Cheaters Read online

  If you don’t take the call now, I will know for sure he is with you.

  He video calls me the very next moment. My hands start shaking. The message sounded like a warning. And what did I do to deserve it? I was honest with him. I pick up the call. I see Raghav and he can see me. He asks me to show him around the place. What has got into him? I say no. He is adamant. I feel embarrassed. I do as I am told. He sees nobody. He starts saying something but I cut the call and switch my phone off. Trust isn’t by nature foolproof. It is made foolproof by your belief in your partner. Today Raghav busted a myth for me. Till now, I was under the impression that he was one of those rare, liberal men and that I was fortunate to be with him. How liberal a person can be with his partner probably depends on how well he knows her and what he assumes about her. The difference between the two often breaks more relationships than love ever builds. I can’t concentrate on work any more. Maybe it is obvious. Why else would my producer ask me to take a break? I don’t say no. I go to my room and lie down on the bed, seething with anger and embarrassment. I know why exactly Raghav video called me. Not just to make sure that I was telling him the truth but also to make me feel guilty. And women and guilt go a long way. If not for guilt, I believe women could never have been controlled by men. Raghav tried to do the same with the video call. How can you meet your ex when you have a husband? That too in the middle of the night? An ideal woman should have not opened the door. An ideal woman who is married would not have met her ex-boyfriend, or some bullshit like that. Raghav is afraid that I might fall for Kshay again. What if we have sex? It could only mean that I chose him sexually over Raghav. Men and women are hardwired to perceive sex differently. For men seek a conquest in it and women, an experience. Is this why a man, subconsciously, seeks a different woman in his mind once he is done being physical with one woman far too many times? But a woman, more often than not, seeks that one phantasmal man of her dreams in the different men she goes to bed with? I decide not to feel guilty. Now when I close my eyes, I feel better.

  A noise wakes me up. I don’t know what happened. I check the time on my phone. Pretty late. I missed dinner. I check my phone again. Raghav has called a few times but, of course, I haven’t picked up. He will conclude that I’m upset. Or that I’m with Kshay. His mind, his thoughts, his conclusions. I can’t be blamed for it. I hear a sound outside my door. It sounds as if someone is scratching it. I feel scared but get up to open it. I find Kshay on his knees, struggling to get up. One look at his eyes and I know he is drunk. He is blabbering something which I can’t understand. I help him up and he puts his arm around my waist. I don’t know why this move of his makes me alert, makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Is it because Kshay and I share a physical history? Or is it because this touch is what Raghav has a problem with, or that I know just how he will react if he got to know about this. If he knows. It makes me feel like I’m ahead of Raghav. Like I can hurt him the way he hurt me this morning.

  Kshay is continuously blabbering. I ask him to stop but he doesn’t. I search his pockets and find the keys of his room. I open his room, switch on the lights and take him inside. Somehow I manage to push him on the bed. I cover him and switch off the lights. I have almost walked out of the room when I pause. I don’t know what comes over me but I go back and kiss him on his lips. I quickly come back to my room. I lie in bed and stay awake the whole night.

  * * *

  Night Five

  I’ve been forever impulsive. That’s one thing I hate about myself. At times I do things without thinking. And then I dwell on them knowing fully well that they can’t be undone.

  The kiss was real. Best part though, I’m the only who knows about it. Kshay was too drunk. Raghav won’t ever get a confession out of me again. Men don’t deserve certain information. They can’t handle it, no matter how much they claim they are cool with it. I feel thrilled: I know something that Raghav won’t ever know. I like this feeling. Maybe kissing Kshay was impulsive, but it was provoked by Raghav. He made me feel wretched when I didn’t do anything. When he asks for a video call next, I won’t mind a bit.

