Contradiction & Reality

Chapter Twenty-two

"You may think it all very fine, Mr. Huntingdon, to amuse yourself with rousing my jealousy; but take care you don't rouse my hate instead. And when you have once extinguished my love, you will find it no easy matter to kindle it again."

― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

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Fourth month

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Whenever someone asked how her married life was, Suman wished she could be honest for once and respond that it was like a glacier. A large accumulation of solid ice that was so cold that it was killing her soul slowly. There were times when her husband granted her a few benevolent moments, and only then the ice would melt a little, moving the glacier downslope under the influence of the weight and gravity of his strange yet tragic love...

But was the warmth of those few benevolent moments enough to live in the soul-killing cold?

It was something she had been asking herself more and more ever since the night of their wedding. In the start, there was a lot of impatience yet there was also boundless hope. She had been confident that once again Shravan would fall into the gravity of the repeated cycle that their relationship always had been. There was no escape for them, no matter how much they denied it, no matter how much they tried, they always gravitated towards each other. But as time passed by, hope reduced and impatience increased, leading her to make many mistakes and encounter pushbacks. Telling him to pretend had been one of her biggest mistakes.

When at first she had asked him, it had been people around her and their questions that had pushed her to do so. And she had liked it. The illusion of having a good married life and a loving husband. The artificial happily ever after that they created was sweet and satisfied some of her fantasies. His flinching and moving away from her touch yet faking a smile had been disturbing, but what she hadn't known was that she would find his easing into feigning to be happy with her even more disturbing...

She hadn't realized when Shravan had started to stop flinching and had gotten used to her touch, but she remembered the day she had noticed it. It was one of those elite parties that they were invited into because Shravan had won the case for some rich businessman. That night, Shravan had introduced her as his wife and when she had leaned into his side, he had accommodated her by moving his arm around her back. Her heart had skipped a beat, dizzy with happiness, she had looked up at him with a bashful smile, just to find his expressionless face and cold eyes looking down at her for a few beats and then looking away. That moment had felt as if someone had dumped ice-cold water on her. It had been only then that she had realized how machinic and calculated everything was for him. He had stopped flinching at her touch not because he was letting her in or becoming comfortable with her, but because he had eased into faking. Her touch no longer meant anything to him. Somewhere along the way, he had gotten numbed to her as he had to everything else...

And once Suman had noticed it, she couldn't go back to the fantasy she had been forcing them to enact in hopes that one day it would become their reality. Day by day, the more he was getting comfortable with the act of faking, the more she realized how wrong her demand of him pretending to be happy was. The tension within her built, suffocating her, and breaking her into pieces, till one day she had enough and told him to stop. She hadn't predicted them to fight, yet she had been hoping for it. She had been hoping for him to object, yell at her, and just do anything. She had gotten a reaction, just as she had wanted, but not the confusion and the silence that came after it...