02-09-2026, 05:39 PM
The first semester ended not with a sense of accomplishment, but with the weary exhaustion of a survivor. I was supposed to return home on Thursday, as per the script. But a gnawing, ugly curiosity had taken root in me—a need to see the truth without the filters of her preparation. On a reckless impulse, I booked a train ticket for Tuesday night. I didn't tell her.
I spent that Tuesday night crashing on the floor of an old college friend’s apartment in a distant Mumbai suburb, my nerves coiled tight. The next morning, Wednesday, I took a local train across the city, my heart hammering against my ribs as I approached our building. It was 11 AM. The time when she would be at work, and the flat would be empty, revealing its true nature.
I used the spare key I’d always kept hidden in my wallet. The familiar click of the lock sounded obscenely loud in the silent hallway. I pushed the door open.
The smell hit me first. Not the familiar scent of sandalwood agarbatti and lemon polish, but something alien: stale beer, faint cigarette smoke, and the lingering, greasy aroma of rich food. My stomach dropped before my eyes even finished surveying the carnage.
The living room was tidy, but in a cold, minimalist way. The family photos were gone from the side tables. In their place were abstract glass sculptures that screamed of Aakash’s sterile, modern taste. It was like walking into a showroom apartment staged by strangers.
Trembling, I moved to the kitchen. The shock deepened. On the granite countertop stood three empty Kingfisher beer bottles. Next to them, in a stainless-steel takeaway container, was the congealed, oily remnant of chicken korma, studded with cashews. I stared, my mind refusing to process it. We were from a community that did not ate products originated from animal cruelty. Strict vegetarians for generations. My mother, who used to meticulously wash utensils if a non-vegetarian guest so much as visited, now had leftover meat in her fridge. This wasn't just a change in diet; it was a ritualistic desecration of her entire upbringing, a surrender so complete it included swallowing what was once considered taboo. Aakash hadn't just claimed her body; he had rewritten her palate, her customs, her very identity. My sanskaari mother was gone, replaced by someone who drank beer and ate chicken curry with her lover.
The realization made me physically ill. I thought of the looks from the neighbors I’d vaguely registered on my way up—the aunties quickly looking away, the uncles with their disapproving frowns. It wasn't just pity for the son of a jailed man. They knew. They knew a young man lived here with her now. They saw him come and go. In their eyes, Parineeti Arya wasn't a tragic figure; she was the neighborhood slut, the cheating wife living in sin while her husband faced execution. And the most devastating part was that she clearly didn't care. Their judgment meant nothing against the weight of his presence, the pull of his "young dick," as my mind viciously supplied, ploughing her without the constraints of tradition or shame. All those values she’d once enforced with such rigid authority had evaporated, dissolved in the heat of an illicit affair.
Steeling myself, I walked down the corridor to the master bedroom—the room that had been my parents' sanctuary. The door was ajar.
I almost cried out loud.
The king-sized bed, the same one they’d bought on their 15th anniversary, was a tangled wreck. The sheets were ripped off one corner, pillows lay scattered on the floor. It looked less like a place of rest and more like a battleground, the aftermath of a "long session," as my traitorous mind whispered. On the bedside table on his side (my father's side) stood another beer bottle, half-empty, and next to it, a small, crumpled foil sachet. I picked it up with trembling fingers. It was for i-pills. Emergency contraception. The pack held ten pills. Five were missing.
The final confirmation came from the walk-in wardrobe. I slid the door open. My father’s suits, his crisp white shirts, his collection of ties—all gone. In their place hung expensive, slim-fit linen shirts, designer jeans, and sharp blazers. On the shelf below, a row of leather belts and three expensive-looking watches gleamed under the closet light. The scent was his—a mix of cedarwood and aggressive cologne that had lingered in the car that day. He wasn't just visiting. He had moved in. His clothes lived here. His smell permeated the marital bedroom. The conquest was total.
I fled the apartment, locking the door behind me, feeling like a ghost in my own home.
The next day, Thursday, I performed the charade of my formal return. I rang the bell at 4 PM, lugging my trunk. She opened the door. Her expression wasn't one of joy, or even relieved surprise. It was thinly veiled irritation, as if I were a delivery boy interrupting a crucial meeting. "You're early," she stated flatly, not moving to hug me or help with the bag. Her eyes flickered past me, down the hallway, as if checking if I was alone. The message was clear: my presence was an inconvenience to the life she was now living.