  Today is the most exciting day of our trip. We are going to trek to a place called Triund and camp there at night. I don’t call up Raghav. I leave him a message saying I’m going for a trek with my team. If he wants, we can video call any time. He sends me a few kiss emoticons. I want to slap him but I understand my message has massaged his ego well. Marriage is just like a compass. We know which way we are heading, but it’s impossible to know where exactly we are. We are always focused on, think and talk about where the future is. But never realize if we really know where the present is. This overlooked present becomes a shocking future later. I’m sure Raghav is unaware of what his chauvinist attitude has provoked me into doing. If and when he learns about it in the future, he will think that I’m the one who cheated on him. But he cheated on me first by breaking the code of trust. Why is it cheating only when one’s spouse has stepped out of marriage? Why isn’t it cheating when the code of trust between two people is violated? Why is sleeping with a third person a prerequisite for cheating? Raghav was never like this. That was why I had married him. But now I know this chauvinism was lying dormant in him. Whether he pretended to be liberal in front of me but wasn’t really, I will never know. But I feel cheated. He isn’t the husband I had married. So who is the bigger cheater? Raghav or me? Or both of us?

  It is late by the time we reach Triund. But the trekking was one of the best experiences of my life. Our plan is to camp here all night and return in the morning. As we locate the place where we want to set up our camps, I notice one tent is already made. As my team begins to set up our tents, one at a time, I notice a man standing outside the already made tent and clicking a photograph of a mountain peak. I smile. I excuse myself and approach Kshay.

  ‘You too were trekking?’ I ask.

  ‘Hey! Just what I had hoped for,’ he answers with a warm smile.

  ‘Don’t tell me you still use hope and me together.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I use hope, you and me together. The best threesome one can imagine.’ His warm smile now has a naughty hue.

  ‘Yeah, sure. You never did that when we were together.’

  ‘When we were together, we were together. What was there to hope for?’ he says, looking at me directly. I feel as if the past four years were an illusion. As if they never existed. That’s another peculiar thing about Kshay. Or perhaps about Kshay and me. We always seem to pick up where we left off effortlessly. We never have to start from the beginning. We are always in medias res.

  ‘Are you seeing someone?’ I ask. I had to.

  ‘I think I am.’

  ‘Just like you thought we were seeing each other. The truth being, of course, that I was trying to make it happen.’

  ‘Just because our ways were different doesn’t mean I didn’t try.’

  ‘Maybe you did. But our destinations were different. Hence, our trying processes were also different.’

  ‘You wanted something contrary to my core.’

  ‘Yes, I wanted to settle down with you. What else can a woman want from a man she is in love with?’ This is something I have been asking myself since we decided to separate.

  ‘You know what’s the worst thing society does to us?’

  I look at him expectantly.

  ‘It makes us believe that there is no alternative to whatever it wants from us. It fucking convinces us that whatever it has designed over the centuries is an absolute. And the ones defying it are crazy people who deserve to be judged and shamed by one and all.’

  He has a point. That’s why I don’t say anything. I get a call. It’s Raghav.

  ‘Husband?’ Kshay asks. I nod.

  ‘Tell him you are with me.’

  I ignore him and tell Raghav I’m with my team, setting up our tents. I tell him I will call once we’re done. Kshay is smirking. I shrug.

  ‘Tha
t’s another reason why I don’t want to settle down with someone. I can’t be brutally honest with her. Nobody can.’

  He again has a point. I don’t say anything. At that moment my director calls me. I don’t tell Kshay anything. I go back to my team while he enters his tent. Later, we retire to our respective tents and I have some hot tomato soup from my flask. I make a short video call to Raghav and then cut the call saying I’m sleepy. There’s a constant emotional itch in me to reach out to Kshay. He’ll never let me be at peace with myself. He is that chaos which makes you feel that it would have been better not to have met him in the first place, but also makes you realize that had you not met him, you wouldn’t have been what you are today. He made me connect to my ruins. Raghav made me connect to my will to make a house amidst those ruins, using the debris. And now Raghav has . . .

  ‘I was thinking . . .’ I hear a male voice. I sit up startled. It’s Kshay.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you but I had this new book with me. And I was thinking if you want to read it with me. The way we used to,’ he says with a twinkle in his eyes. It tells me he misses the past as much as I do. It makes me feel relieved. The way we used to . . . Kshay is crazy about books. Every time he read a new book that he found unputdownable, we would cuddle up naked under a blanket. My head on his chest, his arm around my shoulders and him reading the book. I would listen to him and be lost for hours.

  ‘What say?’ he is waiting for an answer. If he knows me well, he should know my answer too.

