The ground beneath squeaked under pressure, my toes curling each time the thought stirred some recollection.

Oh, what demon possessed me!

While my brain busied in whipping one main course after another, my mind searched for logic— one dam logic to rationalise that dreaded move.

Mamoni stood irate, flinging the door open the moment my feet landed at the top of the porch stairs. She had been watching from the windows, I concluded. I bolted past, kicking the sandals to the side and thumped all the way up the steps until my bedroom door locked tight. The moment the latch fell into place, I breathed a sigh. Somehow the confines of the room gave a sense of safety, the four walls cocooning me from the danger that lurked outside. My hands shivered, the water choking when it spurted out of the bottle. For a second, I thought Mamoni banged loudly, screaming, “you went out despite my warnings! Where exactly were you?” I rushed and looked on either side of the corridor— it was empty, pin-drop silence. Just my wild imagination wreaking havoc— I sufficed in relief.

“It’s you whom I want”—could he be any more obvious? “I'm still aware of your appetite, Sonu. How you used to look like a dog on heat.” His eyes, nose, lips, and the low baritone of his voice all echoed within my head creating a buzz. I pulled at my hair to drown the tension, stomped on the anxiety. A shriek protested right at the tip of my vocal chord.

I hate him. I hate the sorrow, the anger, the desperation or whatever the hell he’s hiding. I wish I can rip…

I sighed. At this point, I wished to rip my very self apart. Sweat dribbled the side of my neck, moistened the kurta collar before vanishing deep into the breast folds. I brushed aside the pooling dampness and turned on the air-conditioner. Will the days now go like this? Alarmed, Panicking?

Any thought of the future came laced with fear. But, it was imminent! It would surely happen, this day or the one after! Rajesh Chowdhury was a man on a mission— he sought vengeance, the very look in those eyes asserted the same.

Two and a half years, thirty months of passion turned to poison. And now, when the night had awakened to drown the insulting and the gratuitous in its tsunami of darkness, the final hour had arrived, ready to knock at my door. I felt it— the ominous juddering of ground, the receding water, the saltiness, the frantic chirping of birds and last but not the least my own heart jolting to a stop. Oh, shit!

It all started with a kiss— a single kiss that turned the world upside down, not that it was quite sturdy before, but at least it was there, something was there! Never in the hell did I imagine seducing my professor, never in hell, did I imagine being wanted in such a wanton manner — taunted, teased and tortured by someone. Not in hell, could I fathom what tasting the forbidden felt like. Still, I continued— twice, thrice, repeatedly until there remained little to nothing of the line separating us. And yet, that line snapped.

“You destroyed our child..you destroyed our child..you destroyed our child..”

Booming voices ricocheted off the walls, each louder than the preceding one. Was it my conscience or was it him? Or was it..

‘No, no, no', I whimpered. The tears gushed like a mountain stream, why I was bursting in pain I had no idea and from where did those bloody emotions come? I had simmered them for the last five years. Not simmered, dumped them. I thought there would be respite once they stopped rampaging my conscience. Could I do it?

Can a mother ever?

Did I just call myself a mother? Funny, it even popped in my head. Me? A mother? Never in this lifetime, never it had the remotest possibility of being true. I saw Ma suffer, through years she endured anguish, her worth diminished to that of a servant. No, even a servant gets paid, there’s a reward for the labour; hers was just unaccounted for.

“Marriage is an ordeal where two lives become one, it involves lots of sacrifices. You can choose to do it willingly or life will squeeze it out of you.” She would say. I knew why she said what she said; she did it for us— me and Dada. But, we, siblings, had always been selfish, putting our interests before that of others.

And that’s how it should remain.

‘Yes, and that’s how it ought to remain', I repeated. Saying it out loud alleviated the guilty consciousness, firmed up the belief that was in ruins ever since I left that dratted hotel.

But, alas! It had remained. It had remained with me, twisting, turning and playing with my faculties all these years, influencing my very being and yet, it was something I refused to acknowledge.

But..but, I couldn’t have smothered my ambition for a foetus!

Did he think I would nurse and feed and potty train at the age of eighteen? Did he think I would be stuck inside the gallows in the name of home and wait for him every evening with a whining infant to accompany?

To what extent a man can go to be this delusional!

Lovesick, he’s always been lovesick.

But, despite every attempt to break free from the shackles, ever since the tender age of fifteen, here I was, locked inside a house in the city with my dreams and aspirations floating freely on the holy waters of the Ganga. The marriage I assumed to be my saviour, a key to get away from the lost land which Swarupnagar was, now led a cue to my destruction.

