Mohit Khanna
The Lift Between Floors
The first time Tara met Armaan, it was in the lift of the Raaga Residency complex. She lived on the ninth floor with her investment-banker husband. He lived on the fifth, newly moved in, unmarried—or so she thought. The air was heavy that evening, monsoon rain clinging to the glass doors, the scent of damp earth clashing with his cologne. Woody, expensive, dangerous.
She pressed 9. He pressed 7. She noticed.
“You’re new here,” she said, not looking directly at him.
“And you’ve noticed already?” His smile was lazy, the kind that made you want to find out what he was hiding behind it.
Tara wasn’t the kind of woman who flirted. Thirty-five, graceful in the way women become when they’ve stopped trying too hard. Her lipstick was smudged from coffee, her hair still damp from a too-quick shower. But something about Armaan’s voice made her heart forget the rules. She turned to him with a half-smile.
“I notice everything,” she said. “Occupational hazard.”
“What do you do?” he asked.
“I teach literature.”
“Ah, that explains the eyes.”
She laughed softly. “What do you mean?”
“Like you’ve already read me and you’re deciding whether I’m worth rereading.”
The elevator paused at 7. He stepped out, looked back once.
“I hope I am.”
The doors slid shut.
That should’ve been it. But by the next morning, she found herself thinking about the brief encounter. It annoyed her how much she did. Especially while stirring sugar into her husband’s tea. Kunal was kind, predictable, and obsessed with quarterly targets. They’d been married for nine years. Safe, solid years. But not burning ones.
She saw Armaan again the following Saturday, at the clubhouse. Her son Aarav was in his swimming lesson, and she was pretending to read a book poolside. He walked past her in track pants, shirtless, a towel slung over his shoulder, earbuds in. He didn’t see her. But she felt seen anyway. Her skin tingled.
Later that evening, she saw him again in the basement parking. She was loading grocery bags into the car.
“Need help?” he asked.
“Sure,” she replied too quickly.
He lifted the bags effortlessly, muscles rippling beneath his T-shirt. “You live alone?”
She hesitated. “With my husband. And son.”
He nodded, but something about the way he looked at her—direct, unapologetic—said he wasn’t stepping back.
“And you?” she asked, turning the tables.
“Divorced. One daughter. Lives with her mother in Mumbai.”
There it was. A crack in the polished armor. She wanted to poke through it.
They talked for a while longer, about trivial things. But the air around them was anything but trivial. When she drove away, his fingers brushed hers lightly as he shut the trunk. It shouldn’t have mattered. But it did.
That night, Kunal was late from office. Again. Tara cooked for three, served for two, and ended up eating alone. She checked her phone unnecessarily often. Armaan hadn’t messaged—of course, he didn’t have her number. Still, she checked. The silence in the house felt louder than usual.
Over the next few weeks, their encounters became a pattern—coincidental, accidental, deliberate.
At the gym. In the lift. Outside the school gate.
She began noticing things about him she had no right to: the mole near his collarbone, the way he laughed with his whole face, the tattoo hidden just beneath his shirt sleeve.
He asked her one day, casually, over coffee at the café across the street from the complex, “Do you believe in soulmates?”
“No,” she said. “I believe in timing.”
“And if the timing’s wrong?”
“Then you burn.”
He looked at her then—not with pity, not with hunger—but with a knowing.
They didn’t touch. Not yet. But something shifted that day.
The next morning, he sent her a poem. Not his, but Pablo Neruda’s. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
She didn’t reply. But she saved the message.
The longing simmered, quietly, insistently. She found herself dressing differently, more deliberately. She wore perfume Kunal never noticed. She read poems out loud to her students with a different voice. She walked past Armaan’s apartment slowly, hoping for the sound of music, a shadow behind the curtain.
One afternoon, it rained unexpectedly. She was caught at the gate, holding a plastic bag over her head.
He saw her from his balcony and called out. “Come up.”
It was the first time she entered his apartment. Spartan. Masculine. A guitar in the corner. No woman’s touch. No signs of a daughter’s visit.
He offered her a towel. She accepted. Their fingers brushed again, deliberately this time.
She stood by the window, watching the storm. He came and stood behind her.
“If you take a step forward,” he said softly, “you won’t be able to step back.”
She didn’t move.
“I’m married,” she whispered.
“I know.”
He placed a hand on her wet shoulder. Gentle. Warm.
The moment lasted a second too long.
She turned.
And kissed him.
Fire Between Curtains
Tara’s lips trembled against his, not from cold but from something she hadn’t felt in years—hunger. Armaan kissed her like he had been holding his breath for days. No hesitation, no apology. Just skin, warmth, and the shock of a door breaking open inside her. She didn’t pull away. Not then.
The rain outside became thunder. Their silhouettes, cast by the streetlight through the curtains, danced on the wall. He held her gently, hand on her waist, forehead resting against hers. The kiss had ended, but the moment hadn’t. Her heart slammed against her ribs.
“I should go,” she said, voice hoarse.
“I know,” he replied, not moving.
But she didn’t go. Not immediately. She stood there, chest rising and falling, staring at the curve of his jaw, the whisper of stubble, the way his T-shirt clung to him. She could hear his breath—controlled, but barely.
