Love and the Dark Night

EIGHT

As if everything was over, as if I was a third person in the room, a non-identity, but because I was there and some attention they showered on me, this lady who was undressing said:

“Why do you do this every time, watch me undress. No one does this.” 

She turned her back, and I saw the slight fat on her sides. Her thighs were the colour of autumn-brown leaves. There was a birthmark on her left buttock, size of a baby’s palm to make it appear as a shadow.

Next she lay on the bed adjusting herself, head against the pillow. I moved away turning my back to her. I undressed and tossed my frayed jeans over the chair and it rested over the back rest, its waist and belt hanging like the head of a  man limp from the neck as it does when brought down from the gallows.

The Door Lady closed her eyes as she held me. I opened my hand and kept it some inches away from her and watched the shadow rest on her breast, over the cleavage and then over the other breast. When I moved my hand and the shadow was caressing her over her stomach and abdomen area, she writhed a little. She trembled, and her moans escaped from her mouth and fell on mine.

Then she turned and faced the wall. The shadow of my hand continued moving, but now over her spine and her buttocks where it rested. She writhed and moaned again.

            Some minutes of silence intervened. As she opened her mouth to speak, the bulb in the room could not be seen. It was replaced by two torches kept on pegs on opposite walls, their flames dancing and leaping in silence and warming the room. Sounds of dice being thrown reached my ears and smell of sweet wine filled the air.

“There’s two hours for you.” And saying this, the lady moved to make herself more comfortable but didn’t change her position.

            “It seems you’ll visit me for quite long. Why don’t you get married?”

            She spoke softly, and above that her words hit the wall and thus, I couldn’t hear all she spoke.  But I could understand.  

            “Married? How do know that I’m not?”

            “Well I don’t know. But you may be. Perhaps you have a wife and a child, and for reason you know better, you come here and pay me a visit. But if you aren’t married, I can help you get one. But I don’t know. Yet all I know is that you have royal blood running in your veins and so have a classic choice, it seems.”

            I sat up. “How do you know?”

            “Well, I just said it offhandedly. But now I know. At your reaction.”

            “Well, actually, I was looking through some old diary of my great grandfather. It said that we belonged to the house of the Rajputs in Rajputana. Rajputs are equivalent to kings. I’ve visited the two manors and the endless acres of land we owned in Udaipur. My father owned ships in Goa which traded fish and silks. His ships halted in ports of Mangalore, Mumbai, and all the way to Singapore, Hong Kong and also the Italian harbours. He married a local Goan lady, that’s my mother. And though I visit other cities, I prefer Goa.”

            “But what about your parents?” she said and turned facing me.

            “That’s a good question. My father passed away. He was killed in a road accident. Planned. Jealousy and greed, how they can ruin a person, and a family. My father was a gambler, and a drunkard. He squandered all his money. Thugs shadowed him, finally a truck ran him over on the highway on the other side of Kalangute Beach, where he was moving drunkenly.” I paused, cleared my throat. “And about mother, well, she suffered father’s absence for three years, till merciful death arrived.” I lay back thinking of what my father had told me stories of our kingly Rajputana clan.

            I wasn’t a good speaker, I didn’t ever know that I could speak for so long, but something came over me that pushed me to open my mouth. I looked at her. She came closer and putting her arms around me, held me close. She was showering me with womanly affection, patting my arm, caressing my face.

            I looked hard at her.

            “Did I say all this?”

            “Yes you did.” She whispered. “You also said you were Jashwant Singh. As far as I know, Jashwant Singh was a Rajput King of Udaipur.

            Then the whispered voice in my ear. It smiled. “Did you speak?”

*

Everything became quiet. Shadow fell. The other lady and the little girl were busy all this while talking in whispers between themselves, but their voices were so soft they couldn’t be heard. I got up, and dressing myself, turned and walked out of the door, leaving the inmates as they were. They knew I had come into their room in Park Road, as much as I knew they were in their room.

