Lust Stories 3, and the Desire That Comes Home by the Side Door

In Hyderabad, in 1987, a woman who teaches Urdu literature sits down with a notebook and writes her husband the way she wishes he were: a lover who comes down from heaven for her. The husband she has is a homeopath. She loves him, and when she longs for him, he answers with a remedy. She does not show him the notebook.

At a resort in Khandala, a woman in her forties knows exactly what her husband likes and exactly what he cannot stand. They have been married for years, and for some time they have not slept together. What she does with that knowledge, in the story, is lie. Her best friend is trying, by arrangement between the two women, to seduce him, and the lie is there to make her fail.

These are two of the women in Lust Stories 3, the third collection of short films to carry that name, which reached Netflix in September 2026. Neither has stopped wanting. Neither says so to the man she wants. That is the ground the film keeps coming back to: marriages in which desire has not died but gone quiet, and the roundabout ways it finds of getting home.

This essay argues that desire in these stories comes home by the side door. Not through the front, where someone would have to say, in her own name and to the person it concerns, what she wants, but by the ways a household uses when it would rather not be seen: a plan borrowed from television, a jealous lie, a quarrel that ends in bed, a book sold across a city under a name that is not the writer’s. The film is generous to the side door. Things do come in by it, and some of what comes in is tender. Where the film is most honest is in counting what the door costs, and who pays.

There is a front door in the film too. It opens all the way only once, and where it leads may be the most surprising thing in the collection.

Lust Stories 3 is a Hindi-language anthology of four short films, directed in turn by Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, Shakun Batra and Vishal Bhardwaj, and produced by Ronnie Screwvala’s RSVP and Ashi Dua’s Flying Unicorn Entertainment. It premiered on Netflix on 18 September 2026, in Japan as well as India, and runs a little under three hours. All four directors are new to the series: the first collection, in 2018, was made by Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar, and the second, in 2023, by R. Balki, Konkona Sen Sharma, Sujoy Ghosh and Amit Ravindernath Sharma.

In Motwane’s story, Radhika Apte and Konkona Sen Sharma play Padma and Shonali, best friends in their forties, with Vijay Varma and Abhishek Banerjee as their husbands, Hemant and Debendu. Rao’s belongs to Sana Thampi as Lisa, a nail artist, with Gurfateh Pirzada as Karan and as his identical twin, Arjun. In Batra’s, Ali Fazal and Radhika Madan play Varun and Sailee, a couple waiting out a divorce. In Bhardwaj’s, Aditi Rao Hydari plays Saira, and Siddharth her husband, Badru. Apte returns from the first collection.

Two notes before going further. The film was not screened for this essay. What it says happens comes from the published record and from reviews written when the film appeared; lines are paraphrased, never quoted as dialogue, and where published accounts disagree, the essay says so rather than choosing. And it discusses how all four stories end, because its argument is made in the endings. They begin a few sections on, where a line says so. A reader who would rather meet them on screen should stop here, and come back.

Eight years before this film, Radhika Apte played Kalindi in the first collection, a college professor who kept stepping out of her own story to explain herself straight to the camera. She wanted, and she said so, at length, to us. This Library’s essay on that film, “Lust Stories, and Whose Want Gets a Hearing”, argued that all four of its women wanted and the film never doubted it, and that what divided them was whether the want got a hearing, from whom, and at what price. The hearing, it found, followed power: who teaches whom, who pays whom, whose house it is.

In the third collection Apte plays Padma, and the distance between the two parts is the distance the series has travelled. Kalindi said everything. Padma shows the opposite of what she feels. Nandini Ramnath, reviewing the film for Scroll, wrote that Apte nails Padma’s faked disgust, and the phrase is worth keeping. Whatever Padma wants, what she performs is not wanting.

That is the change. The first collection’s women could mostly say what they wanted; the open question was who would listen. For the married women at the centre of the third, the saying itself is the problem. Not because nobody would hear, but because saying it, inside a marriage that has gone quiet, could cost the speaker something she cannot spare: her dignity, her standing, the marriage itself, or her name. So the want goes round. Critics felt the change of temperature. Aishani Biswas, in Outlook, wrote that it works best when it stops treating lust as a scandal and starts looking at what desire says about the lives people have built around it.

