The sound had become as predictable as the evening call to prayer from the mosque down the street: every night at precisely eight o’clock, the bathroom door would close with a soft click, followed by the steady rush of running water that would continue, with suspicious irregularity, for the next hour or more. At first, I attributed it to the vanity of youth—my new daughter-in-law Priya was only twenty-four, after all, and I remembered being particular about my appearance at that age, though perhaps not to such an extreme degree.
But as the weeks stretched into months, what had initially seemed like harmless self-care began to feel like something else entirely. Something secretive.
Something that made my mother-in-law instincts prickle with unease.
My name is Savita Sharma, and I have been the undisputed matriarch of our household for thirty-two years, ever since my marriage to my late husband Rajesh. Our Mumbai apartment, though modest by today’s standards, has always been run with the precision of a well-tuned clock. Breakfast at seven, dinner at seven-thirty, and bedtime routines that never varied.
Order was not just preference in our home—it was necessity, the foundation upon which our family’s stability rested.
Priya had entered our lives three months earlier as a bride arranged through the careful negotiations of family friends. She came from a respectable middle-class family in Pune, worked as an office assistant at a small accounting firm, and possessed the quiet demeanor that I had always believed would make an ideal wife for my son Rohan. During the initial meetings and the wedding preparations, she had impressed me with her polite responses to questions, her willingness to help in the kitchen, and her obvious respect for traditional customs.
The early weeks of their marriage had proceeded smoothly.
Priya rose before dawn to prepare breakfast and tea, kept the apartment spotless despite working full-time, and never complained about Rohan’s frequent absences due to his job as a civil engineer. His projects often took him to remote construction sites across Maharashtra and Gujarat, leaving him away from home for weeks at a time. I had worried about how a new bride would handle these separations, but Priya seemed to adapt with admirable resilience.
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