Fantasy The Teacher Who Knelt to maid Son

[Batni123]

The Queen Who Knelt

Part One: The First Crack

The summer of 2020 did not arrive in Mumbai; it invaded.
By the third week of May the city had surrendered. The sea breeze had died, the roads were empty, and the lockdown had stretched so long that even the dogs had stopped barking at nothing.

 Inside flat 1201 of Sea-Facing CHS, Malabar Hill, the air-conditioner in the master bedroom had given up two weeks ago, and the repairman was not “essential”.
Radha Mehta, thirty-six, Head of Mathematics at St. Xavier’s Boys’, had always believed she was made of discipline.
Her husband, Captain Arvind Mehta, had been at sea since January.

 The last time they had made love was 27 December 2019; she remembered the date because she had marked it on the calendar like an exam.

Since then: nothing.
No touch, no voice, only a weekly satellite call that lasted exactly eight minutes and ended with “Duty first, Radha.”
She told herself she did not mind.
She told herself desire was a distraction for weaker minds.
She told herself this every night while lying alone on the left side of the king-size bed, the right side cold and perfectly made, thighs pressed so tightly together that the muscles ached.

She kept the lie going until the heat and the silence finally won.
The only two people who still entered her flat every day were Lakshmi and her son Nikhil.
Lakshmi had been sweeping Radha’s floors since Nikhil was five. She was forty-two, small, cheerful, and completely unaware that her quiet, obedient son had grown into something else entirely.
Nikhil was nineteen now, repeating Class 12 because of the pandemic, still in the same blue-and-white uniform he had worn since.
He was six feet tall, broad across the shoulders from gully cricket, and still terrified of Radha.
She had, after all, made him cry in Class  by striking his knuckles with a wooden ruler for forgetting the factor theorem.
He had never forgotten again.

Every morning at 9:15 the bell rang.
Nikhil entered with folded hands, eyes on the floor.
“Good morning, Ma’am.”
“Late by forty seconds. Sit. Page 217. I want every sum solved before lunch.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
He obeyed. He always obeyed.
But Radha had started to notice things she had trained herself not to notice.
The way his white shirt clung to his back when the fan died.
The way the veins stood out on his forearms when he wrote fast.
The way his voice had dropped an octave since last year, yet still cracked when she raised an eyebrow.
She told herself it was simple biology.

Nine months without sex.
A handsome boy in the house every day.
Nothing more.
She told herself the lie until the afternoon of Monday, 18 May, when the longest power cut of the season hit.
The inverter died at 2:07 p.m.
The ceiling fan slowed, groaned, stopped.
The flat became a kiln.
Nikhil sat at the teak study table, sweat darkening his shirt in a perfect V down his spine.
Lakshmi was in the kitchen, washing clothes by hand because the machine needed electricity.
Radha stood in the doorway holding two steel glasses of nimbu pani.
She had changed into the thinnest cotton saree she owned (off-white, almost translucent when wet). No blouse, only a beige bra underneath. Respectable, but only just.

She placed one glass in front of him.
“Drink. You’ll collapse otherwise.”
He took it with both hands, the way he used to take punishment slips.
“Thank you, Ma’am.”
She did not leave.
She stood there fanning herself with the end of her pallu, watching a bead of sweat roll down the side of his neck and disappear under the collar.
“Impossible to study in this heat,” she said, more to herself than to him.
He nodded, eyes fixed on the graph paper.
She hesitated.
Then, for the first time in fourteen years, Radha Mehta did something that was not in the syllabus.

She pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down.
Nikhil’s pen froze mid-equation.
Radha Ma’am never sat with students.
She took a sip of her own nimbu pani, then spoke in the same voice she used to announce surprise tests.
“When I was your age and the lights went out, we played board games. Ludo, Snakes & Ladders… anything to keep the brain from boiling.”
Nikhil stared at her as if she had started speaking in Latin.
She almost smiled.
“Do you still have that old Ludo set in the storeroom?”
He was on his feet before she finished the sentence.
“Yes, Ma’am!”
He ran.
While he searched, Radha stood in the living room and felt her pulse in her throat.

She asked herself what she was doing.
She answered herself with brutal honesty.
I am lonely.
I am starving.
And this boy will never tell a soul, because he is more afraid of disappointing me than he is of anything else in the world.
The thought should have disgusted her.
Instead it soaked the crotch of her panties.
Nikhil came back clutching the dusty red-and-yellow box like a sacred offering.
Radha took a deep breath, steadied her voice, and began the slow, careful, terrifying game that would destroy everything she thought she was.

Day 1 of seven had begun.
She did not know yet that by Day 7 she would be sitting across from him in nothing but a bra, heart hammering, watching the same boy who once cried under her ruler stare at her breasts like they were the answer to every question he had ever been afraid to ask.

She only knew one thing with absolute certainty:
Nikhil would never betray her.
And that was enough to start.