Trivandrum Mail

2013

2013.

 “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it home early.”

 She looks away from the window. The rain has stopped, leaving behind pools of water in the place of paddy fields and thoroughly cleaned coconut trees on both sides of the tracks. Her husband sits directly opposite her, staring at her. She stares back at his face, suddenly registering how it has changed over the years they have been married – his hair does not fall over his forehead as much, less thick, his jaw not as firm – and yet in a way it has not changed even a little, he still has eyes lined with laughter and a hooked nose that gets in the way when they kiss, and that, she realizes, will never change.

 “What happened?”

 She does not accept his apology immediately, as is customary.

 “The roads were flooded.”

 “They were flooded everywhere, but the maid made it to the flat perfectly on time to collect her advance.”

 “I don’t control the roads,” he replies.

 “You could have left early.”

 “My shift ended only at three, how much earlier could I have left?”

 She puffs out a breath, looks away from his laugh-lined eyes and back to the window. They are passing through a grimy village with children floating paper sailboats in roadside puddles.

 “Alright.”

 “Nadira –”

 “I said it’s alright.”

 Shreyas doesn’t persist. Nadira isn’t the only one of them who is tired, he is too. There are still files for unopened cases on his desk at the station, and the pile grows larger every week. He dreads the size of it when he will return a week later. He would probably have to compensate with double shifts. This will obviously not make his wife any happier than she is at the moment.

  He stares at her as she stares out of the window, thinking about how she has changed over the years they have been married. She does not wear lipstick every day anymore – he loved that, her lipstick, still loves it, but on many days, today included, her lips are bare, soft and plump still, but bare in a way they never used to be.  Her eyes still frighten him, and she finds that fright endearing sometimes – most of the time. He remembers the way they softened the first time they made love, when she stared up at him and it was like all the walls that had been up the first time they met were torn down, like the candlelight in their room was mixing with the warmth in her eyes, covering him, embracing him along with her arms around him. He tries to remember the last time they softened like that – he cannot.

 She finally moves from her position – his eyes watch her as she rummages in her purse and takes out a book, a well-thumbed paperback. She pulls out a bookmark, one he recognizes as something the children she taught at the local school made her – he remembers the excited way she had showed it to him one night he’d come home, waving the long rectangular piece of chart paper coated messily in green glitter and Fevicol, he remembers the slightly apathetic way he had responded – it was just a piece of chart, after all.

 The bookmark is placed between two other random pages, and she starts to read. He has a book too, but the view outside the window is too nice to pass up. He crosses his arms, shifts his legs a little, nudging hers in the process. She kicks off her old black rubber health sandals and crosses her legs under her, leaving them splayed messily on the floor. He pushes them under her seat with his feet, aligning them neatly. She ignores this, or maybe, as he likes to think, she does not notice.

 Their metal flask of water is kept on the small table; he picks it up and has a drink of water. People chatter outside their compartment, someone plays a song on their cell phone, muted electronic notes floating to his ears. The train rattles along, every bump jostling him and his wife in the same direction and she stays absorbed in her book. He realizes that the book is probably better company than he is to her – more exciting, more flavourful. His wife is someone whose every intricacy and complexity and detail and flaw is known to him, someone who knows his every intricacy and complexity and detail and flaw, and yet when they sit together in a four feet by eight feet box, she chooses to talk to imaginary people and not him, whether out of boredom of him, or anger, he does not know.

~