“That is not what I asked.”
I glanced at Sanjana, who was watching me with the alertness of someone who had already understood the shape of the conversation. She had always been smarter than she looked, which was one reason I preferred her. Weak women annoyed me. Hidden strength was more interesting.
“I am tired,” I said. “Can we not do this now?”
“What did you do after the studio?”
I stared at the wall. The rain was louder now, drumming against the window grill. Somewhere downstairs, Bua Devi shouted at a girl who had left her wet dupatta hanging in the corridor.
“I came home,” I said.
“Directly?”
“Yes.”
“You are lying.”
I smiled, but there was no humour in it. “You always sound so disappointed when I have a life outside you.”
He did not laugh. “Where were you for the last two hours?”
“At the PG.”
“With your roommate?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you not answer earlier?”
I closed my eyes. The room had become too small for my patience.
“I was on the phone with my brother,” I said.
“What brother?”
Now that was interesting. He knew I had one, of course. He had simply not cared enough to remember. Men like Khanna remembered what threatened them and forgot what did not.
“My brother,” I repeated. “He exists.”
“And what did he want?”
I looked at Sanjana then, because by then I was beginning to understand the shape of this thing and did not like it. She had gone still, the way animals did before a storm.
“He wanted to warn me about family matters,” I said.
Khanna’s voice sharpened. “What family matters?”
I stood up and walked toward the window, as if movement could create distance. The rain had turned the lane outside into a silver mess. A boy was pushing a cart through the water, his feet disappearing with each step. The city looked washed and dirty at the same time, which was its truest face.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” I said.
There was a pause. Then he said, very softly, “Why are you speaking to me like this?”
“Like what?”
“As if I am a stranger.”
I almost told him that strangers were easier. But I had not yet become stupid enough to say the quiet part aloud.
“Because I am in a bad mood,” I said.
He laughed once, without amusement. “You are always in a bad mood when you are hiding something.”
Sanjana looked away, giving me privacy even in a room built out of thin walls and worse loyalties.
I told myself I had the upper hand because I could still make him wait, still make him wonder, still make him come to me if I wanted. That was my religion for years: if a man desired you enough, he would keep paying for the privilege of uncertainty. I had built a whole philosophy out of that belief. It made me feel clever. It made me feel spared.
But by then his calls had changed texture. The sweetness had gone. What remained was pressure. A hand on the back of the neck. A voice pretending to ask while already deciding.
After I hung up, Sanjana said quietly, “He sounds angry.”
“He sounds rich,” I said.
“That is not the same thing.”
“No. It is worse.”
She did not argue. She just put the tiffin aside and began folding the cloth napkin with unnecessary care. That irritated me more than if she had lectured. Sanjana had a talent for making her worry look like housekeeping.
A few days later, after a morning of auditions and a disastrous hour in traffic near Rajouri Garden, I found found myself in Khanna’s office, standing near the window with my handbag clutched too tightly in both hands while he asked the same question for the third time.
“Where have you been?” he said, and then, as if I were slow, “I asked you where you have been.”
He did not raise his voice. He never needed to. His politeness had the sheen of polished stone: smooth enough to touch, hard enough to bruise. The office smelled of cigarette ash, aftershave, and the cold metal of the air conditioner. Outside, the city had gone orange with evening, the kind of Delhi dusk that made every building look briefly forgiven.
I said, “I told you. Auditions.”
He tilted his head, studying me the way men like him studied art and horses and women they intended to buy. “Which auditions?”
“For a commercial.”
“For what commercial?”
I stared at him. “I did not memorize the product.”
He smiled, but only with one corner of his mouth. “You are being difficult today.”
“I am being tired.”
“You are being evasive.”
I let out a small laugh, because if I did not laugh I might have said something unforgivable. Something honest. “You keep asking questions as if you are my husband.”
His eyes sharpened at once, and I saw the small, dangerous flare of pleasure in that. He liked being reminded that he occupied territory he had not formally claimed. Men like Khanna always preferred conquest to ceremony. Ceremony meant witnesses. Witnesses meant accountability.
“I am not your husband,” he said.
“No,” I said. “You are worse. A husband at least has to behave as if he is embarrassed.”
That earned me a longer look, the kind that searched for weakness and found, if not weakness, then at least nerves. He sat back in his chair and tapped the ash into a crystal tray. He had changed his cufflinks that day; they caught the light each time he moved his hand. Everything about him was curated to suggest effortlessness. Even his temper was expensive.
“Do not speak to me like this in my office,” he said.
“In your office?” I repeated. “Is that what this is?”
He did not answer. He did not need to. The room itself answered for him: the heavy desk, the leather chairs, the framed degrees on the wall, the line of files arranged by someone who knew he preferred obedience to elegance. In that room, he was not merely a man. He was a system.
I had learned that systems were most dangerous when they pretended to be personal.
He stood and came around the desk slowly, not in anger exactly, but with the calm of someone who believed anger was beneath him and therefore more alarming when it arrived. He stopped in front of me and looked down at my face.
“Do you think I enjoy asking you three times?” he asked. “Do you think I do not know when you are lying?”
I did not look away. “Then why ask?”
His gaze held mine. “Because I want to hear what story you choose.”
There it was: the cruelty disguised as intimacy. The warning wrapped in velvet. He was not merely jealous. He was testing the shape of my obedience, checking whether it still fit.
I felt something in me go very still.