Part 9: Confluence
The wedding was only six days away and it was a miracle she still had her two feet on the ground. What must have come across as rejoicing only left her unsettled when everything had been smooth executions after mild setbacks - from getting those difficult Rajasthani hand embroidered shawls she wanted as part of her sendoff gifts to the particular brand of Lipstick that had gone out-of-stock at first and then home delivered with an apology that they had made a mistake checking their inventory.
Even him.
She was only glad that he didn't think she had anything to do with marring his name. The speculation had faded like it had never begun when - admittedly, to his credit - he didn't breathe life into it and had been an adult about his reasoning with the press - which was so unlike him. Not that she knew him intimately to understand his every move, but from common knowledge of what she'd learnt from the papers, this had been his silent period ever. If that hadn't scored brownie points with anyone, it sure did with her.
Ping! An announcement came on the speakers sending a wave of excitement onto the people in the waiting area. His flight was here. Finally. Binoy Varghese Abraham has arrived on Indian soil to take Sana Ruhee Dehlave's hand in marriage, she altered the speaker announcement in her head.
But the first time she'd seen him in a Mumbai local train her mind had been far from having any favorable impression of him, let alone marriage.
It was in the days before the green room incident that she'd found the richness of a predictable middle class life in an everyday train. When once, his phone call had come as a surprise while taking a walk in a neighborhood far from her apartment, she'd slipped into a nearby station and taken the quotidian train back home. Even so, she'd spent the entire thirty minutes with her hands placed on her lap in knots, every time a shoal of people embarked or got off at a station, expecting him to make an appearance.
Much later, the train rides became more than an escape. It was one place she saw the many gossamer textures of life in its darkened hues, being weaved into a commonplace design in the weariest commotions there was. All that talk of Art and life at Sorbonne seemed pointless when she boarded these trains. In their hard transparencies and their flashy modesty made them more beautiful than the greased beauties she'd ever come in contact with.
It was in this unctuous setting, long after she'd had a dissonance with Rishabh, that she'd met Binoy and his friends around January, teasing a homeless girl singing for alms. That they would give her a crisp hundred note, if she could rendition a french song with perfect diction. Without doubt, the four men had been taken over by the ghost of Prof. Higgins in their reforming of the Indian Eliza Doolittle act; a routine bawdy entertaining she'd seen with a few uncultured hypocritical tourists.
She'd sat in a corner watching them, huddled with a book and her face hidden in a silk scarf to not draw attention to herself. Binoy had been the one to translate in broken Hindi what his other friends had to say to the raggedly clothed girl. When she didn't think she could sit back and watch their farce, she got up from her seat. Drawing off her scarf, she placed it over the exposed shoulder of the girl, shocking her and plucked the hundred rupee note from the hands of one of the men, which had made the little girl dance to their tunes all the while and sent her off to another compartment with more money from her own purse.
"Qu' est-ce que c'est? (What is it?)" She said and they looked up at her as if she was their mother's spirit, "Une blague? Tres pathetique (A joke? Very pathetic)"
Then, she turned to Binoy in particular and said," Tu devrais avoir honte de toi! (You must be ashamed of yourself!)"
The train halted at a station that precise instant and without giving place for a lengthy confrontation, she hurried to exit the train. Again, it was the last thing she expected after running into a few french travelers in a local train, when Binoy got off along with her with his back pack, abandoning his friends who had no hope of finding their way around without him.
"Pardon, Mademoiselle. Arretez! (Sorry Miss. Stop!)" she heard him calling behind her and by all means running to catch up as she sieved her way through the station crowd. "Arretez! S'il vous plait (Stop! Please)"
At length, he apologized when she eventually stopped to hear his pleas. Taking pity on his language barrier, she scouted him to the other side of Mumbai where the group had decided to meet if they were to get lost. As it was, he was funny and deep and well informed on the subjects that drew her interests, if she could discount the train incident. One chai led to a walk which later ended in a dhaba lunch and late in the evening, they found themselves by Marine drive overlooking at a pitifully calm sea.
A disquiet came between them in their silence and when the sea breeze swept up a few strands into her face, his fingers offered to tuck them away. She didn't dither him and when his fingers lingered a bit longer by her ears, she knew what was coming as his eyes held hers.
"You are very beautiful, Sanaa," he said, in broken hindi and lowered his lips to hers for a brief kiss.
As Binoy straightened, the memory of that another kiss from months ago was all she could align her thoughts against. In stark contrast, Rishabh had taken a kiss from her, while Binoy had given her a kiss. She didn't know what good it would do to anybody to be lost on how these give and takes differed and decisively struck up a conversation with him.
"That's a chaste school boy's kiss that you gave me," she said softly,"Either you are pretending to be french or you play for the opposite sex."
Her remark sent him chuckling. "Or I'm trying hard to resist every impulse to kiss you as you deserve, so that you would see I'm looking for more than a one night stand," he proffered an alternative to her suggesting.
"Or you are playing hard to get, a poser, so that I would invite you back to my apartment." She spoke in a tone of condescension and shifted her gaze back to the sea.