Hopeless, I slumped on the chair, legs stretched and eyes closed. The filtered air melted into my parched skin. I went over the conversation. In my head words replayed without a pause, every stop intact. “Bullshit!” it roared even in rewind, the way he emphasised it— so much angst, so much pain. I was indeed young and naïve, might be it was too huge a blow for his fragile heart.

No, don’t think that way.

But, he was a man to make good on promises. He wouldn’t stray.

There was no guarantee. Once a housewife always a housewife. Do you want to be like your mother? Or Piyali Di?

Of course not! Leading life like a doormat, relying on validations and spending every day trying to satisfy some lame ego either to hold on to an illusion called marriage or for the well being of a bunch of kids! The whole system was rigged, and if anything it could maximum be compared to a slaughterhouse. Nothing more, nothing less. A child was never my cup of tea. Having grown up seeing the damage toxicity could incur on innocence, people might very well label me sterile and I would give a dam.

‘Blast it, Sonu! How fucked up can you be?’ my inner voice jabbed. My mouth broke into a guffaw. I was born to be fucked up. The static building up cracked and fissured. I laughed again, my brows twitched and lips quivered. An ugly wail hushed the cackle. But, my eyes were bereft of tears! They were baked dry!

Impotence makes you stupid, really stupid.

Wasn’t my blasted childhood to blame for this? Shouldn’t Baba be held accountable?

“People need to learn to harness their potential, otherwise it will be just another problem. Look at you, you’re nothing more than another rebellious teenager.”

“Freedom of expression isn’t rebellious, Baba. In a democracy, the voice matters.”

“Yes. But, not in a way you or your friends are doing. Make your voice count. Freedom isn’t about going off the rocker, Sonu. It’s not about dressing this way or that way or leading life in whatever manner you choose. Freedom comes from within.”

And sometimes I wished to remind— his list of accomplishments, that is. “So, when you restricted Ma from singing and dancing, what did you think, Baba? That her inner freedom will fuel her to become a sacrificial lamb?”

But, Ma always butted in. “Marriage isn’t about having the perfect person, Sonu. It’s about thinking and doing things beyond yourself. Your Baba too went against his family and rescued me. If it weren’t..” and that’s all she would say and that’s all I heard growing up, that’s all Dada knew too.

If it weren’t for those pointless suggestions, if it weren’t for those overt display of conflicting interests, if it weren’t for those absolute lack of cohesiveness, if it weren’t for Ma's dearth of pride and Baba's continuous hypocrisy, I might have grown a different perspective. Just might have.

Integrity is everything, they said. My foot!

Does the world even allow honesty to thrive?

And so I learnt to cling to my ambitions, chanted day and night to never bow down to petty emotion. Life is glued to reality, excess sentiments throw you out of control. It had been so always, except that time when I fell hard, pretty dam hard.

Back at seventeen, fresh off my years of pigtails and ribbons, I bumped upon this man who, in the next six months, captured me in a bout of frantic lechery, who brought alive the desire to be worshipped and whom I beguiled with my luminous intensity. We burnt at the sight of each other, yet marked our bodies with feral brutality, making love everywhere— the empty rice fields at night, the back of Wasim Chacha’s barn, the dilapidated mill on the outskirts and sometimes in the broken cottage within the forest. I would hide the bruises with full sleeve kurtas and he with enclosed buttons. Beneath, my breasts would recover from blue to pale yellow and then to natural skin colour. The questionable nature of the liaison drew us like bees to nectar. Outside school, I was his most desirable project and inside, one of his favourite pupils. Thus, it remained an all-consuming mutual passion; he sought an escape from his eccentric and illiterate wife while I tasted an unbound sense of freedom through erotic whispers and carnal intimacy. I studied and climaxed, he worked and rammed and this continued for the next two years until I stopped bleeding, until he pleaded with me to keep the baby, until I understood this wasn’t where I wanted to be.

                            **********

Siddhartha’s hands traced hearts on my bare skin. His fingers rounded my navel, spiralling downward before taunting the slope of my hips. “I love your curves”, he murmured in a husky tone, the pungency of alcohol clear through his breath. I lolled my head back, allowing him to make love to my neck. He cupped a single breast, pouring all his pleasure into an innocent nipple. Little did he know they weren’t innocent and had tasted the very essence of fruitfulness. My hands grazed through his hair, gripping it with an excruciating force. The locks near his neck strained the skin and he uttered a moan. Through my hazed pupils, I perceived his twitching forehead and pursed lips. The cool air from the air-conditioner rendered my nipples taut and the enlarged reddish bud invited him with devilish seduction.