It helps to say plainly what the two doors are. The front door is the sentence said to the person it concerns, in the speaker’s own name: I want you; I want this; this is what has gone missing. The side door is everything else a want can use to get into a house unannounced, and using it is not a moral failing. In a long marriage it is often the only door that opens. But it is not free, and what it charges is the subject of this essay.

In Motwane’s story, neither Padma nor Shonali sleeps with her husband any more. Shonali’s husband, Debendu, would rather sit at his computer than come to bed. Rahul Desai, reviewing the film for The Hollywood Reporter India, wrote that the two women have reached a stage where all they want is to be wanted again.

A Korean drama about swapping partners gives Shonali an idea, and she talks a reluctant Padma into it. They will spend a weekend in Khandala, where each wife will seduce the other’s husband. The weekend is passed off as a birthday trip, and the husbands are not told what it is for. Zico Ghosh, in The Federal, saw in the premise a feminist flip on Ajnabee, a Hindi thriller of 2001 in which a partner swap is a man’s proposal and the cover for a murder plot. Here the idea belongs to the wives, and the film plays it as comedy.

It is worth being exact about what the plan is, even while the film laughs. It is consensual on one side of the table only. Two wives have agreed with each other about four people. What they agreed covers what each of them will do. It cannot cover anything on the husbands’ behalf, and it cannot turn a husband’s silence into a yes, because nobody has asked him anything. Whatever Hemant or Debendu does that weekend is his to choose or refuse, then and there, with no plan standing behind it. The story respects this more than its premise promises. When Shonali stages an evening for Hemant, he walks out of it. That is a refusal, and nothing in the plan has any claim on it.

The same is true inside the pact. Padma agreed with misgivings, because her friend talked her round. A reluctant yes to a scheme is not a yes to anything in particular the scheme contains, and she was free to stop at any moment. In a way she does stop, though not honestly, and how she does it is the story’s hinge.

Before the hinge, notice what the film has already done. The plan is made between two women, in their own words, before any man is asked anything. Biswas wrote that the friendship lets the story explore female desire without turning it into a performance for the men around them, and that is the story’s best idea. For a few scenes, the plainest and least ashamed talk about wanting anywhere in this story happens between two friends. It is a front door of a kind. It leads to the wrong house, but it is a front door.

From here, this essay describes how the stories end.

Padma, jealous, sabotages her friend. She feeds Shonali false tips about Hemant, so that every move Shonali makes on him is the wrong one. The film plays the lies for laughs, and they are funny. They are also manipulation, and should be called that. Padma uses her friend’s trust, and her friend’s reliance on what only a wife could know, to steer her into failing, while letting her go on believing they are on the same side. And the lie closes the one front door the story had: the room where two women were telling each other the truth.

Look at what the lie requires. To mislead Shonali about Hemant’s tastes, Padma has to know them exactly: what he likes, what he cannot stand, what would win him and what would send him out of the room. The two of them no longer sleep together, and still she carries all of it. It was in the house the whole time. She had not been using it. It takes another woman’s interest in her husband to make her open the file, and the first thing she does with what is in it is turn it into a weapon.

This is an old mechanism, and it should be seen clearly rather than admired. This Library’s essay “Mating in Captivity Asks a Difficult Question: Why Can Desire Fade Inside a Loving Relationship?”, a reading of Esther Perel’s book, argued that what flattens desire in a long marriage is not knowing the other person too well but finality: the settled sense that they have been fully accounted for, that the file is closed. It also named what can reopen it: remembering that the other person exists in rooms we are not in, that they can surprise us, that they can be interesting to other people. Padma’s weekend is that last sentence played as farce. She watches her friend find her husband interesting, and the file comes open.

The same essay drew the line this story walks along, and it is the line this essay keeps. Jealousy, manipulation and fear, it said, are not healthy ways to restore attraction; the useful reading of Perel is not to make a relationship dangerous but to stop erasing the other person’s separateness. The film shows jealousy working. It does not recommend it, and neither does this essay. And it matters who pays. The lie that turns Padma back towards her husband is told to her best friend, and the bill goes to Shonali.

