[Muralimm]

This is really awesome man

This narration is brilliant

[Runer]

Great Writing

[Tarun..]

You are God-sent, Shivani! The way you have taken this story forward is truly commendable. What's even more impressive is that you haven't let the quality drop at any point; instead, you've managed to raise the bar even higher. Keep up the amazing work!

[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 52: The Sting

The van was a white Tata Winger with Sri Durga Travels painted on the side in red and a garland of plastic marigolds on the dashboard. It was parked across the road from the gate of Rahul's building in New Alipore, under a streetlight that someone from the cyber cell had quietly unscrewed an hour earlier.

Inside it smelled of cigarettes and cold samosas. There were five of us. Inspector Banerjee, a heavy, soft-spoken man of about fifty with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. A young woman technician called Mitali with a laptop and two receivers and a pair of headphones round her neck. A constable at the wheel. Fatima, in a dark kurta with her hair tied back, very still, holding a folder on her knees. And me.

Behind us, a second unmarked car with four more officers. The warrant was in Banerjee's shirt pocket. He had shown it to me once, a single sheet with a magistrate's stamp, and then put it away again.

"Section 308 and IT Act 66E and 67A," he had said. "Search and seizure of all electronic devices at the premises. The moment he displays or threatens to transmit the material, we go in. Not before. If we go in early and he hasn't done anything, his lawyer says it was a social visit between old friends and the whole thing collapses." He looked at me over his glasses. "I understand this is your wife, Mr. Sen. I need you to understand that if you get out of this van before I tell you to, I will arrest you myself."

"I understand."

"Good." He handed me a spare set of headphones. "Then listen."

At 7:52 Poroma's car pulled up at the gate.

I watched through the tinted side window as she got out. She was wearing the same white saree with the red border she had worn to my flat. No jewellery. Her hair tied back. She stood for a moment looking up at the building, seven floors of glass balconies glowing in the dark. Then she walked to the guard's cabin.

"She's live," Mitali said quietly, touching her headphones. "Clear signal."

In my ears I heard Poroma's footsteps on the gravel. Her breathing, slightly fast. Then a man's voice.

"Madam." Mahmud. "Sir said you would come. He said to send you straight up."

"Thank you, Mahmud."

A pause. Then, very quietly, the guard's voice again.

"Madam. Are you all right?"

Another pause.

"I'm all right, Mahmud," Poroma said. "Thank you for asking."

Banerjee glanced at Fatima. Fatima did not move.

The recorder was sewn into the inside of Poroma's saree blouse, under the left arm. Mitali had done it herself in the back of the van an hour earlier, with Poroma sitting very straight and staring at nothing while the young woman's needle went in and out. A tiny thing the size of a shirt button. Poroma had not said a word the whole time. When it was done she had looked at me once, across the van, and then got out without speaking.

Now I heard the lift doors. The hum of the lift. Her breathing. Seven floors.

The lift doors opened. Footsteps on a corridor. A doorbell.

The door opened almost at once.

"Mrs. Sen," Rahul said. "Right on time. As always."

I had never heard his voice through a wire before. It was flatter than in person, and somehow more intimate, as if he were speaking directly into my skull.

"Come in."

The door closed. Footsteps on a wooden floor. The clink of ice in a glass.

"Drink?"

"No."

"You used to like the white wine."

"I'm not here for wine, Rahul."

"No. You're here because you've made a very big mistake and you want to know how to fix it." His voice came closer. "Sit down."

"I'll stand."

"Sit down, Poroma."

A long silence. Then the creak of a sofa.

"Good girl," Rahul said.

In the van, Fatima's fingers tightened on her folder.

"You went to the security officer," Rahul said. He sounded almost amused. "You went to Lalbazar with your mother and told some fat inspector that I was blackmailing you. You gave your husband's lawyer a recording of a private phone call between us." Ice clinking. "I spent last night in a lock-up in Gariahat security officer station because your husband's karate teacher called 100. Do you know what that's like? Do you know what it smells like?"

"I'm sorry you had a bad night," Poroma said evenly.

He laughed.

"No, you're not. Look at you. All in white like a widow. No sindoor. No mangalsutra. Very dramatic. Who are you in mourning for, Poroma? Him, or yourself?"

She said nothing.

