Living In Bombay

The lights were dim outside. She missed her twilights, her life. She was faced with an endlessly repeating cycle of work and home, children and too many people inside a capsule of a house. She used to imagine these lives when she was young and not married, shuddering at the thought of how a family of ten, that included three couples, could live in a constricted 2BHK off the grinding railway platform of Byculla. Little did she know she would land in precisely a family like that.


"Where do they have sex?" she wondered then. She never dared ask, though. On their first night together, they were hustled into one of the two bedrooms, decorated with wilting flowers. It was miserable - she hardly knew this man, but she was not going to complain about sex, of course. She had waited for this night. It was an anti-climax of sorts when he fell asleep within seconds of resting his head on the pillow.


Sex was always hurried, performed in strictly traditional positions, at the most random times of the day or night, with quickly stifled moans, of mostly pain. On days that they found themselves alone in the house, when her ribs would hurt from all the jostling they put up with, in the local trains, she was expected to be sufficiently lubricated and ready to take the ramming. And clean up after him too. Not one word of love, not one caress, not a second to wait and ask her if she had enjoyed it.


So it was not surprising when, on one particularly tiring work day, she bumped into her cubemate at work, in the office restroom. They both quickly apologized, smiled in unison, and she stepped aside to let her out. Instead, she got pulled in.


There was shock and disgust piling up inside every pore of her body at first, as the girl pinned her to the wall. "I cannot get you pregnant. Relax," the girl said. "You are fighting too hard. Let go. Elope with me, I am going to make you so happy," she whispered.

And to her utmost chagrin, those words sent up a thrill of the most beautiful tingling up her spine, her hips. The girl let her fingers run over her collar bone, raising goosebumps on her skin. The girl knelt down at her feet then, her eyes raised in a worshipping stance, slowly hiking up the saree, and it was then, looking into those eyes, that she realised how much she had wanted her husband to do this to her.


He was just going to have to pay for all those hurried nights and days of insensitivity, wouldn't he?

By The River - Part 4

His mouth in the hollow of her neck, when he lay spent and panting one night, she pulled back his head. Why did you not come those two evenings, she asked, her voice casual but determined. Just wanted to test you. Wanted to test myself, he whispered. Test the waters, she asked. He smiled in agreement. You were angry, weren't you, he wondered aloud. I heard you raging. It was nice in a very odd way.


So you are here. You failed then, did you not, if your test was to keep away?

No. I wanted to know how badly I wanted to be here, with you, this way. I learnt that I wanted very badly to be with you.

It is odd, how your method of finding things out about yourself, must hold somebody else at stake.

Why are we talking about this now? I thought you were happy to be here with me.

I am happy you came back so I could see you again and ask you, what is it about men and women of the earth, that makes them curious? So curious that you play with other destinies. Why is it difficult to ask straight questions and get straight answers?

Things are not that simple.


But they are. It's your ego, is it not? Your need to feel important and vital? I will tell you what's vital. It's vital when I stop watering your fields. When I toss back the ashes of your dead. When I trample over your lands and leave everything barren despite being the most fertile river you have set eyes on. That is important.


She stood up, snatching his hair, dragging him to his feet.


You enjoyed humiliating me, didn't you? Here's how it feels.


She threw him into her waters, her currents catching him in violent gushes, tossing his body back and forth against the rocks before attempting to drown him. She stood on the banks, her legs rippling into the now dark waters, her eyes red and lit. He screamed silent screams for help, for mercy, but she plunged back into the waters and with one powerful blow, threw him out, wet and breathless, bruised and broken.

You are cursed, she screeched, her hair flying out behind her like a black curtain while the heavens opened up, putting her in spate. You are cursed henceforth, man, to bear the burden of your ego. In this lifetime, you shall have no other woman the way I let you have me. You shall enter no woman, you shall create no other. It is time you learnt that to spite a woman is to spite nature.

And she sank, never to surface again. She changed course. The Sindhu, incidentally, has moved out of Indian soil inch by inch over the centuries. And although she watered an entire civilization, right from the Harappan and Mohen-jo-Daro cultures, she also wiped them all out in a massive flood that took away all connections to the history of where we come from. Where you come from. The price man has paid, for his ego. For Edging God Out.