17-08-2026, 12:42 PM
Episode : 1
# PAGE THREE
### Episode 1: The Unknown Caller
---
The fluorescent tube above Animesh Gupta's desk had been flickering for three days now, and three days running he had meant to complain to the office boy about it, and three days running he had forgotten. It buzzed now, a thin insect whine underneath the groan of the ceiling fan, as he stacked the last of the day's files into a leaning tower at the corner of his desk. Outside his cramped cabin in the Divisional Insurance office at Vashi, the evening traffic on the Sion-Panvel highway had begun its long, patient crawl, headlights smearing gold through the grimy window glass.
He was thinking, as he often did at this hour, of nothing in particular — the specific gray nothing of a tired mind coasting toward home — when his phone buzzed against the file marked **CLAIM NO. 4471/GEMINI TEXTILES & DYES PVT. LTD. — FIRE, TOTAL LOSS.**
An unlisted number. Eleven digits, no name.
He almost let it ring out. In seventeen years of service he had learned that unlisted numbers after 7 p.m. were rarely worth the airtime — a wrong number, a courier boy lost near the depot, occasionally a drunk colleague from the Andheri office wanting to reminisce about a retirement party. But some old, dutiful reflex in him — the same reflex that made him double-check figures other men would have rounded off — made him pick up.
"Hello."
Silence, but not empty silence. Someone breathing carefully, as though counting the breaths before they let them out. Then a woman's voice, low, urgent, wrapped in a Hindi that carried the flat vowels of somewhere north — Uttar Pradesh, perhaps, or Bihar — worn thin by years of trying to sound like the city.
"Gemini ka case aap dekh rahe hain na? Fire wala?"
Animesh straightened in his chair without quite meaning to. "Kaun bol raha hai?"
"Please, sunna sirf. Wo aag... woh accident nahi tha." *That fire — it wasn't an accident.*
"Madam, agar aapke paas koi jaankari hai to aap office aa kar—"
"Nahi." The word came fast, frightened, cutting him off. "Aap file band mat kariye. Please. Sirf itna keh rahi hoon — jaanch kariye. Achhe se."
*Don't close the file. Just investigate it properly.*
"Aapka naam—"
The line went dead.
Animesh held the phone away from his ear and stared at it as though it might explain itself. The screen showed **00:47** — forty-seven seconds, no more, gone now into the call log as an eleven-digit stranger. He pressed redial. Three rings, and then the flat, recorded apology of a network that had never heard of the number he was trying to reach — *the number you are trying to call is currently switched off.*
He sat very still for a moment, the file marked GEMINI TEXTILES lying closed under his forearm, its cardboard corner gone soft and gray with handling. He had signed off on it as a routine industrial fire eleven days ago — an old dye unit near the Taloja MIDC belt, faulty wiring in the humidifier room, four workers overcome by smoke before the fire brigade arrived, one dead on the spot, cause of death asphyxiation, insured value Rs. 3.4 crore, claimant M/s Gemini Textiles & Dyes Pvt. Ltd., Chairman **Vikram Oberoi.**
He had met Oberoi exactly once, at the site inspection — a tall, silver-templed man in a linen shirt too crisp for a burned-out factory floor, who had walked the wreckage with his hands clasped behind his back like a man touring a garden, offering Animesh bottled water and a card with a personal mobile number scrawled on the back in blue ink, *in case anything else is required, Inspector, please don't hesitate.* The man had not once raised his voice, not once looked anxious about the four crore rupees at stake, and Animesh — who had spent two decades learning to read the particular anxiety of men who stood to gain from disaster — had found that absence of anxiety more unsettling than any amount of pleading would have been.
He looked again at his watch. 8:52. He was already forty minutes behind schedule for his sister Manju's Lakshmi puja, and Gopa had sent two reminder messages in the last hour, the second one carrying that particular punctuation — three dots, no exclamation, the silence of a woman deciding whether irritation was worth the airtime.
He closed the file. He did not, however, put it away in the cabinet where closed files went. He set it, instead, in his bag.
---
By the time his scooter rattled up to the gate of his sister's building in Kharghar, the puja was already deep into its second hour, and the smell of camphor and marigold drifted down two floors to meet him on the stairs, along with the high, competitive murmur of thirty relatives all talking at once about the same six subjects — children's marks, property rates, someone's gall bladder operation, and, this year, apparently, the boutique.