"I'll tell you what you're going to do," he said. His voice had changed. Quieter. Harder. "Tomorrow morning you're going to go back to Lalbazar and withdraw your complaint. You're going to say you were emotional. That your husband's lawyer pressured you. That we had a lovers' quarrel and you made the whole thing up to get back at me. And then you're going to go to Ballygunge and get your husband to write that email to Compliance. That's still the deal. Nothing's changed."

"Everything's changed, Rahul."

"Nothing's changed." Something slammed down on a table, a glass, hard enough that I heard it rattle. "I still have the video. I still have everything."

Banerjee leaned forward slightly. Mitali touched a key on her laptop.

"Show me," Poroma said.

There was a pause.

"What?"

"Show me. You keep saying you have everything. I want to see it." Her voice was steady, but under it I could hear something else, a tiny tremor, like a wire pulled tight. "You told me you'd send it to Ranjeet. To the judge. To my father. I want to see what you're going to send. If you're going to destroy my life, I want to see it first."

Another pause. Longer.

Then Rahul laughed softly.

"You want to watch it with me," he said. "Of course you do. You always did like watching. All right, Mrs. Sen. Let's watch."

Footsteps. A laptop lid opening. The soft chime of it waking up. Keys tapping.

"Here," Rahul said. "My favourite folder."

And then, faint and tinny, coming through the wire from the laptop speaker in that room seven floors up, I heard a woman's voice.

I'll fight you so he sees me fight.

My wife's voice. From ten months ago. Husky and soft and certain.

And then I'll lose. I'll scream it so everyone hears. And he'll forgive you—

I took the headphones off.

I did not decide to. My hands did it by themselves. I sat in the back of that van holding them in my lap and staring at the plastic marigolds on the dashboard, and in the silence I could still hear it faintly, leaking out of the earpieces.

Fatima reached over without looking at me and put her hand on my arm. She did not say anything. She just left it there.

After a moment I put the headphones back on.

"—sixty-eight files," Rahul was saying. "Not just you, Poroma. Don't flatter yourself. You're just the best one." Keys tapping. "That's Sutapa. That's Priyanka Gupta, in New York, at the Marriott. That one's from Delhi. Do you know her? Nandini. Her husband was my team lead. He made a complaint about me to HR, so I sent him this." Tap. "He withdrew it the next day. Patel got me transferred to Kolkata to make it all go away, and in return I made Patel's numbers look very, very good." Another tap. "And this one's just a girl from a party. I never even got her name."

In the van, Banerjee took his glasses off his forehead and put them on properly. Mitali's fingers were moving fast on her own keyboard, logging timestamps. Fatima had gone completely white.

"Sixty-eight," Poroma said. Her voice was very quiet. "Sixty-eight women."

"Sixty-eight women who had a good time and wanted to forget about it." Rahul's voice was warm again, coaxing. "Just like you. That's all this is, Poroma. Insurance. Everybody had a good time, and everybody stays quiet, and nobody gets hurt." The sofa creaked as he sat down beside her. "Come on. Look at you on that screen. You were happy. You wanted it. You said so. You can't tell me you don't still want it."

"Don't touch me."

"You came here alone. At night. In a white saree with nothing underneath, I bet." His voice dropped. "You know what you came here for. You always know. You just like to pretend."

"Rahul, take your hand off me."

The sound of a struggle. Fabric. A sharp breath.

Banerjee's hand went to the van door handle. He did not open it.

"Not yet," he said quietly. "He hasn't threatened transmission. Not yet."

"He's touching her," I said. My voice came out as a growl I did not recognise.

"I know, Mr. Sen. Thirty seconds. Stay in your seat."

In my ears, the struggle went on. A thud, like someone being pushed against a wall. Rahul's breathing, heavy. Poroma's, fast and ragged.

"You don't get to say no to me," Rahul hissed. "You've never said no to me. Not once in nine months. You're mine. You've always been mine. Since the car. Since the first time I touched you. You planned to be mine. It's on video, Poroma—"

And then Poroma's voice, very clear, very cold, a voice I had heard only once before, years ago, when a drunk man at a wedding had put his hand on Nupur's head and she had told him to take it off.

"I am not yours. I was never yours. I was a stupid, selfish woman who lied to her husband because she wanted to be wanted. And you were the cheapest way to feel that." A breath. "You're nothing, Rahul. You're a folder of videos on a laptop."

A short, heavy sound. Then a man's voice, high and strangled, a sound of pure agony.

