Saroja’s throat tightened. “We have done nothing wrong, Meena.”

Under the punnai tree, with the temple bells ringing for the evening puja , they kissed—not like lovers in a film, but like two people who had finally remembered that night is not for hiding. It is for coming home.

She found herself dressing for the night. A fresh pottu (bindi) before Raman left. A comb through her greying hair. Her daughter, Meena, who had come home for a week from her IT job in Bangalore, noticed.

She never learned his full name. The watchman at the temple chariot shed called him “Chandran,” meaning moon. He was a retired school music teacher who now sold malli poo (jasmine) garlands outside the Kapaleeshwarar temple. Each night, around ten, he would walk past her street, a thin veshti wrapped around his waist, humming a Mohanam raga alapana softly into the dark.

“So we become strangers who share a fridge?” she interrupted.

One Tuesday, unable to sleep, Saroja began her secret ritual: sitting on the terrace thinnai (raised platform), watching the neighborhood exhale. The night maami from three doors down walked her ancient, blind Labrador. The coffee club uncles dispersed, their kadhai (stories) unfinished. And then, he came.

Her husband, Raman, had become a creature of the night shift at the bank’s processing center. He left at nine, returned at dawn, a ghost in his own home. Their conversations had shrunk to notes on the fridge: "Milk finished. Pay electric bill." Love, once a garden, had become a dry well they were both too tired to dig.

“Tonight, you won’t stop,” he said. It wasn’t a question.