The expletive had come later, after a brief stormy silence that I had taken to register the promise her response held.
I panicked, stumbled over my feet, picked myself up and ran after her before she could leave the room. "What do you mean what husband? Does that imply you are not married? That you are available and very much single?" The volley of questions I had just wouldn't stop and I didn't care for the open concern that twisted my face for her view.
Coming to a stop, she swirled around and crossed her arms across her chest, a ridicule curving her lips.
"Who have you been gossiping with? Shiv?" she asked, raising a decisive brow at me.
"Not really..." I said while my lowered gaze fluttered to everywhere at once from that telling denial.
"Is that how he has been coping with his issues these days?" At her asking, my gaze shifted back to her and I felt I was reading every one of their stories backwards. What was worse was that it was also missing a few pages.
And for the first time in a long time, a vague tension circled in my stomach from having heard his name, her implications not escaping my attention nevertheless, but there were more pressing questions I needed answers to. "Mitra, tell me..." I spoke low with a faint pleading.
"Well, then you are better off asking him than me." She waved her hand at me with a derisive smile as she turned and walked away, while I yelled, "Hello! Mitra! You can't do this to me..."
The answer came to me once I was out of the moment. I wasn't speaking of the clarity I was looking for, but of the rashomon effect that had come into being. To me, it didn't matter anymore if she was married or not. Truth was far from what I was seeking and instead, I was only curious about the multiple realities that they had set their worlds against.
That night though I had every reason to call Shiv, I didn't.
***
When Prithvi wouldn't return my calls or come down for our study sessions at Leela palace, I decided to write up a part of the story and deliver it in piecemeal to lure him out of his hiding.
"The following night, she stayed awake waiting for him in the shadows of his library to confront him. Keeping up with his routine, he went into her room to bring the parrot out for its night lessons and after having noted her form buried under layers of sheets, he left without checking on her. Despite her unforeseen presence, behind the racks of palm leaf scrolls that he collected, he wasn't taken back - he knew their exchange would happen eventually.
What he'd not expected was the swirl of change he saw in her eyes: a new rage flamed in the black of her iris, the remnants of her crushed hope gone and instead it was replaced with a struggle he didn't understand. Far from being surprised by her fixed gaze on him, he felt fear grip him and that provoked him to gain footing against the threat she was suddenly appearing to be.
Placing the cage on the floor, he moved in making her step behind, her back pressing against the shelf racks.
"You have wandered too far off from your room," he said shaking her by her forearm and she still wouldn't look away. "Now get back to your bed. Or else..."
"Another empty threat?" she scoffed, "Will you even follow on your threat? That is, if you ever made up your mind about what you would do with me if I'm to disobey?"
"You are asking for it, Vandana," he screamed gripping both her arms into his hold, his fingers digging into her skin with a renewed anger.
There had been a whimper when he'd gathered her against the length of body, her lips holding a faint shiver from the abrupt shifting and that had been enough to drain the restraint in him. When he raised her further to take her into a kiss while she struggled to escape him, her chunni fell off her shoulder and bared much of her torso and his arms wound around her waist.
He hadn't intended for the kiss to be inviting, only that it would let him derive his strength from the fount of hatred that should have sprung from his kiss.
It was something else to let the desire lash into his blood and it coursed that much more fiercely compounding in its effect for all the time he'd resisted touching her. In him, he felt the oblivion and the awareness tease out a new state of being. All until, he tasted the metallic tang of her blood in his tongue, when he finally let her go.
A full lock of hair fell over her face and though her expression was hidden for him to take stock, he didn't mind the reprieve to observe her disheveled form, her panting that made her chest rise and fall for a full breath of air and her fingers that were closed into small fists by her sides.
And all this had been his doing. But, with that reckoning came a tremble from the burn that started in his chest.
She looked up at from under her lashes, her gaze resolute and open and sucked in a corner of her lower lip to tongue her blood clean.
He took a step away from her, his eyes wide from her brazen move of acknowledgement. "You are in love with me," she said without any trace of doubt.
Admittedly, he dismissed her other claims that followed, the poems that he'd taught the parrot and shouted frustrated with her incessant questioning that she'd gone mad. During that heated exchange, he let her get close to him again and without notice she caught hold of his hand when he'd just begun to storm out of the room. That same instant he fell to the ground writhing in pain, his body coiling from a fit of violent spasms. Along with the blaze of the burn on his skin, he also felt a rise of something potent inside him. The mix of pain and desire were a spread of sensations unknown to him.
The sight of him on the floor had removed her to one corner of the room. She didn't understand how or what she'd done to him, however, she knew she had been the reason for his hurting. When he finally recovered to stand on his own again, she felt a cold tear drop down her cheek.
When he managed to meet her gaze again, she saw the man he was behind the appearances he kept and the woman she'd become after his revelation.
It went without saying that that night their places had changed inside the anthapura. Pondering into the early hours of the morning she realized, that in reality he was the prisoner in her hands.
From then on, his secret was hers too."
That had been the first serving of my story to him. If anything, I was assured, that he would only be enraged beyond the limits of my imagination for having penned down something along the lines of his first kiss with Mitra, if indeed that had been the truth - I was no longer certain about the facts they shared with me. At first, the content had embarrassed me to no limits, but I was convinced it was just as necessary to bring out his long buried affection - if not his passion - for her.
By some inexplicable instinct, I had known that the first delivery wouldn't fetch me a reaction from him and to be certain that I wouldn't fail the second time I planned the next draft carefully and left it by his door one fine Saturday morning.
Of course, his call came as anticipated sometime during the afternoon.
"Are you f**king with my mind?" he screamed from the other end of the line without wasting time for niceties.
"I don't know what you are talking about," I responded with a show of nonchalance.
"Why is there a blank sheet of paper under my door?" he gritted out with impatience and I jumped up with a victory dance that he'd unknowingly confirmed reading the first part I'd left there.
"What do you think? I'm going through a writer's block. That is what it is," I responded with an equal measure of firmness.
His silence that ensued for the next few seconds, I could handle, but the laughter that I heard later wasn't one I had prepared for.
Edited by Lahari. - 12 years ago
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