He heard his wife's name before he saw her.
*"Gopa bahu ne toh kamaal kar diya, dekho na, apna khud ka business, aur phir bhi ghar-parivaar mein itna time deti hai—"*
*Gopa daughter-in-law has done wonders, look, her own business, and still gives so much time to the family—*
The voice belonged to his aunt Kamala Mashi, seventy-one years old and possessed of an opinion on every woman who had ever married into the family, most of them unkind. That she had chosen, tonight, to be kind about Gopa told Animesh everything about the performance currently underway in his sister's drawing room.
He toed off his shoes at the door and stepped in, and there she was.
Gopa sat cross-legged on the floor near the small brass Lakshmi idol, a plate of fruit and sweets balanced with the deliberate, careful grace of someone who had rehearsed the posture in a mirror — though he knew, watching her, that she hadn't; this was simply what twenty years of performing had made instinctive. She wore a cream and maroon Bengali-style tant saree, the anchal drawn modestly over one shoulder and pinned with an old gold brooch that had belonged to his mother, her hair oiled flat and knotted low at the nape of her neck, a fresh vermillion streak bright as a wound down the parting of it. No jewellery beyond her mangalsutra and small gold studs. No lipstick. She looked, in that gathering of aunts and uncles and cousins, exactly like what she was pretending to be — a devout, dutiful, unremarkable Bengali housewife, feeding her mother-in-law's side of the family fruit off a steel plate with both hands cupped beneath it in the correct, respectful way.
Akash sat near her, cross-legged too, in a small white kurta someone had ironed within an inch of its life, mimicking his mother's posture with the earnest solemnity of an eleven-year-old who has been told, more than once tonight, to sit properly and not fidget.
"Boro Jamai Babu!" Kamala Mashi called out, spotting him, and the whole room turned — the small ripple of attention that always accompanied his late arrivals, the faint, forgivable scolding that was really just affection wearing a stern face. "Itni der? Office se seedha aana tha na?"
"Traffic tha, Mashi," he said, folding his hands in a general namaskar to the room, moving toward his mother to touch her feet, then his father's. Behind him he heard his sister Manju's voice, warm and a little smug, saying to someone: *"Dekho, dono office se seedha aate hain, na Gopa ko time milta hai na Animesh ko, phir bhi Gopa dekho — kitna sambhal leti hai sab kuch."*
*See, both come straight from office, neither Gopa nor Animesh gets much time, and still look at Gopa — how well she manages everything.*
He sat down beside his father, accepted a plate of prasad he had no appetite for, and watched his wife across the room being told, by no fewer than four separate relatives in the space of ten minutes, what an ideal bahu she was — how lucky Animesh was, how rare it was these days to find a working woman who still touched her mother-in-law's feet every morning, still fasted on Ekadashi, still knew how to fold a saree the traditional way instead of those modern pre-stitched things young girls wore nowadays.
He did not say anything. He simply ate a piece of coconut barfi that tasted, for reasons that had nothing to do with the coconut, faintly bitter, and thought about a strapless kurti the colour of a bruised plum.
It had been two days ago — the launch of some NGO's fundraiser for underprivileged girls' education, held in a five-star banquet hall in BKC with a guest list heavy on textile-industry money and a sprinkling of minor Bollywood faces for the cameras. Gopa had shown him three outfits before leaving that evening, holding each one against herself in the mirror with the particular narrowed, assessing look she reserved for exactly two things — sarees for family functions, and clothes for everything else. She had settled, in the end, on the kurti — a deep plum silk thing, strapless, boned at the bodice like something closer to a blouse than a kurti, paired with palazzo pants and heels that added three inches she did not, strictly speaking, need. *"Yeh theek hai na?"* she had asked him, not really asking, already knowing the answer she wanted, and he had said, in the flat, resigned voice he used for these conversations now, *"Theek hai."*
Fine. It was fine. It was always fine, because saying otherwise cost more than it was worth, and because — this was the part he did not enjoy admitting even to himself — some old, stubborn, humiliating part of him still found her beautiful in it, still felt that small hot twist of pride and possession and dread when she walked out the door dressed for an audience that was not him.
