YRKB
03-16-2012, 10:32 PM
She watched him from a window on the third floor foyer. Stealing his way down the court building steps, illuminated by flashes. Eyes rooted firmly to his leather shoes, negotiating their next step with difficulty - clearly projecting himself to a mental space beyond the present; the photographers' incessant cat calls for attention, their jeering queries...
19 years ago, in her parent's New Delhi drawing room - he'd seemed just the same, beyond the madness - transfixed, then instead, on his chappals. She'd watched him, across the intimate distance, a furnace of rage inside - listening to their parents discuss her as if she were a doll. Arranging her a new playhouse... his family home. She would belong to his man. This indifferent, meek young man.
Head bowed, he lowered himself into the back door of the black Bentley Arnage, and was gone. She turned her attention back to her lawyer, allowing the chirpy, nonsensical drivel the thick-set women had been sounding out behind her to take meaning as words.
Nodding - teeth bared, through her radiant, dead-eyed smile, she choked back the well of tears.
*** *** ***
Arjun Mehra was lovable. Flaxen skinned, round and soft like the Ladoo sweet - wet looking green eyes, and the kind of confused expression that you saw on children encroaching adult conversation.
Except he was 26 then, and when it wasn't painfully endearing it was pathetic.
He was the butt of his large family's jokes. The youngest of the Mehra's three boys, the baby his parents and distinguished elder brothers frequently joked was the prettiest lackey in North India. Gayatri sat, eyes darting over the tall, fair skinned member's of her husband's family, doubled up - their hands smacking the dining table, eyes tearing up at the adorable tales of his inadequacy. Sometimes she met the watery eyes of a sister-in-law, and fought the urge to haul the hot contents of her plate over the conceding smile. Knots formed in her stomach when she turned to her side and always found Arjun keeled over too - mouth full, eyes thinned to cheery slits as he struggled to chew, to direct his meal down to his heaving abdomen.
How could he be so happy? A manager of the family's flagship hotel, as his brothers sourced land and developed new chains across the country. She saw the way their 'serious business' faces invaded their cheeky, regal features when the last plates were cleared - how their bodies' developed a taut and proud posture as they followed their father onto the veranda to smoke and talk forthcoming agendas or fresh ideas.
Arjun typically proceeded to the kitchen, chin propped resolutely on his ambling mother's shoulder as she directed the staff.
In bed, Gayatri watched him - a light smile still on her lips from the last joke he'd told before his eyes flickered shut - listening to his faint snore, like a pollinating bee, and wondered when he'd have his moment of glory. Wondering when, now that Shiva knew she'd submitted to her fate and somehow, fallen blissfully for the man she'd been selected for -their time in the sun might come.
In his more serious moments, Arjun hoped his chance to prove himself might come in the form his maternal grandfather - his beloved Dadaji. The rake thin, live wire of eccentricity openly favoured Arjun amongst the boys - and often remarked that the rugged, browning farmhouse sitting on four acres he owned in Noida, would be an honour to bestow to his daughter's little tiger. Dadaji's sudden death enshrouded the Mehra household in a suffocating gloom - swamping Arjun, his mother and those who crossed into their close vicinity the most - but Gayatri could not help but notice the veranda sessions ensued...could not help the feeling that coursed through her veins when she thought of the farmhouse. Of the renovations Arjun had tentatively imagined out loud, face furrowed, weaving his fingers between her own in the heat of the night. Of the sprawling, reputable guesthouse framed in moonlight and sun. Of the share in the Mehra's catalogue of success that would truly be his own.
It was decided the farmhouse would be sold on, and the profits re-directed to the Kerala branch, where the restaurant being developed there would certainly benefit. No real money could be made from tourists in Noida.
When Arjun relayed what the men had discussed before him in their room later that night - Gayatri finally cracked. Hours later, both of them - sitting on the edge of their wide bed, chests heaving, eyes raw red, dragging shaking palms across streaming noses, had decided. Gayatri watched the man next to her, pale in the moonlight - nodding down at his soft feet as she spoke to him, and decided no one would ever make a fool of him again. This man would command respect.
They announced their decision to move to America two days later, at breakfast. Arjun spoke to the silence, gaze slipping from one wide-eyed family member to the next - and then back to his hands. He'd rehearsed, and he was relaying brilliantly. Gayatri, listened, as he spoke the lines just like she'd advised him too - hearing, beyond her own belief, the same words in his timber with the confidence, the clarity she'd envisioned.
She snaked her palm into his, and fixed the biggest, brightest smile for them all.
*** *** ***
Gayatri cried feverishly in her car, two blocks from the South County Courthouse - at the lights. Florida sunshine streamed in through the windows, and the Manoranjan radio station omitted a shrill, bassy number from an upcoming Hindi film. She'd turned it on and up, on her way there earlier that morning - buzzing with the certainty of her win. Enthused by the idea of the blow being delivered. Stripping some magnanimity away from the man she loved.
