[shivanikaur2]

Hi All, 
This will be a continuation for My wife through the lens of CCTV after taking permission from the original author

[shivanikaur2]

[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 31 - May 4th: "Normal Sex"

I told myself I would stop at May 3rd.

I told myself that at two in the morning, with the study fan turning above me and my own breathing loud in a house that had no wife in it. I told myself the same thing at three, when I got up for water and found that I had carried the laptop into the kitchen with me like a man carrying a sleeping child. By four I had stopped lying. The calendar grid sat on the screen, a field of little grey squares, each one a day I had lived through without knowing it, and the square after May 3rd was already glowing with a file size that said, as plainly as a signature on a cheque, Lakhan came.

May 4th. I clicked.

It was a Thursday in the footage, which is to say a day on which I went to the office at nine and came home at half past six with a packet of something fried. I want to say that again, because it is the only thing about those weeks that I find unbearable in a pure, uncomplicated way: every single day that I watched was a day on which I had been somewhere else. I was in a meeting. I was on a scooter. I was eating dal in the canteen with Javed Khan, discussing freight rates to Indore, while three miles away, in a house with my name on the rent agreement, my wife was learning how to be another man's.

1:09 PM. Living Room Camera.

She was not on the sofa.

For three weeks I had watched Dhristi take her place on the edge of that leather sofa a quarter of an hour before the bell. Spine straight, knees together, hands folded in her lap, eyes on the door: the posture of a woman waiting for a verdict. I had come to know that posture the way a man knows the sound of his own cough. Today the sofa was empty. The cushions still held the shallow dent where Lakhan had flung himself down the day before and informed her, in the tone of a man reading out a timetable, what he intended to do to her for the rest of her life. I rewound to be sure. 12:51. 12:58. 1:03. The living room sat in its grainy green stillness, the television dark, the ceiling fan turning slowly, nobody in it at all.

I switched to the bedroom feed.

She was standing in the doorway of our bedroom with her back to the camera, one hand resting on the frame, the other holding the end of her pallu against her chest. A maroon cotton saree, the pleats pressed so sharp you could have sliced bread with them. Her hair was in its long plait, damp at the nape, as if she had bathed in a hurry and not quite dried. There was a stillness in her shoulders I did not recognise. Not the brittle, listening stillness of fear. Something heavier and more deliberate, the stillness of a person who has decided something and is waiting for the decision to arrive.

I went back through the morning to find out what she had been doing before.

She had got up at six, as always. She had made me tea and parathas and watched me eat them, my past self talking with my mouth full about a client in ,.'abad, and she had said "Ji" in the right places. She had stood at the door and watched me go. And then, instead of beginning the housework, she had walked slowly through every room of the flat, touching things. I watched her do it from three different cameras. The dining table. The back of the sofa. The kitchen counter, where she lingered with her palm flat on the granite, and then, for a long moment, the edge of the bed. She took her washing off the balcony line, folded it, and put it away. She emptied the dustbin. She wiped the mirror in the hall.

At eleven she went into the bathroom and the feed stayed dark for forty minutes. At 11:40 she came out wrapped in a towel with her hair streaming and went to the wardrobe and stood in front of it for a very long time. Her hand moved along the hangers. Pink, no. Green, no. The pale orange cotton she had worn on May 2nd, which she took out, looked at, and put back as though it had burned her. She settled, in the end, on the maroon, one of the plain ones she wore for the temple, and held it against herself in the mirror, and I saw her mouth move.

I turned the volume up. I leaned toward the monitor.

"Itni sundar nahi hoon," she whispered to her reflection. I am not that pretty.

And then, after a pause that went on so long I thought the file had frozen: "Phir bhi."

Still.

I have never worked out what she meant by it. I have played that single word, phir bhi, until it became a sound without meaning, like a name repeated too often. Still what? Still I will? Still he comes? Still I want him to? I'm an accountant. I deal in what can be added up. But I know the weight of a sentence that has been trimmed to its last two words, and I know what a person is doing when she says it to a mirror at noon with the door locked: she is giving herself permission.

