by Nikita Singh
She found herself smelling his shirts before washing them, craving his touch. One night, after tossing and turning in the cold bed for an hour, she sat up, pushed the covers back and decided it was time for her to take action. She rose and padded to the living room. She left the lights off, as she walked over to the couch. Gautam turned over and looked up at her in the dark room.
‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered.
‘You are my husband,’ Falguni said. She lowered herself to the floor, on her knees to meet his eyes.
‘Natasha …’ Gautam muttered.
Falguni leaned forward and placed her lips firmly on his. His mouth smelled like peppermint and his body smelled like his dirty shirts. She pressed harder. Lifting her head to look at him, she lowered it again for another kiss. Without breaking it, she climbed on top of the couch, on top of him. Their bodies were separated by the blanket.
Gautam didn’t make any sounds, but his hands were now clasped around her. They slid lower, to her hips, of which he grabbed a handful. His grip on her hardened, when she slipped her fingers under the blanket and reached for his pants. He was kissing her back now, his tongue exploring hers. Their breath became one.
Soon, they were up on their feet, peeling off their clothes. Gautam threw the blanket to the floor and they got back on his couch–bed. His breathing was more haggard now. Too haggard, Falguni observed. Soon after, too soon, he lay on his back, panting hard, finished.
After that night, the couch wasn’t made into a bed again. Gautam slept with Falguni in the bedroom. As relieved as Falguni was to have a normal marriage, she couldn’t help but feel disgusted by how quickly he finished every time. How short, and frankly boring, their sex was. Always in the bed, always in the same position, always finished within minutes.
In a few months, Gautam lost interest too. They still did it once a week, like clockwork, more as an obligation than for pleasure or connection.
It was nothing like Manoj’s tight, sweaty body ramming into her. Falguni missed how hungrily Manoj used to suck on her breasts, how aggressively he shoved his fingers inside her, how hard he slapped her face, how disgusting the names he called her were. She tried to forget about him, pushed those memories away every time they resurfaced. They kept coming up at the most inconvenient of times. Like now, as she watched Gautam carefully pick up his cup and slurp his chai, the image of Manoj’s laughing face as he repositioned her so Pankaj could push deeper inside her, flashed before her eyes.
In her hometown, it had been difficult for Falguni and Manoj to find a discreet place to be together. Pankaj had provided that secret place for them. He had only been half-joking when he said he wanted a taste of her in exchange. Later, Manoj had convinced her. It had taken some time, but she had eventually given in. She had only been with both of them a few times. As time passed, she had fallen out of love with Manoj. Her body still wanted his, so she had kept up their alliance, not out of love, but for the thrill of it, and because of the threat of Pankaj leaking a video he had secretly made of them.
Falguni had never had anyone to talk to about any of this. She could not confide in her girlfriends in Daltonganj; they were all judgemental prudes with their own secret lives. Falguni couldn’t possibly have talked to Garima, seeing as she was her husband’s sister. And anyway, Garima had never been with a man. The most she had done was kiss one of her girlfriends out of curiosity.
After the sex between Falguni and Gautam slowed down to a snail’s pace, something magical happened. Falguni got pregnant.
‘Natasha! Are you serious!’ Gautam exclaimed.
Falguni had never seen Gautam this excited. Or excited at all.
‘I think so. I got this test from CVS …’ Falguni offered it to him.
Gautam located the box it came in, read the instructions, asked Falguni some questions about the specifics of her urination method, and concluded that the test was in fact conducted in the prescribed manner. Just to be sure, they took a second test.
‘I can’t believe it. This is amazing news!’ Gautam announced in the end. He held her by her shoulders, peered into her eyes and said earnestly, ‘Natasha, you’ve given me so much happiness. I’ll call home.’
What followed were the three most exciting months of Falguni’s life. The prospect of this baby had finally fully erased her past life. She felt like a new person. She felt like Natasha.
She no longer needed secret, dirty affairs for a thrill. Or for her husband to choke her in bed. For the first time in her life, she didn’t need cheap thrills and distractions from reality to sustain her. Because, for the first time in her life, she was genuinely happy.
Gautam was gentle with her. Every move he made showed how much he cared. Falguni had fallen in love with his tenderness, with him. For the first time in her life, she felt safe.
When she miscarried, their world shattered around them. Even though it was her body that suffered, her blood that soaked the rug, Gautam seemed to take it harder than her. It took them months to return to normal, to look each other in the eye. Falguni wanted to try again, reclaim everything she’d lost, but Gautam treated her like a porcelain doll – delicate, breakable.
He still loved her, she knew he did, but she missed his attention. He was too scared to try again. He didn’t let himself hope. Falguni resented this. He was her whole world. She had had a taste of the full force of his love and attention on her, and she needed it back.
Desperate, she had to resort to lying about pain in her abdomen. She was on her period, but it was easy enough to pretend that it wasn’t her time of the month, that the blood was inexplicable. She took off her underwear and stood in the bathroom for fifteen minutes, until a puddle of blood collected on the floor between her legs. Then, she stepped in it, and spread the blood on the floor to create a bigger, bloodier mess before screaming Gautam’s name.