Here she was now, a woman sitting on millions - a little less than half of her husband's thriving US hotel empire...
It made her stomach cramp.
It made her sick to think that as she sat alone in this black whale of car, returning to the rented condo with more bedrooms than she could bring herself to peer into, her husband would be at what was once her home - packing his bags to join the woman who'd been his mistress for the last six years in Manhattan. She'd heard he was flying her back to India, to be introduced amidst a reconciliation gathering with the Mehra clan.
The family who'd made a fool of him. Who didn't know any better than to treat him like a child, to denigrate his value. They'd probably laugh off his multi-million dollar empire, the empire she'd helped him cultivate - at the expense of everything.
Her heart seized to think that his homecoming wasn't hers to experience. She'd dreamed for years of that sprawling driveway in Delhi. Disembarking from the passenger seat; understated - assured, quietly powerful in only the way shrewd work and success could have made her. Both of them.
Smiling at his family again.
It would be a woman called Anjali Charan instead, flustered, missing cues, hands nervously caressing her protruding stomach.
A fresh sob thundered out of her - momentarily muting the stereo. The lights changed, and she drove on.
There'd be calls tonight. Countless recent acquaintances, women congealed and buffered with botox and saline - congratulating her in that American drawl that had never quite managed to drown the musical kinks of her native accent. They'd tell her the papers would carry it all, that she'd be hailed as one of the new eligible Palm Beach elite - attractive, exotic, childless.
Childless.
She'd never forget his face when he realized she'd been on a diet of contraceptive pills for years. Not softening to something close to understanding, like she'd been certain it would when she explained that she didn't want him to have any distractions, to lose sight of it all - not when they had something so beautiful, so powerful. Not because he was lonely, and thought little feet might cure the occasional, crippling need to be surrounded by all those voices again. Not when he'd proven those same voices so wrong. It was too little for too much.
His face had contorted, and then cracked into pieces. He'd stood in front of her - a mass of wet, howling incoherence. It had almost killed her too see him like that.
When he told her, suddenly, in a flash of irreversible, inspired spite that he'd been having an affair - that her cold, unfeeling, psychotic mindset had repelled him into the arms of another woman - she'd struggled to find somewhere to sit. Sinking to the floor, barely able to see, she'd realized he had killed her. In a way.
It was over.
What remained of their union was a legacy of clean towels and satisfied comments in guestbooks across the country.
Copyright Yafeu-Khamisi Rodway-Brown
19 years ago, in her parent's New Delhi drawing room - he'd seemed just the same, beyond the madness - transfixed, then instead, on his chappals. She'd watched him, across the intimate distance, a furnace of rage inside - listening to their parents discuss her as if she were a doll. Arranging her a new playhouse... his family home. She would belong to his man. This indifferent, meek young man.
Head bowed, he lowered himself into the back door of the black Bentley Arnage, and was gone. She turned her attention back to her lawyer, allowing the chirpy, nonsensical drivel the thick-set women had been sounding out behind her to take meaning as words.
Nodding - teeth bared, through her radiant, dead-eyed smile, she choked back the well of tears.
*** *** ***
Arjun Mehra was lovable. Flaxen skinned, round and soft like the Ladoo sweet - wet looking green eyes, and the kind of confused expression that you saw on children encroaching adult conversation.
Except he was 26 then, and when it wasn't painfully endearing it was pathetic.
He was the butt of his large family's jokes. The youngest of the Mehra's three boys, the baby his parents and distinguished elder brothers frequently joked was the prettiest lackey in North India. Gayatri sat, eyes darting over the tall, fair skinned member's of her husband's family, doubled up - their hands smacking the dining table, eyes tearing up at the adorable tales of his inadequacy. Sometimes she met the watery eyes of a sister-in-law, and fought the urge to haul the hot contents of her plate over the conceding smile. Knots formed in her stomach when she turned to her side and always found Arjun keeled over too - mouth full, eyes thinned to cheery slits as he struggled to chew, to direct his meal down to his heaving abdomen.
How could he be so happy? A manager of the family's flagship hotel, as his brothers sourced land and developed new chains across the country. She saw the way their 'serious business' faces invaded their cheeky, regal features when the last plates were cleared - how their bodies' developed a taut and proud posture as they followed their father onto the veranda to smoke and talk forthcoming agendas or fresh ideas.
Arjun typically proceeded to the kitchen, chin propped resolutely on his ambling mother's shoulder as she directed the staff.
In bed, Gayatri watched him - a light smile still on her lips from the last joke he'd told before his eyes flickered shut - listening to his faint snore, like a pollinating bee, and wondered when he'd have his moment of glory. Wondering when, now that Shiva knew she'd submitted to her fate and somehow, fallen blissfully for the man she'd been selected for -their time in the sun might come.
