#literary-fiction — Public Fediverse posts

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 19

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Erin L. McCoy, Kathi Daley, Milly Johnson, Elizabeth Strout, R.S. Grey, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-19-2/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 19

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Erin L. McCoy, Kathi Daley, Milly Johnson, Elizabeth Strout, R.S. Grey, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-19-2/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 19

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Erin L. McCoy, Kathi Daley, Milly Johnson, Elizabeth Strout, R.S. Grey, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-19-2/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 19

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Erin L. McCoy, Kathi Daley, Milly Johnson, Elizabeth Strout, R.S. Grey, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-19-2/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

What are the best books on writing literary fiction?

From Google AI:

The best books on writing literary fiction focus on the nuances of prose, emotional resonance, and character-driven pacing. Top recommendations include Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction for narrative craft, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird for the creative process, and Donald Maass’s The Emotional Craft of Fiction for deepening reader impact. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

These highly recommended guides for literary writers are broken down by their primary focus:

Craft & Prose

• Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway: The standard creative writing textbook, it provides practical exercises and techniques for “showing, not telling,” voice, and point of view.
• The Art of Fiction by John Gardner: A deeply analytical and philosophical look at the mechanics of serious fiction, exploring structure, theme, and rhythm.
• How Fiction Works by James Wood: A brilliant exploration of how and why techniques like free indirect discourse, point of view, and pacing succeed in literary masterpieces. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Character & Emotion

• The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass: Focuses on how to make your story resonate deeply with readers by prioritizing internal stakes and complex character reactions over pure action.
• Creating Character Arcs by K.M. Weiland: An excellent guide for building three-dimensional, deeply flawed, and evolving characters, which is a hallmark of literary fiction. [1, 2]

The Writing Life & Creativity

• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott: Equal parts craft book and emotional support. It is essential reading for navigating writer’s block, perfectionism, and the mental hurdles of the writing process.
• Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg: Focuses on tapping into your creative flow, clearing the mind through freewriting exercises, and finding inspiration in everyday life.
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King: While not strictly for “literary” fiction, the second half offers universal, pragmatic advice on vocabulary, prose, and daily discipline. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

A park bench in Stanley Park becomes an unspoken witness to vulnerability, identity, and quiet power.
👉https://alisonlittle.blog/2026/01/14/park-benched/
#literaryfiction #flashfiction #LGBQT

I Made Him A Sandwich (Al Simon)

https://sevenstorypublishing.wordpress.com/2026/05/15/i-made-him-a-sandwich-al-simon/

I Made Him A Sandwich (Al Simon)

https://sevenstorypublishing.wordpress.com/2026/05/15/i-made-him-a-sandwich-al-simon/

I Made Him A Sandwich (Al Simon)

https://sevenstorypublishing.wordpress.com/2026/05/15/i-made-him-a-sandwich-al-simon/

I Made Him A Sandwich (Al Simon)

https://sevenstorypublishing.wordpress.com/2026/05/15/i-made-him-a-sandwich-al-simon/

I Made Him A Sandwich (Al Simon)

https://sevenstorypublishing.wordpress.com/2026/05/15/i-made-him-a-sandwich-al-simon/

The Narrowboat Summer "Lovely...Another heartening story about the possibility of striking out in a new direction at any age" Sale: $23.99 to $1.99 by Anne Youngson Rating: 4.2/5 (1,065 Reviews) #friendship #women #travel #canals #booksky #literaryfiction #feelgood #books

The Narrowboat Summer

The Narrowboat Summer "Lovely...Another heartening story about the possibility of striking out in a new direction at any age" Sale: $23.99 to $1.99 by Anne Youngson Rating: 4.2/5 (1,065 Reviews) #friendship #women #travel #canals #booksky #literaryfiction #feelgood #books

The Narrowboat Summer

The Narrowboat Summer "Lovely...Another heartening story about the possibility of striking out in a new direction at any age" Sale: $23.99 to $1.99 by Anne Youngson Rating: 4.2/5 (1,065 Reviews) #friendship #women #travel #canals #booksky #literaryfiction #feelgood #books

The Narrowboat Summer

The Narrowboat Summer "Lovely...Another heartening story about the possibility of striking out in a new direction at any age" Sale: $23.99 to $1.99 by Anne Youngson Rating: 4.2/5 (1,065 Reviews) #friendship #women #travel #canals #booksky #literaryfiction #feelgood #books

The Narrowboat Summer

The Children of the Silent Door

I. Ma’alot, 1974

Yishai did not hear the knock.

He saw his father hear it.

That was how sound came to him: not as sound, but as changes in faces. His father’s head lifted. His mother stopped with one hand on the chair. Miriam looked toward the door. Eliahu froze in the middle of the room, one bare foot raised, as if the floor itself had spoken.

The door became the center of the world.

Yishai sat in a square of morning light, holding the wooden block he had been turning over and over in his hands. The block was smooth on one side and rough on another. He liked this. The world was made of differences he could feel.

His mother’s dress moved past him.

Blue cloth. Warm smell. Bread. Soap. Her.

She was heavy with the child inside her, one hand often resting on the roundness beneath her dress. Yishai liked to press his cheek there. Sometimes he felt movement. A secret tide. A little swimmer in the dark.

His father opened the door.

There were men outside.

Their mouths moved.

Yishai watched mouths the way other children watched birds. Mouths opened. Mouths closed. Mouths made shapes. Sometimes faces smiled afterward. Sometimes faces tightened. Sometimes hands reached for him. Sometimes doors opened.

