THE APARTMENT IN PUNE
It was raining since early morning, soft and determined, like someone trying to express regret without words. Around the edges of Prarabdha’s third-floor balcony, it curled in thin silver ribbons and patting gently against the windows, as though reminding her that even in a new city, the monsoon still remembered her.
She stood barefoot in the kitchen, watching the steam whorl from the spout of the pressure cooker. The whistle was about to go off. One, maybe two seconds. She waited, not because she needed to, but because she always did. The moment before the release had a certain weight. A tension. A pause filled with something unknown.
When the whistle finally screamed through the narrow kitchen, she didn’t move. But her right hand, resting lightly on the counter, shuddered once, but subtly. She caught it, held it still. It was muscle memory now—the way her body reacted to suddenness. Pune had not changed that.
Her phone buzzed on the small dining table. She didn’t need to check the screen. She already knew who it was.
Maa – Home
Two missed calls. Then a third.
She let it ring out, in the way she had yesterday and the day before. The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful. It hung, thick and sour, like a curry left too long outside the refrigerator.
The cooker whistled again, this time a bit long exhale. She lowered the flame. The dal would need a few more minutes. The judgement came easily to her now, measured not by the timer but the way the steam sounded. That was something she had learned in another kitchen, in another life.
She moved to the window and pushed it open just enough to let in the smell of rain-soaked dust. The lane below was quiet. A homeless canine frizzed below the stall. Someone was boiling tea from couple of floors down; she could smell ginger rising softly through the air.
This city was a clean slate; people had told her. A fresh start.
But clean slates still remembered the pressure and faded yet distinct chalk marks. Just because you tried to rub out something didn’t mean it had never been written.
She reached for her mobile, her thumb hovering over the screen. The screen had gone dark again. She didn’t press anything.
Not yet.
#
THE QUIET TEACHER
The classroom was quiet in the way early mornings often are—half-asleep, the edges still soft with dreams. Twenty-seven students sat scattered across three rows, their notebooks open but untouched. The ceiling fan skreiched gently above them, offering little relief from the persistent humidity after the rain.
Prarabdha stood at the front, her chalk gliding over the blackboard. She had drawn a long white line—slightly bent.
“What does this represent?” she asked, to the stillness rather than to any student.
The line, she explained, was a wall. Not the real one, but like the thing that raises quietly within you. “A barrier of the mind,” she added. “Sometimes built brick by brick. Sometimes all at once.”
“The Yellow Wallpaper” with which she had just started her class. She knew the story too well. A woman isolated in a room, slowly driven to madness under the guise of care. A husband who spoke with tenderness and control in equal measure. A wallpaper that wasn’t just wallpaper.
She’d taught this before in other colleges. But today, there was something in air that made the words appear heavy, almost making her chest feel constricted.
And a cautious hand raised by a girl in the second row caught her attention.
“Ma’am… why doesn’t the woman just leave?”
The question hung in the air. Honest. Direct. A little too real.
Prarabdha looked at her—Reshma, her ID card said. Hair tied in a low plait; sleeves buttoned too firmly for the heat. Eyes that flipped between self-assurance and thoughtfulness, like someone measuring every word she spoke.
“Why doesn’t she just leave…”
Prarabdha repeated the question slowly, her voice neutral. She put the chalk down.
She could have given a textbook answer. Something about gender roles in the 19th century, or the intersection of medicine and patriarchy. But instead, she asked gently, “Have you ever been in a room that has no way out… no door, no window?”
Reshma blinked. A few students shifted in their seats.
“Sometimes,” Prarabdha continued, “you don’t know the walls are closing in until they’re already touching your skin.”
There was a long pause. Then she traversed through the story, as if the question was never put forward. But she felt Reshma’s eyes on her for the rest of the class.
Not with suspicion. Not with defiance.
With recognition.
After the lecture, Prarabdha returned to the staffroom. She sat down slowly, her fingers still curled around the edge of her notebook.
From the open window, the breeze carried in the sound of laughter from the canteen. Some other class had ended.
She took out a pen, opened her diary to a clean page, and began to write.
“A girl asked me today why the woman in the story didn’t leave. I think it’s the first time in months someone asked me something I’ve spent years trying not to answer.”
She stopped. Closed the diary.
There were some questions you didn’t answer with words. You answered them by living.
#
THE TENSION BENEATH THE SURFACE
It was a Thursday afternoon, and the rain had stopped. Pune’s skies, scrubbed clean, looked almost kind—clouds parting just enough to let the light through. Prarabdha stood at the vegetable stall near the colony gate, fingers grazing across a row of pale green bottle gourds. The shopkeeper greeted her with the usual familiarity of someone who saw her three times a week but didn’t know her name.
