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At the party, everyone was getting high. Then she noticed Aanya, her husband’s colleague. She wondered...was he having an affair?
It was a cold January evening, the day of her brother-in-law’s bachelor’s party. Despite the perfection the hours displayed, there was a subtle stillness in the disposition of the night. Her husband was engaged in dressing for an hour now, displaying a consistent smirk on his face, the blush of a teenager. The peculiar detailing of the way he dressed made her strangely uncomfortable as if a warning of an impending tragedy.
Performing her routine in front of the mirror, she adorned herself with embellishments meant for her body, while the heart remained motionless, a numb void. Something was dead inside. After all, it’s been 5 years since she has received even a fraction of his ardent gaze. He has forgotten to admire her, caress her, love her, or maybe he never loved her. She has been treated as an object for most of her life, something to be used and “thrown away.” Maybe these 5 years are a reminder of her limited position in the society, as a woman, as a wife.
Carrying an unnoticed hollowness on her face, a thump in her heart and a luxurious gown, she went to grace the occasion. They reached at seven and were warmly greeted. The gorgeous decor of red and white, the alluring music and the warm ambience, rejuvenated her desire to love and be loved. But pity her fate!
Everything went on smoothly until she noticed Aanya, her husband’s colleague. And there it was, her first clue. The colour of Aanya’s dress and her husband’s shirt were perfectly the same. Is he cheating on me? How long have they been? Her heart, unsatisfied, rapt in the solitude of her married life, began debating over millions of such questions. They raced in her heart like an unstoppable roller coaster until her brain screamed to halt, commanding her soul to accept it as a sheer coincidence. To just stop!
Following the tradition of a bachelor’s party, everyone was high, letting their whiskey out on the dance floor. But she neither drinks nor dances, so confined herself to an isolated corner, unwanted and alone. Her heart ached on seeing him dancing with Aanya. Maybe she imagined but there were some secret inappropriate moves that were warmly welcomed by her.
This time, not being able to bear the swelling anxiety in her heart, she thought whiskey would help. Breaking all the pious oaths, she once made to her mother, there she was devouring alcohol. And yes, once a tamed woman was wild now, striving to demand her rights. But alas! She could not sustain the thrust of the whiskey consumed for the first time and collapsed.
Half-unconscious, she remembered being carried to a room by her brother. Where her husband, reluctantly sitting beside her, faked his care in front of the relatives. Sometimes she wonders how could he hate her so much and what for? How was a hatred so grave even fostered? Could he not remember a thing that she did for him?.
Soon everyone was gone, busy in their chores, and then she entered, Aanya, pretending to be her well-wisher. Taking her to be asleep he grabbed her by her waist and kissed her with the passion she had been craving for. Since the day she was married, she had died several deaths, sometimes she went numb, at others she felt her heart stopped beating, sometimes her brain gave up, but that day her soul was ripped, it was hauled into pieces, was butchered to the extent that it could never be restored. She was broken into lifeless shards of herself.
The next morning, gaining her senses and strength to retaliate, she went out shouting, declaring the infidelity of her husband, enduring to make the others understand what she had seen. She cried, explained, screamed but not even her daughter believed what she said.
She was labelled hysterical, and was told that she must have conjectured it all. Helpless, berated and abandoned by her family, she succumbed to a life of eternal loneliness.
Time and again, she comes back to the word ‘love,’ and tries to decipher the meaning of it. She listens to people eulogizing it in the most beautiful phrases that could have ever slipped through their lips, their language like wine, flowing amid the tranquillity of the serene mountain space. She probes into the details of their interpretation and collates it with her own experience. Alas! Not one similarity.
All through these years, love for her has been limited to the carnality of a stranger to whom she was fettered through a bond called marriage, often a synonym of love for the society. It took her 26 years to realize that they never loved but were ‘used to’, were dependent on each other.
A marriage sustained on anything but love shall collapse and so did theirs!
Image Source: Still from Ghost Stories
Muskan is an undergraduate literature student, an avid reader and a writer. Her areas of interest include gender, sexuality and psychology. She feels strongly for the things around and does not shy away from voicing read more...
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