Souls Swapped

The first time I realized my tongue was not my own, I was standing at the hand pump in our courtyard, watching water spill over my knuckles. Cold. So cold it made my teeth ache. I remember thinking how strange it was that I couldn't feel the chill anymore, not the way I used to. My hands moved through the motions, pumping, rinsing, but they felt borrowed.

That was three months ago. Before everything changed. Before I stopped recognizing myself in the mirror.

My name is Babita. I am twenty-two years old, unmarried, and until recently, I was the quiet one in our family. The one who kept her eyes down when guests came. The one who slipped out of rooms like a shadow, hoping no one would notice her leaving. My mother, Sandhya, used to say I was born with a mute button pressed into my chest. Even as a baby, I rarely cried.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. You need to understand how it started. Or maybe when it started. The truth is, I don't know exactly. Some things happen so slowly you don't notice until you're standing in the middle of them, wondering how you got there.

We live in a small village outside Jaipur, the kind of place where everyone knows whose daughter eloped and whose son failed his exams before the news even reaches the family. Ours is a two-story house with a courtyard in the middle, open to the sky. In the summer, my mother would spread wet sheets on the floor to cool the rooms. In winter, we'd huddle around the chulha, and my brother Pardeep would tell stories that made my mother laugh until she coughed.

Pardeep got married two years ago. Anita. She came to us from a village near Ajmer, a girl with a wide smile and hands that never stopped moving. She could cook for twenty people without breaking a sweat. She could remember everyone's birthday, everyone's favorite sweet. My mother loved her immediately. "Finally," she said, "a daughter who talks."

I didn't mind. I liked Anita. She never made me feel strange for being quiet. Sometimes she'd sit beside me while I folded clothes, not saying anything, just being there. Those were good moments. Comfortable. Like wearing an old sweater.

The change came on a Tuesday. I remember because Tuesdays were when the vegetable cart came, and I always bought the small, bitter gourds that Anita hated but my mother craved. I was standing at the gate, counting coins in my palm, when something shifted. Not outside. Inside. Like a door opening in a room I didn't know existed.

My head went light. My knees buckled. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground, and Anita was running toward me, her dupatta flying behind her like a flag.

"Babita! Babita, what happened?"

I opened my mouth to say I didn't know. What came out was: "The gourds. Don't let him cheat you. He always adds two extra and charges for three."

Anita froze. Not because of what I said. Because of how I said it. My voice had changed. It was lower, rougher. Like gravel rolling downhill.

I felt it too. The words had come from my throat, but they didn't feel like mine. They felt like they'd been sitting there, waiting, and I'd just opened the wrong door and let them out.

Anita helped me inside. She didn't ask about the voice. She didn't mention it at all. But I saw her hands shaking as she poured me water.

That night, I dreamed I was standing in a field of mustard flowers. The yellow stretched so far it touched the sky. Someone was calling my name, but the voice was coming from my own mouth, and I couldn't stop it. I woke up with my heart pounding and my pillow wet with tears I didn't remember crying.

The next morning, I went to the kitchen to help with breakfast. Anita was already there, kneading dough. She looked up when I entered, and something passed between us. A flicker. Recognition, maybe. Or fear.

"Babita," she said slowly. "Do you remember what you said yesterday? About the gourds?"

I nodded.

"Have you ever noticed that before? That you knew something you shouldn't?"

I wanted to say no. But the truth was, I had. Small things. Knowing that the neighbor's cow would calf early. Knowing that the postman would bring a letter from my aunt before anyone told me she'd written. I'd always dismissed it as intuition. A lucky guess.

"Anita," I said, and my voice was mine again, soft and small. "What's happening to me?"

She didn't answer. She just kept kneading, her knuckles white against the dough, and I saw something in her face that I'd never seen before. Not fear. Not confusion. Something older. Something that looked like recognition.

That was the first time I wondered if Anita knew more than she was saying.

The weeks that followed were strange. I'd find myself doing things I didn't remember deciding to do. My hands would reach for the spice box and add turmeric to the dal when I'd never liked turmeric. My feet would carry me to the terrace at dusk, and I'd stand there watching the sun set, feeling a peace that wasn't mine. My mouth would form words in a rhythm I didn't recognize, like a song I'd heard in another life.

And then there were the moments when I'd look at Anita and feel something I couldn't name. Not affection. Not dislike. Something like familiarity. Like I'd known her before. Like I'd been her before.

I know how that sounds. Believe me, I've spent many nights telling myself I was imagining things. But the body keeps score, doesn't it? The body remembers what the mind tries to forget.

One evening, about a month after the first change, I found Anita crying in the storage room. She was sitting on a sack of rice, her face buried in her hands, her shoulders shaking.

"Anita?"

She looked up. Her eyes were red, her nose running. And in that moment, I felt it again. That shift. That door opening.

"I can't do this anymore," she whispered. "I can't pretend."

"Pretend what?"

She stared at me for a long time. Then she said something that made the ground tilt under my feet.

"Don't you feel it, Babita? Don't you feel like you're wearing someone else's skin?"

I didn't answer. I couldn't. Because she was right. I did feel it. Every day. Every hour. And the worst part wasn't the feeling itself. It was that I was starting to like it.

That night, I lay in bed and listened to my own heartbeat. It sounded different. Stronger. Like it belonged to someone who wasn't afraid. Someone who knew what she wanted and wasn't going to apologize for it.

I thought about Anita. About the way she'd looked at me in the storage room. About the words she'd said. And I realized something that terrified me more than the changes themselves.

I didn't want to go back. I didn't want to be the old Babita again. The quiet one. The shadow.

I wanted to be the one who spoke up. The one who knew things. The one who felt alive.

But if I wasn't Babita anymore, then who was I? And if Anita was feeling the same thing, what did that mean for both of us?

The answer came three days later, in a way I never expected. I was helping my mother fold laundry when I heard Anita's voice from the kitchen, sharp and clear.

"I told you, I don't want to go. I'm tired of pretending everything is fine."

My mother frowned. "Anita? What are you talking about?"

And then I heard it. The voice that came next wasn't Anita's. It was mine. My old voice. Soft. Hesitant. Apologetic.

"I'm sorry. I don't know why I said that. I'm just tired."

I dropped the sari I was holding. My hands were trembling. Because I knew, in that moment, with a certainty that went deeper than bone, that something had gone very wrong.

Or very right.

I still don't know which.