Clouds of Iridescence

The bell had a hypnotic effect on her as she dashed out of the classroom filled with indistinct giggling, chattering and cursing of her classmates. Taking her place next to the door outside her class, she waited. Punching the buttons on her cell, placing the straying strands of hair above her ears, she waited. Waiting had been a part of her days regularly for the past few weeks. He will come, she thought, like every day. And come he did. His checkered sweater vest made him distinguishable from where she stood as he came out of his office at the other end of the corridor. She would have blushed at the sight, had she owned the complexion required for it. His temples had tiny patches of white clouds on them, making him look like those pseudo-mature characters that come on TV serials. Her heart seemed to be out of containment as he neared her with eyes fixed on the classroom at the far end of the hallway. “Good morning, sir,” she said, mastering all the balls within her. He simply nodded in reply and gave a miser’s smile, before continuing on his way.

“Is this the third semester class?” he asked her, pointing at the door next to which she was standing, again, pretending to be engrossed in her cell. That’s the beauty of her college, she thought, it mixes all the departments together. One classroom is from the History department while the next one might be from English, leading to great bafflements. “No sir, it’s the fifth semester room,” she uttered the words with complete awareness of the brewing froth she first felt in her bosom and then suddenly in her bowels. “I see!” he said and started to move along. What she felt, could not be vocalized. There was a buzzing in her head that terminated the whole world by deactivating her senses. Turning on her heels, looking past everything in front of her, she stepped, like someone in a trance, towards her class. “Excuse me,” came his voice from the back, breaking her trance and making her turn back in an instant. “You’re from the History department, aren’t you?” he asked, with an unreadable expression. She had to gulp before saying yes. “I have a book that you might find relevant. My class will be over at 11, perhaps you can see it then.”

His office was well lit. All the walls had lofty, timeworn cupboards alongside them. The fact that she was sitting in a chair right across from him, seemed like a remote fantasy that had come true. The huge table between them had a glass top through which she could see her feet that looked shabby from all the walking she did from her hostel to the college. Opening a drawer on the side of the table, he conjured up a book about the Ku Klux Klan. The subject delighted her as it was one of the things she thought she knew. “Here you go,” he said, pushing the book over the slippery surface of the table. She picked up the book and started leafing through it mechanically. Impassivity was apparent in her face. “Your name?” he asked, taking off his glasses. “Sandhya,” she said, excitedly looking up in pursuit of a follow up question. Sandhya; what an awful name she thought it was. She had made up her mind about how she would only use this name on formal occasions when she first came to the city. “Sandy,” she had scribbled on top of all her notebooks, trailed by tiny heart-shaped marks. The new name did evoke a certain sort of mirth among her peers who, after reading it, immediately skimmed her churidared attire from top to bottom and covered their mouths before turning away. One more boring book piled up on her untidy table, she pondered where she would put the book. “Are you interested in the subject?” he asked. “Yes, in fact I was thinking of doing a diploma in it,” she blurted, inadvertently giving vent to her annoyance. Something like a smile formed in his lips that tugged his wandering eyes to a stillness. Now I must certainly be blushing, she thought and pretended to look down at the book. Her embarrassment was raised by a hundred degrees when she discovered his eyes still watching her as she looked up after what appeared to be a millennium. “I’ve got a meeting now, where did you say you live?” he asked, after having a good enough moment of awkward silence. “Sector 6, although this is the first time I’m mentioning it,” she said with full preparation to face the impact of her quick wit. Again, the smile, the captivating smile that made him look older than he was but all the more irresistible. With him, she smiled too, for a pointlessly prolonged period of time. As she got up to leave, she knew that she had not taken the book, purposely. Saying goodbye, she paced towards the door with a heart that was pacing faster than she was. “So, you really think I don’t know which room is which even after working for two decades in the same college?” came his voice just when she extended her hand to shove the door ajar. Turning her head around, she saw him smile one more time and then slowly pull the drawer open and set the book back at its respite.

Fifty? Maybe fifty-five! She speculated, looking at the family photograph on the nightstand. A recent picture, probably shot on some festival when the scattered family reunited for not many days. The wife looked sophisticated. She worked at some big MNC where money was evidently abundant but time was not. The dark circles that could not be buried wholly by layers of imported beauty products testified to that. No wonder he lost interest in her! The son at one edge of the picture had his arms crossed over his chest, trying to appear stern and intense, probably in an endeavor to look protective of his parents who occupied the cushioned upholstery at the middle of the picture. However, the tiny splotch of straggling goatee on his chin negated all his efforts. He must be a few years older than herself, as she was let known by his father. The daughter was on the other edge, in a quest to seem euphoric at the getting together. With streaks of highlighted hair, she had her mouth agape in merriment. And there he was, happiest of all, ecstatic at the union of his affectionate family, perhaps feeling blessed to be by his wife’s side, for a couple of minutes, who was probably having a business call on hold while the picture was being taken. A smile that she had not known, a smile that didn’t make him look older but rejuvenated him with the long forgotten youth. Must be fifty-five, she thought. She still had not asked him his age and only surmised when her mind hovered over the question. She thought of asking him, but, at the same time, didn’t see the point. The sounds of spraying and splashing from the adjacent bathroom stopped and she checked her propriety. “Ready to go?” he asked, coming out drying the hair on his head and crotch with the ends of his towel. She ran her eyes over his drenched, hairy body and began retrieving her handbag and cellphone from the nightstand reluctantly. He had two more classes for the day and her classes were over, so he could drop her at her hostel on his way back to college.

