Autumn Love 

    This is the story of moral conflict between marital fidelity and extramarital attraction in a woman’s emotional sphere, in the autumn of her life.

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She willed herself to not to check her phone to see if he had replied. It had been about three days now. She hated that she was constantly checking his ‘last seen at’ status and yes, he had logged in just five minutes ago. Yet she couldn’t stop herself. This sinking feeling to find absolutely no communication from him was becoming unbearable, almost tortuous.

And then, just as she sat down in her chair, her phone vibrated. With her heart thudding in her ear, she unlocked her phone and stared at the screen. Finally! It was his message.

But when she opened it and read it, she nearly stopped breathing. She didn’t know if he was joking or not. What was this? [*]

‘Is it a point of no return?’ she thought involuntarily moving to the edge of the chair.

Reading his ‘have you forgotten about the castration?’ message, she sank into the chair thinking, ‘is it a lighthearted joke or as a loaded message?’, and for a clue, began to recall the events of the year passed by.

‘Oh, how my life had turned on its head when I turned fifty?’ she thought in wonderment. ‘That’s when I immunized my heart against attractions and insulated my life from vacillations! So I believed, didn’t I? But when he enamored my heart to give a flirty spin to my life, didn’t it dawn upon me that I had only sterilized it for a ritual regimen, and no more. Oh, how his first glance pierced my heart to stir my life that very instant!’

Returning from a temple when she found him alone in the drawing room, she felt as if god had sent his angle to receive her in her own abode. The moment their eyes met, it was as if they began their joint search for a love ground to share, which they had to abandon as her husband entered the scene from behind the curtain.

He was a friend of her husband’s childhood pal settled in the States. Having spent the best part of his life there, he came back with his wife for good, leaving their two children, who were US citizens. That was six months back and they had since settled in Hyderabad, where, incidentally, both her married daughters stayed. As he happened to be in their town alone, to explore some business opportunities there, that evening, he came to call on her husband at their common-friend’s behest. Introductions over, as her husband wanted her to prepare some coffee for them; she went into the kitchen with a heavy heart.

‘While my missing his sight had understandably irked me, didn’t the thought that he too would miss my sight inexplicably hurt me?’ she began reminiscing about that dream encounter. ‘But then, how the smell of the boiling decoction lifted my spirits for it portended serving him some steamy coffee with my own hands. When he said he never tasted anything better, how I hoped he would leave some dregs for my palate to share his satisfaction. What a disappointment it was seeing him empty the cup and how exhilarated I was when he said he had broken his life-long habit of leaving the dregs. Then, as he was preparing to leave, how depressed I was, but how relieved I was when my husband invited him to visit us again!’

She got up from the chair and as if to walk down the memory lane, she walked up to the compound gate.

‘Oh, how that fateful evening changed the autumn tenor of my life!’ she went on reminiscing. ‘Were it the deities I pray that chose to pave a pathway of love for me? Or was it a case of my prayers gone awry? Before he stirred my heart, how sedate was my life, sterile though? After all, there was no material change after he had entered into it. Neither I did I venture onto his love ground nor did I let him into my sexual sphere. Why should life seem drab now as he cold shouldered me? Why not, won’t the change of heart alter the tenor of life? Even the one as dull as mine, well, but it did start on an exciting note for a provincial girl like me.’

She was born to humble parents, who felt increasingly proud of her as she grew up. After all, she turned out to be the small town’s beauty and the brains of its academics. When she was eighteen, calf love turned a new leaf in her life. The object of her adoration happened to be the stopgap lecturer from a nearby town. He taught maths alright but the equation was wrong for their marriage as he was doubly aged and twice married. Yet, amidst the protestations from her parents, with her tenacity of love, augmented by obduracy of adventure, she ascended the altar to be led by him to his native town. Her marital life, underscored by her zest for it, though clouded by his thrift, was exemplified by her two cute daughters born in quick succession.

‘Didn’t his thrift drift towards miserliness soon pushing my life into nothingness.’ she began to recollect that phase of her life when her children were growing up. ‘Why, as his passion for lovemaking too lost traction, how my life entered into the arena of frustration? Yet I shut my mind to adulterous thoughts, didn’t I? But did he stop at that? Why, he did acquire a sense of insecurity as well and how insensibly I imbibed both his vices! Maybe that’s why I learnt short-hand as a long handle for my secretarial security. Was it really so? Wouldn’t have my own fear of the future bred an urge for self-preservation in my subconscious mind? Who knows, I might’ve been.

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This story, written for “Write India Campaign of Times of India, 2015” on Preeti Shenoy’s prompt [*] is a part of the author's free ebook 'Storied Varied - A book of Short Stories', that can be googled.  

 

     

 

    An End Without An End

   A short story by BS Murthy

It is the enigma of life in that death impacts the living in ways varied, so it seems. When I heard she died, well after her death, I was doubly pained. Not that it was any untimely for she lived long enough to become a great-grandmother. Even then, death, after all, is death that is finite. But she made hers, an end without an end, haunting me no end.

