The Morning After

An entire night's worth of life had been erased. He remembered not a thing. The last confirmed sight in his head was having, what was probably, his sixth shot of the night. What had happened after that?

He had to remember because the circumstances of his waking up had greatly puzzled him. He had woken up in his room, in his night wear. The other side of the bed looked perfectly creased and slept-in. It was evident that she had slept by his side like every night.

He waded out of the room like he had the webbed feet of a duck. He investigated every room with the discerning precision of a crime sleuth. A crime sleuth who had spent the night soaked in a vat overnight.

She was gone. Doubly puzzling. How could his wife have gone to work like it was any other day? It was clearly not. Nor was the night before. Exactly what had happened after that sixth shot? For that matter, what had happened before it? He retched on the stairs. He felt vomit in his nasal passage. His head felt like a construction site.

Maybe it was his guilt that throbbed in his head. He didn't know yet what he was guilty of but all evidence (or the lack of it) pointed south. He had to pull himself together and piece the events together. What did he know? He had walked in to Hic!, the neighbourhood bar, to catch a game of football. BFC had played Mumbai off the park. Keshav Thapa, the talismanic import from Sikkim had dazzled with two assists and one goal. The game had ended at 7.30.

Status at 7.30: happy high at three pints of beer.

Then the first round of shots arrived. The local lads had won. The i-league was going to be theirs this season. That called for a shot.

The second shot arrived twenty minutes later because only pansies stopped at one.

Then there was a break during which a pint was emptied in the restroom and promptly offset with another at the bar. That is when the DJ stunned everyone with a rare Benny Benassi track. It was the track in which the vocalist kept mispronouncing 'hour' as 'How-er.' How he loved singing along to that. In a matter of minutes, everyone was on the floor.

A third shot was gulped down 'for Benny and the good old times.'

Status at around 9.00: Throwback to a young Travolta from 'Grease.'

His recollections after that were sketchy at best. A periodic status log was impossible. Much dancing had happened. The women had taken to him. He had complained about age 'taking the steam off his engine' to someone in the restroom.

At some point, his wife had called. The contents of the conversation had been wiped clean from his mind.

"Come here and dance, you old fart." Again, no recollection of who had said that.

The ketchup song. Those wretched steps he hated seeing on tv but didn't mind matching with her last night.

Wait, what? Who was the 'her?' And at what point had they kissed?

Was it before or after the sixth shot?

How the fuck did it matter? He had kissed her. Another woman. At the ripe old age of 45, he had crossed the line. Or had he?

No, no. His mind was playing tricks. It hadn't happened. Surely, it hadn't? Right?

But it had. What a kiss that was! He could still feel the part minty part beery taste of her mouth. Her body had felt like it would collapse into his arms any moment. He wasn't sure but it must have been something really important that interrupted it. Must have been the sixth shot. Good, so now events were gradually settling in a chronological sequence. But that solved nothing.

How had he gotten home? How had he made it to the bedroom? Where was his car? Who had driven? Where had the woman gone? God! Who was that woman?

He went hurtling down the stairs and out of the door. His car was right where it should have been. He ran back up and into his room. His wallet was on the table. Not a note seemed missing. Then who had paid? Was it her? So she had paid for his drinks and driven him home? Why? Had she thought she could come over to his place?

At that last thought, a chill climbed up his spine all the way to his shoulders, causing an involuntary shudder. And another more disconcerting thought occurred to him.

Did his wife know? It made perfect sense. The woman from the dance floor had driven him home, mistaking him for a lonely, rich guy she could get lucky with. But once home, she had come face to face with the wife. Much name calling had happened. The wife had called her a whore. She had unkindly reminded the wife of her inability to keep 'the man' at home. Then she had left in disgust. The wife had cursed him, her fate, her parents and Vijay Mallya before tucking him in.

She knew. If everything was in place and nothing was out of the ordinary, it was just a passive-aggressive build-up to the tempest that awaited him in the evening. Probably earlier, if she couldn't hold the rage in and took half a day off from work. That also explained why he had seen beetroot paranthas at the breakfast table. After all, it was his favourite.

It is sheer mastery at mind games that makes a woman treat her man with affected love on a day she plans to guilt-trap him.

He retched again. This time, in the bathroom. On the third attempt, he successfully threw up. The regurgitation brought some much-needed clarity. He had to address the situation. He had to address her and explain himself. He wasn't a serial cheat. He was feeling let down by himself. There was no excuse. She could punish him however she wished. He would tell her all this. He couldn't call her because she couldn't talk about it at work. It was too long for a text message. He couldn't wait till she got home because then it would all blow up in his face. He had to act. Now.

