She stands at the end of the room not taking her eyes off
me, while I, head bowed, walk around in a mock trot, stepping only on every
alternate tile. I can feel the stare. It’s not cold and scornful, but expectant
and anxious. That makes two of us, I feel like telling her but she isn’t in the
mood for conversation I suppose. I look up and finally face her.
‘Why the shoes,’ I ask her.
‘Not just the shoes, take off your socks as well. I want to
see your feet.’
‘I didn’t take you for a cleanliness freak. My shoes are
clean, you know.’
Now she is getting impatient. ‘It has nothing to do with that.
I just want to see your feet. I know it sounds weird but it’s hard for me to
explain. It’s like your fixation with zombie films.’
Great. I fell in love with a woman who was seated across the
table at a business meeting, I got her number citing work reasons, asked her
out a week later and now I am in her living room, waiting to get my feet
examined. What’s with my feet? She doesn’t look like she is nursing a kinky
fetish. Maybe she wants to know if my feet stink or if I’m wearing torn socks,
which by extension would imply that I am careless about personal hygiene. I’m
not but this makes me uneasy. She seems so anal about this ceremony that I’m
worried the stray strands of cat hair on my socks might upset her. Wait, I know
what it is. Doesn’t the size of the foot have a positive correlation with the
size of the penis? No, actually, that’s the palm, not the foot.
What are the odds of her asking me to get out of her house
and not seeing me ever again, because I refused to take my socks off? I don’t
want to know. Let me just show her my feet and be done with it. So I take my shoes
off, deposit them carefully by her shoe rack. Then the socks come off. I turn
around and find her walking towards me.
‘Sit here, the light is brighter here,’ and she leads me by
my hand to the centre of the room where there is a bean bag. I have no idea
what is happening to me. By this time I have even considered and hastily
dismissed the prospects of an ‘Audition’-style torture.
She sits on the floor in front of me and places my feet in
her lap. She straightens out my big toe and the long toe. I’m mildly ticklish
but I bite down a chuckle. She then examines the other foot, repeating the
ritual again with the precision of a cobbler who is about to stitch me a shoe.
Then, without a word or a warning, she bends down and kisses my foot. I’m not prepared
so I involuntarily withdraw my feet.
‘What was that?’
She is smiling now, what a relief. ‘I’m in love with you,’
she says.
What? No, I didn’t see this coming. ‘Okay…I’m sorry…no what
I mean is, all this is a little surreal.’
A bigger smile, ‘I know. But I mean it, which is why it was
important that we got this out of the way.’
‘That’s great if we have, but what exactly is that ‘this’?’
‘You won’t get it,’ she says. The smile hasn’t left her face
for a moment after that private revelation.
I’m tempted to just forget the
events of the past ten minutes and pull her into a kiss. But I need answers for
the trauma I was put through. So I press,
‘Try me. I really want to know.’
Now she gets serious and lets go of my feet.
‘I have been in love thrice. Like, really in love. I’m someone
who invests everything she has into a relationship, if she thinks it’s the
right one. So I thought I was in the right relationship, thrice. Have you ever
really been in love?’
‘Umm, yes. Once.’
‘Okay so you know how it is. The getting-to-know bit, the
moving in together, the cooking, shopping, the evening walks, the
conversations, the holiday plans and so on. You dream up a future with the
promise of the present. And when that promise fades, the inquest begins. It
happened to me thrice. It was the same pattern. The loving, caring, sensitive
man would start turning slowly, much like your zombies. I would find myself letting
go of one dream at a time, one expectation at a time, until their gradual
domination of my life was complete. And when I would decide to walk away, I had
to also take the blame. ‘You got him used to it,’ ‘why did you let it fester?’
etc. So I would decide to be more careful the next time. And then err again.
Has it happened to you?’
‘Well, the specifics may differ but…’
‘O but you’ve been in love only once so you wouldn’t really
understand,’ she says without waiting for me to complete. ‘So this once, when I was
still smarting from a failed relationship, the third one, this person asked me
if my men had a longer long toe than their big toe. He said if the long toe is
longer than the big toe, it’s a sign that the man has a dominating streak in
him. That’s when it occurred to me. He was right. All the three men had unusually
long long-toes. And they were dominating, aggressive, all of that. I decided
that moment I would never date such a man again.’
She pauses to study my reaction. I struggle to keep a solemn
look.
‘You don’t have anything to say?’
‘It’s kind of different. I don’t think anyone thinks like
that.’
‘All my rational, logical reasoning failed me so what’s wrong
with this?’
‘True, but were you really going to accept or reject me
based on the size of my toe?’
She smiles one of those beatific smiles again, ‘will you
accept it as a quirk? I’m a normal girl otherwise, I promise. When one fails at
love so many times, having a little hope gives her the courage to try again. It’s
just that.’
What I want to do is wrap her with promises of velvet
evenings and spring and merry music. But I settle for a long silent hug. Her
hair has a familiar shampoo smell. Her breath normalizes on my neck. Her arm on
my chest rises and falls to a rhythm. I gently break the silence,
‘So who was the wise man who told you about the toe-theory?’
She stays in my arms, eyes closed, and whispers, ‘I lied. It
wasn’t someone I met. It was that babaji on Teleshopping Network.’
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