Premala ka Pyar

Closing her eyes, she could feel the tears welling and burning like the painful ebbing of an angry shore against jagged rock.

Finally, she stared at the saffron colored sari in quiet silence. The colors fused from one festive corner to another, like a serene liquid movement of orange to a circular moving bright red.

Pretty, she thought to herself, amused almost.

It was strange how his infidelity had spanned the abstract into concrete in such a short time. She squinted deeply at it, as if trying to unravel some answer embedded within its diaphanous fabric.

Running her hands over it, she let her fingers catch on the upraised gold gota and buti kaam. Her fingers were dry and knotty; they looked worn, she thought. Looking away and smoothing her cotton kurta kameez, she could hear the soft whirring of the water tank outside her open window and her husband’s muffled sloshing of water in the bathroom a few feet away.

Soft mellifluous sounds of the bustling city reached her ears, as did the gentle wind immersed with the essence of humidity and lulling energy of the waning summer evening. The nearby small houses and buildings were lazily settling into their foundations, cooling in the dusky sunset. The racket of small children slowly fading away as watchful mothers shooed them inside.

The sounds made her think of her own children, fast asleep in the room next door.

She’d always been a good mother, she thought.

An even better wife, she thought bitterly.

The overhead movement of the fan and the glare of the fluorescent lighting in the room made her cringe with pain that night.

She moved toward turning it off and lighting the oil lantern instead. She smiled ruefully at the lantern; this had been his first gift to her on their wedding anniversary. “A lantern?” she had said with a small laugh and peered into his eyes looking for an explanation but got none.

Anand always had that sort of inexplicable quirkiness, which always seemed to elude her, no matter how hard she tried to understand. Wistfully, she remembered the way in which she’d forced her shaking hand steady so that she could rim her eyes with kala kajal, just before he came home.

The soft tinkling of her colorful glass chooriyan as she hurriedly pushed them onto her small wrists. Breaking a few in the process, she couldn’t help but giggle at her silly fervor.

Staring into the mirror for a long time that night she took herself in with a smug complacence. She purchased the sweet pink shalvar kameez a couple weeks ago in preparation for this night.

The loud tactless salesman at the bazaar shop boasted promises of blooming love and prosperity as he pointed to the hanging suit, fluttering in the summer wind and accumulating dust from the street.

She applied just a touch of neem oil to her hair, being careful to encapsulate each long strand, in slow gleeful anticipation of the night. She had been so proud of the quiet strength of the red laali in the part of her hair on that magical evening.

Standing in the same spot near the window she wiggled her toes excitedly in her kolapuri chapals as he quietly approached her from behind in a warm embrace, enveloping her. She felt tingling in her stomach. He whispered with loving faintness into her ear, “Premala…”

She adored his dark liquid eyes, shining fiercely even in the darkened room. He delicately kissed her bare shoulder, his eyes never leaving hers…

The fluorescent tube crackled harshly as a mosquito flew into it and she blinked several times.

Jarred to reality, she looked at the fabric of the sari again with disgust this time and felt sick to her stomach. The almost pleasing saffron now seemed garish in the bluish light.

He would always bring some well-appointed sari, paying for it with money on loan. It was a fruitless effort to please her, she thought with bitter resentment as she took the sari from him each time in silence.

A different hue each time; the rich colors enlivened further by his guilty eyes and anxious demeanor. Each time she searched his eyes wishing for a different moment in time, a different Anand.

Alas, the sari was to make amends for the guilt that he and she both felt but never dared speak of. The guilt ran its course over the few months; enlisting a divide so deep, she shivered with the memory. So much had changed, she thought bitterly.

Sitting upright, she gripped the heavy wood frame of the bed, her knuckles turning close to white.

The benign fabric represented to her all that she had lost; a quiet storm inside her welled and faded away again, brimming her eyes with burning tears once more.

Slowly, she relaxed her grip on the innocent frame and felt blood return to her fingers. Instead, she pulled back whisps of dark black hair that had escaped her thinning bun and with a deep sigh, got to her feet.

She heard the door open but stood still facing the window. “Premala..”, she waited to hear. But, heard nothing.

In a slow and deliberately even voice she mouthed the responding words before they escaped her lips. Her lips were dry and her mouth parched, she realized.

She had gone through the same scenario before, with ease. Sometimes she ran through the scene in her dreams, sometimes seeing more than she wanted to.

Other times, she dreamt that she had left him finally or in a moment of surprising rage, had even killed him. She chuckled softly.

Remembering with an uneasy clarity the rushing relief as she inflicted upon him the same pain he forced her to endure. In her thoughts the blood would slowly seep from his tattered skull each time, congealing in a thick dark red pool next to his stark white kurta.

She would smile sweetly and run her hands through his blood-drenched hair, now sticky. Later, she’d take a hot scalding shower, washing away the decaying scent of blood from her fingers.

Other times she dreamt their life was the way it was when she wore the sweet pink shalvar kameez-they were young and in love again. Anand loved her and only her in those dreams--to the point where the immense welling of love in her heart became almost aching and she would wake with a start.

But ashamedly, she dreamt most of the blood seeping from his skull...

She rubbed her tired eyes fiercely, as if they were the cause of the vile thoughts.

Hearing the soft scraping path of his chapals on their concrete floor as he neared their bedroom, she paused. Not turning, she stood rooted next to the window.

He finally entered the room and spoke her name cautiously, “Premala...”

His voice was raw with caring emotion as it always was on nights like this with a twinge of anxiety, deep within its layers somewhere.

She sensed fearfulness too.

Glad it was he who was fearful this time and not her, she smiled to herself and turned.

They ate in relative quiet that night, both aware of the fabric lying on the bed a few feet away. He asked her numerous times anxiously if she fancied the sari.

The same searching eyes penetrating her. Not skipping a beat, she nodded yes and they continued to discuss the events of the day with the strange formality of strangers.

Washing away the remains of food from their plates seemed to lend her ultimate satisfaction for some reason. She had no answers to anything anymore. As he had changed, she had also. Maybe this was just how life unveiled itself, in stages, she surmised. Each stage bringing forth unique changes to their union.

She laid the saffron colored sari with the others in a separate drawer that night after Anand had went to bed. Running her hand over the multicolored shades of the silken fabrics, she thought how each was unique in its’ own way.

Each represented its own wound.

She could recall each memory of the moments he presented the saris to her with astounding clarity. Each were crystal droplets in her mind. They were smooth and round in their individual form, yet mixing together to create the imminent deluge of tears that singed her eyes even in the darkness.

She tried so hard to push away the memories, but each rising sun brought with it the same crystal translucence.

She pushed the drawer in and locked it laying the small flat key on her bedside. It was the only drawer of the house that she took care to lock as if doing so would contain the hurt and the betrayal somehow.

Standing by the armoire, she watched him sleep as the moonlight filtered on to his face through the iron-clad bars of their tiny window. His eyelids fluttered softly, a rhythmic pulse behind each lid.

She knew she inexplicably loved him still.

She watched his sleepy eyes during her own sleepless nights, ran her fingers over his, knowing that they had only recently caressed another woman’s body.

She would move close to him, so that her lips barely grazed his while he slept, careful not to wake him, knowing that they had only recently kissed another woman’s lips.

Yet, she knew nothing else, but to love him. With every shard of her body.

She lay down next to him, pain erupting in stages through her joints as she pulled the chadar over her body. She released her tangled hair from the bun and let it cascade onto her pillow.

She waited with patient resoluteness for the rising sun as he slept with his fingers entwined deeply in her hair…