The sky was absolutely cloudless. Every single visible thing
on the horizon had turned into a reflective surface – flat planes of white
light shimmered back from treetops, roofs and even the asphalt.
As the heat climbed past the usual antidotes of continual showers and copious
glasses of chilled lime water, Shashwati felt a familiar heaviness settle on
her. It was easy to ignore but it stuck to her anyway, a delicate trickle of
sweat on her temple , a dampness on the exposed midriff. Her saree hung on her
breasts and hips, swathing itself around her frame, perhaps responding both to
the heat and to the unstarched regularity of its use. This undulating figure kept darting from the
gas oven to the cupboards, balancing the fish curry and rice for her husband’s
lunch and a complicated mutton preparation for his dinner. The kitchen was a
room of alchemy and myriad scents. The musk of her hollows and the saffron
fought with each other for prominence.
It was nine in the morning. Aurobindo, of the hard voice and bony limbs was
dozing in the sofa. Work was at least another hour away. In any case what would
the point be of turning up before his boss? Mr Chatterjee was certain to show
at midday, as he always did. Aurobindo was a loyal servant of his master. So,
no hurry. Yet, he could not take his post-breakfast nap. Something pricked at
the back of his mind and for the life of him, he could not shake it off. Nor
could he put his finger on it. While he was sure it had something to do with
the rushed maneouverings the previous night between himself and Shashwati, the
matter itself was so small, so indistinct and the memory of it so dim, that all
Aurobindo retained of it a prick of discomfort and a premonition of upheaval.
But right now, as the old ceiling fan whirred loudly above their heads, both Shashwati and Aurobindo were occupied
with the morning, its heat and that cultivated art of skimming through the
newspaper while not letting in the news past the point of noncommital
appraisal.
They liked to call themselves respectable. They liked to be called middle
class. Since the fifties and the Zamindari Abolition, Aurobindo’s family had
made that painful transition from the fetid remains of an old landowning family
to barely comfortable pieces of a house broken moving upwards in society. Even
now, Aurobindo’s brother liked to brag about the gold cutlery and the diamonds
on the idol in the house shrine when he was a little tipsy. Or in the company
of a pretty girl. The proclivity to brag was of course not was limited to him
alone. After their marriage Aurobindo had spent hours telling his sleepy wife
how many bigha of land his great
grandfather had once owned, how both the Muslims and the Hindus of the area
trembled at his name.
‘Onar naamey baaghey gorute ek ghaate jol kheto’
‘The tiger and the ox would run to the same pool at the mention of his name’
Shashwati, smeared with vermillion and her wrists heavy with wedding jewellery
would nod and smile. She had been groomed from the age of ten, that is, since
she started having her monthly flows. She had been taught how to respond,
reject, manipulate and persuade the future husband. In fact it could be
reasonably said that her whole life had been a prelude to her marriage.
Therefore, as her husband bored her to death, she managed not to yawn but smile
and even laugh, at the required intervals, until he fell asleep – exhausted by
the newfound pleasures of marriage.
Shashwati was not always Mrs Shashwati Ganguly. A few years back she used to be
Chandni. Anyone barely ever used the name except on the passport and the
gradesheet. Buri to her father and
Chandni to everyone except her schoolteachers, she was a vivacious, loud, witty
girl. She wore red and green and yellow and sang out lyrics from a Rajesh
Khanna hit. Chandni loved her roasted maize with a dash of lemon on the way
back from school and hid newspaper cuttings on Sanjeev Kumar and other
filmstars she thought of marrying.
In college she had perhaps fancied a classmate. We will never know. The most
obvious unity in Shashwati was her conformity. ‘To have an affair’ would have
been to plunge the family into doubts about the success of their style of
childrearing. It would also have been to expose herself to potential rejection.
Shashwati chose the prudent path. She stayed obediently and doubtlessly single
until her parents advertised her in a daily.
Among the many matrimonial ads competing for attention, there was a tiny black
and white square dedicated to a certain Shashwati Mukherjee. The official title
of the page was ‘Patro Chai’, which roughly translated comes to something like
‘Husband Wanted’ except English will never be able to fathom nor capture the
mysterious conflation of the concepts of wedding, man and commodity into that
one word – ‘patro’.
‘Patro’ : A homunculus abject to the transactions of body, money and status.
Just like its counterpart – a ‘patri’ or the bride. Both the groom and the
bride are selected by the families on the basis of the caste, of the
compatibility of dowry demands and corresponding wealth and finally, that
esoteric yet highly amenable factor – the astrologer.
