Chapter 1
The note was a grenade with the pin already pulled, lying there on the teak table like it belonged. Aravind stared at it. Read it again. The words didn't rearrange themselves into something kinder the second time.
His head throbbed — a thick, dull pressure behind his eyes, the kind that settled in after too many sleepless nights and not enough water. He pressed two fingers to his temple and looked around the apartment.
Twelve floors up, the city was already awake outside the glass. Chennai morning light came in pale and hot through the floor-to-ceiling windows, catching the dust motes drifting through the centralized AC's low hum. Everything was exactly where it should be. The cushions on the sofa. The brass lamp. Her half-empty glass of water from last night, still on the side table, condensation long gone.
Everything except her.
He walked barefoot across the cold marble, and his feet carried him to the bedroom door before his brain caught up. The wardrobe was open. Not ransacked — *chosen*. The gaps in her side of the closet were surgical. One suitcase missing from the storage loft. Her toiletries gone from the bathroom shelf, leaving that small bald patch of tile where her bottles used to stand.
*On the roads as I always wanted.*
He read that line again. It sat in his chest like a swallowed stone.
Six years of love and relationship. Two years of marriage. He'd known her since second year of college, when she'd argued with a professor in front of three hundred students and won, and he'd sat there in the back row thinking *who is this girl*. He'd quit smoking for her. Quit drinking. The anger — the thing his father used to call *the Krishnan temper*, passed down like a family heirloom — he'd wrestled that down to almost nothing. Almost.
Last night.
He tried to reconstruct it and the pieces came back jagged. Something about the dinner. He'd said something, she'd said something back, and then the volume had climbed, and he'd — he couldn't even remember the exact words now, just the shape of it. The way her face had gone still and cold at the end. The way she'd walked out of the room without slamming the door, which was somehow worse than slamming it.
He sat down on the edge of the bed. His phone was on the nightstand, screen dark. He picked it up, thumb hovering over her contact. *Don't look for me.*
His thumb came down anyway. Rang. Rang. Rang. The generic voice telling him the person he was calling was unavailable. He called again. Same. Third time, he didn't even wait for the message — just ended it and dropped the phone face-down on the mattress.
She was fast. She'd always been fast. Decisions, movements, judgments — Reena moved through the world like water finding the lowest point, no hesitation, no second-guessing. She'd packed, written the note, and been gone before he'd even stirred. Probably before six. He'd slept through all of it. Slept through his wife leaving him.
His gaze drifted to the note again. *Take your medicines properly.* Even now. Even with the grenade in her hand, she'd thought about his blood pressure tablets sitting in the kitchen drawer. That was Reena. That was the thing about her — she could cut you open and bandage you in the same breath.
He stood up. Paced to the window. Twelve floors down, the street was a river of autos and two-wheelers, tiny and indifferent. Somewhere down there, or on a bus, or a train, or in some hotel room she'd booked without telling him, his wife was starting her life over.
*I will be on roads as I always wanted.*
He didn't know what that meant. She'd never said that before. Not to him. Maybe it was a thing she'd told her sister, or a thing she'd kept folded up inside herself for years, waiting for a morning like this one. The thought made his stomach turn. How much of her had he not been listening to?
He went to the kitchen because his body needed to do something. Opened the drawer. The strip of tablets was there, half-used, exactly where she'd said. He took one with a glass of water and stood at the counter drinking it, staring at the fridge — at the photo magnet from their Ooty trip, her laughing with her head tipped back, his arm around her waist.
His phone buzzed on the bed. He was across the apartment before he'd decided to move.
Not her. His manager. *Sir, the Malabar shipment —*
He typed back *later* and threw the phone onto the sofa.
The apartment was very quiet. The AC hummed. The city hummed twelve floors below. And Aravind Krishnan stood in the middle of his own living room, a grown man of twenty-nine, the owner of a jewellery business his grandfather had started with one small shop on NSC Bose Road, and he had absolutely no idea what to do next.
*Don't look for me.*
He looked at the door anyway.
The ceiling fan in the bedroom spun its slow, useless circles, and Reena watched it with the kind of attention you give something when you're trying very hard not to think about the thing you're actually thinking about.
Aravind was asleep beside her. On his back, one arm flung out, breathing deep and even and untroubled. He'd fallen asleep within minutes of getting into bed. Of course he had. The fight had rolled off him like water off a tiled roof, the way it always did — he'd said his piece, his conscience had settled, and he'd drifted off while she lay there in the dark with the words still lodged in her throat like fishbones.
*You never appreciate anything I do.*
He'd said that. Around eleven, when the fight had been winding down into that exhausted, circular phase where nobody was winning anything anymore. *I've changed so much for you. I quit everything. And it's still not enough for you.*
And the worst part — the absolute worst part — was that it was true. He *had* changed. She'd watched him do it, year after year. The cigarettes, the drinks, the temper that used to make him punch walls in college. He'd buried all of it for her. And she still felt like she was drowning in this marriage.
The fan spun. One o'clock came and went.
Her mind had a voice now, and the voice was very clear and very calm, and it kept saying the same thing over and over. *Leave. Just leave. You know you want to. You've known for months.*
She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him. The moonlight through the blinds made stripes across his face. He looked younger when he slept. He looked like the boy from second year, the one who'd waited outside her classroom with two cups of chai and a grin, the one who'd made her laugh so hard in the library that the librarian had thrown them both out.
She loved him. That was the thing nobody understood, and the thing she could barely admit to herself at one in the morning. She loved him and she could not breathe in this house.
She sat up.
The movement was quiet, practiced — she'd been rehearsing it in her head for weeks without ever admitting that's what she was doing. She slid her feet into her slippers and padded to the wardrobe, and she opened it slowly, and she stood there in front of her clothes and picked the way you pick when you're not coming back. Two kurtas. Jeans. The grey sweater. Undergarments rolled tight. The small toiletry bag from the bathroom shelf. Her charger. Her wallet, with the cash she'd withdrawn two days ago — two days ago, she realized, which meant some part of her had already known.
Except the mangalsutra, she didn't take the jewellery, the earrings he'd given her for their first anniversary. She left them in the box on the dresser, and she wasn't sure if that was mercy or cruelty or just the truth of how she felt right now.
The note. She'd written it in her head a hundred times. On the table by the sofa she found a pen and the pad of paper he kept for grocery lists, and she sat down and wrote it out in her small, fast handwriting.
*I am leaving the house. Don't look for me. I am tired of your anger issues and non-attentive nature, and last night's fight has made my decision stronger. Don't worry about me. I will be on the roads as I always wanted. Take your medicines properly. Goodbye. — Reena.*
She read it once. It was too short and too long at the same time. She thought about adding something — *I love you* — and she didn't. She left it on the table and stood up.
At the door she stopped. Her hand was on the latch, and she looked back down the dark hallway toward the bedroom, and for one long second she thought about going back in there and shaking him awake and telling him everything, all of it, the whole truth of it, the way she'd never managed to in two years.
She didn't.
The main door clicked shut behind her, and the sound was so soft it was almost nothing, and that was the last thing she heard of her marriage.
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