“Why now?” she asked, almost to herself.
“Because sometimes,” he said, “a match meets its fire.”
She laughed. It sounded like it came from someone else. “You’re dangerously poetic.”
“I was always better with silences,” he said, touching her wrist.
When she finally walked out into the corridor, hair still damp, a flush still blooming across her cheeks, she knew things wouldn’t go back. Her reflection in the elevator’s mirror looked unfamiliar—someone a little wilder, a little less afraid.
Kunal was on a call when she got home, pacing the living room, Bluetooth stuck in his ear. He didn’t notice she’d come back late. He didn’t smell the perfume she never wore before. He didn’t ask about the rain. That night, he slept with his laptop on his chest, and Tara stood in the dark kitchen, drinking water she didn’t need.
The next day was Sunday. Morning brought routine. Cornflakes for Aarav. Kunal scrolling through stock updates. And Tara, standing in the balcony, scanning the air five floors below. No sign of Armaan. No message either.
But at 11:27 AM, a text arrived.
Armaan: If I made you uncomfortable, I’m sorry.
She stared at it. Typed. Deleted. Typed again.
Tara: You didn’t. I did.
His reply came too quickly.
Armaan: Then don’t. Let’s not run from it.
That evening, they met again. The library in the complex was always empty. A backroom of forgotten books and a flickering yellow bulb. She told Kunal she had papers to grade. He nodded without looking up.
Armaan was already there, seated at the last table, fingers flipping through an old hardcover. He looked up when she entered, his eyes softer than before, as if he too had tasted hesitation.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he said.
“Neither could I,” she whispered.
This time, they didn’t kiss. They sat across from each other, inches apart, knees brushing beneath the table. They talked. About their first heartbreaks, about loneliness that doesn’t look like loneliness, about the ache of being needed but not wanted.
“You make me feel like I’m still alive,” she confessed, “like I’m not just someone’s mother, someone’s wife.”
“You’ve always been more than that,” he said. “You just forgot.”
They met like that often—between lives, behind curtains. Never at night. Never in bed. Just quiet places with closed doors. Her pulse became a secret rhythm. Her lipstick, once unused, became armor. She laughed more. She glowed in ways that had nothing to do with highlighters or creams.
But with every meeting, the line grew thinner.
One Tuesday afternoon, as sunlight filtered through blinds in his apartment, he touched her again. Fingers on her wrist, sliding up to her elbow, like tracing memory. She didn’t flinch. Instead, she let her forehead rest on his shoulder. They didn’t speak for minutes.
“I’m falling for you,” he said simply.
Tara stiffened.
“No expectations,” he added quickly. “I just needed to say it out loud.”
“I can’t love you,” she replied, but her voice lacked conviction.
“I know.”
That night, Kunal noticed her silence. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she lied.
He nodded and returned to his screen. The lie settled between them like perfume she hadn’t worn.
By mid-June, the weather turned. Muggy days, restless nights. Armaan suggested they drive out one weekend—just a few hours. “No hotel. No madness. Just the road. And air.”
“I have a life,” she said.
“You have a prison,” he corrected gently.
It stung because it was true.
The next Saturday, she found herself in his car, wearing sunglasses that weren’t hers, chewing gum she didn’t like. The road cut through mustard fields and tired towns. Music played—old Hindi songs she hadn’t heard since college. She sang along. He joined in. Their laughter tasted like stolen freedom.
They stopped near a dried-up riverbank. Lay on the bonnet of the car, sky above them, silence between them.
“Do you ever regret your marriage?” he asked.
“I regret not living,” she replied.
He looked at her then—not like a man looks at a woman he wants—but like a man who’s found something he never expected to touch.
They didn’t kiss that day. They didn’t need to.
The fire was already burning—between fingers, beneath skin, behind ribs.
It was no longer a question of if.
Only when.
The Room with Red Drapes
Tara didn’t plan on following him in. Not that day. She told herself it was just tea, just a little break from her life. The kind you forget once you’re home, folding laundry and helping with homework. But by the time she reached the third floor of that boutique hotel on the outskirts of Gurgaon, everything inside her had stopped pretending.
Armaan held the door open. She walked in.
The room was quiet. Clean. Minimalist. A single bed, neatly made. A pair of glasses on the side table. Red drapes hanging beside a window that looked out over a barren patch of land. She stood near the window, fingers brushing the fabric. Velvet. Too rich for the room.
He poured her water, handed it to her without a word. They didn’t need words anymore.
“You can still leave,” he said. “I won’t stop you.”
She took the glass from his hand, placed it on the table, and turned to face him.
“I crossed that line long ago.”
He exhaled, as if he’d been holding that breath for days. His hands trembled slightly as they touched her shoulders, her collarbone, the curve of her back. They moved slowly, reverently, as if memorizing her shape.
There was no rush. No tearing at clothes, no frenzied mouths. Just quiet. Like two pages finally allowed to overlap.
He kissed her neck first, gently. She closed her eyes. She had forgotten what it meant to be touched like that—not possessed, but seen. Her sari slipped off her shoulder without resistance. Her breath hitched when his lips reached the hollow of her throat.
