Sex With My Father-in-Law: The DIL and the Cuckold Husband
Calling the Father-in-Law: Come Home, The House Is Big Enough
The email did not leave the laptop.
Rohan read it again after coffee. He read it again after a shower. He read it standing in the kitchen with a towel on his shoulders, as if the words might change if he stood in a different room.
Kolkata. Three weeks. Transfer.
Simran watched him from the sofa. She had put on jeans and an old shirt. Her hair was still wet. She looked like a person waiting for a door to open.
“You have to call him,” she said.
Rohan nodded. Then he did not move.
He had not called his father in a real way for a long time. Festival messages. One short call after the court marriage. I got married. Her name is Simran. And then that flat answer. Okay. Do what you think is right.
Three years of marriage. Almost no voice.
Rohan did not know the size of his father’s life. He knew only old, thin facts. A businessman. A house somewhere in Kolkata. A man who stayed behind when a small boy was sent to Bangalore. Rohan did not know about big offices. He did not know about property. In his head, Debashish was a strong, simple man with a simple house. That was all.
“I am only asking to stay for some time,” Rohan said, more to the window than to her. “After that we will take a flat. Near my office. This is just… first days.”
“I know,” Simran said.
He walked up and down the small hall. Six steps one way. Six steps back. The phone felt heavy, like a stone that could talk.
He pressed the number.
It rang.
It rang again.
“Hello.”
The voice was deep and calm. It did not sound surprised. It did not sound warm. It sounded like a man who answered phones in the middle of work.
“Uncle— I mean. Father. It’s Rohan.”
A short pause.
“Yes. I know.”
Rohan closed his eyes. Simran sat very still.
“I am calling because of work,” Rohan said. He spoke slowly, the way he spoke when he was afraid of saying the wrong thing. “My company is sending me to Kolkata. In three weeks. We need a place to stay for some time. Only for some time. After that we will find our own house.”
Another pause. Somewhere on the other side, a chair moved.
“You and your wife,” Debashish said.
“Yes. Simran.”
“The house is big enough,” Debashish said. “Come home.”
That was all.
No question about salary. No question about how long. No how are you, beta. No I am happy. Just those words, hard and plain, like a gate opening because it had to.
“Thank you,” Rohan said. “We will not trouble you for long.”
“Tell me the date. I will send a car to the airport.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Send the date,” Debashish said.
“Okay. I will.”
“All right.”
The line went dead.
Rohan stood with the phone still at his ear. The apartment looked the same. The cricket bat in the corner. The plant that Simran always forgot to water and then saved at the last minute. The fridge with old wedding magnets. Nothing had moved. And still he felt like a guest in a hotel he had not booked.
Simran stood up.
“What did he say?”
“He said the house is big enough. Come home.”
She waited.
“That is all?”
“That is all.”
Rohan sat on the arm of the sofa. He laughed once, a small dry sound. “I asked for a few weeks. He made it sound like I was returning to a place I belong. I don’t belong there, Simran. I grew up here. I don’t even know how many rooms he has.”
“You will see,” she said softly.
“I feel like a stranger.”
She put her hand on his neck. “Then we will be strangers together. Only for some time.”
He nodded. He did not look sure.
Simran’s office smelled of coffee and print paper and the perfume the receptionist wore too much.
She packed her desk on a Thursday afternoon. People came one by one, the way people come when they do not know if they should be happy for you.
“Kolkata, wow.”
“Family city, no?”
“You will start something new there. Design work is everywhere.”
She smiled because smiling was easier than the truth.
The truth was a box of pens and a small cactus and a photo of her and Rohan at Cubbon Park, both squinting at the sun. The truth was her name on the glass cabin that would belong to someone else next week. The truth was that she was leaving a job she had built with her own late nights. She was leaving the money that came into her account. She was leaving the version of herself who took an auto home and did not ask anyone if she was allowed to be late.
She was doing it for Rohan.
She loved him. That part was not a question. Love, today, looked like bubble wrap and a resignation letter.
Her manager squeezed her shoulder. “If it doesn’t work, you call me.”
“It will work,” Simran said.
She did not know if she believed it.
On the metro home she looked at her face in the dark window. She tried to imagine a traditional house. A distant father-in-law. A man who had not come to their wedding. A man who had not said her name with any softness on the phone. She tried to imagine calling him Dad and the word sat in her mouth like a stone.
He did not approve. He had not stopped them. That was not the same thing as welcome.
She pressed her forehead to the glass.
Only for some time, she told herself. Then our own flat. Then I find work. Then the bubble can be built again.
The train went into a tunnel and her face disappeared.
Packing took days.
It was not only clothes. It was five years of small things that had become a life.
Rohan wrapped the coffee mugs in newspaper. One mug said World’s Okayest Husband. Simran had given it to him on a joke anniversary. He held it too long.
“We can buy new mugs there,” he said.
“I want this one,” she said.
So it went into a box marked KITCHEN – OPEN FIRST.
They found a movie ticket from their second date under the bed. They found a charger that belonged to a phone they no longer owned. They found a letter Simran’s mother had sent after the court marriage, full of tight, polite anger. Simran put the letter in the bin, then took it out, then put it in a file. She did not know why. Some hurts you do not throw away. You just close them.
At night they ate on the floor because the table was gone, sold to a neighbour for a price that felt like an insult.
“Are you scared?” Rohan asked.
“Yes.”
“Of him?”
“Of the house. Of being a daughter-in-law in a place that never asked for me. Of losing my work and then smiling at breakfast.” She looked at him. “I am not scared of you.”
He pulled her close. Their bodies knew this part. The rest of their life was in cartons.
They made love that week the same way they always did. Soft. Short. His breath breaking too soon. Her arms around him after, hiding the unfinished feeling, choosing the man instead of the minute. In the dark he whispered, “When we have our own place again, it will feel like this. Like us.”
She said, “Yes.”
She packed the black slip in a side pocket of her suitcase, not because the nights were perfect, but because it belonged to the bubble they were leaving.
The last morning in Bangalore was too bright.
The landlord took the keys. The plant went to the neighbour. The hall looked larger without their life in it. Rohan stood in the empty bedroom and said, “This is where I burned the butter chicken.”
Simran laughed, and then her eyes filled, and she wiped them before the driver could see.
The airport was full of people who knew where they were going.
Rohan checked the bags. Simran held the boarding passes so hard the paper bent. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport. The name looked long and official on the screen. A city she had seen in photos. A father-in-law she had never touched.
They sat at the gate.
Rohan’s phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number.
Car will wait at exit gate 2. White Innova. Driver name Babu. — D. Roy
Rohan stared at the message.
“He sent a car,” he said. “I didn’t even give him the flight number yet. I sent the date last night. Only the date.”
“He knows things,” Simran said.
Rohan shook his head slowly. “I thought I was calling a man with a simple house. I don’t know what I am walking into.”
She took his hand.
His palm was damp. Hers was cold.
“We stay a few weeks,” she said, in the easy words they had been repeating like a prayer. “Then we move. This is not forever.”
“No,” he said. “Not forever.”
The boarding call came.
They walked down the tube into the plane. Simran took the window. Rohan took the seat beside her. When the plane began to move, she held his hand so tightly that her nails left small marks.
She did not look out at Bangalore falling away.
She looked at their joined hands and braced for a house that was big enough, a man who spoke in short sentences, and a life that had not asked her if she was ready.
The plane lifted.
The bubble stayed on the ground.