The bell rang at 1:09.

She flinched. I will say that for her. But it was a small flinch, a ripple, not the old full-body jolt that had made her sway on her feet like a tree in a gale. She drew a breath. She straightened the pallu over her shoulder. She went to the front door at an even pace, and I watched her through the living-room angle as she turned the lock and opened it.

Lakhan filled the frame.

Black shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, the outside still on him, sun and dust and motorcycle. He came to the threshold with his usual forward lean, the weight of a man who has never in his life waited at a door. And then he stopped.

She had not stepped back. She had not looked at the floor. She was standing in the doorway in her plain maroon saree with her chin level, looking up at him with her kohl-less eyes, and what she said was:

"Aaj sofa par nahi."

Not on the sofa today.

It was not a question. It was not quite a request. It had the flatness of a thing already settled, and for one second I saw the stalled look cross his face, that of a man who has thrown his weight against a door that was open.

"Achha?" He raised an eyebrow, amused, wary. "Phir kahan?"

"Andar." She stepped aside. "Ek baat poochni thi."

Inside. There's something I wanted to ask.

He came in. She shut the door behind him. I saw him glance round the flat, at the vase on the table, the swept hall, the absence of the sofa-vigil, and I saw him sniff the air, very slightly, like an animal. She had put a stick of incense on the shelf. The room smelled of sandalwood and soap.

He followed her down the passage to the bedroom. At the threshold he stopped again, and I understood why: I had never seen him in that room by daylight and by invitation. Always before he had come to take her wherever she stood, on the sofa, the hall floor, the kitchen counter, the dining table, as if the bed were a kind of territory too sacred to be trampled. Now the curtains were half drawn, a band of sun lying across the white sheet I had smoothed with my own hands that morning, and it looked like a stage set for something he hadn't rehearsed.

He sat on the edge of the bed. He did not undress. He sat with his knees apart and one hand resting on his thigh and said, "Bol."

Speak.

I should tell you now what Lakhan did with silence, because it matters for what came after. He used it like a tool. He'd stand in a room and say nothing and the room would fill with the sound of other people's guilt. I had seen him do it to junior accountants at the office, the long silence, the slow look, until they began to babble. I had seen him do it to Dhristi on April 18th. It was a weapon he had refined over twenty years of being the biggest man in every room.

Dhristi stood in front of him with her eyes on the floor, and let the silence stand.

I must have counted twenty seconds. The microphone picked up the street outside, a hawker's call, a scooter backfiring, and the faint tick of the wall clock. Then she lifted her eyes and I saw the cost of it: her lips were pressed white and there was a thin sheen of sweat at her temple, but her voice, when it came, did not shake.

"Kal," she said. Yesterday. And stopped.

He waited.

"Kal aapne… saree par…" She made a small gesture with two fingers, towards her own pallu, towards the place where his release had dried on the silk and stiffened it into a crust that no amount of washing had entirely removed. "Teen saree kharab ho gayi hain. Main sabko dhulwa nahi sakti. Aap jaante hain, Manav ji poochhenge…"

Three sarees are ruined. I can't get them all washed. You know Manav will ask…

She stopped again. She swallowed. I watched her throat move on the screen.

"To?" said Lakhan.

She lifted her chin a little more. "To… kapde poore utaar loon? Pehle se. Taki kharab na hon."

Then… shall I take my clothes off completely? Beforehand? So they don't get spoiled.

I stopped the footage.

