The Unbecoming Poem by Sumita Jetley

She didn't light a candle.
She didn't dress in silk.
No music played,
no mirror watched.

Just a woman
in an old nightie,
sitting cross-legged on the floor,
with a book wrapped in newspaper
and a heartbeat wrapped in dust.

Kamasutra.
Not for seduction,
but for resurrection.

She had disappeared,
not with drama,
but with dishes.
Tiffins.
Timetables.
The quiet undoing
of women who are always useful.

She read.
And her body began to listen.
Not with heat—
with memory.

A pulse she hadn't felt
since school bells rang
and she thought she'd be more
than schedules
and someone's someone.

She didn't touch herself.
She touched
her truth.

That night,
she wrote.

Not erotica.
Not fiction.
But something in between—
a sacred confession
for women who had forgotten
what it means to want.

One story a night.
One scene a week.
Always after the dishes.
Always after
a daughter's kiss
and a whispered:
'Be whoever you want.'

She wrote not to be known,
but to know.

Her husband found her
asleep on the couch,
laptop open,
a sentence unfinished:

"It wasn't the touch that changed her—
it was the fact she had touched her own truth."

He didn't understand.
But he saw her face.
Soft. Certain.
Lit from within.

She never signed her name.
But women found her.
In inboxes.
In whispers.
In the wild permission of her words.

And on her fridge,
One sentence stayed:

What pleases the truest part of me becomes my finest truth.