After all, he was her ex, right? Why would he have let go of the long-lost chance of realizing his dire fantasies, not get the things he’d craved for eons?
I don’t know if I was to blame my wife for her infidelity or myself for the incompetence of my manhood. But whatever it was, how did it make a difference?
No matter where I went, I couldn’t help but picture that man lay his hands on my wife and fondle her tender assets; imagine him play with her…handle with care, just the way she would’ve wanted, the delicate parts of my wife’s body, which I once thought was mine. And every time I conjured such an imagination, it posed me before the most disturbing reflections from my past.As if, once again, after all these years, I was standing just outside Geetika’s apartment, peeking at her from the window, watching the man in black do her savagely. Or perhaps it was not Geetika… it was Aarti in her stead. I felt diminished by his dazzling appearance, his super-elegant dress-sense and his compulsion to snatch away from me all that was rightfully mine: my wife’s body.
I was growing mad, gripped by the idea that I had lost everything. So I went to a shopping complex to buy a new set of shirt, trousers, and those derby shoes. I ensured they looked just like his.
Only when I walked out of there did I realize that it wasn’t the clothes but what was inside of them that mattered… and whatever it was; it was definitely better than mine…
May be I was a bit extravagant with my thoughts, but time and again, my perversions made me see Aarti in the company of that stud…from different angles, experimenting different styles…switching between positions in my bed… She was everywhere, naked, unconcealed, being voraciously devoured by someone whose face I couldn’t remember properly, for he didn’t matter, I did…
The complex of inferiority is like the cancer that killed Ma. It’s made up of you; it lives within you. But this one conceals a more insidious agenda - it doesn’t kill you like Ma’s cancer did; it only secretly inspires you to kill yourself.You look into the mirror and you judge yourself before someone else does, the judgement never being in your favour. And you’ve lost half the battle before it even started. A warrior may fight even with an amputated hand. But meeting the world head to head becomes a tough nut to crack, when your mind is sodden with the idea that something is wrong inside of you. It’s like a termite; it corrodes you from within, feeds on you, piece by piece, and leaves you hollow.And then you start freaking out. And then you want to fight again. You want those pieces of yours back that it took away from you, no matter what, but you know you can’t.And then you become a hideous monster, determined to do anything to defeat the cancerous complex. So you see it goes like a circle and it ends with you doing the killing yourself….
I was inferior to every man in the world. I wasn’t impressive, wasn’t charming enough and wasn’t capable of satisfying a woman. And I was definitely not loved…by anyone. I could feel it churn within me…first Malvika, then Geetika, and now, after getting married, after I had a beautiful daughter – Aarti…even Aarti…
With each step I advanced, I watched the bark of time that’d sought to protect me from external hostilities and internal difficulties fall off the flesh of my conscience.
I witnessed myself being stripped off the layers of the fake contentment, off the chimerical satisfaction, off the illusory repletion I’d inherited from the imminent, yet counterfeit promises of my married life. I conceived actively every splinter of an excruciating pain, as though of watching wither away the pieces of my skin off my flesh, coupled with the knowledge which was bettered by time that I could do nothing about it. That I couldn’t stop it! I was scared, of becoming that man once again and yet, I was dwindling between what I was days ago before watching that man, Adwit, and what I’d been years ago – a frustrated bug, an embittered lesion…
Every second those flashbacks of Malvika devastating me unfolded before my eyes. Every instance my memory cast before me the images of Geetika and her boyfriend struggling to copulate, every moment I subjected myself to the torments of imagining the details of my wife in the hands of another man, it made me want to scream the hell out, loud enough to make my lungs bleed.
It was erupting within me, it was all boiling, and I wanted to throw it out. I wanted to run, I wanted to go somewhere, but where do I go…what do I do? Whom do I kill…what do I break?
