by Neil D'Silva
There were no words spoken, only he moaned gently as he saw more and more of her. And, she sighed gently as she bore the pain she could not mention. When all of the ornaments were removed, he stood back a moment to scrutinize her, and then lunged forward like an animal to reach the hook of her blouse at the back. His chest smothered her, but he let go only when he had exposed her smooth back, and then he realized her saree was pinned to the blouse, and almost tore it off.
Maya sat there with her breasts exposed, scarred and scared; but, she was also fascinated by this man who was about to ravage her. He bent down to remove her saree, and then untied the knot of her petticoat. She had never felt as vulnerable as she did now, and that was because no one had looked at every inch of her body as impiously as he did. His gaze itself was orgasmic; wherever it fell, she felt a tingling sensation that made her hair stand on end.
She sat now, with not a thread to cover her skin, on her small, rose-petal adorned marital bed. He stepped back, admiring her body, sighing like the bellows the blacksmiths use to fuel their forges. Then, he began to remove his own clothing, perhaps hoping that she would admire his body just as he did hers.
The kurta came off first and then the vest inside. Maya followed his every action, and when the chest was exposed, let out a gasp. It wasn’t a gasp of disgust; rather, it was a gasp of awe. For the first time, she saw the redness of his chest in its full glory—the fabled blemish that everyone spoke about in hushed whispers. It was like a rash, but not as prominent, and it extended from his neck to his abdomen, and disappeared somewhere into his navel. She stood up and went up to him, touching that redness.
“Do not be afraid of this,” he said. “It is an allergic skin condition. It is not contagious.”
“What is the allergy to?”
“I don’t know.”
She ran her fingers over his chest, and found that it wasn’t raised over the skin; rather, it was a coloration on the skin itself. He seemed worried about his strange physical condition, but she did not want fear to wedge in between them on their first night. She put her arms around him and he, in turn, squeezed her to his chest with his sheer brute strength.
He then made her sit on the bed again and she obediently followed. He moved back again and loosened the knot that held his pants. Keeping his eyes focused on her every expression, he lowered his trousers and then his briefs and stood stark naked in front of her, looking for appreciation much like a student who has submitted an essay to a teacher he has a crush on.
Maya’s heart was now beating with increasing rapidity. Like any woman, she first saw his groin. Her face did not have any expression though—neither appreciation nor disappointment—she just looked. After lingering there awhile, her attention went to his legs, and that is what truly horrified her.
His legs, long and gangling, were marked all along their surface with scars of various sizes. He looked like he had been in a torture cell where he had been brutalized sans mercy. She knelt down and felt those scars.
“These scars?” she asked.
But, did not bother to explain. He held her and, making her stand, pinned her arms to her back. Then he propped her against a wall, her hands still fettered in his, and began feeling parts of her with his mouth and hands and legs and whatever else he had.
The animal passion within him was at its prominence now. There wasn’t a shred of docility left as he unleashed his bodily desires. He pinched her skin and bit her and forced her legs apart with his own legs. He slapped her everywhere, even where it hurt the most, and then lifted her by her legs and, holding her against the wall with the dog’s picture on it, thrust his organ into her with the force of a bull.
Maya let out a shriek at the impact, at the sudden presence of the flesh inside her, and clawed into his arched back for support. She didn’t want to open her eyes, but when she did, she saw his back in a dirty cracked mirror on the opposite wall, and her legs humiliatingly jutting out from both sides of his lithe back. She saw his buttocks thrusting in embarrassing rhythm, and she saw they bore the same scars as his legs. She had never seen herself in such a shameful position before—being ripped apart like a sex doll by a starved maniac—and she tried to avert her gaze from her own reflection in the mirror.
He came in a flood inside her, and she felt every bit of the warm fluid filling into her body, and she shuddered and held on tightly to him. It was like an earthquake exploding within her and she whispered to him in his ear, “Don’t let go… not yet.”
Minutes later, they lay naked on the bed, fondling each other wherever they could reach. They didn’t speak a word, though his firm hand on her soft skin made all the necessary communication.
Even when he passed out in sleep, she remained awake. She could not get the whole thing out of her head. She looked at his sleeping form, at his face. There was an undeniable animal-like quality in it. But, wasn’t that what had attracted her to him in the first place? She had expected just this, and her rewards had been reaped. At the same time, as he established his stamp of manhood all over her, there was an increasing sense of awe. The fear rose somewhere in the chest and stayed there, without finding an outlet.
Debating thus with mixed feelings of fascination and fear, she drifted off to sleep.
~ 7 ~
Aroma of Eggs
In the distance, she heard a dog. The dog was giving out a long, loud howl that pierced through the sky. She was on the street—a street she had never been on before—and she was walking on it in quest of some unknown destination. She saw a light shining in the distance. Her instinct told her she had to reach there, but her tired legs began to fail her and thick beads of perspiration arose from her forehead, clouding her vision.
And then the dog howled again, this time closer.
But, there was something different about the howling of this dog. It was unlike any other howl she had heard before. It was not entirely vulpine; there was a weird human quality to it. As it grew louder and closer, she cocked her ears to discern where it came from. Then, she realized—the source of the howling was right behind her.
