Adultery My Friend Wants My Mother

[CoreMadness]

Madhu is the heart of this story, and her journey is written with real care. She starts as a forty-two-year-old woman who has spent twenty years serving her family and feeling unseen, and her loneliness is handled gently enough that her vulnerability makes sense. Her fall is slow and gradual, never sudden, and the battle in her head between the dutiful wife and the awakened woman makes her feel deeply human. I especially liked how her body tells the story, through the exhaustion, the backache and the fainting, and how quietly painful it is when she gives up her job, the one thing that was truly hers. The line “she would rather be used than be empty” says more about her than pages of description. The ending, with her numbness, her slow pulling away and the relief of no longer lying, felt true to life.

Still, her journey falls short in places. For most of the story things happen to her rather than because of her, so her awakening sometimes reads as being worn down rather than discovering herself. Some of her changes come too suddenly, and her guilt as a mother toward Vinay barely gets any space, which is a big gap in a story built around a son and his mother. Most of all, she leaves only after Gautham has already lost interest. She ends it out of exhaustion, not out of choice. She keeps the secret, forgives him as “just a young man,” and goes home without ever really facing what she did or what was done to her. Leaving him should have been the moment she took back her dignity. Instead, the goodbye felt almost as his scene and not hers. He calmly agrees, tells her “you are doing the right thing,” comforts her while she cries, kisses her and thanks her. Even her decision gets his approval, as if she needed his permission to go. She, on the other hand, never answers the humiliation. In that last conversation the sofa scene is only something they “talk about” along with everything else but the humiliation, his comment about her fall further every day than the previous day, what she meant to him was the truth she never faced at the end, assuming he loved her is silly outright and moreover feeling that she would rather be used than be empty doesn't justify his action though it might justify her stand, and then Lakshmi’s “he is not a bad man” lets him off completely. So she absorbs everything he did, and he walks away graceful. So yes, it reads less like a woman reclaiming herself and more like a woman who was used up and then sent home.

Overall, Madhu is a beautifully drawn character, and her fall is written with emotional depth. But her ending brings peace to her without growth or purpose. One moment where she truly chooses herself, or faces her son honestly, would have turned a well-written fall into a complete journey. The story might not be about reforming or pay back to Gautham but the way this story normalizes his actions at the end takes away all the efforts and worth put into a well written story.