Collateral Tomorrow

Collateral Tomorrow

By Lokanath Mishra

Aarohi learned early that love rarely announces its terms. It enters quietly, through tone and patience, through the careful way someone waits while you finish a thought. When Raghav first spoke to her, he did not rush. He listened as if listening itself were devotion. He remembered the smallest things—how she avoided eye contact when anxious, how she preferred bitter coffee, how silence unsettled her more than arguments. To a girl raised on caution and compromise, this felt like being seen.

He spoke of permanence as if it were not a promise but a natural conclusion. Forever sounded less like a vow and more like relief. She stepped into it the way one steps into shade after long heat, unaware that comfort can harden into confinement.

Trust followed without resistance. Raghav disliked secrets, said they created distance. He spoke of honesty as intimacy, of openness as courage. Each request arrived gently, framed as closeness rather than demand. Nothing felt abrupt. Nothing felt dangerous. Each yes was smaller than the one before it, until refusal would have required a language Aarohi had never been taught to speak.

When the relationship ended, it did not fracture. It thinned. Raghav withdrew his attention slowly, as if losing interest were a natural evolution. There were no accusations, no cruelty she could point to. Aarohi blamed herself for a while, then sealed the memory away like an unsorted box from another life. She completed her studies, found work, and eventually married Vikram—a man whose love did not require demonstrations, whose affection did not arrive with conditions. With him, silence was rest, not suspicion. With him, her body was not evidence. She believed the past had lost its power simply because time had passed.

Years later, while standing in a crowded market choosing fruit, her phone vibrated. A name she had archived out of habit, not fear. The message was brief and stripped of emotion. It did not ask how she was. It did not pretend nostalgia. It reminded her of what he still possessed.

She did not reply. She deleted the message and carried her groceries home, telling herself that time dulls even the sharpest edges. She believed distance was protection. She believed wrong things often.

The messages did not return to her. They moved outward instead, like smoke finding open windows. Vikram received one late at night. Her cousins another. Her in-laws the next morning. Each carried fragments of a past rearranged into accusation—images altered, timelines twisted, context erased. What had once been private was repackaged as spectacle. Truth, once forced to explain itself, lost authority.

Aarohi tried to speak. Her words sounded thin even to her own ears. Every denial felt rehearsed. Every explanation seemed incomplete. No one asked what coercion looks like when it wears affection. No one asked how consent erodes under persistence. They asked why she had been careless. Why she had not protected her marriage from her own history.

Vikram did not shout. He did not argue. He looked at her as though she had become unfamiliar furniture—something once chosen, now inexplicable. He packed his clothes before dawn and left without asking her to follow.

Meera, her mother, collapsed when the phone rang again. Mahesh, her father, listened to Aarohi’s explanation without interruption, then closed the door gently when she finished. The sound of the lock carried a finality words could not.

Aarohi moved into a rented room on the edge of the city, close enough to the railway tracks for passing trains to rattle the windows. The room smelled faintly of damp and previous lives. At night, voices from neighboring rooms seeped through the walls—arguments, laughter, televisions murmuring news. Evidence of other lives continuing.

She learned to sleep with the lights off even when fear resisted. She learned that shame is heavier when carried alone, and quieter when it has nowhere to go. She replayed everything—not to absolve herself, but to understand the mechanics of harm. Where persuasion becomes pressure. Where affection becomes leverage. Where choice narrows until it resembles inevitability.

Raghav never contacted her again. He did not need to. The damage had learned to sustain itself. Destruction, once released, requires no supervision.

Days blurred into routine. Work. Commute. The small room. She avoided mirrors again, not because she despised herself, but because she no longer recognized the woman reflected there. She was older than the girl who had trusted too easily, yet the world treated them as the same person, fixed forever at her worst decision.

One evening, during a power cut, she began to write by the glow of her phone. Not a defense. Not an apology. An account. She wrote about how manipulation often begins as patience. How control prefers to borrow the language of care. How women are trained to preserve harmony even when it costs them safety.

She wrote about evidence and how it rarely tells the whole story. About how a past can be weaponized if it exists outside forgiveness. About how society demands clean victims and simple villains, and how many lives are ruined in the space between those demands.

Writing did not repair what had been broken, but it gave shape to what had been formless. It allowed her to see herself not as an isolated failure, but as part of a pattern that thrives on silence.

Months later, she mailed those pages anonymously to a women’s collective. She did not sign her name. She did not need recognition. What she wanted was circulation.

She moved again after that, to a smaller place with a window that caught the morning sun. The city did not soften toward her. Her family did not return. Vikram did not call. Healing, she learned, is not restoration. Some losses are permanent.

But she learned to live without apologizing for existing. She learned that survival does not require permission. Her life was not over—it had simply been rerouted through harsher terrain.

Sometimes she imagined speaking to girls younger than herself, not as a warning carved from fear, but as an inheritance shaped by truth. She would tell them that love should never demand proof that can be reused against you. That trust is not blind obedience. That anyone who asks you to gamble your future for reassurance in the present is not offering devotion.

She would tell them that a single message can alter the architecture of a life. And that silence—chosen carefully—can sometimes be the only way forward.

Most of all, she would tell them this:
Your tomorrow is not collateral.
Protect it.