With a terrified face, she turned to look.
The creature stood there.
It had stopped howling now; the howling had been just a ploy to grab her attention. Now, instead, it was grinning. It was an almost human grin, a malevolent grin designed to tear people to shreds. With those piercing red eyes, the animal looked at her with its muzzle pointed to the ground. Something told her to run, but there was no escape route left open to her. Just then, the creature opened its mouth, and she saw those fangs.
In a trice she knew—this animal was not a dog. It was a wolf.
A hungry, vicious wolf.
She didn’t waste another moment and started running. The creature stayed put though, and gloated at the clumsy attempt to escape. Scared to bits, she ran in an attempt to put as many strides between the creature and her.
The creature started running too, and in just a few quick strides it was almost upon her.
She tripped and fell, and the creature was on top of her, its lithe well-built body pressing against her soft flesh.
She saw those fangs. She felt those claws.
The claws pierced into her flesh, ripping away chunks of it, and she could do nothing but cry out in horror as she saw her flesh falling away to the ground.
The nightmare made Maya open her eyes. She found herself gasping, her throat parched and hurting.
It was still dark outside and her husband’s naked form was sprawled all over her. His leg was stretched over her slender stomach and his hand squeezed her breast. She could feel his manhood, still hard, pressing against her buttock. But he was in deep sleep, his mouth partly open, drooling over her shoulder.
She tried to move to a more comfortable position but could not. Her arms were pinned against her sides. Not blessed with a great deal of strength, her squirming wasn’t much fruitful. And when she did manage a little movement, it did not help much. He moved in his sleep too, and
held her tighter than before.
Realizing the helplessness of the situation, a small tear flowed out of her eye and, with her eyes thus moistened, she again drifted away to sleep.
***
When she woke, the sun was already up and he was fully clothed.
“Morning,” said Bhaskar.
“Are you going somewhere?” Maya sat up suddenly, as the thought of being left alone in this strange house hit her.
“Do not worry,” he assured her. “I’ll be back soon. We need some supplies for the day, don’t we?”
She gave him a slight nod.
“Now that’s a good girl,” he said. “You will be fine here; just don’t try to go out of the house. The men outside are not decent. I will be back in a blink.”
She saw him going out of the house, and promptly latched the door from inside. The door was a light one, made of wood that was already rotting. The latch had rusted in part. Hesitant to touch the latch with her fingers, she used a handkerchief to fasten it.
Now alone in the house, Maya gave it one good look. This is where she had decided to spend her future. It was necessary she got acquainted with each nook and cranny of it. Like any domestic woman in new surroundings, she decided to give the whole place a once-over, and the best way to do that would be to clean it up, making it more habitable in the process.
However, she first needed to attend the call of nature. Which meant, she had to enter into the bathroom—something that she had been avoiding until this instant.
With great trepidation, she stepped into the bathroom. She expected it to be a dirty mess as the rest of the house, and she braced herself to see the worst of filth inside. She stepped inside, her nose wrinkled and her eyes open only a slit, but she found it wasn’t as bad as she had imagined it to be. There were tiles on the floor, the bathroom mirror wasn’t broken, the bulb gave off enough light and there were no stains on the commode. She quickly did her business inside and came out, glad that at least the bathroom hadn’t molested her dignity.
Next, she opened her suitcase. There wasn’t much inside to choose from, for she had not packed all her clothes. She selected the first gown she found inside and threw it upon herself.
Then she took the ornaments she had been wearing. Most of them were now kept on the side of the bed where they had been discarded the previous night. She took a large handkerchief and made a neat bundle of those; and put them in a small recess she found in a loft above the kitchen area.
The next thing she had to do was to take care of her growing hunger pangs. In her mother’s house, a breakfast of poha or upma might have been prepared by now. But, this was her house now. She had to ensure that routine was maintained here as well.
When she entered the kitchen, she found that Bhaskar had already prepared something.
There was a covered vessel on the counter. She went up to it and opened the lid, and regretted it immediately. An aroma of eggs assailed her nostrils, prompting her to noisily shut the lid. Maya realized that she hadn’t had much talk with Bhaskar about her vegetarianism, which excluded even eggs, but this blatant assertion unsettled her. Was this his method of telling her that he expected her to eat what he ate? She told herself she couldn’t subscribe to that. She was vegetarian by choice, and she wasn’t going to change that for anything. She kept the vessel aside, and found a few slices of bread in the worn-out refrigerator. She buttered them, prepared some tea in a vessel she washed herself, and that was her breakfast.
Then she went and sat by the window, telling herself she should start cleaning the house. But her mind was arrested by the chaos that prevailed everywhere on the street outside. In the daytime, the street looked almost normal, but it also exposed the grimness of routine living. The sleeping men were all up now, and they had gathered near a single municipal tap near one of the shops. She watched them in amazement as they showered under that one tap with almost nothing on their dark starving bodies. The water of their shower, carrying soap suds and the grime from their bodies, flowed out into the street through a small channel right under the garbage bin and formed an unhygienic puddle there.