The men’s mouths moved in the doorway.

His father’s shoulders lowered.

Perhaps the words were safe words.

Police. Searching. Terrorists.

Grown-up words. Door-opening words. Words with uniforms hidden inside them.

Then the men entered.

The room broke without sound.

One arm rose.

Light flashed.

His father folded.

Yishai blinked.

His mother’s mouth opened wider than he had ever seen it open. No sound came. No sound ever came. But her eyes changed so suddenly that Yishai knew something had entered the house that was older than language.

Eliahu fell.

Miriam disappeared behind the table.

A cup rolled across the floor, turning its white mouth over and over in the light.

His mother moved toward him, toward Miriam, toward the child inside her, toward everything at once.

Then she stopped.

Her body jerked.

Her hand brushed Yishai’s shoulder.

Then she was on the floor beside him.

He crawled to her because she was his country. He crawled to her because every road he knew led to her hands.

But her hands did not rise.

Around him the silent house filled with thunder he would never hear.


II. Galilee, 1948

Samira did not hear the shouting.

She saw the village hear it.

That was how danger came: first into the eyes of others. Her grandmother’s hand tightened around the bread. Her brother turned toward the road. Her mother lifted the baby from the mat so quickly that the baby’s head fell back like a flower on a broken stem.

Outside, people were running.

Samira stood in the doorway and watched dust rise at the edge of the village.

Dust meant goats. Dust meant carts. Dust meant boys playing chase. Dust meant weddings sometimes, when many feet came dancing up the road.

But this dust was different.

It came with mouths opened wide.

Men pointed. Women gathered children. Someone dropped a basket of figs, and the figs rolled into the dirt, splitting their purple skins.

Samira did not know the word catastrophe.

She knew her mother’s hands.

Her mother’s hands tied cloth. Her mother’s hands pushed bread into a sack. Her mother’s hands pressed Samira’s shoulders and turned her away from the doorway.

Go.

That was what the hands said.

Not in a word. In force. In trembling. In the way fingers became birds against her back.

Samira looked for her doll, the one made from rags and two black beads. It lay beside the sleeping mat. She bent to get it, but her mother pulled her upright.

No.

The doll remained on the floor, face turned toward the ceiling, as if waiting for the roof to explain.

Outside, her father stood with other men. Their mouths moved quickly. Their hands argued in the air.

Samira watched them and thought: adults are always making weather with their mouths.

Then came the flash from the road.

Not sound.

Light.

A white tear in the morning.

A man near the well fell backward. The bucket rope slid through his hand. Water spilled into the dust and vanished.

Her mother seized her.

The baby was tied to her mother’s chest. Her brother carried the sack. Her grandmother held the key.

The key was large and black and old. It had opened the same door for many years. Samira had watched it turn in the lock every morning and every evening. The key was a little iron animal. It belonged to the house the way bones belonged to the body.

Her grandmother held it even as they left.

The village moved toward the fields.

Samira turned once.

Her house was still there.

The fig tree was still there.

The doorway was still open.

Her doll was still inside.

She wanted to go back and close the door.

But her mother’s hand kept pushing.

Go.

Behind them, mouths opened. Arms waved. Dust rose. Light flashed.

The world was ending in a language Samira could not hear.


III. Ma’alot

Yishai learned the world from what remained.

A chair on its side.

A cup near the table.

A darkening place on the floor.

His mother’s sleeve beneath his cheek.

He did not know that the men had gone on. He did not know that they had entered a school. He did not know that other children, older children, children who could hear every command and cry and burst of gunfire, were now gathered beneath the same terrible sky.

He knew only the house.

And the house had become strange.

Before, everything in it had a place. The table stood. The chairs stood. The door closed and opened. His father came and went through it. His mother moved from room to room like the soul of the house itself. Eliahu ran. Miriam reached. The child inside his mother pushed against the hidden wall of her body.

Now everything was misplaced.

His father lay where fathers did not lie.

Eliahu lay where brothers did not sleep.

Miriam was small behind the table, her eyes enormous, her body twisted around pain.

His mother lay beside him, and no matter how he pressed his face into her, no matter how his fingers pulled at her sleeve, she did not gather him back into the world.

Yishai touched her hand.

It was still his mother’s hand. It had not forgotten its shape. It had not become someone else’s hand. But something had left it.

He placed his small palm in hers.

Nothing closed around him.

Outside, people were running.

He could see them through the open door, crossing and recrossing the slice of morning that had once been ordinary. Their mouths were open. Their arms were lifted. A woman’s scarf flashed red. A man bent low and vanished from view. Another man appeared with something dark in his hands.

Yishai did not understand urgency.

He understood absence.

His mother’s hand did not answer.

That was the first language of the massacre.

Not blood.

Not smoke.

Not the mouths of men.

The unanswered hand.

He sat beside her until another pair of hands came.

They were not his mother’s hands. They were rougher, hurried, trembling. They lifted him from the floor. He twisted back toward her. He reached.

The hands held him tighter.

A face leaned close to his. A stranger’s face. Wet eyes. A mouth opening and closing.

Yishai looked past the mouth.

He wanted the floor.

He wanted the sleeve.

He wanted the hand that had known him before the world broke.

But he was carried out through the silent door.

Behind him, the house remained open.

Behind him, the dead kept their places.

Behind him, thunder continued without sound.

IV. Galilee

Samira learned exile from the soles of her feet.

