Rooh
For most of her childhood, she had been at a girls’ orphanage in Mumbai.
She had been brought there when she was six months old.
No one had ever been able to tell her much about the woman who left her there. There were no photographs waiting in a drawer, no letters tucked away for her eighteenth birthday, no family name she could trace back through generations.
Just a name.
Rooh.
And an institution that became the closest thing she had to a home.
There was rarely enough food to make anyone forget hunger. The showers were cold more often than they were warm. The rules were strict, and the nuns had little patience for tears.
Children learned quickly.
You ate when food was put in front of you.
You slept when it was time to sleep.
You shared what you had.
You did not ask for things that nobody could afford to give you.
Rooh grew up watching girls leave.
Some were adopted.
Some were sent to relatives they barely remembered.
Some were married as soon as they were old enough.
Each time, Rooh wondered what it would feel like to have someone choose her.
Not because they needed an extra pair of hands.
Not because she was convenient.
But simply because they wanted her.
She stopped asking herself that question as she got older.
So she became quiet and obedient.
The sort of girl adults described with approving words.
Well-mannered, no trouble, she doesn’t complain, she knows her place.
Rooh never understood why those words sometimes made her uncomfortable.
She only knew that being easy to manage seemed to make people like her more.
Then, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, an unfamiliar woman came to the orphanage. She was elegant and expensively dressed.
The sort of woman Rooh had only ever seen from a distance before.
She spoke privately with the head nun for a long time.
Then she asked to meet Rooh.
Rooh remembered sitting across from her that afternoon, hands folded neatly in her lap.
The woman studied her.
“You’re eighteen?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’ve completed your schooling?”
“Yes.”
“You know how to cook?”
“A little.”
“Clean?”
Rooh nodded.
“Take care of a household?”
Another nod.
"Excellent. You are perfect." The woman smiled faintly.
That smile stayed with Rooh long after the woman left.
She didn’t understand it then.
The woman was her future husband’s grandmother.
And she had come looking for a bride.
She wanted someone quiet, someone respectable enough, someone without a family powerful enough to interfere.
Someone who would accept the life she was given without demanding too much in return.
Someone convenient.
At the time, though, she didn’t know that.
All she knew was that someone had chosen her.
And for the first time in her life, that felt like being wanted.
The marriage was arranged quickly. There were conversations Rooh didn’t fully understand and decisions made in rooms she wasn’t invited into. Nobody asked her what she wanted.
But when the head nun explained that she would be marrying into a wealthy family, Rooh found herself imagining things she hadn’t allowed herself to imagine in years.
A bedroom, a family and regular meals. A place she could call home.
Maybe, eventually, affection.
She knew nothing about the man she was going to marry.
But she told herself that love did not always begin before marriage.
The wedding itself passed like a dream.
Too many people and too many eyes watching her. She remembered the weight of the jewelry more than anything else.
She remembered being told to sit here.
Stand there.
Smile and then lower her eyes.
She did exactly as she was told.
Her husband was beside her for most of it, but she barely knew what to make of him.
He was distant.
And there was something in the way he carried himself that told her he did not want to be there.
Still, Rooh tried not to take it personally.
She understood enough to know that the marriage had been arranged by his grandmother.
She could see the resentment in him.
She simply hoped it wasn’t resentment toward her.
For one brief moment after the wedding, she allowed herself to believe that perhaps things would become easier once they were alone.
Perhaps he would talk to her and she could tell him about the orphanage.
Perhaps he would ask about her.
Instead, he went to London and left her behind.
Rooh found herself wondering if he hated her. If the resentment she felt when he looked at her was because of her.
Was it her face? Or maybe because she was an orphan?
She told herself he would come back but she had no reason to believe that he would.
She waited anyway.
Because that was all she could do and somewhere inside her she still believed that this house could become her home.
She didn’t know yet that the house had never been waiting to welcome her.
It had only been waiting for someone quiet enough to fit inside it.
When the car finally stopped in front of the enormous house, Rooh stared through the window.
It was larger than anything she had ever lived in.Tall gates, stone walls and rows of windows glowing beneath the evening sky.
A place that looked permanent and safe.
She tightened her fingers around the edge of her sari and she could see her younger self—the little girl at the orphanage who used to wonder what it would feel like to be chosen.
Now she had been chosen.
She had a husband and a home then the driver opened the door.
Rooh stepped out and looked up at the house.
Then, instinctively, she lowered her eyes and walked inside.