“Tara,” he whispered, and the name sounded new, like it had been waiting for someone worthy.
They made love like it was the only truth in a world of lies. No expectations, no tomorrows. Just two people, skin on skin, learning the language of each other’s loneliness. Outside, traffic passed by unaware. Inside, time stopped.
Afterward, she lay against him, his heartbeat slow and steady under her ear. She traced circles on his chest, listening to the rhythm they now shared.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “I feel more real than I’ve felt in years.”
“Does that scare you?”
“No. What scares me is going back to being invisible.”
He kissed her forehead. “You’ll never be that again. Not with me.”
They stayed like that for a while, wrapped in silence. Her phone buzzed on the floor beside the bed. She ignored it. It buzzed again. And again.
She sat up slowly, wrapped herself in the white sheet, and checked.
Kunal: Where are you? Aarav needs to be picked up from robotics.
She stared at the screen, the illusion snapping like a thread pulled too tight.
“I have to go,” she whispered.
“I know,” Armaan said, already sitting up, handing her the sari.
There was no drama, no tears. Just a shared ache that came with stolen time. She dressed in silence. He didn’t touch her again. Not because he didn’t want to. But because she needed space to rebuild the version of herself that could walk back into that other life.
At the door, he paused. “Tara… I don’t regret anything.”
“Neither do I,” she said, and smiled—but it didn’t reach her eyes.
The drive home was slow, the city too loud. She picked up Aarav, kissed him twice, and listened to his stories about gearboxes and coding errors like nothing had changed. Except everything had.
That night, she cooked his favorite pasta. Kunal complimented it without looking up from his laptop. Aarav watched TV. And Tara… Tara floated somewhere between the red drapes and her dining table, between memory and duty.
Later, in bed, Kunal reached for her absently, as though flipping through channels. She let him, let him finish, let him fall asleep with a satisfied grunt. She stared at the ceiling, eyes wide open. For the first time, she felt the full weight of what she was living.
This wasn’t guilt. Guilt was too small, too clean. This was something else. Something more tangled.
The next morning, Armaan didn’t message. She didn’t either.
Two days passed. Then three.
The silence grew louder than any confession.
On the fourth day, she found a note tucked inside her mailbox. No envelope. Just folded cream paper.
I can handle your world not knowing about us. But I can’t survive if you keep pretending you don’t.
—A
Her fingers trembled as she read it.
She folded it back carefully and slipped it into her book of Neruda poems, right between Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines and I Like For You To Be Still.
She didn’t reply.
That night, she stood in the balcony long after the lights went out. Somewhere below, a car honked. Somewhere above, the sky waited without asking questions.
And inside her, something burned.
It wasn’t over.
It was never going to be.
A Week of Silence
The silence was not just absence—it had shape, texture, even sound. It followed Tara like a second shadow. A week passed since the red-draped hotel room, and not a single word had passed between them. Armaan had disappeared from the spaces he used to occupy—no elevator run-ins, no gym sightings, not even a glimpse of him from the balcony.
At first, she told herself it was temporary. A retreat. Space to breathe. But by the third day, her pulse had begun to race every time her phone buzzed. It never was him. By the sixth day, the ache had settled behind her ribs like a dull toothache she couldn’t reach.
She saw him again on the seventh day, outside the complex, beside his bike. He was speaking to someone—maybe a delivery boy—but his shoulders stiffened when he saw her. Their eyes met. No wave. No smile. Just a pause, like the moment before a match is struck.
Tara didn’t stop. She walked past him, heart slamming, spine straight. But her fingers ached to touch him.
That night, she opened their old thread of messages. Typed:
“I miss you.”
She deleted it.
Then typed again:
“Are we pretending this never happened?”
No reply.
She placed the phone face down. Sat still. Breathed in. Waited.
The next morning, she found him by the community garden, sitting alone, headphones in, scribbling something in a small notebook. He didn’t notice her approach. Or maybe he did and didn’t care.
She stood there until he looked up.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
A pause. The air was thick. She didn’t know what to do with her hands.
“I got your note,” she said.
“I know.”
“Then why this silence?”
He closed the notebook slowly. “Because you haven’t decided.”
Her voice cracked. “Decided what?”
“If you want me in stolen hours or not at all.”
She looked at him—really looked. He looked tired. Not angry. Not distant. Just tired of waiting.
“I can’t leave everything,” she whispered.
“I never asked you to,” he replied.
“Then what do you want from me?”
“Presence. Not guilt.”
She sat beside him on the bench. They didn’t touch. A child chased a butterfly nearby. A sprinkler rotated lazily over overgrown grass. The mundane world mocked them with its indifference.
“I’ve never done this before,” she admitted.
“Neither have I,” he said, softly. “But that doesn’t make it less real.”
She turned to him. “Do you regret it?”
“No,” he said without hesitation. “But I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of becoming another part of your life you feel the need to hide, justify, erase.”
Tears welled up in her eyes. She blinked them away before they could fall.
“I think about you all the time,” she said. “Even when I’m slicing onions. Even when Kunal is sitting right across from me, telling me about some goddamn mutual fund.”
