Episode 3: The Roti Stack

Bahadurgarh, Haryana · 2026

The roti stack had a system.

Sushma peeled the first one off the towel — hot, puffed, butter pooling in the center — and set it on Rashika’s plate. Second to mama-ji, who took it without looking up from his phone. Third she tore in half for herself, standing at the counter, eating the way she had since her own wedding day. The last one, stiff at the edges where the griddle had cooled, went to Gopina.

Nobody discussed this. The house had an order, the way a drainpipe has a direction, and Gopina had been at the bottom of it since she was nine.

“Big news,” mama-ji said. He set his phone down with the gravity of a man about to announce a war.

Sushma didn’t look up. “If it’s about the akhaada —”

“Baba Ramji is changing the morning slot. Six-thirty to seven-fifteen.” He paused for effect. “That is forty-five minutes. Before, it was only thirty-five. Ten extra minutes of training, every single day. In one year, that is —”

The math defeated him.

“Sixty hours,” Rashika said, without interest.

“Sixty hours! You see? This is what people don’t understand about Baba Ramji. The man thinks long-term.”

Sushma set the dal bowl down hard enough to rattle the spoons. “Baba Ramji charges two hundred a month for grown men to roll in the dirt and come home smelling like buffaloes. That is the full extent of his long-term thinking.”

Mama-ji’s face went through several stages of objection and settled on silence. He tore his roti and dipped it.

Gopina ate hers. It was cold, but she chewed it carefully, without complaint, taking up as little of the table as she could manage.

· · ·

After dinner, the courtyard. The walls still held the afternoon’s heat — the two-to-four blackout had baked the house like a kiln, and even with the power back the fan only pushed warm air in circles.

“Sit,” Sushma told Rashika, and pulled the oil bottle from behind the water cooler. Thursday. Oil day.

Rashika sat on the floor and pulled out her phone. Gopina sat on the step two feet away, folding clothes nobody had asked her to fold.

“Now,” Sushma said, working oil through Rashika’s hair with the focus of a woman unclogging a drain. “Anil’s boy.”

“No,” Rashika said.

“You haven’t heard the full thing.”

“I already said no last Thursday.”

“Last Thursday was a different boy. Keep up.” She sectioned the hair and pulled. “Anil’s boy. Government clerk. Class Two. Gazetted. Twenty-six. Fair. Doesn’t drink — or at least his mother says he doesn’t drink, which is the same thing until the wedding is done.”

“What a standard.”

“Shut up and listen. Salary: forty-two thousand. Scooter: his own. House: joint family, five members, manageable. The mother, though —” Her hands stopped mid-stroke. “The mother wants the full cabinet. Gold. Top to bottom. Not half, not three-quarters. Full. As if we are running a branch of the State Bank of India.”

She resumed oiling. “So. No.”

Rashika said nothing. She had learned years ago that the groom reviews were not conversations. They were recitals. Her job was to sit still and be the audience.

“Then there is Sharma’s nephew from Rohtak. Revenue clerk. Motorbike, not scooter — which is something. But the family wants a Bolero.”

“A Bolero.”

“In the settlement. A full Bolero. White. New model.” She shook her head the way someone shakes their head at the price of onions in a bad month. “For a revenue clerk. I told Seema at the kitty circle — Seema, for a Bolero I want at least a deputy collector. At least. She agreed.”

“The whole kitty agreed?”

“Unanimously.”

“Then it must be true.”

“Don’t be smart with me.” She pulled a section of hair tighter than necessary. Rashika winced. “You think proposals fall from the sky? Every Thursday I sit there with these women and I listen, and I count, and I do the math so that you don’t have to. You know what the going rate for a good match is right now? In this town? You don’t want to know.”

Mama-ji appeared at the courtyard door in his vest, holding a glass of water like a man who had earned it through great labor. “What about Prem Nath’s son? The one at the Gurgaon call center?”

Sushma looked at him the way a school principal looks at a child who has wandered into the wrong exam hall.

“Prem Nath’s son,” she said, “got drunk at the Diwali fair and fell into the community pond. In front of the whole colony. You want me to send my daughter to that house?”

“He was pushed,” mama-ji offered. But he was already backing through the door.

Gopina’s mouth twitched. She kept folding.

“What are you smiling at?” Sushma said, without turning around. The woman had eyes in her fingertips. “You think this is funny? One day I will be doing this for you too, and let me tell you — your list is shorter.”

The smile left.

“Not because anything is wrong with you,” Sushma added, after a beat, still oiling, not looking at her. “Your face is fine. Your cooking is — well. We won’t discuss the cooking. But there is no father’s name to put on the card. No land. No brother to stand at the gate when the boy’s family comes. These things count. I didn’t make the rules. I just have to count them.”

The courtyard was quiet. Sushma’s hands in Rashika’s hair. The dog under the lane transformer, barking at nothing.

Three houses down, the Guptas had spent the entire blackout under their inverter — fans running, television running, curtains pulled shut — while the rest of the lane sat in the dark and sweated. Thirty-five thousand rupees, that inverter cost. Sushma knew the price the way she knew the price of everything in this town. She did not have thirty-five thousand rupees. She did not talk about the Guptas’ inverter. She talked about it all the time.