Shashwati was born as the Crab had scuttled from the Lion in the nightsky. Born
on the cusp and assigned to the astral caste of the ‘Demon’ or ‘Debari’, she
was doomed in the wedding market from the beginning. Besides, as Aurobindo
would repeat many times in their long marriage, her parents had perhaps hid her
Condition of the Mars. Otherwise why did she have to wear the coral on her
third finger? And why did they insist on marrying her to a goat before letting
her put the garland around her neck?
On hindsight though, none of these reasons of the true cause of Shashwati’s
shamefully long stint as an unmarried burden. It was her height that had made
things so difficult. At five feet seven, Shashwati stood taller than most
Bengali women, and unfortunately, most Bengali men too. No man worth his salt
was going to marry a taller woman. An insult to him and injury to his family.
Such a woman, complacent in her physical, immediate superiority would never bow
down to her husband nor be docile to his parents. Only a shrill, power-hungry
shrew could result from such ease over the natural master.
In Shashwati this fear found a further edge in its adaptation. Her body had
shot up like a lithe vein of the Pata Bahar climber. It intimidated by the
indubitable cuts of sensuality that crisscrossed and flushed out of the
restriction of the modest collar of her blouse and self-effacing line of the
saree over her breasts. As she had silently entered with the platter of tea and
snacks, the homage of the meekness had been lost upon far too many prospective
mothers-in-law who had at once been disturbed by the power that Shashwati
seemed to wield so unknowingly. One such mother, when she could not find
anything else to vocalize her discomfort with, finally complained that it would
not to do to be taller than one’s mother-in-law even if the height differential
with the groom was appropriate. A bride, she had opined, was an object of the
sight, not a subject. One should never have to crane the neck to watch her.
Therefore when Mr. and Mrs. Mukherjee finally found a prospect taller than
their daughter, they did not wait for even a month. A hall, an altar and a
priest were all hired, gold bought and designed, a wedding saree somehow
scraped out of a winter sale at a big store and the wedding itself fixed within
three weeks of the introduction. This was a blitzkrieg wedding and both parties
conspired and played their part – both considering themselves lucky for reasons
immediate and not.
On the wedding night, as his bride had sat next to him, a bundle of sequin and
gold, Aurobindo had the seized the opportunity and imparted the three pieces of
wisdom that any woman would have to internalize in order to love and serve him.
The first piece of wisdom was that a woman married to him could never ever wear
sunglasses. Only men and whores wore them and he would never tolerate such
looseness in his family. If she got a headache from the sun she was welcome to
make a veil out of her saree. In fact, in possible, she should always wear the
veil.
The second piece of wisdom was about the nightly affairs that would shortly
take place. Aurobindo hoped that Shashwati knew that the woman was never to
make any overtures in bed. Neither enthusiasm nor defiance was going to be
tolerated. It was her sacred duty towards marriage to lie amenable as her
husband took his fill of her. Oh, and he preferred black brassieres. Hopefully
her mother had packed some in the suitcase.
Finally, and this was sacrosanct – his predilection for the carp in mustard sauce.
Shashwati would be taught the secret to the perfectly textured mustard sauce by
his mother from the next morning and she was to be diligent. He preferred a single split green chilli upon
the fish as it was served and it had to be steaming hot. The rest of the
particulars she would learn from the matriarch.
Right now, in the glorious dusty heat of the morning, it was precisely this
dish that Shashwati was preparing. Although she resented many things about her
husband, she took great pride in his fetish for her cooking. In a land full of
mysterious phantasms that seemed beyond her power, it was her husband’s acute
need for food made by her that gave her a sense of safety and anchorage.
Could it be said that Shashwati thought the heart, bound as it seemed to be, in
Aurobindo’s case, to the stomach, would never stray as long as it found its
carp and mango puree and soups in his wife’s lap? No. It is better to say that
Shashwati’s misgivings never quite assumed the shape of sexual jealousy; in the absence of the shape, they only
remained generic doubts and fears about marriage which she kept at bay by
banging the brass and the steel in the kitchen. That cooking gave her strength
since it quantified her effort and contribution into the marriage. It tied back
to her childhood lessons about holding a talisman out of doing good.
So she stirred and stirred.