He smiled. It was tired, but real.
“I think about you too,” he said. “But I won’t beg for scraps, Tara. I’m not here to fill the holes in your life while you continue living it like nothing changed.”
“What do we do then?” she asked.
“Either we end it,” he said slowly, “or we stop pretending it’s not the most alive either of us has felt in years.”
She didn’t answer.
Later that day, while folding Aarav’s clothes, she thought of Armaan’s hands on her spine. That night, while lying beside Kunal, she remembered the taste of hotel room silence, the burn of red drapes.
By the third sleepless hour, she picked up her phone and texted:
“Tomorrow. My place. 2 PM. Kunal’s out. Aarav’s in school.”
No emoji. No kiss.
Just an invitation. A risk.
A choice.
He replied instantly.
“I’ll bring coffee.”
The Hourglass Room
The clock on the wall ticked like a metronome, too loud for a house meant to be silent in the afternoon. Tara had cleaned obsessively all morning—not for Kunal, not for Aarav, but for Armaan. She’d dusted corners no one noticed, changed cushion covers, lit a subtle sandalwood incense stick.
At exactly 2:01 PM, the bell rang.
She didn’t run to the door, but her heart did. When she opened it, Armaan stood there, holding two takeaway coffees and something wrapped in brown paper.
“You’re late,” she whispered.
“You let me in,” he replied, walking past her, not waiting to be asked.
He set the coffee on the table, unwrapped the brown paper. A small hourglass. Brass frame. Clear glass. Slow sand.
“It’s symbolic?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “It’s literal. One hour.”
Tara laughed. It came out as a nervous flutter. She took the coffee, sipped. “You didn’t bring guilt this time?”
“I left it outside.”
He looked around. “It smells like you in here.”
“That’s because I’m not pretending today,” she replied.
He didn’t kiss her immediately. Instead, he stood behind her as she leaned against the kitchen counter, tracing the tattoo on her shoulder with a fingertip.
“You got this when?” he asked.
“College. After a breakup. It’s a phoenix.”
“Of course it is.”
They stood in silence. Outside, the sun blistered. Inside, time slowed down.
The first touch wasn’t electric. It was quiet, deliberate. Like coming home to a room you forgot you ever lived in. His mouth on her collarbone, her hands in his hair, the soft groan when her fingers slid under his shirt.
She led him to the bedroom—not theirs, hers. The one Kunal never entered. The one where she kept her books, her sarees, her long-forgotten self.
They undressed slowly, as though each button, each fold of cloth, held history. No suddenness. Just ache and want and unspoken promises written on skin.
When they lay together, it wasn’t wild like before. It was molten. Every movement carried weight—of restraint, of surrender, of time measured by falling sand.
“I want to stay longer,” he said, his voice muffled against her chest.
“I want to freeze this,” she replied.
The hourglass was already half empty.
After, they lay entangled in silence. Her cheek on his shoulder. His fingers tracing lazy lines on her hip. Outside, someone honked. Life tried to continue.
“I hate leaving,” he murmured.
“You’re not the only one,” she whispered.
She knew how this went. There would be a return to routine. Aarav’s tiffin. Kunal’s laundry. Groceries. Calls. Lies.
But the body remembers what the mind tries to bury.
When he finally dressed, she stayed wrapped in the sheet, hair wild, lipstick smeared, soul wide open.
At the door, he turned. “Do you want more of this?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then we’ll have to start telling the truth,” he warned.
“To whom?”
“To ourselves, first.”
He kissed her forehead, left the coffee half-finished on the table, and was gone before the last grain of sand fell.
Tara didn’t cry.
Instead, she flipped the hourglass again, and sat watching it, wondering how many more turns they had left.
Ashes on Her Tongue
The next morning, Tara tasted ashes in her tea.
Kunal was reading the newspaper, glasses sliding down his nose, his phone buzzing on the table every few minutes. Aarav was finishing the last of his toast, humming something off-key from a cartoon he loved. The world continued in neat compartments—marriage, motherhood, middle-class mornings.
But inside her, something had collapsed and rebuilt itself overnight. Not out of guilt. Not yet. But something like recognition. Of a life lived on mute.
“Tara, did you book Aarav’s PTM slot?” Kunal asked.
She blinked, nodded. “Yeah. Thursday, 11:30.”
“Great,” he said, not looking up.
That was what marriage had become—appointments, coordination, efficient silence.
Later that afternoon, Tara stood on her balcony staring at the road, wondering how one hour could rearrange the inside of your body, your mind, your future. She touched her wrist absentmindedly, where Armaan had kissed her skin like it was a question he never wanted answered.
The phone vibrated. One message.
Armaan: Still burning?
She smiled.
Tara: The smoke hasn’t cleared.
Armaan: Then let’s not pretend to hold our breath.
That night, they didn’t meet, but they talked. Not through texts, but voice messages. Soft, private, late-night confessions whispered between static and sighs. She told him about her first kiss in college, the fear of being too much. He told her about the night he drove aimlessly for six hours after signing his divorce papers.
They built a language only they understood. Between dusk and midnight, they became real.
But love is greedy.
