Chapter 1: The Femina Cover That Changed Everything
The key turned with a stiff scrape, the deadbolt giving way to the smell of stale sweat and cheap detergent. Rohan shouldered the door open, his backpack sliding off one arm to hit the floor with a thud.The dorm room was a tomb of his own disarray. Half-unpacked boxes bled clothes onto the linoleum, and a mountain of engineering textbooks buried the narrow single bed. The only clear surface was the desk, a landscape of crumpled paper, empty Thums Up cans, and glossy magazines.
His eyes went straight to the Polaroid tacked to the corkboard, a silent ritual. His mom, Anjali, caught mid-stride on some forgotten runway. Not smiling for the camera, but at something just off-frame, her expression sharp, alive. A pair of fabric scissors lay next to the photo, points gleaming under the sickly buzz of the fluorescent light.A different noise cut through the hum.A ragged, rhythmic sigh.
Rohan froze. From the angle of the door, he could only see the back of his desk chair, the one he’d hauled up from the basement.It was tilted back slightly, creaking.
“Yeah… fuck,” a voice muttered.Sameer’s voice.
Rohan took two silent steps into the room.The scene resolved itself like a slap. Sameer was slumped in the chair, head lolled back, one hand working furiously beneath the waistband of his track pants.His other hand gripped a magazine splayed open on his lap. The page was a burst of stark white against the room’s grime. A woman in a sheer, drapey saree, backlit by a studio light, the fabric doing nothing to hide the silhouette beneath. Her head was turned, profile achingly familiar.The hinge of her jaw. The curve of her neck.
The world narrowed to the glint of drool on Sameer’s lower lip and the dog-eared corner of the Femina cover. His mom’s name, “Anjali Sharma,” in elegant print.Something detonated in Rohan’s chest. A white-hot wire of rage spliced with something else, something viscous and shameful. He didn’t remember moving. He was just there, his hand clamping down on Sameer’s shoulder, fingers digging into the muscle.Sameer jolted, his body convulsing in the chair. “What the—!”
The magazine slipped, fluttering to the floor. Rohan’s eyes dropped to it.The page was damp.A sticky, translucent patch warped the image of her draped hip.
“Get out,” Rohan said.The words were low, frayed.
Sameer scrambled to tuck himself away, his face flushing a deep red that quickly twisted into a defensive sneer. “Chill, man. I didn’t know you were coming back.”
“Get out.” Rohan’s voice didn’t rise.It just got harder.
“It’s a fucking magazine, Rohan. It’s what it’s for.” Sameer stood up, adjusting himself, his bravado returning.He nudged the magazine with his foot. “You’re the one who leaves them lying around. You got a problem, maybe stop buying them.”
The logic, crude and unassailable, made the shame inside Rohan burn hotter.He did buy them. Every issue. He’d cut out the best photos, the ones where she looked most like the person in the Polaroid, not the distant, worried woman who sat by his father’s hospital bed.He kept them tucked under his mattress, a secret he barely admitted to himself.
His fist clenched.Sameer saw it and took a step back, hands coming up in a placating gesture. “Okay, okay.Jesus.You need to unwind. Seriously.” He sidestepped towards the door, keeping his eyes on Rohan.“It’s just a picture, man. Doesn’t mean anything.”
The door clicked shut behind him. The sterile buzz of the light filled the sudden silence.Rohan stood there, breathing hard, staring at the magazine on the floor. The damp spot was drying, leaving a faint, puckered bloom on the paper.He should throw it away. Burn it.Instead, he bent down. His fingers, trembling slightly, closed on the glossy pages.He lifted it.The image stared back at him.The sheer fabric.The suggestive shadows. It was artistic, the magazine would say.Tasteful.It was her job.
A slow, treacherous heat spread through his gut.His eyes traced the lines the photographer had captured, lines he knew. The turn of her ankle.The dip of her waist. His friend’s panting breaths echoed in his memory, superimposed now over the photo.A violent shudder ran through him. He hurled the magazine across the room.It slapped against the wall and slid down into a shadow.
He walked to the sink, the small, stained basin in the corner. He ran the cold tap and splashed water on his face. Drops clung to his lashes as he looked up into the smeared mirror. His own face, lean and sharp—her features, but harder, masculine—stared back, eyes wide with a confusion that felt like sickness.
He dried his face on a dirty towel.His gaze drifted back to the Polaroid on the board. That unguarded, living smile.The person she was before the pills and the pale hospital walls and the quiet desperation.
The magazine lay in the gloom by the wall.He didn’t pick it up again. He just looked from the frozen, vibrant joy in the Polaroid to the posed, provocative figure on the floor. Two halves of a whole he couldn’t reconcile, pulling at a wire of tension anchored deep inside him, a wire that had just been plucked and now hummed with a dangerous, revealing note.
He didn’t clean up.He didn’t turn off the light. He sat on the edge of his bed, textbooks digging into his thigh, and stared at the wall until the buzz of the fluorescent tube was the only sound left in his head.