He had not gone to that fundraiser. He rarely went to these events anymore; his presence, he understood without being told, was not required — a husband in a rumpled office shirt did not photograph well next to the industrialists and gallery owners and self-styled "collectors" who made up the guest lists of Gopa's new world. He had stayed home with Akash and watched a cricket match he didn't care about, and at some point around eleven had opened Instagram — not out of suspicion, he told himself, simply out of the idle habit of a man scrolling before sleep — and there she was.
Twelve photographs, tagged, captioned, filtered gold. Gopa laughing with her head thrown back beside a man in a Nehru jacket whose name he half-recognized from the business pages. Gopa's hand resting on the forearm of another man as they leaned together to read something on a phone screen, her collarbone catching the light, the boned plum silk doing exactly what boned plum silk is designed to do. Gopa from behind, the deep open back of the kurti bare to the base of her spine, someone's palm resting there, proprietary, for just the half-second it takes to steer a woman toward a photographer.
*Grateful for evenings like this,* the caption read, *surrounded by people who truly understand art and impact. #forthegirls #artforchange #blessed.*
He had looked at that caption for a long time. Gopa did not read poetry. He had been married to her for thirteen years and had never once seen her finish a book that was not, in some fashion, a means to an end — a design magazine, a self-help title recommended by a client, a biography of some industrialist she was hoping to meet. She had told a journalist once, at some function he had also skipped, that Neruda was her favourite poet, and Animesh — who had, in his own quiet unremarkable way, actually read some Neruda once, in a college hostel, borrowed from a friend who fancied himself a poet — had wanted to laugh out loud at the absurdity of it, except that laughing would have required explaining himself, and explaining himself to Gopa about anything had stopped, some years ago now, seeming worth the effort.
Thank god, he thought now, watching her cup prasad in both hands and offer it with lowered eyes to his father, that none of these relatives — not Kamala Mashi with her bifocals, not his mother with her rosary of complaints about modern girls, not his own father, silent and approving in his cane chair — had the faintest idea what an Instagram account was, let alone how to find his wife's.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He excused himself with a murmured word to his father and stepped out onto the narrow balcony, past a forest of drying clothes and a tulsi plant gone leggy in its pot, and looked at the screen.
The same eleven digits. Unlisted.
He answered on the second ring, his back to the glow of the drawing room, the sound of bhajans and chatter behind him, the traffic on the Sion-Panvel highway a distant, endless murmur below.
"Hello. Haan, bataiye—"
Nothing. Not even the careful breathing from before. Just the faint hollow static of an open line, the sound of someone holding a phone very still, very close, perhaps in a room where speaking was no longer safe. He said hello twice more, his voice dropping instinctively lower, more urgent, and then the line went dead again, and this time when he tried redial the number did not even ring — a single flat tone, and then nothing.
He stood there for a while with the phone still in his hand, looking down at the small black rectangle as though it were a door he had knocked on and no one had answered, though he was almost certain, now, that someone was standing directly behind it.
---
They did not speak much on the drive home. Gopa sat behind him on the scooter — she had wanted to take her own car separately, as she usually did to these family functions "in case something comes up," but tonight, unusually, she had let Akash ride with his grandparents in his uncle's car and come home with Animesh instead, her saree hitched carefully to one side, one arm looped loose around his waist in the particular disinterested way of a woman holding on to a husband rather than embracing him.
It was only once they were inside the flat, the door shut, Akash already peeling off his kurta and heading for his room with the boneless exhaustion of a child who has been made to sit properly for three hours, that Gopa exhaled — a long, theatrical breath, shoulders dropping six inches, the entire posture of the evening sliding off her like a garment.
"Baap re," she said, unpinning the anchal from her shoulder and letting it fall loose. "I thought that puja would never end. Your Kamala Mashi asked me four times if I'm eating properly, as if I look like I'm starving." She caught her own reflection in the hallway mirror and turned her face slightly, checking something in it — the vermillion, perhaps, or the tiredness around her eyes. "And your Baba kept staring at the TV instead of talking to anyone, honestly, three hours of my life I'll never—"
"You seemed happy enough in there," Animesh said. He had not meant it to come out as sharp as it did.
She glanced at him in the mirror, one eyebrow lifting a fraction. "What does that mean?"
"Nothing." He set his bag down by the shoe rack, felt the hard corner of the Gemini file press against his knuckles. "You looked like you were enjoying it."
