Word. Mental Pukings of the Random Kind

         She begged me to let her in. She told me that I needed to hear her out. I needed a lot of things, I thought, a conniving slut wasn’t one of them. Perhaps the optimist, but most likely the sadist in me guided my hand to the latch which opened with a click. She had rearranged her face into a passable expression of virtue, apologetic even; but traces of a smirk still lingered around the corners of her brightly painted mouth.

    I gestured for her to follow me into the living room where she sat herself on a chair - his chair, the one by the lamp, turned towards the T.V. at the perfect angle and just the right distance from the kitchen. I left her there and vanished into the kitchen on the pretext of making us some tea. It was a feeble attempt on my part to put off the moment when I would have to face her. I boiled, strained, stirred and clattered dishes for as long as I could then, I began my slow march back to the living room.

     ” These things happen,” she assured me, ” it’s nobody’s fault. ” We had never planned for it to happen, it just did. Who can label things as right or wrong when it comes to matters of the heart, no?” Matters of the heart? More like matters of the….never mind. I set the cups down on the side board. ” That’s such a pretty dupatta,” I said. ” Oh this thing?” she said patting at it absent-mindedly, her red claws gleaming in contrast with the white fabric. ” I picked up this salwar-kameeze set at Lajpat Nagar when I accompanied Rajeev- ” She stopped mid-sentence, searching my face for any signs of emotion on hearing my estranged husband’s name. ”- accompanied Rajeev on his business trip to Delhi last month, ” she continued slightly hesitantly.

    ” The embroidery looks so delicate against your neck!” I exclaimed, tugging at the ends. I pulled tighter and tighter till the vapid smile on her face suddenly transformed into a look of horror, her eyes wide with terror. She frantically tried to pry my hands off, digging into them with her nails, kicking her heels about. I calmly stood my ground.

   Mustering all her strength, she made one final effort and pushed the chair back into me. I was knocked off my feet and I let go of my grip. She darted towards the door but I was too quick for her. I was back on my feet in no time blocking her path. She wasn’t going anywhere this time. We were going to settle this for once and for all. She tried to run past me but tripped over the rug instead and slammed into the stand, sending the vase perched on top of it crashing to the ground.

  I bent down and picked up one of the larger fragments. I stood over her holding the jagged piece of glass in my hand. She had taken what had been mine; now, I would take what belonged to her. You could call it fair trade. I could already see the deep crimson stain slowly spreading over the stark white; a dark, glistening rivulet streaming from her, all it would take was one —- ” And CUT! ” The shout shook me out of my reverie and sent me spinning back to the present. Someone was helping her up. Another was sweeping away the shattered pieces of glass. I stood rooted to the spot, blinking rapidly. The broken shard of glass fell to the floor with a faint tinkle. Oh well, there always was Take Two.

      The Great Flood occurred;a symbol of God’s wrath.It rained for forty days and forty nights.The Earth was washed clean.Our sins remained.

     Her phone beeped,she knew it was him even before she had glanced at it.”You should consider getting your hair straightened,you know.I think it would look good on you,” it read.

  The next day,she went to her hairdresser.

“How much for a perm?”

    Red,purple,blue,brown,black,white,grey…-she had them in almost every colour.She was rarely seen without them on.It often appeared as if she got out of bed,stepped into her heels and only took them off when she got back into bed at the end of the day.

  ‘Red’,’Purple’,’Blue’,’Brown’,’Grey’,’Black’,’White’- she stuck labels on each box.She gathered them up and buried them deep in the back of her closet.She didn’t need them any more.She never felt small around him.

  They had been driving around the city for a while now.Neither could decide where to go.He didn’t care as long as they were together.He watched her gaze out of the window into the traffic.He loved the way her hands looked so delicate as she adjusted the dials on the radio.He saw her fidget with her seat belt from time to time,he watched her occasionally brush her hair off her face.He never did quite notice the light turn red.

