HOME IS WHERE THE SCANDALS ARE !
The old saying goes, "Home is where the heart is." In our family, we had a different, more whispered version of that phrase, one born from years of observing the intricate, unspoken dramas that played out behind closed doors: Home is where the scandals are.
And it all seemed to orbit, in one way or another, around my mother.To the outside world, we were the picture of normalcy. But I knew the currents that ran beneath the surface, and they all started with Anuradha—Mom.
Mom (Anuradha) - At forty-six, she carried herself with a grace that her former profession had bestowed upon her. A decade ago, she had been a teacher of English Literature, and you could still see it in the careful precision of her words and the thoughtful, almost analytical light in her eyes when she listened. She hadn't stood in front of a classroom in ten years, but she never quite left it behind.
It was more than just her mind, though. People always did a double-take when I introduced her as my mother. She possessed a kind of beauty that was both elegant and disarming. She’d maintained a well-structured, enviable figure that she cared for with a quiet, disciplined dedication. I remember, with the strange clarity that children often have, the specific details of her presence. Her daily uniform was the soft, comfortable embrace of a crisp cotton sari, its gentle fabric moving with her as she went about her day at home, and the distinct, faint whisper of her 36B bra beneath them—a detail I’d known since I was a curious child rummaging through her drawers, a number and letter that somehow symbolized her perfectly put-together femininity. In the evenings, that sari would be swapped for the simple comfort of a soft cotton nighty, a uniform of quiet domesticity.
But for special occasions and family functions, a transformation occurred. The practical cottons were carefully stored away, and out would come the brilliant, rustling silks. She would dbang herself in a Kanjeevaram or a Banarasi, the rich fabrics and intricate zari work transforming her from the comfortable, familiar figure of my mother into a vision of stunning, formidable elegance.
Her skin was a smooth, white tone that seemed to glow against the vibrant colors she loved to wear, a genetic gift she shared with her sisters. She came from a simple, unassuming middle-class family, but she and her sisters had always been the talk of their town—the stunning trio. Her elder sister, my Auntie, carried her beauty with a matronly authority, while her younger brother, my Uncle, was the proud brother always flanked by his gorgeous siblings. But it was the two sisters, Mom and her elder sister, who were truly a sight together. They were different flowers from the same breathtaking vine, both gifted with faces and figures that could command a room.
She had married my father, a man five years her senior, and together they had built this home, this beautiful facade that housed our beautiful family. But even the most beautiful vases can have hairline cracks, and in our house, you learned to listen for the faintest tell-tale sounds of strain. I knew, even from a young age, that Mom’s beauty and Dad’s quiet, steady presence were just the opening lines of a much more complicated story. .
Family - Our family was a simple unit of four. There was Mom, Anuradha, the quiet center of our home. Then there was my father, Anthony, a man whose steady presence had always been the foundation of our lives. He was a man of faith and hard work, his devotion to God matched only by his devotion to providing for us. My elder brother, Britto, inherited that devout nature, always more serious, more inclined to follow the rules than I ever was. And then there was me, John, the younger son, the one who always seemed to be questioning the very foundations they held so dear.
We were a Christian family, and for my parents, that identity was woven into the fabric of our daily life. Every Sunday without fail, we would don our best clothes and file into the church pews—Dad with his solemn prayer book, Mom with her head bowed in genuine reverence, Britto following dutifully, and me, just going through the motions. They were both deeply religious, but somewhere along the way, I had diverged from that path. While they found solace in scripture, I found my answers in logic and the tangible world. I was the silent atheist in a house of faith, a contradiction that often made me feel like a stranger within my own walls.
Dad’s journey had been one of upward mobility. He had started his career in the IT sector, a reliable job that placed us firmly in the comfort of the middle class. But ambition burned in him, and a few years ago, he took a leap of faith—the kind I could believe in—and started a business with a friend right here in Bangalore. The gamble paid off. The company began to flourish, generating high revenue that steadily lifted us from our middle-class existence into the realm of the upper middle class. The tide had turned, and a new current of prosperity began to flow through our lives.
This shift changed the physical landscape of our world. We moved out of the familiar rental house that held the memories of my entire childhood and into a symbol of our new status: a sprawling, modern 4 BHK house in the heart of the city. Our new neighborhood was a community of high-class families, their imposing homes standing as testaments to their success. Our house, however, was situated at the very end of the street, a fact that lent it an air of secluded privacy. And next to us was not another mansion, but a surprising vestige of wilderness: a little forest of full-grown, ancient trees. The only barrier between our manicured lawn and that untamed green world was a huge, formidable compound wall.
The composition of our home changed too. With the business demanding more of his time and Britto securing a good job out of station, the rhythms of the house altered. Now, it is just Mom and me. I’m in my third year of college, navigating the chaos of assignments and an uncertain future. And Mom, Anuradha, is here too, but she seems to have retreated further into the shell of our new, large house. Having left her teaching career a decade ago, she is now a housewife, and her nature has grown increasingly conservative. She mostly stays within these four walls, a beautiful, silent presence moving between rooms. She doesn’t have friends to speak with, no circle of companions to share her days. Her world has shrunk to the dimensions of this luxurious, empty house, with its high ceilings and silent corridors, with only me and the whispering trees from the forest next door for company. The stage was set, beautiful and isolated, waiting for the drama to unfold.
