The writer commenced writing.
In the new house, mother and her friends explored the turquoise coated dinner table. Leaving them behind, I stepped out into the balcony adjoining one of the three bedrooms. In the balcony next to ours, an attractive lady, lean, and of fair complexion, was cleaning dishes. Ermine jacket suspended overhead troubled her as she carried the iron grilled basketful of dishes inside. sound of radio poured out of the windows with drawn blinds; from where I stood, I noticed that her hallway, sporting an arch, was decorated with scarlet velvet drapes. Wind blew from the other side, ballooning the great wide drapes. The resounding flap of the drapes as they beat against themselves in the torrent of wind, left me in wonderment that the house resembled a giant fly (with velvet wings) perched atop the first floor. “oye! Close the door. Will you!” splashing water on the face, dipping her cupped hands in the plastic bucket before her, reproached “feels like the house would uproot and fly away”. With the doors closed, the drapes flew back into their humble suspension states, flat and listless, as if life has been sucked out of their voluptuous pits. Very briefly, I noticed the silhouette of the person behind the receding drapes.
The writer paused here. what should happen next? He has got about 3 main characters now- the narrator, his mother and the attractive lady neighbour. Scratching his chin, and squinting through his temple, stared poignantly at the monitor. The story, he believed, would spring out, slowly and methodically. He bethought “let me describe the characters’ moods and perhaps the vicissitudes. By the end of it, I am sure, I will spot an opening, a beginning”. The idea was to dramatise the plot. However well written it may be, a story is spineless as long as there is no underlying drama. He was very keen to introduced drama now.
“yes, mother! Coming right away” shouting those words, unconsciously and impulsively, I announced my presence to the lovely neighbour. She froze in her walk, dropping an enquiring glance at me, rested the basket on the wooden table before her. Water drops clung to her milky white feet; now, as she approached towards me, hitherto dreary afternoon found the sun leaking his fiery stare through voluminous dark clouds and pinching her diamond crusted moist cheeks. Her saree was puckered into folds and firmly lodged by the waistline, exposing her gleaming shins. Her waist, slender and firm, hoisted a figure of anatomical accuracy. “Hi! Are you moving in?” loosening the tight clip of her saree’s end that held together the folds running upstream, to meet over the left shoulder, she continued “ I knew the previous occupants”. My mind in a bait of familiar lapse, wandered in limbo as the silver embroidery of her blouse’s sleeves shone through the polyester saree that now obediently embraced her like a broad membranous wing from bow of the neck to stern of the knees. Through the veneer of ladyship, she extended her hand, over the parapet wall “I am Lalitha”
“Oh! wait a minute” writer thought to himself “this is not right”. His characters, instead of playing out their roles in the plot, seem to reveal a side of himself. The writer’s indulgence in a fanciful flight of attraction of sexes, as he realised, was outrageous. Although, it led to the display of excoriating beauty in a woman, he was no where close to the inception of the plot. He sat upright now, clearing his mind off the slightly lecherous obsession, he began again.
Growing up as a child, Lalitha learnt of the effect she had on men. She conscientiously avoided her feminine qualities to overwhelm her; dressed conservatively, sported an elegant posture, talked confidently, and clutched at each rung of corporate ladder with grace and poise. A smart woman, she finished her MBA, a “magna cum laude”, from one of the prestigious B-school in India. Now, in her late twenties, following a marriage fraught with trauma, she was left devastated. Her husband, also an MBA, died in a road accident only two months after the marriage. In the last two years, Lalitha spent more and more time at the office. She made no new friends; avoided parties at office and family reunions at home. Her life was reduced to work in the weekdays; on weekends, she washed her clothes, blankets, drapes, pillow covers, napkins and towels. Once in a month, she scrubbed the floor clean, wiped the glass windows off dirt, dusted the cupboards and attics. Secluded from the social life, she continued to exist as a sore of the eye that narrows the vision of the world but revels in swell itself.
“Now, that’s something” the writer thought. “It seems to be leading somewhere”. Here, he made the mistake of an artist uneasily staging confrontation with the pace of the budding plot. Instead of patiently patting the plot as one does a pet, he drove his sharp instincts as a playful dog digs its teeth into the flesh of its prey, killing it.
Lalitha, unclasping the sharp toothed crocodile hair pin, let the hair loose from her braid. The starry firmament overhead twinkled with its many eyes; Venus was ensconced exquisitely over the crescent. Night sky was chafed with falling stars; she wondered “this great emptiness bothers me, mummifies my bereavement”. And then it happened. Hitherto, like a tall tree with broad leaves whose capacity to hold water (in the curve of each leaf)increased with every passing day, she burdened herself greatly. But, with the coming of autumn, the tall trees shed plentifully, and stand shamelessly, naked. That night, two years after the accident, under the sight of cosmic extravagance, she shed her leaves of sorrow. The morning after, she extended her hand. I reached out, over the cracked parapet wall whose rusted iron railing gave in under the weight of two bodies commingled into one, in a brief embrace. Beneath my feet, polished floor slipped away at the very moment I shook hands with Lalitha.
The writer terminated writing.
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