So to say, born not long apart, we became close neighbours, that was in our late teens. Besides being pretty and lively, she had grace and poise. Yet I was not drawn to her as I was infatuated with someone by then, say in calf-love. Hence, not to mention her nuanced advances, I was even blind to her come-hither looks. But soon enough, as she laid bare her heart to me, I was insensibly impacted by the warmth of her love. So, with her craving for me crushing my crush for the other, I began seeing her passion in the light of her love, and that enhanced mine own ardour for her. Soon thus, the physics of proximity abetted by the chemistry of intimacy pushed us into a secretive courtship, of necking and pecking. Even therein, we refrained from crossing the threshold of chastity, ahead of the nuptial night that we thought was in the offing.

However, given the nearness of our births, when she became marriageable, I was still some way from obtaining my degree, and far off from becoming an eligible bachelor. So, when her father wanted her to don the bridal attire, she bought time, on one pretext or the other, for quite some time. Eventually though, as he would have no more of her excuses, and as there was no way I could seek her hand from him, she urged me to somehow find a way out for us to tie the knot. But then, my family was in no financial position to man our marital burden and I too had no means to stop her dad from stalling his move. Thus, in spite of her support, as I found myself unequal to the task on hand, she felt that I did not want her enough to have her as wife, the hallmark of love. Maybe, she had our elopement in mind, but all the same, she may be justified in believing that I dithered at the goalpost for I was more of her lover than she was my beloved. Then, probably on the rebound, she married a not so remarkable man, and as if to show me my altered place in her life, she pictured me to him as a ‘distant’ relative. 

But when we met some four years later, though she appeared feisty, yet I could discern in her an element of disconcert that she wryly put it as her life’s course correction. Even so, as if to put her on a lively path, her old flame got aflame, making her uninhibited in her affection and flirtatious in her attention. Though her allure furthered my desire, not wanting to compromise her position, I resisted myself from yielding, hard though it was. Needless to say, the premise I have heard that ‘even as gentlemen remain cold to their old flames, blaggards seek to inflame them’, stood me in good stead then. But for her part, I never knew if she mistook my moral distancing from her as a reconfirmation of my disregard for her emotions. Now seeing all that in hindsight and going by the Bard’s word that ‘virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, and vice sometime by action dignified’, I should’ve rather given in. But then, it’s our natures that tend to dictate the courses of our lives.  

Whatever, as if not to push us any farther into the tempting arena of human frailties, life had kept us locationally apart till well past our prime, by when passions tend to pale into nostalgias. So, when it brought us back into its reckoning, lo as residents of the same town, though as an abundant precaution, it had ensured that we came together only in our family get-togethers. Moreover, as if to make us stick to its nondescript script, her man tended to monopolize my attention for his tedious monologues, leaving us no scope to reminisce our past intimacies. Thus, as our formal meetings too becoming boring moments, I had no incentive left to make it to her place. More so, as she too showed no inclination for our private interaction, in time, our meets got limited to family functions that were far and few between. Besides, so as not to give her man any cause for misapprehension, as I kept myself away from any telephonic contact with her, we became neither here nor there things for far too long. 

  

Thus, some six months back, when I was away in another town, as her name flashed on my cell screen, I reached for her call in all anticipation only to find it fall through, followed by my return call as well. Though I sensed that something could be amiss in her aborted attempt to contact me, yet I failed to get to her to enquire, even after I was back in town that is. No denying all that stirred me from my stupor, but sadly, my lethargy stopped me from responding. Even so, I tended to think about her more than ever before, but somehow by then, truth to tell, I lacked the zeal to make it to her place. And as for her, the proof is in the pudding itself, so I thought. Oh, whither gone our urges that used to make us cling together with no heart to part; well it’s as if our flame of passion got extinguished without a trace for any follow up by us.

In that setting, as I heard about her demise, after a prolonged illness at that, it seemed like the proverbial slip between the cup and the lip, of my troubled conscience. When it slowly sunk in that even the inkling of death failed to induce in her an urge to see, and be seen by me, for one last time, I was at a loss with myself. But then, why it had to end without an end? Had she become averse to me, believing that I was cold-hearted for my failure to visit her after her tentative phone call that she herself aborted? Or, could it be the case of her brewing resentment against me that boiled over at the near end of her life? Why, she did tell me after our breakup that her life won’t be what she imagined it would be with me. Though I took that as a boilerplate reaction in that situation, going by her life-long reticence, it turned out to be prophetic, as vouched even by her man! That being the case, maybe her reminiscences of things past came alive to rake up her twice bitten wounds, goading her to have the last laugh at me over her cold shoulder, to make me seem her nobody in the end. Oh me, but is it not hard to believe that she would have really wanted me to go through my last days with that sickening thought.

But, how am I to know what had transpired in her troubled head towards the end? Maybe, as and when I bump into her over there, provided she cares to reveal, that too if she had left her bitterness here behind her. But then, having ignored her all the while, when she was alive, why, after her death, am I perturbed about her indifference to me towards her end? It’s as if, more than her pitiable death, that’s what it was as I have learned, it’s my hurt ego that is paining me; so be it, for it implies that I valued her more than either of us ever thought. All said and done, looks like love, in the long run, tends to leave its poetic course to take the prosaic route, and that’s the irony of life.