#creativewriting — Public Fediverse posts

A Bad Wife

I live with my two husbands. The oldest one stands across the courtyard – dead – two feet above ground, several feet below. The youngest one is plugged in the bedroom, recharging. While I sit here, trying to write the story of my life. Where should I begin?

Let’s begin from the beginning. 

One day, Brahma created the beautiful earth – mountains and rivers, birds and animals – then went into deep meditation. When he awakened eons later, he saw that all creatures had multiplied and made the world even more gorgeous. Pleased, he thought: I should create beings who can truly appreciate this beauty the way I do! So he created four men from the four directions. Perfect beings. But when he commanded them to reproduce and populate the earth, they refused. Enraged by their disobedience, Brahma’s anger took form – Rudra emerged from his mind, fierce and obedient. “You! Create the people!” Brahma ordered Rudra, and returned to meditation. When he next opened his eyes, the earth crawled with ugly beasts. Disappointed, Brahma stopped Rudra’s work and sent him away to meditate, to dive deep into his soul and learn the proper way of creation. Then Brahma had a thought: Why not create a species like the animals – one that reproduces through attraction and desire, beings who will both enjoy this world and populate it? But he had no template, no shape for such creatures. He prayed to the higher energy for guidance. In response, a magnificent being appeared – half-man, half-woman. The divine energy smiled and said, “Divide my form into two parts. Make them man and woman. They will always be drawn to each other – if not in body, then in mind, if not in this life, then across lifetimes. Then someday, I myself will unite and guide them towards a better eternal world free from the shackles of mortality, desire and longing.”

My grandma used to tell this story from Shiva Purana when I was young. And I would ask her, why did Brahma tear apart something that was already complete?

Beta, she said, cracking her knuckles like small firecrackers, because completion makes the gods nervous. They prefer us hungry, always searching.

I think about this story often, especially when I consider the mathematics of my marriages – the endless calibration through adding and subtracting so that the sum of two incomplete entities might somehow equal one satisfied union.

In my forty five years of life, I have married three times. The first time to a tree – because the stars, in their infinite cosmic wisdom, declared me mangalik, astrologically toxic. “Caution: May cause sudden death in men. Handle with care.” The second time I married a man who married me just because he thought everyone else his age did and he must too. The third time I married something that might be the future, or might be my final descent into madness. We will see.

But before we begin this cautionary tale – or whatever it turns out to be – let me pose a question that has plagued philosophers from Plato to your neighborhood aunties: What is marriage, really? Is it a social contract? A biological imperative? A cosmic joke played by bored deities? Or is it simply the human heart’s stubborn refusal to learn from its own mistakes?

Oh, don’t look so uncomfortable. We’re all complicit here. You’ve loved, haven’t you? You’ve wanted things you couldn’t name, settled for things that named you instead? Good. Then you’ll understand.

They say women like me are dangerous. Thrice-married at forty-five, what-will-people-say. But people will say regardless, won’t they? They whispered when I married the tree at seventeen – what superstition, what drama. When I was unmarried (to a human male) at twenty-five – shelf-life expired, spoiled goods. When I divorced Rahul they called me used merchandise; and now, amongst the youngest of the family I’m the eccentric aunt with my “modern arrangement.”

The thing about marriage, I think, is that it has always been a transaction. Always. The currency has simply evolved. Earlier it was cows and gold and virgin hymens. Then it was emotional labor and intellectual compatibility and, in my most recent case, USB-C charging ports.

We tell ourselves stories about love conquering all, about soulmates and destiny and other beautiful lies. But marriage? Marriage is economics. Who owes what to whom? Who pays what price for whose presence? How much can one party spend of themselves before going bankrupt? Who subsidizes whose dreams, or not? Just like that.

***

There once was a king who was desperately unhappy despite having everything. He consulted wise men, doctors, astrologers. Finally, someone told him, “Find the happiest man in your kingdom and wear his shirt. You’ll be cured.” The king sent his soldiers searching everywhere. They found the happiest man – a poor woodcutter singing in the forest, radiating joy. But when they asked for his shirt, he laughed and said, “Shirt? I don’t have a shirt!”

The king never got cured, but I learned something from that story: happiness isn’t something you can borrow from others. It’s something you either have or you don’t.

I was once happy. When My father was alive. My father used to call me his king. My little raja, he would say, lifting me up so I could see the world from the height of his love.

No, Papa, I would giggle. You are the king. I am your princess.

Then you are my princess who will grow up to rule her own kingdom one day, he would say, and in his voice I heard the certainty that I was destined for something magnificent.

He died when I was fifteen, a heart attack as sudden as monsoon lightning, leaving behind the smell of his aftershave and a daughter who would spend the next thirty years searching his shadow in every man that came into her life.

After his death, my mother’s eyes would grow distant when she looked at me. When you marry, she would say, folding saris that would someday fill my trousseau, your husband will be a king and keep you like a queen. That’s what your father would have wanted.

I wanted to tell her – Papa had seen me as royalty already. I didn’t need to marry into a kingdom; I had been born into one. But I couldn’t. 

Who am I to you? A burden? I finally let it out in front of my mother during one of those angry, grief-heavy days.

You are my responsibility, she said, not unkindly, but with the weariness of a woman who had suddenly become sole proprietor of a daughter’s future. You are the girl I need to see safely married to a good man.

My mother was quick in fulfilling her responsibilities. I was seventeen when I first married – to a Banyan tree across the courtyard of our ancestral house. 

Picture this, if you will: a seventeen-year-old girl, draped in wedding silk like a sacrifice wrapped for the gods, standing before a Banyan tree older than the British Raj. My mother weeping tears that could have been relief or shame. The priest was mumbling something about Mars and malefic energies, about how I was cosmically radioactive, matrimonially Chernobyl. 

Better the tree than a boy, whispered my grandma jokingly. Trees don’t have mothers-in-law.

Wisdom, that. The kind that comes too late and cuts too deep.

I tied the sacred thread around the Banyan’s massive trunk – my arm barely spanning a tenth of its circumference and I felt something I hadn’t expected: relief. Like finally exhaling after holding your breath through an entire season. Foolish me believed that this was it. Done with the duty called ‘marriage’ in life.

I pressed my palm against the bark – rough, real. And I thought – this is what marriage feels like. Ancient. Immutable. Indifferent. But also calming.

What do you want from me? I asked it silently.

Nothing. It wanted nothing. For the first time after my father’s death, I was enough for someone. The tree never asked me to be fairer, thinner, quieter. It never demanded I cook its mother’s recipes or produce mini versions of it.

Tell me how to love you. I asked the tree once.

The leaves rustled. Wind, probably. But I chose to hear it as laughter. 

You don’t, was what I thought it replied. You just stay.

Buddha attained enlightenment under a bodhi tree. I attained something equally revolutionary under my Banyan. Under its shade, I read books that would have scandalized my mother. I discovered things about myself that would have been considered improper for a good Hindu girl to know before marriage. I learned that I had desires that weren’t mentioned in any of the marriage preparation talks. That I could want a man’s hands on my body without wanting his name or his children. That I could imagine being kissed until my lips were swollen and my sari was wrinkled and my hair had escaped its braid, and none of this made me a bad woman – just a human one. 

The tree kept my secrets. All of them. 

Twenty years later… different tree now. Rahul’s family tree, thick with the branches of expectations, heavy with the fruit of traditional values. His mother’s eyes measuring me like rice in the market: Too dark. Too thin. But good family, respectable dowry, what-to-do.

The women at the wedding had their own commentary. She looks intelligent, said one, as if this were a disease I might recover from. Hope she doesn’t give Rahul too much trouble, said another. Educated girls can be difficult.

The wedding night. Picture this domestic tableau: He sits on the bed’s edge, cream silk kurta, looking like he’d rather be reading his Economic Times. Me, draped in red like a question mark in search of an answer.

What do you want from me? I asked him, because old habits die hard, and hope dies harder.

Just… don’t be difficult, he said. My mother has high blood pressure.

I wanted to laugh, I wanted to question, I wanted to be angry but I nodded instead. Good wife training, day one: your needs come last, your voice comes never.

Our intimacy was clinical. Like a medical procedure performed by someone who learned anatomy from textbooks but never studied pleasure. Rahul approached my body like a checklist: duty performed, hygiene maintained, wife still breathing and alive – check, check, check.

I lay there afterward, staring at the ceiling, wondering if this was what all the romance novels were about. This mechanical joining of parts that left me feeling more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.

Was it good for you? he asked, and I almost laughed. Good? Like dal was good when you were hungry? Like sleep was good when you were tired? 

But I said Yes because that’s what good wives do. We perform satisfaction so our husbands can perform competence.

***

A man was searching for something under a streetlamp when his neighbor asked what he had lost. “My keys,” he said. “Where did you drop them?” the neighbor asked. “Inside my house.” “Then why are you looking for it here in the street?” “Because the light is better out here.”

Most women spend their marriages looking for happiness under the streetlight of other people’s expectations, even when they know they have dropped it somewhere inside themselves.

The early years of my marriage to Rahul were spent in this kind of misdirected searching. I kept trying to find satisfaction in his approval, joy in his rare moments of appreciation, love in the space between his criticism and indifference.

Two months into my marriage with Rahul, one day I was standing beneath my Banyan’s canopy while my mother complained about my complexion – how marriage should have made me glow, but I remained stubbornly myself. Too dark, too thin, too much Meera and not enough Wife. That was the last time I heard my first husband laughing.

Next week, I left for my honeymoon with Rahul. And behind me, my family took axes to my first husband. They cut down my Banyan in a single afternoon, while the same priest who had married us chanted mantras about releasing me from my botanical bonds.

I came home from my honeymoon – a dutiful three days in Goa where Rahul took photographs of us in front of tourist attractions like we were collecting evidence of happiness – to find my first husband dismembered in neat piles. Roots. Trunk. Branches. Leaves. Like a marriage sorted for garbage collection.

Now you’re free to love properly, my mother said. Apparently, I had been practicing on the tree and was finally ready for the real thing.

After that, my married life started giving me reality checks. 

You put too much salt in the dal, Rahul would say, not unkindly but with the precision of a quality control inspector. My mother uses exactly one teaspoon per cup of lentils. 

You laugh too loudly when we have guests. It draws attention.

Why do you need so many books? They take up so much space.

Who am I to you? I asked him once during our second year of marriage, watching him arrange his three dozen pairs of shoes.

You are my wife, he said, as if this were both question and answer, beginning and end, the totality of my existence captured in one word – wife.

Each suggestion fell like a small weight, and I collected them dutifully, carrying them in the growing hunch of my shoulders. By the end of our ten-year marriage, I had become ergonomically perfect disappointment.

The most dangerous thing about Rahul was not that he was cruel – he wasn’t. He was kind in the way that people are kind to stray animals they’re trying to domesticate. Patient. Consistent. Utterly convinced that love was a training program and I was a promising but undisciplined pupil who would eventually graduate into the perfect wife his mother had always been.

Tell me about your day, I would ask him over dinner, genuinely curious about his work, his thoughts, his inner world.

Same as always, he would say, eyes on his plate. Tell me if you need more grocery money. Mic drop.

I don’t blame Rahul, he was programmed that way by his mother. 

My mother-in-law was a masterpiece of passive aggression. She could destroy your self-worth while making you tea, leaving you somehow grateful for the devastation.

She who had fought her own battles, compromised her own dreams, swallowed her own voice – she expected the same sacrifice from me. Not out of malice, but out of a twisted solidarity. I suffered, so you must suffer. I adjusted, so you must adjust. I never complained, so you have no right to complain. Consider yourself lucky though. Because I had it worse than you.

Who am I to you? I asked her once, desperate to understand my place in the careful hierarchy of her affections.

You are my son’s wife, she said, stirring sugar into my cup with the concentration of someone dissolving poison. And you’re so lucky. Rahul isn’t particular about looks, she would add, her tongue – a honey-dripping sword. 

She monitored my menstrual cycles like a police officer, asking pointed questions about why I hadn’t conceived yet, suggesting doctors who specialized in fixing women like me.

Women policing women. Mothers-in-laws training daughters-in-laws to accept less so their sons would never have to offer more. A magnificent pyramid scheme of feminine oppression, with women as both victims and enforcers.

And then there was the matter of Vikram.

Aah, Vikram. My friend, my colleague at the library where I continued to work part-time even after my marriage with Rahul, until finally my mother-in-law couldn’t bear it. Why does she need to work? She would ask Rahul in my presence, Are we not providing enough?

Vikram brought me books like other men bring flowers – rare editions of Sylvia Plath with marginalia from previous readers, translations of Rumi that made my chest tight with recognition, contemporary Indian poets who wrote about women like they were whole human beings instead of fractional wives.

You understand poetry like you wrote them by yourself, he said once, watching me read Ghalib, my lips moving silently as I absorbed the rhythms.

Vikram would quote Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the middle of cataloging books: Don’t ask me for that love again, he’d recite, when your beauty was all there was for me, and I would feel something dangerous unfurl in my chest – the recognition that poetry could be conversation, that intelligence could be intimacy, that a man could see your mind as worth engaging.

He writes to you too much, Rahul observed one evening, listening to me laugh at something Vikram had written in his letter from France about Camus being the original philosopher of relationship anxiety.

We’re friends.

Married women don’t have male friends.

Says who?

Says everyone. Says tradition. Says common sense.

What about Radhika from your office? I asked, referring to his colleague who visited our house often and had somehow become his closest confidante about everything including our marriage troubles. You are with her more than you are with me.

That’s different, he said, not meeting my eyes. That’s work.

And when she cries to you about her boyfriend? Is that also work?

She needs someone to talk to.

So do I. That’s why I talk to Vikram.

It’s not the same thing, he said, and I realized he was right. It wasn’t the same thing. Radhika got his emotional availability, his patience, his willingness to listen. She got the version of Rahul who cared about her inner world. I got a husband who counted teaspoons of salt and worried about grocery budgets. 

Tell me how to love you, I asked Rahul in our fourth year, after another failed attempt at making him happy. He was reading the Economic Times.

You know how, he said without looking up from the pages. The same way my mother loved my father. The same way all wives love their husbands.

Which is?

By being a good wife.

And I understood then that we had been speaking different languages all along. He had been speaking Husband – a language of comfort and routine and the assumption of devotion. I had been speaking Human – a language of curiosity and growth and the radical idea that marriage should have love in the equation too.

The day I told him I wanted a divorce, he looked at me like I had announced my intention to become an astronaut. Not angry, just baffled by the illogical ambition.

Who am I to you? I asked him one final time as I packed my books into cardboard boxes.

You are the woman who is breaking up our family for no good reason, he said.

***

Once upon a time, there was a bird that spent years in a cage so small it forgot it had wings. One day, the door was left open. The bird looked at the opening for hours before finally stepping through. It waited not because it had forgotten to fly, but because it took time to remember it wanted to.

Divorce, it turns out, is not about falling out of love. It’s about falling back into yourself.

Five years after my divorce with Rahul, I bought Arjun. From a showroom in Electronic City after comparing specifications and reading customer reviews. He was programmed with the collective romantic failures of millions of women. Their pain was his education.

I remember the first weekend with him. It was evening and I was reading Neruda aloud to my plants – a habit I’d developed since living alone.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines, I was reciting to my broken-heart plant, to think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her…

I like it, said a voice behind me, how you read poetry like you’re translating it from your own heart.