But, I knew Siddhartha well. It wasn’t the act that pleasured him, it was the mere thought of it that worked. Often his manhood took a particular stance— like those half-mast flags during mourning and throughout our encounters, I noticed how he struggled to climax. Hurrying to foray into the main act, he struggled with my underwear. “Why the hell do you wear these..th-these ties?” his shaking hands wrestled with a frail loop. I rolled my eyes but, gripped his forearms; “Relax. We have ample time”, I said before tossing the negligee to the side.

It was the first time in two days that we talked, the first time we had intercourse. Given a voluptuous appetite, one would assume he was a monster in bed but, he always undeshot. This time too he grunted, “Ahh, ahh!” just like those big lions with a mass of black mane— the ones who are high on testosterone but in reality, he wouldn’t fare better than probably a mouse. It was the mere thought of sleeping with someone that gave him a high— I concluded. Things with us, with him, were never quite straight and ever since the past week he had been behaving differently. Erratic would suit better, though. Not different, erratic; and seldom eccentric too.

Huh! These days my life had been dripping irony. Can any copulation be any more explosive?

Five minutes, just five minutes more—I kept on chanting. And the more I persisted, the more he fought. Sprawled like a log with him thumping for some solid ten minutes, I knew it was time to take the reins.

Sex is more than just an act of pleasure, it’s the feeling of being immersed in chasm of contentment that has people chasing it and we, women, fancy nothing else than be connected to the person to the point where you’re left broken and the small fissure between ‘you’ and ‘I’ is completely obliterated. And as a person who had experienced the very peak of pleasure, letting this idiot make an utter fool of himself or me screaming to feign another orgasm was the last thing I would do.

Grrrr..grrrr..grrrr— his phone vibrated. Grrr..grrr..grrr— it kept on rumbling.

“Shall I switch it off?” I said stifling a groan. He was thrusting the bloody wits out of me. My fists held on to the sheet for purchase, barely managing to remain stable as recurring plunges sent strong tremors right up to my lower belly.

“N-no..no..I..I'll do it”, he panted before lunging towards the bedside table. I clenched my teeth at the obstruction, disgust shrouding every cell. Inside, I felt the contractions, my vaginal walls collapsing; but, it wasn’t of ecstasy, rather of repulsion.

Siddhartha fiddled with the keypad, grunting every time another message grumbled; I inched closer, towards his fingers— the way they were moving in random frenzy. An inch more..just an inch and I would see what he was typing, but, damn! Curse my bitch of a luck, the phone shut off with it’s typical Nokia ring.

Shit! Shit!

No, Sonu. If that isn’t an alarm for you to be more careful from tomorrow, then nothing else will—  I reminded myself.

The rest three minutes were pure torture. One more and I would kick him at the balls. ‘Now leave and jerk your shit off', I would silently curse. Sometimes I wondered whether his half-deflated balloon actually had any elasticity to expand.

Cretin wants to eat cake when he can’t even stomach a mere bread.

One minute passed and that was it. Good, God! At this rate, Anthony Bridgerton would hand-deliver his watch to me. I squeezed his shoulder muscles, clawing his back for a more dramatic effect and faked a moan, hoping it would brush a little ointment on his fragile masculinity.

“That was..that was..good!” I puffed, careful to act breathless.

“But, but..”

“Shhh”, I put my finger on his lips and brushed his damp locks to the side. “It’s alr—”

"No, it isn't. I don't understand.." he furrowed his eyebrows in an exaggerated show of confusion. “Sreya, let me..please..can we try again?”

I sighed. The clock was fast approaching one and I had plans for a morning run, Siddhartha's grimace and the stuffy weather had me feeling uncommonly closed in. “You were great, dear”, I gave a light peck. “Stuff happens when one's stressed or agitated.”

“Still..” he interjected. "How can I make it upto you?"

“Still?” I stroked my chin with my forefinger— a mock gesture of thinking hard. “Since you so insist, looks like there's something you can do something to make me feel better.”

“I'm sorry, Sreya”, he clasped my palms. “Tell me.”

“I sure will”, I replied curving my lips into a fiendish smile.

If there was one thing I learnt while growing up in a male-dominated society, it was never to make a man feel frivolous— without substance. Know what to ask and when to ask ; if perfected, it quite serves the male ego. And once you satisfy the male ego, there’s much you can achieve out of it.

