The honeymoon lasted nine days. Munnar. Tea hills. He took photographs of her against the green and said she looked like every poem he had ever read.
On the tenth day, they came back to his parents' house.
She had known they would live with his parents — everyone in their world did. She had assumed, the way young brides assume, that it would be a season. He had said so himself, three times before the wedding.
What she had not known was Kausalya. Her mother-in-law was a small woman with a soft voice that had never in her life been disobeyed. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. She had perfected the art of opinion-as-fact.
[ Day eleven of marriage. Aaranya is helping in the kitchen. She has just added onions to the sambar. ]
KAUSALYA — "Kanna. We don't eat onions on Tuesdays. Rudra has always known this. I am sure he told you?"
AARANYA — "Mami, I'm so sorry — I didn't know. I'll start a new pot."
KAUSALYA — "No, no. Throw this one. The vessel will have to be washed twice. And kanna — that sari colour. It is a little — what to say — bright. For our family complexion. Tomorrow, wear the cream one your mother sent."
[ Aaranya nods. She does not look up. Her hands smell of onions. She does not yet realise she has just thrown out a pot of food for the first time of many. ]
And Rudraksh — funny, charming, jaw-dropping Rudraksh — turned, in his own mother's house, into a boy of six. He laughed at his mother's jokes a half-second too quickly. He ate what she put on his plate without looking at it. He asked her permission for things he did not need permission for.
The first time Aaranya gently raised the topic of moving out:
[ Bedroom. Lights off. Eight months into the marriage. ]
AARANYA — "Rudra. I saw a flat today. Two streets away. Just two streets. Mami could come for lunch every day. I could —"
RUDRAKSH — "Aara. Don't."
AARANYA — "Don't what?"
RUDRAKSH — "Don't start this. She will be heartbroken. She raised me, Aara. I cannot do this to her."
AARANYA — "And me? You promised me, Rudra. You said two years —"
RUDRAKSH — "Please. Not tonight. I am tired. We will talk about it."
[ They never talk about it. ]
She understood, slowly — the way one understands a leak in the ceiling that has been there for months — that he had already chosen. He had chosen long before she had arrived. Her job was to live inside the choice he had made