Chapter 3: sister love vs jealousy
The study door clicked shut behind him, sealing him into a world of dark wood and deeper shadows. Prem didn’t turn on the main light. He went straight to the decanter on the sideboard, the crystal loud in the thick silence, and poured three fingers of whiskey. He didn’t taste it. He just let the heat of it sit on his tongue, trying to scorch away the image of Nurjahan’s tear-streaked face.
He heard her move through the house. A door closed. The pipes in the walls groaned as a shower ran, long and pointless. An attempt to wash away a stain that wasn’t on the skin.
An hour passed, measured by the slow descent of the liquor in his glass. Finally, the handle turned. Nurjahan stood in the doorway. She’d washed her face, but her eyes were red-raw, glassy. She wore one of his old hoodies, swimming in it, her hands lost in the sleeves. She looked like a ghost of the girl he’d married.
“She has to leave,” Prem said. The words came out flat, final. He didn’t look up from his glass.
A brittle laugh escaped her. “Of course. That’s your solution. Remove the temptation. Never mind that the temptation lives and breathes inside you.”
“It’s the only practical thing to do,” he said, finally meeting her gaze. “Her being here… it’s a fuse waiting for a match. You felt it. I can’t… I can’t trust myself.”
“Trust yourself?” Nurjahan stepped into the room, the overhead lamp casting harsh shadows under her eyes. “What about trusting the vows you made? What about controlling yourself? Or is that not something a man like you has to do?” Her voice was sharp with a new, lashing sarcasm. “The great Prem. Gets what he wants. Even if what he wants is his wife’s little sister.”
He flinched. “Don’t.”
“Why not? It’s the truth. You want her. You lust for her. I saw it today. It’s written all over you. It’s probably been there for months.” She hugged herself tighter. “My family saw it coming, you know. They saw you coming.”
That stopped him. “What does that mean?”
“When I married you,” she said, her voice dropping into something cold and conversational, “my father, my uncles… they didn’t just dislike you because you were Hindu. They said you were too hungry. That your eyes took in everything, everyone. That a man with that much appetite could never be satisfied with just one woman.” She let out a shuddering breath. “I called them prejudiced fools. I fought them. I tore my own family in half for you.”
Prem remembered the shouting matches, the threats, the way Nurjahan had stood in front of him, a tiny, furious shield against their disdain. His success, his money, had eventually muted them, but it hadn’t won warmth.
“They didn’t let Zarina stay here,” Nurjahan continued, her gaze fixed on a point past him. “Not for the first few years. Not until I was pregnant with the twins. They insisted she live at home. Do you know why?”
A cold knot formed in Prem’s gut. He knew.
“They were protecting her,” Nurjahan whispered. “From you. They said a young, unmarried girl shouldn’t be in the house of a man like her jiju. I was so angry. I told them they were disgusting, that they had filthy minds, that my husband was a loyal, good man.” She finally looked at him, and the betrayal there was bottomless. “Turns out they had filthy, accurate minds.”
The revelation landed like a physical blow. His in-laws’ hesitant respect, their constant, slightly strained gratitude—it had always been layered with this unspoken suspicion. They had seen the animal in him before he’d even fully acknowledged it himself.
“So, send her away,” Prem repeated, the phrase now sounding hollow, pathetic. “Tell her… tell her anything. She needs to find a job, an apartment. We’ll pay. We’ll set her up. But she can’t live here anymore.”
Nurjahan walked slowly to his desk, trailing her fingers over the stacked papers, the cold leather blotter. “And what should I tell her, Prem? What reason do I give my sister, who loves me, who helps me with my children? Should I say, ‘Please leave, Zarina, because my husband wants to fuck you so badly he can’t sleep at night’?”
“Nurjahan!” He slammed his glass down. Whiskey sloshed onto the ledger.
“Is that not the reason?” she shouted back, the control snapping. “Should I sanitize it for you? Should I say your presence is disruptive? That it’s time for you to be independent? She’ll see through it in a second. She’s not a fool. She felt every bit of this today. Or should I just tell her the ugly, honest truth and let the chips fall where they may?”
The idea of Zarina knowing he had demanded her exile, that his desire was so uncontrollable it required banishment, filled him with a strange, perverse shame. It made him look weak. He was used to taking what he wanted, discreetly, with no consequences. This was a consequence he couldn’t manipulate or buy off.
“She’s your sister,” he said, deflating, sinking into his high-backed chair. “You adore her. You’ve said it a hundred times.”
“I do adore her!” Nurjahan’s voice broke. “That’s the poison in it, Prem! I love her. And I love you. And the two of you are in this… this silent pact against me. You with your hungry looks, her with her little touches and her jealous eyes. I saw the way she looked at you in the pool. Like a prize she was seconds from winning. My sister. My husband.” She put her hands over her face, her shoulders shaking. “How do I choose which betrayal hurts more?”
