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?
