Believe Me
- Luvv A Sanwal
- Jul 26
- 7 min read
Monday. 11:42 PM.
"Go home." I stood outside the red lit staircase. "Just go home, Vikram." I had been standing there eleven minutes. I know because I checked my phone three times, each time telling myself that if I was still standing here in two more minutes I would turn around and go home.
I took one step forward. Then another. By the time I reached the second floor, a woman I hadn't seen me before opened the door.
"First time?" she asked.
"Yeah."
"Don't lie."
I said nothing.
"Everyone says first time."
She stepped aside to let me in, already looking at her phone. "Room's on the left. Thirty minutes."
I didn't move.
"You coming?" she said, not looking up.
"I..."
She sighed and finally glanced at me properly. She stared at me the way like she was trying to figure out what category I belonged to.
"I don't get paid for waiting. So don't waste my time."
I made myself walk toward the room. My legs felt like they are following instructions rather than making a choice. Afterward, in the small mirror on the back of her door, I caught my own face for half a second before looking away.
I hadn't looked at a mirror properly in weeks.
Tuesday. Office. 11:10 AM.
Priya leaned across my desk to point at something on the screen. Her dupatta shifted. A thin strap, visible for less than a second. I looked for milisecond. Too obviously.
"You okay?" she asked.
"Hmmm..."
I sat very still after she left, hands flat on the desk, repeating the same two things I had been saying since college.
'Not now. Not here.'
The sooner she left, I went to the bathroom on the second floor, the one nobody used much, and locked the door and stood in front of the mirror.
"No," I told it.
Five minutes later I walked out. I didn't look at the mirror on the way past this time. I had learned that not looking hurt less than looking.
Tuesday night. A different lane.
This one didn't ask questions at all.
"Money first," she said, holding her hand out before I'd even finished walking in.
I handed it over.
"Room three."
That was the entire conversation. No first time, no small talk. Just a transaction conducted with someone who had done this thousand times and stopped finding anything in it worth commenting on. I found, strangely, that the indifference hurt more than anything anyone had said to me all week.
Wednesday. Home. 12:23 AM.
Shabana was awake, sitting at the dinner table. She looked at the clock. Then at me.
"You went there again."
Silence.
"I asked you something, Vikram."
"Yes."
"You disgust me."
"I've been trying."
"No." She shook her head slowly. "You've been choosing."
I wanted to argue. I had the argument ready, had rehearsed it a hundred times. I don't experience it as a choice, I stand outside for twenty minutes telling myself to go home and but looking at her face I understood that the argument would land exactly the way it always landed. Nowhere.
She stood up, walked to the bedroom and bang... she shut door hard on me.
We been sleeping separately for years now. On my way to the guest room I passed the hallway mirror, the one we'd bought together in our second year of marriage, and I turned my face away from it before it could show me anything.
Thursday. Mother's call. 8 PM.
"Beta, are you alright?"
I sat on the edge of my bed, phone against my ear, and for one long moment I considered telling her everything.
"You sound tired," she said.
"I..." My throat closed around the rest of the sentence. "I need..."
"What, beta? What do you need?"
I looked at the small mirror on my side table. My own reflection looked back, patient and unhelpful.
"Nothing," I said. "I'm fine, Ma. Just tired."
"Okay, beta. Sleep well."
I sat there a long time after the call ended, holding the phone, thinking about the word nothing and how much room it had somehow contained.
Thursday. Metro. 6:40 PM.
A woman standing beside me struggled to keep her balance as the local train lurched through another curve. Every sudden local train movement pushed the crowd closer together. Her shoulder brushed mine once. Then again. Then her hand landed briefly against my arm before she steadied herself. It was the most ordinary thing in the world. She shrugged, her face suggesting she'd seen hundred versions of men like me and had long since stopped being moved by any of them, which somehow made the moment land harder, not softer.
My mind refused to treat it that way.
By the next station I wasn't listening to the announcements anymore. I was fighting thoughts that had already outrun me. I already knew where I was walking. I was looking at myself in the small mirror above the public toilet sink. "Not now. There are people outside that door. You are thirty-eight years old and you are not going to do this today."