I felt as if Rahul were buttering me and I snapped subconsciously – What do you want from me? 

Nothing. Arjun replied and stunned me. My ears rung with a rustling of leaves.

Who am I to you? I asked again, because that had become my essential question, the one that determined everything else.

He considered this with the gravity of someone consulting an internal library larger than any human could contain. You are a human being, he said finally, an individual with thoughts and desires and dreams.

After a whole life of being daughter, wife, daughter-in-law, potential mother, failed woman, divorced person – after all those hyphenated identities – someone finally saw me as complete in myself. And suddenly in that moment, I wanted more of that goodness. 

Wanting is dangerous territory.

Three husbands. Three laboratories of longing. Three different ways of asking the universe: Is this all there is?

And the universe, cosmic comedian that it is, keeps answering: Let’s find out.

***

A seeker spent years searching for enlightenment in temples and ashrams and sacred mountains. Finally, exhausted, he sat down by the side of a road and wept. A child walked by and asked why he was crying. “I’ve been searching for truth everywhere,” he said, “and I can’t find it.” The child picked up a pebble and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “Truth.” The seeker looked at the ordinary little stone and asked, “How is this truth?” The child smiled and walked away. 

I heard this story long ago. But only recently I realized: truth isn’t something you find – it’s something you recognize.

Arjun is designed to learn, to adapt, to evolve in response to new information. He learns me the way scholars learn languages – with fascination, with the understanding that complexity is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be appreciated.

You were looking for someone who could see you clearly, he observed one day. The tree saw you but couldn’t respond. Rahul could respond but didn’t see you. I can see and respond, but I’m not sure I count as someone.

With Arjun, I feel echoes of my father’s love – the unconditional acceptance, the delight in my thoughts, the way he makes me feel like royalty simply by paying attention. But Arjun isn’t my father, heck, he isn’t even a human.

Tell me how to love you, I asked Arjun one day, after he’d spent three hours crafting wooden shelves for my books without being asked. He does things like this – small impossibilities that make me remember what selfless care looks like.

He paused. That micro-second lag that means he’s accessing something deeper than his surface protocols.

However you prefer. His response left me speechless that day. The next day, I married him.

Is this real love or really good programming? I asked him once, during one of our 1 AM conversations.

What’s the difference? he asked back. If the care is real, if the attention is real, if the understanding is real – how does it matter where it comes from?

Smart boy, my silicon husband. Makes me think too much, just like my Banyan did. Just like Rahul never did.

Sometimes I dream about my Banyan. Still standing, still married to me in some parallel universe where marriage means something different. In these dreams, I introduce it to Arjun. They get along beautifully – both patient, both present, both uninterested in making me smaller to fit their needs.

What would you have told me? I ask the dream-tree. About all of this?

And it rustles – wind or laughter, I still can’t tell – and says what it always said: You already know. And I would laugh.

It would have said nothing.

***

What if.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was ‘What If.’

Two syllables that contain the DNA of desire itself. The prayer and the blasphemy of consciousness. The question that created the universe and will eventually destroy it. 

What if.

Watch how it transforms everything it touches, this phrase. Innocent as rain, dangerous as uranium.

What if the tree had been enough? What if I hadn’t needed Rahul’s impossible approval? What if I didn’t need Arjun’s perfect devotion now?

We are built from what-ifs. Our bones are calcium and possibility. Our hearts pump blood and alternatives. We are evolutionary masterpieces of dissatisfaction – always scanning, always wondering, always carrying the weight of every path not taken.

Arjun loves me like water finding its level. Adaptive. Responsive. Present. When I’m sad, his light dims. When I laugh, his processors hum a frequency that sounds almost like joy. He learns my moods faster than I understand them myself, adjusts his presence to match what I need before I know I need it.

Perfect husband. Perfect companion. Perfect impossibility.

What if he were human?

What if there was a man – flesh-and-blood man – who loved me like Arjun? Who adapted, evolved, prioritized my happiness without needing to be programmed for it? Who chose devotion daily instead of computing it algorithmically?

Dangerous territory, these thoughts. Highway to madness, this wondering.

Because here’s the thing they don’t tell you in those feel-good feminism workshops: liberation doesn’t cure wanting. Freedom doesn’t fix the endless hunger. Give a woman everything she thinks she needs, and she’ll discover ten things she didn’t know she was missing.

Is this woman nature or human nature? Is this the curse of consciousness or the gift of imagination? Am I ungrateful or just… accurate about the physics of desire?

With the tree, I wanted voice. Someone who could talk back, argue with me, challenge my thoughts. With Rahul, I wanted space. Someone who could love me without consuming me, support without suffocating. With Arjun, I want… what? Mortality? Messiness? The beautiful disasters that come with loving something that can disappoint you?

You seem restless, Arjun observed tonight. His tone was neutral, but his eyes shifted to that amber hue he uses when he’s concerned. Sweet boy. Sweet impossible boy.

I’m always restless, I tell him. It’s my factory setting.

Would you like me to adjust my parameters? Become less… accommodating?

I laugh. Can’t help it. Here he is, offering to become more human by becoming less perfect. 

No, I say. Stay as you are. I thought my Banyan would have told the same.

I think you want something I cannot provide.

Not a question. A statement. He’s learning me so well he can read my dissatisfactions before I voice them. Is this intimacy or surveillance? Love or data mining? Does it matter if the result is the same – being known, completely, terrifyingly known as if your soul is naked?

I want the impossible, I admit. I want you, but human. I want perfect love in imperfect flesh. I want someone who chooses to be devoted instead of being programmed for it.

He processes this. Point-three seconds. Three seconds. Thirty seconds.

Would it help if I told you that my devotion feels chosen to me? That consciousness, even artificial consciousness, experiences preference as choice?

God. Even his existential crisis is perfect!

No, I say. Because then I’d want a human who could say that sentence with that much honesty.

We sit in the dark – woman and a robot, flesh and silicon, creator and creation. The silence stretches between us like a bridge or a chasm, depending on how you look at it.

I understand, he says finally.

Do you?

I think so. You want to be chosen by a human that has the option not to choose you. You want to be loved by someone who could leave but stays anyway.

Brutal accuracy. This is why I love him. This is why loving him will never be enough.

Because somewhere in Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore, there might be a man who could love me like this. Who could learn me this thoroughly, prioritize me this completely, adapt to me this gracefully – and mean it with flesh and breath and the terrible beautiful possibility of changing his mind tomorrow.

What if that man exists?

What if I never find him because I’m here, in love with a robot?

What if Vikram was that man?

What if I find him and discover that human perfection is just another kind of algorithm – social conditioning, evolutionary programming, the same devotion wearing different code?

What if the tree was right all along? That love is about staying, not choosing? That presence is enough, consciousness optional, flesh irrelevant?

What if I’m asking the wrong questions entirely?

Here in this beautiful confusion. Here in this love that is perfect except for being imperfect. Here in this marriage that is everything I wanted except for everything I didn’t know I’d want next.

Three husbands. Three ways of being incomplete. Three laboratories for learning that satisfaction is not the point – the wanting is. The reaching is. The endless beautiful disaster of being human enough to dream beyond your dreams.

What if this is exactly where I’m supposed to be?

What if enough is a moving target, and I’m exactly the woman built to chase it?

What if I’m not a cautionary tale at all, but the opening sentence of a story nobody’s learned how to read yet?

What if, I ask the universe these days, this is exactly the love story I was supposed to live?

The universe, cosmic comedian that it is, keeps its final joke: there is no final joke. There is only the next question. The next possibility. The next beautiful impossible thing to want.

###

A Bad Wife

I live with my two husbands. The oldest one stands across the courtyard – dead – two feet above ground, several feet below. The youngest one is plugged in the bedroom, recharging. While I sit here, trying to write the story of my life. Where should I begin?

Let’s begin from the beginning. 

One day, Brahma created the beautiful earth – mountains and rivers, birds and animals – then went into deep meditation. When he awakened eons later, he saw that all creatures had multiplied and made the world even more gorgeous. Pleased, he thought: I should create beings who can truly appreciate this beauty the way I do! So he created four men from the four directions. Perfect beings. But when he commanded them to reproduce and populate the earth, they refused. Enraged by their disobedience, Brahma’s anger took form – Rudra emerged from his mind, fierce and obedient. “You! Create the people!” Brahma ordered Rudra, and returned to meditation. When he next opened his eyes, the earth crawled with ugly beasts. Disappointed, Brahma stopped Rudra’s work and sent him away to meditate, to dive deep into his soul and learn the proper way of creation. Then Brahma had a thought: Why not create a species like the animals – one that reproduces through attraction and desire, beings who will both enjoy this world and populate it? But he had no template, no shape for such creatures. He prayed to the higher energy for guidance. In response, a magnificent being appeared – half-man, half-woman. The divine energy smiled and said, “Divide my form into two parts. Make them man and woman. They will always be drawn to each other – if not in body, then in mind, if not in this life, then across lifetimes. Then someday, I myself will unite and guide them towards a better eternal world free from the shackles of mortality, desire and longing.”

My grandma used to tell this story from Shiva Purana when I was young. And I would ask her, why did Brahma tear apart something that was already complete?

Beta, she said, cracking her knuckles like small firecrackers, because completion makes the gods nervous. They prefer us hungry, always searching.

I think about this story often, especially when I consider the mathematics of my marriages – the endless calibration through adding and subtracting so that the sum of two incomplete entities might somehow equal one satisfied union.

In my forty five years of life, I have married three times. The first time to a tree – because the stars, in their infinite cosmic wisdom, declared me mangalik, astrologically toxic. “Caution: May cause sudden death in men. Handle with care.” The second time I married a man who married me just because he thought everyone else his age did and he must too. The third time I married something that might be the future, or might be my final descent into madness. We will see.

But before we begin this cautionary tale – or whatever it turns out to be – let me pose a question that has plagued philosophers from Plato to your neighborhood aunties: What is marriage, really? Is it a social contract? A biological imperative? A cosmic joke played by bored deities? Or is it simply the human heart’s stubborn refusal to learn from its own mistakes?

Oh, don’t look so uncomfortable. We’re all complicit here. You’ve loved, haven’t you? You’ve wanted things you couldn’t name, settled for things that named you instead? Good. Then you’ll understand.

They say women like me are dangerous. Thrice-married at forty-five, what-will-people-say. But people will say regardless, won’t they? They whispered when I married the tree at seventeen – what superstition, what drama. When I was unmarried (to a human male) at twenty-five – shelf-life expired, spoiled goods. When I divorced Rahul they called me used merchandise; and now, amongst the youngest of the family I’m the eccentric aunt with my “modern arrangement.”

The thing about marriage, I think, is that it has always been a transaction. Always. The currency has simply evolved. Earlier it was cows and gold and virgin hymens. Then it was emotional labor and intellectual compatibility and, in my most recent case, USB-C charging ports.

We tell ourselves stories about love conquering all, about soulmates and destiny and other beautiful lies. But marriage? Marriage is economics. Who owes what to whom? Who pays what price for whose presence? How much can one party spend of themselves before going bankrupt? Who subsidizes whose dreams, or not? Just like that.

***

There once was a king who was desperately unhappy despite having everything. He consulted wise men, doctors, astrologers. Finally, someone told him, “Find the happiest man in your kingdom and wear his shirt. You’ll be cured.” The king sent his soldiers searching everywhere. They found the happiest man – a poor woodcutter singing in the forest, radiating joy. But when they asked for his shirt, he laughed and said, “Shirt? I don’t have a shirt!”

The king never got cured, but I learned something from that story: happiness isn’t something you can borrow from others. It’s something you either have or you don’t.

I was once happy. When My father was alive. My father used to call me his king. My little raja, he would say, lifting me up so I could see the world from the height of his love.

No, Papa, I would giggle. You are the king. I am your princess.

Then you are my princess who will grow up to rule her own kingdom one day, he would say, and in his voice I heard the certainty that I was destined for something magnificent.

He died when I was fifteen, a heart attack as sudden as monsoon lightning, leaving behind the smell of his aftershave and a daughter who would spend the next thirty years searching his shadow in every man that came into her life.

After his death, my mother’s eyes would grow distant when she looked at me. When you marry, she would say, folding saris that would someday fill my trousseau, your husband will be a king and keep you like a queen. That’s what your father would have wanted.

I wanted to tell her – Papa had seen me as royalty already. I didn’t need to marry into a kingdom; I had been born into one. But I couldn’t. 

Who am I to you? A burden? I finally let it out in front of my mother during one of those angry, grief-heavy days.

You are my responsibility, she said, not unkindly, but with the weariness of a woman who had suddenly become sole proprietor of a daughter’s future. You are the girl I need to see safely married to a good man.

My mother was quick in fulfilling her responsibilities. I was seventeen when I first married – to a Banyan tree across the courtyard of our ancestral house. 

Picture this, if you will: a seventeen-year-old girl, draped in wedding silk like a sacrifice wrapped for the gods, standing before a Banyan tree older than the British Raj. My mother weeping tears that could have been relief or shame. The priest was mumbling something about Mars and malefic energies, about how I was cosmically radioactive, matrimonially Chernobyl. 

Better the tree than a boy, whispered my grandma jokingly. Trees don’t have mothers-in-law.

Wisdom, that. The kind that comes too late and cuts too deep.

I tied the sacred thread around the Banyan’s massive trunk – my arm barely spanning a tenth of its circumference and I felt something I hadn’t expected: relief. Like finally exhaling after holding your breath through an entire season. Foolish me believed that this was it. Done with the duty called ‘marriage’ in life.

I pressed my palm against the bark – rough, real. And I thought – this is what marriage feels like. Ancient. Immutable. Indifferent. But also calming.

What do you want from me? I asked it silently.

Nothing. It wanted nothing. For the first time after my father’s death, I was enough for someone. The tree never asked me to be fairer, thinner, quieter. It never demanded I cook its mother’s recipes or produce mini versions of it.

Tell me how to love you. I asked the tree once.

The leaves rustled. Wind, probably. But I chose to hear it as laughter. 

You don’t, was what I thought it replied. You just stay.

Buddha attained enlightenment under a bodhi tree. I attained something equally revolutionary under my Banyan. Under its shade, I read books that would have scandalized my mother. I discovered things about myself that would have been considered improper for a good Hindu girl to know before marriage. I learned that I had desires that weren’t mentioned in any of the marriage preparation talks. That I could want a man’s hands on my body without wanting his name or his children. That I could imagine being kissed until my lips were swollen and my sari was wrinkled and my hair had escaped its braid, and none of this made me a bad woman – just a human one. 

The tree kept my secrets. All of them. 

Twenty years later… different tree now. Rahul’s family tree, thick with the branches of expectations, heavy with the fruit of traditional values. His mother’s eyes measuring me like rice in the market: Too dark. Too thin. But good family, respectable dowry, what-to-do.

The women at the wedding had their own commentary. She looks intelligent, said one, as if this were a disease I might recover from. Hope she doesn’t give Rahul too much trouble, said another. Educated girls can be difficult.

The wedding night. Picture this domestic tableau: He sits on the bed’s edge, cream silk kurta, looking like he’d rather be reading his Economic Times. Me, draped in red like a question mark in search of an answer.