****
Aurobindo watched his wife over the newspaper. The whiff of his brunch was
wafting out of the kitchen and into his being. Suddenly all his discomfort was
gone and he lowered himself luxuriously into the bath of the damp spiced odors
that now engulfed him. It would not be too far from the truth to say that he
was also suddenly assailed from a small erotic niggle between his legs. There
was something, Aurobindo mused, about a woman cooking. At times he felt that
his wife’s limber body would become an extension of the tender, cooked meat
that melted in his mouth. He remembered how he used to fuck her at all times of
the day when they were first married. She was forbidden from making any gesture
during these moments of course. He did not want a red-lipped whore in the
house. Just silent gratitude for the frequency of his affections was enough.
Most of these episodes took place while she worked in the kitchen. Naturally
they happened at all sorts of times since Shashwati only stopped cooked when
dinner was served. On Sundays, when he stayed in the whole time, he would see
her limbs caught in culinary acrobatics. Graceful and sweetly corrupt, she
would dip, dust and grind her dark materials, creating a world and dissolving
herself in it.
An articulate moment of sound left Aurobindo’s mouth before they diffused into
the soft whirr of the ceiling fan above his head. For a moment Aurobindo was
devoutly grateful for the fan. Its concentric movement and continual hum filled
the space between him and the woman. Aurobindo realized only now that if he had
to exist alongside Shashwati in absolute silence, the walls would close in very
soon. The cerements of their once-infatuation had only stymied into the habits
of marriage and for Aurobindo, his incipient obsession with her cooking.
The sibilant noise that had abruptly stopped in his throat was Aurobindo’s
momentary lapse in remembering that the husband and the wife would never call
each other by their names. Aurobindo’s tongue had never once touched his palate
in preparation for the letters of her name to form in his mouth. Aurobindo
briefly wondered why he suddenly forgot the old silence on this day.
Perhaps, perhaps it had something to do with Shashwati’s sudden, unprecedented
movement towards his mouth the previous night. Why had she kissed him? It was
not like her. Finally, the little knot of discomfort dropped out of his
subconscious with a soft plop. Fearfully, Aurobindo realized that somehow, with
her kiss, the cogs had started towards their destruction – his destruction.
This girl – his wife, his woman, his cook, his slave, the object of his love,
lust, anger and silence – she was changing into a human. A human who could kiss
– a human whose kiss he did not refuse because it was that sweet.
‘You there?’, he barked out at last.
Shashwati heard him from the first syllable but she took her time to come out
of her kingdom. Her exit out of the kitchen was always accompanied with a kind
of regal grace that spoke eloquently of her dexterity and command on her little
room. Her anchal came off briefly from its place at her waist as she made a
little, soft dance of picking up its edge and wiping her face with it.
She wore a white saree, unstarched. It had stopped being a saree a long time
back. Instead, a second skin, it had begun to take on the contours of its
wearer. This saree formed a pool of shadows over her skin, covering and
uncovering it to the consuming eyes of Aurobindo, who suddenly sat transfixed.
He sat transfixed not merely by the sheer capacity for the
erotic that reached out of Shashwati’s person but his own, sudden impotence in
the face of it. Was this the same woman? Was he the same man? What had changed
on a midsummer morning like any other that had carried Shashwati at the helm of
their relationship?
As she advanced towards him, the thick, layered odors swirled into little
djinns out of her body. They reached him one by one. The sharp ginger, the
poppy, underscored by the light spray of lemon. The fires of the chilli, potent
even in flavor, pinned down by the camphor that she must have put in the
earthen jug. All the odoriferous spirits gathered her up and at once, at the
side of Aurobindo’s bed, Shashwati became a witch or a goddess, an ephemeral
figure.
Without uttering or hearing a word, Aurobindo realized that somehow, in a
moment of cosmic design and evil, this woman, this silly goat that had cooked
for him and fed him and let him fuck her for years, had been turned into his
crisis, his pain. The sharp pain of desire that rose through him did not feel
anything like the previous little crystallizations of pleasure under him.
An intricate latticework of torture and infinite pleasure began to crisscross
through Aurobindo’s limbs. All the memories of being together with Shashwati,
of lying next to her, burying his face on her navel, ruffling her hair – it all
began to swirl into a solid shape inside him.
Of course, Shashwati entered completely unaware of the metamorphosis that her
husband was going through. She came into the room and instead of the lean
clockwork of bones and a mop of hair that she usually registered as her
husband, she found a breathless, worried man. As her eyes swept over his body
reclining on the bed at a lethargic angle, she felt a slight unease at the
sheer contradiction between Aurobindo’s posture and his expression. A fine film
of sweat had settled on his forehead and his eyes bulged in desperation.