"I was *performing*, Animesh," she said, and there was no defensiveness in it at all — she said it the way she might have said *I was cooking* or *I was driving*, a plain description of labour. She pulled the pins from her hair one by one and dropped them into a small china dish on the console table, the low knot at her nape loosening. "Someone has to. Your mother needs to hear those things from Kamala Mashi's mouth, it makes her happy, it keeps the house peaceful. You think I *enjoy* sitting cross-legged on a marble floor for three hours in a nine-yard saree feeding fruit to people who ask me every six months when we're having a second child?" She shook her hair loose, dark against the cream saree, and for a moment — just a moment — she looked genuinely, humanly tired, and something in Animesh's chest softened despite himself. "I was bored out of my mind in there. I kept thinking about the boutique inventory."
"You didn't look bored."
"That's because I'm good at my job," she said, and there was something almost like pride in it, a flash of the sharp, appraising woman who negotiated fabric rates with wholesalers and cornered gallery owners at parties — a woman entirely different from the one who had sat with lowered eyes near the Lakshmi idol an hour ago. "Which job, husband dear, you should be grateful for, because it pays for Akash's tuitions."
She went toward the bedroom, already unhooking her saree pleats at the waist, and Animesh stood in the hallway a moment longer, looking at the small china dish of hairpins, at the tulsi-leaf smell of her perfume still hanging faintly in the air, thinking — not for the first time — that he had married a woman who could hold two entirely different truths in her body at once and never once seem to notice the seam between them.
---
Akash was asleep within twenty minutes, the particular deep unguarded sleep of an eleven-year-old, one arm flung above his head, the ceiling fan pulling the corner of his blanket in a slow rhythm. Gopa took longer — she always did, her nightly ritual of cream and serum and the careful re-braiding of her hair taking a good forty minutes, so that by the time she finally slid under the sheet beside him, her back to him, breathing already slowing toward sleep, Animesh had been lying in the dark for the better part of an hour, staring at the same water stain on the ceiling that had been there since the monsoon before last, listening to the flat, unpromising silence of his phone.
He waited another ten minutes after her breathing evened out completely. Then, carefully, the way a man defuses something rather than simply reaches for it, he slid her phone off the bedside table.
He told himself, as he always told himself in these rare, shameful moments — three, perhaps four times in thirteen years of marriage — that he was checking for something specific. A name. A number. Some thread that might connect the Gemini file in his bag to the woman who had called him twice tonight and said nothing the second time.
The screen lit the dark room pale blue. Her lock pattern was Akash's birthdate, drawn in a Z — she had never bothered to change it, some vestigial trust in him he did not examine too closely tonight — and it opened without protest.
WhatsApp. Forty-one unread messages across a dozen chats — the boutique supplier group, her cousin in Kolkata, a chat simply named "R.S." with a small business-suit emoji beside it that he knew, without wanting to know, belonged to Rakesh Sinha, the silver-haired investor who had taken to calling Gopa "my most promising protégé" in a voice Animesh found difficult to listen to for more than thirty seconds at a stretch.
And then, near the top, a number saved only as three letters and a question mark — **"V.O.?"** — the small green unread dot glowing beside it like something alive.
He opened it.
One message, sent forty minutes ago, while they had all still been sitting on the floor of his sister's drawing room eating coconut barfi under the approving gaze of Kamala Mashi. It was written in the halting, slightly wrong English of someone more comfortable in another language, each word correct on its own and strange together, as though translated too literally and too fast.
***"Need meet you. Is urgent. Please call when free, any time is fine for me."***
No name. No signature. Just the words sitting there in the dark, glowing faintly against Animesh's face, and beside them, in the little grey oval of a business-suit emoji she had not bothered to change, three letters that stood, he was almost entirely certain now, for a man he had met exactly once, on a burned-out factory floor, being handed a business card with a personal number scrawled on the back in blue ink.
*In case anything else is required, Inspector. Please don't hesitate.*
Somewhere below the window, very faint, a stray dog began barking at nothing, and stopped. Gopa shifted beside him in her sleep, murmured something unintelligible, and was still again. Animesh sat with the phone glowing in his hand for a long time, the water stain on the ceiling and the message on the screen occupying, somehow, the exact same weight in his mind — two shapes he could see clearly and understood not at all — until his eyes grew heavy despite themselves, and the phone slid from his slackening fingers onto the mattress, and the last thought that trailed after him down into sleep was not a thought so much as a single suspended syllable, the beginning of a question he did not, that night, manage to finish asking himself.
