Chapter Eleven: Paper Cuts
429 Words
The envelope was plain.
No emotion. No letter. No note.
Just a courier from India, thin and official, with a rustling finality inside.
Anjali opened it slowly, like it might explode. But it didn’t. It just ended something.
Raghav had signed.
His signature sat at the bottom of the divorce decree — steady, emotionless, as though this was a formality, not the closing of a chapter that had once started with vermillion and vows.
Her fingers traced the edge of the paper.
No tears came.
Just an odd stillness.
The kind you feel after an earthquake when the cupboard stops shaking but your body still doesn’t trust the ground.
---
Maahi came into the room, rubbing her eyes.
“Mumma?”
Anjali quickly tucked the papers under a folder. “Hmm?”
“Are we still a family?”
Anjali looked at her, that little face shaped like her father’s, but full of questions only she would answer now.
“Yes,” she said softly. “We’re still a family. Just… a different one.”
---
That evening, after putting Maahi to bed, Anjali sat alone with a cup of tea she didn’t really want.
She didn’t feel joy.
She didn’t feel free.
She felt tired.
Tired of signing papers that reduced a life to clauses. Tired of explaining choices to people who thought healing was rebellion. Tired of pretending to be strong every single day.
The apartment was quiet, and for a brief second she missed noise — missed her mother-in-law’s footsteps outside the room, even if they had come with disapproval. Missed the smell of incense from the temple corner back home. Missed being someone's wife, even if it had become an illusion.
Because even illusions had routines. And routines were warm.
This? This was cold and clean and empty.
---
But then she opened the drawer.
Inside was a drawing Maahi had made just weeks ago:
A house with two windows.
A woman in a pink sari.
A little girl with a crooked ponytail.
And above it, the words:
“My Happy Home.”
No mention of a father.
Not out of bitterness.
Just… clarity.
---
Anjali took the decree, folded it neatly, and placed it inside a file.
Then she lit a single diya on the windowsill.
Not for religion.
For remembrance.
Because she had loved.
Because she had tried.
Because she had left — not out of hate, but out of hope.
Tomorrow, she would begin again.
Not as a wife.
Not as a refugee of love.
But as Anjali.
Mother.
Immigrant.
Woman.
Whole.
- Writer
