The Kiss

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.