# PAGE THREE
### Episode 1: The Unknown Caller
---
The fluorescent tube above Animesh Gupta's desk had been flickering for three days now, and three days running he had meant to complain to the office boy about it, and three days running he had forgotten. It buzzed now, a thin insect whine underneath the groan of the ceiling fan, as he stacked the last of the day's files into a leaning tower at the corner of his desk. Outside his cramped cabin in the Divisional Insurance office at Vashi, the evening traffic on the Sion-Panvel highway had begun its long, patient crawl, headlights smearing gold through the grimy window glass.
He was thinking, as he often did at this hour, of nothing in particular — the specific gray nothing of a tired mind coasting toward home — when his phone buzzed against the file marked **CLAIM NO. 4471/GEMINI TEXTILES & DYES PVT. LTD. — FIRE, TOTAL LOSS.**
An unlisted number. Eleven digits, no name.
He almost let it ring out. In seventeen years of service he had learned that unlisted numbers after 7 p.m. were rarely worth the airtime — a wrong number, a courier boy lost near the depot, occasionally a drunk colleague from the Andheri office wanting to reminisce about a retirement party. But some old, dutiful reflex in him — the same reflex that made him double-check figures other men would have rounded off — made him pick up.
"Hello."
Silence, but not empty silence. Someone breathing carefully, as though counting the breaths before they let them out. Then a woman's voice, low, urgent, wrapped in a Hindi that carried the flat vowels of somewhere north — Uttar Pradesh, perhaps, or Bihar — worn thin by years of trying to sound like the city.
"Gemini ka case aap dekh rahe hain na? Fire wala?"
Animesh straightened in his chair without quite meaning to. "Kaun bol raha hai?"
"Please, sunna sirf. Wo aag... woh accident nahi tha." *That fire — it wasn't an accident.*
"Madam, agar aapke paas koi jaankari hai to aap office aa kar—"
"Nahi." The word came fast, frightened, cutting him off. "Aap file band mat kariye. Please. Sirf itna keh rahi hoon — jaanch kariye. Achhe se."
*Don't close the file. Just investigate it properly.*
"Aapka naam—"
The line went dead.
Animesh held the phone away from his ear and stared at it as though it might explain itself. The screen showed **00:47** — forty-seven seconds, no more, gone now into the call log as an eleven-digit stranger. He pressed redial. Three rings, and then the flat, recorded apology of a network that had never heard of the number he was trying to reach — *the number you are trying to call is currently switched off.*
He sat very still for a moment, the file marked GEMINI TEXTILES lying closed under his forearm, its cardboard corner gone soft and gray with handling. He had signed off on it as a routine industrial fire eleven days ago — an old dye unit near the Taloja MIDC belt, faulty wiring in the humidifier room, four workers overcome by smoke before the fire brigade arrived, one dead on the spot, cause of death asphyxiation, insured value Rs. 3.4 crore, claimant M/s Gemini Textiles & Dyes Pvt. Ltd., Chairman **Vikram Oberoi.**
He had met Oberoi exactly once, at the site inspection — a tall, silver-templed man in a linen shirt too crisp for a burned-out factory floor, who had walked the wreckage with his hands clasped behind his back like a man touring a garden, offering Animesh bottled water and a card with a personal mobile number scrawled on the back in blue ink, *in case anything else is required, Inspector, please don't hesitate.* The man had not once raised his voice, not once looked anxious about the four crore rupees at stake, and Animesh — who had spent two decades learning to read the particular anxiety of men who stood to gain from disaster — had found that absence of anxiety more unsettling than any amount of pleading would have been.
He looked again at his watch. 8:52. He was already forty minutes behind schedule for his sister Manju's Lakshmi puja, and Gopa had sent two reminder messages in the last hour, the second one carrying that particular punctuation — three dots, no exclamation, the silence of a woman deciding whether irritation was worth the airtime.
He closed the file. He did not, however, put it away in the cabinet where closed files went. He set it, instead, in his bag.
---
By the time his scooter rattled up to the gate of his sister's building in Kharghar, the puja was already deep into its second hour, and the smell of camphor and marigold drifted down two floors to meet him on the stairs, along with the high, competitive murmur of thirty relatives all talking at once about the same six subjects — children's marks, property rates, someone's gall bladder operation, and, this year, apparently, the boutique.