The two friends quarrel, get high together and make up. The night ends in pieces. Hemant is hurt in a fall at the club. Shonali, back at the rooms, finds Padma and Debendu undressing each other: the half of the plan that was Padma’s to carry out has worked. And in the ambulance, Padma and Hemant find their way back to each other.

Shonali leaves Debendu in their room. She goes to the empty hall, where the music is still playing, and dances alone. After a while the hotel’s manager, David, joins her. The story stops there.

Ghosh wrote that the story starts off like a comedy and ends in a quiet tragedy, with the cruel irony of a cautionary tale, and the irony is precise. The woman who designed the weekend is the only one of the four it leaves outside. Her husband was seduced, as the plan intended. Her friend got her own husband back, which the plan never intended at all. The side door let everyone in except the person who had propped it open.

The dance deserves care, because it is easy to load it with more than it carries. The story stops on it, and so does this essay. What can be said is what the dance is not. It is not part of a plan. It is not addressed to a husband, performed for a friend or borrowed from a Korean drama. It is the first thing in the story that Shonali does for nobody, and for as long as the music lasts she is not trying to be wanted. A stranger joins her. The film does not offer him as an answer to her marriage, and neither does this essay. It may be the beginning of something, or of nothing. The dance, at least, is hers.

Shakun Batra’s story starts at the other end of a marriage. Varun and Sailee married after three months together. Five years later it is Sailee who files for divorce, and she names the reason: a marriage without sex. The judge will not waive the six months the law provides for, so two people who are finished with each other, or think they are, have to wait half a year for the court to agree.

What happens in those months is the story’s comedy and its point. Sailee goes back to their old flat for her things, and a fight over a painting they bought together ends in bed. So does the next fight, and the one after that, to the bewilderment of both their families. Both of them keep choosing it, quarrel after quarrel. A marriage in the middle of being dissolved is no more a standing yes than any other, and the story does not treat it as one. Ramnath caught the joke: the marriage is on the skids, and it has something to do with the difficulty of verbal communication, a problem that disappears when the two stop talking altogether.

Here the side door appears in its plainest form. The marriage Sailee left for want of sex is having more of it than it has had in a long time, and none of it is saying anything. Biswas wrote that intimacy becomes the one thing they still understand about each other. It is also the one thing that asks nothing of them in words. Desire had found a way back into the house that did not require either of them to speak.

Then, in their therapist’s room, the two of them come to see that sex has become the only way they still talk, and they begin to use the front door. They talk about his mother’s hold on their lives, which reached even into the flat he found for them, one floor above his parents’. They talk about how little each of them understood the other. Desai thought some of this writing overwritten, and a reader may agree. But the direction of the story is not in doubt. This is the one front door in the collection that opens all the way.

And what comes through it is a goodbye. Six months on, Sailee walks into the final hearing holding Varun’s hand, ready to part as friends. Tatsam Mukherjee, reviewing the film for The Wire, described the story as a couple grieving their relationship, and reaching a point of friendship after exorcising all the unpleasantness between them. The front door did not save the marriage. It let two people end it without lying about why.

This Library’s essay “Come Together and What a Long Relationship Actually Decides About Desire” argued that in a long relationship desire eventually has to be decided rather than felt, and that deciding is something two people do together or not at all. It also said the harder thing that a book about lasting connection is not built to say: that not every relationship ought to be repaired. Varun and Sailee are that sentence on screen. The quarrels in bed were desire felt. The conversation was the first thing the story shows them deciding together, and what they decided was to stop.

The wait has a source in law, and it is worth stating it as law rather than as a reading of the film. Under section 13B of India’s Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, a married couple may petition a district court together for divorce by mutual consent, on the grounds that they have lived separately for a year or more, have not been able to live together, and have agreed that the marriage should be dissolved. The court grants the decree on a second motion by both of them, made not earlier than six months after the petition was presented and not later than eighteen months after it.

In 2017, in Amardeep Singh v. Harveen Kaur, the Supreme Court held that the six months are directory rather than mandatory, so that a court may waive them where, among other conditions, the statutory periods of separation have already run, mediation has failed, the couple have genuinely settled their differences, including alimony and custody, and waiting would only prolong their agony. On 1 May 2023, in Shilpa Sailesh v. Varun Sreenivasan, a Constitution Bench of five judges held that the section places no fetters on the Supreme Court’s own power, under Article 142 of the Constitution, to grant a divorce by mutual consent without the wait, and that the Court may, with safeguards, dissolve a marriage that has irretrievably broken down. The same judgment explains what the wait is for: to give the couple time to introspect and to consider the decision to separate before the second motion.

