A time-lapse video of a moulting cicada showed the creature attaching itself to a vertical surface. It seemed to quiver endlessly before at last breaking open along the back of its body. Another being, a transparent phantom, emerged from the shell.

The imago. A sexually mature adult, the fifth and final instar of the cicada life cycle. The imago grew under its old skin. In this new form, it had red eyes. Its wings were crumpled, wet. Rocking back and forth, it found its way free. In this ritual of becoming, nothing could be rushed. The wings filled with air, opening as the wetness that weighed them down evaporated.

The cicada laboured for more than an hour to birth its new body. The video that we were watching condensed it into five minutes. Even then, the girls grew impatient. The sight of the insect rising from itself was boring – they wished someone would help it out and didn’t understand when I said it was wrong to interfere. Unaccustomed to watching exertion, they moved away to do other things.

As terrifying as the insect was, I felt protective of it, its perseverance, its utter vulnerability. It reminded me of the book I was trying to write, and the well-meaning questions I received from friends – how uncomfortable it felt to share ideas still nascent within me, unformed, fragile creatures. I had learned to keep quiet, and not because of superstition, or fear. To help the creature out of its shell weakened it. It needed to struggle, to crack itself open.

By the end, the imago stood at 90 degrees from the ground, perpendicular to its old self. But in a disappointing finale, it did not take flight as I had hoped, instead falling to the earth, landing on its back. After scrambling to its legs, it disappeared in the uneven grass. All that remained was the exuvia, the shell left behind. In the time-lapse, the empty exoskeleton seemed to quake, a ghost remembering what it was to be alive.

It occurred to me that this creature was 13 years old, or perhaps 17, that it had been alive longer than my children, sucking on the roots of plants, escaping its own skin at each new phase, tunnelling below the frost line. I wondered that it had managed to survive.

Earlier I had been examining the astrological chart of our wedding day, and now, in the margins of that page, I noted down the phases of the cicada life cycle. Then I searched for mentions of them in history, in mythology. In ancient Athens, citizens wore golden cicadas as a sign of their origins. Athenians believed themselves to be native to the land, that, like the cicada, their earliest ancestor had come from a split in the earth. I tapped my pen against my cheek. In the Ramayana, Sita was born from a furrow in the earth.

When she was ready to leave her body, the earth opened to receive her again.

Reading about Sita’s reabsorption, her desire to disappear, her plea for annihilation, a familiar distress churned within my stomach. I pushed my notes away. I had read this story before, as a child, and was always troubled by its ending. Ram had asked her to rejoin him as queen, to take her rightful place by his side, reinstate her honour, with their children. What made her say no?

Why did some choose preservation and others destruction? Marriage offered a secure container – a vessel for a family to imagine the future, to grow into wholeness, insulated from the dangers of the world beyond. Soft, permeable bodies needed shells, after all.

I looked out the window. The cicadas would begin their mating season soon, and it seemed that my husband wanted to begin his own.

For the rest of the week I tried to seem calm, unaffected, in front of him, maintaining my composure and hoping my husband would see that he was wrong about me, about us. When he left his dirty clothes on the floor I didn’t grumble but quietly washed and ironed them, making sure they were hanging in his closet the next day. I froze the ripe fruit before it went bad to show him I was taking his advice, being less wasteful. But he was wary, trying to ascertain if the ground before him was a solid ledge or a loose stone. He no longer trusted, no longer wanted, my show of kindness. And the constraints I had placed on myself were taking their toll. From the outside, I looked presentable, perhaps even beautiful, my eyes soft, my tone fragile. But inside, some part of me was trying to kill itself. I had lost my appetite, and anything I forced down gave me acid reflux. The day would pass before I realised I had not had a sip of water. A fear of the dark I’d had in childhood suddenly returned. The shadows in the bedroom and throughout the house were terrifying, and while everyone else slept I walked in circles around the garden. The grass felt dry, piercing the soles of my feet.

The tension inside me kept growing. I could not comprehend that this man who was avoiding me, leaving any room I entered, was my husband. I spent hours poring over our astrological charts, searching for answers. Each circular diagram offered a picture of the sky from the moment of birth, a blueprint of past, present and future. Answers about marriage or partnership usually came from the seventh house, divorce from the eighth, but my eyes kept wandering to the fourth house, which told the story of home, origin, ancestry. It was from there, the base of the chart, that the patterns of our lives would arise. My husband had Saturn in the fourth house. Obstacles and contractions.

One night, my husband told me he was going out and didn’t know when he would come home, and I burst, saying men were supposed to be simple – how was it possible that he was so complicated?

He pointed his finger at me, wagging it in my face.

“That,” he said. “That right there.”

There it was: I was caught. My feigned sweetness had not lasted long. But what did he want from me?

“You can’t speak without insulting me,” he sneered. “This is who you are. Just like I said.”

My throat was closing. Why was he trying to torture me? I lifted my hands to reach for him and saw that they were trembling.

He shook his head and told me I blamed everything on my anxiety, but the real problem was that I was spoilt and never thought of others.

“What about me?” he said. “Did you ever consider my needs?” I fired back that his expectations were unrealistic. How could he be so selfish? He was more unreasonable than the children.

