STOLEN KISS - Part 2

To the lanes of College Street, Calcutta…

It was another sticky August night in the city of Calcutta and a half radiating moon loosely hung in the sky. For some reasons, she was having a bad headache that day and was lying in the bed as every other second a throbbing pain, like an electric wave, originated from her temples and sped down her neck to hurt her shoulders. Each of those torturing waves made her writhe on the bed with slices of the sullen moonlight slanting through the window, glistening upon her skin.

Against all odds she tried to shut her eyes to the pain and digging deep into the pillow, wished sleep to steal her away. But some days are just as bad. She had only turned to the other side that she is held by the waist.

“I am unwell. Please.” A genuine plea evoked through the voice.

Her husband replies with a groan, perhaps an ignoring groan, and with an even firmer grip pulls her towards himself. Her aching body, sliding along the bed like a sack, comes to a halt against the man’s broad torso.

He grips her bosom, slowly tightening his fingers around them and rubs his stubbly face on her shoulders. She is agitated and wants to be freed. On one hand the pain continues to torment her from within, knocking her head and neck with an invisible hammer and on the other was her husband trying to satiate his arousal. She is squeezed, pinched and slapped before the husband rolls over and gets on top of her. She is sobbing; her voice drowned by his fist shoved into her mouth and just when he has taken off his trouser and leaned on her, a momentary relief shot through her. High on alcohol he just fell asleep between her legs and having laid there for quite some time, she finally withdrew and descended the bed. Though the pain still buzzed inside her head, she was glad to have been spared of the pounding down below.

She emerged into the darkness of the drawing room and humidity in that encapsulated place, looming high between the close knit walls, held down on her, making her sweat instantly. She sighed and having washed her face decide to stand out at the porch for some time.

She unbolted the door, the ringing sound of metal yet to subside in the night’s silence; and with the first step out, her limbs froze and she nearly passed away. There’s someone already standing at the door and now, the broad, shadowy structure seem to walk her way. She attempts to hurry back inside the house but she couldn't move. Her legs are pinned down; someone is standing on her feet. And in the nearest possible distance as she raises her face, she feels the blood in her brain freeze. In the scatter of the dilute moonlight across the veranda, she knew it is the same hoodie jacket she had seen worn, descending the stairs of that sagging building in College Street from the bookstore window the other day and dissolve away into the city’s humdrum.

He dips his head and taking her lips in his mouth, sucked with immense passion. She wanted to push him back with all his might but he soon buckled her hands on her back, squeezing her buttocks seductively. It was when he unbuttoned her loose night shirt and kissed her chest, she felt something ease in her. The disgust that used to sprang up her skin with every touch of her husband is not even making a whisper of protest to this sexual assault by someone unnamed at the death of a night, at the porch of her own house. She was sensing a Deja-vu. 

“Who are you?” She asked.

“I am your dream and you are sleeping.”

“But I can feel you. In real. In skin and bones. In every touch, kiss and squeeze.”

“That’s the thing with love, dear; you feel what it is not.”

And then a ghastly wind swept across, spraying into her face the scent of the night as drops of rain started rhythmically beating upon the branches of the sleeping trees. She ran ahead and out into the rain to find him but he was not there.

The arrow sharp realization that failed to reach her that evening in the dimness of the claustrophobic bookstore had finally reached her in the middle of a sticky night with her aching body coming to meet the cool, lively rain.  She knew it was him. The poor guy she madly fell in love with six years back. But never got married. Because…because he was poor.

Back in the washroom as she was changing, she discovered from the rear pocket of her shorts; a folded piece of paper. It was a note. She opened it. The rain wetted paper had the ink running in all directions; it was all flowy and blurry yet not completely unreadable.  She leaned by the wall and tried to read the spilling scribble. 

"You can be rich, very rich and can afford to, for all the extreme seasons of life, cover your body with the finest of clothes. But it is during the season of love, the moment you intend to share your everything with someone else’s everything; you have to shed the clothes of wealth and lie down naked. As naked as those poor children on the streets, carefree and unworried about almost everything in life. Love, after all, is two souls seduced by the mutual desire to seek each other and for it to happen to you with all its colors; you need to be naked, poor and childlike, all at the same time."

***THE END***

Author - Sobhan Pramanik
Email - subho.pramanik@gmail.com