This essay does not say which provision the film’s couple come under, applies no law to them, and gives no legal advice. What it can notice is an irony. The wait exists so that two people will think again. Varun and Sailee do think again, in no way a drafter could have pictured: first in bed, then in a therapist’s room. The law’s six months did what the law meant them to do. Its answer was still a divorce.

Read from Japan, the same wish meets a very different door. A couple in Japan who agree to divorce need no court at all: the Ministry of Justice’s guidance says a divorce by agreement may be notified at any time, at a municipal office, and the family courts offer mediation when a couple cannot agree or cannot talk. This is not a ranking. A wait can be an imposition on two people who have already decided, and it can be the only time they are ever given to decide properly. Batra’s story lets it be both.

Vishal Bhardwaj’s story goes back to Hyderabad in 1987, to a world that Ramnath described as full of people caught between social decorum and progressive values. Saira teaches Urdu literature at a conservative women’s college. She loves her husband, Badru, a homeopath, and when she longs for him, he answers with remedies. Desai put the marriage in a phrase: the sex is functional at best. What the story deals with, he wrote, is not sexlessness or a lack of intimacy but the inherently patriarchal nature of the act itself; the marriage is fine, and Saira bemoans the ignorance surrounding female desire.

She thinks the racy paperbacks of the day are crude, and she argues that Urdu can write desire better than they do. Challenged to prove it, she writes a story in a notebook in which an idealised Badru comes down from heaven to be her lover. Then the notebook goes missing. It resurfaces in print: a student’s parents, whose press is failing, publish it under a pen name, Raseeli Jaan, as Chulbuli Begum. Men across the city buy it, and it becomes a bestseller.

Saira panics and refuses to write any more. It is worth honouring the panic before going further. In 1987, for a woman in her position, the front door would not have been one sentence said to one man. It would have been her name on the cover of a bestselling erotic novel, in a college, in a city of readers. She has every reason to keep to the side door, and nothing in this essay asks her to leave it.

Bhardwaj has said where Saira came from. In an interview with the Press Trust of India, he described looking for a figure from the literary world and finding Anaïs Nin, who, short of money, was offered, as he put it, one dollar per page to write erotica; he modelled Saira on her. Nin wrote her erotica to order in the lean years of the early 1940s; a collection of it, Delta of Venus, appeared only after her death. Bhardwaj also offered, in the same interview, what might be the story’s theory of itself: “If you bring poetry in lust, it becomes love, that’s what poetry does.”

It is a generous sentence, and it is the film’s own account of the side door: desire goes out in words and comes home changed into something a marriage can hold. Whether it has to change in order to come home is a question this essay will come back to.

When Saira finally goes to tell Badru, she finds that he has been reading the book all along, and learning from it, and that he hopes its author will write another.

Published accounts of the last scene disagree about one thing, and it is not a small one. In one, Saira tells him that she wrote it, and he finds the book educational rather than vulgar. In another, he never realises, to the very end, that his wife is Raseeli Jaan. This essay does not choose between them. It notices that the story works either way, and that the two ways make two different stories.

If he knows, a husband has met his wife as an author, a person with an imagination he had never been shown, and has wanted her more for it. That is the reopened file in its happiest form: the discovery that the person beside you lives in rooms you have never entered. If he does not know, the story is funnier and sadder at once. He is learning his wife’s desire from a stranger, hoping for more of the stranger’s work, and never guessing whose it is. Her want has reached him. She has not.

Either way, the desire came home by the side door, through a notebook that went missing, a failing press and a city full of strangers, and arrived in the right bed. And either way, the book reached the city under a name that was not hers. Whether her own name ever follows it into her own house is exactly where the two accounts part. This Library’s essay “Valeria, and Writing Under Her Own Name” followed a novelist who was talked out of signing her book away under a man’s name, and argued that beneath its love triangle the series is about a woman learning to put her own name on her book, her wanting and her leaving. It also saw the cost: a novel can be the first place a woman says a true sentence in her own name, and the least kind place to say it. Saira’s story is the case in which the want arrives before the name.