Terrified that it had something to do with the miscarriage, Gautam rushed her to the doctor. He was by her side, at her beck and call, whenever she needed him. He took time off from work. She was his priority again. When the doctors found nothing, and all the tests came back clean, she could only continue complaining of pain for so long before she had to put the matter to rest.
She needed something real. Or, if not, something that couldn’t be dismissed by medical scans. That’s when she invented chronic pain in her right arm. She groaned and moaned all day long. A general physician gave her muscle relaxants and eventually sent her to a physiotherapist. After months of therapy, she made no progress. The physiotherapist was baffled. He assigned her new exercises every week, monitored her range of movements closely, even changed her entire routine every other week, but there was no progress.
It was when she was prescribed pain medication that things really took a turn. She didn’t take them at first, because she didn’t need them, because the pain was a mere fragment of her imagination. But one day, boredom and the feeling of emptiness engulfed her more than usual, and she took one. That’s when the addiction began.
This particular morning, she had called Gautam out of desperation. Her medication sometimes gave her a calming clarity. At other times, however, it made her feel helpless and paranoid. Today, it was the latter. Gautam had calmed her down, told her that she should rest, and he would try to come home from work early.
She had felt better, until she didn’t. She called him again. He didn’t pick up, and she spun out of control. By the time she called him the third time, she was desperate for attention, and could not think of a plan fast enough to secure it. So, without much thought, she made up an accident to get him to drop everything and come to her.
Now, he will be here any moment and Falguni still didn’t have a plan. She had to make it look real. She had told him there was blood. Had she specified where the blood was coming from? Didn’t she say she was chopping tomatoes with her bad arm? Had she said that she slipped and cut herself?
She needed to cut herself.
Falguni sprung to her feet. She pulled out the chop
ping board from the cupboard, three tomatoes from the fridge and placed them on the kitchen counter. She chopped the tomatoes, barely seeing anything she was doing, her eyes blurry with tears. With shaky fingers, she chopped as fast as she could.
How had it come to this? What had she done? If Gautam came home and saw that she had been lying to him, she would lose him. He would never trust her again. He wouldn’t love her anymore. And she couldn’t let that happen. He was her whole life now, her only life.
Maybe there was a way this could work … Maybe she could tell him everything. About Manoj and Pankaj forcing her, her father and brother beating her. Maybe he would give her a second chance. Maybe he could help her find something to do with her time. Maybe she could study further, even have a career. She could speak English quite fluently now, after all. Maybe there was a future for her beyond seeking Gautam’s attention.
Just when she felt a glimmer of hope, she heard ambulance sirens. Were they coming for her? Had Gautam called 911?
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Falguni muttered to herself. Of course, Gautam would’ve called the ambulance! Why did she have to hang up on him and turn her phone off for the extra drama? He would’ve come home to her even without that part of the ruse. She cursed herself.
Falguni stumbled to the couch and picked up her phone. She held down the power button and waited for the screen to light up. What was she doing? Should she call him now? What would she say? If he had called the ambulance, it was too late now.
The sirens grew louder. Falguni stood rooted to the spot. If she didn’t open the door, didn’t say anything at all, would they break open the door?
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
She had pushed herself into a corner here. She knew what she had to do. Her chest rose and fell as she tried and failed to calm herself. She went back to the kitchen counter. With hands that shook violently, she picked up the knife again. How deep would the cut need to be to warrant the panicked phone call, begging her husband to come home? She’d told him that there was so much blood, everywhere. Would she need to chop a whole finger off? Would doctors be able to sew it back? Or would she spend the rest of her life without that finger?
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
Gautam didn’t see an ambulance anywhere near the building when he got there. Had they already taken her away? He checked his watch, frantically racing up the stairs. It had taken him longer than usual; he shouldn’t have taken a cab. He should’ve just run back home, as fast as he could.
When he got to the fourth floor, he ran to their apartment door. He paused for a moment, gathering himself, preparing for the worst. He slid his key into the lock and turned it open. When he pushed the door open and looked inside, he saw the last thing he had expected to see.
‘Natasha …’ he breathed.
Natasha sat there, on the couch, facing the door. When she saw him, she stood up, staring at him with wide eyes. She looked … fine. His eyes darted to the kitchen counter. Chopped tomatoes and no blood. He looked around. Nothing was out of place. His eyebrows came together in confusion.
‘I’m sorry!’ Natasha cried. ‘I sent the ambulance away. I told them it was a prank. That I didn’t know my husband would call them. They’ll send us a bill.’
‘I … I don’t …’ Gautam stammered. ‘What’s going on …?’
She ran to him, looked at him with shiny, desperate eyes. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ll tell you everything. Please just … listen to me. There’s so much. I’m so trapped. My only other option was hurting myself. I can’t do that to you again. I have to tell you the truth. Please, just hear me out.’
Natasha’s voice sounded different. The expression on her face made her look like a completely different person. For the first time since their marriage, his wife looked … scared of him. What was she so afraid of? Whatever it was, it couldn’t be worse than the horrifying scenarios Gautam had been imagining for the last half hour. He shut the door behind him and walked inside.