At first she thought they would return before nightfall.

Her grandmother had taken the key, after all.

The key meant return. The key meant the door still belonged to them. The key meant the house was waiting, offended perhaps, but waiting. Samira imagined her doll lying beside the mat, patient and solemn, guarding the room until she came back.

They walked through fields she knew and then through fields she did not know. The familiar stones ended. The familiar trees ended. Even the dust seemed different once they passed beyond the place where the village could still be seen.

Her mother kept turning back.

Each time she turned, Samira turned too.

At first, the village was a whole thing: roofs, trees, walls, the shape of home.

Then it became pieces.

Then it became a pale unevenness in the distance.

Then it became smoke.

Samira did not hear the cries behind them. She did not hear the arguing of men or the prayers of women. She did not hear the names shouted into the fields as families searched for those who had scattered.

But she saw the mouths.

All day, mouths opened around her.

Mouths asking.

Mouths accusing.

Mouths begging God.

Mouths forming names.

Mouths forming curses.

Mouths forming promises that no road could keep.

Her grandmother’s mouth moved most of all. Sometimes she touched the key hanging from her neck. Sometimes she lifted it and kissed it. Sometimes she held it in her fist so tightly that the iron left a mark in her palm.

Samira watched the mark darken.

She wondered whether the house could feel the key missing.

Toward evening, they stopped among other families beneath a line of trees. Children slept against bundles. Old men stared at nothing. Someone shared water. Someone else spread a cloth on the ground and placed bread upon it as carefully as if the earth had become a table.

Samira’s mother sat and pulled her close.

The baby slept against her mother’s chest.

Her brother looked older than he had that morning.

Her grandmother stared in the direction from which they had come.

Samira wanted to ask when they would return. But her own mouth had never been useful for asking. Her hands could ask small questions. Her eyes could ask the large ones.

She touched her grandmother’s key.

Her grandmother looked at her.

For a long time, neither moved.

Then the old woman took Samira’s hand and closed it around the key.

The iron was warm from her body.

Her grandmother pointed behind them.

Home.

Then she pointed ahead.

Go.

Samira shook her head.

The old woman’s eyes filled, but no tears fell. She touched Samira’s mouth. Then her own ear. Then the road.

There were things Samira could not hear.

There were things no one wanted to hear.

That night, under trees that did not belong to them, Samira dreamed of her doll rising from the mat and closing the door by herself.

V. The Boy Who Survived

Years later, Yishai remembered in pieces.

Not as a story. Never as a story.

Others made stories.

They knew dates. They knew names. They knew the number of the dead. They knew the names of the groups, the demands, the failures, the rescue attempt, the arguments that followed, the speeches, the ceremonies, the photographs, the memorials, the anniversaries.

They knew what to call it.

Massacre.

Terror.

Tragedy.

National wound.

They had words enough to build walls.

Yishai had images.

A cup rolling.

His father’s knees bending strangely.

His mother’s hand open.

Miriam’s eyes behind the table.

The doorway widened by men who had entered through a lie.

The flash.

Always the flash.

Not the report.

Not the crack.

Not the thunder.

Only the light.

People sometimes spoke about silence as if it were peaceful. They had never been inside his silence. His silence was crowded. It was full of faces turned toward sounds he could not hear. Full of mouths moving too late. Full of bodies struck down by things that arrived without warning.

As he grew, people looked at him with pity and tenderness and sometimes with a strange reverence, as though survival had made him a kind of holy object.

The unhurt child.

The deaf child.

The child spared.

But he did not feel spared.

He felt carried.

Carried out of the house.

Carried through years.

Carried by hands that were not the hands he wanted.

At memorials, he saw flags.

At memorials, he saw soldiers.

At memorials, he saw officials stand before microphones. Their mouths opened and closed. Translators shaped some of the words for him. Interpreters moved their hands. There were always words.

Security.

Memory.

Justice.

Never again.

Enemy.

Homeland.

Sacrifice.

He watched these words pass from mouth to hand to page, and he wondered how many words a people could speak before it heard the child on the floor.

Sometimes he looked at the faces around him and saw that they were listening only to their own dead.

He understood this.

He too listened only to his own dead.

But he wondered whether this was how the world remained broken: each people holding its murdered children like a shell against the ear, hearing only the sea of its own grief.

VI. The Girl Who Carried the Key

Years later, Samira remembered in textures.

The wool of the bundle against her cheek.

The iron key in her palm.

The dry skin of her grandmother’s fingers.

The cracked earth beneath her feet.

The first night under trees that did not know her name.

Others made histories.

They knew maps. They knew armies. They knew resolutions, borders, expulsions, battles, villages emptied, villages destroyed, villages renamed, villages remembered only by those who carried their names in the mouth like seeds.

They knew what to call it.

Nakba.

Catastrophe.

Dispossession.

Return.

Exile.

Homeland.

Loss.

They had words enough to keep wounds alive.

Samira had images.

Figs split in the dust.

A bucket rope sliding through a dead man’s hand.

Her mother pushing her forward.

Her doll left staring at the ceiling.

Her grandmother carrying the key.

The house becoming smaller behind them until it became smoke.

She grew in rooms that were not home. Then in tents. Then in crowded places where everyone had a village folded inside them. Some villages were spoken of daily, as if they were only just beyond the hill. Some villages became chants. Some became lullabies. Some became arguments. Some became photographs of elders holding keys.

The key remained.