But this comparison to the girls made him furious. He brought up a fight we’d had when our first daughter was born, when he wiped the baby from back to front and I asked him whether he understood female anatomy. All I knew how to do was ridicule and undermine him. Glowering at me, he suggested we consider some examples of my incompetence.

I stormed out of our bedroom, stopping short when I saw the girls perched at the bottom of the stairs. They looked up at me, their faces resigned, as though they didn’t need an explanation, as though they understood exactly what was going on.

The children had already noticed that something was wrong. Over the past week I had tried to hide it, but it was impossible. The younger one, as always, had read my mood, my unsteady gait, turning solemn in response. My older daughter seemed almost relieved that we were reflecting the melancholy she had been feeling since she turned ten years old.

That night my older daughter told me to sleep in her room, that she didn’t mind if I left the lights on, reminding me that I had let her leave them on years ago – she remembered that – and one good turn deserved another. I laid my head on the pillow near her mouth and listened to her grind her teeth, imagining the grating bone, the diminishing enamel, the nerves in her gums, aching to be free. I wished I could say I was only thinking of the girls, of their future and keeping the family intact, but kids were usually okay. They had a chance, they would leave one day. But what about me? Where would I go and what shape would I take if he left me?

My father called me the following morning as I was packing lunch for the children. I debated whether to answer and then picked up.

He asked about the girls first, as always, and then my husband, before wanting to hear how my weekend was.

“Tiring,” I said. I told him I had been exhausted recently.

“You should call Didi.” My sister had seen a doctor who had given her something for her energy levels. She looked younger, fresher than ever, he said.

“Okay,” I replied, though I had no intention of reaching out to her. We had not spoken in nearly a decade, and my father tried to change that every time he called.

“Connect with her today, if you can.”

I would have normally let his entreaties pass, but I was on edge, full of nerves, waiting for whatever new horror the day would bring. I told him that my sister owed me an apology, and that I would not be the one to call her.

I immediately regretted my words. My father’s voice was soft but no longer gentle. “You children are really lost,” he said, and I knew when he said children he really meant child. “In my life, I never expected calls from my elders. It didn’t matter what they had done or said. I never held a grudge.”

I thought about telling him what was happening, what my husband was putting us through, if only to redirect his anger. But how could I tell him what I didn’t understand myself? I had to contain this chaos. No one could know.

“Even on birthdays,” he continued, “the same nonsense. As though you’ve done some miraculous thing yourself to be born. There are roaches born in the gutter every day. While my parents were alive, I called them on my birthday to thank them, to seek their blessings. Not to ask for bloody congratulations.”

When I hung up I saw a message from my cousin Sama.

“It’s Tuesday,” she wrote. “Again. Where are you?”

So it was. Tuesday was the day we did our groceries together while the children were at school. It was out of her way to come to my town, but she had started doing it as a favour, because I didn’t drive and it was inconvenient for my husband to take me every week, and too expensive to call a taxi. She would pick me up and we would select vegetables and fruits together, discussing our menus for the next few days, and she would let me use my credit card to pay for her shopping and give me cash in return.

I realised that Sama had texted me the week before, too. She had sent one message on Tuesday, about groceries, and a few more in the days that followed. Squinting at the phone, I couldn’t even remember reading them. I opened the refrigerator and there was barely anything left to eat, but seeing Sama in this state was out of the question. This was a bad dream that we would wake up from, and if she saw me now she would know immediately that something was wrong. She would guess what had happened, or it would spill out of me, and I couldn’t bear that. Taking a deep breath, I brought my head down to my knees. I was tired, so tired. I didn’t have whatever was required for me to live this way. When I returned to standing, I felt dizzy, my vision blurring. Leaning against the fridge, I could feel the magnets sticking into my back, the jagged ones we had picked up on family holidays, in the shape of houses, sea life, a toucan, a crashing wave.

Rubbing my eyes, I called a taxi. Outside, the sky above me was full of clouds and the ground below was a bed of cottonwood pollen. At the grocery store my card was declined and I counted the wad of cash in my hand. The cashier wasn’t surprised. Smiling kindly, she waited. She had been seeing me there for years; she had seen this before.

Later, I blended a smoothie to give to the children when they got home from school. The machine growled and I stared absently out the window at the neatly trimmed hedges, hawthorn and boxwood, separating our house from the neighbours’. On the double doors leading to the backyard my daughters had left fingerprints the day before, lip marks, a painting of saliva on the glass.

The girls came in from school, mumbling inaudibly when I asked them about their days, and parked themselves in front of the TV. An hour later, my husband walked in and dropped a pile of mail on the kitchen counter, junk mostly, catalogues, credit card applications. He looked handsome. He had dressed up for work that morning, in trousers, a white shirt and a belt my parents had given him last year on his birthday.

“I won’t be having dinner,” he said, glancing at the pot I was filling with water.

Swallowing, I murmured, “The card was declined.”

“I’ll check,” he said, without looking at me, before striding out of the kitchen.

I ate dinner at the table with the girls, didn’t comment when they wasted their vegetables, and focused on chewing each flavourless mouthful. It was disgusting, to eat one’s own cooking, to stew oneself in the pot, and swallow what had already permeated one’s clothes and hair, as disgusting as it was delicious to be fed, to feel food as a surprise in one’s mouth, to be served without making the slightest effort.

Excerpted with permission from The First House, Avni Doshi, HarperCollins India.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.