"Femme fatale"

 “I felt an angel's possessing grip, the flames

rising from your skin,

the shadow of the divine.”

“Why did Providence disperse women endowed with guile and charms that would torment men? And why must I not own up that I have lecherous desires.” He thought. “Who would not have craved for her? The limitation in the facial beauty as some would opine, or not being in the class of the most beautiful, pretty faces was well offset by the tempting physique, provocative voice and the viciousness of her gaze. Perhaps beauty was less endowed in her face so that she can be more enchanting!  Her being what she is effectively bound me in a spell that was more than being spellbound. Who would not? She was viciously beautiful.” He mused, dragging a lung full of cigarette smoke and blowing it out into the air. He saw her spectre swirling in the smoke and dissolve in the thin air.

He did not demure and ever held back his feelings on the enchanting beauty in which God created his second biggest blunder as some would express about woman. But then the proclivity and wish of male to fornicate with every enchantress of the female species was something he felt as a physiological aberration Nature inflicted on men. Perhaps often used as an alibi, and quibble! However, the complexities of social properness and consciousness that got infused in men, made this fine razor thin distinction between man and beast. Yet, men dream, stray and often too! “Now, now”, he spoke to himself, “this is sententious and can be dealt without.”

He could not gauge the change in her attitude towards him. It has been these many days since he have been here and she had gone about with the least acknowledgement of his presence .She ignored him and was often looking through him when they crossed the other in the hallway. At meetings she would go about her secretarial work with dismissal of his presence and would address the other participants even if he probes her with a demand. She would greet others around him in the morning when she comes in and would joke with the rest on a break while demonstratively neglecting him. A couple of times he prodded with some conversation to get in through the barrier and she was rather brusque. Perhaps did she see his constricted longing? Did his eyes betray his lust?

He hankered miserably for her attention and was fairly disturbed by the comments and exclamatory statements some of his colleagues made about her. She was single and in her late thirties. That perhaps gave immense scope and room to pass sleazy comments about her private life. Men obviously are ravenous, he thoughtfully confessed. But there must be something about her liaisons if they have to comment much and titillatingly. Or were they fantasising as he? He was in turmoil when one of the fellows claimed having had a date with her.

He wondered if she was aware of these comments and innuendos, related to her amourous private life. But she went about her secretarial work in the office with élan and moved with provocative grace. Her panache was tortuous and suffocating him. He was impatient and felt he would succumb and mess his reputation.

A few times, he happened to travel with her in the official vehicle and she would alight and walk away at her street ignoring him and with a glance and thankful nod to the driver. He was peeved and resentful. He could not understand why she cannot pirouette her “Madam Bovari” image with him. Her callosity was excruciatingly painful and made him restless.

It was her unfriendly disposition towards him that caused his anguish as much as the affableness that she displayed to others in the work place.

It was then that one day while she passed his office one morning, she greeted him. He was virtually jettisoned out of his chair. He could not believe it. Perhaps she bade the greeting to someone else? With few quick steps he reached the door and leaned out only to see her enter the elevator and no one else was in sight. Then on she would smile pleasantly at him whenever they met in the hall way and wish him for the day. She was no longer cold and indifferent when taking calls for him or informing him matters of official importance.

“Jackpot”, he thought! It should not matter why it took long for her to reckon him. He grew excited and patience was deserting him and he was increasingly enamoured.

Fretted by restlessness he ensured that an official call on the phone to her prolonged for a while. She was pleasing and at ease on the phone, often teasing him with harmless comments. He began to read her words euphemistically. He suggested that she drop in at his office sometime during the day and he wanted to discuss something with her.

When she came by into his office faintly unsure but with a graceful smile he was palpitating inside. He motioned her to sit. She sat down with predictable flair that perhaps not all women can do .He said, “I have something important to ask you and I would expect you to be candid in your answer.” Her eyes glinted with eagerness and she nodded affirmatively .Did he hear her whisper, “Yes certainly”? His palms were wet and he perspired while his heart throbbed faster. “It has been a while, fair time since I have been here and I have noticed your total indifference towards me and sometimes your attitude towards my presence seemed like calculated snub. However, over the past few days I have been seeing a different you, who has suddenly taken a fancy and liking to me and begun to appreciate my presence here. I feel good for that. Tell me why, and what has brought this change in you”. She was carefully watching him and his words .She smiled when he stopped and drew in a deep breath. “You see, it is not my temperament to frolic with a person, man or woman who is stranger to me. And the perils of being a single woman are rather unforgiving. A smile or a friendly demenour is understood for a hustler. Pardon me for being candid.” She watched him intently and continued. “It took a while for me to know you from the distance and I decided that you are a person from good moorings and grooming, a fellow with respectable countenance. I hope that is no offence.” Her voice was like sweet whisper of nothing.