When her grandmother died, the key passed to Samira’s mother.

When her mother died, it passed to Samira.

By then, the key opened nothing.

That was what people said.

But they were wrong.

It opened grief.

It opened memory.

It opened the room where a rag doll still waited beside a sleeping mat, because the child who had left it there had never quite grown old enough to abandon it.

At gatherings, men spoke loudly. Women spoke fiercely. Young people spoke with fire. Translators moved their hands for Samira, but she often looked away. She knew the words already.

Occupation.

Resistance.

Martyr.

Right.

Return.

Enemy.

Justice.

She did not reject them. Some were true. Some were necessary. Some were the last shelter left to a people whose houses had been taken.

But she wondered how often true words became stones.

She wondered how often stones became walls.

She wondered how often walls became graves.

Sometimes she looked at the faces around her and saw that they were listening only to their own dead.

She understood this.

She too listened only to her own dead.

But she wondered whether this was how the world remained broken: each people holding its stolen house like a shell against the ear, hearing only the sea of its own grief.

VII. The Language of the Wounded

Yishai learned signs.

Samira learned signs.

Their hands became voices.

But neither could sign to the other.

Not because their hands were incapable.

Not because their grief had no grammar.

But because history had placed them on opposite shores of the same silence.

Between them stood fathers and mothers, fighters and soldiers, refugees and mourners, graves and keys, schools and villages, doors opened by deception and doors locked against return.

Between them stood the dead.

And the dead were not neutral.

No dead child is neutral.

Each side lifted its own children before the world and said:

Look.

Each side turned away when the other lifted theirs.

Look at what was done to us.

No, look at what was done to us.

Listen to our dead.

No, listen to ours.

And so the land filled with mouths.

Mouths in parliaments.

Mouths in refugee camps.

Mouths in military briefings.

Mouths in classrooms.

Mouths in mourning tents.

Mouths in ceremonies.

Mouths on television.

Mouths at checkpoints.

Mouths at graves.

Mouths saying peace.

Mouths saying security.

Mouths saying resistance.

Mouths saying terror.

Mouths saying never again.

Mouths saying return.

Mouths saying this land is ours.

Mouths saying this land was ours.

Mouths saying God.

Mouths saying blood.

Mouths saying history.

Mouths saying enough.

But the mouths did not become ears.

And the ears did not become mercy.

Yishai grew older.

Samira grew older.

They did not meet.

He did not see the key she kept wrapped in cloth.

She did not see the empty space where his mother’s hand should have closed around his.

He did not know the name of her village.

She did not know the name of his brother.

He did not know about the doll.

She did not know about the cup.

They remained strangers.

Not enemies exactly.

Something sadder.

Unheard witnesses in a world addicted to speech.

VIII. The House Without Thunder

In the end, there was no meeting.

No conference room.

No reconciliation circle.

No table where the two old survivors sat across from each other and drew doors with trembling hands.

No translator leaning in.

No miraculous recognition.

No exchanged key.

No shared photograph.

No softening music.

No final embrace to make the reader feel forgiven.

There was only the land.

The land held everything.

The house in Ma’alot.

The emptied village in Galilee.

The school.

The road.

The door.

The key.

The cup.

The doll.

The mother’s hand.

The child who could not hear the knock.

The child who could not hear the shouting.

The children who heard everything and died anyway.

The adults who heard everything and understood nothing.

Silence did not mean absence.

Silence was full.

Full of unborn children.

Full of unreturned refugees.

Full of murdered families.

Full of frightened soldiers.

Full of boys taught to become weapons.

Full of girls taught to become memory.

Full of prayers spoken toward the same heaven.

Full of graves facing the same sun.

And over all of it, the mouths continued.

The mouths accused.

The mouths defended.

The mouths mourned.

The mouths justified.

The mouths promised peace while sharpening knives.

The mouths said dialogue.

The mouths said useless.

The mouths said listen.

The mouths said never.

The mouths said child.

The mouths said enemy.

The mouths said ours.

The mouths said theirs.

But somewhere beneath the speeches, beneath the slogans, beneath the ceremonies of grief and the machinery of revenge, two children remained seated in the first rooms of catastrophe.

Yishai on the floor beside his mother.

Samira on the road with the key in her hand.

Neither heard the gunfire.

Neither heard the orders.

Neither heard the great words by which adults made the world burn.

They saw only what the words did.

Perhaps they were called deaf because they could not hear the violence.

Perhaps they were called mute because they could not answer it.

But the land knew better.

The land had listened to everyone.

The land had heard every speech, every oath, every anthem, every command, every prayer, every curse, every justification.

And after all that hearing, the land asked its final question without a sound:

Who, then, is deaf?

Who, then, is mute?

The children?

Or the peoples who, wounded past bearing, taught themselves not to hear?

The children?

Or the nations who, terrified of each other’s grief, chose not to speak except through walls, raids, rockets, checkpoints, funerals, flags?

The children?

Or the two sides standing forever at the silent door, each knocking, each refusing to open, each unable to hear the child crying on the other side?

No answer came.

Only the cup, turning once more in the light.

Only the key, warm in a closed hand.

Only the door.

Only the silence.

Ever wondered what life behind the headlines might really feel like? 🕰️ Mrs Trump by Alison Little is a fictional dive into power, image, and isolation at the very top — completely imagined, completely compelling.
👉 https://alisonlittle.blog/2026/02/11/mrs-trump/
#PoliticalFiction #LiteraryFiction #SpeculativeFiction

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.

