A Story

Chapter One

A line is a poignant thing. It starts off with a nudge and lingers, readying itself to endless possibilities and confessions: an afternoon of forbidden memories or a desire to do dangerous things as the half dried clothes tremble on the clothing line, or streets tick away towards a dreadful evening.  A handy thing at this point is the doorbell, a postman or the maid, startling the dishevelled mistress. Dishevelled inside out.  The novel was boring; it rose to a crescendo and then hung limp, for the writer hesitated to pass the amorphous limits into the carnal and the fleshly. How many times that has happened, she wonders.
would it have been better if she spoke?  Was it possible to churn out the magical and the mysterious out of a life that was a series of cardboard boxes, substantial, worthy, but devoid of pre-empted colors?
She laughed. Boredom was a fashionable garb of the eighties. She had worn it with pride. There was ammunition, naturally! The drop dead revolution, the irrelevant French Decadents and that enormous feeling of a blossoming womanhood that left you insufficient every inch of the way… from the busy volatile College Street to the innocuous by lanes of South Calcutta.  Only, the words had to be found: copious, unabashed and hard to believe.

— “Why do you say such shocking things all the time?”

— “Because I am I am I am”

— “that is a discarded philosophy, passé, smacking of Paris and the dead sixties”

— What are my choices?

— Love me!

 — “I collect men with interesting names.”

Loving wasn’t easy. It was unfurling oneself, soul first. That is what she had dreaded all her life. Not the body. That was the easy part. Touchable and dreadfully predictable. The routine pregnancies that happened in her family, the lustreless physical combats that were described by her giggly friends. Love was a much abused word and came as spelling errors in crumpled notes shoved into her palms unwarranted. The worst fear: someone would tear at the veil, would reveal something ugly as a spider that crawled on the damp bathroom wall during the monsoon, more lethal than the crumpled word. That was not Desire.
Poetry was better.

Body was another possibility in her world. She often imagined herself on the delivery table after it was all over – the thick limp pain and the joy of reaching out to a wriggling piece of her own flesh with a round pink mouth. Motherhood was different, she thought; she knew.

As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk
She hears the caustic ticking of the clock.

Chapter II

A European Gone Girl –The Wall Street Journal

“An internationally bestselling phenomenon: the darkly suspenseful, highly controversial tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives-all over the course of one meal.

It’s a summer’s evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.”

That would be a clincher, she thought with a smirk (she hasn’t lost it even after all those years that tried her sense of humor).  Just the thing for the cleavage heaving readers resting their tired soul on a pillow during afternoons or insomniac midnights (a pertinent question would be…, but we know better we don’t ask such questions). Only if she could pen those lines: a pretty face and a sad face and some  terrible news to be sliced up with steak knives and delivered, mopped clear with the white napkin. No such luck.

–Let us talk

–What about?

–the first thing that comes to our mind.

He was always like that, an attempting intruder who broke down defined walls: from hockey stick to Godot, forging his way in, blending the sportive and the literary. A rich man’s parlor was as good as the crumbling attic that housed wet dreams and  Tagore alike; “heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together” … passion, coercion all blended with ease and emptied out metaphors of clichéd associations.

–Do you love me?
–I don’t know

–You’d better…

Love was not desire. Poetry was better; it was assuring, made you dream of colors. Orange. Pistachio.
Why can’t she ever write a story? Because events did not surge like waves … because things happened that were not meant to be… even when the round pink mouth uttered its first wail, it wasn’t as she had imagined. She was scared of the small bundle that commanded her to take charge.
How does one write a story? “Gustav Freitag’s triangle: first comes the exposition… a pyramid in Cairo,” as she would tell her students.
What if life wasn’t like that? What if there was an unannounced visitor at the door? What if the intensity demanded a poem, not a story?
Middle aged crow feeted eyes looked in the mirror. She crackled and shook her index at the image: “No, for god’s sake; don’t start “Mirror mirror on the wall”…only penny novels did that.

Besides, she hated wetness and all things smudged.