And in the end, we were all just humans, drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.
-Christopher Poindexter
A week had flown by in the most languorous of paces, each hour killing odds and ends of the strength she had mustered up from the corners of her mind the day he had left for some township across the border. This strength was essential to her functioning normally, since she hadn't lived a solitary day without him ever since they had met. On the first day her heart seemed to have been doused in paranoia, till the second he had called to inform her of his safe arrival. The second day slowly started picking up bits and bobs of nausea as her senses got acquainted to the pregnant peace smothering their room, the crystal clear clacking of the rat and gazing for hours at a stretch at the crumbling wallpaper of the ceiling. "Yahaan koi network ki problem chal rahi hai - shayad, har roz phone na kar pau," he had informed her that night, as she had hung on to his every word, sketching in the canvas of memory an imaginary image of him talking, the receiver wedged between the crook of his neck and his shoulder. The third day was worse, she slowly realized. His words, from the phone last night replayed in her mind like a broken tape, battling and winning against understanding whatever Maithili had been trying to instruct her about in the kitchen that afternoon. The fourth day, the first of his kisses from the night before he had left, hounded her heart as the water sluiced down her face, rolling down her neck as she stood shivering in the shower stall. The fifth day, she spent the evening sitting on a stool across his cupboard and surreptitiously slanted her gaze every once in a while to the column of his shirts dangling athwart the closet. The blushing dawn of the sixth day saw Maithili giggling at the beautiful girl adorning a voluminous BSD shirt who sat in front of that fascinating mirror, making loony faces. The seventh day, all hell broke loose. Kakisa delivered the finest of her sarcastic scoffs, coming upon the fourth charred parantha that she had pensively slumped onto the audience of the rattling steel plate. Bapusa received the morning cup of tea devoid of its usual condiment of the two generous spoons of sugar. And when finally the phone pierced the silence swathing the house sometime during the late hours of the night, she had shouted some peeved profanity she didn't know she was in knowledge of, at her particularly shocked husband on the other end of the line.
"Paro!" His voice was followed almost immediately by her horrified gasp, echoing through their room - then, shrouded in darkness. She thought she heard him chuckle, and through that handsomely throaty laughter streamed in another line, blasphemous as it was to her ears. "Pata nahi tha mujhe, ki tujhe yeh sab bhi bolna aata hai!"
"Nahi- woh, hum," she mumbled through a mortified smile before her anger stormed in. "Aap mhaare ko itne dino mein ek baar phone nahin kar sakte the?" He might have interrupted her tirade or tried to, at the very least. But there was no stopping the fervent young heart that night. "Nahi - aap humein bolne dijiye pehle." If he was astounded, he didn't show it. If he was secretly smiling at the antics of his endearing wife, he didn't let her know of that too. "Pata nahin - kal aadhi raat ko, mhaare ko aapki awaaz, woh gussa, woh baat karne ka dhang, kuch yaad nahin aa raha tha! Darr gayye the hum!" She heard her him inhale a fairly audible gasp, and her voice softened. "Aap ko...aapko mhaare yaad nahi aati? Wahan...wahaan aap akele kaise reh lete hai? Jagah kaisi hai?" She was rambling by then, unknown to the fact how deeply her carelessly thrown words had affected his stature. She had just asked him guilelessly to describe hell - it was almost morning, the odd hour of 4 a.m., he was awake and without her presence anywhere in his vicinity. His shoulders had drooped and he had sighed, as if wanting nothing more than the woman on the phone to materialize before him that very instant. "Kahiye naa? Yaad nahi aati humaari?" Her words sounded childlike and he was sure that if could see her then, her eyes would be twinkling with hope. "Aati hai na...boht" His own speech sounded outlandish to him, and till the very syllables had let afloat his mouth, he himself couldn't believe of his ardent admission. And then immediately he added a small non-committal kabhi kabhi. After he had opened the deepest niches of his heart to someone, anyone, he had felt an inexplicable need to close down those gates again, to restore a semblance of his privacy. It had always been that way for him.
Nonetheless, she smiled. Then she smiled some more. He could hear it through the telephone receiver (a fact otherwise so hopelessly romantic and foolish at the same time, but refusing to dawn on his mind). And then she giggled. And his heart roared. It pleased him to know, that he was able to light that fire in her heart, make her smile and laugh by just few simple words. "Hasna band kar Paro!" He said, like he always did out of sheer habit; even though she hardly listened to him. But he didn't tell her how it was almost like a secret pleasure he indulged in whenever he acknowledged her laughter, her happiness - even more so when the trigger was him. She had danced her way into his life, like a silly sunbeam breaching in through a broken window and rendering his dark room, aglow. And eventually the constant battle in his head between the fiction that he could overlook her existence and the fact that she was the entirety of his world, could be finally silenced. Those garrulous giggles of hers, were slowly weaving a song to the chaos of his life, rendering it a meaning, he didn't know existed.