There was no answer. The study clock ticked, a mechanical heartbeat in the room of dying things.
After a long minute, she lowered her hands. Her face was composed now, wiped clean of everything but a chilling resignation. “You want her gone to make it easier for you. So you don’t have to fight yourself. But the problem isn’t in that guest room, Prem. It’s in you. It’s been in you. The other women… I suspected. I chose not to see. But this? This is a mirror held up to my face. It shows me what I’ve become—the worn-out wife you’re bored of—and what you really are.”
She turned to leave, pausing at the door. “I’ll ask her to leave. I’ll make up a reason. Not for you. For me. Because I can’t watch it happen. I can’t be the audience to my own humiliation.”
“Jaan…” The endearment felt like ash.
“But know this,” she said, her voice eerily calm. “If I do this, if I send my own sister away because my husband can’t keep his eyes in his head, then something in this marriage is finished. You can’t put it back. That fight I had for you? That girl who believed you were worth tearing her world apart? She’s gone. You just watched her walk out of this room.”
She left, pulling the door shut softly behind her.
Prem sat in the deepening dark, the taste of whiskey and regret thick in his mouth. He’d gotten what he wanted. Zarina would be removed. The immediate danger would pass. But Nurjahan’s words echoed, a terminal diagnosis.
Something in this marriage is finished.
He thought of Zarina’s defiant, jealous face in the pool. It’s in the air now. You can’t call it back.
He was a man who solved problems with action and money. But this chaos, this emotional wreckage he’d authored, had no clear solution. Only consequences, unfolding in the quiet house around him, and the terrible understanding that the person he’d just broken most completely was the one he’d once sworn to protect above all others.
Only consequences, unfolding in the quiet house around him, and the terrible understanding that the person he’d just broken most completely was the one he’d once sworn to protect above all others.
The door opened again.
He didn’t turn, assuming she’d forgotten something, a final, parting shot. But her footsteps stopped behind his chair. The silence stretched, different this time—less shattered, more calculated.
“I can’t do it,” Nurjahan said.
Her voice was low, stripped of its earlier rage. It was just tired.
Prem turned. She stood with her arms crossed, leaning against the doorframe, staring at a spot on the Persian rug as if reading a script from it. “I can’t send her away. I adore her. Even knowing she’s jealous of me, even feeling that knife every day, she’s my sister.” She finally looked at him. “What reason do I possibly give? To her? To my parents?”
He stood up, a spark of frustration cutting through his guilt. “We’ll think of something. A job opportunity in another city. We’ll fund it.”
“And when they ask why? When my mother, who already watches you like a hawk, wants to know why her younger daughter is being packed off with our money?” She let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “Should I tell them the real fact? Should I call Ammi right now and say, ‘Your suspicions were right, the man I married lusts after my sister, so we’re evicting her’?”
The vulgarity of it, laid bare like that, made his skin feel tight. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then you tell me. You’re the brilliant businessman. You fix things. Manufacture a reason that won’t have my parents pulling her aside and whispering, ‘What did he do to you?’” She pushed off the doorframe and took two steps into the room. “Because that’s what they’ll think. Not that she did anything. That you did. That you crossed a line. Maybe more than a look.”
“Nothing happened,” he insisted, the force of his own lie surprising him.
“It was only harmless fun!” The words burst from her, high-pitched and mocking. “Just flirting, Prem! A little touching by the syrup, a little swimming pool tease. Nothing more. Right?” She was in front of the desk now, her palms flat on the mahogany, leaning into his space. “That’s what you’ll say. That’s what we’ll have to pretend. That my sister’s obvious hunger and your obvious… erection… were just a game. Harmless fun.”
She spat the last two words as if they were a foul taste.
He had no retort. The phrase was a hollow shield, and they both knew it. It would be the official story, the one they’d cling to to avoid societal and familial ruin. A pathetic, transparent fiction.
“So she stays,” Nurjahan said, straightening up. The decision settled on her shoulders like a heavy, ugly coat. “Because the alternative is admitting the truth, and neither of us is brave enough for that carnage. She stays, and you will learn to live with the temptation. You will swallow it. You will choke on it if you have to.”
She turned to leave, this exchange somehow more final than the last.
“And if I can’t?” The question left him in a whisper.
She paused, her hand on the brass doorknob. She didn’t look back. “Then you destroy us. All three of us. And you get to live in that wreckage knowing you were warned.”
The door clicked shut, softer this time, a seal on a new, more dreadful agreement.
Prem remained standing, the silence now a ringing in his ears. He looked at the whiskey decanter but didn’t move. Sending Zarina away had been a clear, if painful, line. This was murk. This was leaving a lit fuse in the next room and praying for rain.