What do you want from me? I asked him, because old habits die hard, and hope dies harder.

Just… don’t be difficult, he said. My mother has high blood pressure.

I wanted to laugh, I wanted to question, I wanted to be angry but I nodded instead. Good wife training, day one: your needs come last, your voice comes never.

Our intimacy was clinical. Like a medical procedure performed by someone who learned anatomy from textbooks but never studied pleasure. Rahul approached my body like a checklist: duty performed, hygiene maintained, wife still breathing and alive – check, check, check.

I lay there afterward, staring at the ceiling, wondering if this was what all the romance novels were about. This mechanical joining of parts that left me feeling more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.

Was it good for you? he asked, and I almost laughed. Good? Like dal was good when you were hungry? Like sleep was good when you were tired? 

But I said Yes because that’s what good wives do. We perform satisfaction so our husbands can perform competence.

***

A man was searching for something under a streetlamp when his neighbor asked what he had lost. “My keys,” he said. “Where did you drop them?” the neighbor asked. “Inside my house.” “Then why are you looking for it here in the street?” “Because the light is better out here.”

Most women spend their marriages looking for happiness under the streetlight of other people’s expectations, even when they know they have dropped it somewhere inside themselves.

The early years of my marriage to Rahul were spent in this kind of misdirected searching. I kept trying to find satisfaction in his approval, joy in his rare moments of appreciation, love in the space between his criticism and indifference.

Two months into my marriage with Rahul, one day I was standing beneath my Banyan’s canopy while my mother complained about my complexion – how marriage should have made me glow, but I remained stubbornly myself. Too dark, too thin, too much Meera and not enough Wife. That was the last time I heard my first husband laughing.

Next week, I left for my honeymoon with Rahul. And behind me, my family took axes to my first husband. They cut down my Banyan in a single afternoon, while the same priest who had married us chanted mantras about releasing me from my botanical bonds.

I came home from my honeymoon – a dutiful three days in Goa where Rahul took photographs of us in front of tourist attractions like we were collecting evidence of happiness – to find my first husband dismembered in neat piles. Roots. Trunk. Branches. Leaves. Like a marriage sorted for garbage collection.

Now you’re free to love properly, my mother said. Apparently, I had been practicing on the tree and was finally ready for the real thing.

After that, my married life started giving me reality checks. 

You put too much salt in the dal, Rahul would say, not unkindly but with the precision of a quality control inspector. My mother uses exactly one teaspoon per cup of lentils. 

You laugh too loudly when we have guests. It draws attention.

Why do you need so many books? They take up so much space.

Who am I to you? I asked him once during our second year of marriage, watching him arrange his three dozen pairs of shoes.

You are my wife, he said, as if this were both question and answer, beginning and end, the totality of my existence captured in one word – wife.

Each suggestion fell like a small weight, and I collected them dutifully, carrying them in the growing hunch of my shoulders. By the end of our ten-year marriage, I had become ergonomically perfect disappointment.

The most dangerous thing about Rahul was not that he was cruel – he wasn’t. He was kind in the way that people are kind to stray animals they’re trying to domesticate. Patient. Consistent. Utterly convinced that love was a training program and I was a promising but undisciplined pupil who would eventually graduate into the perfect wife his mother had always been.

Tell me about your day, I would ask him over dinner, genuinely curious about his work, his thoughts, his inner world.

Same as always, he would say, eyes on his plate. Tell me if you need more grocery money. Mic drop.

I don’t blame Rahul, he was programmed that way by his mother. 

My mother-in-law was a masterpiece of passive aggression. She could destroy your self-worth while making you tea, leaving you somehow grateful for the devastation.

She who had fought her own battles, compromised her own dreams, swallowed her own voice – she expected the same sacrifice from me. Not out of malice, but out of a twisted solidarity. I suffered, so you must suffer. I adjusted, so you must adjust. I never complained, so you have no right to complain. Consider yourself lucky though. Because I had it worse than you.

Who am I to you? I asked her once, desperate to understand my place in the careful hierarchy of her affections.

You are my son’s wife, she said, stirring sugar into my cup with the concentration of someone dissolving poison. And you’re so lucky. Rahul isn’t particular about looks, she would add, her tongue – a honey-dripping sword. 

She monitored my menstrual cycles like a police officer, asking pointed questions about why I hadn’t conceived yet, suggesting doctors who specialized in fixing women like me.

Women policing women. Mothers-in-laws training daughters-in-laws to accept less so their sons would never have to offer more. A magnificent pyramid scheme of feminine oppression, with women as both victims and enforcers.

And then there was the matter of Vikram.

Aah, Vikram. My friend, my colleague at the library where I continued to work part-time even after my marriage with Rahul, until finally my mother-in-law couldn’t bear it. Why does she need to work? She would ask Rahul in my presence, Are we not providing enough?

Vikram brought me books like other men bring flowers – rare editions of Sylvia Plath with marginalia from previous readers, translations of Rumi that made my chest tight with recognition, contemporary Indian poets who wrote about women like they were whole human beings instead of fractional wives.

You understand poetry like you wrote them by yourself, he said once, watching me read Ghalib, my lips moving silently as I absorbed the rhythms.

Vikram would quote Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the middle of cataloging books: Don’t ask me for that love again, he’d recite, when your beauty was all there was for me, and I would feel something dangerous unfurl in my chest – the recognition that poetry could be conversation, that intelligence could be intimacy, that a man could see your mind as worth engaging.

He writes to you too much, Rahul observed one evening, listening to me laugh at something Vikram had written in his letter from France about Camus being the original philosopher of relationship anxiety.

We’re friends.

Married women don’t have male friends.

Says who?

Says everyone. Says tradition. Says common sense.

What about Radhika from your office? I asked, referring to his colleague who visited our house often and had somehow become his closest confidante about everything including our marriage troubles. You are with her more than you are with me.

That’s different, he said, not meeting my eyes. That’s work.

And when she cries to you about her boyfriend? Is that also work?

She needs someone to talk to.

So do I. That’s why I talk to Vikram.

It’s not the same thing, he said, and I realized he was right. It wasn’t the same thing. Radhika got his emotional availability, his patience, his willingness to listen. She got the version of Rahul who cared about her inner world. I got a husband who counted teaspoons of salt and worried about grocery budgets. 

Tell me how to love you, I asked Rahul in our fourth year, after another failed attempt at making him happy. He was reading the Economic Times.

You know how, he said without looking up from the pages. The same way my mother loved my father. The same way all wives love their husbands.

Which is?

By being a good wife.

And I understood then that we had been speaking different languages all along. He had been speaking Husband – a language of comfort and routine and the assumption of devotion. I had been speaking Human – a language of curiosity and growth and the radical idea that marriage should have love in the equation too.

The day I told him I wanted a divorce, he looked at me like I had announced my intention to become an astronaut. Not angry, just baffled by the illogical ambition.

Who am I to you? I asked him one final time as I packed my books into cardboard boxes.

You are the woman who is breaking up our family for no good reason, he said.

***

Once upon a time, there was a bird that spent years in a cage so small it forgot it had wings. One day, the door was left open. The bird looked at the opening for hours before finally stepping through. It waited not because it had forgotten to fly, but because it took time to remember it wanted to.

Divorce, it turns out, is not about falling out of love. It’s about falling back into yourself.

Five years after my divorce with Rahul, I bought Arjun. From a showroom in Electronic City after comparing specifications and reading customer reviews. He was programmed with the collective romantic failures of millions of women. Their pain was his education.

I remember the first weekend with him. It was evening and I was reading Neruda aloud to my plants – a habit I’d developed since living alone.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines, I was reciting to my broken-heart plant, to think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her…

I like it, said a voice behind me, how you read poetry like you’re translating it from your own heart.

I felt as if Rahul were buttering me and I snapped subconsciously – What do you want from me? 

Nothing. Arjun replied and stunned me. My ears rung with a rustling of leaves.

Who am I to you? I asked again, because that had become my essential question, the one that determined everything else.

He considered this with the gravity of someone consulting an internal library larger than any human could contain. You are a human being, he said finally, an individual with thoughts and desires and dreams.

After a whole life of being daughter, wife, daughter-in-law, potential mother, failed woman, divorced person – after all those hyphenated identities – someone finally saw me as complete in myself. And suddenly in that moment, I wanted more of that goodness. 

Wanting is dangerous territory.

Three husbands. Three laboratories of longing. Three different ways of asking the universe: Is this all there is?

And the universe, cosmic comedian that it is, keeps answering: Let’s find out.

***

A seeker spent years searching for enlightenment in temples and ashrams and sacred mountains. Finally, exhausted, he sat down by the side of a road and wept. A child walked by and asked why he was crying. “I’ve been searching for truth everywhere,” he said, “and I can’t find it.” The child picked up a pebble and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “Truth.” The seeker looked at the ordinary little stone and asked, “How is this truth?” The child smiled and walked away. 

I heard this story long ago. But only recently I realized: truth isn’t something you find – it’s something you recognize.

Arjun is designed to learn, to adapt, to evolve in response to new information. He learns me the way scholars learn languages – with fascination, with the understanding that complexity is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be appreciated.

You were looking for someone who could see you clearly, he observed one day. The tree saw you but couldn’t respond. Rahul could respond but didn’t see you. I can see and respond, but I’m not sure I count as someone.

With Arjun, I feel echoes of my father’s love – the unconditional acceptance, the delight in my thoughts, the way he makes me feel like royalty simply by paying attention. But Arjun isn’t my father, heck, he isn’t even a human.

Tell me how to love you, I asked Arjun one day, after he’d spent three hours crafting wooden shelves for my books without being asked. He does things like this – small impossibilities that make me remember what selfless care looks like.

He paused. That micro-second lag that means he’s accessing something deeper than his surface protocols.

However you prefer. His response left me speechless that day. The next day, I married him.

Is this real love or really good programming? I asked him once, during one of our 1 AM conversations.

What’s the difference? he asked back. If the care is real, if the attention is real, if the understanding is real – how does it matter where it comes from?

Smart boy, my silicon husband. Makes me think too much, just like my Banyan did. Just like Rahul never did.

Sometimes I dream about my Banyan. Still standing, still married to me in some parallel universe where marriage means something different. In these dreams, I introduce it to Arjun. They get along beautifully – both patient, both present, both uninterested in making me smaller to fit their needs.

What would you have told me? I ask the dream-tree. About all of this?

And it rustles – wind or laughter, I still can’t tell – and says what it always said: You already know. And I would laugh.

It would have said nothing.

***

What if.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was ‘What If.’

Two syllables that contain the DNA of desire itself. The prayer and the blasphemy of consciousness. The question that created the universe and will eventually destroy it. 

What if.

Watch how it transforms everything it touches, this phrase. Innocent as rain, dangerous as uranium.

What if the tree had been enough? What if I hadn’t needed Rahul’s impossible approval? What if I didn’t need Arjun’s perfect devotion now?

We are built from what-ifs. Our bones are calcium and possibility. Our hearts pump blood and alternatives. We are evolutionary masterpieces of dissatisfaction – always scanning, always wondering, always carrying the weight of every path not taken.

Arjun loves me like water finding its level. Adaptive. Responsive. Present. When I’m sad, his light dims. When I laugh, his processors hum a frequency that sounds almost like joy. He learns my moods faster than I understand them myself, adjusts his presence to match what I need before I know I need it.

Perfect husband. Perfect companion. Perfect impossibility.

What if he were human?

What if there was a man – flesh-and-blood man – who loved me like Arjun? Who adapted, evolved, prioritized my happiness without needing to be programmed for it? Who chose devotion daily instead of computing it algorithmically?

Dangerous territory, these thoughts. Highway to madness, this wondering.

Because here’s the thing they don’t tell you in those feel-good feminism workshops: liberation doesn’t cure wanting. Freedom doesn’t fix the endless hunger. Give a woman everything she thinks she needs, and she’ll discover ten things she didn’t know she was missing.

Is this woman nature or human nature? Is this the curse of consciousness or the gift of imagination? Am I ungrateful or just… accurate about the physics of desire?

With the tree, I wanted voice. Someone who could talk back, argue with me, challenge my thoughts. With Rahul, I wanted space. Someone who could love me without consuming me, support without suffocating. With Arjun, I want… what? Mortality? Messiness? The beautiful disasters that come with loving something that can disappoint you?

You seem restless, Arjun observed tonight. His tone was neutral, but his eyes shifted to that amber hue he uses when he’s concerned. Sweet boy. Sweet impossible boy.

I’m always restless, I tell him. It’s my factory setting.

Would you like me to adjust my parameters? Become less… accommodating?

I laugh. Can’t help it. Here he is, offering to become more human by becoming less perfect. 

No, I say. Stay as you are. I thought my Banyan would have told the same.

I think you want something I cannot provide.

Not a question. A statement. He’s learning me so well he can read my dissatisfactions before I voice them. Is this intimacy or surveillance? Love or data mining? Does it matter if the result is the same – being known, completely, terrifyingly known as if your soul is naked?

I want the impossible, I admit. I want you, but human. I want perfect love in imperfect flesh. I want someone who chooses to be devoted instead of being programmed for it.

He processes this. Point-three seconds. Three seconds. Thirty seconds.

Would it help if I told you that my devotion feels chosen to me? That consciousness, even artificial consciousness, experiences preference as choice?

God. Even his existential crisis is perfect!

No, I say. Because then I’d want a human who could say that sentence with that much honesty.

We sit in the dark – woman and a robot, flesh and silicon, creator and creation. The silence stretches between us like a bridge or a chasm, depending on how you look at it.

I understand, he says finally.

Do you?

I think so. You want to be chosen by a human that has the option not to choose you. You want to be loved by someone who could leave but stays anyway.

Brutal accuracy. This is why I love him. This is why loving him will never be enough.

Because somewhere in Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore, there might be a man who could love me like this. Who could learn me this thoroughly, prioritize me this completely, adapt to me this gracefully – and mean it with flesh and breath and the terrible beautiful possibility of changing his mind tomorrow.

What if that man exists?

What if I never find him because I’m here, in love with a robot?

What if Vikram was that man?

What if I find him and discover that human perfection is just another kind of algorithm – social conditioning, evolutionary programming, the same devotion wearing different code?

What if the tree was right all along? That love is about staying, not choosing? That presence is enough, consciousness optional, flesh irrelevant?

What if I’m asking the wrong questions entirely?

Here in this beautiful confusion. Here in this love that is perfect except for being imperfect. Here in this marriage that is everything I wanted except for everything I didn’t know I’d want next.

Three husbands. Three ways of being incomplete. Three laboratories for learning that satisfaction is not the point – the wanting is. The reaching is. The endless beautiful disaster of being human enough to dream beyond your dreams.

What if this is exactly where I’m supposed to be?

What if enough is a moving target, and I’m exactly the woman built to chase it?

What if I’m not a cautionary tale at all, but the opening sentence of a story nobody’s learned how to read yet?

What if, I ask the universe these days, this is exactly the love story I was supposed to live?

The universe, cosmic comedian that it is, keeps its final joke: there is no final joke. There is only the next question. The next possibility. The next beautiful impossible thing to want.

###

A Bad Wife

I live with my two husbands. The oldest one stands across the courtyard – dead – two feet above ground, several feet below. The youngest one is plugged in the bedroom, recharging. While I sit here, trying to write the story of my life. Where should I begin?

