Chapter 39: The Song of Songs
She didn't listen to her lectures that night even though the CDs did get played many many times as she repeatedly rewound and replayed just the parts when he spoke to her. She was finding that everything she thought of as an exaggeration of angst was not quite so… she could swear that one could actually feel a heart melting, when something transformed into warm liquid in your chest and it flowed down to spread its warmth to everything it touched…
She gradually got out of her chair and walked to her closet to change into her sleep-shirt… her movements were almost lethargic as she leaned against the door of the closet to pull the jeans off, the everyday chore taking her much longer because she couldn't seem to use enough force to do it. Once it was finally off, she placed it on handle of the chair next to her and just as she turned around to reach for her sleep-shirt, her mind registered what else had been on the chair. She looked back to find the shirt that he had been wearing last night. She picked it up now and could see where she had ripped it down the middle… her face colored as she remembered and she held it close to her chest, the smell of his cologne and something that was definitely just him snaring her senses. She abandoned the night shirt that she had reached for and instead put her arms through his torn shirt, clutching it closed over her breasts where the rip in it gaped widely open.
Part of her was glad that he wasn't here with her tonight… she felt a listlessness that she couldn't explain – everything was registering in parts than as its whole and all her senses were ten times magnified - like now, as she lay in bed, she could feel each thread trailing from the ripped edges of his shirt caress her skin… her eyes drifted close as sensation took over and then her mind filled in with an image of him... He was stroking up the length of her leg… trailing his fingers over her belly button and up her midline until his hands came up to the edges of the shirt that were covering her breasts and pulled it apart. Her face turned sideways against her pillow to mask her cry of desire… she felt drowsy from her body and from her memories of him… Her mind was trying to will him back to her side… but at the same time, she didn't want to see him… she didn't know how she should act… she didn't know what she would say…
She realized then that she had never really talked to him on the phone before...they had never had that sort of a relationship growing up. She didn't know what she would even say if she did get a chance to talk to him. She lay there in her bed for a long while thinking, alternating between wanting to hear his voice and feeling that that would be too much… an idea finally came to her when she was trying to picture where he was and as the scenery of Cochin took root in her mind… Her mother had always been into watching movies from all over India rather than just ones in Hindi and it was a habit that Gauri had picked up early on with her… During one such evening with her mother, she remembered watching an old Malayalam movie in which the main leads become separated from each other and the woman writes a letter to the man in code. She gives him the verses to a particular book in the Bible as a way of confessing her feelings for him… in Gauri's young mind, she had thought that the message was quite scandalous, although she had still thought that it was quite a clever way of saying something that one didn't want to say directly. Her mother had thought that it was the most romantic thing ever and Gauri had rolled her eyes at her.
She of course had no Bible handy, so she grabbed her laptop to bring it back to bed. Google ended up being her Bible resource for the night and after about fifteen minutes of search, she finally found what she was looking for… she picked up her phone, feeling strangely apprehensive, and typed in what she wanted and hit Send before she lost her nerve.
***
He had just gotten back to the hotel after a late meeting with the client and had bid his father good night and walked into his room when his phone beeped.
He had been looking at it intermittently all through the day and the evening to see if she would call, but she hadn't. Not that he had expected that she would, but a man could always hope for a pleasant surprise. He loosened his tie now as he looked at his phone. There was a text from her. He paused in his motions as read the message.
Song of Songs. 3:1
He had no idea what that meant and he left his tie on as he grabbed his laptop to type in what she had written into Google. It came up quickly; it was chapter 3, verse 1 of the book Song of Songs from the Bible.
He had never realized that the Bible had scandalous material, because the verse read,
"One night as I lay in bed, I yearned deeply for my lover, but he did not come."
He re-read the message five times to make sure that he had indeed read it correctly, all the while checking his phone to make sure that the message had indeed come from Gauri's phone.
When he finally sat down on the bed, his heart having slowed back to its baseline, he called the reception desk with the oddest request that he was sure they had gotten today.
"Do you have a copy of the Bible somewhere there?"
"Pardon me, sir?" The woman asked.
"A Bible, you know, the Christian Bible? Do you have a copy somewhere?" he repeated.
"Umm… Would you hold, sir?" She requested after some hesitation and he heard the generic jazz music playing as she put him on hold. Jazz… he didn't think any jazz would ever sound generic to him ever again… Or that Hindi song that had played at the end of it with lyrics that had had a visceral effect on his wife, even though the aphrodisiac had finally loosened its stranglehold on her by then…
When dawn had finally broken through and he had felt her clutch him tightly in her ecstasy, he had realized that he had been wrong before… there was a difference between having sex and making love.
The woman finally came back on the phone and it said something about their impeccable hospitality when she replied, "We will be securing a copy of it shortly. We will have it brought up to your room, Sir. Will there be anything else?"
He smiled. "No, that would be all. Thank you very much."
A half hour later found him showered, changed and in bed with the strangest reading material he had ever thought he would read in bed. Even though the Bible was a very long book, Song of Songs was a relatively short one and he read it in full in a half hour. He allowed that the book may have a context or metaphor that he was not privy to, but it was also sensual in the highest. He wondered how Gauri had come across it.
And finally when he had re-read once more, he sent her his reply… and realized that these days in the beautiful Cochin were about to get long, and the nights even longer…
***
She didn't know what she expected, but it surprised her when she got a text back from him and it said,
Song of Songs, 7: 11-12
She searched for that one and found that they were the same verses the man had used to confess to the woman in the movie.
"Come, my love, let us go out into the fields and spend the night among the wildflowers. Let us get up early and go out into the vineyards. Let us see whether the vines have budded, whether the blossoms have opened, and whether the pomegranates are in flower. And there I will give you my love".
She held the phone to her chest as she imagined the words leap off the screen and onto her, swelling in its passion as it absorbed into each and every pore of her being.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
** The movie mentioned is indeed real, as are the scenes from the movie; it's a Malayalam movie called "Namukku Parkkam Munthiri Thoppukal" ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiNh9K61sN4 (start at 6:56)
Chat Clubs
Members Lounge
56