Indrajeet Singh Chauhan (31 years)

Height: 6'2''
Education: Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Global Politics from the London School of Economics (LSE).
Member of Parliament from UP, Son of the ruling CM of UP.
Heir to a major regional political dynasty.

He was educated enough to know every argument for why a woman was equal & patriarchal enough that it never once applied to the woman in his house.

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He had studied the politics of the world at one of the finest institutions London had to offer. He had sat in lecture halls where men debated the liberation of nations, the rights of the oppressed, the moral architecture of a just society — and he had argued well. Brilliantly, some said.

He came home to Uttar Pradesh and took his seat in Parliament.

He believed in progress. He said so, often, in speeches that drew applause and were quoted in newspapers. Progress of the nation. Progress of society. The upliftment of the common man. He meant it, in the way that powerful men mean things that do not cost them anything personal.

In his own house, he was his father's son.

The Chauhan name had held this constituency for two generations — through partition, through independence, through every political current that had tried to unseat them and failed. His father was Chief Minister. He was Member of Parliament. The dynasty did not skip a generation, and it did not bend.

He was educated enough to know every argument for why a woman was equal. He was patriarch enough that it never once applied to the woman in his house.

He did not raise his voice often. He did not need to.

What he wanted, he took. What he decided, stood. What he felt — if he felt anything at all beneath the surface of that particular, practiced stillness — he kept to himself with the discipline of a man who had been taught that control was the only inheritance worth having.

He married Anushree Tripathi at thirty because a wife was the next item on a list.

He never told her that.

He never told her much of anything.

The question is not whether Indrajeet Singh Chauhan is capable of more than this.

The question is whether he will ever allow himself to find out.

Female Lead:

Anushree Tripathi (19 years)

Height: 5'2''

Softness is not weakness — she was soft the way water is soft, the way water will take the shape of any vessel it is poured into and still, given enough time, wear through stone.

She had passed her tenth standard examinations in a small town in UP, in a school where the windows had no glass and the teachers came three days out of five. She could read. She could write.

In another life — in another decade, another family, another country even — that mind of hers might have gone somewhere.

In this life, she was married at nineteen to a man she had met not even once before the wedding.

She was not a weak woman. This is important to understand before anything else. Softness is not weakness — she was soft the way water is soft, the way water will take the shape of any vessel it is poured into and still, given enough time, wear through stone.

She was kind in a house that did not reward kindness. She was patient in a marriage that gave her nothing to be patient for. She adjusted, and adjusted, and adjusted again — the way women of her time were taught that adjusting was the same as surviving, and surviving was the same as succeeding.

She entered the Chauhan household as a daughter-in-law, which meant she entered it as something between a guest who never left and a servant who was never paid. She cooked and served and kept her eyes low and her voice lower, and she told herself it would get better.

It didn't get better.

What it got was clarifying.

Nearly 8 months, sitting in a doctor's office with normal reports and a husband who had never once reached for her without an agenda, she understood something that she could not un-understand.

She was not his wife.

She was his arrangement.

Will Anushree break?

What will she do with herself once she finally, fully understands what she has been placed inside?

Because soft does not mean she will not reach her limit.

And kind does not mean she will not, one day, ask for something back.

She is nineteen. She has the whole life ahead of her.

So does he.

Blurb…

He married her the way you complete a task.

Quietly. Efficiently. Without sentiment.

She was nineteen. He was thirty. She was a commoner from a small town in UP. He was an MP, an LSE graduate, the heir to a dynasty that had held this district for two generations.

She entered his house and became invisible in it.

He never learned her favourite colour. Never asked what she dreamed about before she fell asleep. Never sat beside her long enough to find out who she was beneath the adjustments and the silence and the careful smallness she had made of herself to survive in his world.

He only came to her in the dark.

Only for one reason.

She told herself it would get better.

It didn't get better.

This is not a love story that begins with love. It begins with a doctor's report, a woman finally asking a question she already knows the answer to, and a man who doesn't understand what he has done — because he never stopped to look.

It is a story about what happens when a woman who has been treated as an arrangement begins, slowly and at great cost, to remember that she is a person.

And what happens to the man who built a wall so high he forgot there was something worth seeing on the other side.

Some distances are made of miles.

This one was made of silence.

And silence, held long enough, becomes its own kind of violence.

Copyright © 2026 [authourShreya]. All rights reserved.

No part of this story may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.

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