Fuckkkkk! I wanted to kill them all. I wanted to nail all three of them on a large table and peel their skins off them one by one. I wanted them to kneel in front of me, with their hands chained, with their eyes looking up at me before I would shoot them right in the middle of their foreheads. I wanted to carve their kidneys bloody out of their abdomens.
I wanted to better the sum of anguish they’d meted out to me.The trinity of those women had fucked my life bottoms-up.Yes! I held them responsible. I had my reasons. They had me left with nothing… They had fucked my soul, plundered my being. No more of it! I wanted something else… something to make them hurt.
I wanted to hit them all three where it’d hurt them the most; I wanted to rob them all of what they loved most, of what they held dearest. And I knew what it was…
I was going to begin from where it’d all started…and stop at where’d it all ended…
Chapter 19.0
After my couple of hours’ long excursion, in the semi-inebriated state that I was, I managed to stumble athwart the crowd and find my way home. I didn’t try initiating a conversation with my wife, who was still seated in the same chair she’d been on when I’d gone out.
I could see the tears still leaking out her eyes. She hadn’t stopped crying, though she had managed to strangle that sound of sobbing now. She didn’t dare look at me, didn’t react even to the stimulus of my arrival. She kept looking at the table, with her head shielded on both sides by her palms. I rushed to the kitchen and opened the door of the fridge. I pulled out the tetra-pack of milk from the door shelf and drained it half down. Then I trudged to my bedroom and latched it from inside. I fetched my laptop from the cupboard, turned it on, and connected it to my home-internet connection.
I logged on to a social-networking site, which happened to be the most-used one of its category then. In the search field, I typed in Malvika’s name. In no time, the screen was loaded with a good number of profiles with the same name. In the hope of finding the right person, I scrolled down the list, looking at the display pictures. I even opened some of the profiles. Each time, I had a feeling it could be her. I hadn’t seen her in years; she could look like anything.
After having riffled through over fifteen of them, I finally found that one entry.
It had to be her! That face bore so much resemblance to hers. I looked up the details and I found the names of the institutions where the owner of the profile had at one time studied.The name of the school was St Joseph’s.That propelled me to proceed further and browse through the rest of her profile.
I went through her status updates and comments. She lived in Bhopal now, which wasn’t too far from my hometown.She’d left a good number of pictures as ‘viewable’ in her profile. Most of those pictures were of her with her friends. In one of them, she was in the company of four other women, all seated around a table in a restaurant; in another she was taking a selfie of herself and a cousin, weirdly both wearing an assortment of gold and diamond jewellery, while they must’ve been trying them out at a jewellery shop. In a few that remained, she was with her husband. His name was Kabir. Oh, they had a dog too. And it seemed they didn’t have a kid yet, as I didn’t find any pictures of them. It was the ‘tagging’ facility on that website that enabled me to deduce all that.
But I couldn’t find her number. So I began dialling any and every person from school I had on my phonebook. Even though I’d never made really good friends out of any of them, most of them were welcoming enough for a small conversation.
Even though it was a remarkable challenge to my social skills, I was able to exchange some cordial words without awkwardness. That was becaus
e it felt somewhat weird to talk to people I hadn’t talked to much when I could have in school and had to talk to now, when in all probability they could well have forgotten my name.
When I was done talking insanely trivial things with them, I would go about my questions in a roundabout way. I would go like, ‘…and are you still in touch with that guy… oh, do you remember that girl… and where is that girl Malvika nowadays?’When one of them, Rohan, happened to know where she was and told me she was in Bhopal, I let myself sound pleased. ‘Oh my god, she lives in Bhopal? I’m going to Bhopal in like two days.What a coincidence! Do you think you might have her address by any chance?’
And much to my surprise, he had it. I shamelessly verified it with him twice after he dictated it to me and let me note it down. I talked a little longer, so he wouldn’t find things weird, and then we exchanged our goodbyes.
Thereafter, I searched for and logged onto one of those websites that tell you how to handle a woman, along with many other manly tips.