Shashwati grasped the sinewy lines of desire under Aurobindo’s sweat and open
mouth.
Still caught in the languorous, self-possessed posture of the man, the master
of the house, Aurobindo’s sudden plunge into abject helplessness appeared
comical to Shashwati. How funny and sad this man was! Shashwati regarded each
portion of his body the way she watched the mutton at the butcher’s. Without
breaking the step, without letting him realize she was weighing him,
contemplating him, she extracted once more those awkward protruding knees,
those jutting elbows and those veined forearms that were testament to the years
and years of typing, copying and signing that Aurobindo’s unexciting job had
asked for.
The sun was resolutely climbing to noon, and the scorching bars of dirty white
light fell in columns through the iron bars of the window. Across Aurobindo’s
bent, broken body, bulbous and bony at all the wrong parts, the sun fell with
relentless precision. As if highlight, to remind his wife once more why she
could never find this oblong animal attractive and yet, why his helplessness to
her was important.
Coolly, Shashwati calculated how long the erotic rush would
last. Should she run back and turn off the gas? Would the carp burn? No,
thankfully, Aurobindo was sated quickly. A great blessing, since she found his
movement upon her body all wrong ; Aurobindo could only grope and poke, even
after the hundredth time, like a ragpicker who still could not believe his
luck.
And yet, yet, she had kissed this man the previous night. Why? Why? She had
woken up that morning with a thorn lodged at the back of her head. A nudge of
the impending migraine had begun to form in the last moments of sleep as the
memory of the involuntary, unwanted kiss had crept all over her senses,
paralyzing her. The question of spontaneity had nipped at the bud at the
beginning of their marriage, and even later, the topic of romance or love had
never really cropped up. For one thing, Shashwati was not even sure such a
thing existed. Of course, she had seen Rajesh Khanna romance Dimple Kapadia
along choreographed dance moves. As Chandni, in another life, she had even gone
to sleep with a newspaper cutout of Rajesh Khanna and sometime, of that other
superstar, Amitabh Bachchan, as lanky as her husband but somehow infinitely
more desirable.
But behind that entire college girl fantasizing, Shashwati had always
instinctively known that ‘love’ for what it was on the screen of the cinema
hall did not really exist in middle-class lives. Where was the scope for all
the dupatta-billowing, designer suited song and dance in lives that were
embroiled in a constant battle for respectability? There was money and honour;
the corresponding feelings then, of security and gratitude.
When she had first seen Aurobindo, was that exactly not what she had hoped for?
A delivery from the dogged search for a home, from the insinuating glances of
her parents, from the auguries of a lonely future as a spinster aunt? And she
had found it all in him. He had kept her safe from the ravages of uncertainty
and deprivation. She had sarees in her wardrobe, food in the new Godrej fridge
and gold in the bank. What more would she ever need?
For all this and more, she had always been devoutly grateful to Aurobindo. Her
gratitude, all the more potent because of the fear of losing it all with the
loss of his attention had made her worship Aurobindo; attend to his every need;
listen to his bragging; tending to him while ill. But the nature of Shashwati’s
worship had always been impersonal. Her piety was part of the barter – no more,
no less. Love was certainly was not a part of it. In fact, all her feelings for
Aurobindo could be circumscribed within the folds of fervent gratitude and
impersonal dutifulness.
So then, what had changed now, after three years of marriage? Shashwati looked
at her long, pale forearms. She had always been pale – her only capital in a
marriage market where she had lagging behind in every other respect. She knew
Aurobindo had chosen her for the dulcet floury hue of her skin; for that
crimson heat that spread across her translucent cheeks whenever she felt
uncomfortable.
The blush, the blush. Had she blushed last night? She could
not remember. Had she blushed before the kiss? After it? She only recalled a
sudden stillness afterwards. Everything had stood still for a minute and then
Aurobindo had gently yet abruptly left her and collapsed beside her. They had
not spoken at all. Shashwati had stared at the silvery web of the mosquito net
for a long time. In the compassionate darkness, the confrontation had seemed
avoidable. Surely, such a small indiscretion could be forgotten, stowed away
under the bed, like that old trunk of spare bedding?