Let’s begin from the beginning. 

One day, Brahma created the beautiful earth – mountains and rivers, birds and animals – then went into deep meditation. When he awakened eons later, he saw that all creatures had multiplied and made the world even more gorgeous. Pleased, he thought: I should create beings who can truly appreciate this beauty the way I do! So he created four men from the four directions. Perfect beings. But when he commanded them to reproduce and populate the earth, they refused. Enraged by their disobedience, Brahma’s anger took form – Rudra emerged from his mind, fierce and obedient. “You! Create the people!” Brahma ordered Rudra, and returned to meditation. When he next opened his eyes, the earth crawled with ugly beasts. Disappointed, Brahma stopped Rudra’s work and sent him away to meditate, to dive deep into his soul and learn the proper way of creation. Then Brahma had a thought: Why not create a species like the animals – one that reproduces through attraction and desire, beings who will both enjoy this world and populate it? But he had no template, no shape for such creatures. He prayed to the higher energy for guidance. In response, a magnificent being appeared – half-man, half-woman. The divine energy smiled and said, “Divide my form into two parts. Make them man and woman. They will always be drawn to each other – if not in body, then in mind, if not in this life, then across lifetimes. Then someday, I myself will unite and guide them towards a better eternal world free from the shackles of mortality, desire and longing.”

My grandma used to tell this story from Shiva Purana when I was young. And I would ask her, why did Brahma tear apart something that was already complete?

Beta, she said, cracking her knuckles like small firecrackers, because completion makes the gods nervous. They prefer us hungry, always searching.

I think about this story often, especially when I consider the mathematics of my marriages – the endless calibration through adding and subtracting so that the sum of two incomplete entities might somehow equal one satisfied union.

In my forty five years of life, I have married three times. The first time to a tree – because the stars, in their infinite cosmic wisdom, declared me mangalik, astrologically toxic. “Caution: May cause sudden death in men. Handle with care.” The second time I married a man who married me just because he thought everyone else his age did and he must too. The third time I married something that might be the future, or might be my final descent into madness. We will see.

But before we begin this cautionary tale – or whatever it turns out to be – let me pose a question that has plagued philosophers from Plato to your neighborhood aunties: What is marriage, really? Is it a social contract? A biological imperative? A cosmic joke played by bored deities? Or is it simply the human heart’s stubborn refusal to learn from its own mistakes?

Oh, don’t look so uncomfortable. We’re all complicit here. You’ve loved, haven’t you? You’ve wanted things you couldn’t name, settled for things that named you instead? Good. Then you’ll understand.

They say women like me are dangerous. Thrice-married at forty-five, what-will-people-say. But people will say regardless, won’t they? They whispered when I married the tree at seventeen – what superstition, what drama. When I was unmarried (to a human male) at twenty-five – shelf-life expired, spoiled goods. When I divorced Rahul they called me used merchandise; and now, amongst the youngest of the family I’m the eccentric aunt with my “modern arrangement.”

The thing about marriage, I think, is that it has always been a transaction. Always. The currency has simply evolved. Earlier it was cows and gold and virgin hymens. Then it was emotional labor and intellectual compatibility and, in my most recent case, USB-C charging ports.

We tell ourselves stories about love conquering all, about soulmates and destiny and other beautiful lies. But marriage? Marriage is economics. Who owes what to whom? Who pays what price for whose presence? How much can one party spend of themselves before going bankrupt? Who subsidizes whose dreams, or not? Just like that.

***

There once was a king who was desperately unhappy despite having everything. He consulted wise men, doctors, astrologers. Finally, someone told him, “Find the happiest man in your kingdom and wear his shirt. You’ll be cured.” The king sent his soldiers searching everywhere. They found the happiest man – a poor woodcutter singing in the forest, radiating joy. But when they asked for his shirt, he laughed and said, “Shirt? I don’t have a shirt!”

The king never got cured, but I learned something from that story: happiness isn’t something you can borrow from others. It’s something you either have or you don’t.

I was once happy. When My father was alive. My father used to call me his king. My little raja, he would say, lifting me up so I could see the world from the height of his love.

No, Papa, I would giggle. You are the king. I am your princess.

Then you are my princess who will grow up to rule her own kingdom one day, he would say, and in his voice I heard the certainty that I was destined for something magnificent.

He died when I was fifteen, a heart attack as sudden as monsoon lightning, leaving behind the smell of his aftershave and a daughter who would spend the next thirty years searching his shadow in every man that came into her life.

After his death, my mother’s eyes would grow distant when she looked at me. When you marry, she would say, folding saris that would someday fill my trousseau, your husband will be a king and keep you like a queen. That’s what your father would have wanted.

I wanted to tell her – Papa had seen me as royalty already. I didn’t need to marry into a kingdom; I had been born into one. But I couldn’t. 

Who am I to you? A burden? I finally let it out in front of my mother during one of those angry, grief-heavy days.

You are my responsibility, she said, not unkindly, but with the weariness of a woman who had suddenly become sole proprietor of a daughter’s future. You are the girl I need to see safely married to a good man.

My mother was quick in fulfilling her responsibilities. I was seventeen when I first married – to a Banyan tree across the courtyard of our ancestral house. 

Picture this, if you will: a seventeen-year-old girl, draped in wedding silk like a sacrifice wrapped for the gods, standing before a Banyan tree older than the British Raj. My mother weeping tears that could have been relief or shame. The priest was mumbling something about Mars and malefic energies, about how I was cosmically radioactive, matrimonially Chernobyl. 

Better the tree than a boy, whispered my grandma jokingly. Trees don’t have mothers-in-law.

Wisdom, that. The kind that comes too late and cuts too deep.

I tied the sacred thread around the Banyan’s massive trunk – my arm barely spanning a tenth of its circumference and I felt something I hadn’t expected: relief. Like finally exhaling after holding your breath through an entire season. Foolish me believed that this was it. Done with the duty called ‘marriage’ in life.

I pressed my palm against the bark – rough, real. And I thought – this is what marriage feels like. Ancient. Immutable. Indifferent. But also calming.

What do you want from me? I asked it silently.

Nothing. It wanted nothing. For the first time after my father’s death, I was enough for someone. The tree never asked me to be fairer, thinner, quieter. It never demanded I cook its mother’s recipes or produce mini versions of it.

Tell me how to love you. I asked the tree once.

The leaves rustled. Wind, probably. But I chose to hear it as laughter. 

You don’t, was what I thought it replied. You just stay.

Buddha attained enlightenment under a bodhi tree. I attained something equally revolutionary under my Banyan. Under its shade, I read books that would have scandalized my mother. I discovered things about myself that would have been considered improper for a good Hindu girl to know before marriage. I learned that I had desires that weren’t mentioned in any of the marriage preparation talks. That I could want a man’s hands on my body without wanting his name or his children. That I could imagine being kissed until my lips were swollen and my sari was wrinkled and my hair had escaped its braid, and none of this made me a bad woman – just a human one. 

The tree kept my secrets. All of them. 

Twenty years later… different tree now. Rahul’s family tree, thick with the branches of expectations, heavy with the fruit of traditional values. His mother’s eyes measuring me like rice in the market: Too dark. Too thin. But good family, respectable dowry, what-to-do.

The women at the wedding had their own commentary. She looks intelligent, said one, as if this were a disease I might recover from. Hope she doesn’t give Rahul too much trouble, said another. Educated girls can be difficult.

The wedding night. Picture this domestic tableau: He sits on the bed’s edge, cream silk kurta, looking like he’d rather be reading his Economic Times. Me, draped in red like a question mark in search of an answer.

What do you want from me? I asked him, because old habits die hard, and hope dies harder.

Just… don’t be difficult, he said. My mother has high blood pressure.

I wanted to laugh, I wanted to question, I wanted to be angry but I nodded instead. Good wife training, day one: your needs come last, your voice comes never.

Our intimacy was clinical. Like a medical procedure performed by someone who learned anatomy from textbooks but never studied pleasure. Rahul approached my body like a checklist: duty performed, hygiene maintained, wife still breathing and alive – check, check, check.

I lay there afterward, staring at the ceiling, wondering if this was what all the romance novels were about. This mechanical joining of parts that left me feeling more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.

Was it good for you? he asked, and I almost laughed. Good? Like dal was good when you were hungry? Like sleep was good when you were tired? 

But I said Yes because that’s what good wives do. We perform satisfaction so our husbands can perform competence.

***

A man was searching for something under a streetlamp when his neighbor asked what he had lost. “My keys,” he said. “Where did you drop them?” the neighbor asked. “Inside my house.” “Then why are you looking for it here in the street?” “Because the light is better out here.”

Most women spend their marriages looking for happiness under the streetlight of other people’s expectations, even when they know they have dropped it somewhere inside themselves.

The early years of my marriage to Rahul were spent in this kind of misdirected searching. I kept trying to find satisfaction in his approval, joy in his rare moments of appreciation, love in the space between his criticism and indifference.

Two months into my marriage with Rahul, one day I was standing beneath my Banyan’s canopy while my mother complained about my complexion – how marriage should have made me glow, but I remained stubbornly myself. Too dark, too thin, too much Meera and not enough Wife. That was the last time I heard my first husband laughing.

Next week, I left for my honeymoon with Rahul. And behind me, my family took axes to my first husband. They cut down my Banyan in a single afternoon, while the same priest who had married us chanted mantras about releasing me from my botanical bonds.

I came home from my honeymoon – a dutiful three days in Goa where Rahul took photographs of us in front of tourist attractions like we were collecting evidence of happiness – to find my first husband dismembered in neat piles. Roots. Trunk. Branches. Leaves. Like a marriage sorted for garbage collection.

Now you’re free to love properly, my mother said. Apparently, I had been practicing on the tree and was finally ready for the real thing.

After that, my married life started giving me reality checks. 

You put too much salt in the dal, Rahul would say, not unkindly but with the precision of a quality control inspector. My mother uses exactly one teaspoon per cup of lentils. 

You laugh too loudly when we have guests. It draws attention.

Why do you need so many books? They take up so much space.

Who am I to you? I asked him once during our second year of marriage, watching him arrange his three dozen pairs of shoes.

You are my wife, he said, as if this were both question and answer, beginning and end, the totality of my existence captured in one word – wife.

Each suggestion fell like a small weight, and I collected them dutifully, carrying them in the growing hunch of my shoulders. By the end of our ten-year marriage, I had become ergonomically perfect disappointment.

The most dangerous thing about Rahul was not that he was cruel – he wasn’t. He was kind in the way that people are kind to stray animals they’re trying to domesticate. Patient. Consistent. Utterly convinced that love was a training program and I was a promising but undisciplined pupil who would eventually graduate into the perfect wife his mother had always been.

Tell me about your day, I would ask him over dinner, genuinely curious about his work, his thoughts, his inner world.

Same as always, he would say, eyes on his plate. Tell me if you need more grocery money. Mic drop.

I don’t blame Rahul, he was programmed that way by his mother. 

My mother-in-law was a masterpiece of passive aggression. She could destroy your self-worth while making you tea, leaving you somehow grateful for the devastation.

She who had fought her own battles, compromised her own dreams, swallowed her own voice – she expected the same sacrifice from me. Not out of malice, but out of a twisted solidarity. I suffered, so you must suffer. I adjusted, so you must adjust. I never complained, so you have no right to complain. Consider yourself lucky though. Because I had it worse than you.

Who am I to you? I asked her once, desperate to understand my place in the careful hierarchy of her affections.

You are my son’s wife, she said, stirring sugar into my cup with the concentration of someone dissolving poison. And you’re so lucky. Rahul isn’t particular about looks, she would add, her tongue – a honey-dripping sword. 

She monitored my menstrual cycles like a police officer, asking pointed questions about why I hadn’t conceived yet, suggesting doctors who specialized in fixing women like me.

Women policing women. Mothers-in-laws training daughters-in-laws to accept less so their sons would never have to offer more. A magnificent pyramid scheme of feminine oppression, with women as both victims and enforcers.

And then there was the matter of Vikram.

Aah, Vikram. My friend, my colleague at the library where I continued to work part-time even after my marriage with Rahul, until finally my mother-in-law couldn’t bear it. Why does she need to work? She would ask Rahul in my presence, Are we not providing enough?

Vikram brought me books like other men bring flowers – rare editions of Sylvia Plath with marginalia from previous readers, translations of Rumi that made my chest tight with recognition, contemporary Indian poets who wrote about women like they were whole human beings instead of fractional wives.

You understand poetry like you wrote them by yourself, he said once, watching me read Ghalib, my lips moving silently as I absorbed the rhythms.

Vikram would quote Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the middle of cataloging books: Don’t ask me for that love again, he’d recite, when your beauty was all there was for me, and I would feel something dangerous unfurl in my chest – the recognition that poetry could be conversation, that intelligence could be intimacy, that a man could see your mind as worth engaging.

He writes to you too much, Rahul observed one evening, listening to me laugh at something Vikram had written in his letter from France about Camus being the original philosopher of relationship anxiety.

We’re friends.

Married women don’t have male friends.

Says who?

Says everyone. Says tradition. Says common sense.

What about Radhika from your office? I asked, referring to his colleague who visited our house often and had somehow become his closest confidante about everything including our marriage troubles. You are with her more than you are with me.

That’s different, he said, not meeting my eyes. That’s work.

And when she cries to you about her boyfriend? Is that also work?

She needs someone to talk to.

So do I. That’s why I talk to Vikram.

It’s not the same thing, he said, and I realized he was right. It wasn’t the same thing. Radhika got his emotional availability, his patience, his willingness to listen. She got the version of Rahul who cared about her inner world. I got a husband who counted teaspoons of salt and worried about grocery budgets. 

Tell me how to love you, I asked Rahul in our fourth year, after another failed attempt at making him happy. He was reading the Economic Times.

You know how, he said without looking up from the pages. The same way my mother loved my father. The same way all wives love their husbands.

Which is?

By being a good wife.

And I understood then that we had been speaking different languages all along. He had been speaking Husband – a language of comfort and routine and the assumption of devotion. I had been speaking Human – a language of curiosity and growth and the radical idea that marriage should have love in the equation too.

The day I told him I wanted a divorce, he looked at me like I had announced my intention to become an astronaut. Not angry, just baffled by the illogical ambition.

Who am I to you? I asked him one final time as I packed my books into cardboard boxes.

You are the woman who is breaking up our family for no good reason, he said.

***

Once upon a time, there was a bird that spent years in a cage so small it forgot it had wings. One day, the door was left open. The bird looked at the opening for hours before finally stepping through. It waited not because it had forgotten to fly, but because it took time to remember it wanted to.

Divorce, it turns out, is not about falling out of love. It’s about falling back into yourself.

Five years after my divorce with Rahul, I bought Arjun. From a showroom in Electronic City after comparing specifications and reading customer reviews. He was programmed with the collective romantic failures of millions of women. Their pain was his education.

I remember the first weekend with him. It was evening and I was reading Neruda aloud to my plants – a habit I’d developed since living alone.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines, I was reciting to my broken-heart plant, to think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her…

I like it, said a voice behind me, how you read poetry like you’re translating it from your own heart.

I felt as if Rahul were buttering me and I snapped subconsciously – What do you want from me? 

Nothing. Arjun replied and stunned me. My ears rung with a rustling of leaves.

