The tea stall leaned against the Family Court Complex wall the way a drunk leans against a lamppost—grateful, graceless, permanently attached. Two men sat on the low compound wall beside it, legal files balanced on their laps like sleeping children they hadn’t asked for. Plastic cups of over-sweet chai cooled between their fingers. Auto-rickshaws coughed past in a procession of yellow and green, trailing exhaust that mixed with the smell of fried mirchi bajji from the cart across the road.

Niranjan spoke first. The words fell out of him like coins from a torn pocket.

“I cannot do that act—have never felt the slightest stirring in my body.”

Kamesh turned slowly, his tie loosened to a limp diagonal across his chest. For a long time the only sound was the rattle of a passing share-auto and the vendor slapping dough behind them. Then Kamesh set his cup on the wall, and said, very quietly, “My wife thinks nobody in the world has sex. She thinks it’s something movies invented, like item songs and happy endings.”

They looked at each other. Two strangers who had met once at a wedding, reintroduced twenty minutes ago by the same mutual friend who had a talent for placing people in each other’s wreckage. Behind them, the Family Court Complex nameboard glowed under a single yellow bulb—dim, indifferent, perpetually on.

Niranjan laughed. It was a sound like paper tearing.

“So one of us can’t, and the other one’s not allowed to.”

“And both of us are criminals now,” Kamesh said.

He understood. God, somebody actually understood.

~*~

Five months earlier—in Madhuranagar—their apartment smelled of jasmine garlands drying on the balcony railing. In the bedroom, a heart shape made of artificial rose petals still clung to the bedsheet, faded from red to the pink of old bandages. Niranjan had kept it since their wedding night. He could not explain why. Perhaps the same impulse that makes people preserve evidence of the crime they committed against themselves.

Avani stood by the window, her glass bangles catching the light from the street below. Three months married. Three months of his excuses stacked against each other—night shifts, acidity tablets on the bedside table arranged with suspicious neatness, a temple vow he had invented on the second week.

“I’m not asking again after tonight,” she said.

She traced the edge of the KS packet in the drawer with her thumbnail. She already knew. She’d known since the third week, maybe the second.

The ceiling fan threw its shadow across the wall in slow, judicial circles.

“I’ve got a condition,” Niranjan said. He sat on the edge of the bed, his software-company shirt still ironed and tucked in at 9 p.m., as though formality could substitute for function. “Erectile dysfunction. I’ve been seeing doctors since before the wedding. Nothing has worked.” His voice was flat, rehearsed, the confession of a man who had practised it in bathroom mirrors for months. “I married because my parents said the rumours were getting bad. People were calling me a chekka.”

Avani’s hand stopped moving.

“You can take a boyfriend if you want,” he added, and something in his tone suggested he thought this was generosity. “I won’t mind.”

One by one, she pulled the glass bangles off her wrists. They dropped into the metal dustbin beside the dresser with small, bright sounds—tink, tink, tink—like a xylophone playing a funeral scale.

“What you’re calling freedom,” she said, “is just the same fraud wearing a different shirt.”

In the pause that followed, she felt a cold clarity seep in where hope had been.

She left the room. The rose petals on the bed looked like dried scabs.

~*~

That same month, in their Kukatpally flat, Kamesh had bought the fairy lights from Troop Bazaar, bargaining with the shopkeeper for ten minutes over sixty rupees, because the act of haggling felt more like marriage than anything happening inside his actual marriage. He strung them across the bedroom ceiling. He placed a gift-wrapped Pochampally silk saree on the bed. He stood back and assessed the scene with the careful eye of a man who had built marketing campaigns for lesser products.

Suchita walked in scrolling her phone. She looked up, saw the lights, and her face performed a complicated sequence—pleasure, then recognition, then something that hardened behind her eyes.

“Oh, this is cute. Wait, don’t move, the angle’s perfect for a reel.”

She positioned herself against the fairy lights, tilted her head towards the camera, filmed fifteen seconds, then turned to him with the phone still raised.

He touched her shoulder.

She recoiled as though his fingers were electrodes.

“Ayyo Rama, you’re such a maniac. You think about nothing else, do you? In our house nobody even shared a bed. That’s how decent families live.”

She believed it. That was the terrifying part. She believed she was the sane one in a world gone vulgar.

“Suchi, I’m talking about counselling. Just talking to someone together —”

“I don’t need counselling. Wanting this every night is your sickness, not mine.” She closed the steel wardrobe with a clang that rang through the room like a headboard hitting the wall—loud, embarrassing, impossible to ignore. The silk saree stayed wrapped on the bed for a week before Kamesh moved it to the top shelf, where it joined the ornate mangalsutram box and the unopened perfume bottles—a museum of gifts for a marriage real only on paper.