###

Today's showcase features DAUGHTER OF MINE (A STOLEN AT BIRTH NOVEL) by ANGIE STANTON! This gripping blend of crime, literary fiction, women's fiction, domestic suspense, and psychological thriller unravels sixteen years of carefully kept secrets, asking just how far a mother will go to protect what she believes is hers. 💔✨

@AngieStantonAuthor @partnersincrimevbt
#Crime #LiteraryFiction #WomensFiction #DomesticSuspense #PsychologicalThriller #KU #KindleUnlimited
https://archaeolibrarian.wixsite.com/website/post/daughter-of-mine-a-stolen-at-birth-novel-by-angie-stanton

Meet these great indie literary fiction authors at the Literary Fiction Genre Indie Authors Starter Pack! If you wish to be included in the starter pack, reply here. #literaryfiction #writingcommunity #authorsky bsky.app/starter-pack/inventi...

Literary Fiction Genre Indie A...

Meet these great indie literary fiction authors at the Literary Fiction Genre Indie Authors Starter Pack! If you wish to be included in the starter pack, reply here. #literaryfiction #writingcommunity #authorsky bsky.app/starter-pack/inventi...

Literary Fiction Genre Indie A...

Meet these great indie literary fiction authors at the Literary Fiction Genre Indie Authors Starter Pack! If you wish to be included in the starter pack, reply here. #literaryfiction #writingcommunity #authorsky bsky.app/starter-pack/inventi...

Literary Fiction Genre Indie A...

Meet these great indie literary fiction authors at the Literary Fiction Genre Indie Authors Starter Pack! If you wish to be included in the starter pack, reply here. #literaryfiction #writingcommunity #authorsky bsky.app/starter-pack/inventi...

Literary Fiction Genre Indie A...

A park bench in Stanley Park becomes an unspoken witness to vulnerability, identity, and quiet power. Park Benched is a piece of flash fiction exploring what it means to be confident in who you are. . .AI used in image creation.
👉https://alisonlittle.blog/2026/01/14/park-benched/
#literaryfiction #flashfiction #LGBQT

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 12

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Maya Alden, Kitty Johnson, Douglas Stuart, Kinga Brady, Amanda Ashby, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-12-2/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 12

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Maya Alden, Kitty Johnson, Douglas Stuart, Kinga Brady, Amanda Ashby, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-12-2/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 12

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Maya Alden, Kitty Johnson, Douglas Stuart, Kinga Brady, Amanda Ashby, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-12-2/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 12

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Maya Alden, Kitty Johnson, Douglas Stuart, Kinga Brady, Amanda Ashby, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-12-2/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

The Summer Before the War: A Novel "It is the end of England’s brief summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful" Sale: $27 to $1.99 by Helen Simonson Rating: 4.2/5 (11,442 Reviews) #historicalfiction #british #books #booksky #wwi #romance #literaryfiction

The Summer Before the War: A N...

The Summer Before the War: A Novel "It is the end of England’s brief summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful" Sale: $27 to $1.99 by Helen Simonson Rating: 4.2/5 (11,442 Reviews) #historicalfiction #british #books #booksky #wwi #romance #literaryfiction

The Summer Before the War: A N...

The Summer Before the War: A Novel "It is the end of England’s brief summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful" Sale: $27 to $1.99 by Helen Simonson Rating: 4.2/5 (11,442 Reviews) #historicalfiction #british #books #booksky #wwi #romance #literaryfiction

The Summer Before the War: A N...

The Summer Before the War: A Novel "It is the end of England’s brief summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful" Sale: $27 to $1.99 by Helen Simonson Rating: 4.2/5 (11,442 Reviews) #historicalfiction #british #books #booksky #wwi #romance #literaryfiction

The Summer Before the War: A N...

I’m home recovering after a bug, post-finishing my doctorate, post-finishing-school-vacation-trip, and in that in‑between space where I’m figuring out how to bring my doctoral thesis into the world as a book while preparing to release the third ecofiction novel in my trilogy.

I’ll share the trilogy more on Instagram soon; but of course I’ll talk about it here too.

While I’m resting, I’ve been thinking about two things:

1. How to share what I’ve learned from writing visionary ecofiction; not as formal tutorials, but as small, generous micro‑snippets of thought.
2. How much I enjoy posting Three Good Things here on Mastodon.

This led me to realize that the micro‑tutorials can become Three Good Things. A small, informal, unstructured series about what I’ve learned so far.

Here we go.

---

Three Good Things I’ve Learned About Writing Visionary Ecofiction

1. It brings community together; even when people disagree.
Across all three novels, I learned so much from people with different perspectives:
• fracking / hydraulic fracturing (Book 1)
• medical marijuana (Book 2)
• high‑speed rail (Book 3).
Ecofiction is a meeting place; not a consensus.

2. Writing is solitary; but you don’t have to be lonely in it.
Anything that helps you contextualize yourself in your larger community is healthy;
walks, cafés, writing groups, reading groups, sharing drafts.
People’s commentary is subjective but sharing your work is grounding.
Place yourself in your wider spheres; it helps.

3. Take joy in the finishing and sharing stages.
There’s real pleasure in thinking about the special parts of your process and how you want to share them.
I love outlining, first drafting, sculpting, revising, hearing the text read back to me, and working with an editor and designer, but also, imagining the visual vignettes that accompany the trilogy. I’m figuring out a visual narrative to share the trilogy on Instagram.
Finishing is its own creative act.