When i looked at apartment, it was clean almost like the evidence of a crime has been erased, every symbol of Aakash was gone, the kitchen clean and so was her bedroom.
The following three days were a masterclass in icy coexistence. She spoke to me only when necessary—"Dinner is ready," "Don't leave the lights on." Conversations about college, friends, life were nonexistent. She moved through the flat with a detached efficiency, her phone never far from her hand, her attention perpetually elsewhere. The home felt like a hotel where we were unfortunate co-guests.
A temporary thaw came with Rohan’s arrival from Bengaluru. We went to pick him up together. At the station, when she saw his small, eager face searching the crowd, she did cry. A few genuine tears rolled down her cheeks as she hugged him fiercely. For a moment, I dared to hope a shred of motherhood remained, buried beneath the layers of betrayal. I, however, broke down completely, holding my little brother after six months, feeling the profound wrongness of our fractured reunion. He’d grown taller, but his eyes held a new, unsettling wariness.
At home, for a brief, deceptive period, things felt almost normal. Rohan’s chatter filled the silence. We played board games. She cooked his favorite aloo parathas. It was a fragile pocket of borrowed time, a photo album tableau of a family that no longer existed.
Then, the ultimate letter arrived.
We had forgotten about our father was in jail for last nine months.
It was from the dubai court through embassy, forwarded from Dubai. Its official seal seemed to bleed coldness. My hands shook as I watched her slit the envelope. Her eyes scanned the dense, formal Arabic and English text, her face paling. She wordlessly handed it to me.
The language was dry, legal, and utterly final. After nine months of legal proceedings, the Dubai court had delivered its verdict. Given the severity of the financial fraud, compounded by the "grave moral crimes" of sexual harassment and coercion, the sentence was death. Arun Arya was to be executed.
The world narrowed to a pinprick. The words "death" and "father" collided in my brain, unable to reconcile. I made a sound, a choked gasp that wasn't quite a sob. I looked at her. She had sunk into a chair, her face ashen, one hand pressed to her mouth. She was shocked. But even in that moment of seismic news, I saw the difference. Her shock was that of someone receiving tragic news about a distant acquaintance. My shock was the obliteration of my universe.
Her recovery was unnervingly swift. By the next day, she was back to routine—making breakfast, answering work emails, her grief compartmentalized into a neat, one-day event. You couldn't tell, looking at her calmly sorting laundry, that her husband had just been condemned to die. The death sentence was just another piece of bad paperwork.
A week later, another embassy letter came, this time from Indian side. This one told that they were planning to appeal the death sentence in dubai court and outlined the appeals process exclusively for arun's family member (my mother). It was a complex, expensive, long-shot undertaking, but it existed. It listed the required formalities, the mountains of paperwork, the need to engage specialized international lawyers, the substantial fees required to even file the appeal by them. All these things had to done by us. It was a lifeline, however thin.
She read it at the breakfast table, her expression unreadable. Then, she folded the letter neatly, placed it back in the envelope, and set it aside on a pile of old bills. She didn't make a single call. She didn't consult a lawyer. She didn't move to gather a single document. She ignored it. Completely.
That very Friday, she dressed with extra care and left for the night. The death sentence for her husband wasn't a call to action; it was, perversely, a green light. With the finality of the verdict, perhaps the last lingering thread of guilt was severed. Her Friday night shenanigans with her lover resumed, now underscored by the grim knowledge that the man she was betraying would soon be legally erased from the earth.
One month later, on a Tuesday morning, a terse, formal call from the embassy confirmed it. The appeal had never been filed because of no reply from the family. The sentence had been carried out. Arun Arya was dead. Executed by the authorities in Dubai.
When she told me, her voice a hollow monotone, everything went black at the edges. I didn't faint, but the world lost its color, its sound, its meaning. My father was gone. Not lost, not passed away. Executed. A cold, clinical termination in a foreign land. She began to cry then, slow, quiet tears that tracked through her makeup. It was the most authentic sorrow I’d seen from her in over a year.
Then, her phone rang.
