‘What the fuck! This is scary. Are all our lives in danger?’ Zinnia asked.
‘No. Only mine.’ Prisha said.
There was a momentary silence.
‘I’m a little scared. Can I stay with you guys tonight?’ Zinnia asked.
‘Of course,’ Prisha said. ‘But I wanted to ask you something, Zin.’
‘What is it?’
‘If it was really Saveer, would you have told me or continued fucking him behind my back?’
Zinnia was quiet.
‘Please be honest even if it’s brutal,’ Prisha added.
‘I don’t think I would have told you,’ Zinnia answered softly. Few seconds later, she added, ‘It’s just that Saveer is . . .’
‘One helluva guy,’ Prisha completed the sentence for her.
Zinnia nodded in agreement.
‘And such guys always have multiple women trying to mark them their own. Just like helluva women have multiple suitors,’ Gauri joined in, making the conversation further awkward.
‘I’ll freshen up now,’ Prisha said, getting up.
Next day in college, Karthik approached Gauri while the latter was sipping tea with Prisha at Nandini’s. He asked Gauri out for a movie over the weekend. She skilfully shifted the plan over to the next weekend. He agreed. He asked for her number. It seemed to Prisha that he had asked for it earlier as well. But Gauri told him she would give it to him if she enjoyed the movie. He flashed a smile and went away.
‘You guys haven’t exchanged numbers yet?’ Prisha asked.
‘Nope. But we will,’ Gauri said matter-of-factly.
‘Tell me one thing honestly: are you interested?’
‘How many times do I need to tell you?’ Gauri sounded irritated.
‘As many times as I feel you are toying with him.’
‘Well, I’m not. I have a grudge against the concept of love, thanks to Sanjeev. And I shall take it out on Karthik because he approached me. We all carry either the unfulfilled desires or the bottled-up grudges of our last relationships and unload them on the current ones. And many of us term this emotional relay race love. Who knows? Maybe Saveer too is living the unfulfilled desires of his last incomplete relationship and calling it love.’
‘Please talk for yourself,’ Prisha said, sounding hurt.
‘All right, I will destroy Karthik and shall be happy if he calls it love. That’s the moral he will associate with love when he gets into another relationship. Call me a bitch but that’s me.’
‘I know you are not. So don’t pretend like one.’
‘Whatever! And I’m sorry for mentioning Saveer. I’m off to the lecture.’
Prisha knew that Gauri wasn’t mean. Few things provoked her into being rude although she never meant it. And the topic of love was certainly one of them. Though Prisha too attended the lecture, she couldn’t get Gauri’s words out of her mind. During her next break, she looked for Karthik and found him in the library. She excused herself and asked him if he could talk to her for a few minutes. Karthik recognized Prisha but he didn’t know her name.
‘You are Gauri’s friend, right?’ he said.
‘Prisha.’ She shook hands with him.
‘Karthik.’
‘I know. I just wanted to tell you something.’
‘Sure.’
‘In fact, I want to ask you something first.’
Karthik asked her to go on.
‘Do you love Gauri or is it just casual dating that you are looking for?’
‘If it was casual then I wouldn’t have approached her so many times. I don’t know about love but I want to know her.’
‘That’ll do. So, what I wanted to tell you is that she is an amazing girl but a difficult one as well. Just hang on in there. Okay?’
‘Yeah, okay. I’m ready to hang on.’
‘Cool. Take care.’ Prisha felt better after meeting Karthik. She knew Gauri needed someone who genuinely cared for in her life even though she wasn’t really in mood for that person.
Prisha called Saveer right after college. He was at home. They decided to meet there. Prisha went straight to his place and found him immersed in deep thought, holding a piece of paper as he opened the door for her.
‘What happened?’
‘The medical reports are in. There are heavy traces of a sleep-inducing drug in my urine sample,’ he said, closing the door behind her.
‘Oh! You were right. You were drugged!’
‘We were drugged the other night when we camped by the backwater. And every other night when I felt too sleepy.’
