Continuation of “He is My Man”
I. Privacy, Surveillance, and Small Wars
Pawan and Shruti, twins, had grown up in the same house yet in very different worlds. Privacy was their shared religion. Shruti was gloriously sloppy—clothes strewn across the floor, books left open face down, secrets half-hidden in plain sight. Pawan, meticulous in his own chaotic way, would quickly gather her things into scattered mounds that looked organized from a distance but collapsed into disorder on contact. Their rooms smelled faintly of talcum powder, overheated processors, damp towels, and adolescent impatience.
Their mother, Sharda, inspected everything. Pockets before washing clothes. Pages between textbooks. Drawers opened quietly and closed with disappointment. She had the instincts of a customs officer at a hostile border crossing. She dropped hints at breakfast about money left carelessly in trousers or about the copy of Hustler buried deep inside her son’s cupboard. After two days of moral turbulence she had reluctantly concluded that such things belonged to “normal growing.”
The twins, though polar opposites, were deeply loyal to one another and entirely wise to her surveillance. Over the years they had developed almost supernatural instincts for concealment. Incognito modes appeared mysteriously on browsers. Terminal windows multiplied across their screens. School Python classes were child’s play; their computers overflowed with code, scripts, command lines, and cryptic text that looked like alien scripture to their parents. Their mother occasionally stared at the green letters on black screens as though the machines themselves had joined the conspiracy.
Father Hari Om returned from office at 6 PM with the reliability of a government signal. By 8 he was entertaining the family with sharp wit and office gossip after two large pegs of whiskey. By the fourth, he was asleep in philosophical surrender. Sharda, furious at his emotional absence and cultivated vagueness, searched his purse and office bag with professional persistence but found nothing incriminating. Even he had learned to adapt to her detective instincts. He carried almost nothing anymore.
Sharda herself had found an ally in the neighboring colony—a woman who somehow received scandal before sunrise and redistributed it before lunch. If Sharda was the detective, the other woman was intelligence services.
The house functioned like a republic of small undeclared wars. Nothing explosive ever happened openly. Yet currents moved beneath everything: suspicion, affection, concealment, alliances, temporary ceasefires. The twins had learned diplomacy before adulthood.
II. Michael Robarts Arrives
Into that house of contesting wills arrived Michael Robarts—a much younger colleague of Hari Om, temporarily attached to a Defense Ministry assignment. He carried the lonely politeness of a man who had spent too many evenings inside anonymous business hotels. Hari Om, sensing both obligation and amusement, invited him home for dinner.
Michael had expected stiffness and ceremonial hospitality. Instead he found himself inside a loud domestic republic of argument. Beautiful Shruti moved through the house with absent-minded elegance; Pawan observed conversations the way chess players study openings; and Sharda, sharp-eyed and intellectually restless beneath her household authority, presided over the dining table like a field marshal of spices and suspicion.
The evening expanded unexpectedly. Michael praised the food with such sincerity that Sharda glowed visibly. Shruti laughed more than usual. Even Hari Om became animated, retelling office stories with theatrical confidence and bureaucratic exaggeration.
By the time dinner dissolved into tea, sliced mangoes, and arguments about Europe, it was considered absurd to send the German back to his hotel. The guest room was prepared immediately.
The next morning Michael praised the Indian food so effusively that Sharda floated on air for the rest of the day, and Shruti glowed beside her. For three days Sharda cooked with escalating ambition and tenderness. The kitchen became an arena of emotional warfare disguised as hospitality.
Shruti asked Michael endless questions about Germany—trains, winters, loneliness, relationships, student life, silence. Pawan, quieter and more dangerous, interrogated him obliquely about philosophy. One evening he asked, with deceptive casualness, whether Albert Camus’ The Outsider was truly about alienation or merely emotional exhaustion disguised as philosophy. On another night he brought up The Plague. Michael, trapped happily between interrogation and hospitality, answered with charm, intelligence, and patience.
During those three days, Shruti fell completely in love.
Not with any clear intention, but with the atmosphere around him: the foreignness, the gentleness, the loneliness he carried lightly, the way he listened as though ordinary conversation mattered.
Sharda, meanwhile, underwent a subtler disturbance. While sorting laundry she encountered unfamiliar masculine scents—foreign cologne, hotel starch, cigarette smoke, traces of another climate and another life. Something restless awakened in her. Not merely desire, but the memory of being capable of desire.
The two women never spoke of it. They did not need to. Women possess ancient methods of detection. A pause too long at the dining table, a shift in tone, the careful neutrality around a name—these were enough. They recognized one another almost by scent.
Sharda had imagined Michael naked while folding his clothes.
Shruti had watched her mother watching him.
Pawan and Hari Om remained blissfully oblivious. Hari Om simply enjoyed the novelty of intelligent company and foreign appreciation of Indian food. Pawan sensed emotional weather but lacked sufficient evidence to form conclusions.
III. The Slap
Michael Robarts stayed only three days in the house.
It was long enough.
After he returned to his hotel and eventually departed the city, the house seemed to sag inward upon itself. Ordinary life resumed too quickly, and that itself felt unbearable.
That night Sharda made desperate, almost angry love to her husband, clinging to him with an intensity that puzzled and slightly alarmed Hari Om. He accepted the development without inquiry, as men sometimes do when confronted with emotional storms they cannot classify.
The next morning the house was quieter than usual. Shruti wandered through rooms without purpose. Even Pawan seemed subdued.
At dinner the following evening, beneath the slow rotation of the ceiling fan and the ordinary clatter of steel utensils, Shruti said softly:
“The house feels so empty now.”
The slap came instantly.
Sharp. Clean. Unmistakable.
It was the first time in her life that her mother had ever struck her.