She inspected and picked ten tomatoes, and slid them into her khadi bag.
Behind her, someone dropped a steel container. The piercing clank against the wet concrete—abrupt and juddering—sent a shiver that ran through her spine like an uninvited serpent forcing itself into your room through an unknown gap. The sound didn’t belong to this place.
And the very next moment, she was not in the city.
She was back in the kitchen of a two-bedroom flat in Gwalior. It was 7:45 p.m. The dal had overboiled, hissing over the edge of the cooker like an open wound. Mukul’s footsteps had come recklessly; his voice was brasher than usual. The floor had been sticky with spilled water.
“You had one thing to do!” he’d shouted.
Then the steel bowl had tolled against the wall covered with blue tiles. Not aimed at her, never directly. But always close enough.
Prarabdha blinked. Her hand had frozen mid-reach. The shopkeeper was saying something. She forced a nod and paid quickly, her bag a little heavier than she remembered.
She strolled back slowly and gradually, each step with enough caution, as if she was striving hard enough to not to wake up someone asleep underneath her own skin.
Back to her kitchen, she placed the veggies on the kitchen counter, but that was it… she was not thinking about cooking. She sat instead on the edge of the sofa, hands clasped together. Her mind played tricks sometimes, she knew. Not with words or images, but with sounds. A clang. A whistle. A voice raised just slightly too much.
She stared at the window, trying to let the silence settle over her like a sheet.
Her phone lit up again.
Maa – Home.
She didn’t answer.
But this time, she didn’t look away either.
Her mother would ask about the rains. About her new neighbors. About the apartment. And like always Prarabdha would nod, say “Sab theek hai, Maa” like she always did.
What else could she say?
That even today, a dropped appliance could pull her back in time?
That she had left, yes—but parts of her had stayed back in that house, tucked into corners like forgotten receipts?
Outside, the rain started again, softly this time. She rose, turned the gas on, and took the cooker to fill it with water and rice. The steel lid felt cold in her hands.
#
RESHMA’S DISAPPEARANCE
The staffroom smelled faintly of phenyl and cooled tea. A ceiling fan squeaked overhead, its rhythm steady but weary, as if it too was trying to drag itself through the days passing by. Prarabdha was at her writing desk near the door way, checking attendance register as the students went back to their classrooms emptying the passage outside after the recess.
She paused when she reached the B.A. Literature class list.
Reshma Shah – Absent.
Her brow furrowed. Reshma had missed Monday’s lecture too. That made two days in a row.
Not unusual, perhaps. Students remained absent for all kinds of reasons—a head ache, celebrations at home, and sometimes even—heartbreak. But something about Reshma’s absence tugged at Prarabdha in a way she couldn't explain. A quiet instinct, like a string being pulled gently from somewhere behind her ribs.
She closed the class register and marched out to the passage. The class monitor, Meenal, was seated on a bench, typing furiously into her phone.
“Meenal,” she asked softly, “any idea why Reshma is not coming? She has been absent this entire week.”
Meenal glanced up. “She said she wasn’t feeling well on Sunday. But no updates since then, ma’am. I tried calling. No reply.”
Prarabdha nodded, her lips pressed into a thoughtful line. “Did she say anything unusual? Was she upset about something?”
Meenal hesitated. “She mentioned... um... something about her father being strict. Controlling, actually. But I thought maybe it was just... you know, small-town parents being overprotective.”
Prarabdha averted her gaze for a moment, observing a leaf fall slowly from the fig tree just outside the school building. Strict. Controlling. The words settled quite profoundly in her chest, aware in a way she never want them to be.
“If you hear from her… please let me know,” she said with calm.
That evening, she found herself rereading The Yellow Wallpaper. Her fingers lingered over the lines where the narrator begins to see figures behind the paper—a woman stooping and creeping, behind that pattern. When first time Prarabdha got to read the line, she had discharged it classifying it as symbolism. Now she knew it was something else. Recognition. A woman trying to free another version of herself.
She closed her copy as she observed the flaked wall.
There was something around Reshma’s voice that echoed in her ears:
“Why doesn’t she just leave?”
The irony cut deeper now. It was easy to ask the question when it wasn’t your house, your body, your shame folded neatly inside your suitcase.
She sat at her desk and opened her diary again.
“I used to think that sometimes people disappear from your life all at once. But now I know—disappearance happens in small pieces. The skipping of a class. A message left unread. A bruise hidden by a long sleeve.”
She closed her diary and reached for her cell phone.
No calls. No updates. Nothing.
Just silence.
