Dedicated to the Pure Flower of Womanhood

Ok, People,

That time when he got her out of that scary brothel place, he had held her to him for a while as they hid from the raiding police party. She had felt his chest, broad and smooth under her hands, and seen that odd amulet of his up close, where it lay on its black cord in the hollow of his throat, his pulse beating hard below it. That was the sexiest amulet ever. She wished she'd had the nerve to tell him that. On their one outing before the wedding, she had wanted to wear a sari for him; she knew she had a nicely curved midriff. She had imagined him admiring her figure in quick glances, perhaps even venturing something bolder as they came home in the auto. And she, brushing his hands off, would have pouted in punishment, and he pleaded for forgiveness the way men did in the films she sometimes watched. But those obtuse sisters of hers had insisted on dolling her out in a smart and shiny and all-concealing salwar kameez, and the midriff had had to wait its turn.

And then, his Aai's Puja diktat. She had abided by it, it was her nature to abide by such things. But she had waited with eagerness, greedily inhaling the musky male odor of his shirts as she took them off the hook he always hung them on when he got back home, and scrunching them roughly and possessively as she brought them back from the verandah, washed clean and hot from the strong afternoon sun. Because she was mild-mannered and obedient, and usually kept her eyes averted from him when others were around, nobody guessed at her thoughts. Nobody, that is, except perhaps Manav himself. She puzzled him once in a while, she could see, but he was so brought up to believe in good women's virtue and chastity and remoteness from passion that he would shake off the puzzling thought guiltily and treat her always with the most frustrating gentleness and courtesy. Often, as they talked quietly in the evenings, she'd lay her cheek on his hard shoulders, and her yielding body against his, silently willing him to break his mother's rule, delighting in his evident awareness of her, and secretly angry at his reluctant but final self-control. Weren't men supposed to be the weak ones, responding haplessly to a woman's touch? When the tape exonerated him she had wept (of course) with relief; he was really hers after all, and Bappa had been good to her. Yet had not some tiny unacknowledged part of her dwelt in unwilling and horrified fascination on the idea of him as those pictures had presented him... virile and playful and uncaring and waiting to be shamelessly pleasured?

How now, in this welter of emotions and hungers, to pretend indifference? How now, so late in the day, to think of strategy?

My favourite part is where you compared Manav to the bhajia that she was frying- crunchy outside, moist inside and spicy all over. How apt!!!

@ Piya: Thanks! Praise is always welcome. 😊

@ Kool: Morning!

I'm glad you found it funny.

Though I think I should tell you that it was written in right earnest, as a sort of warm-up and quick mental reconnaissance of the facts at hand, and the general lie of the land in this regard. 😊

Women have more surprises inside them than men usually give them credit for. Most women, though, as I think you know, are conditioned to playing out approved roles, one of them being apparent disdain for all things bodily and sensual. So you're good not only if you refrain from sex except (reluctantly) to conceive - and certainly from showing any interest in it - but also, for example, if you bathe for two minutes in cold water, instead of six in hot, and eat less and sleep hardly at all, as an indicator of your ultimately non-corporeal essence. Was reading the autobiography of Rashasundari Devi (a 19th century Bengali housewife, one of the first to actually write the story of her life) translated by Tanika Sarkar (the same historian I wrote you about). There the young married heroine is obliged preferably not to eat at all in public, even in the family kitchen that always had a dozen people in it, for the sight of a woman relishing her food was considered unthinkably gross and that woman shamefully self-indulgent. She must not express preferences, she must eat in private, and just to survive, as simply and sparingly as possible, on leftovers if there were any, or not at all if there weren't. Rashasundari represents this as the conventional wisdom on virtuous upper class women's food habits in her time. She writes that she often went to bed hungry after feeding everyone else, and her mother tells her sadly that she's in what we would call a lose-lose situation: people, particularly the elder women in her in-law's house, would be annoyed and contemptuous if she were to ask for food, and if she didn't ask, nobody would think of offering it to her.

!!!!! Makes you think, doesn't it?

C

Why don't thesedumb CV's show them wanting each other . The more I read C's scripts the more I get angrier at the CV's ..

They can make this show so much more interesting . They have the perfect lead ,good looking so compatible and in love , but where is the damn passion...

keep up the good work C, till the CV's do it ...you keep us happy .

Fascinating from the start to the end.

A shiver ran though the spine- Is our kind sometimes really competing with spicy bhajias in the eyes of fairer ones? That an amulet can ward off was an old knowledge. But that it can have such mesmerizing effects on a sharp, observant and incredibly beautiful eye is a revelation. The Obtuse sisters had made us acutely missing the delicious scene of an uncontrollable rough hand on a lovely midriff revealed through a red-chiffon.

And how well a villainous evidence was turned into a token manifest of her inner desires.

The winds are blowing in right directions.