SEMEN ANALYSIS. Under it, the figures, and beside the figures a column of normal values, and beside that a column that said RESULT, and in every one of those, in the doctor's hand, the same word. NORMAL.

Count. Motility. Morphology. Volume. All of it. Normal.

Below, a line in Tamil: No abnormality detected. Husband fit for conception.

I turned the page.

The next sheet had Meena's name at the top and a different heading, and a different set of tests, and the same column of results, and the same word written over and over in the doctor's slanted hand.

NORMAL.

And a line at the bottom. Both partners fertile. No medical impediment to natural conception.

I sat and looked at it. Then I looked at it again, more slowly, reading the Tamil through twice to be sure I had not misread it.

Both partners fertile.

Both.

I turned the pages over and there was nothing else in the folder. Just those two sheets, and the two of them were enough to take the ground out from under everything.

Because the story I had been told, the story that had been told to Amma, the story that had been told to my grandparents at the lake, the story that had been told to the whole village in fragments and hints, was that Meena and Ravi could not have a child. That they had tried for years. That the doctor at the camp had said surrogacy. That was why they had come to my mother. That was the reason for all of it.

And these papers said they could.

I sat there on the floor of their bedroom with the lamp guttering at my elbow, and a slow, cold thing began to move through me.

They could have a child. Both of them, fit, normal, no impediment, nothing in the way. They could have lain down on that cot in the ordinary way and made one, without my mother, without any of this.

So why her?

Why the money? Why the debts, why the surrogacy, why the thaali, why the whole long, patient, careful performance?

And the other thing, the thing that had been turning over in me for days: the pulling out. Four nights running. A man who could make a child and would not finish inside his own wife.

If they could have a child and chose not to, and then built a lie around not being able to, then the child was never the point at all.

Then what was?

I looked at the papers in my lap and my mouth was dry.

Then I remembered something, and the remembering came with a small, unpleasant click, like a latch falling into place.

They had not always been here. Ravi and Meena. They had come to the village about a year and a half ago, and they had come from somewhere else, and nobody in the village knew where. Nobody had asked. They had money and they were quiet and they were helpful, and in a village like ours that is enough. A man who gives loans and does not shout does not have to explain where he is from.

A year and a half. And within a year and a half, Ravi had come into our house, into our debts, into my mother.

I put the folder down and got up, because sitting was making it worse.

The bottom of Ravi's wardrobe.

I had not finished with his things. I went back to it, and I went through it properly this time, taking everything out and setting it in a heap, and when it was empty I crouched down and looked at the floor of it.

The wood was old. But the floor of the wardrobe was not the same wood as the rest of it. It was newer, cleaner, and it sat a little proud at one edge.

I pressed the heel of my hand down on it and it gave, a fraction, and came back up. Loose.

I got my nails into the gap at the edge and worked it, and it lifted, and under it there was a shallow space, and the space was full.

A thick book, with a dark cloth cover and a rubber band around it. And under the book, in a flat bundle, cloth.

I lifted the bundle out first.

Women's underclothes.

Two bras. Not Meena's, or at least not Meena's now, because they were older, faded, one of them with the elastic gone slack and the hooks rusted at the back. Three blouses, folded small, in colours I had never seen on her. A petticoat with a tear in the hem that had been mended with different thread.

I sat with the bundle in my hands and turned it over, and they smelled of old cupboards and, faintly, of other women.

Then I set them down and picked up the book.

The rubber band was perished. It broke when I pulled it, and a bit of it stayed stuck to the cover, and I flicked it off with my thumb.

I opened the diary in the middle of the room with the lamp beside me and sat down on my heels and began to read.

The first pages were in Tamil, in a small, neat, disciplined hand. Ravi's hand. Numbers. Columns. Dates.

Salary. Rent. Savings. A careful ledger of a careful man, going back years. Month by month, page by page. Then, further in, a change.

Money given out. Amounts, and beside each amount a name and a reason. Two thousand for a hospital. Five thousand for a wedding. Three thousand for a field. Fifteen hundred for a funeral. Eight thousand for a house repair. On and on, page after page, an unbroken record of money going out of Ravi's hands into the hands of other people, and never a word about it coming back.

Not loans. Gifts. Settled sums.

Then the nature of it changed again.

The entries got shorter. A date, a name, an amount, a place. Nothing more. No reason given. Just a woman's name and a figure, and I began to see that the names were all women's names.

Lakshmi, Kalaivani, Meenakshi, Revathi, Sundari, Vasanthi, Thangam.

Each one with money against it. Each one with a place.

And then, on the next page, the crossings out.

Some of the names had a single line drawn through them in the same neat hand, and beside the line, written small, two words. NOT SELECTED.