The side door is old. The Kagerō Diary, usually said to have opened the way for the diaries women wrote at the Heian court, records its writer’s marriage to the courtier Fujiwara no Kaneie, from their wedding in 954 until his visits stopped in 974, and the rival wives and mistresses the marriage kept acquiring. It has come down to us under no name of its writer’s own. Her real name is not known; a standard Japanese encyclopaedia notes that she is called by her father’s name or by her son’s, the mother of Michitsuna. What she wanted has been read for a thousand years. Her name never came in by the front.

Kiran Rao’s story is the one that does not fit, and it belongs here for that reason. Lisa is a nail artist from Kerala, working in Mumbai, and she falls for Karan, who delivers pizzas, at first sight. He is using her. He and his identical twin, Arjun, sell drugs with the pizza run as cover, and Lisa’s flat becomes his hiding place, first for the drugs and then for the takings. Ramnath wrote that Karan needs the sleepy-voiced Lisa as a cover for his side hustle.

Both brothers assume she will never notice. She notices everything. She finds the stash in her bathroom, works out that there are two of them, and says nothing. When Arjun turns up passing himself off as Karan, she sleeps with him knowing exactly who he is.

That scene needs one careful sentence, because the twist rests on a deception that, had it worked, would have been a wrong done to her: a yes given to Karan would not have been a yes to Arjun. The film spares Lisa that wrong by letting her know, and then hands her the advantage the men believed was theirs. She is the only person in the room who knows who is in it.

When she overhears that the handover of the money has been put off by a week, she swaps the cash for fake notes, quits her job at the nail studio and disappears from Mumbai. The last time she is seen, she is relaxing in a hotel far from the city, and the money is meant for a salon of her own. Desai called the story a nifty depiction of how lust becomes an instrument of ambition. It is a caper, and it knows it. The film does not scold Lisa, and neither does this essay; it reads her as the film does, as the one who wins.

She belongs in an essay about side doors because the men used her flat as theirs, a way into the city’s business that nobody would think to watch. She watched. And her own want never went underground. She wanted Karan the moment she saw him; she wanted a salon of her own, and when the shortest road to it opened, she took it. What Lisa kept hidden was not her desire but her knowledge, and she hid it on purpose, because silence was worth money. The married women in this film keep their wants quiet because saying them could cost too much. Lisa keeps what she knows quiet because saying it would cost her the salon. It is the same silence turned the other way round, and the film gives its most carefree ending to the one woman who owed nobody an explanation.

In Japan the series carries a gentler title than the English one, a word for longing and affection rather than lust. Bhardwaj’s remark about poetry suggests that the third film, in its last story at least, is trying to earn it: to take the lust of the English title and bring it home as longing.

Two details may land differently for a reader in Japan. The first is where Shonali’s idea comes from: a Korean drama, watched at home, that becomes the plan for a weekend in Khandala. Imaginations of desire travel this way now, between countries that do not share a language, and a plan borrowed from someone else’s drama arrives without the lives it was written for.

The second is Saira’s insistence on Urdu. She does not set out to prove that desire can be written; the paperbacks already do that. She sets out to prove that it can be written well in her own language, with its own music. A reader who lives in Japan in a language she learned as an adult may feel this more than anything else in the film. For her, the front door may have to be crossed in that second language, and a want may first be drafted, privately, in the language of childhood, in a notebook nobody else reads. That draft is not the front door. It may be the first step towards knowing what she would say there.

None of this makes Lust Stories 3 a film about Japan, and nothing in it is a portrait of Indian marriages or of Indian women, any more than a Japanese drama is a portrait of Japanese ones. Four directors made four stories about particular people. What travels is the mechanism: a want that cannot be said, looking for another way in.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong.

First, it may be arranging four films that were never arranged. An anthology is four directors with four temperaments, and the side door is this essay’s pattern, not theirs. Ghosh wrote that the series keeps giving us filmmakers worth watching, but not always films worth remembering, and that its ideas are more interesting than their execution; an essay that finds one argument running through four uneven shorts may be doing some of the films’ work for them. That is fair. The claim here is about what the stories show when they are set side by side, not about what anyone planned.