"Trust me! Sanaa," he weaved his fingers with hers then,"There are a hundred things I could do right here, to prove that I'm both French and I'm into you, but that won't give me a place in your thoughts long after I leave you tonight..."
All her resistance in his touch dissolved, when he led her into a walk by the sea side. After another hour of carefree banter about how life differed between Mumbai and Paris and concluding that it wasn't much in any sphere of life, he hailed her a cab, sending her away with another kiss that was undoubtedly subdued by french standards.
It was two months before she visited him in Paris in the name of an advanced spring class she wished to take at the Sorbonne. They dined nights in little euro-cafes by the roadside and spent much of their time in her apartment, cooking and feeding each other while old french songs played on. By then, he'd learnt to guise the near awe he had in his eyes for her with a new-found fondness for a lover - which he knew, she preferred to the former - and she'd adjusted to the remarkably banal approach in which he showed she held a different place in his life: in the dinners he made from scratch, in the poetry he recited at their waking together - an appeal that was all french and dull to her, albeit, thankful that it took her mind away from that compeer who had by some stroke of luck, stumbled on Poe's Raven when Binoy sought after Verlaine and Yeats.
Within months after their first meeting, he proposed marriage to her on the day of his product launch - a line of cosmetics and skin care in which his years of research was vested as was all his money. She needed time and he gave it to her gladly, until the day a lawsuit was filed against his product in a Paris court, that a said ingredient in his company's cream had caused irreversible skin damages to the three women who had sued him. At the first sign of crisis, all his investors had pulled out when his legal bindings with them had been loose, leaving him in debt in the order of hundreds of thousands to both his manufacturers and agents who could no longer sell his products.
She was in India, when his call came in. "I love you too much to bring you into my world when its practically crumbling, Sanaa," he gave as an explanation on why they should no longer see each other. In contrary to his words, his voice had showed a need for her and concomitant, Trishna, her assistant had changed the channel to one where his song was being telecast: he was chasing a woman in a wet, orange sari close to an oasis, while he'd dressed in a sheer shirt that revealed all of his chest.
There was no telling what had prompted her to convince Binoy that she did not enter and leave his life on his terms alone. Was it that he will forever remain a believably average man or his strong convictions at such life altering situations that had pushed her to take a step towards him.
Or that she would rather commit other sins than give into her temptations?
It was also then, she'd agreed to give him the money and buy out his company. The matter was settled after a few days of persistent screaming and long silences that had eventually broken Binoy. Her Naanaji had hit the roof upon hearing her decision to marry a christian, let alone the amount that she would also lend him. The old book deal had been considered and after a long night of deliberation, she'd bought her way into a blase future by making a deal out of her mother's sizzling but now, decrepit past.
A tall man with short clipped hair, too much scruff and a white suit walking in her direction, brought her back to the present. Toned for their wedding, he'd filled out his fitted shirt; his seemingly fair skin was too tanned to be Indian, but his unmistakably black hair didn't qualify him for an European either and all his woes of the previous months added a grey handsomeness - that of period romance male leads - to his already manly mien.
He had no idea what a delight he would be to her female cousins, she mused, with his thick french accent and quite irresistible foreign mannerisms.
"Ca va? (Are you well?)" she asked with her hands stretched out.
"Euh!" he gathered her in his arms and lifted her against him "Ma Cheri! (My dear!)...Tu me manquais (I missed you)" he said in a whisper.
"J'ai besoin de toi (I need you)" he spoke into her ears with a hiss, "En ce moment! (Now!)" He tugged at her ear with his teeth.
"Attention! (Watch out!)" She drew her head away to the other side and playfully tapped on his shoulder to let her down, "Ce n'est pas Paris (This is not Paris)" she said as her feet touched the ground and looked around to see if his censorious act had garnered curious stares.
Once more, she hugged him when she was convinced they had gotten away from being identified, her smile a long time in the making after having let go of her misgivings with their wedding and a life together.
But it had to be just then, when she noticed he didn't have his suitcases on him except his hand luggage and shifted her gaze sideways to find a familiar figure in dark glasses and a baseball cap maneuver a cart stacked with suitcases towards them.
Her breath caught in her throat when she recognized the self-indulging air of manner and his haughty step.
"I can't believe you didn't tell him that I was picking him up at the baggage counter," he said, throwing a hand over Binoy's shoulder and pulling them apart.
She blinked as her mind reeled with possibilities on why he'd chosen to spring back into her life at this time and place.
With his hand still around Binoy, he bent down and spoke in a low teasing tone to her benefit alone. "You two should get a room, if you need it that bad."
"Euh!" Binoy exclaimed with a roll of his eyes, "Your best friend has already started with his groom jokes, hasn't he?" he asked with an accent, his words sounding as if minced in a stone grinder to have all his vowels removed.
Oh! you have no idea, she wanted to tell Binoy, on what really qualified to be called a joke, that moment. Suddenly, her life seemed to be one, apart from it being a confluence of her perceived past and her so-called future.
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Edited by 6th.Element - 12 years ago
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