(A short story)
The phone pinged. Shefali didn’t stir from her chair.
She needn’t; she knew who it was.
It was the seventh notification in the past two hours.
Any other person in her place would’ve felt wanted.
Nope.
Not she!
Pushing her forties, Shefali couldn’t afford to commit another mistake.
She sat in her chair, in near comatose mode, mulling over the quandary, turning increasingly restless; her mind a cesspool of ever-darkening indecisiveness.
Finally, something clicked in her mind.
She got up and rummaged through the drawer, all three compartments of it.
After what seemed an eternity, she found what she was looking for.
Grabbing it in both hands, Shefali headed towards the bed, her anxiety writ visage mirroring the turbulence in her mind.
Flipping through the album, her fingers shook, her five feet frame trembled as her past came alive in sepia-toned images.
It was something she hadn’t laid her hands on in ages.
Twenty years to be precise!
Albums, Shefali had come to realise, contained deadened memories that best lay buried.
Here she was alive, yet riffing through her past to make sense of the present so as to figure out what lay in the future.
Like a long-forgotten movie clip, albeit in slow motion, grainy images from her tumultuous past came alive.
There she was, a newly wedded wife, looking resplendent in a bright red saree and matching blouse.
Shefali bent down to have a closer look at her younger self.
The 22-year-old that stared back was all smiles, eyes aglow, twinkling like a million stars. Decked in bridal attire, big “bindi” on her large forehead, thick wavy hair tied up in a neat bun, and a cherubic face that screamed a magnetic child-like innocence and sheer joi de vivre!
She flipped.
Another photograph came into focus.
Amidst snow-capped mountain peaks, there she was in a “shikhara”. Two faces, young and pregnant with desire, stared back at her.
Harshit and she, arms entwined, lips locked, and utterly oblivious to the world around them.
It was their honeymoon!
What love those two pairs of eyes held for one another!
How blissfully happy was she!
She had found and married the love of her life.
Had believed in the power of life fully, blindly, faithfully, passionately, unwaveringly!
Alas!
A tear dropped from Shefali’s eyes.
Where did all this happiness vanish?
How did my life go kaput, she wondered.
A sentence from the past, exactly five years to this day, smashed through her eardrums.
“I hate making love to you. You look ugly, you cook badly, your body repels me”.
Harshit’s words were a sharp-edged dagger that plunged straight into her heart.
That day Harshit died. For her, he was persona non-grata.
Shefali shut the album and wiped her tears.
There was a new-found resolve in her eyes.
She picked up the phone and stabbed the keys.
‘Yes, Niladri. Let’s meet”.
Mrs Shefali Das was finally ready to seek love outside the four walls of marriage.
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