Working in a genre that’s still emerging (visionary ecology or visionary ecofiction) gives me freedom to genre‑bend fearlessly.
Book 1 is a love story (but not a romance).
Book 2 is a mystery (but not a cozy).
Book 3 is an adventure (but not Indiana Jones).
The elasticity is part of the joy.

These are my three good things today, the first in what I hope will become an informal series of micro‑tutorials on writing visionary ecofiction.

What lights are you up? When you write, how do you define yourself within your genre?

Keep writing and share!

PS, the photo was taken at Giverny, Monet’s Garden in France, on my recent trip.

#VisionaryFiction #VisionaryEcoFiction #VancouverAuthor #TransportationFiction #ThreeGoodThings #NewYorkAuthor #NewJerseyAuthor #MetaphysicalFiction #MedicalMarijuanaFiction #LiteraryFiction #IndiePublisher #IndieAuthor #FrackingFiction #EcoFiction #CreativeWriting #CanadianAuthor #CanLit #BritishColumbiaAuthor #Bookstodon #AmericanAuthor

I’m home recovering after a bug, post-finishing my doctorate, post-finishing-school-vacation-trip, and in that in‑between space where I’m figuring out how to bring my doctoral thesis into the world as a book while preparing to release the third ecofiction novel in my trilogy.

I’ll share the trilogy more on Instagram soon; but of course I’ll talk about it here too.

While I’m resting, I’ve been thinking about two things:

1. How to share what I’ve learned from writing visionary ecofiction; not as formal tutorials, but as small, generous micro‑snippets of thought.
2. How much I enjoy posting Three Good Things here on Mastodon.

This led me to realize that the micro‑tutorials can become Three Good Things. A small, informal, unstructured series about what I’ve learned so far.

Here we go.

---

Three Good Things I’ve Learned About Writing Visionary Ecofiction

1. It brings community together; even when people disagree.
Across all three novels, I learned so much from people with different perspectives:
• fracking / hydraulic fracturing (Book 1)
• medical marijuana (Book 2)
• high‑speed rail (Book 3).
Ecofiction is a meeting place; not a consensus.

2. Writing is solitary; but you don’t have to be lonely in it.
Anything that helps you contextualize yourself in your larger community is healthy;
walks, cafés, writing groups, reading groups, sharing drafts.
People’s commentary is subjective but sharing your work is grounding.
Place yourself in your wider spheres; it helps.

3. Take joy in the finishing and sharing stages.
There’s real pleasure in thinking about the special parts of your process and how you want to share them.
I love outlining, first drafting, sculpting, revising, hearing the text read back to me, and working with an editor and designer, but also, imagining the visual vignettes that accompany the trilogy. I’m figuring out a visual narrative to share the trilogy on Instagram.
Finishing is its own creative act.

Working in a genre that’s still emerging (visionary ecology or visionary ecofiction) gives me freedom to genre‑bend fearlessly.
Book 1 is a love story (but not a romance).
Book 2 is a mystery (but not a cozy).
Book 3 is an adventure (but not Indiana Jones).
The elasticity is part of the joy.

These are my three good things today, the first in what I hope will become an informal series of micro‑tutorials on writing visionary ecofiction.

What lights are you up? When you write, how do you define yourself within your genre?

Keep writing and share!

PS, the photo was taken at Giverny, Monet’s Garden in France, on my recent trip.

#VisionaryFiction #VisionaryEcoFiction #VancouverAuthor #TransportationFiction #ThreeGoodThings #NewYorkAuthor #NewJerseyAuthor #MetaphysicalFiction #MedicalMarijuanaFiction #LiteraryFiction #IndiePublisher #IndieAuthor #FrackingFiction #EcoFiction #CreativeWriting #CanadianAuthor #CanLit #BritishColumbiaAuthor #Bookstodon #AmericanAuthor

I’m home recovering after a bug, post-finishing my doctorate, post-finishing-school-vacation-trip, and in that in‑between space where I’m figuring out how to bring my doctoral thesis into the world as a book while preparing to release the third ecofiction novel in my trilogy.

I’ll share the trilogy more on Instagram soon; but of course I’ll talk about it here too.

While I’m resting, I’ve been thinking about two things:

1. How to share what I’ve learned from writing visionary ecofiction; not as formal tutorials, but as small, generous micro‑snippets of thought.
2. How much I enjoy posting Three Good Things here on Mastodon.

This led me to realize that the micro‑tutorials can become Three Good Things. A small, informal, unstructured series about what I’ve learned so far.

Here we go.

---

Three Good Things I’ve Learned About Writing Visionary Ecofiction

1. It brings community together; even when people disagree.
Across all three novels, I learned so much from people with different perspectives:
• fracking / hydraulic fracturing (Book 1)
• medical marijuana (Book 2)
• high‑speed rail (Book 3).
Ecofiction is a meeting place; not a consensus.

2. Writing is solitary; but you don’t have to be lonely in it.
Anything that helps you contextualize yourself in your larger community is healthy;
walks, cafés, writing groups, reading groups, sharing drafts.
People’s commentary is subjective but sharing your work is grounding.
Place yourself in your wider spheres; it helps.

3. Take joy in the finishing and sharing stages.
There’s real pleasure in thinking about the special parts of your process and how you want to share them.
I love outlining, first drafting, sculpting, revising, hearing the text read back to me, and working with an editor and designer, but also, imagining the visual vignettes that accompany the trilogy. I’m figuring out a visual narrative to share the trilogy on Instagram.
Finishing is its own creative act.