She had kicked him. I learned much later that it was not the first time. Months earlier, at his dining table, she had driven her heel backwards into him when he tried to go without a condom. That time she had knelt down afterwards and kissed the pain away. This time she did not kneel.

"Ahh— you— bitch—" Rahul was gasping. Footsteps, stumbling. The laptop. Keys tapping frantically. "You want to see what happens? You want to see? I'm sending it. Right now. To him. To your father. To that judge. To your whole fucking building's WhatsApp group—"

"Go," Banerjee said, and was out of the van before the word was finished.

I do not remember crossing the road. I remember the gate, and Mahmud standing up from his chair with his mouth open, and Banerjee holding up his ID card and the warrant at the same time without slowing down. I remember the second car's doors banging open behind us and four officers running. I remember the lift being too slow and Banerjee taking the stairs, all seven floors, a heavy fifty-year-old man going up two at a time. I remember being right behind him.

The door of 701 was locked. The constable did not knock.

Inside, the flat was bright and white and expensive. A huge television. A glass coffee table with a whisky glass knocked over and a puddle spreading across it. On the floor beside the sofa, a laptop, its screen still glowing. Rahul was kneeling over it, one hand pressed between his legs, the other on the keyboard, his face grey and sweating.

Banerjee's foot came down on the laptop lid and shut it.

"Rahul Mehra," he said, quite calmly, slightly out of breath. "You're under arrest under Section 308 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and Sections 66E and 67A of the Information Technology Act. Please put your hands where I can see them."

Rahul stared up at him. Then past him. At me, standing in his doorway.

For a moment none of us moved. He looked at me, and I looked at him, kneeling on his own white floor clutching his groin, with his face streaked with sweat and his expensive hair sticking up and his last weapon closed under a security officerman's shoe.

He did not say anything. For the first time since I had known him, Rahul had nothing to say.

Poroma was standing against the far wall, by the balcony door.

Her white saree was crumpled and pulled off one shoulder, the pallu dragging on the floor. A red mark was coming up on her left cheekbone. Her hair had come loose from its knot and fallen across her face. She was standing perfectly straight with both arms wrapped around herself, staring at the laptop under Banerjee's foot.

Mitali, the technician, was already beside her, a hand on her arm, speaking softly.

I crossed the room. I did not decide to. I was simply there in front of her.

She looked up at me. Her eyes were enormous.

"Did he send it?" she whispered. "Did it go?"

I looked back at Banerjee. He was kneeling now, with a pair of blue gloves on, lifting the laptop carefully by its edges. He opened it just enough to look at the screen. Then he looked up at me and shook his head once.

"No," I told her. "It didn't go."

She let out a breath that seemed to go on forever. Her knees started to give way. I caught her by the arms before she could fall, and held her upright, and for a moment, for the first time in eleven days, for the first time since the night of the Holi party really, my wife's head was resting against my chest.

She did not cling. She did not cry. She just stood there leaning against me with her eyes closed, shaking, while behind us the security officer photographed the flat and bagged the laptop and the camera that had been sitting for ten months on top of the bedroom wardrobe, and led Rahul Mehra out of his own front door in handcuffs.

"Sixty-eight," she said into my shirt. "Ranjeet. There were sixty-eight."

"I know. I heard."

"I thought I was the only one. I thought I was special." She laughed, a terrible small sound. "I thought it was a love story."

I held her for a moment longer. Then I gently stood her upright and took my hands away. She understood. She nodded, and wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and stood on her own.

"You did it," I said. "You did the right thing."

"One thing," she said. "One thing on the list."

"Sixty-eight things," Fatima said quietly from behind me. She had come up the stairs after all of us and was standing in the doorway, looking at the empty space where the laptop had been. "Mrs. Sen, you understand what you've just done? Every one of those women. Sutapa. Mrs. Gupta. The woman in Delhi. That man doesn't have anything on any of them any more."

Poroma looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked down at her own hands.

"I didn't do it for them," she said. "I wish I could say I did. I did it for my daughter."

"I know," Fatima said. "But they'll still be free."

[Muralimm]

This is the best way to end the story line wonderful narration man

I will follow your next story writing and waiting for that

[shivanikaur2]

It is not the end yet

[Muralimm]

It is not the end yet

Hi 

I know and I am waiting for that 

On upcoming update 

Keep updating and keep rocking

[Runer]

Waiting for next update

[Kaedukettavan]

Excellent writing

[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 53: Rashmi's Goodbye

The news reached the office on Wednesday.

