Stories Varied - A Book of Short Stories

Story 11 - Eleventh Hour

All of us live with our past. All of us allow it to shape our future. But some of us know how to shrug the past. I think that is who I am, [*] Chitra by name. But what if past catches up with the present? Well, as the moment of reckoning is dilemma, before I come to that, I will take you to my past.

When I completed my course in fashion designing, fate seems to have patterned the woof and weft of my love life that was a score of years back. Landing up with my first job in a reputed company, so to say, I landed in Gopal's lap. He was smart and handsome, witty and humorous, enough to enamour women that's besides his conversational skills. Well, if man dents woman's heart with darts of his eyes, it's the tenor of his words that grips her mind. So, at the threshold of seduction, words are weapons of conquest for men that pierce the chinks in women's armour of chastity! Whether it was his conquest of me or my surrender to him that tended our union is immaterial to my love but it is material to his morals.

As he began courting me, I started taking solo rides into a dream world that is besides our long drives into the wilderness on the outskirts. How the prospect of life as his spouse seemed a dream in itself? Why not, yet to cross thirty, he was the head of fabric design of a blue chip company. Does man's status add aura to woman's love? If so, is love as pristine as poets tend to picture it? Or is it that women have an innate weakness for successful men? What about man's love, isn't it beauty leaning? The bard said that beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold and it can as well be said that it influenceth men to alter their amour. It's not as if women give a damn for man's looks, maybe some of them do, why, isn't it said that some dames prefer ugly men. Lo, some men, rare though, are taken to mustachioed women, oh, what a messy human emotion, this so called love! Then why blame love for its fallibilities? And yet, if urgency for possession symbolizes man's love for woman, her prudence lay in not putting the cart before the horse, so it seems. If woman were to serve man on a premarital platter, won't she let herself bereft of that for which he would die to tie the knot with her? And marriage is no guarantee either for her to keep her man all for herself, as men, rarely, if ever, fail to explore the avenues of fornication for sexual exploitation. And that's what Gopal did. That I realized long after I lost my virginity to him.

As he averred that he was constrained to lead me to the altar forthwith for his only sister was yet to be married, I believed him as that's the prevailing custom. That's fine, but what was fatal in the end was his proposition that it made no sense to waste time before our nuptial time. Yet what a time we have had on the sly till I discovered, on that accursed day, that I was but his other woman; or was it a moment of deliverance from his deceit? When I happened to see him from afar with a woman and two kinds in a cinema hall, I thought she could be his cousin of sorts. Not wanting to embarrass him, I refrained from approaching them, but settling behind them, well after the movie began, I couldn't take my eyes off them. Courtesy the kids, it didn't take me long to know that she was Usha his wedded wife. What with my decency of not hurting her overpowering my instinct to shame him, I left the theatre to bring the curtains down on our affair. Back home, I reflected hard and long as to how to deal with him. First I was tempted to get even with him by pulling him up for his shameful act but on second thought I felt it was too lenient a sentence for his utter perfidy. That way, he would know why I walked out on him. But what if I put in my papers to leave him in the lurch guessing as to why I had left him; was it owing to my discovery of his double life or did I ditch him for he never knows why.

Shrugging off the past, though I readily wedded Murali, it took me a while to shed the baggage of guilt from his bed. Though it made no difference to the physicality of our sex, as it bogged me down in the emotionality of coition, I could see that past is the future of the present. Added to that was Murali's confession about his own past – an unfructified love between him and his classmate owing to her parents' superior status. Thinking it prudent to keep mine away from him and determined not to let the sapphire of my life turn literally blue, I began applying my mind.