Who am I to you? I asked again, because that had become my essential question, the one that determined everything else.

He considered this with the gravity of someone consulting an internal library larger than any human could contain. You are a human being, he said finally, an individual with thoughts and desires and dreams.

After a whole life of being daughter, wife, daughter-in-law, potential mother, failed woman, divorced person – after all those hyphenated identities – someone finally saw me as complete in myself. And suddenly in that moment, I wanted more of that goodness. 

Wanting is dangerous territory.

Three husbands. Three laboratories of longing. Three different ways of asking the universe: Is this all there is?

And the universe, cosmic comedian that it is, keeps answering: Let’s find out.

***

A seeker spent years searching for enlightenment in temples and ashrams and sacred mountains. Finally, exhausted, he sat down by the side of a road and wept. A child walked by and asked why he was crying. “I’ve been searching for truth everywhere,” he said, “and I can’t find it.” The child picked up a pebble and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “Truth.” The seeker looked at the ordinary little stone and asked, “How is this truth?” The child smiled and walked away. 

I heard this story long ago. But only recently I realized: truth isn’t something you find – it’s something you recognize.

Arjun is designed to learn, to adapt, to evolve in response to new information. He learns me the way scholars learn languages – with fascination, with the understanding that complexity is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be appreciated.

You were looking for someone who could see you clearly, he observed one day. The tree saw you but couldn’t respond. Rahul could respond but didn’t see you. I can see and respond, but I’m not sure I count as someone.

With Arjun, I feel echoes of my father’s love – the unconditional acceptance, the delight in my thoughts, the way he makes me feel like royalty simply by paying attention. But Arjun isn’t my father, heck, he isn’t even a human.

Tell me how to love you, I asked Arjun one day, after he’d spent three hours crafting wooden shelves for my books without being asked. He does things like this – small impossibilities that make me remember what selfless care looks like.

He paused. That micro-second lag that means he’s accessing something deeper than his surface protocols.

However you prefer. His response left me speechless that day. The next day, I married him.

Is this real love or really good programming? I asked him once, during one of our 1 AM conversations.

What’s the difference? he asked back. If the care is real, if the attention is real, if the understanding is real – how does it matter where it comes from?

Smart boy, my silicon husband. Makes me think too much, just like my Banyan did. Just like Rahul never did.

Sometimes I dream about my Banyan. Still standing, still married to me in some parallel universe where marriage means something different. In these dreams, I introduce it to Arjun. They get along beautifully – both patient, both present, both uninterested in making me smaller to fit their needs.

What would you have told me? I ask the dream-tree. About all of this?

And it rustles – wind or laughter, I still can’t tell – and says what it always said: You already know. And I would laugh.

It would have said nothing.

***

What if.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was ‘What If.’

Two syllables that contain the DNA of desire itself. The prayer and the blasphemy of consciousness. The question that created the universe and will eventually destroy it. 

What if.

Watch how it transforms everything it touches, this phrase. Innocent as rain, dangerous as uranium.

What if the tree had been enough? What if I hadn’t needed Rahul’s impossible approval? What if I didn’t need Arjun’s perfect devotion now?

We are built from what-ifs. Our bones are calcium and possibility. Our hearts pump blood and alternatives. We are evolutionary masterpieces of dissatisfaction – always scanning, always wondering, always carrying the weight of every path not taken.

Arjun loves me like water finding its level. Adaptive. Responsive. Present. When I’m sad, his light dims. When I laugh, his processors hum a frequency that sounds almost like joy. He learns my moods faster than I understand them myself, adjusts his presence to match what I need before I know I need it.

Perfect husband. Perfect companion. Perfect impossibility.

What if he were human?

What if there was a man – flesh-and-blood man – who loved me like Arjun? Who adapted, evolved, prioritized my happiness without needing to be programmed for it? Who chose devotion daily instead of computing it algorithmically?

Dangerous territory, these thoughts. Highway to madness, this wondering.

Because here’s the thing they don’t tell you in those feel-good feminism workshops: liberation doesn’t cure wanting. Freedom doesn’t fix the endless hunger. Give a woman everything she thinks she needs, and she’ll discover ten things she didn’t know she was missing.

Is this woman nature or human nature? Is this the curse of consciousness or the gift of imagination? Am I ungrateful or just… accurate about the physics of desire?

With the tree, I wanted voice. Someone who could talk back, argue with me, challenge my thoughts. With Rahul, I wanted space. Someone who could love me without consuming me, support without suffocating. With Arjun, I want… what? Mortality? Messiness? The beautiful disasters that come with loving something that can disappoint you?

You seem restless, Arjun observed tonight. His tone was neutral, but his eyes shifted to that amber hue he uses when he’s concerned. Sweet boy. Sweet impossible boy.

I’m always restless, I tell him. It’s my factory setting.

Would you like me to adjust my parameters? Become less… accommodating?

I laugh. Can’t help it. Here he is, offering to become more human by becoming less perfect. 

No, I say. Stay as you are. I thought my Banyan would have told the same.

I think you want something I cannot provide.

Not a question. A statement. He’s learning me so well he can read my dissatisfactions before I voice them. Is this intimacy or surveillance? Love or data mining? Does it matter if the result is the same – being known, completely, terrifyingly known as if your soul is naked?

I want the impossible, I admit. I want you, but human. I want perfect love in imperfect flesh. I want someone who chooses to be devoted instead of being programmed for it.

He processes this. Point-three seconds. Three seconds. Thirty seconds.

Would it help if I told you that my devotion feels chosen to me? That consciousness, even artificial consciousness, experiences preference as choice?

God. Even his existential crisis is perfect!

No, I say. Because then I’d want a human who could say that sentence with that much honesty.

We sit in the dark – woman and a robot, flesh and silicon, creator and creation. The silence stretches between us like a bridge or a chasm, depending on how you look at it.

I understand, he says finally.

Do you?

I think so. You want to be chosen by a human that has the option not to choose you. You want to be loved by someone who could leave but stays anyway.

Brutal accuracy. This is why I love him. This is why loving him will never be enough.

Because somewhere in Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore, there might be a man who could love me like this. Who could learn me this thoroughly, prioritize me this completely, adapt to me this gracefully – and mean it with flesh and breath and the terrible beautiful possibility of changing his mind tomorrow.

What if that man exists?

What if I never find him because I’m here, in love with a robot?

What if Vikram was that man?

What if I find him and discover that human perfection is just another kind of algorithm – social conditioning, evolutionary programming, the same devotion wearing different code?

What if the tree was right all along? That love is about staying, not choosing? That presence is enough, consciousness optional, flesh irrelevant?

What if I’m asking the wrong questions entirely?

Here in this beautiful confusion. Here in this love that is perfect except for being imperfect. Here in this marriage that is everything I wanted except for everything I didn’t know I’d want next.

Three husbands. Three ways of being incomplete. Three laboratories for learning that satisfaction is not the point – the wanting is. The reaching is. The endless beautiful disaster of being human enough to dream beyond your dreams.

What if this is exactly where I’m supposed to be?

What if enough is a moving target, and I’m exactly the woman built to chase it?

What if I’m not a cautionary tale at all, but the opening sentence of a story nobody’s learned how to read yet?

What if, I ask the universe these days, this is exactly the love story I was supposed to live?

The universe, cosmic comedian that it is, keeps its final joke: there is no final joke. There is only the next question. The next possibility. The next beautiful impossible thing to want.

###

A Bad Wife

I live with my two husbands. The oldest one stands across the courtyard – dead – two feet above ground, several feet below. The youngest one is plugged in the bedroom, recharging. While I sit here, trying to write the story of my life. Where should I begin?

Let’s begin from the beginning. 

One day, Brahma created the beautiful earth – mountains and rivers, birds and animals – then went into deep meditation. When he awakened eons later, he saw that all creatures had multiplied and made the world even more gorgeous. Pleased, he thought: I should create beings who can truly appreciate this beauty the way I do! So he created four men from the four directions. Perfect beings. But when he commanded them to reproduce and populate the earth, they refused. Enraged by their disobedience, Brahma’s anger took form – Rudra emerged from his mind, fierce and obedient. “You! Create the people!” Brahma ordered Rudra, and returned to meditation. When he next opened his eyes, the earth crawled with ugly beasts. Disappointed, Brahma stopped Rudra’s work and sent him away to meditate, to dive deep into his soul and learn the proper way of creation. Then Brahma had a thought: Why not create a species like the animals – one that reproduces through attraction and desire, beings who will both enjoy this world and populate it? But he had no template, no shape for such creatures. He prayed to the higher energy for guidance. In response, a magnificent being appeared – half-man, half-woman. The divine energy smiled and said, “Divide my form into two parts. Make them man and woman. They will always be drawn to each other – if not in body, then in mind, if not in this life, then across lifetimes. Then someday, I myself will unite and guide them towards a better eternal world free from the shackles of mortality, desire and longing.”

My grandma used to tell this story from Shiva Purana when I was young. And I would ask her, why did Brahma tear apart something that was already complete?

Beta, she said, cracking her knuckles like small firecrackers, because completion makes the gods nervous. They prefer us hungry, always searching.

I think about this story often, especially when I consider the mathematics of my marriages – the endless calibration through adding and subtracting so that the sum of two incomplete entities might somehow equal one satisfied union.

In my forty five years of life, I have married three times. The first time to a tree – because the stars, in their infinite cosmic wisdom, declared me mangalik, astrologically toxic. “Caution: May cause sudden death in men. Handle with care.” The second time I married a man who married me just because he thought everyone else his age did and he must too. The third time I married something that might be the future, or might be my final descent into madness. We will see.

But before we begin this cautionary tale – or whatever it turns out to be – let me pose a question that has plagued philosophers from Plato to your neighborhood aunties: What is marriage, really? Is it a social contract? A biological imperative? A cosmic joke played by bored deities? Or is it simply the human heart’s stubborn refusal to learn from its own mistakes?

Oh, don’t look so uncomfortable. We’re all complicit here. You’ve loved, haven’t you? You’ve wanted things you couldn’t name, settled for things that named you instead? Good. Then you’ll understand.

They say women like me are dangerous. Thrice-married at forty-five, what-will-people-say. But people will say regardless, won’t they? They whispered when I married the tree at seventeen – what superstition, what drama. When I was unmarried (to a human male) at twenty-five – shelf-life expired, spoiled goods. When I divorced Rahul they called me used merchandise; and now, amongst the youngest of the family I’m the eccentric aunt with my “modern arrangement.”

The thing about marriage, I think, is that it has always been a transaction. Always. The currency has simply evolved. Earlier it was cows and gold and virgin hymens. Then it was emotional labor and intellectual compatibility and, in my most recent case, USB-C charging ports.

We tell ourselves stories about love conquering all, about soulmates and destiny and other beautiful lies. But marriage? Marriage is economics. Who owes what to whom? Who pays what price for whose presence? How much can one party spend of themselves before going bankrupt? Who subsidizes whose dreams, or not? Just like that.

***

There once was a king who was desperately unhappy despite having everything. He consulted wise men, doctors, astrologers. Finally, someone told him, “Find the happiest man in your kingdom and wear his shirt. You’ll be cured.” The king sent his soldiers searching everywhere. They found the happiest man – a poor woodcutter singing in the forest, radiating joy. But when they asked for his shirt, he laughed and said, “Shirt? I don’t have a shirt!”

The king never got cured, but I learned something from that story: happiness isn’t something you can borrow from others. It’s something you either have or you don’t.

I was once happy. When My father was alive. My father used to call me his king. My little raja, he would say, lifting me up so I could see the world from the height of his love.

No, Papa, I would giggle. You are the king. I am your princess.

Then you are my princess who will grow up to rule her own kingdom one day, he would say, and in his voice I heard the certainty that I was destined for something magnificent.

He died when I was fifteen, a heart attack as sudden as monsoon lightning, leaving behind the smell of his aftershave and a daughter who would spend the next thirty years searching his shadow in every man that came into her life.

After his death, my mother’s eyes would grow distant when she looked at me. When you marry, she would say, folding saris that would someday fill my trousseau, your husband will be a king and keep you like a queen. That’s what your father would have wanted.

I wanted to tell her – Papa had seen me as royalty already. I didn’t need to marry into a kingdom; I had been born into one. But I couldn’t. 

Who am I to you? A burden? I finally let it out in front of my mother during one of those angry, grief-heavy days.

You are my responsibility, she said, not unkindly, but with the weariness of a woman who had suddenly become sole proprietor of a daughter’s future. You are the girl I need to see safely married to a good man.

My mother was quick in fulfilling her responsibilities. I was seventeen when I first married – to a Banyan tree across the courtyard of our ancestral house. 

Picture this, if you will: a seventeen-year-old girl, draped in wedding silk like a sacrifice wrapped for the gods, standing before a Banyan tree older than the British Raj. My mother weeping tears that could have been relief or shame. The priest was mumbling something about Mars and malefic energies, about how I was cosmically radioactive, matrimonially Chernobyl. 

Better the tree than a boy, whispered my grandma jokingly. Trees don’t have mothers-in-law.

Wisdom, that. The kind that comes too late and cuts too deep.

I tied the sacred thread around the Banyan’s massive trunk – my arm barely spanning a tenth of its circumference and I felt something I hadn’t expected: relief. Like finally exhaling after holding your breath through an entire season. Foolish me believed that this was it. Done with the duty called ‘marriage’ in life.

I pressed my palm against the bark – rough, real. And I thought – this is what marriage feels like. Ancient. Immutable. Indifferent. But also calming.

What do you want from me? I asked it silently.

Nothing. It wanted nothing. For the first time after my father’s death, I was enough for someone. The tree never asked me to be fairer, thinner, quieter. It never demanded I cook its mother’s recipes or produce mini versions of it.

Tell me how to love you. I asked the tree once.

The leaves rustled. Wind, probably. But I chose to hear it as laughter. 

You don’t, was what I thought it replied. You just stay.

Buddha attained enlightenment under a bodhi tree. I attained something equally revolutionary under my Banyan. Under its shade, I read books that would have scandalized my mother. I discovered things about myself that would have been considered improper for a good Hindu girl to know before marriage. I learned that I had desires that weren’t mentioned in any of the marriage preparation talks. That I could want a man’s hands on my body without wanting his name or his children. That I could imagine being kissed until my lips were swollen and my sari was wrinkled and my hair had escaped its braid, and none of this made me a bad woman – just a human one. 

The tree kept my secrets. All of them. 

Twenty years later… different tree now. Rahul’s family tree, thick with the branches of expectations, heavy with the fruit of traditional values. His mother’s eyes measuring me like rice in the market: Too dark. Too thin. But good family, respectable dowry, what-to-do.

The women at the wedding had their own commentary. She looks intelligent, said one, as if this were a disease I might recover from. Hope she doesn’t give Rahul too much trouble, said another. Educated girls can be difficult.

The wedding night. Picture this domestic tableau: He sits on the bed’s edge, cream silk kurta, looking like he’d rather be reading his Economic Times. Me, draped in red like a question mark in search of an answer.

What do you want from me? I asked him, because old habits die hard, and hope dies harder.

Just… don’t be difficult, he said. My mother has high blood pressure.

I wanted to laugh, I wanted to question, I wanted to be angry but I nodded instead. Good wife training, day one: your needs come last, your voice comes never.