Kalaivani. Not selected.
Sundari. Not selected.
Thangam. Not selected.
Vasanthi. Not selected.

But others had no line through them, and beside those names Ravi had written other things. Not reasons. Descriptions.

One had: two blouses, one petticoat. Blue. From the town near the river.
One had: one blouse. Green. From her mother's house.
One had: brassieres, both. From the town where her husband worked.

And each of those matched, roughly, the bundle of cloth in my lap.

He had kept something of each of them. One garment, two, whatever he could take, and he had written it down beside her name like a man keeping an inventory of what he had got for his money.

Trophies.

I looked down at the faded bra in the bundle and felt a small, sick lurch in my stomach. This was not one woman's clothes. This was a collection.

I turned the pages faster.

Further on the entries thinned out and the writing changed character entirely. Here it was not money and it was not women's names. It was places. Routes. Distances. A page with three towns on it and the bus fares between them. A page with a list of villages and, beside each, a short note. Two wells. No bank. Temple on the north side. Big family, three daughters, debts. Waterlogged in the rains. Good soil.

Then, near the back of the book, the names.

Ravi's full name, and under it, in the same neat hand, a place. Not this district. Another one, two hundred kilometres away at least, and a street address that meant nothing to me.

Meena's name below it, with a different place, further north again, and a village name that had the ring of somewhere I had heard of once, in passing, on the radio.

And under the two of them, in a line that ran across the whole page, the word MARRIED, and a date a little over two years old, and then the name of a town neither of them was from.

They had married in a third place. Away from both their homes. Away from anyone who knew either family.

I turned the page, and there was a gap.

The page after it started in the middle of something. A sentence that began with a place name and no context, and under it figures that looked like rent and a deposit, and then, two lines down, the page stopped and the next one began somewhere else entirely.

Roughly a dozen pages further on, the same thing. A page that did not follow from the one before it. Then another.

I went back and counted. Eleven pages missing, torn out close to the spine, the stubs still there, ragged, the paper fibres showing. Somebody had gone through this book with care and taken out what they did not want read.

Eleven pages.

What had been on them?

I sat on the floor of that room with the book open in my lap and the lamp burning down and my hands gone colder than they had been all night, and the cold was not from the floor.

Money. Women. Places. A marriage kept away from home. Pages torn out.

And a set of medical reports that said the whole story was a lie.

I read on. There was not much left after the gaps. The last few pages were current — the move to this village, the rent on this house, a list of the things bought to furnish it, the amounts given to the man who had sold them the house. And then, in the last entries, a page of names again, and one of those names was written in a different ink and underlined twice.

Lakshmi.

Under it, a figure larger than any other figure in the book.

And under the figure, in the same neat hand, three words. Second. In progress.

I closed the book.

For a while I did not move at all. I sat there with my back against the cot frame and my hands in my lap and the closed diary on my knees, and I listened to the house and the night and my own breathing, and I tried to make the pieces lie down together.

They had money. They had a good name in the village. They had picked a village with no bank and big families in debt. They had married somewhere nobody knew them. They had picked a woman who was drowning and had a husband who was drowning faster. And they had told her a story about a child that they did not need.

And Ravi had a book with eleven pages torn out of it, and a bundle of other women's underclothes in the bottom of his wardrobe, and a list of names with money against them, most of them crossed out.

Not selected.

Lakshmi. Second. In progress.

So my mother was not the first. She was not even the first attempt. She was a selection, made from a list, out of several women, in a village that had been chosen because it had no bank and plenty of debt.

Something much larger than a childless couple was going on here. Something that had been going on for years, in more than one place, with more than one woman.

And Amma thought she was helping a friend.

The thought of it made me want to be sick. She was in there right now, in our house, naked on the cot, with Ravi's mouth on her and Meena's hand on her breast, giving herself over to it because she believed she was solving her family's money problems and giving a childless woman a baby. She had counted the days for it. She had sent me away for it.

She had no idea. None at all.

I got up too fast and the room tipped, and I had to put my hand on the wardrobe to steady myself. I stood there breathing until it passed.

The question now was what to do.

Part of me wanted to gather all of it up — the papers, the book, the cloth — and walk straight down the lane to our house and open the door and put the whole lot on the floor in front of them. In front of Ravi, in front of Meena, in front of Amma. Watch him try to explain it.

But it was the middle of the night. They were in the middle of it. If I walked in now, the night would turn into a scene, and Amma would have to sit there in her saree with all of us looking at her, and the whole thing would come out at once, in a mess, without any of it being understood.

And there was the other thing. If Ravi could talk his way out of it — and he could, he could talk his way out of anything — then I would have shown my hand for nothing, and he would know I was looking, and he would close everything up tight.

Better to hold it. Better to know more.

