Under The Mango Trees

Chapter Thirty Seven : In Between Adventures Of A Whore

I flung down the clothes from my cupboard till the heaps of clothes inside formed little hills of clothes outside, but I didn't find anything that I liked. There was still two hours to go for the date, but in pictures, Aastha looked so fashionable that I felt intimidated. With Lila, I could wear a graphic t-shirt and jeans and still feel overdressed. Here, I wasn't sure if a dress would be sufficient. Maybe, I could take the netted red dress of Pavitra since she would not need a date-worthy dress anymore . . . Till someone decided to marry her again.

"Ay! Why did you steal my earring? How many times do I have to tell you to not touch my things?!" I felt a sharp pull of my hair and from the corner of my blinking eyes, I noticed a familiar silver earring dangling in Pavitra's hand. The pain was an excruciating burning sensation on my scalp and I could no longer focus on remembering where I had seen that earring. Through tears in my eyes, my flailing hands grasped her arm that was tugging my hair and I dug my nails mercilessly into her flesh till she screamed and let go of me.

Both of us regarded each other with caution from our opposite beds. I couldn't recollect what I had stolen due to my throbbing head. I massaged my sensitive scalp for a minute and muttered, "I didn't steal any rubbish of yours."

"What is this then? It fell out of your pants!" She held a Chandbali earring in one hand and the pants that I hadn't worn since last summer in her other hand. I recognized those pants instantly, those pants which I had worn during my trip with Lila, those pants which I consciously avoided wearing later like a recent widow avoiding colourful clothes. Too many memories were attached to it. When Pavitra held the forbidden cloth with the earring together, I realized where I had found that earring, in a corner at the stony backyard of Lila's villa.

"That's not your earring. It's Lila's," I said, reaching towards her to snatch it, but she enclosed it tightly within her fist and refused to open it like a toddler with mud in its fists to eat. "I found it at Lila's villa in Tarkarli! Give it back to me!"

Suddenly, there was a crooked smile on her face and she got up and walked sedately towards the drawers where she kept her jewellery. Her sly silence insinuated that she knew something that I didn't. After all, the silence was never devoid of meaning. But this silence was more sinister, the classic, the calm before the storm kind.

"What if I told you that it's mine? That I must have lost it there at that place?" she began smilingly and my confusion added to her pleasure. She continued humming some song, leaving me in that state of heightened curiosity and senselessness. She picked up another Chandbali earring from the drawer so that they became a pair now, it was indeed hers, both the earrings were a striking replica of each other. Her humming turned to crazy humming with her gazing at me and swinging the earrings by her ears without actually wearing them.

"How could those be yours? Why would you be at Lila's place? You're messing with me, right?" A chuckle escaped my lips and hearing it quaver, I realized how anxious and scared I was of this lunatic of a sister who hummed some upbeat Bollywood song shamelessly. I advanced towards her in an attempt to snatch those earrings again and put an end to her singing, but she dodged me. Frustrated, I yelled, "What the hell are you talking about? Quit messing me with me! It's not bloody funny."

"Who said I'm being funny?" she asked in a shrill voice now to irk me and I took a threatening step forward which made her sigh and keep those earrings on the windowsill. "Relax. You had to know this anyway. Remember how last year I said that I was going on a trip with my friends from my university days . . . Well, well, I never went with them. You can guess now where I was." Humming again, she brushed past me and sat on her bed, taking a nail cutter and tending to her toes with it. "Let's see how long you will take to figure this one out. Aren't you the smarter one in our family?"

"Who did you stay with . . . "

"Who else do you think?" She continued with her cruelty and I had never been this afraid of her. Her hollow, detached voice belonged to a murderer who would never be guilty of her crimes. She was a moral criminal, she had committed the crime of infidelity. All of her crimes dawned on me in the ultimate showdown without any pity. All the answers that I was desperately trying to question about with Dev . . . Why her husband asked her to drop her job at Lila's father's company . . . Why Pavitra showed interest when I used to talk about Lila's family . . . The earrings. With each second, my understanding grew and I became afraid of not only Pavitra but the next moment.

"How could you . . . ? I can't believe this."

"I couldn't believe that I would do it either, but it was so thrilling. Like gifting a virgin with the dirtiest, smuttiest videos. That's how it felt for me when someone like him showed interest in someone like me. Come to think of it, I surprised myself too. I always thought that I was the straight arranged marriage types, not the---"

"Stop talking! Fuck, stop talking! How can you do this? To cheat---" I lowered my shouts to controlled whispers, "---to whore around with your fucking boss? With my best friend's father?!"

"You're pretty smart you know. You figured this quickly. Wait, did you already know . . ."

"Why? Why are you doing this? What sick pleasure are you getting out of this?"

"Oh, you would not want to know certainly," she dared to smile lewdly, setting aside her nail cutter. "Aren't you interested in knowing how I pulled it off? You should learn from me or you'll end up in some arranged marriage with a boring guy who'll run away from you the second you tell him about your past adventures. It's not like I cheated on him. I ended it before the wedding day. But that's how the men in that family are, they think they know everything and there's no way that you can make them believe you."

"Stop talking rubbish! You know you're at fault, why are you telling me all this? Why couldn't you keep your mouth shut!"

"Stop barking like a dog," she snapped. "I just slept with him a couple of more times than I should have. It's not like I killed anyone. There are worse things than having sex."

"Sex with a married man! Cheating. Say it, c-h-e-a-t-i-n-g, cheating," I said through gritted teeth, remembering how her father's exploits had gnawed at Lila and devastated her. "You killed a family."

"What if the family was already dead? What if I just took the corpse out and gave it a proper burial?"

"Burial in your panties!" I exploded, no longer able to restrain myself. "Just shut up. Just shut up with your nonsense and never speak of this again. You don't know what all you have done. That's why you're getting punished now. You deserve this, you deserve to be fucking divorced and dumped." Grabbing a dress and a denim jacket off the floor, I stormed out, just as my mother entered to check on what commotion was going on in English between her peculiar daughters. One a whore, other a queer. Which one was better, she would never know. She couldn't.

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