Latest / My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story / My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 2: The Rules of the House

Transcript

My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 2: The Rules of the House · My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

0:00
My Playful Wife, Episode 2, The Rules of the
0:04
House, written by Mia. There are two roads. I
0:11
understood this, standing on the balcony with
0:14
the watering can, while the city went about its
0:17
Tuesday below me and the plants received more
0:20
water than they had asked for. The first road
0:24
was visible and had a name and a tradition and
0:27
the full support of every film I had ever watched,
0:30
every story I had ever heard, every conversation
0:33
I had overheard at family gatherings where men
0:36
talked about such things in the specific aggrieved
0:38
tone of men who feel they have been done wrong.
0:41
The first road involved a confrontation, a statement
0:45
of what I had seen, the loud and righteous withdrawal
0:49
of permission for what was happening. The first
0:53
road ended in one of two places, a marriage that
0:57
became a wound that wouldn't heal, or the absence
1:00
of a marriage. Both had a kind of dignity, a
1:04
cleanness. You could stand at the end of the
1:06
first road and feel correct. The second road
1:10
had no name. It had no tradition. It had no support
1:15
of any kind except the specific, complicated,
1:19
Difficult thing I was finding in my chest when
1:21
I thought about my wife's voice in the kitchen.
1:24
Not the anger, not the grief, but the other thing.
1:28
The thing that had no name either. I was standing
1:32
at the fork between them. The plants got more
1:36
water than they needed. There is a particular
1:41
kind of silence that happens inside a man when
1:43
everything he thought was true turns out to be
1:46
slightly, not entirely. Not catastrophically,
1:49
but slightly wrong. I stood on the balcony with
1:53
a watering can in my hand, and I listened to
1:57
that silence for a long time. The plants didn't
2:01
need more water. I gave it to them anyway. Below
2:05
the building, the city was already moving. Autorickshaw's,
2:10
schoolchildren, a vegetable vendor calling out
2:12
the price of tomatoes. The whole ordinary Tuesday
2:16
morning rolling forward without any knowledge
2:18
of what had just happened in my kitchen. I found
2:21
this deeply strange. Shouldn't something have
2:24
changed? Shouldn't the light be different? Or
2:28
the air carry some new weight? But no. The sun
2:32
was the same sun. The tomatoes were the same
2:36
price. I sat down on the plastic stool we kept
2:40
on the balcony, and I pressed my hands flat against
2:43
my thighs, and I tried to think clearly. What
2:48
I had seen, my wife, in the pale pink cordage
2:51
she wore when she thought no one was watching,
2:54
standing at the stove. My brother's arms around
2:57
her from behind. His hands, I closed my eyes,
3:01
and the image came back sharp and unwanted. His
3:04
hands not where family hands go. What I had heard,
3:09
her voice, a register of her voice, I had not
3:13
known existed. Low, amused, unbothered. The voice
3:18
of someone in a situation they had been in before.
3:22
This is where the story begins. Some part of
3:25
me said, not a helpful part, not the part that
3:29
knew what a husband was supposed to do. Some
3:32
older part, something that lived below the chest.
3:36
I thought about what happened next. I could go
3:39
back inside. Confront them. The word felt theatrical
3:43
even as I thought it. Confront. As though this
3:47
were a film. As though I had the lines ready
3:50
and the music would swell at the right moment
3:52
and Saloni would cry and Piyush would look ashamed
3:56
and the scene would resolve into something clean.
4:00
But I knew my wife. I had known her for three
4:04
years. which is not long, but is long enough
4:06
to know the shape of a person, the contours of
4:10
who they are when they're not performing. And
4:12
the thing was, the thing I couldn't stop turning
4:14
over my hands like a stone I'd found, was that
4:18
what I had just seen was not performance. She
4:21
hadn't been putting on a show. She had been simply,
4:24
completely, at ease. That told me more than the
4:29
act itself. If she had seemed guilty, If there
4:34
had been a flinch, a moment of calculation, I
4:38
would have understood it differently. People
4:40
make mistakes. People reach for things they shouldn't
4:44
in moments of weakness, that I could have read
4:47
as a story with a before and an after. But Saloni
4:52
at that stove, still stirring, head tilted back,
4:56
Piyusha's arms around her and her voice low and
4:59
warm, that was not a mistake. That was a life
5:03
she had been living alongside our life, quietly,
5:06
without apology. I thought, how long? I thought,
5:13
does she love him? I thought, and this one surprised
5:18
me, does it matter? The second road, when I finally
5:25
let myself look at it, was this. I could choose
5:29
not to turn this into a confrontation. I could
5:32
choose to know what I now knew and carry it differently.