He felt peeved with himself and somewhere in him a pang of remorse and disappointment in equal measure. 

Diamonds

“What did you say? How old I’m? Ask not how old I’m, ask how young I’m. Sixty and nine my friend, going to be seventy years young soon.” He said that with a hearty smile and leaned forward to pat  my palm.

That confident statement and the smiling weather beaten face of the man from Down Under charmed my spirits. By the time he bade goodbye and left, I could feel life and charged air particles infused with positive spirit around me. He may be leaving behind whiff of positive air wherever he would go. He will pass it on to all who may notice it! I remember someone had said that a positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. It annoyed me too, that I felt it contagious. And was pleasant!

The restaurant was immaculately clean and well lit. The gentle soothing cool breeze from the ocean blowing through the ventilated windows smelt the freshness of the ocean. It was a few minutes after sundown and the splash of harmony of colours painted the horizon far across were the sea seemed to end. The curtains were milky white with satin sashes and they swayed gently inviting the breeze as it caressed them on its way into the restaurant. 

I sat at the table little away from the window and sipped the semi dry Martini on ice. I looked around the sparsely full place. Though being week end it was a trifle early for the regular revelers to enter. There was a lone table little  to my right closer to the window. A black satin table cloth was laid neatly covering the table top. A chair stood by it and a solitary candle was flickering on a silver candle stand. A white flower that looked like rose was placed near the candle stand. A beer mug was on the table, mouth down along with a crystal ash tray and an unlit cigar.

“If you might be wondering about that”, he said, “it is for the old bloke who passed away same day the previous year.” The voice came from the bar counter and I turned to see a man who looked to be in his sixties wave at me and smile. He walked up to me with a glass of beer and pulled a chair and sat down at my table. He continued, “the young fellow was a regular and faithful client here and would come by seven in the evening and hang on with a few mugs of beer and his cigars till about ten .He was the most gregarious  bloke evolution could bring about ha, ha.” He continued,” the Restaurant can feel his presence but yet miss him much. So do many of us.”

I nodded in understanding and asked, “Did he die young? I suppose you said he was a young fellow.”

“Ha, he was younger than I’m when he went away in his sleep. He was only eighty eight.” He said with a glint in his eyes.  

I let out a small whine of astonishment. “By the way may I ask how old are you?” And he gave me perfect retort that amazed me and brought forth a kind of respect for the gentleman. Exasperatingly, don’t I often mourn and fret about getting old? And here were some strange examples. 

“Did he live alone? I mean his children and his folks?” I asked enquiringly. The gentleman then told me the short story of the man from Australia, who left home and settled in this pristine island. Lived all alone in a cottage by the sea for thirty and five years, went fishing on his skiff, chatted with his friends at the pub on evenings and went home gay and happy, read books and to die one night in his sleep, a quiet end to a life which midway had to change course and resurrect from emotional perils. He was a farmer in Western Australia and one day while scouting his farm he tread on a dark black stone that looked awful different from the one generally seen there. He took it home and cleaned the dirt to notice that he may have tread upon a literal minefield. It became apparent soon that his farm of four hundred acres was a mine field with immense deposit of carbon stone. The deposit of diamonds altered his life drastically from thereon and the Government offered him a royalty of an outlandish sum per day by the hour. The deposits were estimated to be exquisite and lasting for a hundred odd years. The precious stone changed his life. His wife of thirty years in whose name the land was, stood to gain much of the royalty. His children grabbed the rest. She divorced him and shut the door leaving him in the cold. He left Australia with the annuity he had from his job of twenty five years,  devastated. But none on this island have seen him lacking in mirth and gaiety. He took life by the horn and resurrected to live thirty five years after his departure from Australia. I was truly fascinated by the biography. 

Ironically the story had a different flavor but the same whiff in his case too. He was a chemical engineer in the oil and natural gas mammoth in Australia. He married his distant cousin of ten years younger to him .He said they fell in love while in their adolescence. His zealous attitude to his profession and work was unique and uncompromising that it often paved way to irksome marital discords and even near separation. He virtually worked nonstop the twenty five years that his bride of much tender age than he was, was distressed and lonesome. She yearned for a life of travel and fun. While his predilection for his job ruled foremost vacations  and time with the family was out of bounds. He hardly was even with his kids while they grew. When he decided to retire at fifty four to acquiesce his wife, he was unsure as she as to his ability to be away from his one and only passion- work. A month after he retired he was requested by the boss of the company to head the oil exploration on this archipelago which was ten thousand miles from home. As his wife feared he accepted and here he was living alone and working know not when to cease doing that. It is fifteen years since.  His wife continues to live in Australia and hoping that he unlaces his shoes anytime soon.