As she watched the journey of the water, her attention was caught by a person walking on the street. This was a most remarkable man, and Maya just couldn’t take her eyes off him. She instantly identified him to be a sadhu of some sort, mostly because of the garb he wore. But such sadhus are usually in search of alms—what would he get here in a place where people didn’t even have proper shirts on their backs, she wondered.
The man was dressed in a black robe and a red dhoti and he wore a long and heavy chain of rudraksha beads around his neck. As he came closer, she managed to see him more clearly. The face, wizened with age, was almost unrecognizable under the several layers of grey ash smeared on his forehead and cheeks. His hair was bizarre too; perhaps it had been years since he had paid any attention to them. The hair, grown in large unkempt curls, came up to his shoulders. Their tight curls made them jut out at various angles. He wore wooden slippers, and their sound now became audible as he moved closer to her part of the street.
Maya was still looking at him with avid interest, when he suddenly looked up at her. She saw those eyes looking right back at her—huge orbs with black irises surrounded by white pupils—and let out a gasp. Seeing her, he raised the stick that was in his right hand, and it was then she understood—this was not a stick, it was a human bone.
Staring right at her without batting his eyelids, he let out what seemed to be a war cry.
“Bam Bholenath!”
Frightened out of her wits, Maya pulled the window tightly shut and sat on the bed, breathing profusely.
Maya almost jumped when she heard the tapping on the door. It was a loud tapping, almost furious, which made the saliva dry out of her mouth in profuse fear.
“Open the door. It’s me.” It was Bhaskar’s voice.
She used the handkerchief again and unfastened the latch. Bhaskar entered in a hurry and noticed the shut window. Mumbling something under his breath, he walked up to the window, unlatched it, and threw it open. “If you close this one window also,” he said, “we will suffocate in here.”
Nervously, Maya looked down on the street. However, apart from the near-naked bathers, there was no one on the street below. The hermit was gone.
***
“You don’t need to ever bother about my food,” Bhaskar told Maya at lunchtime. “Do not interfere with my meat-eating and I will not interfere with your vegetarianism. Don’t look into my plate if you cannot; I’ll never force you. Is that a deal?”
Maya remembered that her mother had warned her against this. That was one of the primary oppositions the old lady had harbored against their marriage.
So during lunch, Maya sat at the one table they had, and ate the vegetables she had cooked herself, while he sat down on the floor, gorging on some mutton he had bought from some local restaurant. They didn’t talk, but she did spend a lot of time looking at her husband eating out of the plate kept on the floor in front of him. She didn’t quite understand the food, but she could make out the bones. She watched him as he took the bones and bit the flesh off them, and she was reminded of a program on carnivores she had once watched on Animal Planet. She had not seen many people eating meat before, but the way this man ate it—holding bones in both hands and tearing the flesh off them—was certainly not a human way to eat. That much she could easily surmise.
After finishing dinner, Bhaskar picked the food he had spilled on the floor, put it in his plate and then took the plate into the kitchen. He dumped the bones into a garbage bag and placed it below the sink, out of sight. Maya was secretly thankful he did this chore himself. She would have almost puked if she had to carry the bones into the kitchen and dump them.
~ 8 ~
Placed Like a Pastry
A week had passed for Maya’s new life with her new husband, but it seemed to her like an age had gone by. She hadn’t begun going back to school yet, for she had been able
to bundle her large number of uncashed casual leaves into a longer post-marital break. Being at home facilitated her to get acquainted with her new life and, piecemeal, through her home-cleaning endeavors, she started getting used to the place.
Bhaskar spent a lot of time outside the house. She wondered where he went. She knew he hadn’t resumed school yet, but then she knew better than to ask. Maya knew that men don’t like being asked too many questions; at least she knew her husband would not like that.
In her brief experience with Bhaskar, Maya had discovered that he was an alpha male. He was like the fiercest lion in a pride whom even the other male lions fear. She had noticed that on the first night itself, when the drunken men had cowered momentarily under his menacing advance. At other times too, men seemed to retract from his path. Rarely did anyone come up to his house. At times, she felt like Rapunzel in a tower, and Bhaskar the fearsome witch protecting her.
Whenever he went out, Maya spent time tidying up his house, starting with the outside room. There wasn’t a lot of space in the house, but there was indeed a lot of filth. Unread newspapers and magazines, unfinished drawings and portraits, broken pencils and paintbrushes were strewn haphazardly, apparently undisturbed since ages. The utensils in the kitchen had thick sediments of carbon, which she brushed furiously till her fingers peeled, in a vain bid to make them sparkle again. She even washed the walls with soap water to give them some semblance of civility.
Maya came across an assortment of insects in the house. Being a Biology teacher, she didn’t fear the creepy-crawlies, but they grossed her out all the same. Oversized cockroaches ruled the roost and lizards crept in the dark crevices of the walls. There wasn’t a single corner where spiders didn’t have their cobwebs. One day, as Bhaskar sat to eat, a rather frightening millipede started creeping on his thigh. She recoiled in disgust but he merely looked at it with interest, and then swept it away before crushing it with his mutilated foot.