~*~

Avani sat in the Women’s Legal Aid Centre at Lakdi-ka-Pul on a pink plastic chair beneath posters of illustrated brides cutting marital chains with oversized scissors. The fluorescent tube above her flickered at a frequency designed to make hope feel clinical.

The counsellor, a woman in her fifties with reading glasses pushed onto her forehead and a pen tucked behind right ear, explained the provisions calmly. Non-consummation. Concealment of medical condition. BNS Section 318. The word ‘annulment’ entered Avani’s vocabulary and settled there with the weight of a key fitting a lock she hadn’t known was there. For three months she had worn the word defective like an invisible bruise. Now she felt the bruise shift—still tender, but no longer on her own skin alone.

She thought of her father, watching news tickers about mosakari abbayilu—fraudulent grooms—and grumbling at the television. She had watched that same ticker two months ago and felt nothing. Now the words had teeth.

~*~

In Suchita’s parents’ house in Kachiguda, ornate sofas sat beneath framed Saibaba calendars on every wall, and a steel tumbler of water waited on the table, untouched. Kamesh sat between his own parents, who looked shrunken and bewildered, like travellers who had boarded the wrong bus and couldn’t afford the fare back.

Suchita’s mother wailed with the practised rhythm of someone who had rehearsed grief for an audience. “She’s innocent, she just needs time. What kind of man can’t wait? You people have raised a brute.”

Kamesh’s father opened his mouth. Closed it. His fingers trembled against his knee.

“Good husbands control these urges,” Suchita’s father said, adjusting his spectacles without looking at anyone. “Our family has a reputation. You want the whole colony to know your dirty business?”

Kamesh stared at a crack in wall putty that ran from the Saibaba calendar to the window, a jagged line dividing the room like a border neither family could cross.

Suchita, sitting very straight on the opposite sofa, kept her eyes fixed on that same crack, as if the wall might split open and offer an escape. If she looked at Kamesh, she feared she would see not a man but a demand with a face.

~*~

The Family Court in Purani Haveli had peeling off-white walls and humming tube-lights and rows of wooden chairs filled with people whose patience had been converted into legal fees. Niranjan sat between his parents, clutching a leather file so old it had begun to shed flakes onto his trousers.

Advocate Srimukhi, sharp-tongued and efficient in a starched cotton saree, built Avani’s case with surgical calm. Avani described her wedding night, the weeks of excuses, the confession, the grotesque offer of a boyfriend—all in halting Telugu that cracked on certain syllables the way cheap glass cracks along invisible fault lines. The judge asked about non-disclosure. Mental cruelty. Niranjan watched the words land on paper and understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that his attempt to purchase respectability had been repriced as criminal fraud.

Outside the court complex, in the white-hot glare of afternoon sun bouncing off parked cars, Srimukhi told Niranjan’s parents the number. Ninety lakhs. Withdrawal of the criminal case. The sum equalled their only house and his father’s entire retirement gratuity, GPF and commuted pension. His mother’s hand went to her mangalsutram, then dropped.

In a separate corridor of the same complex, Kamesh faced a different arithmetic. When he insisted on intimacy on an impatient night, Suchita had torn curtains, scratched her own arms with a hairpin, screamed from the balcony that he had beaten her, tried to force himself on her, and stormed out. The FIR under Section 85 named him and both his parents. Suchita’s family demanded one crore in a fixed deposit in her name, a written statement that he would never raise ‘dirty topics’ again, and the permanent burial of the annulment petition.

His parents, terrified of arrest and whispers in their middle-class colony, pushed him to sign.

He signed.

Suchita smiled during the compromise settlement, her gold bangles clinking on the polished table—small, bright, percussive sounds, like tiny locks snapping shut.

Relief from his harassment at last, for life. She still could not tell which she was protecting—her body, her upbringing, or the version of herself who had never been taught that desire could also belong to women.

~*~

Back at the tea stall—Family Court Complex—Purani Haveli.

The two men found each other again, stripped of houses and plots in Medchal, sitting on a compound wall with their feet dangling above the gutter.

“What if we just switched?” Niranjan said.

Kamesh turned.

“Think about it, yaar. Avani wants a husband who can—you know. You can. And Suchita wants a man who’ll never touch her. That’s me. That’s literally the definition of me.”

The idea hung between them, absurd and luminous, the way a firecracker looks magnificent for exactly two seconds before becoming ash and cardboard.

Kamesh let himself imagine it. Walking along Necklace Road with Avani, hand in hand, laughing like the silhouette couples Niranjan had spent months watching from bus windows. Suchita and Niranjan in separate rooms, discussing TV serials and yoga routines with the peaceful coexistence of flatmates who had given up on passion and found something less flammable.