She glanced at the screen, her weeping hiccuping to a stop. Without a word, she stood up, walked into the next room, and closed the door. From where I sat, paralyzed in my grief, I could hear the low murmur of her voice. It wasn't the hushed, broken tones of a newly widowed woman. It was normal. Conversational. And then, unmistakably, a soft, brittle laugh escaped the room. A laugh. While the ghost of my father’s execution still hung in the air of our home.
The embassy again called for arrangement of body transportation, but she declined to accept the body, This was another shock to me in addition to ongoing shock as i won't be able to provide him last rites as his son, but i was not in a mental and physical state to even argue about this to her.
For the next month, she entered a strange period of mourning performance. She didn't visit Aakash. She didn't even go to the office. She wore simple white cotton saris, the traditional garb of a widow. But she was constantly on her phone, texting, chatting, her fingers flying over the screen, her expressions shifting from somber to animated and back again. She was grieving publicly, but privately, she was maintaining a connection. To him. It was a pantomime of widowhood orchestrated for the neighbors' eyes, while her digital heart remained elsewhere.
When it was time to return Rohan to his boarding edu, inst., the performance continued. At the station, she held him tightly, her eyes wet. But once he was on the train and we returned to the empty flat, the veil dropped instantly. The white sari was swapped for casual home clothes, and the phone was back in her hand.
My own departure was due on Monday. On thursday evening, I told her I'd decided to leave a day early, on Friday. She merely nodded, not even asking why the hurry. My absence was, as always, preferable.
But I wasn't going for a project. Using the skills and components I'd quietly acquired from the Electronics Club, I had spent my time at home building something. Tiny, wireless pinhole cameras with cloud connectivity. While she was out shopping one day, I had installed them. One in the living room corner, disguised within a fake smoke detector. Another with a view of the main entrance. A third, with a trembling hand and a heart full of self-loathing, I'd placed high on the bookshelf in the master bedroom, angled to cover the bed.
On Friday, I left for Pune as announced. But as soon as I reached my hostel room that night, I didn't unpack. I locked the door, opened my laptop, and logged into the secure, anonymous cloud server. The feed from the Mumbai apartment loaded on my screen, crisp and clear.
The living room was empty, bathed in the late evening gloom. The entrance was still. I clicked on the third feed, the one from the bedroom.
I spent that Tuesday night crashing on the floor of an old college friend’s apartment in a distant Mumbai suburb, my nerves coiled tight. The next morning, Wednesday, I took a local train across the city, my heart hammering against my ribs as I approached our building. It was 11 AM. The time when she would be at work, and the flat would be empty, revealing its true nature.
I used the spare key I’d always kept hidden in my wallet. The familiar click of the lock sounded obscenely loud in the silent hallway. I pushed the door open.
The smell hit me first. Not the familiar scent of sandalwood agarbatti and lemon polish, but something alien: stale beer, faint cigarette smoke, and the lingering, greasy aroma of rich food. My stomach dropped before my eyes even finished surveying the carnage.
The living room was tidy, but in a cold, minimalist way. The family photos were gone from the side tables. In their place were abstract glass sculptures that screamed of Aakash’s sterile, modern taste. It was like walking into a showroom apartment staged by strangers.
Trembling, I moved to the kitchen. The shock deepened. On the granite countertop stood three empty Kingfisher beer bottles. Next to them, in a stainless-steel takeaway container, was the congealed, oily remnant of chicken korma, studded with cashews. I stared, my mind refusing to process it. We were from a community that did not ate products originated from animal cruelty. Strict vegetarians for generations. My mother, who used to meticulously wash utensils if a non-vegetarian guest so much as visited, now had leftover meat in her fridge. This wasn't just a change in diet; it was a ritualistic desecration of her entire upbringing, a surrender so complete it included swallowing what was once considered taboo. Aakash hadn't just claimed her body; he had rewritten her palate, her customs, her very identity. My sanskaari mother was gone, replaced by someone who drank beer and ate chicken curry with her lover.