So he decided to write an email. Even if that didn't strictly qualify as a conversation, he hoped it would soften her up a bit by the time she got home.

'Hey honey,

I know you are furious about last night. I would be too, if I were you. I have no excuses to offer for what happened. I screwed up.

Trust me when I say this, I have never cheated on you in all these years. Until last night. I kissed a woman I hadn’t met before. I don't remember when I met her or what really happened. Looking back, it feels like a horrible thing to have done but I promise I am not having an affair.  

I was drunk. It was a moment of weakness and it just happened.

You don't deserve this. But can we talk about it and move past it? I know things haven’t been great but we could start working on them now.

Let’s talk, yes?

Love'

After much contemplation over the phrasing of his note, he sent it out.

There was nothing to do but wait. That made it even worse for him. Till that point, he had a sense of purpose, something he had to do to set things right. Now all he could do was await his damned sentence. It was the wait of a lamb at the slaughter.

Every few minutes, he checked his email. Citibank was offering him a platinum credit card. A Nigerian widow wanted him to inherit a stately sum in dollars. His wife was in no mood to put him out his misery yet.

More junk mails arrived. And after an agonizing wait and a dozen deleted junk mails, the note he was waiting for arrived -

'When you asked me to join you at the bar, I should have known it wasn't you speaking. That stranger you kissed was me.

I allowed myself to think that life had turned a corner last night. I am not so sure any longer.

I’m spending the night at Diya’s.'

It was resignation that pushed him to visit the palmist. This mysterious science, he hoped, would tell him his story with a clarity he was trying hard to find. Not one to believe in the wonders of astrology and palmistry, merely walking into the slight, gentle-looking palmist’s room felt like a defeat. The litany of predictions and advice barely made it to his absent mind. He realized the futility of his visit even as the sagely-looking man started talking. Midway through his consultation, he abruptly walked out with a half-muttered apology. Once out, he hurried his steps as if he didn’t want to be spotted there. In a strange city with nobody but a crowd of tourists milling about, he felt an urgent need to hide.

He could see a ghastly picture in his mind. He was in the middle of a court in session and a hundred pairs of eyes looked at him, passing their sentence even before the court could pass its judgment. They kept a safe distance, careful not to be in the same space as him but the weight of those eyes was palpable, causing him to slouch a little as he walked. As he rushed away with his eyes pointed at his toes, he hoped to forget all about having visited the palmist. He hoped to forget that he had been so weak.

That evening, he had found himself on the cold and unwelcoming floor of his terrace, smoking the carefully preserved half of a cigarette. He had been off smoking in happier times but it was yet another promise he had reneged on to escape his temporary hell. He felt the revulsion of a man who had just visited a brothel to make his loveless life bearable. Except, the dormant misery always returned with a ruthless fury once his short-lived escape was over.

His heartbreaks were no ordinary ones. They always showed up with a viciousness he could neither foresee nor defeat. They were not the outcome of a mistake or the fall from a missed step, but the tempestuous revenge of the wronged. Here he was, far away from home trying to deal with rejection all over again. He couldn’t take comfort in the familiar sight of his neighbourhood park or the long drive out of the city or call one of his colleagues and get drunk till the only worry for him was a headache from hell, the next morning.

Instead, he was on that gelid terrace floor, replaying a few words in his head. It was a dangerous game to play, for every time he played them back, he discovered a new ominous meaning. A loosely thrown comma became an emphasized pause, an ellipsis turned into reluctance and innocuous words transformed into diabolical puns. Everything sounded caustic. He tried to piece everything sequentially, every word she had spoken and his reply to each of them. He tried to cut through the mist in his head and decode how she had gone from “you have no idea how invaluable you are to me” to “I think our little story has run its course,” within two days. He tried but he could not nail down that moment or that turn of phrase which changed everything.

After a while, he gave up. He decided that he would wait for the answers to present themselves when they chose to. That was probably the cue, for that is when he heard the little girl sing. She was on the terrace next door, picking up clothes from the line. She was probably singing to keep herself warm. Her voice flowed in like it didn’t quite belong there and had been planted for a reason. It was like the waft of a fragrance completely out of place in the mustiness of that small town. He wasn’t sure she even knew the meaning of the words she was singing.

And summer will soon arrive with fanfare;

And burn your skin with its deathly glare.

And the rain will batter down in a torrent

And pierce every pore; it won’t relent.

The promise of tomorrow will only make it worse

For what’s within you is your curse.

So make of this day, what you will

The evening won’t wait for your heart to heal.

It was a song he had never heard before but it was one he knew he would remember forever. In that little girl’s voice. In that velvet whisper of a cold evening in dusty Mirajpur.

