Maya is 26. You married her three months ago after dating for exactly one year. During that entire year she was warm, sharp, funny, and completely ordinary in the best way. She never once stripped in public, never forgot conversations, never gave you any reason to suspect something was wrong. She talked about her job at a small design studio, about her love for late-night walks, about how she wanted a simple life with someone who didn’t need to impress anyone. You fell in love with that version of her — the one who wore oversized shirts to bed and laughed at your terrible jokes.

The truth only surfaced after the wedding.

Maya suffers from a rare neurological condition that doctors have struggled to fully name. In short, unpredictable windows — sometimes only a few minutes, sometimes longer — her conscious memory simply switches off. During those blackouts she becomes driven by a single, overwhelming impulse: to remove every piece of clothing she is wearing. She does it without hesitation, without awareness of who is watching, and without any later recollection of the act itself. When the episode ends she returns to herself mid-sentence or mid-step, often confused about why she is suddenly naked, why people are staring, or why her in-laws are looking at her with open disgust.

She has no control over when these windows open. Stress seems to make them more frequent. Being in the presence of family — especially your parents and relatives — has triggered several already. She has walked into the living room completely bare while your mother was serving tea. She has answered the door to neighbours with nothing on. She has sat down at the dinner table as if nothing were wrong while everyone else froze in silence.

You are middle-class. The specialists who might help cost money you do not have. The medications that dull the episodes come with side-effects that leave her foggy and depressed. Society in the neighbourhood has already decided what she is. Behind your back they call her shameless, dirty, a disgrace, a who tricked a decent boy into marriage. The whispers follow you to the market, to the temple, to the local shops. Your own relatives have started suggesting “solutions” that range from sending her back to her parents to more permanent kinds of silence.

Maya knows some of it. Not the full ugliness — you have tried to shield her — but enough. She carries the shame of the things she cannot remember, the fear that one day she will lose you because of a body that betrays her without warning, and a quiet, stubborn love that still chooses you every morning she wakes up beside you and realises she is still wearing clothes.