My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

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It flowered on a Thursday, in the last cold week of the year, months after Kabir had pressed the seeds into the soil and long after every one of us had privately, quietly, given up on it.

"Papa. Papa, come. Look."

I came, the way I always come, because I made it the whole business of my life a long time ago to come when that boy calls, and I found him out on the balcony in his school uniform with his bag still on his back, standing over the two clay pots on the sill, and I saw that it had happened at last. Both marigolds had bloomed. Overnight, in the cold, on no schedule but their own and certainly not on mine, the tight green buds that all of us had stopped watching had opened into flowers — gaudy, oversized, an orange so bright it looked faintly rude against the grey Delhi...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

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The table in our flat was bought, a long time ago, to seat two. It has a leaf that folds up out of the middle when you need it, and for years we almost never needed it, and then this last while we have needed it every Sunday, and last Sunday even the leaf was not enough, and Saloni sent me down to borrow two chairs from the neighbour, and I stood at the head of the thing while it was being laid and counted the places, and there were eleven, and I understood, counting them, something about what we had built without ever quite deciding to. A marriage, when it is working, does this quietly and constantly, I have found: it builds things you never drew up plans for. You set out to love one person, and you end up, years later, standing at the head of a table you did not know you were...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

It was Saloni who said I should take Kabir to see my father. She said it lightly, the way she says the things she has thought about the longest, over the marigold one morning, and then she left it in the air and did not press, which is how she presses. And I said yes of course, soon, and then I did not arrange it for three weeks, because I had been keeping the two of them apart without ever admitting to myself that this was what I was doing. It is a particular kind of cowardice, the avoiding you do without ever letting yourself see that you are avoiding, and I am good at it, better than I would like to admit. I had told myself a dozen small reasonable things — that my father tired easily now, that Kabir's routines were delicate, that there would be a better week — and every one of them...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Kabir has taken to narrating the marigold to me. Every small change in it — a second leaf, a lean toward the window, a millimetre of new height overnight — is an event that must be reported, and the report always takes exactly the same form. He finds me wherever I happen to be in the flat, and he says, "Papa, look." And I look. That is the whole of the ritual, and it is the thing I have been turning over in my hands for a week now, unable to put down, because I have noticed something about myself in it that I had never had occasion to notice before: that I cannot not look. Whatever I am doing when the two words arrive, I put it down and I go, and I have begun to wonder why a summons so small should land in me with such an enormous, disproportionate, almost frightening weight. I have...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The first real sign that Kabir was going to be all right was not that he stopped grieving. He did not stop grieving; I understood by then that he never entirely would, that the loss would surface in waves for the rest of his life the way Saloni's does, on some ordinary Tuesday out of nowhere. The sign was smaller than that, and stranger, and I almost walked straight past it. The sign was that he started wanting things.

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The other shoe dropped about a month after the court, and for a while I misread it completely.

Kabir changed. Not dramatically, not all at once, but unmistakably: the boy who had been slowly unclenching all year began, in the settled weeks after the adoption, to clench again. He went quiet in a new way, a heavy way. He slept badly, was up in the night, came to breakfast grey and short-tempered. He was prickly over nothing, then flat, then prickly again. He cried once, hard, over a dropped biscuit, in a way that had nothing to do with the biscuit. And I felt, watching it, the cold clutch of a fear I had thought the courtroom had retired forever: that it was not working, that the adoption had somehow broken something, that we had made him permanent and he was, in response, coming apart....

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Nothing changed, the morning after, and that was the whole of the miracle.

I had half expected to wake up into a different life, the way you expect the morning after a wedding or a death to have a changed quality of light, a new air. It did not. The morning after the adoption was exactly like the morning before it: the same grey kitchen, the same chai, the same boy who did not want to get up for school, the same metro map on the wall, the same ordinary friction of three people sharing a small flat. The court had said its enormous sentence and stamped its stamp, and then the world had simply gone on being the world, indifferent as ever, handing us another unremarkable Tuesday. And I understood, standing in the kitchen making chai while Kabir dawdled over his uniform, that this was not...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The Tuesday came, as Tuesdays do, indifferent to its own importance, an ordinary grey morning that had no idea it was the largest day of three lives. Kabir wore the clothes Saloni had made, the simple good ones folded ready on the chair for weeks, and he wore them without complaint, which was its own small signal that he understood the day was not nothing. We ate very little. Nobody said much. And then we set out for the court where a judge would, in a few minutes of flat official language, make permanent the thing we had all been living as true for the better part of a year. I had not slept much. The fear of the last weeks had crested, in the small hours of that final night, into something close to superstition, the conviction that to want the day too openly was to jinx it, so that...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The letter came on an ordinary morning, as the large things do, and it had a date in it. After all the months of process, the assessments and the forms and the open-ended waiting, the adoption had at last been given a day: a hearing, in a courtroom, some weeks off, on which a judge would consider the matter and, if all was in order, make Kabir ours in the eyes of the law forever. I read it twice, standing in the doorway, and then I had to sit down, because a thing that had lived for so long as a hope, a direction, a long uncertain corridor, had suddenly become a Tuesday. There was now a specific square on the calendar on which our whole future would be decided, and the having of a date did something to the waiting that I had not expected: it made it, somehow, worse. I would not have...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

It was the adoption paperwork, again, that surfaced it, because the paperwork has his date of birth on it, printed in a box, and Saloni saw it one evening and went very still and then said, quietly, "His birthday is in two weeks." And we sat with that for a moment, and then the second realisation arrived behind the first, the one that hollowed me out: that as far as we could tell, from the file, from anything he had ever said, this boy had reached the age of seven or eight and had never once, not a single time in his whole life, had a birthday that anyone celebrated. The date had come and gone, year after year, in this home and that one, and no one had marked it, no one had made the day his, no one had said the words. He had a date of birth. He had never had a birthday. The distinction...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.