Cheaters Read online

  I am distracted by a call. It’s my husband. My hand begins to shake. I suddenly feel guilty looking at his name flashing on my phone. As if I’ve been caught red-handed doing something sinful. I take the call and ask him to wait for two seconds. I stand up, turn my back to N and shift to another seat, tugging my Samsonite along.

  * * *

  Minute Five (N)

  I wish she hadn’t received that phone call. Was it her husband? Is that why she stood up and turned her back to me? R was always like that. She spoke in gestures when overwhelmed. But does that mean that right now she is . . .

  Why did we meet each other when we were young? Too young. When we wanted to be in a relationship but couldn’t handle it, sustain it. I was too possessive; she was too wild. She was patronizing; I was egotistic. I feel we were right for each other but weren’t ready at that time.

  With time, I’ve realized that too many lies in a relationship stales it while too much honesty kills it. R and I were too honest with each other. We were too frank, often at the cost of wounding each other beyond healing. Honesty mixed with maturity is important. We were difficult. For her, it was okay to meet boys but if I met girls, she would feel insecure and start fighting with me. It was always about what she wanted. If I so much as told her not to flirt with other boys, I was accused of curtailing her freedom. It cannot always be my way or the highway in a relationship.

  And I think everyone will agree that the mere pressure of sustaining an already stressful relationship can at times prove to be too demanding. The year before we broke up, I feel, we stayed with each other simply for the sake of it, because we didn’t want to let ourselves down, after all we were in it forever, weren’t we? Ours will last a lifetime and beyond . . . and all that jazz. It took us a year to realize that not everything was meant to last a lifetime.

  Too much closeness and intimacy ends up making a relationship stifling and not transparent, which is the desired result. This observation is based on my relationship with R. Perhaps that’s the reason why I’ve never been too close or too distant with my wife. I love her. But our relationship is not stifling, maybe because I haven’t bared my soul to her, not let her into my core. It makes me wonder if my wife knows that behind our successful marriage is a woman named R. And the lessons I’ve derived from being in a relationship with her.

  Sometimes I feel R was my childhood, my adolescence, while my wife is my adulthood. One applies the lessons learnt in one’s early years throughout adulthood. I’m a different person now with my wife. Do different people make you behave differently? Probably. I’m so tempted to know how R is with her husband. Is she as wild with him as she was with me? Or has she been domesticated? How would we have fared as a married couple? These questions mar my present, never letting me see the past the way it was.

  R is now sitting closer to a boarding gate. She is done with her phone call. If that’s her boarding gate, then I’m afraid we are heading towards the same destination. I smirk at the thought of this. Were we ever heading towards the same destination? We had only taken a road that was common. We had only experienced a journey together. But then roads end, journeys don’t. Somewhere, somehow it continues, lingers on. We can’t do anything to stop it. It may fade, but is never erased completely. Like R had faded for me until I spotted her tonight and suddenly everything resurfaced in vivid details.

  I have an overwhelming impulse to strike a conversation with her. If she says she is not interested, I will back off. But the way she was looking at me tells me otherwise. People are queuing up in front of the boarding gate close to her. I start walking towards her.

  * * *

  Minute Six (R)

  What is marriage but an emotional straitjacket? When you wear it, you also clamp on a set on societal blinders along with it and sign away any agency to loosen it. The day I or my husband takes off this straitjacket, we’ll be done.

  I have never told my husband about N. I have wanted to and he did ask me once if I had had anyone in the past but I simply shrugged it off and told him it hadn’t been serious. I don’t think my husband would have understood what N and I had shared. There were multiple shades in our relationship. Sometimes we couldn’t get enough of each other’s bodies while sometimes we were content to share silence and a smoke together. Sometimes the two were mixed up. I have never had such moments with my husband. But I don’t doubt that he hasn’t experienced them. Maybe with someone else? Maybe he too has agonized over the death of a relationship? Maybe he too is vulnerable. Maybe he too was imagining someone else’s face in his hands the night we conceived our child. These maybes sustain our relationship.

  Sometimes I feel like an ignorant teenager, wishing to run away from every responsibility and into N’s arms, into a life that we did not lead. I smile. I think like this because N and I were never about responsibilities. We were there. That’s it. We owed nothing to each other. Except for some intense emotional moments. A thought suddenly occurs to me. What if I approach N and ask him if we can fly away somewhere together? I find that I’ve broken into a sweat. I admonish myself: what am I even thinking? But I can’t help but have these thoughts. Will he accede to my request? If he does then will it at all be a request? It will be . . . well, I can ask him that much, right?

  I bend to take out my water bottle from the bag and gulp down all the water at one go. I feel restless. He must be married. Maybe has a kid as well? How could I be thinking of going away somewhere with him like that in gay abandon? I have a husband. A baby in my womb. I should be the one rejecting such an idea instead of nurturing it. Can’t I temporarily switch to a different life, be with different people, in a different environment? But nobody is allowed such an abrupt change. No one is ever free.

  I turn back to find him coming towards me. My throat goes dry and my heart starts thumping loudly. And when he is right there in front of me, it stops.

