Adultery Priya Didi

[shailu4ever]

Referring to your message

Dear RCF Sir

 
Thank you for engaging with the story so deeply and for articulating your perspective with such clarity. I genuinely value the emphasis you place on agency, accountability, and the idea that Priya’s attraction, and therefore her choice, predates the physical moment. On that, we are largely aligned.
 
You’re absolutely right that Priya is not unaware, passive, or confused about her attraction to Ravi. Her emotional claim on him exists well before the theater, and her reaction to seeing him with other women is a deliberate signal that her internal acceptance happened long before her physical one. The theater is not the beginning of the choice; it is where a long-standing internal process finally manifests physically.
 
Where I want to clarify my intent is timing.
 
The reaction you’re responding to is not meant to be Priya’s final or fully processed stance. It is her immediate psychological response, occurring right after an experience that violently collides with her self-image, her marriage, and her sense of control. At this point, she has not yet integrated what she has done, she is reacting, not reflecting.
 
There are later scenes where Priya slows down, examines her role with greater honesty, and acknowledges shared responsibility, the “partner in crime” realization you describe. Those moments are intentionally placed after emotional distance allows her to process without the rawness of guilt and fear overwhelming her. This scene captures her before that maturity becomes accessible to her.
 
Regarding the confrontation with Ravi: I agree that, in a rational and emotionally integrated state, shared accountability would be the healthier response. But immediately after crossing a line she never believed she would cross, Priya’s mind is in self-protection mode. Her anger toward Ravi is not meant to be morally correct or fair, it is a defensive reflex, a temporary externalization that allows her to breathe before she can face herself. The story does not present this as justification, only as realism.
 
You’re also right that Ravi’s advances are not predatory and that Priya’s responses encourage him. Her later feeling of being emotionally exploited is not a judgment on Ravi’s intent, but a reflection of her own unresolved guilt and the shock of realizing how far she has gone. Emotional truth, especially immediately after transgression, is rarely clean or fair.
 
In short, this scene is not meant to define Priya; it is meant to capture her before clarity arrives. Growth, ownership, and mutual acknowledgment are part of her arc, not absent from it. This moment exists to show the psychological messiness that precedes that growth.
 
I truly appreciate the depth of your reading and your insistence on choice and responsibility. Our difference, I think, is not about what Priya eventually understands, but when she is capable of understanding it. You’re looking at who Priya should be once she integrates her actions, while I’m writing who she is in the immediate psychological wreckage of crossing a line she never believed she would.
 
Now, on a lighter and very honest note,  I might be completely wrong in writing Priya confronting Ravi the way she does. But I’ll confess something from real life: whenever I mess up, my first instinct is to blame my husband. In my head it’s always, “If he hadn’t done this… if he had said that… this wouldn’t have happened.” Only later, after I calm down and replay everything, do I admit, “Okay fine, this one’s on me.” I often joke with him that being a husband means signing up to absorb all the first-round blame, whether deserved or not.
 
So maybe Priya is borrowing a little too much from me there.
 
Sorry about that, and sorry if this particular reaction frustrated you, but I promise, she does grow up emotionally as the story goes on.
 
Thank you again for engaging so thoughtfully. Conversations like this are exactly what make writing layered characters worthwhile.
 
I truly appreciate all your support and the ratings you have been giving me
 
With lots of gratitude and warm regards
 
-- Shailu