Harmless fun.
The words echoed, a sick punchline. There was nothing harmless about the look in Zarina’s eyes by the pool, a look that promised a welcome. There was nothing harmless about the specific, aching tightness in his gut right now, a blend of dread and anticipation. She was staying. The problem wasn’t being removed. It was being baked into the foundation of his home, a persistent, glowing heat under the floorboards he’d have to walk every single day.
He walked to the window, looking out at the dark garden. Somewhere in the city, in a friend’s guest room, Zarina was waiting. She’d return. The game she’d declared over wasn’t over at all. It had just entered a more dangerous, unspoken phase, with his wife as its unwilling, devastated referee.
He placed his forehead against the cool glass. The fight was no longer about resisting a moment of passion. It was about resisting the slow, atmospheric pressure of a want he’d allowed to breathe in his own house. And the terrible, undeniable part, the part that clawed at him as he stood there in the dark, was the thrill that slithered beneath the dread. She was staying. The fuse remained.
The fuse remained. It hissed quietly in the silence of the next three days, a tension so precise it felt woven into the air itself. Zarina returned from the city on Monday afternoon, her suitcase wheeled over the marble foyer with a definitive click. She didn’t seek anyone out. The house absorbed her back into its rhythms, but the rhythms had changed.
Nurjahan watched her from the kitchen island, her fingers tight around a cup of cooling chai. She saw the hesitant way Zarina glanced toward Prem’s study door, the slight deflation when she found it closed. Good, a sharp, uncharitable part of her thought. The larger part of her just ached.
Dinner that night was a landmine of normalcy. The children chattered, oblivious satellites orbiting a cold, dark planet. Prem asked about the salt. Zarina passed the dal without looking up. Nurjahan observed the performance, the careful avoidance of eyes, the overly polite “thank yous.” It was unbearable.
Later, with the children finally asleep, she found Prem in the living room, staring blankly at a financial news channel. The glow of the screen washed the color from his face. She turned it off.
The sudden silence made him jump. “What—”
“This is stupid,” Nurjahan said. Her voice was calm, detached, as if discussing a faulty appliance. “This silent treatment. This walking on glass. It’s exhausting me.”
Prem rubbed his eyes. “What would you have me do, Jaan? You laid down the law. She stays. I stay away. That’s what I’m doing.”
“But you’re not away.” She sat on the arm of the sofa, not touching him. “You’re a ghost in your own home. She’s a mouse. I’m the warden. It’s a miserable way to live.” She took a deliberate breath, the next words feeling like glass in her throat. “You want to look at her? Look. You want to… flirt? Have your harmless little fun? Fine.”
Prem turned his head slowly, his expression unreadable in the dim light. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’m tired of being the villain in a story I didn’t write.” A flicker of her old, fiery smile touched her lips, but it was all edges. “If the tension is going to be here, I’d rather be in the room. I’d rather be part of it. Maybe even direct it.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“I’m making perfect sense.” She stood up, smoothing her kurta. “From now on, no more silent suffering. No more stolen looks when you think I’m not watching. You want to play? We’ll all play. It’s just fun, right? Harmless. And I get to have fun, too.”
She left him there, the peculiar new rules hanging in the air. He didn’t understand, not fully. Not until the next morning.
Zarina was at the stove, scrambling eggs. She wore a simple t-shirt and leggings, her hair in a loose braid. Prem entered, heading for the coffee machine. The usual protocol was to grunt a greeting and leave.
“Sleep well, Jiju?” Zarina asked, her voice bright. A direct hit. She glanced at him, a challenge in her eyes.
Before Prem could form a safe, neutral reply, Nurjahan glided into the kitchen. She went straight to Prem, slipping her arms around his waist from behind, resting her cheek against his shoulder blade. She felt him stiffen.
“He never sleeps well when I’m not in bed,” Nurjahan said, her voice a warm, proprietary purr aimed at her sister. “Isn’t that right, Prem? Like a lost puppy.”
Zarina’s smile tightened. The spatula clicked against the pan. “Maybe he just needs better exercise. To tire himself out.”
“Oh, he gets plenty of exercise,” Nurjahan laughed, releasing him and swatting his backside lightly. “Don’t you, darling? Now, Zarina, make sure those eggs aren’t too dry. Prem hates dry eggs, you know how particular he is about his textures.”
The casual intimacy of the order, the detailed knowledge of his preferences, was a velvet-wrapped brick. Zarina’s knuckles whitened on the spatula handle. “I remember.”
Prem poured his coffee, his mind reeling. This was the allowance. This was the game. Nurjahan had not surrendered; she had enlisted. She would be present for every exchange, framing it, owning it, turning his “harmless fun” into a triangular competition where she held the home-field advantage.
