“Is there anything else you want?”
“A smartphone,” she said. After a prolonged silence.
The silence in the room continued to thicken among her in-laws, her brothers, her mother and the lawyers.
“Apple,” she continued without looking up, “I would ask for extra money but you know, with this situation, my face, it would be hard for me to go to the market and buy it.”
The clunky, dusty fan hanging from the high ceiling of the lawyer’s office continued to be the only other continuous conversationalist in the room.
It was time for negotiations, the lawyer had said.
Best to keep it out of court, he had said.
He had cautioned, what if she asks for all that real estate you have?
She had overheard him saying, “The girl had always been a little spirited. You never know how she will twist things around.”
She had smiled at the choice of words.
“Twist.”
How much more could ‘they’ twist the facts , Mitthi wondered.
More than the way her neck had been twisted by her husband?
*This piece was written in response to a writing workshop prompt by Unboxed Writers.
Duhita is a starving writer who rarely finishes any writing that she starts. It may be the hunger. She is always hungry. Aside from the fine art of procrastination, Duhita has been in the business of understanding consumer behaviour/ design thinking/ innovations for over a decade. If incentivized well enough, she can even have a conversation with a tree.