Not the details. Banerjee was careful, and so was Fatima. But Kolkata is a village with fourteen million people in it, and by lunchtime everyone on our floor knew that Rahul Mehra had been arrested in his own flat on Monday night by the cyber cell. That he had been formally terminated by head office on Tuesday afternoon for "gross misconduct and fraud". That Patel Sir had taken "voluntary early retirement" effective immediately and had not come in since. And that a list was going around, though nobody had seen it, of women whose videos the security officer had found.

People looked at me differently in the corridor. Not with pity, which I had felt for ten months. Something else. A kind of wary respect, as if they had all just noticed that the quiet man in the corner had been there the whole time.

Mohit came to my desk at four o'clock. He stood there holding a file he did not need and cleared his throat twice.

"Ranjeet. I wanted to say. About the Holi party. I should have—"

"Yes," I said. "You should have."

He stood there a moment longer. Then he nodded and went away. It was the longest conversation we had had in ten months, and the last.

Rashmi did not come in on Thursday.

I found out why at six o'clock, when my phone buzzed with a message from a number I did not recognise.

It's me. New number. I've left Mohit. I'm at the Kenilworth on Little Russell Street, room 412, with Tuktuki. My flight to Bangalore is Saturday morning. Will you come and say goodbye? — R

She opened the door in jeans and an old grey T-shirt, with her hair in a messy knot and no makeup. Behind her, the hotel room was chaos. Two open suitcases on the floor, clothes spilling out, a pile of picture books, a pink plastic tricycle. On the far bed, a little girl of three was fast asleep on her stomach with her bottom in the air, clutching a stuffed giraffe.

"She's had a big day," Rashmi whispered. "Come in. Don't trip over the tricycle."

I stepped carefully round it. She closed the door and leaned against it and looked at me.

"You came," she said.

"You asked."

"I know. I thought you might not." She smiled, a little crookedly. "I've been very forward with you, Ranjeet. In restaurants. In your flat. Under tables. I thought maybe you'd decided I was too much."

"You've never been too much. You've been the only person in that office who told me the truth."

Her smile wavered. She looked away, at her sleeping daughter.

"Mohit knew," she said quietly. "About Holi. Before. Rahul told him a week before what he was planning, and Mohit thought it was funny. He actually laughed. He said, Ranjeet's wife won't last five minutes. And then on the night he held you down." She swallowed. "When the list came out yesterday, I asked him if he'd ever been with Rahul's women. If he'd ever watched any of those videos. He didn't answer. He just went into the bathroom and locked the door."

"Rashmi—"

"I packed while he was in there. Tuktuki's things first. Then mine. He didn't come out till we were in the taxi." She shrugged, a small brave movement. "My cousin runs a design firm in Bangalore. She's been asking me for two years. I called her last night. I start on the second."

"Bangalore," I said.

"Bangalore." She looked back at me. "It's very far from Kolkata."

"It is."

"Far enough that I won't be able to sit outside your office in a taxi and drag you to lunch." Her eyes were bright. "Far enough that I won't be tempted to be the second woman in a story that's already got too many women in it."

I did not say anything. She was right, and we both knew it.

"Sutapa told me," she said gently. "About Sunday dinners. About Nupur showing her the cobra's voice." She smiled. "I'm glad, Ranjeet. Truly. She needs someone who doesn't hurt her. And you need someone who'll stay. I was never going to stay. I'm not built for it."

She crossed the room slowly. She stood in front of me, close enough that I could smell the hotel soap on her skin and something else underneath it, her own warm smell.

"So this is goodbye," she said. "And I want a proper one. Not a hug in a corridor. Not a handshake." Her voice dropped. "One night. That's all. Then Saturday I get on a plane and you go home to your yellow curtains, and neither of us ever has to feel guilty about it, because it's finished before it starts."

I looked at the sleeping child on the far bed.

"She sleeps like the dead," Rashmi whispered. "She got that from Mohit. A bomb could go off. And there's a bathroom with a door that locks."

The bathroom of room 412 at the Kenilworth is large and old-fashioned, white tiles and a deep claw-footed tub and a mirror with a gilt frame that has gone spotty at the edges. Rashmi locked the door behind us and turned around and pulled her grey T-shirt off over her head in one movement and dropped it on the floor.