The next thing I did was book a flight to Bhopal for the next day.This was because all flights from Bangalore to Bhopal for the same day were booked.
It was a four and a half hour’s flight and it was scheduled for 7:45 am, the next day.There was a stopover at Mumbai, with a twenty-minute wait, but the same aircraft would fly to Bhopal.
Before going to bed, I packed a couple shirts, a pair of trousers, a magazine, and my laptop into a small trolley-bag, so my wife wouldn’t doubt what I told her: ‘I’m going to Bhopal on some work. I’ll be away for two days,’ I’d told her this as apathetically as I could, just before leaving in the morning. I’d told her the truth about where I was going in case she asked to see my tickets and all. Not that I didn’t know already she wouldn’t dare speak a fucking word.
I had called up a taxi for 6:15 in the morning, so I could leave home well before time to board my flight. I splurged carelessly on food, beverages and anything I could, through the flight as well during the brief halt at Bombay airport.
I reached Bhopal at nearly noon and hired a taxi straightaway to the address I’d been given.The driver told me that though the place was only 18 kilometres from the airport, owing to the daytime traffic, it’d take at least an hour and a half to reach the destination. But that was no reason to fret.
When we arrived, I took out again from my pocket the paper on which I’d noted down the address to verify the building number. I was in the right place. I took a moment to stand there and look at the house.
Chapter 20.0
It was a single-storey house, much like ours. I looked out for the dog I’d seen in the pictures before I entered the compound. But the canine was chained well away from the gate. I undid the gate, made my way in.Well, the dog didn’t react at all. I wonder if the beast was just too lazy to give any reaction or whether that was professional courtesy.
I pressed the calling-bell and waited. When nobody came to attend even after a couple of minutes, I thumbed it again. Now, I could hear footsteps approaching. I heard the door being unlatched and then saw it open with a fling.
Before me stood a woman in a mustard-yellow sari with a berry-red border accentuated by a delicate gold stripe and a matching red halterneck figure-hugging choli, her aanchal carelessly tugged between her waist and the pleats of the sari.
She’d grown both in body and in beauty. She was barefoot and her hair was done into an orb behind her head, as though she’d just taken a shower or had been busy doing something.
‘Remember me?’ I said and smiled.
‘Do I know you?’ she said, almost pointing a finger at me, with no appreciation of my conduct.
‘Oh, we know each other. I’m Suraj… Suraj Deoria. We studied in the same school, remember?’ I said, keeping up the grin.
She remained silent awhile. She was probably trying to recall who I was, or anyone with the name I’d mentioned.
Then suddenly, she resumed the dialogue. ‘Oh, Soooraj,’ she’d clearly been assisted by her memory, ‘… Suraj from the same school… yeah… okay… I remember you now. Come on in,’ she said and gestured me to move inside. Once we were both indoors, she closed the door and latched it.
‘So, how are you here?’ she remained standing, as she directed me to sit on the teal-blue, three-seater, upholstered sofa, placed in one corner of the room. ‘And how did you find the house?’ she said.
I wasn’t a stranger anymore.
‘Actually, I had some work here in Bhopal, related to my job. Before coming here, I accidentally happened to call up a friend from our school, just like that, you know. In the momentum of our conversation, I asked him of the people he was still in touch with and he named you. So I asked him where you were and he told me you were in Bhopal. Since I was lined-in to come to Bhopal in two days, I felt lucky to have called him up, randomly like that, you know. I felt thrilled at the prospect that you were in the same city. I thought why shouldn’t we meet? So I immediately asked him for your address and here I am,’ I said and gave her a radiant smile.
‘Oh, so good of you to come,’ she said courteously. ‘By the way, which friend was it?’
‘Rohan,’ I said.
‘Oh, okay,’ she said. ‘Umm, Suraj, do you mind waiting here for a minute, while I go in and come out very soon?’
‘Sure, not a problem,’ I said.