‘And the night when I couldn’t remember being dropped off to my place,’ Prisha said.
‘Right. Which means . . .’
‘He has access to this place?’ Prisha read Saveer’s mind.
‘Yes. He has been living with me without my knowing it.’
Prisha had goosebumps. ‘Why do I have a bad feeling about this?’
‘Don’t worry. I’ve already taken care of it. He won’t be able to come inside any more. Not without being seen.’
Prisha frowned. Saveer held her hand.
‘Come with me.’
He took her to the small room attached to his bedroom, which he had been using as a store room so far. A computer console was set up with a screen. Saveer picked a remote next to the monitor and pressed a button on it. The room lit up and the computer screen came alive. The screen was divided into sections, showing different parts of the house. Prisha sat in front of the screen and saw the bedroom, the washroom, the main gate, the main entrance, the hall room, the kitchen, and even the store room itself.
‘This is awesome,’ she said with a mischievous smile as she focused on the washroom.
‘What?’ Saveer shrugged.
‘I can be here when you take a bath,’ she said, blushing.
‘Ahan! But why would you when we could be doing it together?’ He came close to her and rubbed his face on her ears and sucked on her earlobes for a while.
‘You know, I had come across a term on Google while I was researching on how to give the perfect blowjob,’ Prisha whispered. Saveer smiled and whispered back, ‘And what is it?’
‘DIY porn. Do-it-yourself porn. Lovers record their lovemaking for later viewing,’ Prisha said. There was a naughty smile on her face.
‘The last time I met someone she was supposed to be only twenty.’
‘But with the skillset of an adult,’ she winked and stood up. She pushed Saveer on to a chair and knelt down on the floor, parting his legs a little while looking at him. He knew what was going to happen next. And it aroused him more. By the time, Prisha tugged down his pants, he had a full-blown erection. She rubbed his penis while he pressed some buttons on the remote. She turned to look at the screen. Now she could see only the two of them as captured by the CCTV in the room. She knew it was getting recorded in some master hard disk. As she looked up, the camera angle made her feel as if someone was watching them getting intimate.
‘You know I had this secret fantasy of wanting to be watched while having sex,’ she said.
‘Really?’
Prisha nodded, ‘You think he would be watching us now? Hearing us now?’
Saveer shrugged, closing his eyes as he felt her thumb on the tip of his penis.
‘If he is watching or listening, then do you know what I want to tell him?’ Prisha asked.
Saveer nodded, eyes still closed, enjoying the way his balls were being softly squeezed.
‘Tell me,’ he managed to mumble.
‘I’ll tell him to feel this fire which we can feel and dare him to extinguish it if he can,’ Prisha said and stood up, tugging down her denim shorts and her panty. She straddled Saveer and started kissing him passionately. While Saveer kissed her back and held her butt, she started riding him. He wasn’t surprised at how wet she was. Their need was so urgent and strong that they both had absolutely nothing else on their minds.
As Prisha kept riding Saveer, approaching the zenith of lu
st, passion, and love, a woman standing under a fused lamp post right outside Saveer’s bungalow removed her earphones. She wasn’t interested in the sound of their fornication. As she walked towards her apartment, she thought: finally, after twenty-five years, you have scored with those CCTVs. They may keep me out of your house but not out of your life. Now wait till I score back. And big.
14
They were still in the store room. A little sweaty and cuddling together. They were done with the chair. Saveer had brought the furry mat from the living room and was sitting on it, his back against the wall with Prisha in his arms; naked. They were watching their lovemaking footage on the monitor. After it got over, Prisha turned and gave Saveer a prolonged kiss. ‘I had never imagined myself in that act,’ she finally said.
‘Nor had I.’ Saveer moved the strand of hair falling on her face.
‘It’s weird to see your naked self doing these things, no?’
‘Why weird? I enjoyed it. In fact, I too had this on my mind for a long time but it was never possible with Ishanvi,’ he said.