No. Not so. Not under this harsh noon sun. The unsparing, jaundiced eye that
refused to spare her. Spare them. She looked again at her husband. Shashwati’s
face did not lose a beat as she gazed at the loose, deflated bag that held on
to Aurobindo’s midriff. Not the tight, gluttony paunch of her giant father but
a little pet, an indulgence born out of indolence and Shashwati’s cooking. Once
again, Shashwati understood that she could never aspire to the love she had
seen enacted in the dark hall of the cinema.
Slowly, slowly then she tore her eyes away from Aurobindo’s
belly and met his eyes.
She read the urgency of his desire and felt a corresponding
calm shoot through her body. Her migraine disappeared and she suddenly felt
more clearheaded than ever.
She advanced towards him.
*********
It was a Sunday, exactly a week since Shashwati and Aurobindo had had a long
conversation. After that little incident, their lives had become even more
silent. Each conversation had seemed to begin and then dwindle away in
necessities of lists, shopping and chores. They both sensed a growing tension
but felt paralyzed in their tiny house of display. Each morning that week had
begun with the ritual of the bed tea. Aurobindo had dutifully asked for the
kind of fish Shashwati would want that day. Shashwati too, had made the most
perfect meals, nothing to complain about, nothing to fight over.
Yet, they began to resent each other. Aurobindo found
himself wondering about the kiss. Soon the small knot of apprehension surged
towards a sharp point of curiosity and desire. He began to notice Shashwati
more, while she cooked, ate, slept and dressed. A maddening, heady delight
started to take over as he realized that she was his. She would stay with him
until he died. This flesh and blood creature, who could perform a series of
complicated, beautiful movements in the kitchen, this woman – the sole object
of his voyeuristic pleasures – she would be with him forever. It was as if, by
kissing him, Shashwati had affirmed her existence once and for all.
As this realization solidified, his need to consume her seemed to sublimate
into insatiable gluttony. He began to ask for two helpings of everything she
made and Shashwati found herself stuck in the kitchen for even longer, sweating
even more and wishing she had quicker habits and better skills.
However, that was not all. Across the horizon of Aurobindo’s
obsession, tiny, almost invisible lines of resentment began to bleed in.
Was this woman a witch? Why could he not stop thinking about
her? Even at work, he found himself imagining her bathing – wondering what it
would be like and why he, her wedded husband and master had never had the guts
to ask her if he could watch. Middleclass Bengali men did not watch their wives
bathe. Such mad things were confined to the adult English films that he had
surreptitiously watched twice at Chaplin. There blond, muscular men, veritable
gods, really, had blown rings of smoke out of their mouth as the robust, buxom bileeti women had risen out of baths in
front of them or stood under showers.
As he watched her sleep, Aurobindo began to resent the
allure of her sleeping body. Why this act of insubordination? Had he not told
her that she was not to make any overture? Now, because of this single act,
this seemingly innocent kiss, he was being reduced to a man fantasizing about
his own wife. A wife sleeping next to him! The kiss, he decided, was an act of
betrayal. A betrayal that was premeditated and cruel. The power in any
relationship, Aurobindo remembered his mother telling him, should rest with the
man. And where was his power now, he would like to know? All gone. All gone and
only left with an erection that refused to go away. This was what her kiss had
done to him.
Meanwhile, Shashwati too, felt a niggle of shame creep in.
She still could not explain to herself why she had done something so mad. Only
later, much later had it occurred to her that it had been a gesture had reeked
of desperation. The kind of desperation that did not become a dignified married
woman of her stature. Really, what had she expected? That Aurobindo would
suddenly forget all his values and kiss her back? That they would then embark
on reciprocal adoration? This was a marriage, for God’s sake, not a college
affair! What good did college affairs bring anyway, she asked herself. Had she
had seen her best friend suffer shame and abandonment and eventually a
premature death because of it? All affairs did was to make unmarried women
pregnant, leading them to suicide. Was she not a thousand times luckier, having
found a responsible husband with a fixed income and the promise of pension? She
looked forward to a flat at Ballygunge or Salt Lake eventually – the posh
neighborhoods of Kolkata. Aurobindo would sit for exams, get promoted and they
would have fixed deposits and insurance policies and gold. What more did she
need, really?
Now, because of her stupidity, her serious, no-nonsense
relationship with this man, her sole source of livelihood had been jeopardized.
She was not an idiot. She could feel his eyes on her all the time. Aurobindo
was obviously not happy. He had lain upon her only once since that night and it
had an awkward affair. For a brief while Shashwati had even considered
apologizing but no, she realized she did not have the courage to take up a
topic so difficult. Besides in her heart, she did not know whether she was
imagining it all. May be it was all paranoia. Was it not possible that he had
forgotten about it all and that the lack of sex had just been an unfortunate
coincidence? She could not risk bringing it up when he might have forgotten it.
