Chapter 43: Disintegration
He remembered one night several years ago when he had had two drinks too many at an office party and had come back home feeling a heavy buzz clouding his senses. He had turned on his laptop to find that his desktop background had rotated to a new one – one of those NASA spacescapes adapted for PC desktops… He remembered being mesmerized by the sight, feeling as if the explosion of color on the screen was diffusing into a soft glow right in front of his eyes… that somehow his entire being could disintegrate into tiny particles and travel through the screen to be absorbed into the wondrous and brilliant mass that was the universe out there… it was a moment when his father, his mother, and even Salome had disappeared… nothing and no one had mattered… he was blissfully alone and spread out into so many billions of miniscule particles that no one could piece him back together… he had imagined that there was some sort of self-realization in such absolute disintegration of the self…he had stayed that way for a while staring at his desktop, until eventually it had rotated to another spacescape and the magic had disappeared…
It was now three hours since they had been left alone and what the voice had warned was certainly happening… the wall that his wife was chained to was certainly moving closer to him…
He wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn't…
There was no way that she couldn't know by now… because he knew… there were traces of oil mixed with the water that was streaming down at regular intervals…. Not enough to be known right away… but now that close to four or five hours had passed since she had been chained to that wall, the trace amounts of oil that refused to wash away like the water that was carrying it down were starting to stick to her skin, serving as a sinful adhesive for the droplets of water that clung like dew onto the dips and valleys of her glorious body…
He made himself close his eyes so that he couldn't see anymore…. But she refused to leave his mind's eye… and he was back in that room, reveling in the buzz of heavy liquor, watching the infiniteness of the universe, and feeling as if he was disintegrating slowly…
She knew the moment his eyes closed… the whisper of his lids shielding the intensity of his gaze from her body swept over her in sheets of hot and cold. She raised her eyes simultaneously… the music played on… the language and the words had changed many times over, but the sentiments remained the same, the melody tiptoeing up her body stealthily, touching her here and there when she couldn't reach down and brush it off…
She saw his lips part as he swallowed hard… he put his head back against the wall as a bead of sweat made its way down his throat… she watched its slow descent and knew that her breathing turned shallow when it caught in the dip of his neck and paused….
The song reached a crescendo as if on cue and paused as well…
She held her breath…
The song started again just as the bead of moisture decided to resume its path down. She had not really allowed herself to look properly at his bare chest before, as worried as she had been about the chafing and bleeding on his wrists and ankles from the shackles. But he had been relatively still for the past two hours and his wounds no longer bled…
The motion of the bead sliding down his skin held her hypnotized and she pulled in her lower lip without thought…. And bit down hard on it when the stream at her back restarted in just the same moment… she couldn't help but whimper as she sucked in the edge of her lip where she could now taste blood.
She had known that he would have heard it, but it still startled her when he opened his eyes.
She knew then that he had known that she had been staring at him… the thought was now so mortifying that she closed her eyes and tilted her head up to let the water catch at her forehead and run down her face… she felt the cut on her lips with the tip of her tongue as she straightened her head…
…and looked directly into his eyes…
Her belly sucked in reflexively and her feet rose up on its tip-toes, making the chains on her ankles fidget in protest…
The light caught and glinted off the bare skin of her shoulder that was now gleaming… he focused on that spot so that he would not look lower… and see her tightening belly that was responding to his mere look as if he had stroked her there….
They were both starting to disintegrate…
---------------------
Kumkum Bhagya
Anupamaa
Current Affairs
Bigg Boss 19