It doesn’t wait patiently at the margins.
By the third meeting in her bedroom, Tara had stopped flinching when Armaan ran his fingers down her spine. She didn’t check the clock as often. She wore colors she hadn’t in years—deep wine, emerald green, black lace. She let her hair down more. She laughed in whispers. She burned, silently.
But the guilt—when it did creep in—came not from touching Armaan, but from realizing she no longer missed being touched by her husband.
One evening, Kunal brought home orchids.
“For you,” he said. “They reminded me of our honeymoon.”
She stared at them for a moment too long. “That was ten years ago.”
He smiled. “Still counts, right?”
She took the flowers. Thanked him. Kissed his cheek.
Later, she buried her nose in them and didn’t smell a thing.
The contrast became unbearable. The bed too clean. The house too quiet. Her lies too practiced.
And yet, she didn’t stop.
She saw Armaan in bookstores, in parked cars, in her mind during faculty meetings. She saw him in verses she taught, in the mirror, in the steam curling off her coffee.
One afternoon, he brought her a silver anklet.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because it’s the only place no one will notice,” he said. “But you’ll feel it every time you walk.”
She wore it.
That night, as she cooked dinner, the cold metal pressed against her skin. A secret she carried between the folds of her sari.
But nothing stays hidden forever.
Not when love leaves marks on your voice, on your silences, on the way your eyes soften mid-sentence.
Kunal noticed her absences. Her distraction. The new perfume. The way she kept her phone screen turned down.
“You’re… different lately,” he said one evening.
“Good different?” she asked carefully.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Just different.”
She wanted to ask him—Do you still see me? Would you notice if I disappeared into someone else’s arms, someone else’s fire?
But instead she said, “Maybe I just needed a change.”
He nodded. “Maybe we both do.”
That night, she lay beside him like a stranger in borrowed sheets.
And in the dark, she touched her anklet.
It was still there.
Cold.
Bright.
Burning.
When Love Leaves Bruises You Can’t See
Some bruises don’t bloom on skin. They hide beneath conversations, beneath the practiced tilt of a smile. That week, Tara woke up each day wearing them like perfume—undetectable, yet lingering.
Her relationship with Armaan was no longer built on touches stolen in shadows. It was beginning to leave fingerprints on everything else—on how she poured tea, on how she paused mid-sentence while teaching, on the way she stared too long at traffic signals, as if waiting for permission to break free.
Armaan felt it too.
“You’re quieter,” he said, lying beside her on the worn mattress in his studio apartment.
Tara played with the frayed end of his bedsheet. “I don’t know how to divide myself anymore.”
He turned to face her. “You don’t have to. I didn’t fall in love with a fragment.”
She closed her eyes. That word—love—landed heavier than his body ever had.
“Don’t say it unless you’re ready to carry it,” she whispered.
“I’ve been carrying it for weeks,” he replied.
Outside, Delhi honked and howled and heaved. But inside, all she could hear was the echo of what he’d just said.
They didn’t speak much that afternoon. They touched like people who didn’t know if this would be the last time. Armaan kissed her shoulder slowly, memorizing the scent of her regret. She kissed his eyelids, as if trying to keep them closed to the world they didn’t belong in.
But even fire has its limits.
One evening, back home, Kunal asked her to come to a friend’s anniversary dinner.
“I already RSVPed,” he said. “You’ll like them. Artsy couple. The husband writes poetry.”
Poetry.
She almost laughed.
The event was held at a rooftop café with fairy lights and far too many couples who smiled too widely. Tara wore a silk saree, emerald green. Kunal introduced her with casual pride. She smiled politely, laughed where appropriate, sipped wine like it was duty.
Then she saw them.
A couple, seated two tables away. He was running his fingers through her hair. Not possessive. Just familiar. She looked at him like he had been carved from memory. They weren’t young. Maybe in their forties. But they glowed.
Not because they were new.
Because they were real.
Tara excused herself to the bathroom. Locked the door. Stared at herself in the mirror.
The woman who looked back had mascara on. Her bindi was slightly crooked. Her neck bore the faintest shadow of a hickey—Armaan’s mark. Hidden by the saree pleats, but known.
She didn’t cry.
She just stood still, forehead against the cold tile.
Later that night, as Kunal slept, she stood on the balcony barefoot, feeling the rough concrete against her soles. She sent Armaan a voice note, the words trembling even though her lips didn’t.
“I don’t know how to be in two places anymore. I think I’m falling apart.”
He replied at 2:17 AM.
“Then let me help you rebuild.”
The next day, they met again. In a bookstore near Connaught Place. It was safer than her home, than his. They walked between rows of fiction, nonfiction, memoir. And when no one was watching, he reached for her hand.
“Let’s go away,” he said suddenly.
“Where?”
“Anywhere. A weekend. Just us. No clocks. No excuses.”
Her breath caught.
“I have a life.”
“You have a prison,” he echoed again.
But she said nothing.
Instead, she looked down and realized something strange—her wedding ring was missing.
She panicked. Touched her fingers. Her purse. Her pockets.
Then remembered.
She had taken it off the day before to knead dough. And forgotten to wear it again.