The stillness that had wrapped her for years. The same stillness she was watching now, slowly fencing a girl who reminded her of her younger self.
And this time, it didn’t feel like protection.
It felt like complicity.
#
THE VISIT TO THE TEMPLE
It was a memory she hadn’t summoned in months, yet it returned that evening with the precision of a well-worn prayer.
A temple courtyard in Gwalior.
Late afternoon.
Marigold petals scattered like golden confetti across the stone floor.
The air was thick with the smell of incense and cow dung, of turmeric and heat.
She had stood there barefoot, her palms pressed together, the pleats of her saree slightly askew. Women moved around her with quiet purpose—lighting lamps, tying threads, offering coconuts wrapped in red cloth. The resonating sound of Sanskrit mantras drifted from a speaker which was haphazardly tied to a banyan tree, the sound snapping at the edges.
She didn’t remember the lines of the mantras, but the shape of it.
Not courage. Not escape. Just endurance.
She had prayed that day for patience. For the strength to remain quiet. To stay.
Because staying was easier to explain. Leaving required vocabulary, she hadn’t learned yet. Words like self-respect, or emotional distress, or trauma, or abuse hardly occurred in her mother’s universe, and so by default, it didn’t exist in her world too.
“Beta, aise toh har ghar mein aise choti choti an-ban hoti rahati hai,” her mother had said softly, tying a shielding thread around her wrist.
In every home, there is a little conflict.
But what her mother had meant was: A woman should never take an exit, but get herself adjusted.
She had nodded back then. Nodded with the kind of obedience that takes years to untangle from your throat.
Now, in Pune, sitting alone by the window, she could still hear the temple bells in her memory. The echo of them clanged against her ribs.
What is the use of a prayer which directs you to emptiness, having no place for questions that are usually supposed to be asked and answered?
What was the virtue in swallowing pain for the sake of appearances?
She opened her phone gallery. Found an old photo taken outside that very temple. Her face wore a innocent smile, dupatta over her head, thick and vivid sindoor. At a glance, she looked radiant. But then she recollected how her arm was thumped that day. He had forcefully clutched her in the rickshaw, being upset about not wearing the saree that he had proposed.
No one had noticed.
Because she had smiled, as she was supposed to.
She closed the photo and then her thumb hung over the contact of Maa yet again.
She didn’t call.
But it was the first time that Prarabdha didn’t feel guilty about it.
#
SPEAKING THE TRUTH
It was a slow Saturday afternoon, the kind when everything moved a little softer. The rain had taken a day’s rest. Sunshine pressed against the windows like a curious child—warm, temporary.
Prarabdha sat in the college library, an empty corner where she sometimes marked papers or simply let the quiet hold her. Across from her sat Anjali Ma’am, the psychology professor. They didn’t know each other well—just exchanged greetings, shared a flask of masala chai on long days.
Today, Anjali had found her sitting alone, staring at a blank page in her diary.
“Mind if I sit?” she asked.
Prarabdha had nodded.
For a while, neither of them spoke. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable. Just... mutual. Then, unexpectedly, Anjali said, “I heard about Reshma. Still hasn’t returned?”
“No,” Prarabdha said softly.
Anjali sipped her tea. “You seem worried.”
There was a pause. Prarabdha considered denying it, brushing it off like a leaf from her shoulder. She almost did.
But something in the stillness of the room—maybe the filtered light, or the gentle clink of a spoon in a distant cup—made her pause differently today.
“She reminds me of someone,” Prarabdha said, her voice low.
“Someone you knew?”
“No. Someone I was.”
Anjali turned slightly, her face open. No surprise. No pressure.
Prarabdha’s eyes didn’t leave the diary. Her fingers traced the edge of the page.
“He was never... violent, in the way people imagine violence. No broken bones. No bruises that showed. But everything in that house belonged to him—space, time, silence. Even my breath felt borrowed.”
She surprised herself at how easily the words came.
Anjali didn’t interrupt.
“I left after eight years. I didn’t even pack everything. Just walked out with a bag and my degree certificates.” She laughed quietly. “Not clothes. Not memories. Just paper proof that I had once been someone else.”
Anjali said nothing for a long time. When she finally spoke, it was just this:
“I’m glad you left.”
Prarabdha nodded. Then, more to herself than anyone else, she added, “I think I stayed for so long because I didn’t have the words. I didn’t know how to explain pain that didn’t bleed.”
That night, back home, she sat at her desk and picked up her pen.
“Today, I told someone. Just one person. And the world didn’t end. My voice didn’t crack. My body didn’t fall apart. Maybe truth is not always thunder. Maybe, sometimes, it is just a chair being pulled out gently. A space being made.”
