2013

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2013.

 Trains make you question things, Shreyas realizes, as he spends more time staring at his wife and the landscape blurring outside their compartment window. To pass the time, he predicts her actions, giving himself a point every time he’s right and deducting one every time he’s wrong. She scratches her nose while reading, her reading glasses sitting perfectly on the little bump in the middle she got because of a fall from her garden swing when she was eight, or so she has told him – her nostrils flare a little in some parts, and then subside, only to flare again a little later – she pushes a page forward a little when she’s nearing the end of it, impatient to get to the next page, her eyes darting to the words on top of a fresh page eagerly as it is turned, head tilted. Shreyas watches her actions, feeling safe in their familiarity, their easy predictability (his score was near perfect). He feels that same safety in her being as well, that same predictability about the way she feels under his hands, under him, the curves and contours that have stayed the same over the years, maybe a little softer now – but, he wonders, would he notice the constancy if he is craving change? Is he craving change?

 No, he isn’t, he decides, still staring at Nadira but not quite noticing, her image imprinted in his eyes.

 Perhaps she is, he ponders. The thought saddens him.

 His thumb rotates his wedding ring around his finger unconsciously. He stares at the ring on her finger as she holds her book, fingers splayed all over the cover, thumbs holding the pages apart. They have the same rings, thin gold bands that fit perfectly over their ring fingers. He remembers the newness of the feel of the ring in the first months of their marriage, the exciting way they would clink against the coffee mugs in the morning, the way her ring would rub against his skin when he held her hand, the way sometimes he used to find himself staring at the gold against his brown skin when he caught sight of it during the day.

 Now sometimes he sees Nadira’s ring kept near their toothbrush holder when she goes for a bath, or on the shelf on the kitchen wall next to the calendar with stitching patterns on it, when she cooks dinner for them. She always puts it back on, he tells himself, when she emerges from the bathroom, skin glowing, hair wet, she’s always wearing the ring as she puts away her towel and sits down at her small dressing table around which the smell of eucalyptus hovered, a smell he doesn’t like, never has, but it’s a smell which reminds him of his wife, a smell he can predict, and so he likes it, in some way.

 He never takes it off, he doesn’t like to. His friends do – sometimes on their nights out he sees them using their bare fingers as an excuse, and he doesn’t like to do that, he thinks of Nadira and her glowing skin and her wet hair and the ring on her toe and the eucalyptus smell and her steely eyes and he never takes it off.  

 Her eyes flicker up to his, and then to his hands. He knows she is looking at his ring. Then she looks back at her book without saying a word.

 With Nadira, he has learned over the years, sometimes silence is the most eloquent form of words. But this is not one of those times. The silence that hovers over them is one that he aches to dispel, but does not know how. He thinks about asking her what her book is about, and then realizes that he doesn’t actually want to know.

 He just wants to talk to her, the way they used to talk. He wants her to look at him the way she used to, and sometimes she still does, but now he is afraid, that maybe those times will dwindle in frequency and maybe stop altogether, but he does not want that, of course not. He loves his wife – because, after all, love is what remains when being in love has passed, when the exhilaration of that glorious stage passes, a subdued kind of love is what remains, but he is afraid of letting it get too subdued. They are anything, everything, but not subdued, and now somehow they have turned into something they are not, into one of those couples they had once vowed never to be.

 Shreyas knows this. So does his wife. But he stares at her and she stares at her book and no words are spoken.

 “We’ll have to take an auto from the station,” he says finally.

 She looks up from her book.

 “I thought amma’s driver is picking us up.”

 “He’s on leave tomorrow.”

 “Can’t Manoj pick us up?”

 “He has to stay with amma,” Shreyas says. “She’s too sick to be left alone.”

 Nadira is quiet for a moment.

 “Your house is ten minutes away from the station.”

 “Dira, I can’t ask my brother to just leave her alone at home.”

 “Why not? He’s your brother isn’t he? Do you want me to ask him?”

 Her tone remains even. They both feel the heavy fog of disagreement settle over them, its weight now familiar.

 “No. We’re taking an auto.”

 She looks back into her book.

 “We have too much luggage.”

 “I’ll handle it.”

 She opens her mouth as if to say something, and then closes it. Shreyas runs a hand through his hair, heaving out a breath. He knows that she does not want to visit Chennai, she dislikes the heat, the grime, and more so she dislikes his mother. He feels as if he should apologize, then realizes that he’s done nothing wrong.

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