Raghav had the strange feeling that if he vanished on Tuesday, by next Tuesday the house would still run on schedule.
Milk would boil over at 6:40 a.m.
The pressure cooker would whistle.
The neighbor’s scooter would cough to life.
His chair at the dining table would not even look empty — just pushed in.
This thought didn’t arrive as sadness. It arrived like accounting.
He was sitting at his desk, staring at a blank document he had opened three hours ago. The cursor blinked patiently, as if it had nowhere else to be.
He had been afraid of that blinking line once. Afraid of what might come out if he stopped filtering himself. Afraid his mother would somehow sense it from another city. Afraid his wife would read it and see a stranger. Afraid words could be crimes.
Now he laughed quietly.
Nobody was watching.
Nobody ever had.
His mother still called every morning.
“Did you take the tablets?”
“Don’t skip the tests.”
“You never listen.”
Then, during family gatherings, she would say, “He never thinks ahead,” in the same tone she used for bad weather. His sister would add little footnotes to the story of his incompetence. Everyone nodded. Case closed.
Raghav used to try defending himself. Then explaining. Then joking. Now he simply drank his tea and watched the performance like theatre he had seen too many times.
Care, he had realized, did not automatically come with respect.
His wife was not cruel. That almost made it harder.
She informed him of decisions. School fees. Repairs. Travel plans.
Not consulted. Informed.
He had once left a promising position in Mumbai when she was pregnant. It had felt obvious at the time. Necessary. Human. Later he turned down out-of-town assignments. Stability mattered, he told himself.
No one had asked him to.
No one had thanked him either.
The house was efficient. Functional. Like a well-run office where he had become an outdated department.
The cursor kept blinking.
A wild thought entered his head: What if I just write the truth? The ugliest, strangest, most unapproved parts?
He imagined scandal. Judgment. Moral outrage.
Then he imagined something else: silence.
People were busy surviving their own stories. No one had the time to police his inner life.
The fear that had followed him since childhood — that invisible committee of relatives, teachers, neighbors — dissolved like mist under sunlight.
He was unsupervised.
That realization did not make him reckless. It made him calm.
If nobody was really keeping score, he could stop performing.
He typed a sentence. Then another. Honest ones. Not impressive. Not noble. Just real.
He wrote about resentment without disguising it as virtue. About love that felt like duty. About duty that turned into invisibility. About how people move on, not because they are cruel, but because life is a conveyor belt that never stops.
He wrote about his father, who had once been the gravitational center of the house. Now a photograph, occasionally dusted.
Replacement value, Raghav thought. Everything has it.
Except maybe moments of truth while you’re still breathing.
From the kitchen came the sound of vessels clinking. His wife was talking on the phone, laughing. Life proceeding, efficiently.
For the first time, the sound did not sting.
They would move on one day. That was not betrayal. That was biology.
But today, at this desk, in this chair, he was finally not moving around himself.
The cursor blinked again.
He kept writing.
Not to matter forever.
Just to exist honestly now.
....(Contd.)
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