The realization struck like lightning.
She didn’t feel naked without it.
She felt… light.
That night, while brushing her teeth, Kunal stood beside her. They stared into the mirror like two people in a photograph—smiling faintly, standing close, looking at something neither could name.
He noticed the missing ring.
“You forgot again,” he said softly.
“I did,” she replied.
But he didn’t say more.
He left the bathroom.
And Tara, staring at her own bare finger, whispered a truth to her reflection:
“I’m not his anymore.”
The Weekend We Disappeared
They left early Saturday morning. Tara told Kunal she was attending a literature workshop in Jaipur. She’d rehearsed it all—names, locations, even the fake email confirmation she had mailed herself the night before. Kunal didn’t ask many questions. He kissed her forehead absently, wished her luck, and returned to his laptop as if she were leaving for a grocery run.
Armaan was waiting outside in his car, windows down, music playing low. He looked like a man trying not to hope too much.
“You sure?” he asked.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” she replied, throwing her bag in the back seat.
They drove without speaking for a long time. The city peeled away behind them—traffic thinning, buildings growing smaller, sky expanding into something bluer than it had been in weeks. Tara rolled down the window and let her hair tangle in the wind.
“This feels illegal,” she said.
“It is,” Armaan smirked. “Illegal, immoral, beautiful.”
They stopped halfway for tea at a roadside dhaba, shared a plate of aloo parathas, laughed about nothing. For the first time in months, she didn’t feel like a mother, or a wife, or even a woman cheating. She felt human.
By late afternoon, they arrived at a boutique homestay nestled on the edge of a forgotten lake in Alwar. The room was airy, sunlit, with wooden beams and blue curtains that fluttered like sighs. There was only one bed. They didn’t comment on that.
Tara threw herself onto it with a grin. “So this is what freedom smells like.”
Armaan sat beside her. “No clocks. No calls. No borrowed hours. Just us.”
They undressed without urgency. No hunger this time—just softness. They made love with the quiet devotion of people finally allowed to breathe. No guilt hovered in the air, no hurried hands. Just skin against skin, heart against heart, like waves folding into each other.
Later, wrapped in nothing but the quilt, they lay watching the ceiling fan spin stories above them.
“Do you ever wonder what this would’ve been like if we’d met first?” Tara asked.
“I don’t,” he said. “Because then we wouldn’t be us. Not like this.”
She turned to him. “What are we, Armaan?”
He didn’t answer for a while. Then, softly: “We’re what happens when the right fire finds the wrong forest.”
They didn’t go sightseeing. They didn’t take photos. They didn’t post stories or tag locations. They just existed. Held hands on the balcony. Whispered poetry by the lake. Shared gulab jamuns from the same bowl. He read her Neruda. She recited Amrita Pritam.
That night, a storm rolled in. The power flickered out for an hour. They lay in darkness, fingers laced, as thunder grumbled above the hills.
“If I asked you to leave him,” he said quietly, “what would you say?”
“I’d ask if you were ready to live with my ruins.”
“I already do,” he whispered.
She didn’t cry. But her throat ached from all the words she couldn’t say.
The next morning, as the sky turned from grey to gold, she woke to find him sketching her on a hotel notepad. Just her face. The tilt of her lips. Her half-closed eyes.
“You never told me you could draw,” she said.
“You never gave me time before.”
She leaned forward, kissed him like a promise. And this time, it didn’t feel like cheating.
It felt like home.
But home never lasts when it’s not built to survive the light.
As they packed, her phone lit up.
Three missed calls from Kunal. One from Aarav’s school.
Her heart dropped.
“Reality’s calling,” she said.
Armaan touched her cheek. “Let it wait five more minutes.”
So they sat, hand in hand, on the edge of the bed.
Not speaking.
Just breathing.
Trying to hold on.
To the weekend.
To each other.
To the version of themselves they had built in that borrowed room beside the lake.
The Lie That Called It Love
The house smelled like cumin and old silence when Tara walked back in.
It was late afternoon. Kunal was on the couch, laptop open, cricket humming on the television. He looked up, smiled faintly.
“Workshop went well?”
She nodded, dropping her bag near the shoe rack. “Exhausting. But good.”
He stood, walked toward her, and kissed her forehead—a gesture more habitual than heartfelt. Still, it made her stomach turn.
Not from guilt.
But from comparison.
His touch had grown colder than her absence.
She slipped into the bathroom and locked the door. Her reflection stared back, freshly washed but worn. There were no visible marks, yet she felt them everywhere—on her collarbone, behind her knees, in the curve of her smile. Armaan had sketched more than her face this weekend—he had etched something permanent beneath her skin.
That evening, as she folded Aarav’s clothes, Kunal came up behind her. Placed a hand on her waist.
“You seem different lately,” he said.
“Do I?”
“Less tense. Lighter, somehow.”
She didn’t respond.
“Maybe the workshop helped,” he added.
Tara folded a shirt carefully. “Maybe.”
But even lies, when dressed in good intention, don’t always soften. They settle like dust on conscience. She carried the weight of that one all through dinner, through Aarav’s jokes, through the long hour she pretended to read beside Kunal in bed.