Working in a genre that’s still emerging (visionary ecology or visionary ecofiction) gives me freedom to genre‑bend fearlessly.
Book 1 is a love story (but not a romance).
Book 2 is a mystery (but not a cozy).
Book 3 is an adventure (but not Indiana Jones).
The elasticity is part of the joy.

These are my three good things today, the first in what I hope will become an informal series of micro‑tutorials on writing visionary ecofiction.

What lights are you up? When you write, how do you define yourself within your genre?

Keep writing and share!

PS, the photo was taken at Giverny, Monet’s Garden in France, on my recent trip.

#VisionaryFiction #VisionaryEcoFiction #VancouverAuthor #TransportationFiction #ThreeGoodThings #NewYorkAuthor #NewJerseyAuthor #MetaphysicalFiction #MedicalMarijuanaFiction #LiteraryFiction #IndiePublisher #IndieAuthor #FrackingFiction #EcoFiction #CreativeWriting #CanadianAuthor #CanLit #BritishColumbiaAuthor #Bookstodon #AmericanAuthor

I’m home recovering after a bug, post-finishing my doctorate, post-finishing-school-vacation-trip, and in that in‑between space where I’m figuring out how to bring my doctoral thesis into the world as a book while preparing to release the third ecofiction novel in my trilogy.

I’ll share the trilogy more on Instagram soon; but of course I’ll talk about it here too.

While I’m resting, I’ve been thinking about two things:

1. How to share what I’ve learned from writing visionary ecofiction; not as formal tutorials, but as small, generous micro‑snippets of thought.
2. How much I enjoy posting Three Good Things here on Mastodon.

This led me to realize that the micro‑tutorials can become Three Good Things. A small, informal, unstructured series about what I’ve learned so far.

Here we go.

---

Three Good Things I’ve Learned About Writing Visionary Ecofiction

1. It brings community together; even when people disagree.
Across all three novels, I learned so much from people with different perspectives:
• fracking / hydraulic fracturing (Book 1)
• medical marijuana (Book 2)
• high‑speed rail (Book 3).
Ecofiction is a meeting place; not a consensus.

2. Writing is solitary; but you don’t have to be lonely in it.
Anything that helps you contextualize yourself in your larger community is healthy;
walks, cafés, writing groups, reading groups, sharing drafts.
People’s commentary is subjective but sharing your work is grounding.
Place yourself in your wider spheres; it helps.

3. Take joy in the finishing and sharing stages.
There’s real pleasure in thinking about the special parts of your process and how you want to share them.
I love outlining, first drafting, sculpting, revising, hearing the text read back to me, and working with an editor and designer, but also, imagining the visual vignettes that accompany the trilogy. I’m figuring out a visual narrative to share the trilogy on Instagram.
Finishing is its own creative act.

Working in a genre that’s still emerging (visionary ecology or visionary ecofiction) gives me freedom to genre‑bend fearlessly.
Book 1 is a love story (but not a romance).
Book 2 is a mystery (but not a cozy).
Book 3 is an adventure (but not Indiana Jones).
The elasticity is part of the joy.

These are my three good things today, the first in what I hope will become an informal series of micro‑tutorials on writing visionary ecofiction.

What lights are you up? When you write, how do you define yourself within your genre?

Keep writing and share!

PS, the photo was taken at Giverny, Monet’s Garden in France, on my recent trip.

#VisionaryFiction #VisionaryEcoFiction #VancouverAuthor #TransportationFiction #ThreeGoodThings #NewYorkAuthor #NewJerseyAuthor #MetaphysicalFiction #MedicalMarijuanaFiction #LiteraryFiction #IndiePublisher #IndieAuthor #FrackingFiction #EcoFiction #CreativeWriting #CanadianAuthor #CanLit #BritishColumbiaAuthor #Bookstodon #AmericanAuthor

I’m home recovering after a bug, post-finishing my doctorate, post-finishing-school-vacation-trip, and in that in‑between space where I’m figuring out how to bring my doctoral thesis into the world as a book while preparing to release the third ecofiction novel in my trilogy.

I’ll share the trilogy more on Instagram soon; but of course I’ll talk about it here too.

While I’m resting, I’ve been thinking about two things:

1. How to share what I’ve learned from writing visionary ecofiction; not as formal tutorials, but as small, generous micro‑snippets of thought.
2. How much I enjoy posting Three Good Things here on Mastodon.

This led me to realize that the micro‑tutorials can become Three Good Things. A small, informal, unstructured series about what I’ve learned so far.

Here we go.

---

Three Good Things I’ve Learned About Writing Visionary Ecofiction

1. It brings community together; even when people disagree.
Across all three novels, I learned so much from people with different perspectives:
• fracking / hydraulic fracturing (Book 1)
• medical marijuana (Book 2)
• high‑speed rail (Book 3).
Ecofiction is a meeting place; not a consensus.

2. Writing is solitary; but you don’t have to be lonely in it.
Anything that helps you contextualize yourself in your larger community is healthy;
walks, cafés, writing groups, reading groups, sharing drafts.
People’s commentary is subjective but sharing your work is grounding.
Place yourself in your wider spheres; it helps.

