The Good Husband
Meghna Pant
The digital
clock is blinking its red numbers: 3:45 pm. What day is it today? I count the
last time my downstairs neighbour Aliya had visited. One … two … three … four.
Four days ago. So, today is Wednesday.
I stretch
languidly on my bed. I don’t have to be anywhere, not even at work. My
consulting company has put me on paid leave, ‘giving me time to recover from my
indescribable loss’, as that lumpy Mrs HR lady wrote in her terribly long
email.
Aliya, my downstairs
neighbour, will be here shortly, to fulfil her duty as one of my many sympathisers,
though none of my other sympathisers have a mouth like a liquid feather bed,
breasts like paddling pools and legs long enough to wrap around me.
I need to take a
cold shower. I bathe on days that Aliya comes home, twice a week. On the other
days, there is no need. I no longer meet people. No parents. No wife. No
colleagues. No boss. No friends. I am losing my former life like a snake
shedding skin. But I have one thing. I have a body. That is enough for me.
I look at the
clock. 5:05 pm.
The body will be
here soon and I’m getting horny. My hunger for Aliya reaches my stomach. It
growls. I walk to the kitchen and open the fridge.
I haven’t gone
hungry since the tragedy. Mrs. Khanna, my next-door neighbour, has devised a
roster system whereby each household in the building takes turns to make food
for me. My father had loaned her twenty-thousand-rupees three years ago that
she hasn’t repaid. She doesn’t know I know. I allow her to pay for her guilt by
playing on the sympathy and morality of our other neighbours. My neighbours do
not know what to do with a man in his forties living alone in his three-bedroom
apartment despite having a wife, so they feed me like they’re feeding a family.
My fridge is bursting with food, most of which has turned green and leaks brown
liquid. I like to watch the food dwindle away and come to naught, as all life
must. I don’t clean anything either. My house smells of ammonia and sulphur,
unlike anything I’ve smelled in a house before. It’s scented with my odours. I
feel proud.
I light a
doobie. I smoked endlessly now, not out of the window, as I would have around
Katie, but inside the house. I watch the smoke spiral languidly from my mouth.
My eyes are always red now, from drinking and drugs. People think I’ve been
crying. It isn’t my fault that people ascribe emotion to every relationship. In
marriage they expect to see love, or at least, co-dependence. Who am I to shake
this universal paradigm?
I switch on the
TV and flip channels. I stop at National Geographic where a man’s self-assured
British accent tells me that lions move on pretty quickly after their mates
die.
I think of how
Mom and Dad would have coped if I’d gone before them. Would they have died of
heart failure as Dad had after Mom’s accident? Probably not. In the circle of
life, parents witness their child’s birth and a child witnesses his parent’s
death. My parents hadn’t witnessed my birth. Mom was heavily medicated, while
Dad was stuck in traffic. I was born alone. They never expressed regret or
guilt about it. In turn – karma, of course – I didn’t witness my parent’s
death. They left quickly, efficiently (this was just the kind of people they
were) and without saying goodbye. I too refuse to feel regret or guilt. We are
(were?) an efficient family.
I speculate on
what Katie would do if I die before her. She’d have a dinner party on the day
of my funeral, as is the custom in her family. The next week she’d book a
one-way ticket to New York. Six months later she would remarry, probably that
ex-boyfriend of hers, the one (she confessed once in a martini-infused state)
who got away. She would be an elegant widow, a short-lived one.
Some dead are
forgotten as if they are shadows passing the earth.
I will not cry.
It’s six
o’clock. Aliya will be here any minute. I look around for a clean pair of
underwear. I can’t remember where I’ve kept one. Katie would’ve known.
Katie knew
everything about me. And despite that she stayed with me. She played
house-house with me: husband and wife. She planned the names of our children.
She remembered my birthday and reminded me gently of her own. She flattened the
end of my toothpaste tube so I didn’t have to squeeze too hard.
I wonder then if
I’ve been unfair to Katie. All I have of her are memories that I haven’t been
entirely true to. Maybe I love her. Maybe I need her. Vegetable or not, I need
her, I love her. Without her I am alone in the world.
A little hope
comes back to me, as if hope can be big or little, like a person. And then, the
cry I’ve been holding back for all these months, wells up in my eyes. It
becomes a sob. And then I am wailing. I cry first for myself, for my pathetic
loneliness, then for my Katie who may never hold me again, and then for my
parents whose love was incomplete but sincere. I cry for everything in my life
that has gone wrong, and right. I don’t care if anyone hears me, not even Aliya
with her breasts like paddling pools. I let it all out.
Come back to me,
Katie. Come back.
I will be a
better husband, a better man.
The doorbell rings. It’s Aliya. I wipe my tears and open the
door.
Meghna Pant is an award-winning author, journalist and TEDx speaker. Her
debut collection of short stories Happy Birthday, Random House India, 2013 was
longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Award 2014. One And A Half Wife,
Westland, 2012, her debut novel won the national Muse India Young Writer Award
and was shortlisted for other awards, including the Amazon Breakthrough Novel
Award.
She recently abridged the world’s longest epic, The Mahabharata, into
one hundred tweets. Her short stories have been published in over a dozen
international literary magazines, including Avatar Review, Wasafari, Eclectica
and QLRS.
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