I asked him if he would think to retire and go back home. He said he cannot tell if he would be able to say goodbye to work. He misses his family, in some ways but he has never felt remorse and bored for his passion for work or being away from homeland. he agreed that his outlook to work was fanatical.He continues to visit his wife and kids every year. And he feels that may be a consolation and departure from a regimen that stuck to him and that which he enjoys as much as the time he spends at the pub..

He said before he departed, “I feel too young to hang my boots.”

A Tempest

They traveled in silence. He could not wheedle out from her a conversation except the occasional yes and nays. Sometimes his egging for a conversation was met with stony silence and tight lips. He gave up. They drove in silence. It was deafening!

He thought, “Damn this is hell and uneasy”. The tenacity with which women can bleed impatience in you is amazing, excruciating and has no latitude. Couldn't there be a conversation? The asphalt sped towards them as they continued the journey in silence. He wished he traveled alone rather than have someone you have been with for all years and the person slides all sudden  into strangeness and a kind of asphyxiating alienation. He disliked travelling with strangers by his side and it is suffocating when the strangeness is feigned and artificial. He saw that he was becoming distrait and consciously lessened the pressure on the gas pedal to choose to drive tardily. Her silence was oxymoron and the noise of the silence was tortuously painful to the ears and the mind.

She closed her eyes and wished she could sleep. He drove fast as usual and when he braked a couple of times swearing at the traffic ahead, she kept her eyes shut tight and tried to be not in the car. She took care not to glance his way since they left home.She barely wanted to respond even when he persistently began talking about trivial matters seeking to develop a conversation. She wished she was not with him in the car today. She would have wanted to avoid this journey and proximity to him. She felt sudden intense dislike for him. While watching him lie in bed and sleep with nonchalance the previous night, she wondered if this was the same person she loved, she wanted to live with forever. Instinctively, she touched his shoulders,repulsively pulled back and with a shudder. He betrayed her faith. Didn't he?

She confronted him at the dinner table and his defiant and seemingly outraged innocence could not assuage her. He exited the table in huff. And, that alternated her judgment - his behavior when openly confronted about his adulterous liaison, between desperate protestations and acknowledgment of promiscuity. 

“You are enjoying the luxury of perverse imagination.” he said in disgust.

She was furious and dabbing her tears with her palm, screamed “Perverse, imaginary, is that what you call?  I’m at the receiving end of infidelity and do you know how much it hurts? She faced him direct and said. “I should have known, I should have, but what a fool I’ve been, I could not notice her apparent overtures; your betrayal. I mistook sly for something not. And now you shamelessly deny that you did not cheat upon me? “She cried inconsolably.

“Now, this is getting far. And I beg you desist from fantasising wildly.” he pleaded.

The banter and the music on the stereo that accompanied in all their travels was absent. She tried not to think further and stubbornly tried to sleep. The car sped forward and there was nothing but silence within. She slid down the rabbit hole and deep down into sleep. Sleep, she longed would embrace her. The previous night was sleepless tussle with anguish and desperation. And she was tired emotionally, it was sopor.

He glanced at her reclining in the passenger seat by his side. She was asleep. He felt his fingers tighten the grip on the wheel. He sensed constriction in his chest. He glanced at her again and placed his hand on her palm. She was not aware of his touch she was dreaming.

And in the rabbit hole into where she slid into, while she slept, she dream t. She dreamed the life she wished and prayed would not forsake her. Could it be true that she has imagined a mountain to bring forth this tempest?

My Cup Runneth Over

          “It is much easier to become a father than to be one.”

A tough ask, but certainly a pleasant one if one can love to enjoy the roller coaster.

I sometimes muse of the moment of entering parenthood, to be precise, “fatherhood”. A rare treat to one’s eyes that  when you see for the first time a pair of glistening tiny eyes stare at you and wink. A visual and emotional instant that will seldom if not never again visit to be beheld in awe and enthrallment!