She looked at the screen of her phone again.
No messages from Reshma.
But this time, she wasn’t helpless. She knew silence when she saw it now. And she had finally remembered her way around it.
Tomorrow, she would call the college counselor. Maybe visit Reshma’s neighborhood. Ask the questions no one else was asking.
Because staying silent was no longer an act of strength. It was, finally, a choice she was no longer willing to make.
#
THE LETTER
Monday arrived with the gentleness of early June—cloudy skies, hesitant light, and the lingering scent of old rain on the pavement. Prarabdha arrived early, her footsteps echoing faintly through the empty college corridors. The staffroom was still locked. So she turned instead toward the students’ common room.
She wasn’t sure why.
Call it instinct. Or restlessness. Or something else entirely.
Outside the common room door, she noticed a thin manila envelope taped awkwardly to the notice board. Her name, “Prarabdha Ma’am”, was written in soft blue ink—slightly smudged, as if the paper had been handled too many times before being left there.
She peeled it off, heart tightening as she walked back to her desk and sat down. She opened it slowly, deliberately. Inside was a single folded sheet. No salutation. No signature.
Just a letter.
“You said that sometimes the walls close in before we even notice. I think mine closed a long time ago.
There is a version of me I barely remember—someone who used to laugh freely, sing when cutting vegetables, dance alone when no one was home. That girl is now quiet all the time. Even in her dreams, she whispers.
At home, everything looks fine to others. My father prays every morning. He never shouts in public. But when we’re alone, his silence is a punishment. His rules are not written down, but they’re everywhere. I’m not allowed to wear kurtis with slits. I must be home before sunset. I can’t join the college WhatsApp group. If he sees me smiling at my phone, he says I’m dishonoring the family.
I think... I don’t want to disappear quietly like my mother did. She still sits in that same kitchen, cutting onions like she’s afraid to breathe.
I don’t know if I’m strong enough to leave yet. But I wanted someone to know that I am trying. That you helped me see I’m not the only one who feels like this.
Thank you for saying what you did. For seeing me.”
Prarabdha read the letter twice. The first time, as a teacher. The second time, as a woman.
By the end, her hands trembled—not from fear, but from recognition. From the unbearable clarity that pain, when finally named, becomes something else: truth.
She folded the letter gently and placed it in her diary.
There was still no message from Reshma. No call. But she knew now—Reshma hadn’t vanished. She had reached out. Quietly. Bravely. The way girls like her always did: through the back door, in folded letters, in careful silences.
And now that Prarabdha had heard her, she couldn’t unhear.
That evening, she drafted a message to the college counselor and the class coordinator. A soft inquiry about Reshma’s family situation. A request to check in, discreetly.
Then she opened her own diary and wrote:
“A letter changes nothing. And everything. It is both small and seismic. She trusted me with the sound of her own voice. I will not let it be swallowed.”
#
THE CONFRONTATION
The building was old but well-maintained—faded blue walls, a rusted swing creaking in the small courtyard, and rows of carefully aligned shoes outside each door. Prarabdha climbed the stairs slowly, her heart thudding like it did on old school report card days.
She had made an excuse to the college administration—something about a home visit for scholarship paperwork—but this wasn’t official. This was personal.
Reshma’s flat was on the second floor, at the end of a narrow corridor. The door was a muted green, paint peeling near the handle. Prarabdha hesitated, her hand hovering just above the doorbell.
And then, she pressed it.
The chime was sharp. Inside, footsteps approached. The door opened a crack.
A woman—middle-aged, tired eyes, vermilion smudged across her forehead—looked out.
“Yes?”
“I’m Prarabdha. I teach at Fergusson College. I’ve come to check on Reshma. She’s missed classes this past week. We were worried.”
The woman looked startled, unsure. “She’s... she’s resting.”
“May I speak with her? Just for a few minutes.”
Before the woman could answer, a man’s voice called from inside. “Who is it?”
The door opened wider.
He stepped into view. Early fifties, neatly combed hair, white kurta-pyjama. The kind of man who would never raise his voice in a temple. The kind of man who scared people without needing to.
“College teacher,” he said, almost scoffing. “Why are college teachers coming to our house now?”
“I just wanted to see if Reshma’s okay,” Prarabdha said, her voice steady, controlled.
“She is. She’s not well. She doesn’t need interference.”
There was finality in his voice. A hard edge, polite but sharp.
“I understand,” she said. “But students who vanish without a word—especially girls—concern us.”
“She’s not your concern,” he said flatly.
Behind him, a figure moved. A flash of red. A glimpse of a drawn face. Reshma.