It brought upon him a stillness he had missed. Perhaps, certainties were not for him. He would need to eke out his comfort from words thus carelessly hummed and gestures of kindness, completely unintended.  

Between the sheets

He doesn’t know that I’m banging his wife. Every Saturday we head to the stadium together and cheer our team. He is a guy with deep pockets so we usually cap off the game with a pint at the pub nearby with him footing the bill. He gets off on that show of large-heartedness and I love my free beer. It is fun being around him but it is even better when he is not around. I get to meet his wife. Our modus operandi is pretty simple; she leaves home around the same time he does. He comes to the game with me and she goes out to her spa. When the game and the post-game beer are done, I head straight to my apartment, where she waits for me. Yes, she has a spare key. He thinks she is still out with her friends. Or as she puts it, he doesn’t think. After ten years of being married, one no longer concerns themselves over the details. What was once ‘going out to Cristo’s for the karaoke night with Neetu and Shraddha’ now gets conveniently abbreviated to just ‘heading out.’ ‘A late pitch for Yeslife Insurance due tomorrow’ becomes ‘working late.’ So he doesn’t ask. She doesn’t tell. 

She tells me, instead. About his depleting sperm count and growing annoyance at the suggestion of IVF. About the progress she is making at mending ties with her estranged father. She tells me how yoga helps keep her fit but what keeps her calm is lying by my side, talking to me. I listen, without ever proffering advice. I don’t think she needs it because she never seems to notice my lack of participation. In that respect, she is as selfish as I am. On days when I’m not in the mood to listen, I start kissing her toes mid-conversation. It turns her on enough to stop talking. She never asks me why I’m with her. In a way, I’m glad she doesn’t because I don’t think she will like the sound of my answers. She has the most perfect ass I have ever seen. When I hear all this talk about Pippa Middleton, I wish I could line them all up and show them what is in my bed. Actually, she’d probably like to be told that. At her age, she would like nothing more than being told that she has still got it. The message would need a little working on but I think I could make her like that reason. The second reason is that she is my friend’s wife. My friend drives around in a BMW, runs a successful management consultancy, constantly finds himself on the back pages for his golfing exploits and somehow manages to stay humble through it all. And his wife sleeps with me. Lastly, I like her because I am a selfish writer. Writers don’t care as much about material pursuits as we do about the pursuit of material. She provides great material for the stories I write. The last one I wrote about a father who lusts after his young daughter only to be consumed by remorse in his later life was almost entirely based on her troubled relationship with her old man. I was told by those who read it that it is my best work yet. It wasn’t good enough to be published though. All the publications I sent it to rejected it. 

That doesn’t worry me. I am convinced that one day, she will help me write a story that will have the critics drooling. I hope this fling lasts that long. I pray that he doesn’t find out before that. What if he does? I will lose a rich friend, a fuck buddy and a muse in one swoop. On second thoughts, what a great story that will make. I’m sure the journals will fall over each other to publish that.  

A short story about the earth and the sky

Of all the elements, he was closest to earth. He hated high-rises. Heights made him dizzy. He slept on the floor. His cherished childhood memory involved painting his milkmaid Meethiben's walls with cow dung cakes. During navratri, he would use wet sand and mud to create miniature temples for mohalla maata.

He had been in love once. He had wooed her with a song where the pining lover smears his forehead with the earth that his lover has walked on, and compares its fragrance with that of sandalwood paste. The first time they made love was on the dry cold floor of an abandoned parking lot. The grainy uneven surface had left stray marks on her back that he spent the next couple of hours tracing with his fingers as he listened to her doubts about meditation actually helping one levitate.

He got her little souvenirs from every place he traveled to. He got her conch shells, clay pots with hand carvings, the almost-intact scales of a rock python and perches for her budgerigars. Her favourite though was the marijuana sapling he had got her from Manipur. It had provided for many a rainy afternoon spent listening to him sing about love and longing. The fragrance of freshly washed earth and marijuana was the closest they got to making love without actually making love.

He never told her about his cosmic connection with all things earthy. She never saw it either. She put his preference for coarse throaty qawwals over western classical virtuosos down to a different musical upbringing. He was addicted to ginger tea while she loved coconut water. And it seemed alright.

Then one day, he wrote her a poem about wanting to be together till the earth swallowed them whole. For a week after that, he didn't hear from her. When she wrote back, she told him that she needed more space. And that she wanted to break the shackles and fly. She had to go because being with him was holding her back.

That night, he couldn’t sleep. So he stayed up and wrote a story about the day when the skies had swallowed his love whole.