  * * *

  Night Six

  I keep looking at him. I feel a spell taking over me. I simply kneel down and begin to strip. Kshay zips up the door of the tent. I take off my woollens and my inners. I shiver but don’t mind the cold too much. I’m distracted. His eyes travel down my body from my eyes to my lips to my breasts to my belly to below. I feel tempted to ask if there’s any change. Do my breasts look as firm as they were when he touched them for the first time? Do I look as much in shape as he found me years ago? My train of thoughts stops as he begins to strip. The broad shoulders are still the same. The sparsely hairy chest. The perky nipples. The stretch marks. I always had a thing for his stretch marks. He pulls his underwear down too. I don’t look at his penis. I keep my eyes firmly above his waist. Kshay takes out a book, probably the one he was talking about, from his jacket. He comes and gets inside the blanket. An unprecedented arousal grips me the moment our naked skin rubs against each other. He lies down. I place my head on his chest. We don’t say a word but the way we move our bodies tells me nothing is over between us. Everything is still there. We only turned our emotional faces away from each another, and tried to pretend that everything was over. The comfort is both beautiful and disturbing. Perhaps it is disturbing because it’s beautiful. A married woman isn’t allowed to feel such beauty in another man’s arms no matter how much peace she finds herself there. My husband changed my home from Kshay to him but there are certain addresses nobody can change for you. Kshay is one such address for me.

  He begins to read. I know he is hard but I don’t touch him there. He doesn’t make any move either. I always admired this quality of his. Any man would have fucked me by now. He won’t. Not until I want him to. Only then. That’s also why I avoid looking at him. Sometimes you don’t know what story your eyes hold. And how a man will interpret it. He keeps reading. I feel the urge to ask him if the scar on his back is still there. I feel the impulse to kiss every inch of his body. He keeps reading. And I’m lost in my thoughts. I don’t know when we doze off.

  In the morning I wake up hearing a man call my name. It’s my director. The moment I realize I’m naked, I panic. I tell him I’ll come out in a bit. He leaves. I look around. There’s no Kshay. His book is there right beside his pillow. I heave a sigh of relief. I quickly get dressed and check my phone. Thankfully no calls or messages from Raghav yet. When I come out of the tent, I find that Kshay’s tent is still there, but he is nowhere to be seen. My team wants to trek further up but they tell me we’ll be back here for the night and finally go back to Dharamkot tomorrow morning. I like the idea. The book was dogeared at page 204, I remember checking it after I woke up. It’s far from over.

  It is nine in the night when we come back from our trek. It went smoothly. Others prepare a bonfire while I look for Kshay. He is sitting right outside his tent. He waves at me. I wave back. My team and I have dinner by the bonfire and sing old Hindi songs. Everybody gets drunk a bit and later retire to their tents. I prefer to stay next to the bonfire. Kshay approaches me. This time we exchange even fewer words. We go inside my tent and strip; this time lying closer to each other. The way he puts his arm around my shoulder, the way I place mine on his chest; the way I place my left leg on his groin, feel him getting harder; the way his body smells; everything speaks of our past more than the present moment. But visiting the past has repercussions. Sometimes I wonder if those repercussions are created by our own selves more than the situation. Kshay finishes reading the book. He turns to look at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Remember the game?’ he asks. I know what he is talking about. In a flash he turns me over. He doodles something on my goose pimple-dotted skin using his warm tongue. I guess the word: love. This is a game we used to play before. He would scribble words on various parts of my body and I would have to guess them. Then I would do the same to him. Whoever guessed more won. I keep guessing every word he scribbles on my back, thighs, inner thighs, belly, shoulder, arms correctly. I stop him at the tenth word and do the same on his inner thighs. He guesses it wrong. I giggle. I do it on his balls. Wrong again. The moment I grab his erect penis, I don’t scribble any more. I suck it. And till late in the night we make uninhibited and soul-exhaustive love as if Kshay and I are beyond the past, present or future. Beyond societal rules. Miles away from our own prejudices.

  Next morning when I wake up Kshay is again gone. I check myself in the front camera of my phone. I look flushed. I blush.

  * * *

  Night Seven

  My eyes open with a jerk. I realize my flight from Mumbai has landed in Delhi. I look around. My team members are looking outside. I realize it has happened again. I call it an emotional fantasy. I love to revel in the what-ifs of life. And all of them invariably involves Kshay.