When he fell asleep, she crept into the kitchen and checked her phone.
Armaan: I don’t know how to go back to being your secret.
Tara: I don’t know how to let go of the rest of my life.
Armaan: Then maybe this was all just a beautiful lie we told each other.
She stared at that message for a long time. Her fingers hovered, then typed:
Tara: Maybe. But I still needed to hear it called love, even if it wasn’t meant to stay.
He didn’t reply that night.
The next day, she didn’t hear from him either.
On Wednesday, she passed him in the parking lot. He didn’t stop. Didn’t smile. His eyes flicked toward her for a second—brief, sharp, unreadable.
That night, Armaan posted a photo on his WhatsApp status: a beach, stormy sky, captioned “Some tides recede, some don’t return.”
It felt like a slap disguised as poetry.
Tara slammed her phone down.
What had she expected? A fairytale where broken things suddenly healed? Where the other man waited endlessly while she floated between roles?
The silence stretched. Not just between them—but inside her. Days passed. She began wearing her ring again. She made pasta for Kunal. Took Aarav to the dentist. Corrected term papers.
And yet, every mirror she passed asked the same question: Who are you pretending to be today?
The truth was, she missed him.
Not just the touch. But the warmth of being chosen.
The space where she wasn’t a function—but a fire.
On Saturday, she walked to his floor. Stood outside his door for a full minute.
Then turned around.
She couldn’t knock.
She didn’t have the courage to reopen a wound she might have to close again.
But that night, a courier came.
A package.
Inside it—her anklet.
Wrapped in a page torn from Neruda.
“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
She didn’t cry.
She wore the anklet again.
And knew she was still burning.
A Fire Kept Quiet
Tara didn’t speak his name anymore. Not in whispers. Not in thoughts. But his absence rang louder than any syllable she’d ever spoken.
Days passed like faded pages in a book she no longer had the heart to read. Mornings returned to normal—tea with ginger, ironing uniforms, nodding through Kunal’s monologues about quarterly projections. But something had shifted. A quiet throb beneath her breastbone, like a song stuck on the edge of memory.
She still wore the anklet.
Not every day.
Only when she needed to remember that once—just once—she had been chosen, not by duty, but by desire.
Armaan didn’t reach out again. Neither did she. That silence became their agreement. No fights. No promises. Just the echo of everything they’d almost dared to have.
Sometimes, she saw him from the balcony. Once, on his bike. Once, helping an elderly neighbor with groceries. Once, with a young girl—his daughter, perhaps. She smiled just like him. Tara turned away before he could notice her watching.
She kept the Neruda page tucked between her sarees.
She didn’t reread it.
But she didn’t throw it away either.
One afternoon, she sat in the school auditorium, clapping as Aarav received a certificate for something—she couldn’t remember what. Her hands moved, but her eyes had drifted to the couple two rows ahead. The woman rested her head on the man’s shoulder. Simple. Effortless.
It was the kind of intimacy that needed no rehearsal.
Tara envied that more than passion.
Later that week, Kunal came home early. He suggested dinner out. Just the two of them.
“We haven’t done that in a while,” he said. “Might do us good.”
She agreed. Dressed carefully. Not to impress, but to remind herself that she could.
At the restaurant, under amber light, Kunal reached across the table.
“You’ve been somewhere else lately,” he said.
She froze. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Sometimes I feel like I’m losing you without knowing why.”
She stared at her wine glass.
He continued, “I know I’ve been distant. With work. Life. Maybe we forgot how to look at each other.”
The weight of his sincerity pressed against her like a boulder.
“I’m trying, Tara,” he said.
She looked up.
And for a moment, she wished he weren’t.
Because she didn’t have it in her to tell him she was already gone.
Not with her body.
But with her heart.
When they returned home, Kunal kissed her softly. Held her longer than usual. She let him.
But that night, long after the house was quiet, she slipped out of bed and walked barefoot to the balcony.
She didn’t text Armaan.
She just stood under the moonlight, anklet cold against her skin, and whispered into the air:
“I still remember.”
No one heard her.
But the wind stirred.
And somewhere, in a silent room two floors below, a man rolled over in bed—
Dreaming of red curtains and the woman who had once set fire to his quiet life.
The Goodbye We Never Spoke
The seasons had begun to change again. The monsoon was receding, leaving behind humid afternoons and skies the color of unspoken things. Tara sat at the café near the complex gate—alone. A notebook lay open in front of her. She hadn’t written in weeks. The words came like echoes now. Hesitant. Partial. Still bleeding.
She stirred her coffee. It had gone cold.
She wasn’t waiting for him.
At least that’s what she told herself.
But when the bell above the door rang and a familiar silhouette walked in, her breath faltered. Not because she had imagined this, but because a part of her had willed it into being.
Armaan stood at the counter, ordering black coffee. His hair was shorter. His beard a little heavier. He looked older. Or maybe just more finished.
He turned.
Their eyes met.
Neither looked away.
He walked over slowly, hesitation in his step, but not shame. Not anymore.
“Is this seat taken?” he asked, the faintest smile tugging at his lips.
“No,” she said, voice steadier than she expected. “But it’s not as warm as it used to be.”
