The Coral Keeper

She has lost three pregnancies. She has stopped praying. She has stopped sleeping in her husband's bed. The only place left that doesn't hurt is forty feet underwater, where a formation of coral the local fishermen call Devi's Cradle has done what her body cannot: died completely and come back.

Lakshmi is a marine biologist stationed at Havelock Island in the Andaman Sea — brilliant at studying systems of regeneration she cannot apply to herself. Her husband Arvind makes biriyani and Googles the right things to say and cannot reach the place inside her grief where she has been living alone for two years. And in her dive bag, forgotten and unforgotten, a tiny brass Devi holds a staghorn coral branch in her palm.

This is a story about a woman's silent negotiation with her faith — the angry absence of prayer, the failed puja at midnight, the moment she realizes that a coral reef has become her temple because the Goddess is less complicated underwater. It is about the particular grief of a body that has learned to stop, and the particular love of a man who breaks down undignified and snot-running on a research boat and finally, finally becomes someone his wife can reach.

It is about rhythm. Not healing. Not hope. Rhythm — the oldest truth the ocean knows: that what dies and what lives are not opposites, but seasons.

"The Coral Keeper" is the first of twenty stories in the Shivoham Series — intimate, spiritually grounded tales of contemporary Indian women navigating grief, faith, love, and the body's mysterious insistence on continuing. Each story can be read alone. Together, they form a map of a life.

"Die, live, die, live. Not broken. Just rhythm."

Perfect for readers of Kamila Shamsie, Arundhati Roy, and Anita Desai who want their hearts broken gently, beautifully, and with full knowledge that the reef will grow back.