Chapter 25: Salome - 3
"Salome…"
Her voice had floated to him in its usual lilt and he had looked up at her from where he had been seated at the table going through her investment portfolio. She had been standing by the window looking out for a while and he had noticed that she had been subdued throughout the day.
"Hmm...?" He had prompted her to continue.
"Salome. My name. Do you know that I don't know anyone else with that name?" She had finally said.
"It is an unusual name." He had agreed.
"My mother named me, you know. She chose that name after I was baptized in the church; ironic, don't you think? Maybe even sacrilegious. She had never really been the religious sort, but we still occasionally went to church and I took some Catechism classes growing up. I had always been a voracious reader and Bible was my first set of grand stories. Eventually I came across Salome and John the Baptist and I asked my mother why she had named after this dubious character. Why not Mary or Elizabeth, good solid Christian names."
He had turned away from the laptop to give her his complete attention, but she had still stood looking out the window.
"She told me that everyone wanted to be virtuous Mary's and Elizabeth's. That everyone wanted to be "good." She had decided that her daughter would not be like everybody. Her daughter would be beautiful and unique, a set apart from the rest, fawned over by kings and beggars alike. Entirely different from all the Mary's and Elizabeth's of the world."
She had been quiet for some time afterwards, but he had not spoken at all to break the silence for fear that she would stop talking. She had never talked of her childhood or her past before that day.
"Given what I became, she should have named me Mary. Not all Mary's in the Bible are known to be virtuous, you know." She had turned around them to face him, leaning back against the ledge with a smile.
He had gone home that night and had researched the Mary's of the Bible. There were several that came up, but only two were of prominence. Mary the Mother of Jesus was obviously the virtuous choice to whom Salome had referred. There was a second woman, Mary of Magdalene, who was a more controversial figure. She had been first identified in the Bible when she had washed Jesus' feet with precious oils and wiped them with her hair. There was also some reference to Jesus freeing her from 'the seven demons.' The point of contention in her history came in sixth century AD when Pope Gregory the Great noted in one of his sermons that Mary Magdalene was in fact the penitent woman with a past of prostitution, 'the seven demons' representing her vices. For many hundreds of years after that, this idea spread in the church and Mary Magdalene went on to become identified as the woman who turned from her wicked ways and became a follower of Jesus. However, in more recent history, the work of many scholars had found that Mary Magdalene was in fact not a prostitute and had deemed the whole thing to be one of the great misidentifications in history. In fact, some theories – if the popular novel Da Vinci Code was anything to go by – even posited that Mary Magdalene had in fact been the wife of Jesus.
The part of the story that had struck him had been the misidentification. Mary Magdalene had been cleared of the charges raised against her and had been officiated to a much more prominent status in the church. So, why then would Salome say that she should have been named after this particular figure from the Bible? He hardly thought that it was because she did not know of this bit of controversial history herself. In fact, if he could gather as much from 30 minutes of research, then someone like Salome would be much more knowledgeable. There had been something about the whole thing that had stuck with him and he had had this nagging feeling that he had been missing something that should have been obvious to him.
"But, alas, I am Salome. And sometimes our names – or our namesakes – determine our fates. Don't you think, Gaurav?"
She had laughed at the end and he had been determined to look up the history of Salome as well, which eventually led to him buying a copy of the Luini that now hung up in his parlor.
He had asked her whether she thought his name matched him; whether she thought he had a great deal of pride. Even though his tone had been teasing, she had turned quiet for some time.
"You are nothing like I expected, Gaurav. Nothing about you matches your name, your sire, or your family. You alone defy your fate." She had eventually said.
He had been taken aback by her proclamation and had chuckled without humor before he told her, "If I defied fate, Salome, you would be my wife now and I would have taken you and my mother far away from this place."
"Destiny is still yours to make, Gaurav, even if your first plans didn't work out." She had told him in answer.
"Have you eaten dinner?" Vidya's voice called him back from his musings.
He looked at her, holding his copy of Animal Farm in her hands, a Gaon Waali who was nothing like what he had expected.
He shook his head. "Let's go out to dinner today."
She smiled, a surprised relief evident there, and he smiled back.
He waited for her to go ahead of him and when he followed her out of the room, he asked, "So, what puzzle do you have for me today?"
She laughed at his question, "You better hope dinner is long, because this will take a while."
With the return of this routine, the mystery that was Salome receded back into its venerable glassed shelf in his mind…
Indian Idol 15