He sat down, carefully, as though sitting beside history.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said.
“I’ve seen you every day,” he replied. “Even when I tried not to.”
There was a long pause.
Then she asked the question that had haunted her nights. “Why didn’t you say goodbye?”
He looked down at his cup. “Because I was afraid you’d ask me to stay.”
“And if I had?”
“I would have,” he said simply. “And we both know it would’ve ruined everything.”
She stared at him.
There was no bitterness. No accusation. Just a quiet kind of grief that only comes when love was real, and timing was not.
“Did you love me?” she asked, her voice small.
“Yes,” he said. “More than I should have. Less than you deserved.”
She swallowed the lump rising in her throat.
“And now?”
“Now,” he said, “I’ve learned to love you in silence. From a distance. Where you’re safe, and I’m not asking you to choose.”
She nodded slowly, fingers tracing the rim of her cup.
“I still wear it,” she said, lifting the edge of her saree to show the silver anklet glinting on her ankle.
“I know,” he whispered. “I saw it yesterday. In the lift.”
They both laughed, just a little. The kind of laugh that hurt more than it healed.
A song played in the café. Soft. Old Hindi. Something about forgotten chances and half-written endings. She knew the lyrics by heart.
He looked at her then. Really looked. Memorizing the way her eyes still crinkled at the corners. The way she held her sadness like a secret she didn’t want help carrying.
“I have to go,” he said, standing.
“Of course,” she replied.
But neither of them moved.
Then, slowly, he reached into his pocket. Pulled out a folded piece of paper.
“I wrote you something. I wasn’t going to give it. But now I think I should.”
She took it.
Didn’t open it.
Just held it like it was glass.
“Goodbye, Tara.”
It wasn’t dramatic.
It wasn’t final.
It was just real.
She watched him walk out of the café, into the light. No turning back. No second glance.
When she was alone again, she unfolded the paper.
One line. His handwriting, still familiar.
“Some stories aren’t meant to be finished. They’re meant to be remembered.”
She closed her eyes.
And let herself remember.
What Remains After Fire
It had been three months since that last coffee.
Since the line that didn’t ask to be answered.
Since Armaan disappeared again—this time, gently.
Tara had folded the note and tucked it inside her favorite poetry book, alongside Neruda and Amrita Pritam.
She hadn’t touched it since.
Some fires burn clean.
Some leave marks on the walls of the soul.
Life resumed.
Or appeared to.
She taught classes. Wrote lesson plans. Signed report cards.
She laughed at Aarav’s bad jokes, helped Kunal pick out a blazer for a seminar, went to dinner with other mothers who never spoke of desire.
She even stopped waiting for a message.
But the body remembers.
It remembers the curve of a name whispered in the dark.
The heat of skin beneath silk.
The weight of someone choosing you in a world full of people who don’t see past your role.
One morning, Tara was at the metro station, waiting for her train, when she saw a couple standing nearby.
They weren’t young. Maybe early forties.
The woman was reading from a Kindle.
The man had his hand on the small of her back—not possessive, just constant.
They stood like two people who had found safety in each other.
Tara smiled to herself.
She didn’t ache.
She didn’t envy.
She remembered.
And sometimes, remembering is enough.
That night, she told Kunal she needed space.
They sat across from each other, table set, food untouched.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” he said, exasperated.
She took a deep breath. “Maybe nothing’s wrong. Maybe it’s just that we stopped being right.”
Kunal blinked. “Tara—what are you saying?”
“I’m not leaving,” she clarified. “I’m just asking you to see me again.”
He looked confused. Then, quietly: “I don’t know how.”
“Then we learn,” she said. “Or we let go.”
There were no fights. No slammed doors.
Only quiet. And truth. And the beginning of something new—or the honest ending of something long over.
Weeks passed.
One Sunday morning, Tara walked to the neighborhood market.
She passed the bookstore where Armaan had once traced the spine of a novel with such reverence, she had fallen for his hands all over again.
She walked in.
The man at the counter recognized her. “Haven’t seen you in a while, ma’am.”
She smiled. “Been busy forgetting.”
He didn’t understand. But that was fine.
She picked a slim novel—Murakami. Then another—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.
As she paid, the man hesitated. “Oh, someone left this here for you. Said you might come back someday.”
She froze. “For me?”
He nodded. Handed her a sealed envelope with her name on it. Just “Tara.”
No return address.
Her fingers shook as she opened it, there, at the counter.
Inside—
A photo.
Black and white.
The lake house.
The bed with rumpled sheets.
The balcony curtains fluttering.
Her anklet resting on a book of poems.
And a single line in the corner, handwritten in ink that looked like it had bled slightly in the rain:
“If fire must burn only once, let it burn all the way through.”
No signature.
None needed.
She left the bookstore holding the photo like a prayer.
She didn’t cry.
She walked home.
Later that evening, she placed the photograph in a drawer.
Not to hide it.
But to preserve it.
Some love stories aren’t meant to be continued.
They’re meant to be survived.
To remind us that we once opened the door.
Let the fire in.
And let it leave—
not because we didn’t love,
but because we finally loved ourselves more.
The End