  * * *

  Minute Seven

  R stands up as N approaches her. She struggles a bit; N asks her to be careful. He almost touches her but withdraws his hand at the last moment. Good for him. Better for her. Finally, they stand facing the other. Has so much time really gone by? His salt-and-pepper stubble confirms it for her. The faint reddish tinge in the parting of her hair confirms it for him.

  ‘Congratulations!’ N blurts out.

  For a moment, R can’t wrap her head around the context of the word. Why would he say something like that? They are meeting after a decade. Then she realizes it’s for the belly.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Which month?’

  ‘Fifth.’

  N gives a tight-lipped smile. R smiles awkwardly as well. Although they have so much to say to each other, not a single word comes out of their mouths. Their thoughts are all over to be phrased properly into coherent, polite sentences.

  ‘So . . .’ he says.

  ‘So?’ she asks.

  ‘How is life?’ he asks.

  She had never thought that their relationship would ultimately boil down to the dregs of small talk.

  ‘Good,’ she says, nodding her head a little. ‘How is yours?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Where are you heading?’ he asks, trying to keep the conversation going at any cost.

  Before she can stop herself, R blurts out, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Mumbai. I’m heading to Mumbai,’ she adds quickly.

  ‘Oh! I’m flying to Hyderabad.’

  ‘Work?’

  ‘Home. Delhi was work,’ he says. The last word knocks the wind out of her. ‘Home’. She had never thought that he would ever mention this word and she wouldn’t be a part of it.

  ‘Mumbai is my home now,’ she says.

  ‘I guessed.’

  A few quiet seconds later, she asks, ‘Are you married?’

  He flashes a quick smile, which she can’t decode, and says, ‘She is an amazing cook, takes care of me; she is a working woman, never lets me question whate
ver we share . . .’

  R smirks. ‘I get it.’

  ‘You do?’ N is surprised.

  ‘But you never liked monotony.’

  He takes his time to respond. ‘Now I live with it. I loved a lot of things earlier that I don’t live with any more. Our definition of home changes over time.’

  ‘Do you know the best and the worst thing about these homes?’

  ‘You tell me the best. I’ll tell you the worst.’

  ‘They shelter us from each other. I can say no to one only because I have another.’

  ‘And the worst is since they were made by us, though for different people, they still call out to us. Especially after midnight, when others are asleep. When our soul is most awake. Waiting for a call perhaps.’

  There is an announcement; boarding for R’s flight has started.

  ‘I have to go now,’ she tells N.

  You’ll never be able to go, don’t you get it? N thinks.

  ‘Sure,’ he says.

  R joins the queue. N doesn’t move from his spot. He would have loved to kiss her once. She would have loved to hug him once. But they both know it would only have stirred the dust that had settled over the years.

  N is waiting for her to walk out of the boarding gate. There are four people ahead of R. An airline staffer comes and tells her that old people and pregnant women can jump the queue. R follows her. She stops, turns around and comes back to N.

  ‘Will you kiss my belly?’ R is at her most vulnerable self now, pleading in front of him. N feels choked up. Seconds later he kneels down and kisses her belly. You don’t know how lucky you are, he whispers to her baby and stands up. She looks at him longingly. Then she leaves.

  I’ll shrug off this encounter the way I shrugged off my past when my husband had asked me about it.

  R’s last thoughts before she wears her spectacles and shows her boarding pass to the airline staffer.

  Our ashes may smell of the same story in the end but what the fire of life burnt down in us will be two different things. You and I, we were different and so we couldn’t make it. We were different so we will always crave for that what if. N’s last thoughts as he watches R go past the boarding gate and disappear into the foggy dawn.

  Clicks

  Day One

  Everything in my life is right. But nothing seems correct. I understood the difference when I was meeting with a prospective match, who is now my fiancée.

  I wasn’t ready for the engagement. But I didn’t know how to stall it. I’m thirty-two, good-looking, and the vice-president of a successful start-up. Except for ‘I’m not ready’ I had nothing else to say to my parents. And that wasn’t a good enough reason for them. Not after using it for the past four years. You’ll be ready the moment you marry, they told me. But they never really understood me, not now, not when I was sixteen and wanted to study humanities and not the sciences.

  I’d been having an existential crisis. I felt that I had ticked off everything there was on the list of a successful life. A high-end corporate job? Done. An SUV? Done. A property? Done. Trips abroad? Done. Marriage? About to happen. A perfect life on social media? Yes. But were these all there was to life? What was the meaning behind having and doing all these things? What was I actually doing with my life? Did these things ultimately matter? My life was so predictable. Everything was exactly how it was supposed to be, and yet I felt nothing. I barely felt alive. As I said, everything was right. Nothing was correct.

