Not Your Wife

An essay on unlearning, reimagining, and coming home to a new kind of marriage

I was not raised to be a wife.

There were no whispered lessons in the kitchen, no Sunday afternoons spent perfecting rotis to impress some imaginary in-laws. No one taught me to fold dupattas into obedience or to smile politely while being served a thin slice of my own silence. What I inherited was not tradition, but absence. A kind of vast, echoing emot…