The realization made me physically ill. I thought of the looks from the neighbors I’d vaguely registered on my way up—the aunties quickly looking away, the uncles with their disapproving frowns. It wasn't just pity for the son of a jailed man. They knew. They knew a young man lived here with her now. They saw him come and go. In their eyes, Parineeti Arya wasn't a tragic figure; she was the neighborhood slut, the cheating wife living in sin while her husband faced execution. And the most devastating part was that she clearly didn't care. Their judgment meant nothing against the weight of his presence, the pull of his "young dick," as my mind viciously supplied, ploughing her without the constraints of tradition or shame. All those values she’d once enforced with such rigid authority had evaporated, dissolved in the heat of an illicit affair.
Steeling myself, I walked down the corridor to the master bedroom—the room that had been my parents' sanctuary. The door was ajar.
I almost cried out loud.
The king-sized bed, the same one they’d bought on their 15th anniversary, was a tangled wreck. The sheets were ripped off one corner, pillows lay scattered on the floor. It looked less like a place of rest and more like a battleground, the aftermath of a "long session," as my traitorous mind whispered. On the bedside table on his side (my father's side) stood another beer bottle, half-empty, and next to it, a small, crumpled foil sachet. I picked it up with trembling fingers. It was for i-pills. Emergency contraception. The pack held ten pills. Five were missing.
The final confirmation came from the walk-in wardrobe. I slid the door open. My father’s suits, his crisp white shirts, his collection of ties—all gone. In their place hung expensive, slim-fit linen shirts, designer jeans, and sharp blazers. On the shelf below, a row of leather belts and three expensive-looking watches gleamed under the closet light. The scent was his—a mix of cedarwood and aggressive cologne that had lingered in the car that day. He wasn't just visiting. He had moved in. His clothes lived here. His smell permeated the marital bedroom. The conquest was total.
I fled the apartment, locking the door behind me, feeling like a ghost in my own home.
The next day, Thursday, I performed the charade of my formal return. I rang the bell at 4 PM, lugging my trunk. She opened the door. Her expression wasn't one of joy, or even relieved surprise. It was thinly veiled irritation, as if I were a delivery boy interrupting a crucial meeting. "You're early," she stated flatly, not moving to hug me or help with the bag. Her eyes flickered past me, down the hallway, as if checking if I was alone. The message was clear: my presence was an inconvenience to the life she was now living.
When i looked at apartment, it was clean almost like the evidence of a crime has been erased, every symbol of Aakash was gone, the kitchen clean and so was her bedroom.
The following three days were a masterclass in icy coexistence. She spoke to me only when necessary—"Dinner is ready," "Don't leave the lights on." Conversations about college, friends, life were nonexistent. She moved through the flat with a detached efficiency, her phone never far from her hand, her attention perpetually elsewhere. The home felt like a hotel where we were unfortunate co-guests.
A temporary thaw came with Rohan’s arrival from Bengaluru. We went to pick him up together. At the station, when she saw his small, eager face searching the crowd, she did cry. A few genuine tears rolled down her cheeks as she hugged him fiercely. For a moment, I dared to hope a shred of motherhood remained, buried beneath the layers of betrayal. I, however, broke down completely, holding my little brother after six months, feeling the profound wrongness of our fractured reunion. He’d grown taller, but his eyes held a new, unsettling wariness.
At home, for a brief, deceptive period, things felt almost normal. Rohan’s chatter filled the silence. We played board games. She cooked his favorite aloo parathas. It was a fragile pocket of borrowed time, a photo album tableau of a family that no longer existed.
Then, the ultimate letter arrived.
We had forgotten about our father was in jail for last nine months.
It was from the dubai court through embassy, forwarded from Dubai. Its official seal seemed to bleed coldness. My hands shook as I watched her slit the envelope. Her eyes scanned the dense, formal Arabic and English text, her face paling. She wordlessly handed it to me.
The language was dry, legal, and utterly final. After nine months of legal proceedings, the Dubai court had delivered its verdict. Given the severity of the financial fraud, compounded by the "grave moral crimes" of sexual harassment and coercion, the sentence was death. Arun Arya was to be executed.
The world narrowed to a pinprick. The words "death" and "father" collided in my brain, unable to reconcile. I made a sound, a choked gasp that wasn't quite a sob. I looked at her. She had sunk into a chair, her face ashen, one hand pressed to her mouth. She was shocked. But even in that moment of seismic news, I saw the difference. Her shock was that of someone receiving tragic news about a distant acquaintance. My shock was the obliteration of my universe.