5:36
Not pretend I hadn't seen. I was not built for
5:39
that kind of pretending, but choose how to hold
5:42
it. Choose what it meant. Because here was the
5:46
truth. The one I hadn't admitted even to myself
5:49
until I was sitting on that plastic stool watching
5:52
the tomato vendor will his cart around the corner.
5:55
Saloni was a good wife. She was a remarkably,
5:59
genuinely good wife. She remembered things. She
6:03
made food that tasted like care. She laughed
6:06
at my jokes even when they weren't very good.
6:09
She had held my hand through my father's illness,
6:11
slept in that hospital chair for three nights
6:14
without a word of complaint, and when it was
6:17
over she had made sure I ate something before
6:20
she let me grieve. She had never once used her
6:24
beauty as a weapon. In three years, she had never
6:28
made me feel small. And she was, I knew this
6:32
about my wife. I had always known it, a woman
6:35
who needed things I perhaps did not have the
6:38
capacity to give her. A heat I couldn't always
6:41
match. An energy that required a particular kind
6:45
of answer. Was I angry? Yes. Was there something
6:50
broken in my chest? Also yes. But there was something
6:55
else there too, something I didn't have a clean
6:58
word for. A heat that was not entirely the heat
7:02
of anger. I had watched my wife through a doorway,
7:06
and she had been alive in a way that stopped
7:09
my breath. The color in her skin, the sound she
7:13
made, the absolute certainty of her own body.
7:17
I had stood there watching, and my mouth had
7:20
gone dry. I was not proud of that. But I was
7:25
also, at 30 years old, done pretending I was
7:28
made of simpler stuff than I actually was. I
7:32
stood up. I put the watering can down. I went
7:36
back inside. Piyush was in the hallway when I
7:42
came in, a towel slung low around his hips, his
7:45
hair damp from what I understood, with a clarity
7:48
that was almost funny in its precision, was not
7:51
a shower he had actually taken. He had wet his
7:55
hair at the tap, the same thing I was about to
7:57
do. He looked at me. I looked at him. He was
8:03
23 years old and built like a man who took exercise
8:07
seriously, all of it visible in the way the towel
8:11
sat. My brother. My mother's youngest child,
8:15
who had cried at cartoons until he was nine,
8:17
and once kept a stray cat hidden in his hostel
8:20
room for three weeks before anyone found out.
8:24
Bia, he said, you're back. I'm back, I said.
8:31
There was a pause, a very long pause, in which
8:35
several things were not said. Then Piyush looked
8:39
at the floor and said, In a voice that was almost
8:43
too casual, Bobby made sandwiches. Good, I said.
8:49
I like sandwiches. I went to the bathroom. I
8:54
turned on the shower. I stood under it for a
8:57
long time. Our bathroom has a small ventilation
9:03
window near the ceiling, one of those old building
9:06
details, a square of grill and glass set into
9:09
the wall where it meets the kitchen. You'd never
9:12
think to look at it. I had never thought to look
9:15
at it. I am telling you this because honesty
9:19
is the only thing I have left in this story,
9:21
and honesty requires me to tell you what happened
9:24
next. I moved the plastic drum. I climbed up.
9:30
I looked through the grill. I could see a slice
9:33
of the kitchen, the counter, the stove, one edge
9:37
of the window. Not much, but I could hear everything.
9:42
What I heard was my wife. Her voice had dropped
9:47
to something I can only describe as private,
9:50
the register of a sound that isn't meant to travel,
9:53
that belongs to a body and not to a room. I had
9:56
heard versions of this voice before. In the dark,
10:00
in our bed. But this was something slightly different.
10:03
This was a version that had been unwrapped, maybe.
