Short

With his backpack positioned carefully over his shoulders, he thrust himself into the midst of the eastbound throng, and emerged unscathed into the matte silver dullness of the 7:10 to Hoboken. Settling down onto any plot of grimed vinyl clad padding being out of the question during rush hour - especially considering all such plots had been long appropriated by tie-loosened hoodlums newly emerged from the sunless depths of Wall Street's forbidding vaults - Arunivas Nayar permitted himself the luxury of holding on with all the fingers of his muscular right hand to the metal railings running in prison lines high over his head, rather than being supported in Tower of Pisa fashion by his neighbor's presumably heavily-tattooed arms discreetly shrouded by starched pima cotton between the hours of nine and five.

The day had gone well. Dow was up. NASDAQ was up. Sensex was up. But he was thinking about his Indian IT stocks, the non starters that he wanted badly to short but couldn't do from home because of Protima's voice floating down the stairs, "Clean up finished? Clean up finished? What are you doing down there? Hello? Did you finish cleaning up? Did you do the walls? The stairs?"

"Yes Darling, yes Janu, I just finished all the cleaning you wanted Janu".

Protima with her hands on her hips, just out of the shower, her hair wet, dripping, a thick mess of rotting caviar tied with those opaque tarantula-like hair clips that grip unto death. Protima with her untidy laundered shirt that she insisted on washing ten times a day, the entire washer cycle wasted with enough water to quench a village, all for one white tee-shirt. Protima with her bloodless lips and sunken cheeks, the hairy spider legs escaping for miles under her solitary apparel, like a sentry disrobed of armor but not of mien, the whisper of a ghostly shred long escaped from the dungeons of Montezuma. Montezuma with her bloodshot insomniac eyes, her chipped teeth frowning even in wild rippling laughter, daring you to bare yourself and glimpse from the periphery, the certain fury of Hell. Protizuma with the sardonic grin glaring at you from the top of the stairs, a washcloth in one hand, two undernourished children holding fast till death to her lower limbs, innocently glaring at you the oppressor, the merciless, their scorching glances flooding you with an ocean of guilt, from directly behind their maternal spring. Protima the mother, speaking softly, gently, admonishing, her eyes twinkling, smiling; Protima the wife, nagging, prodding, the angry rage searing, scornful; Protima the lover, trembling, ashamed, grateful; Protima - the little girl with her plaits tied together tugging to free them of one bright red ribbon, a blot on her meticulously ironed blue uniform, refusing to conform, refusing to give in, refusing to die.

Protima, refusing to die, her voice floated up even now, in the heat, the stench of the congested train, the heavy doors clanging clattering, the soft hush hush of the wheels, iridescent chattering on twinkling cell phones, the overpowering sense of technical progress, persons displaced between iPods and laptops, tap-tapping on tiny dark keyboards, busy, congested, choking screens perching daintily on the knees of dark blue suits with tiny purple stripes made by fingernails traveling downwards from the thigh, trapping dirt and perc in its crevices. The perc! The perc!

Arunivas Nayar awoke from his reverie to the sudden surge of knowledge that Protima would now make him wash all the dry cleaned clothes by hand.