I sat there with my finger on the mouse and my pulse in my throat, because I knew that sentence. I had heard its twin six days earlier, on April 28th, in this same house, in the voice of the same woman, when she had stood by the window in a pink kameez and asked him, as if she were asking for a glass of water, Kyon na hum normal sex karenge aaj? Why don't we have normal sex today? Jo pati-patni karte hain. What husbands and wives do. And he had laughed until tears came out of his eyes. He had told her she was nothing, a warm body with holes to fuck when I'm bored, and that anything she felt in his arms was a byproduct, like engine smoke. He had put her on her knees on the marble and used her mouth and said good hole and patted her head.

And here she was asking for the same thing in a different dress. It had cost her six days and a mountain of shame, and she had found a way of asking that left him a door to walk through: not I want you to be gentle, which he would have mocked, but my sarees will be ruined, which a man could answer without losing face. She was a village girl with a twelfth-standard education and she had out-negotiated the owner of Chand Tiles. I would have laughed if my throat hadn't been so tight.

I started the file again.

He took his time answering. I could see him turning it over, the whole thing, the way a man turns over a coin that has come up on its edge. His eyes travelled up the maroon cotton to her face, and I saw a muscle move in his jaw.

"Utaar," he said at last.

Take it off.

I have thought about that word more than any other word in the archive. It was not an order. It had none of the gravel of the old utaar, the one that came with a fist in her hair. It was almost gentle. It was the sound a man makes when he lets something happen.

She turned her back to the lens and began with the pleats.

I will describe it as the camera gave it to me, because I do not trust my memory, and every time I tell it from memory I make it a little kinder to myself.

She undressed standing in the band of light. First the pallu, lifted from her shoulder with both hands and laid across the back of the chair with a care that was almost ceremonial. Then the knot at her waist, found without looking, her fingers moving through the cloth the way a weaver's do. The maroon cotton came away in loops and folds, a slow unwinding, and when it fell free she did not let it drop; she folded it, actually folded it in four, with the neatness of a woman who has never owned enough sarees to be careless, and set it on the chair. Then the blouse. The hooks down the front, one at a time, her head bent. The blouse joined the saree. The petticoat string; the white petticoat slid down over her hips and pooled at her ankles and she stepped out of it, one foot and then the other, and folded that too.

She stood in her bra and panties. A white cotton bra, a little greyed with washing. A pair of faded pink briefs. For a moment she was the girl I had married, the one who changed in the dark with her back to me, who wore a nightie to bed and took it off only under the sheet. Her hands hung at her sides. She looked at the carpet.

She reached behind her and undid the bra. The straps slid down her arms. She let it fall on the chair, and her breasts came out of it heavy and full and pale, with those dark, pinkish-brown nipples already tight in the cool air-conditioned dimness. She hesitated at the panties: a breath, a tiny catch. Then she hooked her thumbs under the elastic and pushed them down, and straightened, and turned to face him.

He had seen her naked. God knows I had watched him see her naked a dozen times, twisted, held down, thrown across furniture. But he had never looked at her. I want you to understand the difference, because it is the whole matter. In every assault he had looked at what he was doing to her. He had looked at his hands, at her mouth, at the parts of her he was entering or gripping or bruising. He had never once looked at her.

Now he did.

In the band of afternoon light she stood with her arms at her sides: small, brown, trembling very faintly, the soft shelf of her belly, the thick black curls between her thighs, slightly damp at the tips, the whole of her offered in a way that had nothing to do with surrender. She did not cover herself. It was the thing that undid me. For three weeks she had tried to hide with whatever came to hand: her arms, a cushion, a sheet, a sleeve, her own hair. Now she stood there with her palms open at her sides, like someone holding out two bowls.

Lakhan didn't say a word. His jaw worked once, as if he were biting something down.

"Idhar aa," he said finally.

She crossed the carpet to him. She stood between his knees. He looked up at her from where he sat, and for the first time in the whole archive I saw his face with nothing arranged on it, no smirk, no sneer, no performance of contempt, just a man looking at a woman and finding that he could not stop.

"Itni sundar thi tu," he said, so quietly the microphone almost lost it. "Aur main dekh hi nahi raha tha."

