| Vardhini Chandrasekaran | January 2026 | Short Story |
The gap was small, no bigger than a child’s palm. Yet, it unsettled Bhagyashree the way a missing tooth unsettles a smile. The Eiffel Tower magnet was gone.
She stood in front of the fridge, staring at the pale square of enamel it had left behind. Morning light from the window glared against the glossy surface, making the absence brighter, like the white of an exposed eye. The recipe card sagged without it, corners peeling, curling downward as though in grief.
Not even a real recipe card, just a scrap of ruled paper, her mother’s handwriting in blue ink.
Besan bindi — one cup besan, chopped onions, pinch of ajwain… fry till crisp.
The ink had run where steam from boiling dal once rose against it. Oil splatters dotted the margins like freckles. A faint turmeric thumbprint stained the corner, as though her mother had pressed the paper in place mid-stir. The letters slanted into each other, hurried but firm, the handwriting of someone who cooked from memory and wrote only for the daughter who might one day forget.
Bhagyashree hadn’t cooked it in years; perhaps she never would. Yet it hung there as an heirloom held down by magnets, carrying the scent of fried gram flour and the sound of her mother’s bangles cheerfully clinking against the kadai.
Every morning, she reached for the fridge handle and glanced at the recipe, eyes brushing it out of habit. Now, with the magnet gone, the card sagged and her mornings tipped sideways, as though the weight of memory needed that one chipped Eiffel to steady it.
The fridge was her altar. It was crowded with offerings that told a story, half-true, half-embellished.
A cracked seashell magnet from Kovalam. A gaudy Taj Mahal from Agra station, glitter flecking off into her palm. A wooden mask from a corporate offsite in Bali, its grin too wide to trust. A lurid Goa magnet she had never bought pressed on her by a colleague in the office pantry.
But Paris was different.
It had come from the fringes of a work trip, three days of sterile PowerPoints in a business park outside the city. On the last afternoon, a meeting was cancelled. She boarded the train on an impulse without telling her colleagues, clutching her tote as if someone might accuse her of trespassing. The seats smelled faintly of bread and damp coats while she pressed her knees together, rehearsing her French silently.
She had learned it once, five years of school dictées, verb conjugations, nasal vowels painstakingly corrected by a teacher who never once smiled. Je suis, tu es, il est… A language she had aced on paper but never spoken to a stranger.
On the rattling train, she muttered phrases into the window’s reflection. Trop cher… moins, s’il vous plaît. Not for discussing art, not for flirting. Just to bargain.
At a stall near Trocadéro, keychains glittered on hooks, postcards fluttered. She picked up the smallest Eiffel, cheap paint bleeding into plastic. “Five euros,” the vendor said, bored.
Her throat caught. “C’est… trop cher… moins, s’il vous plaît.”
The syllables scraped but emerged intact. The vendor shrugged, knocked off a euro. She fumbled coins into his palm, heart soaring.
She walked away triumphant with the cheapest Eiffel Tower magnet on the rack. Plastic, paint smeared—but hers. Proof she had been. She even took the long route back to the station, past the river, craning her neck until the real tower loomed into view, enormous and impossible. She didn’t take a photo. The magnet would do.
Back home, she pinned it proudly above the besan bindi card. Paris guarding her mother’s onions and flour. Glamour pressed against grease.
And now it was gone.
From the living room came laughter. Dimple.
Her sister was sprawled across the sofa, anklets jingling faintly as she shifted, one leg draped over the armrest. Three months ago, she had promised: “Two weeks, max. Just while the pest control people finish fumigating my flat.” Then it was repainting. Then rewiring. Every fortnight, a new excuse.
Meanwhile, she had marked her territory. Silk scarves hung from chair backs. A squat Buddha sat atop Bhagyashree’s books. The incense smoked too close to the expensive sheer curtains, threatening to singe them. And an uncoastered rosé bottle wept venn diagrams on the sheesham coffee table. Typical Dimple!
Friends drifted in and out. Women smelling of patchouli, men smelling of desperation and Rowan, the incorrigible pronoun police.
Rowan was the kind of guest who held forth as though his stay required no invitation, only recognition. He would catch Bhagyashree fumbling a pronoun and pounce with theatrical kindness. “They/them, please,” followed by a knowing smile, as if generosity were a performance. Once, during a house party, Rowan leaned close and stage-whispered, “It’s not that hard, Bhagu.” And chased it with, ‘That’s what he said!’ And they had all relapsed into a snarl of vacuous laughter.
She had imagined yanking her hardbound Wren & Martin from the shelf and hurling it at Rowan’s smirk. Not to injure, to puncture. A childish fantasy, alright, but one that made it easy for her to laugh along a little too loudly.
Sometimes, in darker moments, she imagined another kind of sweep. Pest control. Not for cockroaches. For Dimple. A fumigation of her sister, her stupid scarves, her incense, her Buddha, her rosé rings, smoked out once and for all. She even pictured the men in masks arriving, dragging their hoses inside, mist curling through the rooms. And afterward: silence, clean silence, the flat aired and emptied of its infestation.
Dimple called herself a creative consultant, though she could never explain what that meant. Her Instagram bio, though, was more eloquent: storyteller • explorer • aura alchemist • vibe curator, always paired with a flower emoji. She lived as she wrote it, each collapse repackaged as reinvention: a fresh caption, a new chapter, a shift in energy.
It had always been this way. Dimple, lucky from birth, was named after a reigning siren both parents adored. When the baby arrived with dimples already carved into her cheeks, they had cooed over the happy coincidence for many months.
