My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

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Tara came to the flat on a Sunday, a few weeks after the good day, and I was more nervous about it than I let on, because it was the first time the two halves of what Saloni has made were going to be in the same room. Tara is Saloni's apprentice, the young woman she has been teaching for years, the one she reached the way she reaches everyone, by handing her a craft instead of a kindness; and Kabir is the boy she is reaching now. They were both, in their different ways, Saloni's makings, the products of the same patient looking applied across a decade — and I did not know what would happen when they met, whether Kabir would close up against a stranger the way he closes against most new people, whether the careful equilibrium of the flat would hold against the introduction of a fourth...

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

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It was a Sunday, some weeks into the new arrangement, and I noticed, somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, with a small shock that stopped me where I stood, that it was a good day, and that nothing whatsoever was happening. No crisis, no storm, no carefully managed threshold, no metro question asked in the dark with a child's whole future trembling behind it. Just an ordinary Sunday, slow and unremarkable, three people in a flat doing nothing in particular — and I stood in the doorway of the front room holding two cups of tea and understood, with the force of a thing arriving that you had stopped daring to expect, that this was it. This was the thing. This plain, eventless, contented afternoon, with the light coming in and a child on the floor and my wife at her cloth, was the...

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

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The terror of school took me by surprise, because I had not understood, until it was upon us, that everything we had done so far had been done inside walls we controlled. The flat, the visits, the metro outings, even the storm — all of it had happened in a space we could shape, where we could decide how Kabir was treated, where no one would look at him with the casual cruelty children are capable of, where we could hold the line and hold the boy and keep the whole fragile thing safe inside our own four rooms. School was the end of that. School was the first place we had to send him where we could not go, into a building full of other seven-year-olds with ordinary uninterrupted histories, and teachers who had thirty other children to attend to, and a thousand small social brutalities we...

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 came about six weeks in, the first real storm, and it came — this is the thing I did not understand until afterward, and the most important thing in this whole notebook — not because things were going badly but because they had started, at last, to go well. We had had a run of good days. He had laughed twice. He had begun, in small ways, to relax the total vigilance, to leave the map folded in his pocket for whole hours, to let himself, fractionally, be at home. And it was precisely then, precisely when the hoping had begun, that he set about, with a thoroughness that frightened all three of us, to burn it down. Nobody had truly warned us, or rather everyone had warned us in the abstract, and no warning in the abstract prepares you for the specific. The agency, the kind...

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!

In the early weeks I became aware of an absence at the very centre of the house, a small hole in the language where a word should have been, and the word was the one Kabir did not have for us. He had moved in. He ate at our table and slept, eventually, in the bed, and rode the metro on the weekends with me and learned the grain of cloth from Saloni; he was, by every practical measure, living with his parents. But he had no name for us, and the not-having was a live thing in the flat, present at every meal, because a child who cannot name the adults he lives with must address them somehow, and Kabir had become a small genius of the workaround. I recognised the choreography, of course, because I had my own milder version of it, and so does almost everyone, if they look. We are all, in...

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!

He came home on a Thursday, which seems wrong, somehow, that the largest day of three lives should fall on so ordinary a weekday, but the largest days mostly do; they do not announce themselves with weather. There was paperwork, a last signature, a kind goodbye from the staff at the home who had cared for him and who would, I understood for the first time watching them, miss him — and then there was a car, and a short drive across a city that had no idea anything was happening, and then there was Kabir, seven years old, standing in the doorway of our flat with one small bag and his folded map, looking at the place that was now, by the careful machinery of the state and a great deal of waiting, his home. The staff at the home surprised me. I had carried, without examining it, a faint...

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 visits became the shape of our life that season — twice a week, then more, the slow supervised architecture by which a child is moved, if all goes well, from a place that is not his home toward people who might become his — and I learned, across them, the single most important and least dramatic truth about loving a wounded child, which is that the progress does not look like progress. It looks like almost nothing. It looks like a great deal of effort spent on visits that an outside observer would call failures, small grey hours in which very little visibly happens, repeated and repeated and repeated until, so gradually you cannot point to the day it changed, the nothing becomes something. I found this almost unbearable at first, the sheer slowness of it, the way it asked me to...

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!

We met him on a Saturday morning, in a room at the children's home that had been set aside for exactly this kind of thing, a room whose entire furnishing announced its purpose — a low table, some toys chosen by a committee, two chairs for the adults and a smaller one that nobody sat in, and a woman from the home who would stay throughout, kindly, in the corner, so that nothing about it could pretend to be natural. I had not understood, until we were standing outside the door, how much would be riding on an hour that was structurally incapable of going well, and I made myself, in the corridor, take the want down out of my face, because the one thing I knew for certain about the boy on the other side of the door was that he had been looked at by hopeful adults before, and that our hope,...

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 call came on an unremarkable Wednesday, in the middle of the afternoon, while I was failing to concentrate on the accounts, and the woman from the agency said there was a child she thought we should see, and that she would send the file. And just like that, after all the weeks of waiting for an abstraction, the abstraction acquired a face, an age, a name, and a history, and stopped being an idea we were waiting for and became a particular person already alive in the world, who had been alive the whole time we were waiting, in a building across the city, being a child while we were busy imagining one.

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 waiting had a texture I had not anticipated, a grain to it, and I spent those weeks learning the feel of it the way you learn the feel of a new cloth. It was not empty time. That is the thing no one tells you about waiting for a large thing: you imagine it as a blank interval, a held breath, a nothing to be got through until the something arrives. It is not. It is a substance. It has weight and presence; it sits in the flat with you; it gets into the food and the conversations and the space between us in bed at night, the way a houseguest you cannot see is nonetheless always faintly there. We were three in the flat already, in a sense — myself, Saloni, and the waiting — and the waiting was the loudest of us, for all that it never said a word. I had imagined waiting as a passive...

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