I turned the tap on. Cold water. I held my wrists under it.
Think about something else.
Think about the quarterly report.
Think about Shabana.
Think about work.
Think about anything.
But, the touch was not going off my mind and I masturbated. Five minutes later I walked out, feeling ashamed to even look at my reflection on the way past.
Friday. Police station. 2 AM.
The raid happened fast. Loud. Fluorescent light turning every face the same shade of guilty.
"You mean addiction?" the constable asked, looking at me with something close to genuine curiosity.
"No."
"What then? "For enjoying night with prostitute?" He laughed. Not cruelly. Just comfortably, the way you laugh at something that seems straightforwardly absurd.
"No. For whatever is wrong with my head."
Another officer wandered over.
"Listen to him."
"He thinks being horny is a disease."
The room laughed together, warmly, like men sharing a joke they'd heard before and still found funny.
I stopped talking.
They think I'm making excuses, I thought, sitting very still under the fluorescent light.
"I don't know," I said, and it was the most honest sentence I'd spoken in years. "Something's wrong with me. I've tried to stop. I swear I've tried."
Once again, the laughter came, not immediate, arriving in the small gap after my comment, the room finding its cue and taking it.
After.
The news moved fast. My photograph in a WhatsApp group. My office's suspension email, unopened. My brother's one message, then nothing. My mother's single weeping call, then silence. Shabana's lawyer, brisk and professional.
Nobody asked what was wrong with me.
Everybody had already decided.
The dishes in the sink grew into a small unwashed mountain, plates from meals I couldn't remember eating. Three milk packets sat unopened on the kitchen counter, the delivery boy's routine continuing on schedule even after mine had stopped entirely. My beard grew past the point where I could look at it and call it a beard rather than neglect. My phone died on the fourth day and I didn't charge it again. Dr. Shenoy's medication sat on the counter beside the milk packets, the seal still unbroken, a small orange bottle I looked at every morning and could not make myself open.
I passed the hallway mirror every day on the way to the kitchen and stopped looking into it entirely, the way you stop visiting a grave you can't bear to see.
Two days passed without anyone seeing Vikram leave the flat.
The milk packets outside his door kept piling up. Newspapers remained untouched. By the third evening, the neighbour across the hall rang the bell twice. No answer.
"Something's not right," she told the building secretary. They called the police. The constable forced the door open. The apartment was silent.
Found on the kitchen table, in Vikram Sharma's handwriting, folded together with a letter from Dr. Meera Shenoy, psychiatrist.
I know what everyone called me.
Pervert. Animal. Characterless.
I called myself worse than that, for longer than any of you did.
I am not writing this so anyone feels sorry for me. I stopped expecting that a long time ago. I am writing this because I want it known that I tried. For ten years I fought something I couldn't name, in rooms nobody saw, in mirrors I stopped being able to look at. I found a doctor six months ago. Her letter is here with mine. Please read it before you decide what kind of man I was.
I wish one person had asked me why I kept failing instead of assuming they already knew.
Maybe I would have shown them the letter sooner.
Maybe I would have lived.
Shabana, I am sorry. I know sorry means nothing now. I have said it so many times it stopped meaning anything to me too.
This is the last time I will say it.
I'm done saying sorry.
Dr. Meera Shenoy, Consultant Psychiatrist.
The patient presents with a longstanding history of compulsive sexual urges experienced as intrusive, distressing, and beyond his voluntary control. He has engaged earnestly with treatment since diagnosis. This is a recognised psychiatric condition, Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder.
The patient consistently sought help. He should have been met with treatment before judgment.
The constable who found the note was the same one who had laughed at the station.
He folded the doctor's letter. Then he unfolded it again.
He remembered laughing. This time, standing alone in the quiet flat, he couldn't.
Disclaimer - This story is fiction. Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder (CSBD) is a recognized mental health condition. Like many psychiatric disorders, it affects people differently. This story explores one fictional individual's experience and should not be taken as representative of everyone living with the condition.
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