Second, the essay may be kinder to the side door than it deserves. Padma gets her husband back by lying to her friend, and by an accident. A film that plays that as a happy ending, and an essay that calls the reunion real, may be teaching exactly what this essay said it would not teach: that jealousy works. Desai found the resolution gimmicky, and added that sometimes rekindling the fire demands a burn wound or two. The narrow answer is that the essay calls the lie manipulation, sends the bill where it belongs and recommends nothing. But a reader who finds the reunion unearned is not wrong.

Third, the film’s own theory may be the thing to distrust. Bring poetry to lust and it becomes love: Bhardwaj’s sentence is generous, and it may also be the series making itself respectable. In the same interview he said that moral obligations and pressures often lead people to call lust love when it is lust, and that is the risk exactly. Mukherjee described a series carrying the responsibility to make India less coy about sex, and hoped that (especially male) viewers would act with a little more tenderness in the bedroom. A film with a responsibility is always at risk of becoming a lesson, and a lesson needs its lust converted into something improving: love, a wiser husband, a marriage saved. By following desire home, this essay has leaned on the same conversion. A want does not have to come home, or turn into love, to be legitimate. Lisa’s story, the least poetic of the four and the one that gives its woman most of what she wanted, is the reminder.

Fourth, the praise of the front door may be a privilege talking. To say what you want, in your own name, to the person it concerns, assumes that saying it is safe: that it will not cost you your home, your livelihood, your standing or your children. For Saira in 1987, the front door was a name on a cover in a conservative city. For some women the side door is not an evasion but the only door that does not open onto harm. This essay concedes that without reservation. It claims only that the side door has a price, not that everyone can afford the other one.

Fifth, the ending this essay reads most warmly may simply be the saddest. Shonali’s dance can be read as a pleasure of her own, but Ghosh calls the whole story a quiet tragedy. She was lied to by her closest friend, found her husband with that friend, and ends a birthday weekend in an empty hall with a stranger. The film stops before any reading can be settled, and a reader who sees only loss in that hall is seeing something that is there.

Three things, none of them a rule.

A want that has gone quiet in a long marriage may not have gone at all. In this film it never has. Padma still knew her husband’s every taste. Varun and Sailee still wanted each other enough to end each quarrel in bed. Saira wrote a book. What had gone missing was not the desire but the road to the person it concerned.

The side door is not a disgrace, and it is not free. Desire will use whatever way in it can find, and some of what comes in by it is tender. But in these stories somebody usually pays: a friend lied to, a woman left in an empty hall, a writer whose want went out into the city under a name that was not hers. Knowing which door you are using, and who is standing at the other one, is not a moral exercise. It is knowing what you are paying.

And the front door promises no rescue. The one couple in the film who walk through it together are walking into a courtroom to end their marriage, as friends. That is not the front door failing. It is what honesty sometimes buys: not the marriage, but the truth about it, and a way out that nobody has to lie about.

So, once, to you, if your want has been coming home by the side door: as irritation, or jealousy, or a quarrel that ends somewhere neither of you meant, or a story you write and show no one. It has not died, and it is still yours. Nobody is owed your front door, and there may be good reasons it has stayed shut. But it is worth knowing which door you have been using, what it has been costing, and who has been paying. If you ever decide to try the other one, that decision, at least, will be made in your own name.

This is a reading of a film. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and says nothing about the lives of the people who made it or act in it. It applies no law to fictional people and is not legal advice; where it describes the law of two countries, it does so to show how each meets the same wish, not to rank them. It cites no statistic.

When your want cannot come in by the front, what does it use: irritation, jealousy, a quarrel, a fantasy, a story?

Who has been paying for that door: you, the person you want, or somebody standing outside it?

Is there something you know about the person beside you, a taste, a dislike, a way in, that you have not used for a long time? What would it be like to use it for them, rather than against someone?

If you wrote down what you want in a notebook nobody would read, in which language would you write it?

And if you did walk through the front door, where do you think it would lead, back into the marriage or out of it as a friend, and which of the two has been keeping it shut?