She was not wearing a bra. She stood there under the yellow bathroom light, bare from the waist up, and let me look at her the way she always had, without a trace of embarrassment, with that slight defiant lift of the chin. Small and strong and compact. High round breasts with small dark nipples already tight. The faint silvery lines across her lower belly from her daughter.

"Your turn," she said.

I pulled my shirt off. She stepped forward and put both palms flat on my chest and ran them down slowly, over the muscle the gym had built, and let out a low breath.

"I watched you change," she said. "Over the months. In the office. Your shirts got tight across the shoulders. Your face changed. You stopped hunching." She looked up at me. "I used to sit at my desk outside your cabin and look at you through the glass and think, That man has no idea what he's turning into."

"What was I turning into?"

"Someone who could put Rahul Mehra on the ground in one second and then decide not to break his arm." She unbuckled my belt. "That's the sexiest thing I've ever heard, by the way. Sutapa told me. I had to sit down."

She sank down to her knees on the bathroom tiles and pulled my jeans and underwear down together, and looked at me, already hard in front of her face.

"I've been thinking about this since that day in the restaurant," she said. "When I had you in my hand under the tablecloth and the waiter came in. I've thought about it every day for two months. What I'd do if I had you somewhere with a locked door and no waiters." She wrapped her hand round the base of me and looked up. "Do you want to know what I'd do?"

"Show me," I said. My voice was not steady.

She smiled. Then she leaned forward and ran her tongue slowly up the whole underside of my cock, from the base to the tip, and closed her lips over the head.

She was not slow and deep like Sutapa. She was fast and greedy and loud, the same way she did everything. Her head bobbed, her hand twisted round the base in time with her mouth, wet slurping sounds bouncing off the white tiles. She took me deep, gagged slightly, pulled back laughing with saliva shining on her chin, and took me deep again. Her other hand reached up and cupped my balls and squeezed, just hard enough to make me grab the edge of the sink.

"Rashmi—"

She pulled off with a wet sound and looked up at me, grinning.

"Not yet," she said. "I didn't come all this way for that."

She stood up and pushed her jeans and panties down and kicked them off across the bathroom floor. Then she turned round and braced both hands on the edge of the old white sink, and looked at me over her shoulder in the spotted mirror.

"Like this," she said. "I want to watch your face."

I came up behind her. In the mirror I could see both of us. Her small strong body bent forward, her breasts swaying slightly, her dark eyes watching mine in the glass. Me behind her, my hands on her hips. I ran one hand down over the smooth curve of her bottom and between her thighs and found her slick and hot and ready, so wet that my fingers slid straight into her. She pushed back against them with a gasp.

"Now," she said to the mirror. "Ranjeet, now, please. I've waited two months."

I took my cock in my hand and guided it to her and pushed into her in one long slow stroke, and watched her mouth fall open in the mirror and her eyes go unfocused.

"Oh," she said. "Oh. There."

She was tight. Tighter than Sutapa. She gripped me like a fist. I held still for a moment, buried in her, my chest against her back, and in the mirror I watched her close her eyes and breathe.

Then she opened them again and looked straight at me in the glass.

"Don't be gentle," she said. "I'm not Sutapa. I won't break. I want to feel this on the plane on Saturday."

So I was not gentle.

I took her hips in both hands and pulled her back onto me as I thrust forward, hard, and she cried out and clapped one hand over her own mouth and kept the other gripping the sink. I fucked her fast and deep, the slap of my hips against her bottom loud in the tiled room, the old pipes under the sink rattling with every stroke. In the mirror her breasts bounced. Her face was flushed dark, her eyes squeezed shut, then flying open to find mine again, her muffled cries coming out from behind her own palm.

"Harder," she gasped between her fingers. "Harder, harder, don't stop—"

I reached round her and found her clit, slick and swollen, and rubbed it while I thrust. Her whole body jerked. She took her hand off her mouth and gripped the sink with both hands and pushed back against me to meet every stroke. Her knuckles were white.

"I'm going to come," she said to the mirror, very fast. "I'm going to, I'm going to, Ranjeet, I'm—"

She came with her mouth wide open and no sound coming out at all, just a long silent gasp, her whole body clenching round me so hard I had to stop moving. She shook against the sink. Her legs trembled. In the mirror her face looked almost like pain, and then like something else entirely, and then her head dropped forward and she hung there gasping, still full of me.