In ten minutes, she came back, with her hair pinned up, her aanchal draped tidily at the back and with a tray carrying two cups of tea. She kept the tray on the table in front of me and joined me on the sofa.
‘Oh, what was the need for this?’ I tried acting modest.
‘Not much of a deal,’ she said. ‘Please, have a cup.’
I picked one of the cups, and we indulged into casual conversation and talked about ordinary things.
Kabir, her husband, who wasn’t home, was a sales manager in a telecom company and worked from ten to four. They’d been married four years, but still didn’t have any kids (like I’d guessed) because her husband wasn’t ready for it yet and wanted to wait for another two to three years. She had a degree in business management and had worked as a receptionist at a hotel, but for the abject marriage prospects associated with the work, she’d left the job and had chosen to remain a housewife of her own volition. She told me about her in-laws and friends and about how her life as a housewife was, much of which resembled that of my wife’s. I too told her about myself, about my family, my job and more.
That conversation lasted half an hour, but then we fell out of things to say.
‘Suraj?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think I want to confess something,’ she said, not as enthusiastic as she’d been in our erstwhile conversation. She sounded even a little diffident.
‘Yes, go on,’ I nodded.
‘I’m sorry for the way I’d treated you in the class that day, leaving you demeaned and embarrassed like that.’
‘We need not talk about it. I’d even forgotten it,’ I said, moving my hands in the air, gesturing my made-up slackness about the subject.
‘You’re only being generous about it. How can anyone forget something like that? I should’ve apologized long ago. I wanted to. And I’d tried, even, to approach you, back in school. But I never actually found the guts…’
I guess I was supposed to say something, but before I could mouth a word, she broke in again, ‘The fact is, I liked you too. That was the reason I would smile at you in the first place. I don’t know if I had a crush on you or not, but I definitely felt something for you. It’s just that you were too forward.When you came to me with that letter of yours that day, I didn’t know if I was ready for it. I don’t know why I didn’t like that approach from you, so I humiliated you in front of everyone. It must have been such a bad experience for you.’
What?! She liked me? She felt for me? For a moment, I mused. But in the next blink, the dust that was trying to settle on the surface of my determination was washed away at once.To hell with whatever she felt for me! W
hat about the wounds she’d inflicted on my sense of self-worth and allowed to fester all these years? Had I asked for them?
I ran a second check on my state of resoluteness—it was intact. I wasn’t affected.Would you thank the man who left a basket of apples in your backyard and the fruits rotted because you were never told about them? I didn’t care if I was ever loved.
‘Let’s forget it.’
‘Have you forgiven me?’
‘Sshhh,’ I hushed her, as I placed my finger on her lips.
‘What?’ her brows furrowed as she spoke.
I spoke nothing. We remained motionless. And then, softly I said, ‘You felt for me?’
We didn’t speak after that, just looked at each other. I knew what to do.
I advanced towards her and without warning, I shifted my hand off her face, to her left shoulder and made room for my lips to lay on hers. I was aggressive in kissing her, squeezing the juice out of her lips like that. She couldn’t maintain her gaze at me for too long.And for half a minute, we remained like that.
I wonder why I hadn’t read that men’s portal ages ago, why I hadn’t experimented like that.That told, I wondered every second I had her mouth glued to mine, if husbands of all housewives were as unlucky as me and Kabir, or was it just a few of us? True, I was able to sympathize with Malvika’s husband for a while, for in a way, I guess I was doing the same thing to him that man Adwit had done to me, but swear to God, I had no guilt.
When she didn’t protest, I took it forward. Like a free-falling object, I scurried my right hand by the side of her chest, over the curve of her breasts, across her abdomen, through her bare waist, to the curvature of her hips, to the ultra-alluring curve of her lower back. I looked at her; her eyes were still closed. She had no control over whatever was happening…
Without wasting time, I slithered one arm behind her bare back, bordering on her left breast and the other under her knees. It took some manoeuvring as I tried to lift her up on the sofa. I started moving further into her house.
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