He heard his wife's name before he saw her.
*"Gopa bahu ne toh kamaal kar diya, dekho na, apna khud ka business, aur phir bhi ghar-parivaar mein itna time deti hai—"*
*Gopa daughter-in-law has done wonders, look, her own business, and still gives so much time to the family—*
The voice belonged to his aunt Kamala Mashi, seventy-one years old and possessed of an opinion on every woman who had ever married into the family, most of them unkind. That she had chosen, tonight, to be kind about Gopa told Animesh everything about the performance currently underway in his sister's drawing room.
He toed off his shoes at the door and stepped in, and there she was.
Gopa sat cross-legged on the floor near the small brass Lakshmi idol, a plate of fruit and sweets balanced with the deliberate, careful grace of someone who had rehearsed the posture in a mirror — though he knew, watching her, that she hadn't; this was simply what twenty years of performing had made instinctive. She wore a cream and maroon Bengali-style tant saree, the anchal drawn modestly over one shoulder and pinned with an old gold brooch that had belonged to his mother, her hair oiled flat and knotted low at the nape of her neck, a fresh vermillion streak bright as a wound down the parting of it. No jewellery beyond her mangalsutra and small gold studs. No lipstick. She looked, in that gathering of aunts and uncles and cousins, exactly like what she was pretending to be — a devout, dutiful, unremarkable Bengali housewife, feeding her mother-in-law's side of the family fruit off a steel plate with both hands cupped beneath it in the correct, respectful way.
Akash sat near her, cross-legged too, in a small white kurta someone had ironed within an inch of its life, mimicking his mother's posture with the earnest solemnity of an eleven-year-old who has been told, more than once tonight, to sit properly and not fidget.
"Boro Jamai Babu!" Kamala Mashi called out, spotting him, and the whole room turned — the small ripple of attention that always accompanied his late arrivals, the faint, forgivable scolding that was really just affection wearing a stern face. "Itni der? Office se seedha aana tha na?"
"Traffic tha, Mashi," he said, folding his hands in a general namaskar to the room, moving toward his mother to touch her feet, then his father's. Behind him he heard his sister Manju's voice, warm and a little smug, saying to someone: *"Dekho, dono office se seedha aate hain, na Gopa ko time milta hai na Animesh ko, phir bhi Gopa dekho — kitna sambhal leti hai sab kuch."*
*See, both come straight from office, neither Gopa nor Animesh gets much time, and still look at Gopa — how well she manages everything.*
He sat down beside his father, accepted a plate of prasad he had no appetite for, and watched his wife across the room being told, by no fewer than four separate relatives in the space of ten minutes, what an ideal bahu she was — how lucky Animesh was, how rare it was these days to find a working woman who still touched her mother-in-law's feet every morning, still fasted on Ekadashi, still knew how to fold a saree the traditional way instead of those modern pre-stitched things young girls wore nowadays.
He did not say anything. He simply ate a piece of coconut barfi that tasted, for reasons that had nothing to do with the coconut, faintly bitter, and thought about a strapless kurti the colour of a bruised plum.
It had been two days ago — the launch of some NGO's fundraiser for underprivileged girls' education, held in a five-star banquet hall in BKC with a guest list heavy on textile-industry money and a sprinkling of minor Bollywood faces for the cameras. Gopa had shown him three outfits before leaving that evening, holding each one against herself in the mirror with the particular narrowed, assessing look she reserved for exactly two things — sarees for family functions, and clothes for everything else. She had settled, in the end, on the kurti — a deep plum silk thing, strapless, boned at the bodice like something closer to a blouse than a kurti, paired with palazzo pants and heels that added three inches she did not, strictly speaking, need. *"Yeh theek hai na?"* she had asked him, not really asking, already knowing the answer she wanted, and he had said, in the flat, resigned voice he used for these conversations now, *"Theek hai."*
Fine. It was fine. It was always fine, because saying otherwise cost more than it was worth, and because — this was the part he did not enjoy admitting even to himself — some old, stubborn, humiliating part of him still found her beautiful in it, still felt that small hot twist of pride and possession and dread when she walked out the door dressed for an audience that was not him.