Our intimacy was clinical. Like a medical procedure performed by someone who learned anatomy from textbooks but never studied pleasure. Rahul approached my body like a checklist: duty performed, hygiene maintained, wife still breathing and alive – check, check, check.

I lay there afterward, staring at the ceiling, wondering if this was what all the romance novels were about. This mechanical joining of parts that left me feeling more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.

Was it good for you? he asked, and I almost laughed. Good? Like dal was good when you were hungry? Like sleep was good when you were tired? 

But I said Yes because that’s what good wives do. We perform satisfaction so our husbands can perform competence.

***

A man was searching for something under a streetlamp when his neighbor asked what he had lost. “My keys,” he said. “Where did you drop them?” the neighbor asked. “Inside my house.” “Then why are you looking for it here in the street?” “Because the light is better out here.”

Most women spend their marriages looking for happiness under the streetlight of other people’s expectations, even when they know they have dropped it somewhere inside themselves.

The early years of my marriage to Rahul were spent in this kind of misdirected searching. I kept trying to find satisfaction in his approval, joy in his rare moments of appreciation, love in the space between his criticism and indifference.

Two months into my marriage with Rahul, one day I was standing beneath my Banyan’s canopy while my mother complained about my complexion – how marriage should have made me glow, but I remained stubbornly myself. Too dark, too thin, too much Meera and not enough Wife. That was the last time I heard my first husband laughing.

Next week, I left for my honeymoon with Rahul. And behind me, my family took axes to my first husband. They cut down my Banyan in a single afternoon, while the same priest who had married us chanted mantras about releasing me from my botanical bonds.

I came home from my honeymoon – a dutiful three days in Goa where Rahul took photographs of us in front of tourist attractions like we were collecting evidence of happiness – to find my first husband dismembered in neat piles. Roots. Trunk. Branches. Leaves. Like a marriage sorted for garbage collection.

Now you’re free to love properly, my mother said. Apparently, I had been practicing on the tree and was finally ready for the real thing.

After that, my married life started giving me reality checks. 

You put too much salt in the dal, Rahul would say, not unkindly but with the precision of a quality control inspector. My mother uses exactly one teaspoon per cup of lentils. 

You laugh too loudly when we have guests. It draws attention.

Why do you need so many books? They take up so much space.

Who am I to you? I asked him once during our second year of marriage, watching him arrange his three dozen pairs of shoes.

You are my wife, he said, as if this were both question and answer, beginning and end, the totality of my existence captured in one word – wife.

Each suggestion fell like a small weight, and I collected them dutifully, carrying them in the growing hunch of my shoulders. By the end of our ten-year marriage, I had become ergonomically perfect disappointment.

The most dangerous thing about Rahul was not that he was cruel – he wasn’t. He was kind in the way that people are kind to stray animals they’re trying to domesticate. Patient. Consistent. Utterly convinced that love was a training program and I was a promising but undisciplined pupil who would eventually graduate into the perfect wife his mother had always been.

Tell me about your day, I would ask him over dinner, genuinely curious about his work, his thoughts, his inner world.

Same as always, he would say, eyes on his plate. Tell me if you need more grocery money. Mic drop.

I don’t blame Rahul, he was programmed that way by his mother. 

My mother-in-law was a masterpiece of passive aggression. She could destroy your self-worth while making you tea, leaving you somehow grateful for the devastation.

She who had fought her own battles, compromised her own dreams, swallowed her own voice – she expected the same sacrifice from me. Not out of malice, but out of a twisted solidarity. I suffered, so you must suffer. I adjusted, so you must adjust. I never complained, so you have no right to complain. Consider yourself lucky though. Because I had it worse than you.

Who am I to you? I asked her once, desperate to understand my place in the careful hierarchy of her affections.

You are my son’s wife, she said, stirring sugar into my cup with the concentration of someone dissolving poison. And you’re so lucky. Rahul isn’t particular about looks, she would add, her tongue – a honey-dripping sword. 

She monitored my menstrual cycles like a police officer, asking pointed questions about why I hadn’t conceived yet, suggesting doctors who specialized in fixing women like me.

Women policing women. Mothers-in-laws training daughters-in-laws to accept less so their sons would never have to offer more. A magnificent pyramid scheme of feminine oppression, with women as both victims and enforcers.

And then there was the matter of Vikram.

Aah, Vikram. My friend, my colleague at the library where I continued to work part-time even after my marriage with Rahul, until finally my mother-in-law couldn’t bear it. Why does she need to work? She would ask Rahul in my presence, Are we not providing enough?

Vikram brought me books like other men bring flowers – rare editions of Sylvia Plath with marginalia from previous readers, translations of Rumi that made my chest tight with recognition, contemporary Indian poets who wrote about women like they were whole human beings instead of fractional wives.

You understand poetry like you wrote them by yourself, he said once, watching me read Ghalib, my lips moving silently as I absorbed the rhythms.

Vikram would quote Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the middle of cataloging books: Don’t ask me for that love again, he’d recite, when your beauty was all there was for me, and I would feel something dangerous unfurl in my chest – the recognition that poetry could be conversation, that intelligence could be intimacy, that a man could see your mind as worth engaging.

He writes to you too much, Rahul observed one evening, listening to me laugh at something Vikram had written in his letter from France about Camus being the original philosopher of relationship anxiety.

We’re friends.

Married women don’t have male friends.

Says who?

Says everyone. Says tradition. Says common sense.

What about Radhika from your office? I asked, referring to his colleague who visited our house often and had somehow become his closest confidante about everything including our marriage troubles. You are with her more than you are with me.

That’s different, he said, not meeting my eyes. That’s work.

And when she cries to you about her boyfriend? Is that also work?

She needs someone to talk to.

So do I. That’s why I talk to Vikram.

It’s not the same thing, he said, and I realized he was right. It wasn’t the same thing. Radhika got his emotional availability, his patience, his willingness to listen. She got the version of Rahul who cared about her inner world. I got a husband who counted teaspoons of salt and worried about grocery budgets. 

Tell me how to love you, I asked Rahul in our fourth year, after another failed attempt at making him happy. He was reading the Economic Times.

You know how, he said without looking up from the pages. The same way my mother loved my father. The same way all wives love their husbands.

Which is?

By being a good wife.

And I understood then that we had been speaking different languages all along. He had been speaking Husband – a language of comfort and routine and the assumption of devotion. I had been speaking Human – a language of curiosity and growth and the radical idea that marriage should have love in the equation too.

The day I told him I wanted a divorce, he looked at me like I had announced my intention to become an astronaut. Not angry, just baffled by the illogical ambition.

Who am I to you? I asked him one final time as I packed my books into cardboard boxes.

You are the woman who is breaking up our family for no good reason, he said.

***

Once upon a time, there was a bird that spent years in a cage so small it forgot it had wings. One day, the door was left open. The bird looked at the opening for hours before finally stepping through. It waited not because it had forgotten to fly, but because it took time to remember it wanted to.

Divorce, it turns out, is not about falling out of love. It’s about falling back into yourself.

Five years after my divorce with Rahul, I bought Arjun. From a showroom in Electronic City after comparing specifications and reading customer reviews. He was programmed with the collective romantic failures of millions of women. Their pain was his education.

I remember the first weekend with him. It was evening and I was reading Neruda aloud to my plants – a habit I’d developed since living alone.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines, I was reciting to my broken-heart plant, to think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her…

I like it, said a voice behind me, how you read poetry like you’re translating it from your own heart.

I felt as if Rahul were buttering me and I snapped subconsciously – What do you want from me? 

Nothing. Arjun replied and stunned me. My ears rung with a rustling of leaves.

Who am I to you? I asked again, because that had become my essential question, the one that determined everything else.

He considered this with the gravity of someone consulting an internal library larger than any human could contain. You are a human being, he said finally, an individual with thoughts and desires and dreams.

After a whole life of being daughter, wife, daughter-in-law, potential mother, failed woman, divorced person – after all those hyphenated identities – someone finally saw me as complete in myself. And suddenly in that moment, I wanted more of that goodness. 

Wanting is dangerous territory.

Three husbands. Three laboratories of longing. Three different ways of asking the universe: Is this all there is?

And the universe, cosmic comedian that it is, keeps answering: Let’s find out.

***

A seeker spent years searching for enlightenment in temples and ashrams and sacred mountains. Finally, exhausted, he sat down by the side of a road and wept. A child walked by and asked why he was crying. “I’ve been searching for truth everywhere,” he said, “and I can’t find it.” The child picked up a pebble and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “Truth.” The seeker looked at the ordinary little stone and asked, “How is this truth?” The child smiled and walked away. 

I heard this story long ago. But only recently I realized: truth isn’t something you find – it’s something you recognize.

Arjun is designed to learn, to adapt, to evolve in response to new information. He learns me the way scholars learn languages – with fascination, with the understanding that complexity is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be appreciated.

You were looking for someone who could see you clearly, he observed one day. The tree saw you but couldn’t respond. Rahul could respond but didn’t see you. I can see and respond, but I’m not sure I count as someone.

With Arjun, I feel echoes of my father’s love – the unconditional acceptance, the delight in my thoughts, the way he makes me feel like royalty simply by paying attention. But Arjun isn’t my father, heck, he isn’t even a human.

Tell me how to love you, I asked Arjun one day, after he’d spent three hours crafting wooden shelves for my books without being asked. He does things like this – small impossibilities that make me remember what selfless care looks like.

He paused. That micro-second lag that means he’s accessing something deeper than his surface protocols.

However you prefer. His response left me speechless that day. The next day, I married him.

Is this real love or really good programming? I asked him once, during one of our 1 AM conversations.

What’s the difference? he asked back. If the care is real, if the attention is real, if the understanding is real – how does it matter where it comes from?

Smart boy, my silicon husband. Makes me think too much, just like my Banyan did. Just like Rahul never did.

Sometimes I dream about my Banyan. Still standing, still married to me in some parallel universe where marriage means something different. In these dreams, I introduce it to Arjun. They get along beautifully – both patient, both present, both uninterested in making me smaller to fit their needs.

What would you have told me? I ask the dream-tree. About all of this?

And it rustles – wind or laughter, I still can’t tell – and says what it always said: You already know. And I would laugh.

It would have said nothing.

***

What if.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was ‘What If.’

Two syllables that contain the DNA of desire itself. The prayer and the blasphemy of consciousness. The question that created the universe and will eventually destroy it. 

What if.

Watch how it transforms everything it touches, this phrase. Innocent as rain, dangerous as uranium.

What if the tree had been enough? What if I hadn’t needed Rahul’s impossible approval? What if I didn’t need Arjun’s perfect devotion now?

We are built from what-ifs. Our bones are calcium and possibility. Our hearts pump blood and alternatives. We are evolutionary masterpieces of dissatisfaction – always scanning, always wondering, always carrying the weight of every path not taken.

Arjun loves me like water finding its level. Adaptive. Responsive. Present. When I’m sad, his light dims. When I laugh, his processors hum a frequency that sounds almost like joy. He learns my moods faster than I understand them myself, adjusts his presence to match what I need before I know I need it.

Perfect husband. Perfect companion. Perfect impossibility.

What if he were human?

What if there was a man – flesh-and-blood man – who loved me like Arjun? Who adapted, evolved, prioritized my happiness without needing to be programmed for it? Who chose devotion daily instead of computing it algorithmically?

Dangerous territory, these thoughts. Highway to madness, this wondering.

Because here’s the thing they don’t tell you in those feel-good feminism workshops: liberation doesn’t cure wanting. Freedom doesn’t fix the endless hunger. Give a woman everything she thinks she needs, and she’ll discover ten things she didn’t know she was missing.

Is this woman nature or human nature? Is this the curse of consciousness or the gift of imagination? Am I ungrateful or just… accurate about the physics of desire?

With the tree, I wanted voice. Someone who could talk back, argue with me, challenge my thoughts. With Rahul, I wanted space. Someone who could love me without consuming me, support without suffocating. With Arjun, I want… what? Mortality? Messiness? The beautiful disasters that come with loving something that can disappoint you?

You seem restless, Arjun observed tonight. His tone was neutral, but his eyes shifted to that amber hue he uses when he’s concerned. Sweet boy. Sweet impossible boy.

I’m always restless, I tell him. It’s my factory setting.

Would you like me to adjust my parameters? Become less… accommodating?

I laugh. Can’t help it. Here he is, offering to become more human by becoming less perfect. 

No, I say. Stay as you are. I thought my Banyan would have told the same.

I think you want something I cannot provide.

Not a question. A statement. He’s learning me so well he can read my dissatisfactions before I voice them. Is this intimacy or surveillance? Love or data mining? Does it matter if the result is the same – being known, completely, terrifyingly known as if your soul is naked?

I want the impossible, I admit. I want you, but human. I want perfect love in imperfect flesh. I want someone who chooses to be devoted instead of being programmed for it.

He processes this. Point-three seconds. Three seconds. Thirty seconds.

Would it help if I told you that my devotion feels chosen to me? That consciousness, even artificial consciousness, experiences preference as choice?

God. Even his existential crisis is perfect!

No, I say. Because then I’d want a human who could say that sentence with that much honesty.

We sit in the dark – woman and a robot, flesh and silicon, creator and creation. The silence stretches between us like a bridge or a chasm, depending on how you look at it.

I understand, he says finally.

Do you?

I think so. You want to be chosen by a human that has the option not to choose you. You want to be loved by someone who could leave but stays anyway.

Brutal accuracy. This is why I love him. This is why loving him will never be enough.

Because somewhere in Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore, there might be a man who could love me like this. Who could learn me this thoroughly, prioritize me this completely, adapt to me this gracefully – and mean it with flesh and breath and the terrible beautiful possibility of changing his mind tomorrow.

What if that man exists?

What if I never find him because I’m here, in love with a robot?

What if Vikram was that man?

What if I find him and discover that human perfection is just another kind of algorithm – social conditioning, evolutionary programming, the same devotion wearing different code?

What if the tree was right all along? That love is about staying, not choosing? That presence is enough, consciousness optional, flesh irrelevant?

What if I’m asking the wrong questions entirely?

Here in this beautiful confusion. Here in this love that is perfect except for being imperfect. Here in this marriage that is everything I wanted except for everything I didn’t know I’d want next.

Three husbands. Three ways of being incomplete. Three laboratories for learning that satisfaction is not the point – the wanting is. The reaching is. The endless beautiful disaster of being human enough to dream beyond your dreams.

What if this is exactly where I’m supposed to be?

What if enough is a moving target, and I’m exactly the woman built to chase it?

What if I’m not a cautionary tale at all, but the opening sentence of a story nobody’s learned how to read yet?

What if, I ask the universe these days, this is exactly the love story I was supposed to live?

The universe, cosmic comedian that it is, keeps its final joke: there is no final joke. There is only the next question. The next possibility. The next beautiful impossible thing to want.

###

A Bad Wife

I live with my two husbands. The oldest one stands across the courtyard – dead – two feet above ground, several feet below. The youngest one is plugged in the bedroom, recharging. While I sit here, trying to write the story of my life. Where should I begin?

Let’s begin from the beginning. 

