It has been fifteen years, yet I never once lay with my husband—until I stumbled upon a conversation between him and his closest friend.

The gas cylinder man, the maid, the delivery boy in our Gurgaon housing complex (on the edge of New Delhi), still believe that my husband and I are an ideal office couple: leaving together in the morning, returning at dusk, throwing out the trash on the right day, arranging shoes neatly by the entrance, watering balcony plants on Sundays, ordering spicy masala noodles. None of them realize the only true fact inside that ninth-floor flat: for fifteen years, our two pillows have never touched.