He had not gone to that fundraiser. He rarely went to these events anymore; his presence, he understood without being told, was not required — a husband in a rumpled office shirt did not photograph well next to the industrialists and gallery owners and self-styled "collectors" who made up the guest lists of Gopa's new world. He had stayed home with Akash and watched a cricket match he didn't care about, and at some point around eleven had opened Instagram — not out of suspicion, he told himself, simply out of the idle habit of a man scrolling before sleep — and there she was.
Twelve photographs, tagged, captioned, filtered gold. Gopa laughing with her head thrown back beside a man in a Nehru jacket whose name he half-recognized from the business pages. Gopa's hand resting on the forearm of another man as they leaned together to read something on a phone screen, her collarbone catching the light, the boned plum silk doing exactly what boned plum silk is designed to do. Gopa from behind, the deep open back of the kurti bare to the base of her spine, someone's palm resting there, proprietary, for just the half-second it takes to steer a woman toward a photographer.
*Grateful for evenings like this,* the caption read, *surrounded by people who truly understand art and impact. #forthegirls #artforchange #blessed.*
He had looked at that caption for a long time. Gopa did not read poetry. He had been married to her for thirteen years and had never once seen her finish a book that was not, in some fashion, a means to an end — a design magazine, a self-help title recommended by a client, a biography of some industrialist she was hoping to meet. She had told a journalist once, at some function he had also skipped, that Neruda was her favourite poet, and Animesh — who had, in his own quiet unremarkable way, actually read some Neruda once, in a college hostel, borrowed from a friend who fancied himself a poet — had wanted to laugh out loud at the absurdity of it, except that laughing would have required explaining himself, and explaining himself to Gopa about anything had stopped, some years ago now, seeming worth the effort.
Thank god, he thought now, watching her cup prasad in both hands and offer it with lowered eyes to his father, that none of these relatives — not Kamala Mashi with her bifocals, not his mother with her rosary of complaints about modern girls, not his own father, silent and approving in his cane chair — had the faintest idea what an Instagram account was, let alone how to find his wife's.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He excused himself with a murmured word to his father and stepped out onto the narrow balcony, past a forest of drying clothes and a tulsi plant gone leggy in its pot, and looked at the screen.
The same eleven digits. Unlisted.
He answered on the second ring, his back to the glow of the drawing room, the sound of bhajans and chatter behind him, the traffic on the Sion-Panvel highway a distant, endless murmur below.
"Hello. Haan, bataiye—"
Nothing. Not even the careful breathing from before. Just the faint hollow static of an open line, the sound of someone holding a phone very still, very close, perhaps in a room where speaking was no longer safe. He said hello twice more, his voice dropping instinctively lower, more urgent, and then the line went dead again, and this time when he tried redial the number did not even ring — a single flat tone, and then nothing.
He stood there for a while with the phone still in his hand, looking down at the small black rectangle as though it were a door he had knocked on and no one had answered, though he was almost certain, now, that someone was standing directly behind it.
---
They did not speak much on the drive home. Gopa sat behind him on the scooter — she had wanted to take her own car separately, as she usually did to these family functions "in case something comes up," but tonight, unusually, she had let Akash ride with his grandparents in his uncle's car and come home with Animesh instead, her saree hitched carefully to one side, one arm looped loose around his waist in the particular disinterested way of a woman holding on to a husband rather than embracing him.
It was only once they were inside the flat, the door shut, Akash already peeling off his kurta and heading for his room with the boneless exhaustion of a child who has been made to sit properly for three hours, that Gopa exhaled — a long, theatrical breath, shoulders dropping six inches, the entire posture of the evening sliding off her like a garment.
"Baap re," she said, unpinning the anchal from her shoulder and letting it fall loose. "I thought that puja would never end. Your Kamala Mashi asked me four times if I'm eating properly, as if I look like I'm starving." She caught her own reflection in the hallway mirror and turned her face slightly, checking something in it — the vermillion, perhaps, or the tiredness around her eyes. "And your Baba kept staring at the TV instead of talking to anyone, honestly, three hours of my life I'll never—"
"You seemed happy enough in there," Animesh said. He had not meant it to come out as sharp as it did.
She glanced at him in the mirror, one eyebrow lifting a fraction. "What does that mean?"
"Nothing." He set his bag down by the shoe rack, felt the hard corner of the Gemini file press against his knuckles. "You looked like you were enjoying it."