Invitations went to ‘Dimpy’, sometimes ‘Dimzy’, ‘Dimsum’, even ‘Dimtini’ or ‘Dimpster’ when her friends were in a clever mood. Her name was a trinket, an elastic toy, stretched and reshaped with affection, tossed around like slang that never went stale. There was always a new version waiting in each new circle of friends.
Bhagyashree, by contrast, had been named on the dying wish of a grandmother they never met, saddled with a word meaning “auspicious.” She carried it like a trunkful of bones. In school, teachers lingered on the syllables, making them heavier: Bha-gya-shree. Friends shortened it to Bhagu, muttered it under their breath as though it were an obligation, not a name. Sometimes it was worse: “Bhags,” spat out with a laugh, or “Bhaggu aunty” when she dared to remind their teacher of a test.
Even her name seemed to grow older faster than she did.
That evening, Bhagyashree hovered in the kitchen doorway.
“You’ve seen the fridge?” she asked.
Dimple didn’t look up from her phone. “It’s a fridge, Bhagu. Not hard to spot.”
“Something’s missing.”
“Milk?”
“A magnet.”
Dimple snorted. “You and your magnets. Who even collects magnets anymore?”
“They’re memories,” Bhagyashree said stiffly.
“Memories? They’re resin, paint and plastic. You’ve been hoarding junk since stamps.”
“Stamps are of historical significance.”
“You were into dead people’s glue,” Dimple said with devilish glee. “Now it’s dead people’s plastic. What an improvement!”
Bhagyashree’s lips tightened.
That evening, with the second glass of rosé, Dimple’s tongue loosened. Bitterness bubbled up as she sputtered out her roll call of betrayals.
The Pondicherry café she had planned down to distressed furniture, mason jar desserts and chalkboard menus, a ‘partnership’ that collapsed when the boyfriend disappeared with both the seed money and a German tourist. The hipster fiancé who declared he was gay, until he reappeared on Instagram with a girl on his arm. The yoga instructor, all breath and balance, caught practicing a different kind of asana with a student.
Her voice sharpened with each story, like she was auditioning for the role of the wronged woman with the wineglass as her chosen prop. And then came the latest grievance. Yet another ex who had flown off to Prague with his new girlfriend, flooding Instagram with spires and cobblestones.
“For him, it was never about true experiences; it was always about wanderlust.”
The word curled from her tongue like it was a crime. “Never about depth…always about collecting passport stamps like trophies to be lined up on the shelf….”
Bhagyashree had been waiting, her patience coiled tight through the evening’s complaints. The opening came, and she pounced. “Funny how people steal souvenirs from trips they never made.”
“Funny how people think souvenirs can make them travellers,” Dimple said, studying the dregs in her glass with acute concentration.
“That magnet was from Paris. I travelled.”
“Sure, you travelled. Airport to Conference room, Fluorescent lights…buffet lines…”
“Buffet lines, sure. Better than Pondi. Love marked down and thrown out.” Bhagyashree delivered the line with what she imagined was glacial malice. But Dimple merely leaned back and laughed lightly. “Marked down, thrown out? You sound like a clearance aisle. And that’s you all over, clinging to leftovers. Magnets, stamps, recipes. No wonder the house feels heavy.”
“Heavy?”
“Yes.” She gestured vaguely at the fridge. “The aura here is stuck. All these objects, pinning things down. You pin your life, Bhagu. That’s why nothing moves.”
“They’re magnets. They cling because that’s what magnets do. North pole, south pole, attraction, repulsion. It’s Class 5 physics.”
A smile played at Dimple’s mouth. “Physics is just aura in uniform. But I don’t expect you to understand.” She deepened her voice in mock gravitas, parroting as she air-typed: “Grateful for five years at blah blah blah…”
Bhagyashree’s eyes went glassy with unshed tears. “At least I have five years of something!”
What she didn’t add: it had mattered to her. Every word of it.
Later that night, she thought again of that LinkedIn post. She could see herself at the dining table, laptop open, cursor blinking. She had written and rewritten the single line—Grateful for the journey so far, and excited for what lies ahead—until it sounded appropriately bland and professional. Behind it were five years of servile nodding in meetings, earnest contributions to pie charts, careful tailoring of her wardrobe so she looked like she belonged at the table. She had stared at the sentence as if it were scripture set in stone, her finger clammy as it hovered over the post button, heart thumping as though she were confessing something private.
When Dimple showered, Bhagyashree crouched by her suitcase. Tangled chargers, cheap lipstick, crystals, incense sticks. No Eiffel.
The next morning, while shoving the fridge to mop, she heard a clatter and froze.
There it was! The Eiffel Tower, dust-bunnied, leaning against the wall.
Not stolen. Just slipped.
She bent, lifted it gently, cheeks hot with shame.
By evening, it was back, pinning the besan bindi card in place, her mother’s familiar calligraphy restored to the watch of Paris.
Dimple wandered in, a steaming coffee mug in hand. “You found it,” she said.
Bhagyashree said nothing.
Dimple smiled, cruel and tender at once. “If I’d taken it, you’d never have gotten it back.”
They stood side by side, staring at the fridge: Kovalam, Agra, Bali, Goa, Paris, and besan bindi. A small click broke the silence. Another magnet loosened, fell to the floor with a hollow tap.
Neither bent to pick it up.
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Vardhini is an advertising writer who has spent years crafting stories for brands. She now turns the same imagination inward to write short fiction inspired by human absurdities.
When she isn’t writing, she is pursuing adult ambitions like eating enough protein and pretending she isn’t eavesdropping for material.
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Photo by Celine Ylmz on Unsplash
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