A pregnant pause followed. She thought she heard a hesitating pulse, as her hands clutched onto the phone tighter. "Ghar pe sab theek? Bapusa? Tu?" And then she launched into an exhaustive narrative of the days gone by, stories her mouth couldn't spin fast enough. "Aur Kakisa ne kuch kaha tujhe? Bata mujhe -abhi!" The conversant anger of his tone was suppressed only when she repeatedly assayed that she was truly alright. She was beginning to understand, that whenever her husband made a big deal of the trifling of matters, it was only because he cared for her. Deeply.
Her husband though, with every passing word leaving her mouth felt an overpowering need to touch her, to feel the reality of her. His mind had earlier never boasted of extraordinary imaginative powers, but they seemed to be spurred into action and he had begun picturing himself with her in every picture frame she was so diligently describing.
"Paro...tu ne aaj kaunsa rang pehna hai?" The acute necessity to picture her, in his bed, their room and missing him, seemed to be reining his restless body. If his harmless whisper of a question had flustered her, she didn't admit it. Instead she told him in similar murmurs of the yellow and the princely blue. He closed his eyes almost as though the whorl of colors and sensations was almost too intense to bear. "Uss din jo..." She confirmed, her face then reddening in the quietest of undertones. And then, an undercurrent of desirous memories hummed along the column of air between them.
He imagined grazing his fingers over her face, tracing the arch of her cheekbones, the hammering pulse in her throat, and resting his palm against the tender skin at the back of her neck. He imagined her hair that spilled against the designs of one of the pillars of the verandah and his hand shifting casually to caress the length. He knew it would feel like silk under his fingertips. And so would the dip of her waist, that titillating curve tantalizing him even when he was miles away from her. The memory of the warm press of her body against his was dizzying, more fierce and delicious than the most delirious music. He could picture the flush of blood spread over her face and down to the neckline of the maize yellow blouse, staining her pale skin. Only if he had been there in the haveli, with her - he would have known that reality and his imagination could very well, blur their boundaries.
An officer burst in through his quarter that very moment, resulting him in delivering a rebuke and his wife across the line, to cringe. "Kitna gussa karte hain aap!" He laughed, "...haan aur tu bhi toh nahi hai yahaan, gusse ko kam karne ke liye!" Then she relayed, but the obvious. " Toh agli baar se humein aapke saath le jayega naa!" The paused laughter, continued. Oh, how happy it made her whenever she saw that boyish side to him; how ecstatic her heart felt with joy, that she was the reason behind his laughter.
She asked him softly, if he had eaten dinner. She inquired about the happenings of his day. He, was only too happy to share. He had told of his feelings, his sorrows in the quiet of the night to little doll she had gifted him as a child, wishing to stuff and cage in it, the furor of his emotions for fifteen years. Upon her arrival he had little by little, begun to realize how amazing it was to have finally found someone who wanted to hear about all the things that went about in his head, and then whisper back words that could finally render the blur of his thoughts into the tangible.
He heard a soft yawn in his ear a while later, and promptly asked her to go to sleep. His wife stopped, with her loving beckoning. "Major saab..." she paused. There was something in her tone, in the use of that moniker she had especially for him, that got to him every time. It set afire a sweet ache deep inside of him, triggering a response of reddened collars that he could only hope she wasn't aware of. He heard her draw in a deep breath a second later. And then another. And the swelling tide of a very recent memory returned to him, its contents palpable. He nearly saw it happen at the back of his mind, the hazel eyes turning left first, and then right to check for an audience. An ingressive click sounded, as her lips pursed with a sharp intake of breath and the kiss was delivered. Her eyes clenched shut were then masked to everything but the sensation of his skin under her mouth. An enthralling magic that she was slowly, but readily familiarizing herself with, rose through her body, making her flesh tingle. She mused of the fact that he had sauntered into the routes of her heart, sneaking in stealthily as her ears had throbbed with the echoes of his footfalls, as he whispered a quavering goodnight, promising her of his return tomorrow. She fell asleep peacefully and instantly, that night dreaming of that addicting allure of him, that made its presence felt in the smallest of things. It could be the way in which he looked at her, as if she was the only one he could see in a room full of people, akin to the eyes of a blind man glancing upon the sun for the very first time.
And miles away from her, upon closing his eyes, a staggering visual registered in her husband's brain - her lips on his face, the sound of her kiss reverberating across the phone, as if it were a vehicle of some elusive dialog that could put a stop to all that was wrong in his life. In fact reminiscing any of their days from the very beginning could be paraphrased into a gazillion of small sensual travails - a stare thrown in passing, a fleeting smile, and knees brushing together. They all were healing his brokenness, and he was for once, letting them do their work.
Because after all, in the face of everything he had been through, he - his heart too had a story; a fairy tale, akin to hers, that even he wished to adhere to.
---
Based on the the recent episodes that have set our hearts aflutter and on the song Siyaah Raatein!
---
Other RR work -
Indian Premier League
Music Corner
