Adultery Dad's Enemy Made My Mom Heartless (COMPLETED!!)

[thoristhanos]

UPDATE - 2

Another interesting event happened thirteen days later, the phone rang at 9:17 p.m. I was already in the living room with Rohan, who was half-asleep against my shoulder, a half-finished glass of milk balanced on the arm of the sofa. The landline’s shrill tone cut through the quiet apartment, and I reached for it without thinking, expecting the usual brief check-in from my father or perhaps a wrong number. Instead, my mother’s voice came through the receiver, slightly breathless, the faint hum of traffic behind her.


“Arjun, beta, listen—there’s an important client dinner that just got confirmed. I won’t be able to leave before eleven. Can you order something for yourself and Rohan? Don’t wait up. I’ll eat when I get home.” Her tone was brisk, professional, the same voice she used when speaking to suppliers over the phone. There was no apology in it, only the calm assumption that I would handle things.

I told her I would take care of it, and she hung up without further explanation. The line went dead with a soft click, leaving me holding the receiver a moment longer than necessary. Eleven o’clock was already late; the fact that she had called ahead felt like an attempt to make the situation seem ordinary. I ordered Chinese from the place down the street, paid the delivery boy, and fed Rohan before carrying him to bed. By ten-thirty the apartment was dark except for the small lamp near the entrance. I left it on, telling myself it was for her, but the truth was I didn’t want to sit alone in complete darkness while the hours stretched.

She arrived at eleven-thirty-two. The key turned in the lock with a metallic scbang, and the door opened to reveal her silhouette against the dim hallway light. She stepped inside, closed the door quietly behind her, and for a moment I thought I was seeing someone else entirely.

The saree was a deep, vivid green—almost emerald, but with a richer, more saturated tone that caught the lamplight and seemed to glow against her skin. It was not the modest cotton or silk she usually wore to the office; this fabric was thinner, almost sheer in places, and it clung to her body in a way that left very little to the imagination. The blouse beneath it was sleeveless, a matching shade of green with delicate gold embroidery along the edges. There were large sweat patches around her armpit and chest area.

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I had never seen either the saree or the blouse before. The neckline plunged far lower than anything she had worn in the past, and the top two hooks were completely undone. The  topmost one was missing entirely, as though it had been torn away in haste. Her breasts, fuller than I had ever consciously noticed, spilled forward through the open gap, the soft upper curves and the deep valley between them exposed to the point that nearly seventy percent of her boobs were visible. The black lace of her bra—if she was even wearing one—was nowhere in sight.

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Her hair was completely undone, tumbling in wild, tangled waves around her face and shoulders. Strands stuck to her damp neck and forehead, as though she had been running or had spent a long time with her head pressed against something—or someone. Her lipstick, the same deep berry she had applied that morning, was entirely gone except for a faint smear across her chin and another faint trace above her upper lip, right where a mustache would be. It looked exactly like the aftermath of prolonged, messy kissing—the kind where lips had been crushed together so thoroughly that the color had transferred elsewhere. There were no other visible marks on her body, no redness on her neck or shoulders, nothing that could be pointed to as definitive proof. But the state of her clothes and face was enough.

I was sitting on the sofa, half-hidden in the shadow of the bookshelf, and when she stepped fully into the light I felt my stomach drop. I couldn’t look at her face. My eyes slid away almost involuntarily, landing on the floor, the wall, anywhere but the open blouse and the unmistakable evidence of what had happened to her lipstick. A hot, sick feeling rose in my chest—not quite anger, not yet, but a deep, twisting discomfort that made it impossible to meet her eyes. I had spent years defending her in college, fists clenched whenever someone made a crude joke about “hot moms” or “MILFs.” The thought of anyone seeing her like this, calling her those names, made my throat close up. And yet here she was, standing in our living room, looking like she had just stepped out of the exact scenario those jokes described.

She didn’t notice me at first. She set her purse on the console table and slipped off her heels with a soft sigh, rolling her shoulders as though trying to ease tension. The movement made the saree shift, and the already low neckline of the blouse slipped even further. For a brief, horrifying second I saw the full curve of one breast, the dark edge of her areola visible where the fabric had given up trying to contain her. She adjusted it quickly, but not before the image burned itself into my mind.