So instead Shashwati went on cooking his favorite fish every
day.
************
But they could not avoid it for long. It brewed and brewed
in the twin whorls of their silence until it swelled up into a pregnant
disquiet.
Funnily enough, although the day Shashwati and Aurobindo
ended up talking to each other had all the hallmarks of a dramatic ending it
was anything but.
The wan blossoms of the crep jasmine shivered in the wind.
The humble perwinkle buds fluttered on their little tub. Shashwati’s little
veranda garden was being in the danger of being blown away that day. It was
around five in the afternoon and a sudden wall of sooty rainclouds had taken
over the dusk from every side. After days of the flat heat and sun, even the
crows and the stray dogs seemed to be overjoyed at the magisterial darkness,
lapping up the high breeze that suddenly picked up and twirled the plastic and
the leaves from the streets.
It was a Sunday. Shashwati was taking a nap and Aurobindo
watching an old film on their dilapidated, faithful television set when the
storm broke and a cloud of dust washed in. Shashwati leapt out of the bed and started
bolting the wooden windows. Her long plait danced behind her as she ran from
one window to the other, forcing the shutters closed.
Aurobindo pretended not to notice. He ignored, rather tried
his best to ignore Shashwati as she darted past him now and again, almost a
blur of her hues and curves.
By the time Shashwati had prepared the tea and biscuits, it
was pouring outside. It was so dark that she had to turn on the tubelight and
their lamp. It did not last for long though because the power soon went out
crushing them and the house in pitch black.
There were no candles in the house, so they lit an old
kerosene lantern. The ‘hurricane’ as it was called sat rotund between them,
bulging in the middle with a fiery glow.
As they sipped their tea and watched the pale, almost opaque
sheet of rain through their veranda, Aurobindo and Shashwati found the fire
from the hurricane doing silly things to them. For one thing, Aurobindo
unexpectedly found large circles of darkness under Shashwati’s eyes. They made
her look exhausted and brittle and gave him an idea as to how she would look in
a decade.
He did not realize perhaps, but he too looked different in
the chiaroscuro of the stormy twilight. A thin man on any day, he looked
emaciated under the shadows. The lamp cast bright spots on his cheeks, and he
was turned into a skeleton of angles and planes.
They both simultaneously felt a burst of pity for each
other.
‘Well, no work tomorrow I guess.’ Aurobindo’s voice was
hoarse with the habit of not talking.
‘Obviously. Leaving the house in this condition would be
silly’.
‘Is there enough food to last us? I don’t think the mongers
will sit tomorrow.’
‘Some eggs and vegetables. We will make do, I suppose.’
Shashwati ventured again, ‘Do you think you will be okay with a curry and some shukto?’
Aurobindo, for the first time in his life, wondered about
the layers of speech. He was pensive for a minute and then decided that the
shadows were thick enough for a risk.
‘Oh I will be fine…fine. What about you? Anything you need?
I know you are having the flow. Do you have painkillers?’
Shashwati sat still and gaped. Of course, by now the lamp
had almost died out and Aurobindo could only see that she was absolutely
motionless. Aurobindo had never ever spoken about her periods. It was taboo, as
far as Shashwati knew. At the time of the month, she would simply say she was
not feeling well and the painkillers would be there the next morning. That was
the custom. It shocked her immensely that her husband was suddenly saying the
words.
‘I do need some’, she managed finally, ‘but I hadn’t said
anything. How did you know?’
‘I saw you had changed the sheets this morning.’ Then he
smiled, ‘It has been three years. I know by now.’
‘Oh I see. You are right, yes. The anniversary is next week.
Do you have any plans on that day? I was thinking we could visit your mother.
She likes to see us on that day, no?’
Aurobindo squinted at Shashwati’s increasingly darkening
form. He could only see her silhouette now.
‘No. Let’s spend this year on our own. What do you think? We
could watch a film, yes?’
‘Okay…do you want to catch the new one?’
‘Yes, why not?’
‘All right then, that’s settled.’
‘One more thing…’
‘Yes?’
‘We have been married for three years now. I’ve been
thinking. I think it is time I call you by your name. Do you prefer Shashwati
or Chandni?’
There was a very long pause. Aurobindo wondered if Shashwati
had even heard him.
‘Chandni, please’, she whispered at last.
