(Shiv-Gauri): The Oldest Story... - 2 - Page 26

A Dark and Terrible Beauty – Part 3

There were times when you looked back on something, it played out in your mind all differently than how it was when it first happened.  No, that wasn't it, she amended her own thought; it was just that your brain registered everything that your eye could see at any moment, but your mind selectively honed it on some aspect of it while ignoring others.  But later, when the entire scene replayed after a cataclysmic event, the images continued to run in the same reel, but now the spotlight was on different things… things in the background, things in the far off distance, or maybe even things up close and center, but somehow you completely missed it that first time…

And so it was that night that she ran into Shashank again at Dhruv's party.  Shashank… with his soulful eyes and gentle demeanor… whom her Baba found to be too meek to handle her… whom her Baba worried that she would have stepped all over… whom she herself had found easygoing and possessed of the most amiable disposition of any man she had ever known…  Even now, she knew that without Dhruv's party, Shashank would have never given her reason to change her view whatsoever.  She would have been able to blithely smooth over his infrequent disappearances to deal with the mystery girl who was a family obligation that he couldn't avoid.   Until, of course, it became an obligation that he took so far as to stand her up at their wedding without so much as a phone call…  she had wondered that day at her wedding why it had bothered her more that she was coerced into marrying Shiv rather than the fact that her sweet and gentle fianc seemed to have abandoned her… and even after, once she had learned from his family that he was safe but that they were not at liberty to share anything else with her, aside from their profound apologies for what their son had done, she had not been devastated… in fact, his family's stance had only convinced her that something had indeed happened that had forced his hand to not show up for the wedding, something that he had been unable to get out of… 

It was only now when she put Shiv in Shashank's place that she realized that if Shiv had done to her what Shashank did…  there would have been no understanding, no compromises, and no forgiveness...  she would have either been committed to an insane asylum for having had her first psychotic break or been sent to prison for killing Shiv once she found out that he had gone to rescue some mystery girl instead of showing up to marry her….  Her reactions to Shiv were as extreme as they were tame with Shashank.  The question that remained to be answered was which one made for a good marriage…  because after the events that unfolded the night of Dhruv's party, she would have traded in Shiv for the Shashank that she knew before her marriage without second thought… if only the Shashank that she knew had been real… but it turned out that there was a Shashank that she didn't know at all… a Shashank that was hidden so far beneath the calm exterior that there had been not a glimpse of him that came through in her Shashank's eyes…

Because this Shashank, the new Shashank that she had never seen before… he belonged to Thalia.

If the unfortunate spectators of this melodrama thought that she, Gauri Kapoor, was the heroine while Thalia the anointed femme fatale and vixen, they had another thing coming!  She would never be caught dead in the category of the timid, spineless, unassuming, fate-conspired-against-me ilk of heroines that abounded today… oh hell no… and if that wench, Thalia, thought that she could cast herself in the role of the villain, Gauri would only be too happy to show her that she was the better woman for the job!

Any wench that dared kiss a man in plain view of his wife and friends assumed that the wife was a numskull! And a pathetic one at that!  She was going to show Thalia that she was neither! 

As for her husband, Mr. Don Juan DeMarco himself, well… he will see that she would bring new meaning to Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman Scorned!  And if she needed to use this new Shashank that she had never seen before for such nefarious purposes, then so be it… He owed her!  Besides, she was of the mind that he wouldn't require too much convincing anyways, given the way his eyes had blazed fire when he had seen Thalia leaning up on her four-inch heels, pressing not just her entire body, but also her sinful lips, against Shiv.

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