Prarabdha met her eyes. Just for a second.
And in that second, everything unspoken passed between them.
I see you.
I know this silence.
You are not alone.
Reshma’s lips barely moved, but her eyes widened. A breath. A silent cry.
Prarabdha turned back to the man. “I’ll let the principal know I came. We have a responsibility.”
He stared at her, unblinking. “So do I.”
She nodded.
“I hope yours is the kind that doesn’t suffocate her.”
There was no anger in her voice. Just the truth, offered plainly, like a mirror.
She turned and left.
On the way down the stairs, her breath came faster. Not because of the man. Not because of fear.
But because for the first time, she had walked into the house she once lived in—even though the address was different.
That night, she didn’t write in her diary. She didn’t light a candle or pray.
She simply sat on her balcony, letting the breeze touch her hair, holding that brief eye contact with Reshma like a sacred pact.
#
A DIFFERENT KIND OF FREEDOM
The following week passed without spectacle. The world didn’t shift, and yet, something had.
Prarabdha returned to her rhythm of lectures and quiet lunches in the staffroom, of buying vegetables from the same vendor near Karve Road, of washing her own plates at night with the sound of the news murmuring in the background. But now, there was a pause between these actions—a space she hadn’t noticed before. A breath. A choice.
She bought jasmine-scented oil. Wore a red kurta. Let herself wear a bindi again.
She asked her students new questions:
“Are you sleeping enough?”
“What makes you laugh?”
“Is there something you’ve never told anyone?”
Reshma appeared by the corridor.
“I told my mother I don’t want to stay home for the holidays.”
“She didn’t say no right away.”
“Sometimes,” Prarabdha said, “freedom is asking for something that makes others uncomfortable.”
That evening, she climbed the small hill behind her apartment.
She just sat.
And in that stillness, she understood:
Freedom is not always a door flung open.
Sometimes, it is simply the decision to stay seated where you once stood frozen.
#
THE CALL HOME
Sunday evening arrived wrapped in the smell of pressure-cooked dal and the distant sound of temple bells. The sky outside her window was streaked with early monsoon light—silver with hints of orange, as if even the day wasn’t sure whether to stay or go.
Prarabdha’s phone lay on the kitchen counter, face down, vibrating softly.
Maa – Home
The name blinked quietly, and for once, she didn’t turn away.
She wiped her hands on her dupatta and picked it up.
The line connected. A breath. Then—
“Prarabdha?”
Her mother’s voice was exactly as she remembered it: a mixture of briskness and affection, seasoned over years of distance.
“Haan, Maa.”
There was a pause. The kind that only happens between two people who have waited too long to speak.
“Tu theek hai na, beta? Bahut din ho gaye.”
Are you okay, child? It’s been so long.
“I’m okay.”
More silence. A shuffle of movement on the other end—perhaps her mother was sitting on that old woven cot in the veranda, cup of tea in hand, the evening breeze tangled in the mango tree.
“I made that lauki sabzi you used to like today,” her mother said. “You never learned to make it properly.”
Prarabdha smiled softly. “I make it differently now.”
A small sound from her mother—neither approval nor disapproval. Just acknowledgment.
She wanted to say more. She wanted to tell her mother about the evenings she had come home and sat in silence, about Reshma, about the ache that still visited her some nights like an old friend.
But instead, she said, “I’m doing fine here, Maa. Teaching is good. The students are good.”
“That’s good,” her mother replied, but there was something unsaid behind her words, something trembled and folded like a dupatta kept carefully at the bottom of a trunk.
Then—
“Your Baba still asks about you.”
A breath caught.
“And I still can’t tell him everything,” her mother added, barely above a whisper. “But I know. You think I don’t, but I do.”
The words stunned her—gently, like unexpected rain.
“Maa…”
“I raised you to adjust,” her mother continued, “but I did not raise you to disappear. You were right to leave.”
Tears pressed against the back of her throat—not dramatic, not overwhelming. Just there.
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Prarabdha said.
“You didn’t,” her mother replied. “You reminded me what I once forgot.”
A long silence stretched between them—warm, forgiving, still unfinished.
Before hanging up, her mother said, “Come home for a few days, if you feel like it. No one will ask questions. And if they do, let them.”
Prarabdha nodded into the silence. “I’ll think about it.”
And for the first time, she meant it.
That night, Prarabdha opened the balcony door wide, letting the night air spill into the apartment. She sat with a cup of chai, her diary closed on the table beside her.
Somewhere far away, in the same sky, her mother was likely doing the same.
Not everything had been said. But something essential had.
And that was enough—for now.
***
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