A strong wind came up as I walked down the empty roads. I reached my neighbourhood, but the dog was not under the tree nor anywhere around. I went up the stairs, pushed the door open and went to bed as quietly as I had left.

Aanais, beside me, stirred and moved in her sleep. I closed my eyes and found myself being followed by a dog and the two women. The girl in the lemon-coloured frock, the E-mail Girl, the girl I had named Damasque, came from nowhere and stood between me and the women and the canine.  

Could Anais know, by any chance that I was out gallivanting? I looked at her. She looked so innocent. She had declared in one way or another that she loved me. Though it was not said directly, but her smile, and the way she turned her eyes at me on a sudden, in the midst of her work, they all spoke the language of her heart. She had never told me anything about her family, and neither had she ever asked me about mine, and neither did I tell her about mine. But, how come I told that lady of the room in Park Road?

Ananis’ breathing fell soft and slow, in a steady rhythm. She stirred, turned towards me and rested her hand on my chest. I put my hand on hers and turned my face. There were tears trickling down her eyes. Did she know that I was out the entire night? Did she know more than what I knew about myself?

*

The next day pressing ten numbers on my cell phone, I finally hit the green button. The traffic at Golpark crossing was thin as I stood ten steps away from the gas station and with Just Baked behind me. The phone rang at the other end, followed by a woman’s voice, soft and husky to a slight extent. Hello, it said and then, come over. I began walking ahead, and as I did so, last night’s memories returned – from the bar to the drive, the woman thrown out of the car; me going for a walk and the encounter in the room in Park Road; my physical relationship with the lady in the room. And the conversation.

Simran, always the early riser, was the first one to see the newspaper on the floor pushed through the gap at the door. She woke us up with a fitful shout.

“Look, look you lazy bones! Listen to what the paper has to say. Get up, you sleepy garbage: A 33-year old woman was r***d in the back seat of a Honda Civic last night and thrown out of the car near Exide…” and she shook and kicked us all.

“What!!!” all the girls chorused together as sleep broke away from their senses. And then silence followed. It was obvious that the scene of the dark night lighted only by the street lamps throwing an effortless glow after every several metres appeared in front of our eyes: the white car suddenly stopping and a woman in a skirt pushed out of the vehicle; she walking unsteadily… Our eyes popped out once again that morning like it had done after midnight.

Then my reaching home around three-thirty in the morning.  

*

By seven minutes I had reached the end of the road. After crossing over two main crossings, I took the first right turn, followed by the first left and walked to the fifth house painted light yellow, pushed open the common door and took the four flights of stairs and pressed the door bell. Scarcely did the sound of the falling latch reach my ears when the door opened wide and Tessa appeared, a smile playing on her lips. She was in her late thirties. Her semi-curly brown mass of hair fell over her shoulders. Her light grey tight dress reaching till half the length of her thighs was a transparent piece of glass. Thin straps as sleeves went across her slim shoulders. A small piece of diamond, shaped into a thumb-nail dangled in a thin platinum chain around her neck. A matt-finish light brown lipstick lay over her lips. She stepped aside, smiling – her black eyes doing the most smiling – before closing the door. With her arm resting on my shoulder, we walked to the sitting room. It was a dark room with maroon curtains drawn over the two large windows. Two lamps threw their light from lampshades with Chinese writing prints in white against a black base.

“Freshen up, Rudz,” she said and pointed at the folded clothes on the dining chair. I stepped inside the washroom. Removing my clothes, I turned the shower on and soaped myself with Aramusk. Then wrapping the bath robe, I stepped out. Tessa came up on seeing me. Unloosening the silken rope from my waist, she let it fall on the light brown carpet. 

Getting up and at the same time gesturing me towards the bedroom, she walked by my side. The bedroom too was draped in dark maroon curtains and a lone lamp with a dark maroon shade of the same material. That day’s newspaper lay on the bed-side table, the front page of the Metro Section displaying the headlines in bold on the r**e case the previous night.

And a thought crossed my mind. Is Tessa posing as Damasque and sending me the mails?