“Can we have some coffee?” she asked, indicating the Starbucks café amid the slowly receding edifices outside the car window. “But I have a class,” he said, concentrating on the overflowing traffic and the steering wheel. “But your class doesn’t start until an hour and a half, we’d be done by then.” She had only heard of such hyped, expensive, multinational eateries, but had never had a fat enough purse to step into one. “Yes, but with this traffic, who knows if we have to spend the next hour inside the car,” he said, honking the horn with almost every word. “The college is only a kilometer away,” she said and looked outside at the pavement listlessly. Lifting a side of his buttocks, he pulled out his wallet and handed her a raw, fresh-from-the-ATM five hundred rupees note. “Why don’t you go ahead and have it? I’m afraid I won’t have the time,” he said, with eyes on the road. Almost by instinct, almost straightaway, almost eagerly in fact, she took the note and said, “Maybe later.”

The cab fare he gave for the ride back to the hostel was lying undisturbed in an internal pouch of her purse, from where she drew a few coins for the bus conductor. Her car riding days had come eventually to an end. There always was some trouble with the car. He would constantly use a multitude of incomprehensible terms to refer to its dysfunctional state. So, he had opted, finally, to give her the cab fare as her travel allowance that she barely ever spent for its actual purpose. As usual, the time, that day, had ended with him coming out of the bathroom all drenched and appearing more hairy than he did when he was dry. And nothing stirred within her. Nothing tempted her to run her eyes over his blotches of greying hairy apparel. There was something else that she felt. Something that whispered in her ears that it was not worth it. Something that compelled her to feel repulsed. His deodorized body regaining its odor during the act was no longer appealing to her, if anything, it made her cease breathing so that she could evade it. His subtle smile had transformed into a grin, a smirk that didn’t entice, a sneer that made her turn her eyes away from it.

After days of eluding the other end of the well-recognized college hallway, days of silencing the cellphone whenever the familiar number appeared on screen, days of walking as fast as possible into and out of the classroom, days of as much of truancy as possible, days of not looking up when inside the college premises, Sandhya was tired. So one day she decided to pick up the call and get it over with. “Hello,” she said. “Where have you been?” came his voice from the other end. The two roommates had gone for a movie. She looked at their tables, each one laden with a large family pack bottle of cold drink that was now full of water. Then looking for a polite answer, she said, “was just busy with studies.” “Okay, look, I have to see you,” came his voice. “Let me see when I can, the exams are coming and…” “But you have to meet me,” he didn’t let her finish. She looked at her table, full of small half a liter bottles of soft drinks which had come to serve the same way their big brothers on the other tables were. Silence. “You don’t want to regret, do you?” he said, probably with the same old grin that had stopped alluring her. “I don’t understand,” she really didn’t. “I have something you might be interested in, see me tomorrow or you’ll truly regret it.” His sentences were abandoned by the customary tenderness they ordinarily incorporated. The call was disconnected. Putting the cell down on her table, she took three bottles from her table by their necks and went upstairs to give them fulfillment.

She looked different, unfamiliar as a matter of fact. She couldn’t believe it was indeed her in the photographs. Did she actually look that ugly, she wondered. The mole on her neck was growing bigger, wasn’t there a way to stop that? She visualized her face covered by the voracious mole that demanded more of her skin every day. “What do you think?” his question was a statement. A statement that didn’t need an answer and nor could she produce one. They had done that, both of them. She had taken his pictures and he had taken hers, consensually. She had the same genre of pictures featuring him too, but was that a tit-for-tat situation? Would people do the same things to him that they would do to her after observing the blatant nakedness in the pictures? Would his parents, who were already dead, die of disgrace at their son’s promiscuity? Would he, too, be seen as eternally naked once he had been seen naked in the images? She grew fatigued, craved to sleep. It was good that his wife and children were away from him, she would be able to sleep as long as she chose at his home and no one will know. She got up and trod languidly to the kitchen for a glass of water. He looked nonchalant, cognizant of the impalpable leash he had knotted around her neck, sensible of the fact that she would come back, as unafraid to let her loose as one lets a boomerang fly away. She did return, with quenched thirst, extinguished fretfulness, free of the watery eyes that had continually attempted to drag her to slumber. Sitting on the bed, he signaled her to come to him and she obediently yielded. Making her sit on his lap was how he preferred to begin, so he did just that. Two jabs it took against his neck to have him lie on his bed that failed to soak the gushing blood that the knife had engendered. And then, many more for her to stop feeling her heart wriggling vehemently as he lay motionless on the queen size bed that kept on devouring what his lacerated body discharged.

She sat in the Starbucks cafe, sipping her coffee and staring out of the window. The blood stained knife lay next to her handbag, covered with her blue silk scarf. It was an acknowledgement, an absolute reminiscence that, ultimately, made her use the crumpled up five hundred rupees note that had lost its rawness, its smell of novelty, its fascination to be possessed.