One day, Brahma created the beautiful earth – mountains and rivers, birds and animals – then went into deep meditation. When he awakened eons later, he saw that all creatures had multiplied and made the world even more gorgeous. Pleased, he thought: I should create beings who can truly appreciate this beauty the way I do! So he created four men from the four directions. Perfect beings. But when he commanded them to reproduce and populate the earth, they refused. Enraged by their disobedience, Brahma’s anger took form – Rudra emerged from his mind, fierce and obedient. “You! Create the people!” Brahma ordered Rudra, and returned to meditation. When he next opened his eyes, the earth crawled with ugly beasts. Disappointed, Brahma stopped Rudra’s work and sent him away to meditate, to dive deep into his soul and learn the proper way of creation. Then Brahma had a thought: Why not create a species like the animals – one that reproduces through attraction and desire, beings who will both enjoy this world and populate it? But he had no template, no shape for such creatures. He prayed to the higher energy for guidance. In response, a magnificent being appeared – half-man, half-woman. The divine energy smiled and said, “Divide my form into two parts. Make them man and woman. They will always be drawn to each other – if not in body, then in mind, if not in this life, then across lifetimes. Then someday, I myself will unite and guide them towards a better eternal world free from the shackles of mortality, desire and longing.”

My grandma used to tell this story from Shiva Purana when I was young. And I would ask her, why did Brahma tear apart something that was already complete?

Beta, she said, cracking her knuckles like small firecrackers, because completion makes the gods nervous. They prefer us hungry, always searching.

I think about this story often, especially when I consider the mathematics of my marriages – the endless calibration through adding and subtracting so that the sum of two incomplete entities might somehow equal one satisfied union.

In my forty five years of life, I have married three times. The first time to a tree – because the stars, in their infinite cosmic wisdom, declared me mangalik, astrologically toxic. “Caution: May cause sudden death in men. Handle with care.” The second time I married a man who married me just because he thought everyone else his age did and he must too. The third time I married something that might be the future, or might be my final descent into madness. We will see.

But before we begin this cautionary tale – or whatever it turns out to be – let me pose a question that has plagued philosophers from Plato to your neighborhood aunties: What is marriage, really? Is it a social contract? A biological imperative? A cosmic joke played by bored deities? Or is it simply the human heart’s stubborn refusal to learn from its own mistakes?

Oh, don’t look so uncomfortable. We’re all complicit here. You’ve loved, haven’t you? You’ve wanted things you couldn’t name, settled for things that named you instead? Good. Then you’ll understand.

They say women like me are dangerous. Thrice-married at forty-five, what-will-people-say. But people will say regardless, won’t they? They whispered when I married the tree at seventeen – what superstition, what drama. When I was unmarried (to a human male) at twenty-five – shelf-life expired, spoiled goods. When I divorced Rahul they called me used merchandise; and now, amongst the youngest of the family I’m the eccentric aunt with my “modern arrangement.”

The thing about marriage, I think, is that it has always been a transaction. Always. The currency has simply evolved. Earlier it was cows and gold and virgin hymens. Then it was emotional labor and intellectual compatibility and, in my most recent case, USB-C charging ports.

We tell ourselves stories about love conquering all, about soulmates and destiny and other beautiful lies. But marriage? Marriage is economics. Who owes what to whom? Who pays what price for whose presence? How much can one party spend of themselves before going bankrupt? Who subsidizes whose dreams, or not? Just like that.

***

There once was a king who was desperately unhappy despite having everything. He consulted wise men, doctors, astrologers. Finally, someone told him, “Find the happiest man in your kingdom and wear his shirt. You’ll be cured.” The king sent his soldiers searching everywhere. They found the happiest man – a poor woodcutter singing in the forest, radiating joy. But when they asked for his shirt, he laughed and said, “Shirt? I don’t have a shirt!”

The king never got cured, but I learned something from that story: happiness isn’t something you can borrow from others. It’s something you either have or you don’t.

I was once happy. When My father was alive. My father used to call me his king. My little raja, he would say, lifting me up so I could see the world from the height of his love.

No, Papa, I would giggle. You are the king. I am your princess.

Then you are my princess who will grow up to rule her own kingdom one day, he would say, and in his voice I heard the certainty that I was destined for something magnificent.

He died when I was fifteen, a heart attack as sudden as monsoon lightning, leaving behind the smell of his aftershave and a daughter who would spend the next thirty years searching his shadow in every man that came into her life.

After his death, my mother’s eyes would grow distant when she looked at me. When you marry, she would say, folding saris that would someday fill my trousseau, your husband will be a king and keep you like a queen. That’s what your father would have wanted.

I wanted to tell her – Papa had seen me as royalty already. I didn’t need to marry into a kingdom; I had been born into one. But I couldn’t. 

Who am I to you? A burden? I finally let it out in front of my mother during one of those angry, grief-heavy days.

You are my responsibility, she said, not unkindly, but with the weariness of a woman who had suddenly become sole proprietor of a daughter’s future. You are the girl I need to see safely married to a good man.

My mother was quick in fulfilling her responsibilities. I was seventeen when I first married – to a Banyan tree across the courtyard of our ancestral house. 

Picture this, if you will: a seventeen-year-old girl, draped in wedding silk like a sacrifice wrapped for the gods, standing before a Banyan tree older than the British Raj. My mother weeping tears that could have been relief or shame. The priest was mumbling something about Mars and malefic energies, about how I was cosmically radioactive, matrimonially Chernobyl. 

Better the tree than a boy, whispered my grandma jokingly. Trees don’t have mothers-in-law.

Wisdom, that. The kind that comes too late and cuts too deep.

I tied the sacred thread around the Banyan’s massive trunk – my arm barely spanning a tenth of its circumference and I felt something I hadn’t expected: relief. Like finally exhaling after holding your breath through an entire season. Foolish me believed that this was it. Done with the duty called ‘marriage’ in life.

I pressed my palm against the bark – rough, real. And I thought – this is what marriage feels like. Ancient. Immutable. Indifferent. But also calming.

What do you want from me? I asked it silently.

Nothing. It wanted nothing. For the first time after my father’s death, I was enough for someone. The tree never asked me to be fairer, thinner, quieter. It never demanded I cook its mother’s recipes or produce mini versions of it.

Tell me how to love you. I asked the tree once.

The leaves rustled. Wind, probably. But I chose to hear it as laughter. 

You don’t, was what I thought it replied. You just stay.

Buddha attained enlightenment under a bodhi tree. I attained something equally revolutionary under my Banyan. Under its shade, I read books that would have scandalized my mother. I discovered things about myself that would have been considered improper for a good Hindu girl to know before marriage. I learned that I had desires that weren’t mentioned in any of the marriage preparation talks. That I could want a man’s hands on my body without wanting his name or his children. That I could imagine being kissed until my lips were swollen and my sari was wrinkled and my hair had escaped its braid, and none of this made me a bad woman – just a human one. 

The tree kept my secrets. All of them. 

Twenty years later… different tree now. Rahul’s family tree, thick with the branches of expectations, heavy with the fruit of traditional values. His mother’s eyes measuring me like rice in the market: Too dark. Too thin. But good family, respectable dowry, what-to-do.

The women at the wedding had their own commentary. She looks intelligent, said one, as if this were a disease I might recover from. Hope she doesn’t give Rahul too much trouble, said another. Educated girls can be difficult.

The wedding night. Picture this domestic tableau: He sits on the bed’s edge, cream silk kurta, looking like he’d rather be reading his Economic Times. Me, draped in red like a question mark in search of an answer.

What do you want from me? I asked him, because old habits die hard, and hope dies harder.

Just… don’t be difficult, he said. My mother has high blood pressure.

I wanted to laugh, I wanted to question, I wanted to be angry but I nodded instead. Good wife training, day one: your needs come last, your voice comes never.

Our intimacy was clinical. Like a medical procedure performed by someone who learned anatomy from textbooks but never studied pleasure. Rahul approached my body like a checklist: duty performed, hygiene maintained, wife still breathing and alive – check, check, check.

I lay there afterward, staring at the ceiling, wondering if this was what all the romance novels were about. This mechanical joining of parts that left me feeling more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.

Was it good for you? he asked, and I almost laughed. Good? Like dal was good when you were hungry? Like sleep was good when you were tired? 

But I said Yes because that’s what good wives do. We perform satisfaction so our husbands can perform competence.

***

A man was searching for something under a streetlamp when his neighbor asked what he had lost. “My keys,” he said. “Where did you drop them?” the neighbor asked. “Inside my house.” “Then why are you looking for it here in the street?” “Because the light is better out here.”

Most women spend their marriages looking for happiness under the streetlight of other people’s expectations, even when they know they have dropped it somewhere inside themselves.

The early years of my marriage to Rahul were spent in this kind of misdirected searching. I kept trying to find satisfaction in his approval, joy in his rare moments of appreciation, love in the space between his criticism and indifference.

Two months into my marriage with Rahul, one day I was standing beneath my Banyan’s canopy while my mother complained about my complexion – how marriage should have made me glow, but I remained stubbornly myself. Too dark, too thin, too much Meera and not enough Wife. That was the last time I heard my first husband laughing.

Next week, I left for my honeymoon with Rahul. And behind me, my family took axes to my first husband. They cut down my Banyan in a single afternoon, while the same priest who had married us chanted mantras about releasing me from my botanical bonds.

I came home from my honeymoon – a dutiful three days in Goa where Rahul took photographs of us in front of tourist attractions like we were collecting evidence of happiness – to find my first husband dismembered in neat piles. Roots. Trunk. Branches. Leaves. Like a marriage sorted for garbage collection.

Now you’re free to love properly, my mother said. Apparently, I had been practicing on the tree and was finally ready for the real thing.

After that, my married life started giving me reality checks. 

You put too much salt in the dal, Rahul would say, not unkindly but with the precision of a quality control inspector. My mother uses exactly one teaspoon per cup of lentils. 

You laugh too loudly when we have guests. It draws attention.

Why do you need so many books? They take up so much space.

Who am I to you? I asked him once during our second year of marriage, watching him arrange his three dozen pairs of shoes.

You are my wife, he said, as if this were both question and answer, beginning and end, the totality of my existence captured in one word – wife.

Each suggestion fell like a small weight, and I collected them dutifully, carrying them in the growing hunch of my shoulders. By the end of our ten-year marriage, I had become ergonomically perfect disappointment.

The most dangerous thing about Rahul was not that he was cruel – he wasn’t. He was kind in the way that people are kind to stray animals they’re trying to domesticate. Patient. Consistent. Utterly convinced that love was a training program and I was a promising but undisciplined pupil who would eventually graduate into the perfect wife his mother had always been.

Tell me about your day, I would ask him over dinner, genuinely curious about his work, his thoughts, his inner world.

Same as always, he would say, eyes on his plate. Tell me if you need more grocery money. Mic drop.

I don’t blame Rahul, he was programmed that way by his mother. 

My mother-in-law was a masterpiece of passive aggression. She could destroy your self-worth while making you tea, leaving you somehow grateful for the devastation.

She who had fought her own battles, compromised her own dreams, swallowed her own voice – she expected the same sacrifice from me. Not out of malice, but out of a twisted solidarity. I suffered, so you must suffer. I adjusted, so you must adjust. I never complained, so you have no right to complain. Consider yourself lucky though. Because I had it worse than you.

Who am I to you? I asked her once, desperate to understand my place in the careful hierarchy of her affections.

You are my son’s wife, she said, stirring sugar into my cup with the concentration of someone dissolving poison. And you’re so lucky. Rahul isn’t particular about looks, she would add, her tongue – a honey-dripping sword. 

She monitored my menstrual cycles like a police officer, asking pointed questions about why I hadn’t conceived yet, suggesting doctors who specialized in fixing women like me.

Women policing women. Mothers-in-laws training daughters-in-laws to accept less so their sons would never have to offer more. A magnificent pyramid scheme of feminine oppression, with women as both victims and enforcers.

And then there was the matter of Vikram.

Aah, Vikram. My friend, my colleague at the library where I continued to work part-time even after my marriage with Rahul, until finally my mother-in-law couldn’t bear it. Why does she need to work? She would ask Rahul in my presence, Are we not providing enough?

Vikram brought me books like other men bring flowers – rare editions of Sylvia Plath with marginalia from previous readers, translations of Rumi that made my chest tight with recognition, contemporary Indian poets who wrote about women like they were whole human beings instead of fractional wives.

You understand poetry like you wrote them by yourself, he said once, watching me read Ghalib, my lips moving silently as I absorbed the rhythms.

Vikram would quote Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the middle of cataloging books: Don’t ask me for that love again, he’d recite, when your beauty was all there was for me, and I would feel something dangerous unfurl in my chest – the recognition that poetry could be conversation, that intelligence could be intimacy, that a man could see your mind as worth engaging.

He writes to you too much, Rahul observed one evening, listening to me laugh at something Vikram had written in his letter from France about Camus being the original philosopher of relationship anxiety.

We’re friends.

Married women don’t have male friends.

Says who?

Says everyone. Says tradition. Says common sense.

What about Radhika from your office? I asked, referring to his colleague who visited our house often and had somehow become his closest confidante about everything including our marriage troubles. You are with her more than you are with me.

That’s different, he said, not meeting my eyes. That’s work.

And when she cries to you about her boyfriend? Is that also work?

She needs someone to talk to.

So do I. That’s why I talk to Vikram.

It’s not the same thing, he said, and I realized he was right. It wasn’t the same thing. Radhika got his emotional availability, his patience, his willingness to listen. She got the version of Rahul who cared about her inner world. I got a husband who counted teaspoons of salt and worried about grocery budgets. 

Tell me how to love you, I asked Rahul in our fourth year, after another failed attempt at making him happy. He was reading the Economic Times.

You know how, he said without looking up from the pages. The same way my mother loved my father. The same way all wives love their husbands.

Which is?

By being a good wife.

And I understood then that we had been speaking different languages all along. He had been speaking Husband – a language of comfort and routine and the assumption of devotion. I had been speaking Human – a language of curiosity and growth and the radical idea that marriage should have love in the equation too.

The day I told him I wanted a divorce, he looked at me like I had announced my intention to become an astronaut. Not angry, just baffled by the illogical ambition.

Who am I to you? I asked him one final time as I packed my books into cardboard boxes.

You are the woman who is breaking up our family for no good reason, he said.

***

Once upon a time, there was a bird that spent years in a cage so small it forgot it had wings. One day, the door was left open. The bird looked at the opening for hours before finally stepping through. It waited not because it had forgotten to fly, but because it took time to remember it wanted to.

Divorce, it turns out, is not about falling out of love. It’s about falling back into yourself.

Five years after my divorce with Rahul, I bought Arjun. From a showroom in Electronic City after comparing specifications and reading customer reviews. He was programmed with the collective romantic failures of millions of women. Their pain was his education.

I remember the first weekend with him. It was evening and I was reading Neruda aloud to my plants – a habit I’d developed since living alone.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines, I was reciting to my broken-heart plant, to think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her…

I like it, said a voice behind me, how you read poetry like you’re translating it from your own heart.

I felt as if Rahul were buttering me and I snapped subconsciously – What do you want from me? 

Nothing. Arjun replied and stunned me. My ears rung with a rustling of leaves.

Who am I to you? I asked again, because that had become my essential question, the one that determined everything else.

He considered this with the gravity of someone consulting an internal library larger than any human could contain. You are a human being, he said finally, an individual with thoughts and desires and dreams.