3. Take joy in the finishing and sharing stages.
There’s real pleasure in thinking about the special parts of your process and how you want to share them.
I love outlining, first drafting, sculpting, revising, hearing the text read back to me, and working with an editor and designer, but also, imagining the visual vignettes that accompany the trilogy. I’m figuring out a visual narrative to share the trilogy on Instagram.
Finishing is its own creative act.

Working in a genre that’s still emerging (visionary ecology or visionary ecofiction) gives me freedom to genre‑bend fearlessly.
Book 1 is a love story (but not a romance).
Book 2 is a mystery (but not a cozy).
Book 3 is an adventure (but not Indiana Jones).
The elasticity is part of the joy.

These are my three good things today, the first in what I hope will become an informal series of micro‑tutorials on writing visionary ecofiction.

What lights are you up? When you write, how do you define yourself within your genre?

Keep writing and share!

PS, the photo was taken at Giverny, Monet’s Garden in France, on my recent trip.

#VisionaryFiction #VisionaryEcoFiction #VancouverAuthor #TransportationFiction #ThreeGoodThings #NewYorkAuthor #NewJerseyAuthor #MetaphysicalFiction #MedicalMarijuanaFiction #LiteraryFiction #IndiePublisher #IndieAuthor #FrackingFiction #EcoFiction #CreativeWriting #CanadianAuthor #CanLit #BritishColumbiaAuthor #Bookstodon #AmericanAuthor

Margaret is an acclaimed fashion designer, devoted mother, keeper of order and elegance in a city that never slows. But one morning, she simply doesn’t get out of bed. With wit, wonder, and a sharp eye for the absurd, Alteration by Claire Ibarra invites us to ask what happens when we stop merely performing and begin fully living — one unexpected revelation at a time.
#literaryfiction #books
https://www.amazon.com/Alteration-Claire-Ibarra-ebook/dp/B0GHVGY41R/

Margaret is an acclaimed fashion designer, devoted mother, keeper of order and elegance in a city that never slows. But one morning, she simply doesn’t get out of bed. With wit, wonder, and a sharp eye for the absurd, Alteration by Claire Ibarra invites us to ask what happens when we stop merely performing and begin fully living — one unexpected revelation at a time.
#literaryfiction #books
https://www.amazon.com/Alteration-Claire-Ibarra-ebook/dp/B0GHVGY41R/

Margaret is an acclaimed fashion designer, devoted mother, keeper of order and elegance in a city that never slows. But one morning, she simply doesn’t get out of bed. With wit, wonder, and a sharp eye for the absurd, Alteration by Claire Ibarra invites us to ask what happens when we stop merely performing and begin fully living — one unexpected revelation at a time.
#literaryfiction #books
https://www.amazon.com/Alteration-Claire-Ibarra-ebook/dp/B0GHVGY41R/

Margaret is an acclaimed fashion designer, devoted mother, keeper of order and elegance in a city that never slows. But one morning, she simply doesn’t get out of bed. With wit, wonder, and a sharp eye for the absurd, Alteration by Claire Ibarra invites us to ask what happens when we stop merely performing and begin fully living — one unexpected revelation at a time.
#literaryfiction #books
https://www.amazon.com/Alteration-Claire-Ibarra-ebook/dp/B0GHVGY41R/

Margaret is an acclaimed fashion designer, devoted mother, keeper of order and elegance in a city that never slows. But one morning, she simply doesn’t get out of bed. With wit, wonder, and a sharp eye for the absurd, Alteration by Claire Ibarra invites us to ask what happens when we stop merely performing and begin fully living — one unexpected revelation at a time.
#literaryfiction #books
https://www.amazon.com/Alteration-Claire-Ibarra-ebook/dp/B0GHVGY41R/

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 5

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Gillian McAllister, Mariah Stewart, Lucinda Berry, Kathryn Stockett, Catriona McPherson, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-5-2026/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 5

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Gillian McAllister, Mariah Stewart, Lucinda Berry, Kathryn Stockett, Catriona McPherson, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-5-2026/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 5

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Gillian McAllister, Mariah Stewart, Lucinda Berry, Kathryn Stockett, Catriona McPherson, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-5-2026/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 5

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Gillian McAllister, Mariah Stewart, Lucinda Berry, Kathryn Stockett, Catriona McPherson, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-5-2026/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 5

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Gillian McAllister, Mariah Stewart, Lucinda Berry, Kathryn Stockett, Catriona McPherson, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-5-2026/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 5

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Gillian McAllister, Mariah Stewart, Lucinda Berry, Kathryn Stockett, Catriona McPherson, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-5-2026/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 5

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Gillian McAllister, Mariah Stewart, Lucinda Berry, Kathryn Stockett, Catriona McPherson, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-5-2026/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

New Books to Read in Literary Fiction | May 5

Literary fiction readers are in for a treat. This week’s latest releases list is full of intriguing reads you won’t want to miss! The new releases list includes so many bestselling authors like Gillian McAllister, Mariah Stewart, Lucinda Berry, Kathryn Stockett, Catriona McPherson, and more. Enjoy your new literary fiction books. Happy reading!
https://www.newinbooks.com/new-books-to-read-in-literary-fiction-may-5-2026/

#LiteraryFiction #WeeklyReleases

Lady Tan's Circle of Women: A Novel "Friendship is a contract between two hearts. With hearts united, women can laugh, cry, live & die together" Sale: $18.99 to $2.99 by Lisa See Rating: 4.6/5 (40,510 Reviews) #historicalfiction #china #medicine #booksky #friendship #literaryfiction #books

Lady Tan's Circle of Women: A ...