  I switch on my phone. Among other messages, Raghav’s is the first one: call me when you land. Love you.

  My husband is a sweetheart. In fact, he has successfully challenged what Kshay had made me believe about men. But for some reason Raghav is always a sneaky chauvinist in my fantasies. Is it because even in my fantasies, I need my husband to be unlikeable for crossing lines? Marriage is certainly about lines. But a line which is centred around a circle. Many keep moving around in that circle and some go ahead and cross it. Few are like me. We cross those lines, along with a validation, but only in fantasies. It’s so funny. Maybe I’m too happy with Raghav, but not done with Kshay. So one side of me wants to live the fantasy, while the other side is very comfortable with Raghav and wouldn’t want such a thing to happen in real life. I always have these fantasies when I’m travelling and not when I’m in Mumbai with Raghav.

  From New Delhi, we reach Mcleod Ganj in a bus and then to Dharamkot, where we have an Airbnb house booked for us. Impulsively, I ask the owner of the house if the only other vacant room after we checked in has been taken. He says no. My director asks if I’m expecting anyone. I shake my head. In fantasies, you don’t expect anything. That’s why they are so much more idealistic than reality. And, of course, nobody judges you for anything. I go to my room and call up Raghav; I tell him I’ve reached. I grin when he says he wants to see me. A video call.

  After a sumptuous dinner, we retire to our respective rooms. The recce begins tomorrow. I can’t fall asleep. I think of calling up Raghav but it’s too late. He has had a long day in office as well. He might not say it but he needs to sleep. I toss and turn in bed. The room is really cold and in spite of having covered myself wi
th two thick blankets, I can still feel the chill.

  There’s a knock on the door. I sit up and check my phone. 12.45 a.m. Who could it be at this hour? There’s another knock. I get out of bed with my phone in my hand. I can feel the coldness of the floor through my socks. I reach for the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I was wondering if you have any spare cigarettes?’ a man answers from the other side. I swallow nervously. Is it really happening? Or is it still a fantasy? The third knock is softer.

  I open the door.

  The Vacation

  Alarm one: 5.30 a.m.

  For a stranger who visits my house in posh New Alipore in south Kolkata, it won’t take too long to know my name: Radhika. If he looks at the nameplate next to the door, he will know my full name too: Radhika Bose. Not just that. He will know exactly how many people stay in my house—eleven. A house where my name is on everyone’s lips, especially in the mornings. At thirty-four, I’m the eldest daughter-in-law in the Bose household. I’ve an eight-year-old daughter, a loving husband, my in-laws, two younger brothers-in-law, their wives and their two children. I had an arranged marriage when I was twenty-two. My husband says I had reminded him of Maa Durga when he had seen me for the first time, because of my big, round, expressive eyes. I was happy to know that but I would have been happier if he had said that I had reminded him of Madonna.

  Although I didn’t understand it back then, after twelve years, I have understood one thing. My husband respects me a bit too much, which is great. I hope they make more men like my husband. But it is also true that where there is too much respect between two people, there’s also an unbridgeable gap between them. Everything is perfect between my husband and me, and yet there’s a lacuna. Everyone in my family loves me, and yet there is a feeling of, at the cost of sounding a little harsh, being imprisoned. Maybe because I was never the sort who wanted to be domesticated, but was forced to at a young age. A couple of years were spent getting used to my new role, and then Mini happened. Time flew and I didn’t have time to ponder over anything else other than my family. Now that I have time, I wonder: why can’t I too work like my friends? Why can’t I be financially independent like them? I’m not blaming anyone. I just feel sorry for myself at times. I pity myself. I remember the time when I had told my husband that I wanted to join a gym. He had to talk to his parents for a month before I was allowed to go. I would leave home in a sari, change into my gym clothes, and then come back in a sari. The love, the respect is there . . . but I feel shackled ever since I stepped into this house as a newly-wed. I see my sisters-in-law and don’t find them troubled by these chains of domesticity. Maybe they aren’t aware of them; once you’re aware of them, it gets increasingly difficult to live with them. But to live without them, is that too much to ask for?