Woman

The night was long for him. He couldn’t sleep a bit. He was just sitting on the bed with fists pressed on the mattress and his legs forming a taper down till the floor where his feet rested one upon the other. He was trying to erode the surface of the floor with his toe just as a dog digs his shit-pot in sand or mud, in vain. He wasn’t doing it knowingly. While he dug, he stared at an anonymous point on the carpet. It not only had no name but had no existence too. His eyes seemed to have zeroed on a spot on the carpet but if it would have been possible for him to really give a thought to it and try to find that spot, he would have missed it. He liked to just stare like this. The spot somehow resembled him. He felt familiar and safe. It existed but even he couldn’t notice it.

She had slept long back and was fast asleep, her back towards him. She wore a satin nightgown. She was sleeping like a cat, gathering her body into a lump - her legs tightly pressed against each other, folded at the knees and the waist; her hands locked between her abdomen and thighs – trying to be as small as she could. Her hair flowed from her head, curving over the cushion to spread on the bed. It resembled a still waterfall in the night. Her feet still carried some mud and the bed had become dirty. If he would have felt like sleeping, it would have been too uncomfortable with mud all around. But he didn’t clean it. He just didn’t want to sleep. He just wanted to sit there and reflect. However, since a while he was blank. He couldn’t think of anything except for the knowledge of the fact that he was not able to think. He couldn’t proceed.

The curtains swayed once in a while. He looked at them and smirked. He wondered how much force the air carried to make them move. He looked at their top. They hung from clips. Then he looked at the bottom. There was nothing. They were suspended – along a vertical axis. The air rocked them on its will – along a horizontal axis. They sort of experienced a torque – a force in circular direction, since the clips would never let them go and hence whenever the air pushed them, they would, although in a small angle, move around the bar on which the clips hung. He felt jealous of the curtains. He wanted to be a curtain. They were selfless. They had no belongings and no qualms about behaving or being made to behave, forcefully accept rather, others’ will. He wasn’t selfish and selfless here hasn’t been used as a proper antonym of selfish. It just denotes the lacking of the feeling of ‘self’ in the curtains. Since they lacked it, they never felt the loss of it. Since he had it – the feeling of self - he knew the worth of having lost it.

He saw at himself, standing in front of him, in his imagination. He noticed his belongings. He felt attachment towards them including his wife; in fact she was at the fore. For one moment, he felt lucky to have her. The next moment he thought of her as a stranger. The moments thereafter, he could no longer feel belonged to her and vice versa. He could only see some mass, matter with weight, tied in clothing and deposited on his bed. The dirt on her feet and that on the bed belonged to that mass. It was not his. That is why he didn’t feel like clearing it. He looked down on the bed and imagined their moments of intimacy. He thought it was some other woman having sex with someone else of him – probably the one who is sitting on the bed now.

He couldn’t stand himself any longer. He regained his seat, in his imagination. He sort of felt a support to have someone with him now. He felt safe. He tried to talk, but couldn’t come up with a topic to start with. He dropped the plan. He thought he could just sit like that feeling some company. That would make him feel better; feel safer and he would then be able to feel strong at the cost of his company. That helped. For a while, again he continued sitting, just like that getting a hang of his company. Then, he smiled, in his imagination. He looked back at his wife as if to show her his new regained strength. She was staring back at him with wide eyes. He sunk, felt loose and gave away. His head fell on her stomach and oscillated for a while. She didn’t move. She just watched him fall. She felt that she was tied to something and couldn’t move. Not that she really wanted to save him from the fall. She wanted to take it. She wanted to feel the pain. And it did pain – especially since she was pregnant. But not a sound was made. She just lay there – still, eyes half closed.

Two minutes later, she felt wet between her thighs. She thought of holding it and going to the washroom. She pushed his head away from her stomach. It landed on the bed. Her feet touched the floor and some particles of dirt pricked into them. She had gone numb. She couldn’t even sense them. As she stood, the liquid had flowed down to her feet. She looked back to the bed. He lay there in a pool of blood topped with dirt. She gazed down at her feet. She remembered the day when she had entered his home as his wife. She remembered the oaths he had taken of protecting her, of being her care-taker, of being her better half. Then she remembered last evening. She remembered him sitting like a loser in the car. She remembered the policeman taking her behind the tree. She remembered her mouth pressed shut and her hands held tight. She experienced each singular pain after that until she fainted. She remembered nothing after that.

Coming out of her thoughts, she looked at him and then at her blood-soaked feet. She removed all her clothes, one after the other and stood naked. She stood there staring at the curtains for a long while and feeling the breeze across her face blowing her hair. She cleared the curtains and opened the window. The horizon was on the verge of giving birth to a new day. It was dawn and she took the first rays of light on her entire body. She just stood there watching until she saw the sun. Her lips parted to smile.