My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

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It was the notebook that caught me, in the end — which is the irony I keep turning over since, that the very instrument I had begun, in the fifth book, to believe I was nearly finished needing was the thing that reached out one ordinary night and woke me, a second time, from a sleep I had not even known I had fallen back into.

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

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On the third of the month, writing late at the desk by the window with the city gone quiet below, I came to the end of a page and turned it and found that there were only a few left — that the fifth notebook, which I had been filling without quite noticing for the better part of two years, was nearly done. I sat with my pen held above the thinning sheaf of blank paper and felt something I had not expected to feel, which was a small grief, the particular grief of a thing nearly finished that you had not let yourself notice you were afraid to finish. There were perhaps six pages left. At the rate I fill them — a little most nights, a paragraph or two, the day's one true thing set down before sleep — that was a week, ten days, no more. And then the fifth notebook would be full, and I...

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!

On the evening of Diwali, Saloni knelt on the balcony with a row of small clay diyas and a girl who had never lit them properly, and taught Tara the order of the lights the way her own mother had taught her, and I stood at the door and watched a thing get handed down that has nothing to do with cloth and everything to do with the same instinct. I have noticed that the deepest things a family owns are almost never the things it could name if you asked. Ask anyone what their family gave them and they will tell you about the house, the schooling, the money or the lack of it, the large visible inheritances. They will not think to mention the order of the diyas, or the particular way their mother folded a thing, or the exact words a grandfather used before a meal — the small handed-down...

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 flew south again in the spring, to the visit Meera had booked before we had left the last one, and the difference between this arrival and the one a year before was the whole quiet measure of the year.

A year ago Saloni had slept the entire flight, collapsed against the window, a woman who had to be unconscious for a while to survive her own exhaustion, carried south to be emptied and refilled. This time she did not sleep, and she was not empty, and she was not being carried to recover from anything. She came south this time whole — a woman who had, in the intervening year, been handed an empire and refused it, found the truest colour of her life, taken on her first apprentice and taught her to hear, and stood in a quiet room and made a crowd of strangers go hush. She came as...

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 grey-green collection showed in the autumn, almost exactly a year after the December room, and I took up my position at the edge of it, and discovered that the whole world had quietly changed while staying exactly the same.

It was the same kind of room — long, pale, full of strangers come to look. It was the same kind of evening, the same arrangement of my life, me at the back by the window where I do my best living, Saloni at the centre, the cloth about to walk into the light. If you had photographed the two evenings, a year apart, they would have looked like the same photograph. And they were not the same at all, and the difference was the whole of everything the year had taught us, made visible, hung on the rails of a quiet room. I have come to love these anniversaries of the...

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 hunger came back for Tara in the summer, in the shape of a man with very white teeth and a very fast plan, and Saloni did the hardest thing a teacher does, which is nothing at all.

He found Tara the way these people find the gifted young — at a small showing, a little exhibition of student work where her pieces had stood out, as her pieces will always stand out. He ran one of the new labels, the fast bright ones, the kind that does a "drop" and a launch and a collaboration and a viral moment, all velocity and noise and the particular gloss of the present tense. And he offered Tara, more or less on the spot, the thing her hunger had been starving for since the day she walked into Saloni's slow quiet workshop: speed. A name, now. Her designs in production within months instead of...

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!

Tara came to the workshop on the first real morning expecting to be taught something, and Saloni taught her nothing, on purpose, for nine days, and very nearly lost her over it.

I had this from both of them, over the weeks — from Saloni at our table in the evenings, and from Tara herself, much later, when she had come far enough to laugh about it. But that first morning there was no laughing. Tara arrived hungry, electric, ready to be shown the secret advanced things, the clever cuts, the master techniques that would let her leap ahead of her peers and begin, at last, her ascent. And Saloni handed her a bolt of the plain undyed base — the cheapest, dullest cloth in the room, the nothing-cloth, the blank — and a pair of scissors she was not to use, and said: "Don't cut anything. Don't...

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 one came in the spring, and her name was Tara, and the surprising thing about her — the thing Saloni told me about over chai that first evening, turning it over with the wary delight of a maker who has found good cloth in an unlikely shop — was that she had sought Saloni out for exactly the wrong reason. I have noticed that this happens to people who become known for a single dramatic act: the act gets detached from its actual reasons and floats free as a symbol, and others attach themselves to the symbol with no idea of the messy human calculation underneath it. Saloni's no had become, in the small gossiping world of makers, a banner — the artist who refused the money — and young people had begun to navigate by it, the way you navigate by a star without any notion of the...

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 idea arrived a few weeks after the no, the way her best ideas always arrive — not as a thunderclap but as a thing she had apparently been quietly building in the back of herself while the front of her got on with the grey-green collection.

She told me over chai, on an ordinary morning, in the plain voice she uses for things she has already decided and is now simply informing me of as a courtesy, which is one of my favourite of her voices. There is a particular pleasure in being married long enough to have catalogued the voices of the person you love — the work-voice and the worry-voice and the voice she uses for her mother and the rare flat one that means a thing is already settled and beyond debate. I have spent twenty years learning hers, and I am still finding new ones, which...

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!

She did not say no by email. She said it in person, because a no this large, given to a decent man who had offered her something real, is owed a face and a chair and the courtesy of being told to its face. So she went back across the city to the wide pale desk, and I came with her this time, at her asking, and sat again at the edge while my wife declined an empire in person, with grace, and without a single word of apology.

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