Prisha’s body stiffened a bit with the mention of Ishanvi. She looked ahead of her and asked, ‘Did you ever ask her for it?’
‘No. But you know a person when you stay with him or her. She was more into subtlety.’
So, you are fulfilling desires which you had before but couldn’t experience with your ex, Prisha thought. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘When someone as close as you says can-I-ask-you-something, it’s obvious that that something will be serious,’ Saveer said jocularly.
Prisha didn’t smile.
‘What do you think about unfulfilled desires from a past relationship? Where do they go when the relationship ends for whatsoever reason? Or do they go away at all?’
Saveer rested his head against the wall, lost in thoughts. Suddenly, his memories of Ishanvi came gushing back. Before those clouds of memories could hit his emotional mountain, he chose to divert them by saying, ‘They haunt you till you come to terms with the impossibility of those desires.’
‘And how does one come to terms with something like that?’
‘When new desires take over. With the arrival of a new person. A summer, a winter or a spring can never transpire the same desire as the other can in you.’
‘But what if both were summers? Or winters? Or springs?’
‘Are you trying to squeeze out an answer from me which is already in your head?’ Saveer kind of caught her.
Prisha turned and looked into Saveer’s eyes. ‘I will ask you two more questions. Is what you feel with me as strong as what you felt with Ishanvi?’
‘You have both given me a reason to live.’
‘Isn’t there anything that I alone make you feel? Which no one else ever did?
Saveer stared at her for some time. He was about to touch her face when Prisha stopped him.
‘Just answer me,’ she said.
‘You made me feel that a beginning is always possible. After Ishanvi’s death, I had resigned from life. And I was happy not living it because I blamed myself for whatever had happened in my life, believing that I probably deserved it all. That’s till you happened to me. Hope had become a corpse till you breathed fresh air into it by your presence.’
Prisha kissed his cheeks and hugged him. The slight shudder of her body told him that she was crying.
‘I don’t know what it is. Every moment, I feel like life will snatch you away from me and at the same time, I feel like nothing can come between us. The simultaneous surety and insecurity creates a contradiction in me which I don’t know how to negate.’
‘Whoever said loving someone was easy,’ Saveer whispered in her ears.
‘You must be thinking I’m jealous of Ishanvi, right?’
‘I never thought of it that way.’
‘Then you must. I’m jealous of her because she was the first one to get what is mine.
Saveer began to laugh but Prisha clamped his mouth shut with her hand.
‘Don’t you dare laugh. I’m dead serious.’
He removed her hand and said, ‘All right, I won’t laugh but allow me to take this jealous girl to the shower. We are sweating like pigs.’
‘For that you don’t need my permission,’ she said and clung to him. He stood up, stark naked, holding Prisha and headed for the shower.
The next day in college, Prisha sat copying some notes of the previous semester from Gauri’s notebooks. She had to sit for both the semester exams together and she knew it would be nothing short of a daunting task.
‘Hey!’ someone said. Prisha looked up to find Karthik.
‘Hey!’ she said.
‘I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you.’
‘It’s okay. What’s up?’ Prisha said. There was a certain innocence about him that she found comforting.
‘I wanted some notes. Do you think asking Gauri would be the right thing to do?’
Prisha could have laughed her heart out. Notes were an obvious excuse to approach Gauri. And the way he said it, showed how scared he was of her. But Prisha didn’t laugh. Instead she pretended to think hard about it and then said, ‘I think you should. Just don’t be this obvious that you don’t give a fuck about the notes else she would get your ass.’
Karthik smiled at her nervously. At that moment, Prisha got a call from Gauri. She picked it up.
‘Where are you? My lecture is over,’ Gauri said.
‘I can see you. Just turn around,’ Prisha said and waved at Gauri.
‘All right, I’ll do the needful,’ he said and scampered off in another direction.
Gauri sat down beside Prisha and asked, ‘What was he doing with you?’