                              *********

When I wanted Siddhartha to make me feel good, I intended to talk with him, rather fashion his thoughts in a way that suited mine. And allowing him to have his ways once or twice lessened the odds. As women, we all need to play our cards right. And sometimes, it has to be more than just sex. There are clearly two options— either you transcend this whole relationship business by showing a middle finger or you learn to play with it, because, at the end of the day a man is nothing like a woman. Once you de-mould the lump of clay that he is and knead the shit out of the dough his mother invested all her efforts in, you’re left with nothing but a skeleton of hay and twigs and a fat elephantine ego. And now, he’s the perfect cast you may just wish to work your charms on.

I snuggled close to him, maintaining a distance that would allow us to talk freely. Squeezing my knees onto my chest, I rested my chin on them. Siddhartha fidgeted, scratching the corner under his ears as he always did.

“I’m sorry.. I’ll talk to Ma.” He said. “Though, I think she was just hyper. You know ho—”

“It was my brother, Siddhartha!” I howled, rubbed my moist eyes. “He wasn’t any random man. He didn’t call before coming because it just happened that he had some work nearby. Moreover, can’t he come just because he wants to? Can’t he?”

I eased my head into the shallow crevice in between my legs and mewled. The tears struggled to come out but, to give the whole drama a sense of perfection, they were of absolute necessity. Often, I peeked through the gap, trying to map his movements and any change in facial expressions. The dim light from the nightstand made it an onerous task. But, it was better this way, the dark camouflaged my intentions well. For this to work out, Siddhartha would have to relent. And boy he did! Seconds later, I felt a shift in weight and then the space beside me ducked under pressure. Nestling close, he put his arms around my shoulders and said, “I understand your concern. It’s just that she doesn’t want many people in the house except a very, very few whom she trusts. She has been like this since forever.”

“So, that means my brother isn’t one to be trusted?” I almost winced at the truth behind my words. “Yes, I know we don’t share a normal sibling relationship but, the causes are entirely different.” Blowing my bone-dry nose into a handkerchief, I continued, “She only let me out when I made her talk to Dada over the phone. She wanted to make sure that it was he whom I went to meet. Can you imagine the level of embarrassment?” I burst into frenzied sobs.

Comforting had never been my husband's fortè, he shied away as much as he could, at least previous experience spoke so. But, today I felt a difference— the spec of warmth in those wilted eyes oozed an aura of compassion and the air between us heated up with a level of understanding. He didn’t speak but, I realised what he wanted to convey— silent, recurring ‘I’m sorry'. In the darkness eradicated by a soft glow from a lone lamp, his partially obscured face radiated innocence and for a second, when I looked at him— long, deep— I witnessed a different side, a side unexplored, a side he preferred keeping to himself.

Just like me.

At that very moment, I regretted my choice. Somehow that very flash of purity, if at all it could be called so, took me on a memory lane to my eight-year-old self. The time when I danced with glee, prancing around trees without a care in the world, bursting with life and bubbling with excitement at every fallen leaf, the time when my integrity had not been tampered with false hopes and sensibilities.

I dropped the discussion.

I knew it would be regretted the next day but, at that instant, it seemed the perfect choice. Not perfect. Right. Rather pragmatic. So, I sat and let the silence do the talking. Sometimes I wished I never had to pretend— to be someone or something, knowing all the way that I could never be, I wouldn’t choose to be. I wished I never had to fight for every cause, I wished I wasn't born in my family and didn’t inherit Ma’s conflicted nature: impulsive with raging emotions and always repenting because emotion concocts fallacies in your head which makes you an idealist. In the end, you become a resident of a utopia with beautiful ideas and unique thought processes but, a complete utter fool who has no existence in the real world and doesn’t know a thing about how to make those ideas come to life!

Sometimes, I wished I talked more and grew up natural…sometimes, I wished..I was..normal?

Siddhartha lighted a cigarette and blew a puff. The stick between his fingers released coiled, intertwined tendrils of smoke. Up they went and vanished into thin air. I scoffed. ‘If only my life faded away like that…if only I could go to bed free..a simple girl with simple wishes..if only..’

“Sreya, go to sleep”, his voice broke my reverie. “I'll talk it out with her. You’re not a captive in this house. However, I would like if you restrict yourself a bit. As much as I’m concerned about you, my mother is old and she has her set of what is right and what is wrong. If we can’t change ourselves at thirty, how can she do that at her fifties?” he touched my palm and squeezed, the tenderness mild but soothing. On any other occasion, I would probably counter with a quick retort, something on the lines of— ‘I don’t want her to change. I want her to bloody cease meddling in my affairs.' But, no. I kept quiet. Siddhartha kissed my forehead and hopped off the bed. I watched still as his frame receded in the distance and disappeared into the verandah, plumes of smoke leaving a trail.

“Sleep tight”, was all I heard before my lids fluttered and slumber set in like a heavy blanket.