But Avani had already taken the ninety lakhs and relocated to a new apartment in Kondapur. She was hanging fresh curtains when the two men were dangling their feet above the gutter—cream fabric with small embroidered parrots, purchased the same afternoon. She had no reason to look back at a second man already tangled in legal wire.

And Kamesh’s written statement sat in a court file like a padlock on his own throat.

The swap shrivelled. Unlike in Telugu films, people and courts could not be rearranged like mismatched chappals outside a temple door.

~*~

One year later in February, the city had added another flyover near Biodiversity Junction. Malls displayed couple offers for Valentine’s week in pink cardboard and synthetic roses. The city metabolised its people and moved on. The four lives had not.

Niranjan worked night shifts at a call centre adjacent to Hitec City, living in a shared PG room partitioned by thin plywood. Above his narrow cot, he had pinned a small calendar image of Hanuman in a meditation pose—less faith than resignation, a steady reminder of celibacy chosen for him by anatomy and law. His parents died within a month after the case was settled—a week apart. Out of shame, he heard the neighbours whispering.

Kamesh and Suchita occupied the same Kukatpally apartment. Two single beds stood on opposite walls like opposing counsel. Suchita filled her weekends with office parties, shopping reels, trips to Goa with female friends. When relatives asked about children, she tilted her head towards Kamesh and said, “His health problem, aunty, what to do,” and he watched the ceiling fan trace its slow, indifferent circles and said nothing.

~*~

The hot afternoon sun beat down on the Family Court Complex.

They had come to collect certified copies. At the entrance, a new photography stall had appeared beneath a vinyl banner reading Happy Family Court Memories—Get Your Legal Victory Framed! Sample photographs displayed men and women holding laminated decrees like cricket trophies, grinning against a printed backdrop of Charminar surrounded by cartoon hearts and scales of justice.

The photographer, a young man with gel-spiked hair and a belt-pouch full of receipt books, spotted them and waved.

“Saar, come come! Victory photo, saar? Just two hundred for colour, lamination extra. Hold this—.” He thrust blank cardboard certificates towards them, the kind used as props. “Just for memory, saar. Everybody does it.”

The photographer saw two men in front of a court. He saw customers. He did not see what they carried that couldn’t be laminated.

Niranjan looked at the cardboard. For one ridiculous, tempting second, he imagined standing there with the fake decree, smiling into the camera, pretending he had won something—freedom, closure, a second chance, anything with a name.

Kamesh stared past him at the painted backdrop. The scales of justice hung on either side of the Charminar, and one side drooped lower than the other. He looked closer. The tilt wasn’t accidental damage or wind. It had been sewn into the cloth that way, stitched permanently off-balance, a defect baked into the design so deep that no one standing before it could ever make it level.

He stepped back. His hand found Niranjan’s elbow and pulled, gently.

“Vaddu, bhai,” he said. Leave it.

They walked away. Behind them, the blank certificates swayed on their clips in the warm afternoon draft.

The courtyard of the Family Court Complex spread out in the declining light, people moving through it in all directions—advocates with black coats slung over forearms, women in clusters clutching brown envelopes, men alone on benches staring at phone screens. Somewhere among them, Avani crossed the courtyard with a new group of women from a legal support collective she had joined, her dupatta the colour of deep marigold, her stride purposeful. She listened more than she spoke now, collecting other people’s stories, cataloguing each injustice with an organiser’s calm. The law that had once terrified her had become, if not a friend, then at least a tool she could grip without cutting her own hand. Suchita entered from the opposite gate with two office colleagues, heading for a seminar room hosting a workshop on Women’s Rights in Marriage. Their paths bent towards each other for three seconds, then diverged without contact, like two raindrops sliding down the same windshield on parallel tracks.

Near the exit, high on the boundary wall above a rusted drainpipe, a government poster displayed a perfect smiling couple holding hands beneath bold blue letters—VIVAAHAM—OKA PAVITRA BANDHAM. Marriage—A Sacred Union. Someone had pasted two small mismatched passport photos over the original faces. Weeks of rain had softened the paper, blurring features until the couple was faceless, genderless, interchangeable—an ideal that had lost its specifics and become a stain shaped like togetherness.

Niranjan and Kamesh passed beneath the poster without glancing up. They merged into the crowd heading towards the bus stop, two ordinary men with ordinary haircuts and ordinary files under their arms, indistinguishable from every other person the city would forget by evening. The compound wall cast a long shadow across the courtyard as the sun dropped behind the Charminar’s minarets, and the blank cardboard certificates at the photography stall fluttered once more in a gust of warm wind, then hung still.