  And just when I was starting to feel a little hopeful, a little excited, the proposal came along. Last month I had bought a DSLR—Canon 500D—on a whim. As I watched one YouTube video after another on its usage, read photography manuals for beginners, the whole art seemed alluring. It produced the same eagerness to learn in me as cricket had when I was a kid. I was passionate about the sport like nothing else in my life. That is until I bought the Canon 500D. There was finally something to look forward to. Framing, light, focus, shutter speed—these words would keep reverberating in my head even during office meetings. I would be itching to go back home, make a peg of Jack Daniel’s, pick up my camera and start my next experiment. My Canon 500D. I hadn’t been this possessive about anything or anyone in a long time.

  Photography gave me a chance to escape my otherwise monotonous world. People say photography isn’t about capturing a subject but about capturing light. It has made me feel that life isn’t just about tangible things but also about your feelings. And that is precisely why I have taken a week off from work. It is monsoon here in Mumbai. And it’s time to put my theoretical knowledge on photography into action.

  It’s Monday. After an indulgent breakfast, I drive straight from my apartment in Andheri, Lokhandwala, to Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Borivali. Nothing is more magical than trudging through muddy tracks in the wilderness on a rainy day. On the way, I smirk when I see people scurrying to their offices.

  I take as many photographs as I can in the national park. With every click, I smile. I’m delighted to discover that I can still connect to something so deeply. How many of us can say that once we have grown up? There is no pressure under which I click. I don’t have to prepare a pie-chart of my photographs. They are beyond the brackets of success or failure. The last time I had done something with such gay abandon was in kindergarten when I had learnt to draw an apple for the first time. Everything I have done after that, in one way or another, has been about beating someone else or my own self.

  It starts raining harder. I dash inside my car. I check my photographs in the meantime. Zooming in, making sure all parameters were followed. I clean my lenses and then decide to drive to Bandstand. I want to capture the sea and the Mumbai city line.

  It is drizzling now. I have bought a cup of coffee at a cafe near Bandstand. I take out my zoom lens. This lens makes me feel like everything is within my reach, magnifying details I’d have normally missed. I mount it and then pick up the camera; close an eye and peer into the viewfinder, adjusting the lens. Before clicking the city line, I take a random photo to check if everything is in order. A couple sitting in a cafe across the street. And magnify it to check. The cafe looks warm and mellow, its lights twinkling merrily on an otherwise grey day. The couple is sitting near the window, their outlines blurred by the raindrops on the glass. The man looks dapper; he is clean-shaven and wearing rimless spectacles. The woman—my lips part a little and I frown—is my fiancée Shrutika. When I had last called her, she had told me that she would be busy in office all day.

  * * *

  Day Two

  What I saw yesterday is with me today. They left an hour later. I left an hour and two minutes later. While driving back home, I realized there were two Shrutikas. I was engaged to one and the other I knew nothing about, except that she had lied to me. A most terrible revelation about a person one is just getting to know. Especially if it is your betrothed.

  To date I’ve had two major relationships. One was long distance; it started after I graduated. It lasted for four years till the girl got married to someone else. Then I dated a colleague from my second workplace. We were together for five years. But she didn’t think I was very involved in the relationship; I was too ‘detached’ for her. She called it off. I knew she was right. I’ve always been a detached person in all my relationships—romantic and familial.

  Since we have got engaged, Shrutika and I call each other every night. In the beginning, the conversations were fresh; now they have a pattern. She tells me how her day went. I tell her about mine. What’s in store for the next day; maybe we could go for a movie in the weekend; try out a new restaurant after the movie, etc. She sometimes sends me screenshots of lehengas she would like to wear on our wedding day. We are yet to tell each other ‘I love you’. Or give kisses over the phone. We have held hands whenever we have met outside, but nothing intimate has happened till now.

  Last night after talking to her, I opened the snap and looked at her and the man. Was he her ex-boyfriend? What was she doing meetin
g him after lying to me? There was a time during the phone call when I was tempted to ask her why she had lied. That I had seen her with a man in a cafe, but I chose not to tell her anything. I didn’t want to sound controlling or possessive. Maybe she will herself tell me later when she was comfortable. I never probe people to tell me anything. But I’m also incorrigibly curious.

  Today, I went to Marine Drive and clicked a lot of photographs. But I kept glancing at my watch more than peering into the viewfinder. I was waiting for them. I went to Bandstand again and stood on the road across the cafe where I had spotted them yesterday. There they were: Shrutika and that man. I mounted the zoom lens and clicked twenty-five photographs of them. I felt like a detective. Why did I do it? I don’t know. They left after an hour. I left after two hours. Not before checking every picture that I had clicked. Did my photos expose a story she was trying to hide or was my mind scratching a surface beneath which nothing lay? I didn’t have an answer.

  * * *

  Day Three

  After toying with my camera all morning I’ve come to Bandstand after lunch. My parents think I am exploring Mumbai in the monsoons. I did tell Shrutika I’m on a week-long holiday, but she never asked me where I had been, the places I had visited or about the photos I had clicked. I too didn’t tell her anything. I never tell anyone anything about myself if they come across as uninterested. So it’s only me who knows I’ve come here not because I want to click photos but . . . I don’t remember the last time I had done something without knowing why I had done it. I’m not usually like this. But then I can be whimsical too at times.