"Don't stop," she whispered after a moment, not lifting her head. "Please. Keep going. I want to feel you come."

I started moving again, slower now, long deep strokes. She lifted her head and met my eyes in the mirror again, dazed and soft and smiling.

"Inside," she said. "It's all right. I'm on the pill. I want it. I want to take something of you to Bangalore."

That was what did it. I drove into her two, three more times and came with a groan, my forehead dropping against her shoulder blade, pulsing deep inside her again and again. She reached back with one hand and gripped my hip and held me there, pressed into her, until it was over.

Afterwards we sat in the old claw-footed tub with the hot water running, her back against my chest, my arms round her, both of us silent. Steam fogged the spotty mirror. Through the door we could faintly hear the hum of the hotel air conditioner, and once, a sleepy murmur from the little girl on the bed, and then nothing.

"Can I tell you something?" Rashmi said eventually, not turning round.

"Anything."

"Poroma came to see me. Yesterday. At Fatima's chamber, before I left Mohit."

I went still.

"She wanted to say sorry. For the Bengali New Year party. For everything. For being part of what happened to you." Rashmi was quiet for a moment. "And she wanted to thank me. For giving Fatima my statement about Nupur."

"What did you say?"

"I told her I didn't do it for her." Rashmi turned her head slightly against my shoulder. "And she said, I know. That's why I'm thanking you." She was quiet again. "She's different, Ranjeet. I don't know if you can see it from where you are. She's not trying to be liked any more. She sat across from me in that chamber in a plain white saree and didn't ask me for anything at all. I've known her for three years and I've never once seen her not want something."

I did not say anything. I held Rashmi and watched the steam drift across the ceiling.

"It doesn't change what she did," Rashmi said. "I'm not saying that. I'm just saying. When Nupur is grown up and asks about her mother, maybe there'll be a little more to tell than there was a month ago."

At midnight I got dressed in the bathroom while she sat on the edge of the tub wrapped in a hotel towel, her wet hair dripping down her back. When I came out she followed me to the door. The little girl had rolled over onto her back and flung both arms over her head. The giraffe was on the floor.

Rashmi picked it up and tucked it back under her daughter's arm without waking her.

At the door she stood on tiptoe and kissed me once, lightly, on the corner of my mouth.

"Send me a picture," she said. "When Nupur does the cobra's voice for Sutapa on Sunday. I want to hear it."

"I will."

"And Ranjeet." She held the door half-open. Her eyes were wet but she was smiling. "Thank you for not being too much. And for not being too little. You were exactly right."

I walked down four flights of the Kenilworth's old stairs, because the lift was slow and I needed the time. Outside, Little Russell Street was empty and cold. The Christmas lights along Park Street were still up from December, strings of yellow bulbs looped between the lampposts, swaying in the wind.

I stood under them for a while before I went to find a taxi.

[சிவ முருகன் 85]

Chapter 53 is truly emotional and beautifully written. Rashmi's goodbye is not just a farewell; it is a mixture of love, sacrifice, regret, and acceptance. Her decision to leave Mohit and start a new life in Bangalore gives her character a new strength. The final scene under the Christmas lights is especially touching. Some goodbyes are painful, but they leave behind beautiful memories. Excellent writing!

[Gopal Ratnam]

Very nice

[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 54: The Hearing

The family court in Alipore is a red-brick building from the British time with ceiling fans that turn too slowly and a corridor outside the courtrooms where people sit on long wooden benches for hours, waiting for their names to be called. Couples sitting at opposite ends of the same bench, not looking at each other. Grandmothers holding sleeping babies. Lawyers in black coats walking up and down with files under their arms, talking into their phones.

Our case was listed for the twenty-third of February. I arrived at ten with Fatima. Poroma was already there.

She was sitting at the far end of the bench between her mother and father. She was wearing the white saree with the red border again. Her father sat bolt upright beside her in his navy blazer with his hands on his knees, staring straight ahead. Her mother was reading a medical journal. When I came in, Dr. Mukherjee looked up and nodded to me, once, politely, the way you nod to a colleague. The Commander did not look at me at all.

Poroma looked up. She met my eyes for a second across the corridor. Then she looked down again.

We had not seen each other since the night in Rahul's flat. Six weeks.

