He grinned. The toothy thing trapezed across his face and took vindictive delight in making him look like a complete idiot. But he didn’t care. Today, he was grinning because she was smiling. He had made her happy.
I love you too.
Relief spread like a hot blush across her cheeks as she heard the words. He loved her too. She unlocked her hands that had been doing some desperate twiddling over the last few minutes and reached towards him. Her fingers found the side of his face. He watched her, still grinning like an idiot.
*****************************************
He stared at the incriminating evidence of murder before him. The two goldfish floated belly up in the murky water, their ghoulish eyes screaming for revenge. He quickly disposed off the corpses, and destroyed all remaining evidence. A pair of well disguised substitutes now took the place of the deceased. It was a cunning plan.
Her face split into a bright smile when she saw the tank.
“You’ve taken such good care of them!” she said, bending over to watch the bloated orange fish that were swimming around in disinterested circles.
“How did the conference go?” he asked.
“Conference was good. Got to wear the press tag an’ all”
She fished out the orange blobs and transfered them to a bucket.”I was worried about these two.” A warm twinkle played in her eyes. “Thank you.”
He kissed her in reply.
*****************************************
“You should vote,” she said, peering over the top of the newspaper. A steaming hot cup of chai was balanced precariously on the edge of the couch.
“Don’t want to,” he mumbled, trying to shake away the strands of sleep that still stuck in his hair.
“Don’t vote, don’t get to gripe about the nation.” Her voice was annoyingly perky.
“Don’t care,” he said, despondently sipping at his coffee.
His eyes wandered over the pile of bills left neatly on the table. Next to it was a neat balance sheet of their accounts for the month.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“Yep. Split it according to how we decided.”
He did a double take seeing the neat total highlighted in black ink. The recent lay off had left him in a bad place and their living expenses in Bombay seemed to be expanding from month to month.
“Looks like your stocks fell a couple of points,” she said, hidden behind the headlines. “I can cover you for the next month if you want me too.” Her voice reeked of smugness.
“I can take care of it,” he snapped.
Sometimes he wished that she would slip on her own moral superiority and break her neck; in a tragic accident of course.
*****************************************
It was the morning of their wedding. He glanced out of the window, and onto the skyline of his hometown. It shone, like a patchwork quilt made from the childhood of his grandparents and the dreams of a generation that had wandered all over the world, only to come back home. Palm trees like small hypocrisies waved from in between freshly scrubbed red faced terraces.
The groom’s room was a modern tower of babel with family members yelling contradictory instructions at the top of their voices.
His cellphone beeped. “Are you ready?”
He could almost hear her voice through the din – businesslike, pushing him towards the next dead line. As he texted back, he noticed that he had very little nail left. He had chewed off most of it during the previous night.
“Yes.”
He looked out of the window again. He hoped she knew what she was doing, because he sure didn’t.
*****************************************
He stared hard at the black and white scan before him, trying to spot some anomaly.
“Do you see it?”
He laughed nervously. “Yes, yes. That little thing over there-” He pointed vaguely.
“Really?” She was clearly enjoying his discomfiture.
“Yes, That spot over there, I’m sure -”
She giggled. He glared at her.
“Idiot. It’s over here,” she said taking hold of his finger, and placing it over the dark shape in the scan.
He stared at the lump in the image.
“That?” he asked incredulously.
She smiled. “That.”
*****************************************
He opened the door softly and crept into the hospital room. Her grief slapped him across the face.
“The doctors want to know whether you want to carry him.”
She didn’t answer.
He drew up a chair, and sat by her bed.
“You made the right choice.” His voice cracked.
“I killed my baby.”
“You did the right thing,” he repeated.
She turned to face him. Those were not her eyes – they were a stranger’s – and abyss in which guilt, anger and sadness churned in a vicious circle.
The words struggled and died in his throat. His tired body tried to pump out more tears to heal their wound, but he didn’t have any more. He buried his head in the white sheets of her bed. “Its going to be alright.” He repeated it over and over again, hoping that if he said it enough, he would believe it.
He reached for her hand and squeezed as hard as he could. It’s going to be alright.
*****************************************
She deposited a handful of salt and a dried chili in his hand.
“Take dhristhi for me,” she commanded.
He kindly obliged. He stuck the salt under her nose. “Spit.” He carefully carried away the destroyed remains of evil eyes.
On the way to the back door to throw away the salt, he asked her about her sudden obsession for superstition.
“I’m not doing anything wrong this time.”
The salt dropped to the floor. “You didn’t do anything wrong the last time.”
“I must’ve done something wrong.” She said, scooping up the salt with her hands.
“It was not your fault.”
She picked up the salt and pushed past him.
He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. Her bones jangled. He wanted to scream it into her ears over and over again until she turned deaf. He wanted to shake her until time stopped. Until it all went back, until it was all different.
He shook her until the anger slowly faded out from her eyes.
“You really mean it?”
“Yes.”
*****************************************
She wrestled the howling baby down with one arm and was trying to push food into its mouth with the other.
“Swearing in your baby’s presence is not appropriate behavior,” he smirked, dropping down beside her.
“A little help would be nice,” she said through gritted teeth.
He wagged smug forefinger before her. “Uh-uh-uh. We made a deal. You’re the one who said I looked ridiculous.”
“Please?” Her hair waved about like the tentacles of some wispy sea creature. He felt sorry of her.
“You know the strategy right? I’ll do the song, and you shove in the food when her jaw drops.” He stood up, dusted his clothes and cleared his throat professionally.
“I believe I can fly… I believe I can touch the sky…”
The shrieky voice reverberated through the room. His wife winced. His daughter giggled.
She looked at him with relief, hastily shoveling food into the baby’s mouth. “It’s working! It’s working!”
“Of course its working,” he said, straightening his shirt. “I am a professional.”
He scooped up his food splattered dribbling daughter and held her close. “You are beautiful,” he whispered into her ear.
*****************************************
The Principal looked down her bespectacled nose at the three of them.
“So…you want to join your daughter in this school…”
They nodded vigorously.
She hummed and hawed over the application form in front of her. She fixed a beady eye on the little girl seated between them.
“Will you make this school proud?”
She stared back at the beady eye. But before she could start saying anything, her dad hastily interrupted, “She’s a very good girl. Studies hard, will listen to her teachers. All the teachers in her last school loved her. She was the ideal student.” His daughter bobbed her head helpfully and batted her eyelids.
The Principal seemed satisfied with this polite fiction and signed on the dotted line. “You can pay your fees at the counter.”
He looked down at her as they trotted out the room. “What were you about to say?”
She grinned at him. “The truth.”
“Just like your mother,” he sighed.
*****************************************
On weekend nights, they would order out, linger in the dining room and catch up on each other’s lives. They had been increasingly ordering pizza after their daughter proved its nutritional superiority. She was perched on the table, and this night she demanded a re-run of their Story.
Her brows were knitted; she was working her way through a plot twist she had not heard before.
“So why did you say you loved her in the first place?”
“Dunno. Thought it would make her happy.”
She considered him with serious eyes.
“So you lied to make her happy?”
He grinned sheepishly. “Yes, yes, I did.”
*****************************************