10:07
Freed from the consideration she always brought
10:11
to our moments together. I gripped the edge of
10:14
the drum, and I listened. I am not going to write
10:19
every word of what they said. Some things lose
10:22
something in the retelling. They become record
10:24
rather than experience. Evidence rather than
10:28
truth. What I will tell you is what it did to
10:31
me. It did quite a lot. Because what I was hearing
10:38
when I stripped everything else away was a woman
10:41
who was fully, completely herself. No performance.
10:47
Just Saloni. All of her. The part she showed
10:50
me and the part she didn't. The whole complicated,
10:54
magnificent woman I had apparently married without
10:57
fully understanding. She had married me knowing
11:01
she was this person. She had chosen to protect
11:04
me from it. She had in her way, in the only way
11:08
she apparently knew how, been kind. I don't know
11:12
if that makes it better. I don't know if better
11:14
and worse are even the right measurements for
11:17
what I was standing on a plastic drum trying
11:19
to calculate. What I know is that when I heard
11:23
her laugh, that private, unguarded sound, like
11:27
something let loose, My hand against the wall
11:30
was not shaking with rage. I came out of the
11:36
bathroom twenty minutes later with damp hair
11:38
and a face that I had spent some time arranging
11:41
into something ordinary. Piyush was in his room.
11:45
The door was closed. Saloni was in the kitchen.
11:50
She had changed. The pale pink corda was gone,
11:54
replaced by something darker. A cotton salwar
11:58
set she wore on ordinary days. Nothing remarkable.
12:02
Her hair was freshly pinned. If you had walked
12:05
into that kitchen and seen her, you would have
12:08
seen a woman making breakfast on a Tuesday morning.
12:12
She looked up when I came in. She looked at me
12:15
the way she always looked at me. Warmly, openly,
12:19
with that quality she had of giving you her full
12:21
attention and making you feel for a moment. like
12:25
the only person in a large room. Sit, she said.
12:30
Everything's ready. Iset. She put a plate in
12:36
front of me. Sandwiches. The bread toasted the
12:39
way I liked it, the edges crisp. A cup of tea,
12:43
exactly how I took it, placed at my right hand
12:46
without my asking. Small acts of knowledge. the
12:50
accumulated evidence of a person who had been
12:52
paying attention to me for three years. Piyush
12:56
appeared from the hallway, dressed now, and took
13:00
the chair across from mine. The three of us sat
13:04
around the table. Piyush reached for a sandwich.
13:10
I looked out the window. Nobody said anything,
13:14
and yet the silence was not empty. It was full.
13:19
Crammed with everything that wasn't being said,
13:21
everything that had happened in this flat in
13:24
the last 40 minutes, all of it present at the
13:27
table like an uninvited fourth person, sitting
13:30
in the chair nobody had pulled out. I picked
13:34
up my sandwich. Good, I said. Saloni looked at
13:41
me. In her eyes, in the half second before she
13:45
looked back at her cup, something moved. Awareness,
13:49
perhaps. Or the beginning of a question she wasn't
13:53
sure she was ready to ask. I put the green chutney,
13:57
she said. You always forget to ask, but you always
14:01
eat more when I do. I know, I said. Thank you.
14:08
And she smiled at me. A small smile, private,
14:13
just for me. And I understood, with a sudden
14:16
clarity that was almost painful, that this smile
14:19
and the other sounds I had heard through the
14:22
bathroom grill were not in opposition to each
14:24
other. They were both real. They were both hers.
14:28
My wife contained multitudes. I had just never
14:33
bothered to count them. I ate my breakfast. The
14:38
tea was perfect. Outside, the city continued
14:41
its Tuesday. Piyush left first, exams, he said,
14:46
and though his reasons had perhaps never been
14:49
entirely what he claimed, he looked at me when
14:52
he said goodbye, and in his look was something
14:54
I could only read as, I know that you know, and
14:58
perhaps, I don't know what happens now. I didn't
15:03
know either. I watched him go. The door closed.
15:09
Saloni began clearing the table. She moved around
15:13
the kitchen with her usual ease, unhurried, humming
15:16
something I didn't recognize, a film song, maybe,
15:20
or something she'd made up. I sat and watched
15:25
her. At some point, she felt my gaze and turned.
