VII.

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The morning of our wedding, the neem tree bloomed.

 

It hadn’t flowered in years. The potter said it was too old. Meera said it was too tired. But that morning, without wind or warning, it burst into blossom—white buds clinging to every branch like the tree had remembered something just in time.

 

The priest called it a sign. The potter said we should hurry before the rains came.

 

No one asked what I thought.

 

I had no thoughts—only the low hum behind my ribs that returned whenever Meera’s eyes found mine and didn’t look away.

 

We were married beneath the neem tree at dusk. The women strung garlands from its branches, some fresh, some already wilting. A girl too young to speak carried a bowl of rosewater and poured it along the path, leaving a glistening trail between worlds.

 

The village gathered. There were no invitations—just food and fire, and people arriving in the clothes they had. Someone played a drum. Someone else joined with a reed flute that couldn’t hold a tune but tried anyway.

 

Meera wore red—not the quiet red of ceremony, but the kind that looked like it had grown from her own skin. A line of turmeric traced her collarbone, and jasmine in her hair kept slipping free.

 

She didn’t smile. But her mouth held the memory of one.

 

We circled the fire seven times. On the last round, we walked together. The dust lifted gently beneath our feet. I don’t remember the words the priest said. I remember her hand in mine—warm, dry, certain.

 

Someone shouted that the sky was crying.

 

And it was.

 

The first rain of the season came in soft pearls, falling slow and sparse—just enough to stir the scent of earth without soaking our clothes. The crowd clapped. The priest raised his hands. Meera turned her face upward, and when she looked at me again, her cheeks were streaked and shining.

 

Later, inside our hut, she sat cross-legged on the mat and removed her bangles one by one, placing them in a clay bowl beside the door.

 

That bowl would later fill with ashes, milk, loose buttons, and the bones of rats we didn’t want to kill but couldn’t let live.

 

She leaned forward, touched my face with her thumb, and said, “Now you have no excuse not to stay.”

 

“I never wanted one,” I said.

 

She laughed—low, tired, real.

 

And when we pressed together beneath the mosquito net, our bodies slick with sweat and dust and rice flour from the day’s celebration, I forgot everything that came before her mouth.

 

Outside, the frogs began singing.

 

A rhythm older than language.

 

A rhythm of first nights.

Of things that didn’t need to be spoken aloud.

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VIII.

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In the first days after the wedding, time softened.

 

Mornings came late. We woke with the light, not the roosters, and only rose when the warmth made the mosquito net unbearable. Sometimes we didn’t speak. Sometimes we did—about nothing: the shape of a cloud, the bitterness of tamarind, whether the dog that barked every night had a wife.

 

Meera laughed more now, but never loudly. Her laughter was like the cloth she washed by the river—worn, clean, still strong.

 

She took over the cooking. I offered to help, but she refused.

 

“You’ve already done enough,” she said. “You married me.”

 

I made myself useful where I could. Repaired the roof with palm thatch. Mended a fence the goats kept testing. Dug a trench to divert the rainwater that pooled in the corner of our hut. Once, I brought her a frog with markings like Sanskrit along its back.

 

She stared at it for a long time.

 

“Put it back,” she said.

 

We went to the river in the afternoons, sometimes together, sometimes not. If I arrived first, I’d sit on the bank with my feet in the water, watching the current toy with leaves like children who didn’t know they were being led. If she arrived first, she’d be rinsing vegetables or scrubbing pots, her hair tied up with whatever cloth she had nearest, a smear of ash on her cheek.

 

We didn’t show much—not in front of others. But our hands found each other often: passing a ladle, brushing shoulders in the doorway, sitting side by side in the fading heat. Once, when I handed her a cup of buttermilk during a village gathering, our fingers touched for just a moment too long. No one said anything.

 

At night, she slept curled toward me, her breath soft against my collarbone. I liked to listen to the rhythm of it—the pause she took just before exhaling, as if even in sleep, she was deciding whether to stay.