It escalated by the pool that weekend. Nurjahan wore a new saffron-yellow bikini, the color bold against her skin. She oiled her own legs this time, slowly, watching Prem watch her. Zarina, in her sleek black one-piece, swam laps with aggressive strokes.
“Come here, Prem,” Nurjahan called, lying back on the lounger. “My shoulder is knotting up again. From carrying the twins, you know. The weight.”
He knelt beside her, his hands on her warm, oiled skin. He began to knead. Her eyes closed, a soft sigh escaping her. It was a genuine sigh of relief, but it was also a performance.
Zarina hauled herself out of the pool, water streaming. She stood over them, dripping on the stone. “That looks professional, Jiju.”
“Lots of practice,” Nurjahan murmured without opening her eyes. “He knows every knot. Every single one.”
Zarina picked up her towel. Instead of drying off, she walked to the outdoor shower, turning it on. She stepped under the spray, facing them. She rinsed her hair, her arms raised, her body a sleek, arched silhouette against the white wall. The water cascaded over her. It was a blatant, breathtaking display.
Prem’s hands stilled on Nurjahan’s shoulders.
Nurjahan opened her eyes. She saw where his gaze had locked. A hot wire of jealousy, sharp and pure, sizzled through her. But she had sanctioned this. She sat up, breaking his touch.
“My turn to swim,” she announced, her voice a little too loud. She dove into the pool, cutting through the water toward Zarina’s shower. She surfaced right at the edge, treading water. “You’re wasting water, little sister. And the view is a bit obvious, don’t you think?”
Zarina turned off the shower, looking down at her sister. “Just cooling off, Didi. It’s a hot day. Unless the view bothers you?”
“Why would it bother me?” Nurjahan smiled, all teeth. “It’s my pool. I enjoy everything in it.” She pushed off the wall, swimming back to where Prem still knelt, frozen. She reached up, dripping wet, and pulled him down by his neck for a hard, salty kiss. It was a claim, desperate and fierce.
When she let him go, she whispered against his mouth, just for him to hear. “Harmless enough for you?”
He was breathless, torn between the two images—Zarina’s deliberate sculpture under the water, his wife’s possessive fire. The game was no longer silent. It was loud, and tactile, and it was burning them all.
That night, the competition migrated indoors. They shared a bottle of wine in the living room, the children long asleep. The dialogue was light, teasing. It was about old movies, about stupid childhood stories. But every sentence had a double meaning.
“Prem loves a good thriller,” Nurjahan said, sipping her wine. “Something with tension. But he has no patience for slow burns. He always wants to skip to the exciting part.”
“Some things are worth the wait,” Zarina countered, tucking her feet under her on the opposite sofa. She looked at Prem. “The anticipation can be the best part, Jiju. Don’t you think?”
“I think he’s impatient,” Nurjahan laughed, reaching over to run a hand through his hair. He didn’t pull away. “He always has been. Grabbing what he wants.”
“Maybe he just knows what he likes,” Zarina said softly.
The air grew thick. Nurjahan’s hand stilled in Prem’s hair. She could feel the charge between him and her sister, a live current crackling across the Persian rug. Her own participation felt suddenly thin, a brittle shell over a yawning hurt. She was directing a play that was slowly consuming the director.
She stood up, a little unsteady. “I’m going to check on the kids.”
It was a retreat, and they all knew it. She left the room, the silence behind her immediate and heavy. She stood in the dark hallway, listening. She heard the clink of Zarina’s glass being set down. She heard the soft rustle of movement.
“You should go after her,” Zarina’s voice was low, without its earlier teasing lilt.
“She wanted this,” Prem’s reply was rough.
“She didn’t want this. She just couldn’t stand the silence.” A pause. “It’s cruel, what we’re doing. Even if she’s in the room.”
Nurjahan pressed her forehead against the cool wall. We. Zarina had said we.
Then she heard Prem’s voice, closer, as if he’d leaned forward. “You started it.”
“You looked first,” Zarina whispered back. There was no malice in it. It was just a fact.
Nurjahan couldn’t listen anymore. She walked silently upstairs, the “harmless fun” curdling in her stomach. She had tried to control the narrative, to own the flirtation, but the chemistry between them had its own gravity. It was pulling them into a orbit that excluded her, even when she was standing right there.
She lay in the dark of their bedroom. An hour later, Prem slipped in beside her. He didn’t touch her. The space between them was a canyon.
“She’s right,” he said into the darkness, his voice raw. “This is cruel.”
Nurjahan didn’t answer. She just stared at the ceiling, the competitive fire now ash in her mouth. She had allowed the flirting, and in doing so, she had given their desire a language, a stage, and a terrifying, accelerating momentum. The fuse wasn't just hissing now. It was burning down fast, and she had no idea how to put it out, or if she even wanted to see what it was attached to.