That was when the helplessness that had been sitting in my chest all night began to change. It did not go away. But it hardened, took a shape, and the shape was colder and steadier than despair.

All this time I had been a watcher. Standing at windows. Crouching in lanes. Holding my breath behind doors and learning nothing but the sight of things. Watching and watching and watching, and never once doing anything with what I saw.

That was finished now. From tonight, I was going to watch with a purpose. Every small detail. Every name. Every gap. Every figure in that book. Every trip Ravi made out of the village and every person he spoke to and every rupee that changed hands. I would build the whole thing up in my head, piece by piece, until there was nothing left in it that I did not understand.

Then, and only then, would I decide what to do with it.

It was not much. It was a boy with a book and a bad night. But it was more than I had had when I walked in that door.

I put the folder back into Meena's wardrobe, behind the sarees, and pushed it flat against the back wall the way I had found it. I stacked her sarees over it and closed the doors and pressed the brass latch shut.

Then I built Ravi's wardrobe back up. Lungis first, folded as they had been. Shirts on the rope. The heap of things off the floor, back on the shelf. The diary into the hidden space under the floor, and the cloth bundle on top of it, and the loose board pressed back down until it sat proud at the edge the way it had.

I checked it twice. It looked right. He would notice the perished rubber band if he looked closely, but there was nothing to be done about that. I had not taken anything. That was the important thing. If he opened the book tomorrow, it would be exactly as he had left it, and he would have no reason to think anyone had been near it.

Except the band. There was nothing to be done about the band.

I stood in the middle of the room and let out a long breath, and the breath came out shakier than I expected.

And then it all came down on me at once. Not the crying, this time. The tiredness. It hit the backs of my legs and the base of my skull and the small of my back, and my hands were trembling, and my mouth tasted of copper.

I sat down on the floor again, against the wall this time, and put my head back, and the room went quiet around me. My heart was still going too fast and my stomach had a slow roll in it that would not settle.

Every object in that house seemed to be looking at me now. The comb on the shelf. The brass on the shelf in the hall. The lamp on the floor. And behind all of it, the knowledge that at this very moment, four streets away, Ravi had his mouth between my mother's legs and Meena was touching her breasts, and the two of them had a book full of other women in the bottom of a wardrobe.

I got up and sat on the cot. Then I got up again and sat on the floor. Then I stood in the doorway of the bedroom and looked down the hall at the closed front door and thought about walking out of it.

I did not walk out of it. Where would I go? Home, and sit in the hall, and listen to the sounds coming through the wall? Home and be there when they came out, and have to look at all three of them with the truth in my mouth?

No. I would stay. Ravi had told me to stay, and for once his instruction suited me.

I went back into the bedroom and looked at the cot.

It was their bed. His and Meena's. The sheet was creased from the last time. The pillow still held the shape of a head. And it was the bed he had lain on beside his wife three nights running with his seed on her stomach, and it was the bed he had got up out of tonight to go and lie on my mother.

I sat down on the edge of it, and then, because my body was past arguing, I lay down.

The mattress was not like ours. Softer, deeper, and it took my weight and held it. The pillow smelled of hair oil and of a scalp. His.

I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling, which was dark, and waited to feel something.

What I felt was degraded. Small. A boy lying in another man's bed in another man's house while that man was in the boy's house with the boy's mother. There was something almost comic in it, if you stood far enough back. The whole village would laugh if they knew.

But there was something else in it too, something that had nothing to do with comedy, and that was the fact that the house was quiet and the book was two feet away in the dark and my head was full of it.

Sleep did not come.

The ceiling was dark and flat and gave me nothing to look at, so my mind filled it in, and what it filled it in with was the night.

Amma's face when she pulled the pallu off her own shoulder. Not shy. Steady. Her own hand. Meena standing with her arms folded saying, She is not stopping either of us. Amma's fingers in Ravi's hair holding his head where she wanted it. The gold of the thaali lying flat against her bare chest, going up and down with her breathing, and the way Ravi had bent and put his mouth on her foot and licked the skin by the cut, and how she had watched him do it.

And then, when I had worn that out, the book.

The neat hand. The columns. The amounts. Eight thousand for a house repair. Fifteen hundred for a funeral. Money flowing out of the man's pocket into other people's trouble, and a woman's name beside every sum, and most of the names with a line through them and NOT SELECTED written small in the margin.

Kalaivani. Sundari. Thangam. Vasanthi.

Women I had never met and would never meet. Women in other villages with other debts and other husbands, who had been looked at and weighed and passed over, and who probably still did not know they had been on a list.

And the eleven pages gone from the book.

That was the thing that would not lie down. The pages he had taken out. He had gone through that book with his own hands and torn out eleven pages and left the stubs showing, and whatever was on them, he had decided it could not be read by anyone but him.

