Domestic Corpse

First, it was grey divorce.

Then came sleep divorce.

Now, the damned food divorce.

Sociologists and high-society hacks love inventing clean, sanitized phrases to dress up a rotting corpse. In plain, unvarnished language, you’d simply call it what it is: the marriage is dead, the alleged family is a fraud, and you have been reduced from a human being into a piece of household furniture that cooks, cleans, and wipes an old woman’s backside.

Bollywood vomits out sleek fantasies like Cocktail 1, 2, and ad infinitum—all that swapping of beds and easy, guilt-free lust. Meanwhile, in our respectable middle-class pens, the Bettadapuras have called it quits on the wrong side of fifty-five. Dr. Charulatha Doraiswami—Chats to anyone who has shared a peg with her—was holding court at Mango Meadows, spitting venom over her drink: “Look at the serials glorifying this bloody enspousification!”

She hit the nail squarely on its ugly head. The great Indian husband doesn’t divorce you; he simply replaces your soul with his adult children. He looks to his daughter for emotional coddling, leans on his son for masculine pride, and demotes his wife to an unpaid scullery maid and geriatric nurse.

Intimacy rots away, and society piously labels it ‘graceful aging.’ You eat different meals at different hours behind the smug veneer of ‘individual choice.’ You sleep in separate rooms behind shut teak doors. The wife is kept around solely for the unpaid labor—the laundry, the rasam, the daily humiliation of cleaning her mother-in-law’s bedpans. All tasks, by God, that a four-thousand-rupee nursing agency could handle.

And when the woman falls sick? That is when the full, staggering cruelty hits you like a slap across the face.

You are ghosted inside your own four walls. The adulting children—raised on your marrow—are suddenly too busy networking, meditating, or living their sophisticated lives to pick up the phone or walk across the hallway. The pious husband drops a strip of Crocin on your side table, avoids your gaze like you are an inconvenient beggar, and hurries off to his evening walk. The realization burns like acid: they don’t hate you; they simply do not care if you live or die, so long as the kitchen fire is lit tomorrow morning. The shame of having wasted thirty years building a sanctuary for people who treat you as entirely disposable makes the bile rise in your throat.

Andaal sat listening in the humid shade of Mango Meadows, the drink turning to ash in her mouth.

This was no longer about spotting red flags. Red flags are for starry-eyed young girls who still believe in romantic redemption. Valli and Karthik might play at senile honeymooning at fifty-eight like that couple in Lage Raho Munna Bhai, but decades of walking at different speeds had dragged her into a desolate, one-woman graveyard.

Her mother used to declare with foolish, sacred certainty that the real marriage only begins when the children leave home.

What a malicious, tragic lie. What begins is the suffocating echo of an empty house where you are despised for simply taking up air.

Watching Chats down the last of her gin, Andaal felt the raw, venomous burn of betrayal settle in her chest. The Bettadapuras and the Arkalguds weren’t scandalous fools—they were the only ones who refused to be used until their bones turned to dust. It was high time to dial a lawyer and burn the house down, or pack a single trunk, turn her back on this ungrateful pack of ghosts, and bolt to Tumkur under the holy pretext of doing her duty as a daughter.