‘He was asking for some first semester notes. Told him I’ll give him,’ Prisha added the last part deliberately.
‘Hmm. So, what’s the plan? I don’t feel like attending any more lectures. Are you done with your notes?’
‘Almost. I’ll do the rest at home.’
‘Then let’s go and do some bowling, bro. Been long. This stupid Diggy has also gone mad these days.’
‘Did he tell you anything else about that woman?’ Prisha said, arranging her stuff and standing up.
‘Nothing. Don’t know what spell the woman has cast on him!’
‘Happens.’
As the two girls were about to catch an autorickshaw outside college, Gauri turned to Prisha and said, ‘I’ll give the notes to Karthik. You are anyway busy with so much work.’
Before she could say anything, Gauri hailed an autorickshaw. Prisha stood there for a few seconds with a smile on her face. She now knew that the toughness that Gauri had been projecting was only a façade. Karthik had already reached the soft spot within her.
* * *
Diggy was at home. He had told Gauri that he wasn’t feeling well. But the real reason was that the woman, who had taken his senses by storm in just a couple of meetings, had asked him for a video call. In the evening, he sat down on his bed and logged into Skype. Seconds later, his newfound ladylove called him. Diggy had never found anyone as magnetic as her to date. And the cryptic manner in which she talked would keep him on his toes all the time. Never before had anyone occupied his mind so much.
‘Nice to see you, Diggy,’ she said. She always talked in a low voice as if she was afraid of someone hearing her.
‘Nice to see you too, ma’am,’ Diggy said. His excitement was evident. She had told him not to address her as ma’am. But Diggy couldn’t help it. It came out involuntarily every time he saw her.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am. I think I’ll need some more time to not say it.’
The woman laughed gently.
‘You know why I like you, Diggy?’
Diggy shook his head.
‘Because you are abnormal.’
Diggy didn’t know how to react. It had been some time since someone had made him aware of his alopecia.
‘Tell me, do you think you are abnormal?’ the woman asked.
Diggy nodded.
‘Why?’
‘Because . . .’ Diggy was trying to frame his answer, ‘because it’s not normal to not have eyebrows, hair . . .’
‘That’s because the majority have it. And you don’t. That’s how we decide what’s normal and what’s abnormal. But have you ever thought about the things people do behind closed doors? What about those closeted stuff? You will be amazed. When you take those things into account, there won’t be any normal-abnormal business because when stripped down to our basic instincts, we are all the same. We are all predatory. Be it emotionally or sexually. An adult feeling sexually aroused by a four-year-old kid. How do you define that? Is that normal? And what about its implication? Are you getting what I’m trying to say?’
Diggy answered after a few seconds, ‘Yeah, of course, yeah.’
The woman laughed again, this time a little harder.
‘I know you didn’t get anything. But do you want to?’
‘I sure do. It will be great to gain more knowledge,’ Diggy said, although he had no idea what he meant by that.
‘Come to my place around 8 p.m. today and bring your laptop with you.’
‘Sure.’ Before Diggy could say anything else, the woman disconnected the call. He sighed deeply.
He wanted to look his best. And he did. It was when he was trying to look for a perfume inside Gauri’s wardrobe that the girls arrived.
‘What are you doing?’ Gauri asked. Prisha was in the living room, on a call with Saveer.
Diggy gave her a caught-red-handed look.
‘I’m looking for a perfume.’
‘I don’t have men’s perfume. Don’t you know you shouldn’t touch a girl or open her wardrobe without her permission? Did you go to the market?’ she said, pushing him away from the wardrobe.
‘I know, but I just need something to smell good as I don’t have anything,’ Diggy said. He ignored Gauri’s question.
‘Why? Don’t tell me you are going out on a date with that elderly woman?’ Gauri sounded sardonic.
‘Don’t you talk to me that way!’ Diggy had had enough of Gauri’s mood swings. If an older woman could talk to him properly, so could she.
‘Don’t you touch my stuff then without my permission,’ Gauri shot back.
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