15:30
She held a plate in each hand. She looked at
15:34
me with an expression I couldn't read fully,
15:36
half question, half something else. You'll be
15:41
late, she said. Probably, I said. Another moment,
15:48
the humming stopped. I'll have dinner ready by
15:52
eight, she said. Okay, I said. I thought about
15:59
the two roads on the drive to work that morning.
16:01
I thought about them in the lift. I thought about
16:04
them through the first hour of a meeting I attended
16:07
in body only, my responses coming from the automated
16:10
part of the brain while the rest of me was somewhere
16:13
else entirely. The second road required something
16:17
I was not sure I had. Not forgiveness. I wasn't
16:21
ready to call it that. Wasn't sure it was even
16:24
the right word. Something more like a specific
16:27
kind of courage. The courage to stay in a situation
16:31
that was uncomfortable rather than resolve the
16:34
discomfort by making it into a story with a clean
16:37
ending. I had always been, at my core, a man
16:42
who could hold complicated things. My mother
16:45
had said this about me once. You don't need everything
16:49
to be simple. She'd meant it as a compliment
16:52
and also as something more complicated. An observation
16:56
about a person who sometimes holds complexity
16:58
when he should just say the thing and be done
17:02
with it. But perhaps here it was the right capacity.
17:06
Perhaps here it was exactly what was needed.
17:10
The second road meant, I see what is happening.
17:14
I am choosing to receive it as information rather
17:17
than verdict. I am choosing to stay in this marriage
17:21
with my eyes open rather than leave it or perform
17:24
blindness. The second road meant, I am a man
17:29
who chooses this. I did not know yet if I was
17:33
capable of being that man. But I had sat at the
17:37
table. I had eaten the paratha. I had said good
17:41
when she asked how it tasted. And I had meant
17:44
it because it was good, because she always made
17:46
good parathas, because that was one of the unchanging
17:49
true things about this marriage, and it was not
17:52
made untrue by what I had seen in the kitchen.
17:55
I was holding two true things simultaneously.
17:59
The paratha was good. What I had seen in the
18:02
kitchen had happened. Both were real. Both required
18:05
me. I would find out. And that was how it ended,
18:11
the first morning of whatever this new thing
18:13
was. No shouting, no accusations, no dramatic
18:18
rearrangement of the furniture. Just a man and
18:21
his wife standing in a kitchen, each holding
18:24
the knowledge of the other a little differently
18:26
than they had an hour before, both choosing,
18:30
for now, for today, for reasons neither of them
18:33
had fully worked out, to let the ordinary world
18:36
hold. I picked up my bag. I said goodbye. She
18:42
kissed my cheek at the door, the same way she
18:45
always did, her hand resting briefly on my chest
18:48
as she pulled back. Her fingers pressed there
18:52
for a fraction of a second longer than usual.
18:56
Just long enough for me to notice. Just long
18:59
enough for her to know I had. The door closed
19:03
behind me. I stood in the hallway for a moment.
19:08
The metal of the door handle was cool. The lift
19:11
hummed somewhere in the building. Through the
19:13
door I could hear the faint sounds of the flat,
19:16
Saloni moving, the sound of water, the ordinary
19:20
morning continuing. I thought about the two roads,
19:25
about which one I had taken, in that kitchen,
19:28
when I had chosen to sit at the table rather
19:31
than make the scene the first road required.
19:34
I had chosen. Not fully consciously, not with
19:39
the clarity that comes from deliberation. But
19:42
I had sat down. I had eaten the paratha. I had
19:46
let the morning hold. That was a choice. I stood
19:52
in the hallway and I thought, this is not over.
19:56
And beneath that thought, very quiet, very still,
20:00
something I didn't entirely trust yet, good.
20:07
To be continued in Episode 3, What Watching Does
20:21
2 of My Playful Wife. If this story is staying
20:25
with you, the next episode is already waiting.
20:29
Subscribe so you don't miss it. The complete
20:32
book is on Amazon and early episodes plus bonus
20:35
chapters are on my Patreon. Links are in the
20:38
description. I'm Mia. Thank you for listening.