The Husband Sitter
Part 1: The Concept
The wife booked her. The wife knew. The wife left a bottle of wine in the fridge and a note about the geyser.
Riya is twenty-four and runs a business called The Sitter out of a flat on Cart Road in Shimla. A woman leaves her house. Riya goes in, cooks, runs the place and sits with the husband left behind, because a man on his own reverts to a bachelor inside four days and every wife in this country knows it.
Cooking on the invoice. Housekeeping on the invoice. Company on the invoice, because company is work.
Nothing else. Ever. The moment a thing goes on the invoice she has to do it, and the moment she has to do it, it stops being hers.
Her website is eleven days old when Tara Oberoi rings. A conference in Delhi, Friday to Sunday, a husband who will not feed himself, and one line at the end of the call that Riya has repeated to two people since: I welcome initiative.
Vikram is polite for a day and a half. He is polite when he finds her at the open fridge at eleven at night in a silk slip with the cold doing what the cold does. He is polite the next evening through a Test match neither of them is watching.
And then Riya does the thing that is not on any invoice, in another woman’s bed, with that woman’s blessing and not one rupee changing hands for it.
Part one of four. Explicit throughout.
A glimpse beneath the sheets…
Riya is twenty-four and runs a business called The Sitter out of a flat in Shimla. A woman leaves her house; Riya goes in and holds it together until she comes back. Cooking, housekeeping, company — and nothing else on the invoice, ever, because the moment a thing goes on the invoice she has to do it, and the moment she has to do it, it stops being hers.
Tara Oberoi has booked her for a weekend. Tara is at a conference in Delhi. Her husband Vikram is not.
We watched the Test after dinner. Day four. India needed forty with twenty overs and three wickets left, which is the kind of equation that tightens a room even when you are half watching.
He leaned forward as a wicket fell. The sofa had moved us towards each other without either of us arranging it. When the last wicket fell, eleven runs short, a finish that was genuinely heartbreaking, he sat back and exhaled like a man setting something down.
“Eleven runs.”
“Eleven runs,” I agreed.
The room was quiet in the Shimla way, which is a quality of quiet with no traffic in it, just wind in the deodars and a building creaking as it adjusts to the cold. He was close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him.
He was not angling for anything. He had accepted the previous evening’s answer and was sitting with me in the aftermath of a cricket match, which I found more compelling than any deliberate move he could have made.
I turned my head. He turned his.
“If sleep stays difficult like last night,” I said, “I could help with that.”
He looked at me with the careful attention of a man making sure he has understood. Not hesitating. Confirming.
Then he reached up and touched my jaw, and his thumb went, without any deliberation at all, to the small dark mark high on my cheek that my mother has been offering to have removed for as long as I have had a say in it.
“I have been looking at that all evening,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “I let you.”
***
He kissed me and it was tentative for about half a second, and then I turned into his hand and whatever was tentative dissolved.
He got his tongue in my mouth. I gave him room and took it back, and he made a low sound about that against my teeth. I bit his lower lip, not gently, to find out what he did.
What he did was get both hands into my hair and hold my head still.
“Bedroom,” I said, into his mouth.
“Which?”
“I don’t care.”
He took me to theirs.
We did not manage it elegantly, because neither of us would stop kissing long enough to look where we were going. I caught my hip on the doorframe. He apologised to me for the doorframe, which was not his fault, and I laughed into his mouth, and that was better than elegance would have been.
He got the lamp on and then he stopped being careful.
He had my kurta up over my head before I had my arms free of it. My hair came with it, and he did not notice. The drawstring beat him. He pulled at it twice and made it worse. I felt him give up on it entirely and get both hands under the waistband instead and shove it all down at once.
A day and a half of a man being extremely polite in his own kitchen, and this is what was underneath it. I had put it there on purpose, and there is no version of me that objects to being on the receiving end of it.
Continue the story in The Husband Sitter — Part 1: The Concept.
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All images are AI generated and do not depict any real person.