Grandmother, Who, Me?

Grandmother, Who, Me?

Chapter 32: The Night of the Flood

Lakshmi’s POV (Satish)

I did not like any of it.

Not the weight of the breasts that pulled at my shoulders from the moment I woke. Not the constant soft sway of my hips when I walked. Not the thali that never left the warm valley between them. Not the way the saree clung to my skin in the humidity, or the way the locked cage pressed flat and useless whenever a stray thought of my old body returned. I missed my cock with a dull, private ache that never fully left. And yet the cruelest part was that the sight of another man’s, Rajan’s in the evenings, or even the brief glimpse of the false Satish adjusting himself once ,still made the trapped flesh inside the cage twitch and harden helplessly. The body Jessica had given me remembered desire even when I tried to starve it.

I hated the daughter-in-law I had been forced to become in reverse. I hated the power Shreya still held, the remote she no longer needed to use as often, the calm way she spoke to me as if I had always been her mother-in-law. But underneath the hatred the old love remained, stubborn and raw. I still loved Shreya. I still loved the child growing inside her. That love was the chain I could never break, no matter how many nights I spent on my knees or how many mornings I woke to the smell of a man on my skin.

The false Satish came to the house once every week or two. He would sit at the table, call me Amma in that perfect copied voice, and ask about the village or the tuition centre. Each time a sharp, private jealousy cut through me. That face, those hands, that smile, they had been mine. Now they belonged to Jessica’s suit and to the life Shreya preferred. I served him coffee. I answered politely. I played the role. Inside, something small and bitter watched from behind my soft new eyes.

Days blurred. Cooking. Cleaning. The override every night. Small conversations with Rajan that I allowed only because silence had become heavier than speech. Neighbours who treated me as if I had lived in that village house for decades. The slow, helpless knowledge that every week made the old Satish harder to remember.

Then the rains came.

They began in the afternoon and turned violent by nightfall. Water sheeted down the windows. The street outside became a shallow river. Rajan had gone to the neighbouring village for a two-day tuition assignment and could not return; the roads were already flooded. The false Satish was in the city on some errand Jessica had arranged. The house felt too large and too quiet.

I was in the kitchen heating milk when the first scream tore through the rain.

“Satish ..! Satish ... !”

I dropped the vessel and ran.

Shreya was on the bedroom floor, her maternity saree soaked at the hem, both hands locked around her belly. Her face was white with pain and fear. Between gasps she still called the name that no longer belonged to any living body in the house.

“Attai... the baby.... it’s coming....too early.... roads are closed.....”

There was no time for hospital, no time for anyone else.

I became what the last months had forced me to be.

I stripped the bed, laid clean towels, boiled water, washed my soft hands until they shook. I remembered every half-forgotten detail from the pregnancy books I had once read as her husband. When the contractions grew closer I knelt between her spread thighs in my wet saree, the thali swinging with every movement, and guided her through the pushing with the same mature voice that had once felt like a prison.

It took hours.

The rain hammered the roof. Water seeped under the front door. Shreya sobbed and cursed and gripped my fingers hard enough to bruise. I wiped her forehead, murmured the same soft encouragements a mother-in-law was supposed to know, and when the moment finally came I received the slippery, crying newborn into my hands exactly as if I had done it a hundred times before.

A girl.

I cleaned her, wrapped her in the softest cloth I could find, and placed her against Shreya’s chest. Then I sat back on my heels on the wet floor, my own chest heaving, milk leaking unbidden from my heavy breasts, the thali sticky against my skin, and looked down at the tiny red face now quieting in her mother’s arms.

I was still holding the child when the first grey light of morning filtered through the rain-streaked windows.

My granddaughter.

Born into my hands.