Her recovery was unnervingly swift. By the next day, she was back to routine—making breakfast, answering work emails, her grief compartmentalized into a neat, one-day event. You couldn't tell, looking at her calmly sorting laundry, that her husband had just been condemned to die. The death sentence was just another piece of bad paperwork.
A week later, another embassy letter came, this time from Indian side. This one told that they were planning to appeal the death sentence in dubai court and outlined the appeals process exclusively for arun's family member (my mother). It was a complex, expensive, long-shot undertaking, but it existed. It listed the required formalities, the mountains of paperwork, the need to engage specialized international lawyers, the substantial fees required to even file the appeal by them. All these things had to done by us. It was a lifeline, however thin.
She read it at the breakfast table, her expression unreadable. Then, she folded the letter neatly, placed it back in the envelope, and set it aside on a pile of old bills. She didn't make a single call. She didn't consult a lawyer. She didn't move to gather a single document. She ignored it. Completely.
That very Friday, she dressed with extra care and left for the night. The death sentence for her husband wasn't a call to action; it was, perversely, a green light. With the finality of the verdict, perhaps the last lingering thread of guilt was severed. Her Friday night shenanigans with her lover resumed, now underscored by the grim knowledge that the man she was betraying would soon be legally erased from the earth.
One month later, on a Tuesday morning, a terse, formal call from the embassy confirmed it. The appeal had never been filed because of no reply from the family. The sentence had been carried out. Arun Arya was dead. Executed by the authorities in Dubai.
When she told me, her voice a hollow monotone, everything went black at the edges. I didn't faint, but the world lost its color, its sound, its meaning. My father was gone. Not lost, not passed away. Executed. A cold, clinical termination in a foreign land. She began to cry then, slow, quiet tears that tracked through her makeup. It was the most authentic sorrow I’d seen from her in over a year.
Then, her phone rang.
She glanced at the screen, her weeping hiccuping to a stop. Without a word, she stood up, walked into the next room, and closed the door. From where I sat, paralyzed in my grief, I could hear the low murmur of her voice. It wasn't the hushed, broken tones of a newly widowed woman. It was normal. Conversational. And then, unmistakably, a soft, brittle laugh escaped the room. A laugh. While the ghost of my father’s execution still hung in the air of our home.
The embassy again called for arrangement of body transportation, but she declined to accept the body, This was another shock to me in addition to ongoing shock as i won't be able to provide him last rites as his son, but i was not in a mental and physical state to even argue about this to her.
For the next month, she entered a strange period of mourning performance. She didn't visit Aakash. She didn't even go to the office. She wore simple white cotton saris, the traditional garb of a widow. But she was constantly on her phone, texting, chatting, her fingers flying over the screen, her expressions shifting from somber to animated and back again. She was grieving publicly, but privately, she was maintaining a connection. To him. It was a pantomime of widowhood orchestrated for the neighbors' eyes, while her digital heart remained elsewhere.
When it was time to return Rohan to his boarding edu, inst., the performance continued. At the station, she held him tightly, her eyes wet. But once he was on the train and we returned to the empty flat, the veil dropped instantly. The white sari was swapped for casual home clothes, and the phone was back in her hand.
My own departure was due on Monday. On thursday evening, I told her I'd decided to leave a day early, on Friday. She merely nodded, not even asking why the hurry. My absence was, as always, preferable.
But I wasn't going for a project. Using the skills and components I'd quietly acquired from the Electronics Club, I had spent my time at home building something. Tiny, wireless pinhole cameras with cloud connectivity. While she was out shopping one day, I had installed them. One in the living room corner, disguised within a fake smoke detector. Another with a view of the main entrance. A third, with a trembling hand and a heart full of self-loathing, I'd placed high on the bookshelf in the master bedroom, angled to cover the bed.
On Friday, I left for Pune as announced. But as soon as I reached my hostel room that night, I didn't unpack. I locked the door, opened my laptop, and logged into the secure, anonymous cloud server. The feed from the Mumbai apartment loaded on my screen, crisp and clear.
The living room was empty, bathed in the late evening gloom. The entrance was still. I clicked on the third feed, the one from the bedroom.
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