The Quiet House on Colony Road
By Lokanath Mishra
Hariram Rath was forty-five when his world cracked open, though until that moment he believed it to be sturdy as stone. He lived in Berhampur, in a modest private house on rent on Colony Road, where evenings smelled of boiled tea leaves and damp earth. Married for twenty years, Hariram trusted his wife Banita with a faith that never questioned itself. Trust, to him, was the backbone of marriage.
Banita was thirty-eight—graceful, soft-spoken, and restless in ways Hariram never noticed. Their lives revolved around their two daughters: seventeen-year-old Ankita, thoughtful and serious, and fourteen-year-old Riya, still full of sharp laughter and questions about the world. To outsiders, the Mishra family looked complete.
Then David entered their lives.
David Fernandes was twenty-six, a plumber from the neighboring colony, a Christian boy with tired eyes and a permanently bent shoulder from carrying tools. Two months earlier, he had lost his wife to illness. Grief clung to him like a second skin. When he first came to fix a leaking pipe, he addressed Banita as auntie, his voice respectful, almost shy.
Hariram noticed the sadness in the young man and felt a tug of pity.
“Let him come by if he needs,” he told Banita casually. “A cup of tea never harmed anyone.”
And so David began visiting. At first it was simple—tea in the evening, snacks on the table, neighborhood gossip floating between them. When Hariram was home, the conversations were harmless. When he wasn’t, they grew longer.
Hariram’s government job often sent him on tour. On those nights, the house felt emptier to Banita. David would come by after dinner, and they would talk—about loneliness, about regrets, about the quiet weight of being unseen. Words turned into laughter. Laughter into comfort. Comfort into something neither of them named at first.
The neighbors noticed.
Whispers traveled faster than truth in Colony Road. A woman next door finally gathered the courage to speak when Hariram returned from a long tour. She told him that David often stayed late—sometimes overnight—while Hariram was away.
Hariram laughed.
“He’s too young,” Hariram said dismissively. “A Christian boy, barely earning anything. And frankly,” he added with a shrug, “not even good-looking. You people imagine too much.”
Belief protected him—until it didn’t.
One night, Hariram returned early without informing anyone. The house was unusually quiet. Ankita and Riya were asleep. As he walked toward the guest room, he heard muffled giggles—soft, careless, intimate.
He opened the door.
Banita and David lay under the same blanket, startled eyes frozen on him, the truth undeniable in the small, dim room.
The silence that followed was heavier than shouting.
Banita broke it first. Her voice did not shake.
“I deserve happiness too,” she said. “I’ve lived my life for everyone else.”
Hariram did not argue. Something inside him shut down instead.
The divorce was mutual, swift, and devastating. Ankita and Riya chose to stay with their father. Banita left the house she had lived in for two decades and moved in with David. Soon after, they married quietly.
For a while, Banita believed she had chosen freedom.
But six months later, freedom turned bitter. David’s grief had curdled into anger. The man who once listened now controlled. Words became accusations. Accusations became cruelty. He tortured her—not always with hands, but with constant suspicion, insults, and isolation.
Banita finally left.
The second divorce came without ceremony. Broken and exhausted, she went to her mother’s house, where she stayed in a small back room, surrounded by old memories and the weight of irreversible choices.
Back on Colony Road, Hariram raised his daughters alone. The house was quieter now, but steadier. Ankita learned resilience early. Riya learned caution. And Hariram learned that trust, once broken, never returns in the same shape.
Some evenings, Banita would look out from her mother’s window and think of the life she had lost—and the happiness she had chased.
Both had exacted their price.
And the quiet houses of Berhampur remembered everything.