My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

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

January came cold and clarifying.

There is a quality to Delhi in January that the rest of the year lacks — a thinness to the light, a hardness to the mornings, the fog burning off slowly to leave everything looking scrubbed and exact. I have always found it the most honest of the city's seasons. The summer lies to you about how much you can bear; the monsoon lies about how clean things are; but January tells the plain truth, that it is cold, that the days are short, that you should put on the second sweater and stop pretending. I had come, this year, to value things that told the plain truth. The season suited the person I was becoming.

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!

Meera noticed things.

I had understood this within an hour of meeting her, the way you understand the weather of a person before you have any specific evidence for it, just the pressure-change of being near someone who is taking in more than they let on. But the evidence accumulated over four days, and by the end of it the accumulation was, frankly, impressive — the more so because she did so little with what she gathered. Most people who notice things are eager to be seen noticing; the noticing is half performance, a way of saying look how much I see. Meera noticed the way a good camera notices. Silently. For later. Without any apparent need to develop the film in front of you.

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!

Diwali came late that year, pressing into November, the city going gold and loud for a week before the day itself.

I have always loved the approach to Diwali more than the day. The day is a peak, and peaks are exhausting; but the week before, when the markets stay open past their hours and the sweet shops put on extra hands and every balcony in the colony begins, one by one, to outline itself in light — that week has a quality of accumulating promise that the day can only spend. Saloni and I had our rituals for it. We bought diyas from the same man we bought them from every year, a man who recognised us now and set aside the unpainted clay ones she preferred. We strung the lights along the balcony railing on the same evening we always did, me on the stool holding the wire, her below...

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!

There is a particular freedom in the aftermath of an ending, and it does not feel the way you expect it to feel.

I had expected, for months, that when Piyush finally went — when the visits stopped being a thing we organised our lives around and became instead a thing that happened occasionally, at a distance, with notice — I would feel something clean. Relief, I had thought. The simple subtraction of a weight. I had imagined the flat returning to its proper proportions the way a room returns to itself when you take down the scaffolding, and I had imagined standing in the middle of that restored room and breathing out.

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!

Piyush took the job.

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!

What happened after the kitchen — after she held me, after the twenty-minute phone call to Bengaluru, after the thing lifted that she'd been carrying — was not what I had constructed in my imagination.

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!

I started going to the gym in January.

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 wore it on a Tuesday.

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 arrived on a Friday.

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!

There is no manual for this.

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