If you looked at her eyes, they would betray a feeling of
happiness, something she’d felt after a long time. She was beautiful once, but
time takes away what it gives. But as if with a strange sense of magnanimity
it leaves a few traces behind. For her it was her eyes, and she assumes that
he’d seen what she’d lost by gazing into them.
She stopped and picked up a coffee mug from the shelf to her
left. It was a plain white mug but it had this image printed on it, that made
it look like it had a crack running down from the top. She didn’t know if he’d like
it. She would take a look at everything down the aisle, which had some of the most
ridiculously expensive items one could fathom. They called it the gifting
section. She was sure he liked coffee. He’d told her this, on numerous
occasions that she’d visited him. She thought back to the day she’d gone to
meet him at his house for the first time.
He hadn’t taken too long to answer the doorbell, and she
walked in dressed in a yellow Salwar suit and shrouded in apprehension. He had
whiskey on his breath and his hair spilled carelessly yet beautifully over his
forehead. He was dressed in a navy blue shirt, and had left a few buttons at
the top open. He had a light stubble on his face, just the right amount. He smiled and looked
at her, as if trying to see through those invisible walls she’d built around
her for years on end. He shouldn’t try she thought.
She assumed his house was perpetually in the state of
disarray that it was in then. Men were like that, she believed. Her son and her
husband were no different. He gestured for her to sit down on a rather dusty
armchair. She smiled and obliged. He brought a chair from a room inside, and
sat down just across from her. He asked her for how long she could stay. She
had an hour before she’d have to go and fetch her son from school. He asked her how she was and if she’d been doing
well and if she’d been happy. She’d mumbled a few things before he said that
he’d been meaning to tell her a lot of things about himself and his life. He
spoke about leaving this town soon. He spoke about travelling for a while, and
visiting places. He spoke about
soul-searching and about wanderlust. She knew what it meant. It was one of
the most sensuous of words. He spoke fervidly about fulfilling his dreams of
travel. He explained to her the morbidity of an ordinary life, and he then went on to speak about love and how we
conveniently defile it in the name of marital sanctity, which was but a set of senseless impositions by an incorrigible society.
She only listened and listened intently and she could see a glint in his eyes, every now
and then, interjecting and yet adding meaning, like remarkable drunken poetry.
She placed the coffee mug back on the shelf as she remembered
a quote that speaks of how ‘It’s always words that undress you’*. She walked
further down the aisle as she permitted herself a faint smile recollecting whatever
else that had happened on that afternoon.
He was putting on his shirt, as she prepared to leave, and
he asked her if they’d meet soon. She had nodded, smiled and left.
She’d met him several times since then and she’d be meeting
him tomorrow too. It was his birthday, and she decided on buying him a coffee
mug, albeit a one different from the one she’d picked up earlier. She also
picked up a card and wondered what she should write in it.
As she made her way to the billing counter, she felt that in
her own little way she was doing what she can to escape the unpleasantness of what
he (and now she) liked to call an ‘ordinary life’.
She was just joining the queue, when she saw him not too far
away from where she stood. He was walking towards her hand-in-hand with someone
else with that song of a smile on his face that she’d grown to look forward to.
That smile was a song for that someone else too. That someone else did look
happy.
She turned away and walked as fast as she could. She set the
coffee mug and the card on an arbitrary shelf, and she didn’t let any of what
she was thinking show on her face, but if only you could look at her eyes now.
You’d know that time does take away what it gives.
*'It's always words that undress you'- Shahir Zag.
