Hangwoman by K. R. Meera

Author:K. R. Meera [Meera, K. R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143439684
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2018-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

FOUR

Madhav was like a rich dessert. Women devoured him like ants. I was reduced to destitution within the first three years of our marriage. I discovered a glass barrier between us. When we touched each other with our lips, when our heartbeats merged, the barrier remained between us. He seemed encased in armour even when he undressed himself. Even when we made love, he was searching for someone else in the distance.

It was too late by the time I realized that my understanding as a bride had been wrong—the notion that I was the twenty-eighth and final lover who was entering his bedroom. By then I had lost everything. First, my mother—she had died, hardly one month after my elopement. My father lost his sense of judgement. Even before Mallika could finish her MBBS degree, he married her off to the first available doctor. Her dream of becoming an IAS officer was destroyed. In another hastily arranged marriage, eighteen-year-old Tamara, who had scored the second rank in the All India Engineering Entrance Examination, was offloaded on to a businessman thirteen years her senior. A few years later, when I met her in Kochi during the wedding of a minister’s son, Tamara had looked at me with hatred. ‘I do not want to see you. You destroyed your life as well as ours,’ I remembered her accusation now as I lay in the old room in the Maighar.

The honeymoon had ended abruptly. From the lower drawer of the wardrobe in the bedroom, where Madhav stored his documents, a steady procession of corpse-eating ants had marched out. That was the first indication. I was pregnant with Unni at that time. The ants bit me hard when I passed that way unseeingly. Wincing in pain, I had opened the drawer to pull out the papers. That’s when I discovered the sweet that had attracted the ants. I was horror-struck! It was a black snake with a half-swallowed rat in its mouth. In spite of knowing that both creatures were dead, I was terrified.

More than the shock of finding a snake in a ninth-floor flat, or the intense distress of seeing it dead in the act of eating the rat, it was the sight of the ants feasting on both—the predator and the prey— that traumatized me. The rotten stench had quickly spread through the flat. I vomited several times. Finally, gathering the putrefied bodies in a plastic bag, I took the elevator down to dump it inside the communal waste bin. When I returned to our flat, I had wept for a long time, without any reason.

That was a strange day. Madhav had gone abroad for a week with the prime minister’s entourage. I tried to forget my perturbation by walking around the flat, taking a stroll outside it and visiting an acquaintance in a neighbouring flat.

At night, I listlessly browsed through the loose papers I had retrieved from the drawer. They were letters. ‘My dearly beloved,’ was how the first letter began. Unable to control my agitation, I paced in the flat, walking in and out of each room.

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