‘It’s okay,’ he said to her. Whatever it was, at least she was safe, and that mattered more to him than anything else. ‘You can tell me anything.’
Talking to Strangers
The light pouring in through the tiny airplane window was blinding. Raveena squinted, as she angrily pulled out the buckle of her seat belt from under her. She caught the fingerhold on the flimsy window shade and slammed it shut. Now that she wasn’t being attacked by sunlight and poked by a belt buckle, you’d expect that she would feel better. But no. Those were the least of her problems.
She was operating on three hours of sleep, zero caffeine and a debilitating migraine. To top that, she was in the middle of a mild nervous breakdown. She was careful not to complain about that to Shreya – her co-worker and partner on this business trip, who she had left behind. Shreya considered herself a staunch advocate of mental health. However, ironically, if you were to admit that you were struggling to cope, she would be the first one to tell you to stop exaggerating and taking attention away from those really suffering. She was essentially a self-appointed gatekeeper of mental health. Which is why, when Raveena had woken up in cold sweat in the middle of the night and decided to return home the next morning, she had done it quietly, without waking Shreya, who snored softly in the queen bed next to hers.
They still had three weeks left on their business trip, so they had to share the hotel room for that entire time. Raveena didn’t dislike Shreya, but sharing a space for that long with any person can be challenging, especially if you already had so many other, larger problems to deal with.
Raveena leaned forward and rested her forehead against the seat in front of her. It was probably filthy, and her sensitive skin was likely to break out into pimples from it, but Raveena didn’t have the bandwidth to care. She was already hurting, mentally and physically. What are a few pimples? A minuscule drop in the vast ocean of her gloom.
Raveena wondered if she was, in fact, exaggerating. It was possible. In Shreya’s defence, she did read a lot about mental health on Instagram; maybe she knew what she was talking about. If Raveena could just get a handle on her migraine, she could sit back, line up all her other problems and arrange them in order of priority and gravity – worry about them in an organized manner. In their current jumbled state, she couldn’t find the head or tail of anything.
And yet, there was more disappointment to be faced: she had forgotten to pack her medicine. She had taken a tablet the night before, and, as she slumped back in her seat now, she could visualize exactly where she had left the bottle on the bedside table. Upon summoning the flight attendant, Raveena was exasperated to find that the flight couldn’t provide any pain medication to passengers. The flight attendant suggested Raveena purchase alcohol instead. Raveena stared at the flight attendant’s painted face, her own face clearly communicating: are you serious?
‘I know it helps me,’ the flight attendant joked uncomfortably. ‘A drink or two when I’m feeling low.’
Raveena knew she should just smile and put the poor girl at ease, but the pettiness in her didn’t let her perform this simple, small act of kindness. She remained silent.
‘Anyway … we can’t give out medication. It’s against our policy.’
‘Cool, thanks,’ Raveena said dismissively.
‘I’m sorry.’
As soon as the flight attendant walked away, face flushed, Raveena felt terrible about the way she had behaved. It wasn’t the flight attendant’s fault that she had forgotten her medicine, or that the airline had rules that the cabin crew was required to obey.
Not to mention, now that wine had been mentioned in their conversation, Raveena became aware of the fact that her throat was parched. And maybe alcohol would in fact help with the pain … But it was too late; the flight attendant was long gone, and Raveena had behaved too poorly to ask her to come back. Raveena settled in her seat, breathing deliberately, holding back tears of frustration and the resentment she felt towards herself. Sometimes, just sometimes, life could be so much easier
if she just did what her brain was telling her to do. Instead, she had to go on and act like a rude brat, fully aware of what she was doing. Why couldn’t she just handle her emotions? The education system had seriously failed in providing kids tools to handle themselves and their emotions at a later stage in life. And yet, they were forced to learn trigonometry, which a majority of them didn’t require to use in everyday situations, for years. That was a fight for another day.
Raveena picked up her handbag from the seat next to her and dug out her water bottle. She took a long, desperate swig of water, looking at the bright side: no one was sitting next to her, which meant no battles for elbow room, at least for the first leg of the flight. Small mercies, she said to herself. When the same flight attendant came by to ask passengers to pull up their window shades for take-off, Raveena did so without any resistance. She let the sunglasses perched on top of her head drop on the bridge of her nose and rested her head back, eyes closed, lips parted, breath rapid.
Once they were airborne, Raveena waited for the flight attendant to come around, apologized for her rudeness and felt even more terrible than before when the flight attendant responded cheerfully, ‘It’s okay. We’ve all had headaches. I hope you feel better soon.’
Raveena’s lips stretched in a tight smile. Why couldn’t the flight attendant have been rude to her in return? Why couldn’t she have been one of those vapid girls who spoke in English to passengers who clearly couldn’t comprehend a word of it, and the more they didn’t understand, the more the flight attendant insisted on speaking in English, and continued repeating the same words with different emphasis and increasing hostility, over and over again until everyone around them was uncomfortable and the poor, embarrassed passenger said they didn’t want anything from the cart?
It’s much easier to be rude to those types of people. ‘Thank you,’ Raveena said instead. ‘I’m having a really bad day and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.’