So much had happened in those six weeks that I had trouble keeping it in order.

Rahul had been charge-sheeted. The cyber cell had identified forty-one of the sixty-eight women on his laptop. Nine of them had come forward to give statements, including Nandini from Delhi, whose husband had flown down with her. Sutapa had given hers on the second of February, with me sitting outside Banerjee's office. She came out an hour later with her face washed clean and white, and took my hand in the corridor without saying anything. The magistrate had refused Rahul bail. Banerjee said the trial would take two years at least. He said it with satisfaction.

Head office had restored my contracts to my record, formally, in writing. Mr. Gupta had asked that his account be transferred back to me. Last week the MD from Mumbai had called me personally, a man I had never spoken to in ten years, to say that the company owed me "an apology and a conversation about my future". I had not decided yet what I wanted that conversation to be about.

Rashmi was in Bangalore. She sent me photos sometimes: Tuktuki on a swing, the view from her new office, a dosa the size of a cricket bat. I sent her a video of Nupur doing the cobra's voice for Sutapa on a Sunday evening. Nupur hissing Nag! Nag! while Sutapa pretended to be terrified and hid behind a cushion. Rashmi replied with a single line: I've watched it twelve times.

And Poroma's lawyer, a quiet elderly man from a firm on Old Post Office Street, had written to Fatima on the tenth of January. His client wished to convert the contested petition into a petition for divorce by mutual consent. His client would not contest the custody application. His client requested reasonable visitation rights, and would accept whatever terms the court and the children's father considered appropriate. His client waived all claim to alimony and maintenance.

Fatima had read it to me in her chamber twice. Then she had taken her glasses off and looked at me for a long time.

"I've never had a letter like this," she said. "Not in fourteen years. Not once."

Our names were called at a quarter to twelve.

Mrs. Chakraborty's courtroom was small and shabby, with green walls and a portrait of Gandhiji above her chair, and the fan overhead creaking in a slow circle. She was a small grey-haired woman with reading glasses on a chain and a face that had heard every lie human beings could tell each other about marriage. She looked at the file. Then she looked over her glasses at the two of us, standing on either side of the narrow room with our lawyers.

"Mr. Sen. Mrs. Sen." She turned a page. "I see the petition has been converted to mutual consent. I see Mrs. Sen is not contesting custody." She looked up at Poroma. "Mrs. Sen, I want to hear this from you, not your lawyer. Do you understand what you are agreeing to?"

Poroma stepped forward.

"Yes, ma'am."

"You understand that the children will live with their father. That you will have the visitation agreed in these terms. Every Saturday from ten until six, every Wednesday evening from four until eight, and alternate festivals. Unsupervised, with effect from today. That if you wish these terms changed in future, you will have to come back to this court and ask."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You understand you are waiving maintenance. You are a woman with no current income. Your lawyer has advised you of what that means?"

"He has, ma'am." Poroma's voice was low and steady. "I have a degree in English literature from Presidency College that I've never used. I've started applying for teaching posts. My mother is helping me with rent for a small flat in Jodhpur Park until I find something." She paused. "I don't want my husband's money, ma'am. I've taken enough from him."

Mrs. Chakraborty looked at her for a long moment over her glasses.

"The court has received the report of the social worker from your supervised visits," she said. "And a letter from a Dr. Sharmila Mukherjee, who I understand is your mother, stating that you have been attending counselling with a psychologist at Woodlands twice a week since the twelfth of January." She turned another page. "And I have received, through Ms. Ahmed, a copy of a security officer report from the cyber cell at Lalbazar, describing your conduct on the night of the eleventh of January." She took off her glasses and let them hang on their chain. "Is there anything you would like to say to the court, Mrs. Sen, before I record your consent?"

Poroma was silent for a moment.

Behind her on the bench, her father had not moved. But I saw his hand, on his knee, close into a fist.

"Only one thing, ma'am," Poroma said. "If I may."

"Go on."

"The interim order you made in December. Giving my children to their father." Poroma's voice did not waver. "I want to say that you were right. I watched the same footage you watched. I didn't deserve them. I'm trying to become someone who does. But I didn't then." She took a breath. "That's all."

The fan creaked overhead. Somewhere in the corridor a baby was crying.

Mrs. Chakraborty looked at Poroma for a long time. Then she put her glasses back on and picked up her pen.