"I was *performing*, Animesh," she said, and there was no defensiveness in it at all — she said it the way she might have said *I was cooking* or *I was driving*, a plain description of labour. She pulled the pins from her hair one by one and dropped them into a small china dish on the console table, the low knot at her nape loosening. "Someone has to. Your mother needs to hear those things from Kamala Mashi's mouth, it makes her happy, it keeps the house peaceful. You think I *enjoy* sitting cross-legged on a marble floor for three hours in a nine-yard saree feeding fruit to people who ask me every six months when we're having a second child?" She shook her hair loose, dark against the cream saree, and for a moment — just a moment — she looked genuinely, humanly tired, and something in Animesh's chest softened despite himself. "I was bored out of my mind in there. I kept thinking about the boutique inventory."
"You didn't look bored."
"That's because I'm good at my job," she said, and there was something almost like pride in it, a flash of the sharp, appraising woman who negotiated fabric rates with wholesalers and cornered gallery owners at parties — a woman entirely different from the one who had sat with lowered eyes near the Lakshmi idol an hour ago. "Which job, husband dear, you should be grateful for, because it pays for Akash's tuitions."
She went toward the bedroom, already unhooking her saree pleats at the waist, and Animesh stood in the hallway a moment longer, looking at the small china dish of hairpins, at the tulsi-leaf smell of her perfume still hanging faintly in the air, thinking — not for the first time — that he had married a woman who could hold two entirely different truths in her body at once and never once seem to notice the seam between them.
---
Akash was asleep within twenty minutes, the particular deep unguarded sleep of an eleven-year-old, one arm flung above his head, the ceiling fan pulling the corner of his blanket in a slow rhythm. Gopa took longer — she always did, her nightly ritual of cream and serum and the careful re-braiding of her hair taking a good forty minutes, so that by the time she finally slid under the sheet beside him, her back to him, breathing already slowing toward sleep, Animesh had been lying in the dark for the better part of an hour, staring at the same water stain on the ceiling that had been there since the monsoon before last, listening to the flat, unpromising silence of his phone.
He waited another ten minutes after her breathing evened out completely. Then, carefully, the way a man defuses something rather than simply reaches for it, he slid her phone off the bedside table.
He told himself, as he always told himself in these rare, shameful moments — three, perhaps four times in thirteen years of marriage — that he was checking for something specific. A name. A number. Some thread that might connect the Gemini file in his bag to the woman who had called him twice tonight and said nothing the second time.
The screen lit the dark room pale blue. Her lock pattern was Akash's birthdate, drawn in a Z — she had never bothered to change it, some vestigial trust in him he did not examine too closely tonight — and it opened without protest.
WhatsApp. Forty-one unread messages across a dozen chats — the boutique supplier group, her cousin in Kolkata, a chat simply named "R.S." with a small business-suit emoji beside it that he knew, without wanting to know, belonged to Rakesh Sinha, the silver-haired investor who had taken to calling Gopa "my most promising protégé" in a voice Animesh found difficult to listen to for more than thirty seconds at a stretch.
And then, near the top, a number saved only as three letters and a question mark — **"V.O.?"** — the small green unread dot glowing beside it like something alive.
He opened it.
One message, sent forty minutes ago, while they had all still been sitting on the floor of his sister's drawing room eating coconut barfi under the approving gaze of Kamala Mashi. It was written in the halting, slightly wrong English of someone more comfortable in another language, each word correct on its own and strange together, as though translated too literally and too fast.
***"Need meet you. Is urgent. Please call when free, any time is fine for me."***
No name. No signature. Just the words sitting there in the dark, glowing faintly against Animesh's face, and beside them, in the little grey oval of a business-suit emoji she had not bothered to change, three letters that stood, he was almost entirely certain now, for a man he had met exactly once, on a burned-out factory floor, being handed a business card with a personal number scrawled on the back in blue ink.
*In case anything else is required, Inspector. Please don't hesitate.*
Somewhere below the window, very faint, a stray dog began barking at nothing, and stopped. Gopa shifted beside him in her sleep, murmured something unintelligible, and was still again. Animesh sat with the phone glowing in his hand for a long time, the water stain on the ceiling and the message on the screen occupying, somehow, the exact same weight in his mind — two shapes he could see clearly and understood not at all — until his eyes grew heavy despite themselves, and the phone slid from his slackening fingers onto the mattress, and the last thought that trailed after him down into sleep was not a thought so much as a single suspended syllable, the beginning of a question he did not, that night, manage to finish asking himself.
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