In his more serious moments, Arjun hoped his chance to prove himself might come in the form his maternal grandfather - his beloved Dadaji. The rake thin, live wire of eccentricity openly favoured Arjun amongst the boys - and often remarked that the rugged, browning farmhouse sitting on four acres he owned in Noida, would be an honour to bestow to his daughter's little tiger. Dadaji's sudden death enshrouded the Mehra household in a suffocating gloom - swamping Arjun, his mother and those who crossed into their close vicinity the most - but Gayatri could not help but notice the veranda sessions ensued...could not help the feeling that coursed through her veins when she thought of the farmhouse. Of the renovations Arjun had tentatively imagined out loud, face furrowed, weaving his fingers between her own in the heat of the night. Of the sprawling, reputable guesthouse framed in moonlight and sun. Of the share in the Mehra's catalogue of success that would truly be his own.
It was decided the farmhouse would be sold on, and the profits re-directed to the Kerala branch, where the restaurant being developed there would certainly benefit. No real money could be made from tourists in Noida.
When Arjun relayed what the men had discussed before him in their room later that night - Gayatri finally cracked. Hours later, both of them - sitting on the edge of their wide bed, chests heaving, eyes raw red, dragging shaking palms across streaming noses, had decided. Gayatri watched the man next to her, pale in the moonlight - nodding down at his soft feet as she spoke to him, and decided no one would ever make a fool of him again. This man would command respect.
They announced their decision to move to America two days later, at breakfast. Arjun spoke to the silence, gaze slipping from one wide-eyed family member to the next - and then back to his hands. He'd rehearsed, and he was relaying brilliantly. Gayatri, listened, as he spoke the lines just like she'd advised him too - hearing, beyond her own belief, the same words in his timber with the confidence, the clarity she'd envisioned.
She snaked her palm into his, and fixed the biggest, brightest smile for them all.
*** *** ***
Gayatri cried feverishly in her car, two blocks from the South County Courthouse - at the lights. Florida sunshine streamed in through the windows, and the Manoranjan radio station omitted a shrill, bassy number from an upcoming Hindi film. She'd turned it on and up, on her way there earlier that morning - buzzing with the certainty of her win. Enthused by the idea of the blow being delivered. Stripping some magnanimity away from the man she loved.
Here she was now, a woman sitting on millions - a little less than half of her husband's thriving US hotel empire...
It made her stomach cramp.
It made her sick to think that as she sat alone in this black whale of car, returning to the rented condo with more bedrooms than she could bring herself to peer into, her husband would be at what was once her home - packing his bags to join the woman who'd been his mistress for the last six years in Manhattan. She'd heard he was flying her back to India, to be introduced amidst a reconciliation gathering with the Mehra clan.
The family who'd made a fool of him. Who didn't know any better than to treat him like a child, to denigrate his value. They'd probably laugh off his multi-million dollar empire, the empire she'd helped him cultivate - at the expense of everything.
Her heart seized to think that his homecoming wasn't hers to experience. She'd dreamed for years of that sprawling driveway in Delhi. Disembarking from the passenger seat; understated - assured, quietly powerful in only the way shrewd work and success could have made her. Both of them.
Smiling at his family again.
It would be a woman called Anjali Charan instead, flustered, missing cues, hands nervously caressing her protruding stomach.
A fresh sob thundered out of her - momentarily muting the stereo. The lights changed, and she drove on.
There'd be calls tonight. Countless recent acquaintances, women congealed and buffered with botox and saline - congratulating her in that American drawl that had never quite managed to drown the musical kinks of her native accent. They'd tell her the papers would carry it all, that she'd be hailed as one of the new eligible Palm Beach elite - attractive, exotic, childless.
Childless.
She'd never forget his face when he realized she'd been on a diet of contraceptive pills for years. Not softening to something close to understanding, like she'd been certain it would when she explained that she didn't want him to have any distractions, to lose sight of it all - not when they had something so beautiful, so powerful. Not because he was lonely, and thought little feet might cure the occasional, crippling need to be surrounded by all those voices again. Not when he'd proven those same voices so wrong. It was too little for too much.
His face had contorted, and then cracked into pieces. He'd stood in front of her - a mass of wet, howling incoherence. It had almost killed her too see him like that.
When he told her, suddenly, in a flash of irreversible, inspired spite that he'd been having an affair - that her cold, unfeeling, psychotic mindset had repelled him into the arms of another woman - she'd struggled to find somewhere to sit. Sinking to the floor, barely able to see, she'd realized he had killed her. In a way.
It was over.
What remained of their union was a legacy of clean towels and satisfied comments in guestbooks across the country.
Copyright Yafeu-Khamisi Rodway-Brown