"I have been sitting in this chair for nineteen years," she said, writing, not looking up. "I have heard a great many mothers tell me they were wrong. They usually say it after I have ruled against them." She signed something. "Consent recorded. In light of the parties having lived separately and the circumstances placed before the court, the cooling-off period is waived under the Supreme Court's guidance in Shilpa Sailesh. Decree of divorce by mutual consent is granted. Custody of the minor children Nupur and Rajiv to the father. Visitation to the mother as per the agreed terms." She looked up. "Next matter."

And that was it. Ten years of love and eight years of marriage, Presidency College and a wedding in Behala and two children and a Holi party and Mandarmoni and nine months of lies, and a camera on top of a wardrobe. Ended in eleven minutes, under a creaking fan, in a small green room.

Outside in the corridor the Commander was waiting for me.

He stepped in front of me as I came out with Fatima. Poroma was a few steps behind, with her mother. He did not look at his daughter. He looked at me.

"Sen," he said. "A word."

Fatima glanced at me. I nodded, and she moved away down the corridor.

The Commander stood there in his navy blazer for a moment, looking at a point somewhere past my left shoulder. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet.

"When she told me she was marrying you," he said, "I said you weren't good enough for her. I said a sales clerk from Behala with no family name would never be able to give her the life she deserved. I said it to her face. I said it at your wedding." He paused. "I've thought about that a great deal these last six weeks."

I waited.

"I was wrong," he said. "About which of you wasn't good enough." He finally looked at me. His eyes were exactly the same ice-blue as hers, and wet. "I'm not saying that to hurt her. She knows. She's heard it from me already. I'm saying it because you deserve to hear it, and I owe it to you, and I'm an old man and I don't want to die still owing it."

He held out his hand.

I looked at it for a moment. The hand of a man who had commanded ships. Who had never once in her whole life raised it to his daughter.

I shook it.

"Thank you, sir," I said.

He nodded once, curtly, as if something had been entered in a log. Then he turned and walked away down the corridor, very straight. As he passed his daughter he put one hand briefly on her shoulder without stopping. She closed her eyes.

Poroma came over to me after her parents had gone out to the car.

We stood by a dusty window looking down at the court compound. Lawyers' scooters were parked in rows, and a man was selling cut guava with chilli salt from a basket, and a goat was grazing on a patch of grass by the gate, with no apparent owner, completely unbothered.

"Saturday," she said. "Ten o'clock."

"Ten o'clock. Didi will have them ready."

"Can I take them to the Victoria Memorial?" She said it carefully. "Nupur's never been inside. I thought, the gardens, the museum, the paintings of the old ships." A tiny pause. "I'd like to go back there and have it be a place for something good."

I thought about the Victoria Memorial gate at night. A parked car. The lights blurring through a windscreen.

"Yes," I said. "She'd love that. Take Rajiv's hat. He burns."

"I know he burns." Almost a smile. "I'm still his mother."

"I know you are."

She looked at me sideways, then down at the guava seller and the goat.

"Ranjeet," she said. "I have one wish left."

I turned and looked at her.

"From the bet," she said. "In March. When I won and you lost and you gave me three wishes. I used two. The first, and the second." She did not need to say what they were. "I never used the third."

"Poroma."

"I'm not going to use it now," she said quickly. "Not today. It's not the right day. I just wanted you to know I remember. That I'm not going to pretend I don't." She turned to face me properly. "When I use it, it won't be for me. I promise you that. I just wanted you to know I haven't forgotten I have it."

I looked at her for a long time. The plain white saree. The empty parting in her hair where the sindoor had been, every day for eight years. The thin, tired, stubborn face.

"All right," I said.

She nodded. Then she turned and walked away down the long corridor, past the wooden benches full of other people's broken marriages. She did not look back.

[Muralimm]

54 this chapter was really heart touching man really you are genius 

Really good update

[Vineeth412]

Enjoyed the updates. Looking forward to more. Thank you

[shivanikaur2]

Hi everyone only the last chapter is left. Please let me know how you liked it so far

[Yours_bear_for]

Liked? It is amazing, the way you did justice to the story is amazing please please write something like this again new story, new character please please ?

Thanks a lot for this

[Muthiah Sivaraman]

Simply excellent

[Runer]

Excellent story. You can start a new story ( not other's unfinished story ).

[Bensam06]

it's going great