We (I&C) were advised that she undergo an ultrasound scan to ascertain the foetal development. In fact we were also keen to ensure in the very early stage itself that the child that will be born is normal in every sense of the word. We were quite disturbed by a couple of cases of child births to people we knew, to whom babies were born with malformed organs and or some irregularity. That would be very disturbing for life, for us and the child. We would rather terminate the pregnancy than let the foetus develop and be born, say a mongoloid or severely handicapped. Stories were many that haunted us and aided consternation. And the uneasiness was also supplemented by C’s doubt if she had taken a few paracetamols when she was not quite well. A distant acquaintance had a son who was born with no external ear and the matter was traced back to the time when she medicated herself with an anti-allergic pill. The stories brought me the nightmare of the “thalidomide” tragic births in the USA.

We, and in particular me was in favour of a girl. But we did not ask the Obstetrician to reveal the sex of the foetus nor would she have wanted to. That the twinkling, shining  pair of tiny eyes staring through me from the delicate nestled hold of the nurse as she briefly came out of the obstetric room, turned out to be a boy really did not matter nor create an iota of difference. The child was healthy and well!

When R was born it was a foregone matter after the scan as we were eager to know if it was a girl. And honestly I was elated.

I write this in the context of an impending wedding of the daughter of a friend and a couple of other impending weddings of girls, be it my family or of friends. I could sense and see the apprehensions and near anguish that those parents are loaded with. Well that began even among these educated gentry, much before and when the girls were born. Do we (I & C) have such dismay, we have a girl too and is eighteen now? And not long after now in less than a decade we may have to fend to see her married away. The answer is mercifully, not. I (we) do not subscribe to that pattern of social conventions per se. That does not mean I’m a votary of kind of sententious or anarchistic existence and also not endorsing libertine way of living. Family and heterogeneous relationships are in my opinion the corner stones of the society.

Well, perhaps are we comfortable with material resources to organize a gal wedding? Goodness me, I’m now broke!

A typical wedding in Kerala, more amongst the vanity vitiated, caste “Nairs”, is cruelly loaded against parents of brides. Firstly the anguish and uncertainty of fetching a suitable bloke, that is increasingly difficult than creeping through the gateway into heaven. I know parents, who are acutely paranoid that they refused to entertain their girl’s wedding, that if happened may result in the bloke loitering in scandalous behaviours in his late fifties. Poor fathers and mothers are desperate, (and often unquestionably too).

The carefully cultivated thrift begins when the girl is born. And by the time she is in her twenties and is socially at the threshold of wedlock, the parents would expect to have eked out a sizable weight of wealth in gold and other resources to spend on the bash.( In many cases, may even siphon off and extinguish the retirement funds of the desperate parents). The preservation in the form of the yellow metal are obscenely displayed upon the girl when she is decked up as bride. Every nit wit and sundry, ever acquainted will be asked to be present as guests to witness the less than ten minute ritual and thereafter partake in a sumptuous feast, all which will be dramatised in a venue that may pale the coliseum. By late evening the poor old man- the father will be financially and emotionally exhausted. The irony is that until the wedding the parents will be rightfully suited to be catagoerised as borderline psychological cases. The state may not be altered much even thereafter, because either they will be broke or will have to fetch the same quantum of resources to sign off the second child, a girl too. Much that happens thereafter is left to destiny!

The hunt for the groom is often a handicap for the girl’s parents. The dice is loaded against the girl, if she is educationally qualified in the wrong stream. 

It is immense fortune that children are born healthy and normal, they are groomed well and turns out to be independent and conscientious. As for the choice of spouse, I do not think one must waste on anxiety and nothing at all on the frenzied build up or tumult of conforming wedding, lest one may cave in of anxiety. But the pity is almost all are conforming to the ridiculous standards and vanity society has decreed. They fear disparaging remarks from the rest. They all want to be like the Jones who lives next door. 

So the best course is to be less confirming? I guess so.-less confirming to the oft beaten and followed social norms. In fact can wedlock be absolutely imperative and “the thing”? Financial independence can lead to a better life than wedlock foisted, aided or propped by money.

I often wonder what would be the choice of the children (A&R), that I have. Will I think of exercising the veto when their choice of their personal life come into reckon? Will I play the characteristic, domineering, boorish parent when if their choices in matters of matrimony come about? I think nay and that will certainly be the case with C too. In a world that is fast and increasingly becoming a village, I cannot see the logic of insisting on certain oft trodden path.

How wonderful would a quite wedding can be, be it guided by tradition or not and conforming to modest standards; a quite partying in private with close ones- friends and relations ,and a subtle  sure step into another phase of living?

I guess a father would not want for more to happen to resemble the moment the pair of twinkling eyes shown in askance at him many years ago.