The stage was set, beautiful and isolated, waiting for the drama to unfold. For almost two months after moving into our new, spacious home, we lived like ghosts in our own neighborhood. We were adapting, existing behind the large windows and manicured lawn without truly connecting to the world outside our compound wall. We observed the comings and goings of the other high-class families, but we remained outsiders, a quiet Christian family in a sea of unknown affluence.
It was impossible not to notice the house directly opposite ours. It was a palace compared to our own, a monstrously huge structure that seemed to swallow the land it stood on. Whispers, gathered by my father from brief chats with delivery men, reached us. It was said only two people lived in that vastness—the husband and wife—with the rest of the figures we occasionally glimpsed being servants and maids. The couple was the same age as my parents. The story went that the husband, a wealthy man from Delhi, had fallen in love with and married a Tamil girl. Now, their children were grown and living abroad, leaving this opulent shell empty save for the two of them.
Their names were Aravind and Shalini. He owned a multi-national business, a fact that explained the fleet of branded cars—a sleek BMW, a imposing Audi—that would glide in and out of their gate. He was clearly well-settled, a man who didn't need to worry about anything. Shalini, the Tamil wife, was a housewife like my mom, but that seemed to be their only similarity. Where my mother was slender and structured, Shalini was a little chubby, but with a nice skin tone and what I couldn't help but notice was a very sexy, curvaceous body. They were the undeniable big shots of the area, and we were the new, quiet family across the street.
Meanwhile, the sheer size of our 4 BHK house was becoming too much for my mother to maintain alone. The silence that had once been a mark of our privacy was now becoming a heavy, burdensome thing. After much discussion, we decided we needed help. We decided to hire a live-out female maid, not just for the chores, but to provide some semblance of companionship for my mother during the long days when I was at college.
The problem was, my mom didn't know anyone. She had no friends to ask for a reference. Swallowing her inherent conservatism and shyness, she made a decision. She would go to the only person she thought might know: the sophisticated woman who lived in the mansion across the street. She would ask Shalini for information on a reliable maid.
This simple, practical decision, born from isolation and a need for help, was the spark. This is where the story truly begins. This is where everything in my life, and in the carefully constructed world of my family, started to crumble. It all started the day my mother, Anuradha, smoothed down her cotton sari, took a deep breath, and walked across the street to knock on Shalini's door.
She returned an hour later, not just with a phone number, but with a solution. Shalini, in her effortless, wealthy way, had immediately offered up the services of their own part-time maid, a young woman named Vini. Shalini explained that Vini was looking for more work and came highly recommended. She was a 26-year-old from a poor family who lived on a nearby street, a woman with a dusky skin tone and a skinny body who always wore a simple saree to her job. That was all we knew, and it seemed enough.
A few days later, Vini(Maid) arrived for her first day. She was exactly as described—young, slender, and quiet, her dusky skin a stark contrast to the bright, printed cotton of her well-worn saree. She moved through our house with a nervous efficiency, and my mom, ever kind, seemed to relax slightly having another presence in the house, even if it was a silent, hired one.
Around this same time, another presence began to fill the empty spaces of our house more frequently: my mother’s elder sister, my Aunt Madhu. As I had always known, the two sisters were like two exquisite flowers from the same vine. Both possessed the same stunning genes, the same well-structured and enviable figures that turned heads. But the four-year age difference and the vastly different paths their lives had taken had etched itself into their beings. If my mom was a natural, understated beauty, content with her cotton sarees and minimal makeup, Aunt Madhu was a curated masterpiece. She gave intense, meticulous importance to her appearance, every hair in place, her clothes always signalling a high-class attitude that often came across as sheer show-off.
Her recent status as a widow hadn’t dimmed this; if anything, it had intensified her need to be seen. She would visit often, her perfume arriving before she did, her critical eyes scanning our new home, offering unsolicited advice on decor and, more pointedly, on how my mother should present herself now that we had “moved up in the world.” She would constantly compare herself to Mom, a subtle competition where she’d point out her own more expensive saree while backhandedly complimenting Mom’s “sweet, simple beauty.” The dynamic was complex—a blend of sisterly love, fierce jealousy, and a relentless need to assert her own perceived superiority.
So now, the stage was truly crowded. The large, empty house was no longer silent. It was filled with the quiet shuffling of a young, skinny maid trying to be invisible, the loud, perfumed pronouncements of a widowed aunt trying to be anything but, and the quiet tension of my beautiful mother, Anuradha, caught between her old life and this startling new one.
And it all traced back to that one knock on a door. A simple request for a maid’s phone number was the first domino to fall, setting into motion a chain of events that would pull every one of these characters—Mom, Dad, Britto, me, Shalini, Aravind, Vini, and Aunt Madhu—into a tangled web where the scandals we whispered about would finally, devastatingly, come to light.
Below i have attached my mom and my aunt's pic feel free to comment who do you like ?
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[/img]this is my insta id - https://www.instagram.com/affair_master4...BwNw%3D%3D
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