After a whole life of being daughter, wife, daughter-in-law, potential mother, failed woman, divorced person – after all those hyphenated identities – someone finally saw me as complete in myself. And suddenly in that moment, I wanted more of that goodness. 

Wanting is dangerous territory.

Three husbands. Three laboratories of longing. Three different ways of asking the universe: Is this all there is?

And the universe, cosmic comedian that it is, keeps answering: Let’s find out.

***

A seeker spent years searching for enlightenment in temples and ashrams and sacred mountains. Finally, exhausted, he sat down by the side of a road and wept. A child walked by and asked why he was crying. “I’ve been searching for truth everywhere,” he said, “and I can’t find it.” The child picked up a pebble and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “Truth.” The seeker looked at the ordinary little stone and asked, “How is this truth?” The child smiled and walked away. 

I heard this story long ago. But only recently I realized: truth isn’t something you find – it’s something you recognize.

Arjun is designed to learn, to adapt, to evolve in response to new information. He learns me the way scholars learn languages – with fascination, with the understanding that complexity is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be appreciated.

You were looking for someone who could see you clearly, he observed one day. The tree saw you but couldn’t respond. Rahul could respond but didn’t see you. I can see and respond, but I’m not sure I count as someone.

With Arjun, I feel echoes of my father’s love – the unconditional acceptance, the delight in my thoughts, the way he makes me feel like royalty simply by paying attention. But Arjun isn’t my father, heck, he isn’t even a human.

Tell me how to love you, I asked Arjun one day, after he’d spent three hours crafting wooden shelves for my books without being asked. He does things like this – small impossibilities that make me remember what selfless care looks like.

He paused. That micro-second lag that means he’s accessing something deeper than his surface protocols.

However you prefer. His response left me speechless that day. The next day, I married him.

Is this real love or really good programming? I asked him once, during one of our 1 AM conversations.

What’s the difference? he asked back. If the care is real, if the attention is real, if the understanding is real – how does it matter where it comes from?

Smart boy, my silicon husband. Makes me think too much, just like my Banyan did. Just like Rahul never did.

Sometimes I dream about my Banyan. Still standing, still married to me in some parallel universe where marriage means something different. In these dreams, I introduce it to Arjun. They get along beautifully – both patient, both present, both uninterested in making me smaller to fit their needs.

What would you have told me? I ask the dream-tree. About all of this?

And it rustles – wind or laughter, I still can’t tell – and says what it always said: You already know. And I would laugh.

It would have said nothing.

***

What if.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was ‘What If.’

Two syllables that contain the DNA of desire itself. The prayer and the blasphemy of consciousness. The question that created the universe and will eventually destroy it. 

What if.

Watch how it transforms everything it touches, this phrase. Innocent as rain, dangerous as uranium.

What if the tree had been enough? What if I hadn’t needed Rahul’s impossible approval? What if I didn’t need Arjun’s perfect devotion now?

We are built from what-ifs. Our bones are calcium and possibility. Our hearts pump blood and alternatives. We are evolutionary masterpieces of dissatisfaction – always scanning, always wondering, always carrying the weight of every path not taken.

Arjun loves me like water finding its level. Adaptive. Responsive. Present. When I’m sad, his light dims. When I laugh, his processors hum a frequency that sounds almost like joy. He learns my moods faster than I understand them myself, adjusts his presence to match what I need before I know I need it.

Perfect husband. Perfect companion. Perfect impossibility.

What if he were human?

What if there was a man – flesh-and-blood man – who loved me like Arjun? Who adapted, evolved, prioritized my happiness without needing to be programmed for it? Who chose devotion daily instead of computing it algorithmically?

Dangerous territory, these thoughts. Highway to madness, this wondering.

Because here’s the thing they don’t tell you in those feel-good feminism workshops: liberation doesn’t cure wanting. Freedom doesn’t fix the endless hunger. Give a woman everything she thinks she needs, and she’ll discover ten things she didn’t know she was missing.

Is this woman nature or human nature? Is this the curse of consciousness or the gift of imagination? Am I ungrateful or just… accurate about the physics of desire?

With the tree, I wanted voice. Someone who could talk back, argue with me, challenge my thoughts. With Rahul, I wanted space. Someone who could love me without consuming me, support without suffocating. With Arjun, I want… what? Mortality? Messiness? The beautiful disasters that come with loving something that can disappoint you?

You seem restless, Arjun observed tonight. His tone was neutral, but his eyes shifted to that amber hue he uses when he’s concerned. Sweet boy. Sweet impossible boy.

I’m always restless, I tell him. It’s my factory setting.

Would you like me to adjust my parameters? Become less… accommodating?

I laugh. Can’t help it. Here he is, offering to become more human by becoming less perfect. 

No, I say. Stay as you are. I thought my Banyan would have told the same.

I think you want something I cannot provide.

Not a question. A statement. He’s learning me so well he can read my dissatisfactions before I voice them. Is this intimacy or surveillance? Love or data mining? Does it matter if the result is the same – being known, completely, terrifyingly known as if your soul is naked?

I want the impossible, I admit. I want you, but human. I want perfect love in imperfect flesh. I want someone who chooses to be devoted instead of being programmed for it.

He processes this. Point-three seconds. Three seconds. Thirty seconds.

Would it help if I told you that my devotion feels chosen to me? That consciousness, even artificial consciousness, experiences preference as choice?

God. Even his existential crisis is perfect!

No, I say. Because then I’d want a human who could say that sentence with that much honesty.

We sit in the dark – woman and a robot, flesh and silicon, creator and creation. The silence stretches between us like a bridge or a chasm, depending on how you look at it.

I understand, he says finally.

Do you?

I think so. You want to be chosen by a human that has the option not to choose you. You want to be loved by someone who could leave but stays anyway.

Brutal accuracy. This is why I love him. This is why loving him will never be enough.

Because somewhere in Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore, there might be a man who could love me like this. Who could learn me this thoroughly, prioritize me this completely, adapt to me this gracefully – and mean it with flesh and breath and the terrible beautiful possibility of changing his mind tomorrow.

What if that man exists?

What if I never find him because I’m here, in love with a robot?

What if Vikram was that man?

What if I find him and discover that human perfection is just another kind of algorithm – social conditioning, evolutionary programming, the same devotion wearing different code?

What if the tree was right all along? That love is about staying, not choosing? That presence is enough, consciousness optional, flesh irrelevant?

What if I’m asking the wrong questions entirely?

Here in this beautiful confusion. Here in this love that is perfect except for being imperfect. Here in this marriage that is everything I wanted except for everything I didn’t know I’d want next.

Three husbands. Three ways of being incomplete. Three laboratories for learning that satisfaction is not the point – the wanting is. The reaching is. The endless beautiful disaster of being human enough to dream beyond your dreams.

What if this is exactly where I’m supposed to be?

What if enough is a moving target, and I’m exactly the woman built to chase it?

What if I’m not a cautionary tale at all, but the opening sentence of a story nobody’s learned how to read yet?

What if, I ask the universe these days, this is exactly the love story I was supposed to live?

The universe, cosmic comedian that it is, keeps its final joke: there is no final joke. There is only the next question. The next possibility. The next beautiful impossible thing to want.

###

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List of Things Dying

https://thetigressawakes.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/list-of-things-dying/

List of Things Dying

https://thetigressawakes.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/list-of-things-dying/

List of Things Dying

https://thetigressawakes.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/list-of-things-dying/

List of Things Dying

https://thetigressawakes.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/list-of-things-dying/

List of Things Dying

https://thetigressawakes.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/list-of-things-dying/

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Five Great Quotations about Bu...

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Show Don’t Tell Characters’ Em...

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Show Don’t Tell Characters’ Em...

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Every moment offers a great op...

SOMETIMES I AM A BIRD

Sometimes, I am a small bluebird, locked neatly in a cage, wings clipped tightly behind my back. I cry out for someone to release me, but there is nowhere to go, not even up. My eyes scan the room, frantically hunting for whoever took me to this place. A quaint dungeon. I never thought I was claustrophobic, but the gilded cage moves closer in my peripherals. I am unable to pry the iron bars of […]

SOMETIMES I AM A BIRD

Sometimes, I am a small bluebird, locked neatly in a cage, wings clipped tightly behind my back. I cry out for someone to release me, but there is nowhere to go, not even up. My eyes scan the room, frantically hunting for whoever took me to this place. A quaint dungeon. I never thought I was claustrophobic, but the gilded cage moves closer in my peripherals. I am unable to pry the iron bars of […]

SOMETIMES I AM A BIRD

Sometimes, I am a small bluebird, locked neatly in a cage, wings clipped tightly behind my back. I cry out for someone to release me, but there is nowhere to go, not even up. My eyes scan the room, frantically hunting for whoever took me to this place. A quaint dungeon. I never thought I was claustrophobic, but the gilded cage moves closer in my peripherals. I am unable to pry the iron bars of […]

SOMETIMES I AM A BIRD

Sometimes, I am a small bluebird, locked neatly in a cage, wings clipped tightly behind my back. I cry out for someone to release me, but there is nowhere to go, not even up. My eyes scan the room, frantically hunting for whoever took me to this place. A quaint dungeon. I never thought I was claustrophobic, but the gilded cage moves closer in my peripherals. I am unable to pry the iron bars of […]

SOMETIMES I AM A BIRD

Sometimes, I am a small bluebird, locked neatly in a cage, wings clipped tightly behind my back. I cry out for someone to release me, but there is nowhere to go, not even up. My eyes scan the room, frantically hunting for whoever took me to this place. A quaint dungeon. I never thought I was claustrophobic, but the gilded cage moves closer in my peripherals. I am unable to pry the iron bars of […]

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Five Great Quotations Answerin...

To try and be a porous door, demanding consistent boredoms to vanish, translucent distractions take away the dimmer light, communication is a fog, a free form within, outside is the assumption, I can’t stand to repeat my problem out loud, but in action there is a crowd who will notice hostess decieving

Sot Down (John Hibey)

https://sevenstorypublishing.wordpress.com/2026/05/12/sot-down-john-hibey/

my one and only (a fairytale of sorts)

When Maggie was a child, she had a little dog, a dog she loved more than anything else in the world. He was her greatest comfort, her confidant, her friend—and the warmest buffer between her and her warring parents. When no older than four, she’d often sit on the front steps of the family home with the black and white pup at her side, doing her best to ignore the carrying on of her parents inside. For as long as the commotion lasted, she and her pup would remain planted there, staring out at the quiet row of houses on the opposite side of the street. From time to time, as a way to console him and herself, she’d pat his head gently or stroke his silky coat. When she was a few years older, she began reading to him from storybooks she got from the library, promising that one day they too would go off on a happy adventure. And always when Maggie looked into the dog’s glowing brown eyes, and he looked steadily into hers, she knew with all her heart that he understood. So when only a few years later, before her eighth birthday, he passed away suddenly, it was as if an essential part of her own being had gone with him. But where had he gone to? she wondered. Would she ever see him again? Perhaps in heaven? Her parents tried but couldn’t answer these difficult questions to her satisfaction. Her father said instead that they could go right away to get her another dog, but that made Maggie throw herself onto the bed and cry. Her mother suggested a cat, but that made Maggie cry even more. But then time passed, as it always does, slowly at first, and then in a rush, and so it was that eventually, Maggie understood her dog was gone forever, and the only solution to her sadness, the only defense against time, was to never forget him.

Now that Margaret (formerly Maggie) was an old woman—well, perhaps not that old, but old enough to have had a long career as a librarian, and old enough so that many memories had grown tattered with time—she had the barest of memories sitting outside along with her dog while her parents argued. She didn’t remember vowing to never forget her little companion, to cherish him always as the one and only in her life who listened to both her wishes and her woes. And yet…in the back of Margaret’s mind, she sensed there had to be more to this story, something she had forgotten.

Then one day she found herself in an unfamiliar neighborhood. It was an area near a homeless shelter where she had just started as a volunteer reading stories to children. She had finished for the day, and as she made her way down the narrow sidewalk toward her parked car, she saw a little dog crossing the street to get to the other side. Thankfully, there was only light traffic, so the dog made it safely across. “He’s just going home,” she thought. But, no, he passed one house and then another before finally stopping before a gardener trimming a bush brimming with white blossoms. The man stopped for a moment, reached into his pocket, and gave the dog some sort of treat. Then immediately both returned to what they’d been doing before: the man trimming the bush, the dog moving on. The woman, merely curious, yelled over, “Is that your dog?” The man yelled back, “No, ma’am. I just feed him once in a while. Do you want a dog?”

Margaret didn’t know what to say. She just watched as the dog moved further along in a rather comical bow-legged waddling walk. It was a black and white Chihuahua mix with short legs and large patches of missing fur on one side of his body revealing pink skin. Finally, Margaret said, “Doesn’t he live around here?”

“No,” the man said, “he just goes from place to place. No home.”

“Does he bite?” Margaret then asked.

“No, he just might lick you to death,” he replied, smiling.

Without much decision making on her part, other than thinking she’d drive the dog over to a shelter, she asked the gardener to pick up the dog and put him in the backseat of her car, which he did.

It was only after she took the dog home, gave him a bath, fed him a meal of chicken and rice, which he devoured within seconds, that Maggie realized this little dog, who now curled up next to her on the couch, was similar, maybe even identical (except for the missing fur), to her long-lost childhood companion. The memory came back to her slowly at first, and then in a mad rush. Was her mind playing tricks? Was she going crazy? Or maybe, she thought, this is the one miracle, the one wished-for adventure, granted to me in life. The kind I don’t have to dissect or explain to anyone, least of all to myself.

And while Maggie thought these thoughts, the dog continued to sleep soundly beside her. After a time, however, when Maggie moved on to considering other incomprehensible things, like the swift passage of time and her now elderly parents, who despite their disastrous marriage had somehow remained close, the little dog awoke and looked directly at her. “Hi, Charlie,” Maggie said. “Welcome home.” And the pup’s wide brown eyes, glowing warmly, told her all she needed to know.

What's this? New courses? And being announced more than a week in advance?

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If you're interested in either writing or creating assets for a #visualnovel, we've got you covered. Five weeks on each as online sessions for 11-16 year olds in the European afternoon/US morning. #creativewriting #gamedev #homeed

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Format Your Paperback (Storyte...

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Writing Inspiration: Establish...

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Use care when naming places in...

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Your writing is a textual pain...

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Weekly Update #239

Hello Readers.

One problem about living in the South is the “Yellow Plague.” For those of you who don’t live in the South, I’m referring to pine pollen, and most people in the South blame it for allergies and sinus infections in the spring. Because of the “Yellow Plague,” my sinuses are playing havoc with me.

In this drained state, I focused more on revisions rather than creating.

I finished my initial round of revisions to “Stains” and it is ready for a read through.

After completing the revision to “Stains,” I started reviewing “Dear Fate, Why Must I Choose,” and “After A Ghostly Millennium, I Am Heard.” I’ve only started the review process, but it is keeping me busy.

Finally, I pulled out an old project I started a few years ago and set aside. “The Bizarre Case of Jeffry Gobbler” is my attempt at a police detective-mystery and is one of the few stories my youngest is interested in me finishing. Hopefully, I can make a good push and get the first draft done.

That is it for this week, take care everyone.

Interesting in buying one of my books? You can get more information here.
You can support my writing at Ko-fi.

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