Chapter 12: Sisterly Secrets
The private sitting room smelled of leather and dying embers. Prema poured the tea, her movements precise, her eyes not leaving the delicate stream of amber liquid filling the porcelain cup. Shabnam sat across from her, back straight, hands folded tightly in her lap. The invitation had been a shock.
“Thank you for coming,” Prema said, her voice softer than usual. “I find the afternoons… long.”
“It is no trouble, Didi,” Shabnam replied, her tone carefully neutral. She accepted the cup, her fingers brushing Prema’s. A tremor, slight, almost imperceptible.
For a while, they spoke of nothing. The unseasonal heat. The upcoming mango harvest. The price of ghee. The words were brittle shells, empty of meaning. Prema watched the younger woman, saw the wariness in her eyes, the defensive set of her shoulders. She was waiting for the blade to fall.
Prema set her own cup down. The click was loud in the quiet room.
“He wrote me letters,” she began, her gaze drifting to the fire. “For four years. Every week. Pages and pages. They were not just love letters. They were… maps. Maps of a future only he could envision. A house with a veranda. Children with his eyes. A life that was singular, complete. He painted me as the centre of it all.” She smiled, a faint, ghostly thing. “He has a way with words. A poet’s tongue in a conqueror’s mouth.”
Shabnam said nothing. She just listened, her tea cooling.
“I had three children for that dream,” Prema continued, her hand drifting unconsciously to her abdomen, where the skin was still loose. “I held his vision inside me. I built this house with him, board by board. Then…” She took a slow breath. “Then Shilpa came. Not as a guest. Not as a sister. As a… correction. To the map.”
Shabnam’s eyes flickered. Understanding, perhaps. Or pity.
“He didn’t discard me,” Prema said, and now her voice gained a strange, fierce strength. “He expanded his territory. I became the elder sister-wife. The reliable shore. And she became the wild, deep river he swims in every night.” She looked directly at Shabnam. “He is a man of immense appetite. You know this.”
A flush crept up Shabnam’s neck. She nodded, just once.
“He is also a man of immense… presence,” Prema said, the clinical word feeling absurd. “A real jiju. Masculine. Well-endowed.” She forced the crude term out, watching Shabnam’s reaction. The younger woman’s cheeks burned crimson, but she didn’t look away. A silent acknowledgment passed between them, a shared, uncomfortable knowledge.
Prema leaned forward, the space between them shrinking. The fire popped.
“Has he fucked you, Shabnam?”
The question hung in the smoky air, stark and brutal. Shabnam’s breath hitched. Her cup rattled on the saucer. She looked like a trapped bird, her eyes wide, searching for an escape that wasn't there.
“Didi, I—”
“The truth. Here, in this room, it is just us. Sisters.”
Tears welled in Shabnam’s eyes, not of sadness, but of sheer, shamed exposure. She nodded again, a quick, jerky motion. “The first night. At the lodge. He… forced me. And after… he calls. To hotels. I have avoided. I swear, Didi, I have avoided.”
Prema listened, her face a mask of calm. The confirmation was not a shock. It was a key fitting a lock she already held. She reached out and took Shabnam’s cold hands in hers. The gesture was not gentle, but firm, demanding.
“I do not blame you,” Prema said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “His will is a current. Fighting it is exhausting.” She squeezed Shabnam’s fingers. “I want you to teach me.”
Shabnam blinked. “Teach… what?”
“How he likes it,” Prema said, her gaze unblinking. “What you did. What he asked for. How you please him. I want to learn. I want to make him look at me the way he looks at her when he thinks no one is watching. I want him to forget her name, even for a moment. You can show me.”
The request was so monstrous, so raw, that Shabnam could only stare. This was not the anger of a betrayed wife. This was the desperation of a strategist studying the enemy’s weapons. Prema was not asking for secrets to punish; she was asking for them to compete.
“Didi, I don’t…” Shabnam’s voice failed.
“You do,” Prema insisted, her whisper now fervent. “You know the rhythm he prefers. The things he says. The places he likes to be touched. You know what makes him groan. Teach me. For my children. For my home. For the pieces of my map that are left.”
The silence stretched. A log collapsed in the hearth, sending up a shower of sparks. Shabnam looked at their joined hands, then at Prema’s determined, hollowed face. She saw no judgement there, only a bleak, shared reality. A terrible sisterhood.
“He likes… control,” Shabnam whispered finally, the words dragged from a deep, shameful place. “But he likes to be… surprised. A little fight, at first. Then surrender. His hands… he likes to pin them. Above the head. His mouth… he likes to be bitten. Not hard. Just… a promise of pain.” She spoke in broken fragments, each one a confession. “He talks. Dirty. He wants you to talk back. To call him jiju. To beg.”
Prema absorbed each word, her eyes alight with a horrible, focused intensity. She was memorizing a manual.
The lesson continued in hushed, graphic detail for another twenty minutes. Then, a sound from the hallway—a heavy, familiar footfall. Both women froze. The spell shattered. Shabnam snatched her hands back as if burned, her face ashen. Prema smoothed her sari, her expression snapping back to a weary, maternal placidity.
Prem didn’t enter the sitting room. The footsteps moved past, down the corridor, towards the bedrooms. A purpose in his stride.
A cold clarity washed over Prema. The teacups were empty. The fire was low. Shabnam’s lessons echoed in her skull, a filthy, empowering scripture.
“You should go,” Prema said, her voice once more that of the lady of the house.
Shabnam fled, a shadow slipping out the veranda door.
Prema sat for a long moment, the new knowledge coiling inside her like a live wire. Then she stood. She moved silently through the hushed house. She passed the kitchen, where a servant clattered pans. She moved down the corridor, the one Prem had just taken.
The door to Swapna’s room was slightly ajar.
From within, she heard a low, muffled gasp. Then Prem’s voice, a dark, murmured rumble, the words indistinct but the tone unmistakable—possessive, instructional, satiated.
Prema’s hand trembled as she pushed the door open.
The scene was a still life of conquest. The afternoon light cut through the window, illuminating the particles of dust and the scent of sex that hung in the air. Prem lay on his back, sprawled across Swapna’s narrow bed, a mountain of slick, satisfied masculinity. A sheen of sweat glistened on the thick, dark hair of his chest and the powerful lines of his stomach. One arm was thrown behind his head, the other draped possessively over the form beside him.
Swapna lay curled into his side, her face half-buried in the pillow, the bedsheet pulled up to her chin but doing little to conceal her nakedness beneath or the fact that she was tucked into the curve of his body. Her hair was damp at the temples. Her eyes, when they fluttered open and saw Prema in the doorway, were heavy-lidded, sated, and then instantly flooded with a scalding, animal guilt.
Prem turned his head on the pillow. He saw his wife. And he smiled. It was not a smile of apology, or of surprise, or even of defiance.
It was a smile of pure, unadulterated triumph.
His gaze locked with Prema’s. He didn’t move. He didn’t cover himself. He just lay there, in her sister’s bed, in the brutal, sunlit evidence of what he was and what he did. His look said everything. It said, See? See what I am capable of? See what belongs to me?
It said, It is a jiju’s right.
Prema stood in the doorway, Shabnam’s whispered lessons dying on her tongue. She looked from Prem’s triumphant face to Swapna’s—a face still flushed with the throes of her initiation, yet crumpling now under the weight of a sister’s witnessing eyes. Satisfied, but guilty.
The map was gone. There was only this brutal, uncharted territory.