Grandmother, Who, Me?

Grandmother, Who, Me?

Chapter 31: The Happiest Months

Rajan’s POV

The next few months became the happiest of my life.

Not the loud kind of happiness I had imagined when I was younger. Not the kind that needed celebration or big announcements. Just a quiet, steady warmth that settled into the bones of every ordinary day.

My wife began to talk to me.

At first it was only small things, whether the sambar needed more salt, if the neighbour boy’s mathematics notes were correct, whether the monsoon would come early this year. Then the sentences grew longer. One evening, while we sat on the veranda after dinner, she told me about a dream she had, something about a river and an old house. Another morning she asked me, almost shyly, if I preferred the white shirt or the pale blue one for the tuition centre. The silence that had once filled our room began to thin. Sometimes she even smiled ,a small, tired, genuine smile that reached her eyes for a second before she looked away.

She went to the temple for me.

I found out only later. One of the neighbourhood women mentioned it casually while buying vegetables. “Your wife came early this morning, Master. She offered a special archana for your health and long life.” When I asked Lakshmi that night, she simply adjusted the pallu on her shoulder and said, “A wife should pray for her husband.” The thali rested quietly between her breasts as she spoke. I did not press further. The knowledge itself was enough.

For the first time in more than twenty years I felt like I belonged to a family, both inside the house and outside it.

The daughter-in-law, Shreya, treated me with the respectful distance of a proper DIL. She called me Maama. She served me coffee when I visited the city house. The young man who lived with her as “Satish” greeted me as Appa. Neighbours saw us as a complete unit: father-in-law, mother-in-law, son, pregnant daughter-in-law. No one questioned the photograph that now hung in both houses. No one asked why the mother-in-law’s voice was soft or why her hands were so gentle when she folded my shirts. From the outside we were ordinary. From the inside, for me, we were real.

The tuition work grew here too

What began with two boys on the veranda became a small, steady centre. Parents paid on time. Someone recommended me to a nearby private school for evening remedial classes. The salary was modest by city standards, but it was honest money earned with chalk and patience, the same work I had lost two decades earlier. Every morning Lakshmi stood at the door in her cotton saree, thali in place, and handed me my lunch box. Every evening she was there again when I returned, taking the empty box from my hands, asking if the boys had improved. The simple ritual of being sent off and received by a wife settled something deep and long-broken inside me.

And every night, without fail, she came to me.

The override still required it. I knew that. She knew that. Yet the act itself had changed. She no longer lay completely rigid. Sometimes her hand rested on my arm. Sometimes she turned her face into the pillow to hide the small sounds she could not stop. Afterwards she stayed close longer than the required forty seconds. Once or twice, when she thought I was already asleep, her fingers brushed lightly across the back of my hand as if testing whether the contact was allowed.

I would fall asleep with the scent of her skin in my nose and the weight of her soft body against my side, and the same thought would rise, quiet and certain:

What else does a man need?

A house. Work that mattered. Food that appeared without begging. A wife who prayed for him, who waited at the door, who opened herself to him every night, who was beginning, slowly, carefully, to speak.

Everything I had lost had been returned to me in a shape I never expected.

I did not want it to end.