   The sound of the siren of the ambulance died down as it trundled down the road leaving a deathly silence in its wake. I stood around fiddling with my purse, nearly eight years on the job and I still didn’t know what to do. She tapped me on the shoulder and pushed a cheque into my hand as I turned around. I took it wordlessly secretly glad that I had been spared from the awkward conversation that usually took place.

 ”Thank you so much for taking such good care of her,” she said. I nodded and gave her a small smile and turned to leave. My hand was on the doorknob when I suddenly found my legs carrying me back to the kitchen.”Is there anything I could help you with?” I asked. These words slipped out of my mouth without any warning or my consent. Not once in these eight years had they been uttered in this context. As a nurse, it was my job to take care of my patient. Cold as it sounded, once the patient passed, I had to pack up and move on to the next one. Getting too emotionally involved with them and their families was bad business.

    This time however, was an exception. She hesitantly asked me whether I would help her sort through the old woman’s things. I found myself agreeing to be there at eleven the next morning for reasons I weren’t entirely sure of myself.

   We started with the bedroom.Clothes, books, photographs and other knickknacks were strewn everywhere, and she didn’t seem to be doing much. She would just sit there staring at the mess occasionally picking up a sweater or a nightgown only to put it back down somewhere else on the ground. I bustled around her navigating through the mess distributing things into piles as I went. I wished she wouldn’t cry in front of me. Each sniffle made me cringe. It made me uncomfortable and I didn’t know how to react.

  A trunk lay in the corner. I asked her whether I should open it. She told me not to bother.”Nothing in there is of much use to anyone,” she said. I opened it anyway thinking that there might be something I could salvage from it.Inside, I found canvases, paintbrushes, notebooks and pieces of paper all thrown in haphazardly, discarded like contents of a rubbish heap. A couple of bottles of paint lay broken, their contents spilled out on to the bottom of the trunk. None of them seemed to be complete; a splash of blue here, a half-painted tree there, a lone flower, what looked like the beginnings of a portrait and so on.

  Even the notebooks were filled with random words, bits and pieces of stories with no endings, poems never finished. A motley collection of thoughts left incomplete and words left unsaid, abandoned like lost causes deemed to be worthless before they had a chance to protest. For the first time in eight years, I wept.

He sat down on a bench at the bus-stop. The bus wasn’t due for at least another ten minutes that is, if it decided to make an appearance at all; public transport in the city was notoriously unpredictable. She stood a few feet away, evidently waiting for someone to arrive. She appeared to be restless, shifting from one foot to the other constantly glancing at her phone and fidgeting with her dupatta.

 It was probably the heat which drove her to such behaviour, he thought. It had been humid and muggy for days, the sort of sultry weather that makes bad-tempered, irrational beings out of the most pleasant of us. He brushed away the beads of sweat trickling down his forehead with his sleeve wondering whether it would ever rain. Almost as if in answer to his silent query, tiny droplets of water began to fall descending faster and faster until it soon turned into a full-fledged downpour as if a dam had burst in the sky, sending water gushing forth.

    She began to scurry towards the bus-stop. He moved almost involuntarily making room for her on the bench as she ran to take cover under the awning. To his surprise however, instead of heading for the shelter of the stop; she made a sharp turn and ran onto the road. On the childish whim that possessed her, she threw her face up to the sky grinning at the raindrops as they fell. She twirled and splashed in wild abandon, completely unaware of anything or anyone else around her.

    He watched her furtively with the air of someone watching something forbidden or witnessing something obscene knowing that they must avert their eyes but unable to do so. When the rain relented, she proceeded back to where she had been standing before and soon disappeared behind the tinted windows of a car. He watched the car go down the lane and then boarded the bus back home.

    Days, weeks and gradually years passed. He never saw her again though he often found himself recalling that naked display of emotion he had been privy to that day; an act of intimacy he felt had been far greater than the act of making love.