I stood up slowly before she could see me sitting there, keeping my face turned away.  I couldn’t face her. The sight of her, the state of her, the way the green saree and the missing hook had left her so exposed—it was too much. I closed the door to my room and leaned against it, breathing hard.

Sleep didn’t come. I lay on my bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and the images kept replaying. The open blouse, the missing hook, the lipstick smeared on her chin and above her lip like evidence of frantic kissing. The way her breasts had nearly spilled out entirely. The green saree that looked more like something meant for a bedroom than an office. I tried to push the thoughts away, but they circled back, relentless.

And then, unbidden, another memory surfaced—one I had tried to forget. A few months ago, during the semester break, some of my friends had dragged me out for a “guys’ night.” We ended up in a part of Mumbai I had never visited before, a narrow lane lined with old buildings and flickering neon signs. They had taken me to a red-light area, laughing and shoving each other as though it were a joke. I had stood at the edge of the group, uncomfortable, while they pointed out the women standing in doorways and leaning against railings.

There had been young women, barely older than me, in short skirts and tight tops. But what had stuck with me were the older ones—the forty-, forty-five-, fifty-year-old women who looked like they had been doing this for decades. Some of them wore sarees. Not the modest, respectable dbangs my mother favored, but thinner, brighter versions that clung to their bodies and left their midriffs bare. The blouses were often sleeveless or backless, the necklines low enough to show cleavage. One woman, probably in her late forties, had been wearing a green saree very similar to the one my mother had just come home in—even more modest in cut, but the same vivid shade, the same way it caught the light and made her skin look warmer. She had stood with one hand on her hip, the other adjusting her pallu, and for a moment I had imagined what it would be like to see my own mother standing there.
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The memory made my skin crawl. I rolled onto my side and pressed my face into the pillow, trying to erase it. But the image of that woman in the green saree refused to leave. It merged with the image of my mother stepping through the door tonight—the same color, the same low neckline, the missing hook, the lipstick on her chin. She always took auto to work and to home, the thought that when stopping an auto driver standing on road she might have look exactly a cheap whore trying to attract customers as they do for these auto and truck drivers. The auto driver might have seen her like this, might have looked at her exposed cleavage and smeared lipstick and assumed she was one of those women, made my stomach turn. And if my friends had seen her—if any of them had been standing on that street corner and watched her step out of an auto looking the way she did—they would have laughed. They would have called her exactly what they called those women: whore, randi, public cumdump, degraded. The words felt like acid in my mind.

I had spent years protecting her reputation. In college, when someone made a joke about “Arjun’s hot mom,” I had shoved them against lockers, dared them to say it again. The idea that she could be reduced to those crude labels, that someone could look at her and see nothing but a body available for purchase, made my chest ache with a protective rage I didn’t know how to direct. She had fed me from her own body when I was a baby. She had stayed up nights when I was sick, held my hand through fevers, kissed my forehead when I cried. The thought that the same woman could be called a mature randi, a public cumdump, a degraded whore—and that I would have no words to defend her—left me hollow and furious at the same time.

I sat up in bed, the sheets tangled around my legs, and stared at the darkness. The apartment was quiet now; she had probably gone to her room. But the images wouldn’t stop. The green saree slipping lower, the missing hook, the lipstick on her chin, the way her breasts had been almost entirely exposed. The memory of the red-light district, the older women in their thin sarees, the casual cruelty of my friends’ laughter. The fear that one day someone would see her like this and the protective wall I had built around her reputation would crumble, leaving me with nothing but those ugly words and no way to answer them.

I lay back down eventually, but sleep stayed away. The thoughts circled, relentless, until the first pale light of dawn crept through the curtains. By then the only thing I knew for certain was that something had shifted—something I couldn’t name yet, but that made it impossible to look at my mother the same way again. The green saree, the missing hook, the lipstick on her chin—they had cracked something open inside me, and I didn’t know how to close it again.