Maryada FF: Vidya-Gaurav (p. 30) - Page 12

Originally posted by: sri_4

I have pointed before too..and asking again..is there a reason u haven't named the story till now..and would we ever see salome's picture?😳

Chapter 27: The Truth – Part 2

Salome's words repeated themselves in his head time and again; for some reason, he couldn't get rid of the feeling that she had been trying to tell him something – something obvious and not so obvious all at the same time. She was not a woman who was cryptic for the sake of being cryptic; in fact, even though she was a master at playing games with words, she did not waste them…

What could she have meant?

"Gaurav…" he heard his wife's voice calling him in a voice that had a softness that only came from uncertainty.

He had been sitting at the table in their bedroom for some time now looking aimlessly out the window. He didn't know when she had come into the room.

H let go of Salome and smiled as he turned his attention onto Vidya.

"If you won't mind my interrupting…" She started. He couldn't explain the agitation that he felt in that moment as he suddenly got up from his chair and almost grabbed her hand. Almost… he caught himself at the last moment and pulled his hand back. Instead, his tone came out harsher than he intended as he said, "You are my wife! If I cannot be interrupted for your sake, then whose?"

She reared back in surprise and her expression looked as perplexed as what he was feeling at his unexpected outburst.

And then he did take her hand, although gently now, merely to reassure her… and himself.

"I'm sorry…" it came out softly, certain in its uncertainty, just as hers had been before.

Even though she shook her head, she did not say anymore and he felt out of sorts as he gathered that he had truly upset her for the first time. Not to mention that what he had said had been the height of hypocrisy. How was she really his wife? Aside from tying a mangalsutr around her neck, he lived with her as if he would with a roommate. A friend rather… A very close friend, he amended… They had no other relations. And she did not even seem curious as to why they didn't have other relations. Why wasn't she?

And just like that, his ire was up once more and his usually sound capability for logic and reason fell by the wayside as the uncharacteristic anger took over. "But, you know that you have not truly become my wife. Aren't you in the least bit curious why?" He said to her even as he told himself to not project his own issues onto her.

This time, he did see a look of hurt pass through her eyes briefly before she pulled on her hand to get it out of his grip. He looked down, just then realizing that he was still holding onto her.

"I'm sorry… I don't know what's wrong with me today…" he said again, exhaling deeply, frustrated with himself and the confusing women in his life. Well…he corrected himself; it was more apt to say that he was the one confused when the women appeared to be slightly more sure of their feelings and sentiments.

"Isn't this how husbands act when they are in love with another woman?" His head jerked back in shock when he heard her statement, but she had already turned towards the bed and had started walking away from him.

He stood still for a few moments, convinced that he had misunderstood her.

"How do you know?" He finally asked when he could not be convinced.

She didn't answer, but stood at the foot of their bed with her back to him.

He walked closer behind her and asked again, "Vidya, how do you know?"

"You left some pictures of her on the laptop that you gave me."

"Where? Show me…"

She looked back at him with another look that he could not read. He could not read his wife at all…

When he didn't back off, she walked over to her laptop and he waited several minutes as she pulled up the folder. And then he saw it… they were those pictures… he had taken them almost two years ago, one of the few moments in which he thought he had caught Salome completely unaware and had seen her as she truly was… a genuinely sweet and loving woman…

He swallowed hard as he saw the slideshow of pictures and imagined what his wife must have felt when she had discovered them…. He had never seen Salome look at him with as much love as she had in those pictures. It brought fresh pain now as he recalled her earlier request that he never contact her again. However, he also could not ignore the simultaneous distress that he felt that Vidya had had to find out this way. Short of discovering them in bed together, he could not think of a worse way to find out about the other woman.

"How long have you known?" his voice came out thick and hoarse and he cleared his throat.

She did not answer him for a moment, but then said, "Since the night I told you the Infinity Paradox."

That seemed eons ago to him; so much has happened between them since then. In fact, he considered that day to be the true start of their relationship. "Four months…" he whispered.

She nodded.

"You have known for four months?" He asked as the truth of it really registered. "Why didn't you say anything?"

She looked back at him with an expression that told him how awkward that would have been.

"I haven't seen her since we got married…" he told her then, the words spilling out of his mouth without forethought.

"Do you want to?" she asked and as he looked at her, he didn't know what to tell her. He didn't know the answer himself.

"I don't know…" he said truthfully. "She and I… we have a complicated relationship."

"Why did you not marry her?" she asked again and something in her tone made him imagine how long she must have wanted to ask him all these questions.

"She wouldn't have me… Mother was opposed… there are other reasons too, but they are less important."

"Do you still love her?"

He closed his eyes when he heard the question that he dreaded. There was no easy way to answer such a thing… Love itself was a complicated emotion. Regardless, his wife deserved the truth and so he did tell her, "Yes…"

For a second time that day, he felt an intense and almost unbearable pressure in his chest when he saw his wife's face in that moment. She lowered her eyes from him, but he saw that she pursed her lips before biting down on the lower lip tightly before she gave him a single nod… as though this confirmation was what she had suspected all along…

She remained that way for several minutes while he battled an untenable urge to take her in his arms. He wanted to rip his heart open and show it to her so that she could see what he could explain to no one, not even himself. Maybe if she saw, she would understand what words couldn't do justice to. But of course, such were senseless thoughts… despite what Lord Hanuman did, it was impossible to rip one's heart open and show anyone what hid there that you yourself couldn't see…

And thus, when she turned away from him and walked out of the room with the excuse that she needed to help out in the kitchen, he didn't stop her.

