An Unrestored Woman by Shobha Rao

Author:Shobha Rao
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781250073839
Publisher: Flatiron Books

SUCH A MIGHTY RIVER

Alok Debnath sucked on his sixth finger, dangling off the pinky of his right hand, for eighty-four years before he lost it. It was so simple: one quick slash of the knife and there it lay. On the table. Detached. It was moist and trembling, like a snail without its shell, and he looked at it with curiosity, as if it were a museum piece or an artifact that had once belonged to someone else. But it was his, all right. This recognition lasted only a moment because in the next, blood began to pour out of the raw flesh and exposed bone where the finger had once been. Even the little snail on the table was now floating in a pool of blood. Alok Debnath clutched his left hand over the gushing wound. Blood seeped through his fingers and landed on the dirt floor with the pretty plop of fat raindrops. All the blood in his body seemed to be emptying itself through its new faucet. He screamed and screamed. “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Naagi said. Someone came up behind him and stuffed a rag into his mouth. With his mouth plugged up Alok Debnath’s eyes watered, darted around the room. Everyone—Naagi, the fat man, the little bird—eyed him nervously. Except for Rekha. Rekha just stood there placidly, voluptuously, watching him. Who was this woman? Had he loved her once? He might have—he couldn’t be sure, his mind was muddy—but he was certain he did not love her now.

* * *

It was toward the end of December, a little after the ayananta but before the children’s winter holidays, when Rekha didn’t come. He had bought her for the afternoon but she failed to show. Alok Debnath waited nervously. It was unlike her to be late; he was without doubt, in the case of Rekha, of certain things: she would brutalize him with her cruelty, seduce him with her ass, and she was always, always on time. It was nearing five o’clock; his daughter would return at six with the children, his son-in-law at eight. Alok Debnath waited by the window. The street his daughter lived on looked out onto a row of affluent houses in Taktakpur. Her husband had made money in textiles, and theirs was one of the biggest homes on the block. But Alok Debnath cared for none of it: the big house, the money, much less his avaricious son-in-law. He sat morosely at the window of his lavish room sucking on his sixth finger and wondered what to do. He shuffled around the room, unsure what he was looking for, then he put on his coat and his scarf and his knitted hat and walked out of the door without a paisa to his name. He even forgot his keys. When he got to the end of the block he remembered: he was looking for Rekha. With this thought his mind and his spirits lifted like a kite in a strong wind, and Alok Debnath breathed deeply of the chill winter air.

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