 

The village noticed, of course.

 

A woman at the well said Meera’s skin had begun to glow. A boy asked me if I was a magician, because Meera had smiled at him and it made his stomach hurt.

 

Even her father softened. He didn’t say much, but one evening he brought me a cup of toddy, handed it over without a word, and walked away chewing his betel like it owed him money.

 

Nothing grand happened.

 

Just hours, stitched into days, stitched into something we stopped counting.

 

It was a season of closeness—of held gazes and unheld time.

 

And though I did not know it then, these were the days I would return to later—when the river rose, and the sky cracked, and the glass I had been meant to fill shimmered again in my hand.

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IX.

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It began with silence.

 

Not the silence of night, or of two people resting back to back in the dark. This was different. A pause inside Meera that lasted three days longer than it should have. Her body, usually so precise—waking with the sun, bleeding with the moon—went quiet.

 

She said nothing at first.

 

But I noticed how she started turning in bed with more care. How she stopped sitting cross-legged and began sleeping with a cushion between her knees. How she touched her belly when she thought no one was watching.

 

On the fourth day, I asked what she was thinking.

 

She said, “I think something small has entered me.”

 

I didn’t understand, not then. I asked if it hurt.

 

She laughed. “Not yet.”

 

She never said the word. Neither of us did. But we began moving differently. I carried heavier loads from the market. She stopped bathing alone in the river. When she cooked, she sat on a low stool instead of squatting near the fire.

 

The changes came slowly.

 

Her walk shifted—first subtly, then unmistakably—hips rocking slightly, as if the earth had begun to turn beneath her. Her hunger sharpened. She ate mangoes with chili, then wanted only milk. Some days she couldn’t stand the smell of ghee. Other days, she cried while peeling onions and said it wasn’t the onions.

 

Her belly grew.

 

At first, just a soft rounding. Then firmer. Heavier. The village women came and placed their hands on it like reading a warm stone. They smiled and nodded and said nothing useful.

 

I watched her body change with awe and a strange kind of grief. She was still Meera—but slower, deeper, more elemental. Like a mountain slowly remembering it was once fire.

 

She complained of backaches. Of dreams she couldn’t explain. Once she said she felt the child kick, and grabbed my hand to place it on her stomach. I felt nothing—but I nodded.

 

In her eighth month, Meera began to insist that the child was eavesdropping.

 

“He hears what I think,” she said.

 

I laughed, until one day she whispered, I want guava, and a ripe one dropped from the roof with a soft thud.

 

“It’s just wind,” I said.

 

She nodded. But the next day, when she muttered not ghee again under her breath, the entire tin spoiled.

 

After that, we fed her only what she pretended not to want.

 

We didn’t count the months. No one did. We simply lived through them.

 

The rains came and went. The river rose, receded, left behind silt and silence. The kiln cooled. Her father moved more slowly. The village seemed to lean inward, as if bracing for something.

 

And then, one morning before dawn, she woke me with a sound I had never heard from her before.

 

Not fear. Not pain. Just—insistence.

 

It was time.

 

The women came quickly, as if summoned not by voice but by rhythm. They filled the hut with smoke, sweat, boiling water, and murmured prayers. I was sent outside. Given a bowl of turmeric paste to stir and told not to stop. So I didn’t.

 

Hours passed.

 

Then: a cry.

 

High and fierce. Not the cry of a fragile thing, but of something newly claimed.

 

A woman emerged, her arms wet with blood and milk. She handed me the child, wrapped in cotton already stained.

 

A boy.

 

His eyes opened once—unfocused, searching for nothing. Then he sneezed.

 

That night, as Meera lay half-asleep with the baby curled against her, she whispered a name. I repeated it once, so softly I barely heard myself say it.

 

Then I lay beside them, my hand resting lightly on the edge of the mat, as if to keep them from drifting too far from me.

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Continue to Part 4

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