The agony of silence was preferable to the fallibility of words…

superb update.

Originally posted by: rusha4003

FABULOUS !!!

I was waiting to see how you'd handle thie scene ... Gaurav coming to the realisation that Vidya knows ...

Beautifully done ... 👏

My heart went out to Vidya... and Gaurav of course ... !

Cant wait for the next update ...

Does their dinner date still stand ????

Chapter 28: Where the Wild Things Are…

The beast growled. The motion parted its gargantuan mouth and revealed canines that were poised to sink into soft flesh and viscera before it would hit the hardness of the bone and that too would give in and crush with an uneven jaggedness under the piercing force. The thought was jarring and she crouched in stillness as she held its gaze. Its loud breathing was measured and even, at odds with the deathly gleam in its eye and the spittle oozing out of its mouth in anticipation.

She closed her eyes for a moment, just enough to take a deep breath without the face of the striped beast looming in her vision, and in the next blink of an eye, she sprang up and ran. There was only a flash of a beat before she heard the whoosh of air as the beast jumped off the rock where it had been perching back on its hind legs waiting for her to make just this move. What was the thrill of the catch without this chase… and now it had begun…

She ran without looking back or stopping… the time for both had run out…

While her stamina may have been a poor match for the beast, she was nimble and light as a sprite and the tiger skin around her hips and chest was tightly bound, neither loose nor long to snag on twigs or shrubs to slow her down.

The beast had been stalking her for five days now; so patiently, she thought… to drive up her agitation and its excitement…

She knew the jungle like the back of her hand and her path now was not straight. The beast's bulk had to slow it down, although from the sound of it, it didn't seem so.

She imagined that it was gaining on her… she imagined that she was now faster… she imagined that her feet would lift her up and up… until she could fly…

She headed straight for a tree and at the last moment jerked to a sharp left … she heard the immediate growl behind her and imagined that she had made the beast mad…

The thudding of her heart merged in and out of rhythm with the pounding of the beast's paws behind her… she felt as if she was plowing through air, diving headlong into a crash landing…

And then there it was… The mist... it was spreading up and around…

She knew it would be denser fog farther down…

The gushing force of the water was deafening at this distance and she knew that it was close to a 120 feet drop, which was about eighty more than what anyone had willingly attempted to plunge into...

But there was an 800 pound mammoth of a white tiger charging at her from behind…

Stopping had never been an option, she had known…

And so she sped up until her feet flew up and off the solid ground and into the mist…

"Vidya…"

She paused in the rapid strokes of her pen, startled at the unexpected sound of her name.

She shut her journal quickly as a knock sounded, a gentle tap that repeated three times.

She closed her eyes and sighed; she did not want to see him just now, she did not want to go to their room… she just wanted to be alone…

She had been doing precisely what he had told her not to do, wandering the house at night. Except, she was not wandering, not really… she had found one of the guest bedrooms with a window that faced the west side that no one used and had locked herself inside… not wanting to run the risk of meeting the true monster of the night.

Who she should have feared was the one at the door…

The White Tiger…

Chapter 29: Where the Wild Things are… - Part 2

She did not open the door and after a few minutes, he seemed to accept that she wanted to be left alone and he was gone...

The next few days passed in a silence that was… strained, to say the least. For some reason, the fact that they talked of the other woman seemed to make some hitherto unknown difference in her reaction to the situation…

There was something about an unacknowledged truth that made it an un-truth… and un-truths bred false hope without permission…

Despite how rational she had been to that point, she realized now how truly dependent that rationality had been on the un-truth… because there was no such rationality to be found in her now… Pragmatism had somehow flown out the open window when he had grabbed onto her hand and asked her why she wasn't curious that he was not sharing her bed. How dare he?

She closed her eyes and recited five silent Ohms… something that she had had to do with regular frequency over the past few days whenever she thought of what happened… even though she could count on one hand how many times she had been angry in her life, it was still not a lost memory… she knew what the physical manifestations were… there was the classic galvanic skin response of course… she could feel the heat rising in her, making her palms damp, increasing her skin conductance… in fact, the heat was the major indicator… she could feel it everywhere on her body. It was a most unpleasant sensation and she wished to be rid of it. She wished to be rid of this new awareness of raw emotions; she had not a disposition that could be in harmony with something so strong… and each time she saw her husband now, it rose in her like a wave… a heat wave… so, she wished to not be near him… to be far away from him in fact. Aside from that first night after his confession when he had sought her out at the west side of the house, he had not made any more attempts. She was glad.

She had finished Animal Farm and, true to what he had said, she thought it the best allegory she had ever read.

All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

She had never read such a remarkable facet of the human condition explained so succinctly and with such ease. She could write two epics' worth over the next seven lifetimes and never truly arrive at that point with such fluidity as Orwell did.

She had gone back to Gaurav's parlor to replace the book and get another; as she perused the selection once again, she was tempted to grab Orwell's other book on the shelf, '1984'. But then another book that was next to it grabbed her attention and she pulled that one instead.

It was The Prince by an author whose name she could not pronounce. She tried to take the phonemes of the name apart and sound it out, but was interrupted in her progress by a voice behind her.

"It is pronounced, Ni-cco-lo Ma-cchia-velli."

A gasp rose from deep within, but she silenced it before it escaped her lips. There was that galvanic skin response again, but this time it was not anger, but fear that made her palms sweat. Still facing the books, she closed her eyes and said five Ohms… and then turned around to face the imposing stature of her father-in-law.