The gaps made me more afraid than the writing did. What a man writes down, you can argue with. What he tears out, you cannot.

I turned onto my side. Then onto my back again. The pillow was too soft and the sheet too smooth and the whole house was too quiet.

Slowly, the pieces began to arrange themselves without my permission.

They did not come here by accident. That was the first of it. A man with money does not settle in a village with no bank and a lot of debt because he likes the view. He had a page of villages with notes beside them. Two wells. No bank. Big family, three daughters, debts. He had been choosing.

Then the women. Names with money against them, most of them crossed out. Then the one name without a line through it, in different ink, underlined twice, with a larger figure than any other figure in the book, and three words under it. Second. In progress.

Second.

That word sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.

And now here she was, four streets away, on her back on our cot, with her legs open, believing she was doing a favour for a childless woman.

If this had all been arranged before any of them ever set foot in our lane, then Amma was not stumbling into something. She had been walked into it. Every step of it — the money, the debts paid off, the friendship, the thaali, the bed — had been laid down in front of her in advance by a man with a book.

And she had walked it. All of it. Because nobody had shown her the book.

Then there was me.

That was the part that turned the stone over. I had been at the windows since the beginning. I had seen the first touch in the hall. I had seen the thaali go round her neck. I had seen them on the train. I had seen them on the cot in their own house, and now I had seen them in ours, and all of it had gone into me and none of it had come back out.

If I had spoken in the first week, she might have stopped. If I had spoken the night of the temple, she might have pulled back. Every week I stayed quiet, the thing got deeper and harder to undo, and my silence was part of the reason it was as deep as it was now.

They had not needed to buy me. They had only needed me to keep standing at the window.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes until it hurt.

It was a long time before the tiredness began to win. It came slowly, in waves, each one pulling me a little further down. My thoughts started to break up into pieces that did not join. The ceiling softened at the edges.

I went under.

It was not proper sleep. It was shallow and full of movement, and things kept surfacing in it — the smell of the lamp smoke, Meena's folded arms, the ragged stubs of the torn pages, Amma's hand in Ravi's hair — and then sinking again, and then coming back.

Then something brought me up hard.

I sat up in the dark with my heart slamming and no idea where I was. The dark was total and it was the wrong dark, the wrong shape, and there was a smell that was not our house, and my hand went out and found a wall that was in the wrong place.

Then it came back in a rush. The key on the side table. The wardrobe. The book.

I sat there with my hand on the wall, breathing, until my heart came down off the roof.

The village outside was completely silent. Deeper than before, if that was possible. The hour before the first cocks, when everything is at its lowest.

I swung my legs off the cot and sat with my feet on the floor and my head hanging, and waited for the last of the fright to pass.

When it had, the decision was already made, and it had made itself while I slept.

No confrontation. Not yet. Not tomorrow, not the day after. If I opened my mouth now, Ravi would talk, and Amma would believe him because she wanted to, and I would be left holding a folder of papers and looking like a boy who had been snooping in another man's house. Which I was.

So: watch. Watch harder than before. Watch with the book in my head. The women's names. The places. The eleven pages. The word second.

And when I had enough — when there was so much of it that he could not talk his way around it — then I would speak.

Not before.

I turned onto my side and looked at the window. It was a faint grey rectangle in the dark, and behind it the village lay still.

Inside me nothing was still at all.

[Lousy1995]

sorry the issue is still there and i have contacted admin regarding this , sorry for the wait . and if anyone knows how to solve it , please contact me .

[mzafar]

Readers are delighted to receive an update after a long time.

[wxxxx]

With this update, the readers' long wait has come to an end.

[Paty@123]

Great suspence, Arjun has taken decision,and now if he could be able to procure those 11 pages which are missing from the dairy, then he will be able to decide what to do, or other to enquire about him he may go to the town where Ravi comes from, one thing is proved to him is whatever he was suspecting about surrogacy drama is correct, and what I feel is Ravi has to be punished for destroying family of Murugan by Arjun, may be the losses of Murugan in business may be created by Ravi also, may be may not be, now another suspence is that Lakshmi was not his first Target, who was the first Target and why Ravi left his first target and concentrated on second, and the second question arises is what is the mindset of Ravi, is he a perverted psycho, all these things have to be found by Arjun to know to decide further due course of action and has to try for some kind of revenge, ofcourse I have a doubt even Ravi must have married even Meena also in the same fashion, he married lakshmi, maybe may not , Awaiting for the next updates to have clarifications, and I request writer ji to make faster updates

[aravindkkumar08]

By keeping records arjun can blackmail Ravi and take revenge by how made him cuck.it will be great if arjun bang Meena infront of Ravi for revenge

[Paty@123]

Contact admin mem/sir, so that they will show you some solution regarding error