Grandmother, Who, Me?

Grandmother, Who, Me?

Chapter 17: The Man Who Was Paid to Be a Husband

Rajan’s POV

Hello.

My name is Rajan. At least, that is the name they gave me, and the name on every new identity card that now sits in the top drawer of the guest-room cupboard. But I have a secret that none of them know.

I was not always a beggar.

Twenty years ago I was a government school teacher in a small town outside Madurai. I taught mathematics to eighth and ninth standard students. I had a modest house, a bicycle, and a wife I loved more than anything. We had no children, but we had plans. Then one ordinary Tuesday I came home early and found her in our bed with the local postmaster. When the truth came out, she turned the entire story around. She told the family I was a drunk, that I beat her, that I was the one who had destroyed the marriage. My own brothers and sisters believed her. I was thrown out with nothing but the clothes I wore. Depression came like a slow flood. First the teaching job went. Then the small savings. Then the will to care about anything. Within two years I was sitting on temple steps with a cracked steel bowl, the same man who once corrected algebra notebooks under a dim bulb.

That was the life I had accepted until a young pregnant woman in a neat salwar kameez stopped in front of me one afternoon and made the strangest proposal I had ever heard.

She wanted me to become someone’s husband.

I almost laughed and waved her away. But she was persistent. She spoke of clean clothes, three meals a day, a soft bed, and more money than I had seen in a decade. She said it would only be for a few months. In the end, hunger and the memory of what it felt like to sleep under a roof made the decision for me. I said yes.

What followed still feels like a dream. They cleaned me, cut my hair, fixed my teeth, taught me how to stand straight and speak like a man who had never begged. Jessica, the sharp-eyed woman in the white coat, drilled posture and manners into me for ten full days. When I finally looked in the mirror, the ragged beggar was gone. In his place stood a respectable middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair, a neat mustache, and clothes that actually fitted. After twenty years of being invisible, it felt good. Dangerous, but good.

Then they showed me my wife.

She stood in a maroon silk saree, heavy-breasted, soft-hipped, with a weathered thali resting deep in her cleavage. She looked younger than the forty-five years they claimed, almost too soft, almost cute in a quiet way. But her eyes avoided mine completely. She barely spoke. When we were left alone in the guest room that first night she stayed as far from me as the bed allowed. I did not force anything. I simply slept. At some point in the night my arm found her waist without my noticing. When I woke, the faint scent of her skin — rose and warm femininity — still lingered on my vest. It was the first pleasant smell I had fallen asleep beside in two decades.

A few days later the parcels of documents arrived. Aadhaar cards, marriage certificates, family albums that showed a life I had never lived. I looked at the photographs of “our” wedding and “our” son with quiet curiosity. None of it felt real, yet the plastic cards in my hand said otherwise.

The days that followed were strange. My new wife remained distant. She cooked, she served me food first, she answered when I spoke, but her body language stayed closed. She never sat close. She never smiled at me the way a wife of twenty years should. I accepted it. I was being paid, after all.

Then this afternoon I stepped into the bathroom to wash my face and found her used underclothes hanging on the plastic line behind the door. A simple beige bra, still slightly warm from her body, and a matching panty. Without thinking, the way a man who has been alone too long sometimes does, I lifted the bra to my face and breathed in.

The scent was soft, intimate, purely feminine, a mixture of her skin, light sweat, and the rose talc she used. Something long-dormant stirred low in my belly. For the first time in more years than I could count, I felt myself harden fully.

I stood there holding the warm fabric, the blood beating in my ears, and a single clear thought rose in my mind.

I was paid to play this role.

But the documents say she is my wife.

And a husband has rights.

Doesn’t he?