You were this beautiful, and I wasn't even looking.

What went through me then I have never been able to put in a column.

It was not jealousy. Jealousy I knew; jealousy had a handle. It was the slow, cold recognition that the thing I had been watching for three weeks, the brute taking what he wanted, had a hidden door in it, and the door had just swung open, and on the other side stood a man I had no defences against. I could hate a rapist. I had a clear and nourishing hatred for a rapist. I did not know what to do with whatever this was.

He put his hands on her hips, and drew her closer, and kissed her.

Not on the mouth. Not yet. At the soft place under her jaw; at her throat; at the hollow of her collarbone, with his lips open. A long, slow, wet kiss, the kind you give to a thing you have decided to keep. His hands moved over her back, down to the dip of her waist, up again, his palms so wide they covered the whole width of her. She stood rigid for the first few seconds. I could see her fingers curling at her sides. And then, little by little, her head tipped back to give him the line of her neck, and her breath, picked up by the room microphone, began to go uneven.

He worked his way down. He took her left breast in his hand, the whole heavy weight of it, his dark palm cradling her pale flesh, and squeezed gently, as one tests a mango for ripeness. Then his mouth closed over the nipple and she made a sound I had never heard from her. Not a cry. Not a sob. A sound like a person who has put her foot on a stair that wasn't there.

"Lakhan ji," she whispered. It was the first time she had said his name without a plea in it.

He bit down, softly, and she gasped, and her hand came up and landed on his shoulder. Not to push him away. I rewound it three times to be sure. Her fingers closed on the black cotton of his shirt and held on.

He sucked at her slowly, one breast and then the other, his tongue circling the areola, his teeth grazing, his stubble rasping on the soft underside. He took his time. He took so much time that the minutes on the corner clock began to look obscene. There was no urgency in him whatsoever, and that was what frightened me most. I knew the old Lakhan, the quick one, the one who tore through her like a man late for a train. I did not know this one. This one was in no hurry at all.

While his mouth worked her breast his free hand travelled down the flat of her belly and into the thick curls and between her thighs. I saw her knees give. She grabbed his shoulder harder. He found her, and she was so wet, so openly, shamefully wet, that I heard it, that small slick sound on the microphone, and she clapped the back of her hand to her mouth.

"Dekh, saali," he said into her skin, and the word had changed. It had been stripped of its venom and left only its heat. "Teri chut khud bol rahi hai."

Look, girl. Your cunt is speaking for itself.

"Nahi…" she breathed, not meaning it. "Aisa mat…"

He slid two fingers inside her, curled them, and her whole body jerked. She said "Haan" and then "Nahi" and then something in the Bhojpuri her mother must have spoken to her when she was small. Her thighs shook. Her free hand tangled in his hair, and she began to ride his fingers, a small, shy, helpless rolling of the hips, her mouth open, her eyes squeezed shut. He sucked harder at her breast. His thumb found the little bud at the top of her and circled it, once, twice, three times.

She came like that, standing between his knees, on his fingers, with his mouth on her breast and her hand in his hair. And she was ashamed. I will swear to it. The moment the last tremor ran out of her, her face crumpled and she bent over his shoulder, and I thought she would cry. But Lakhan only held her against him, his hand still between her legs, his mouth against her ribs, and let her shake.

"Chal," he said. Come. And he drew her down on to the bed.

He undid his belt. He didn't tear it off. He pushed his trousers and underwear down to his knees, and there it was, the thing I had learned to dread, thick and dark and veined, the head flushed to a deep plum, standing up against the black hair of his belly. And she looked at it, and I waited for the flinch.

It did not come. She looked at it the way one looks at a hill one has finally decided to climb.

He rolled her on to her back and knelt between her thighs. He lifted her legs, one over each shoulder, which made her gasp, and held her knees apart with his hands, and looked into her face. That was what I could not bear: he watched her face the whole time. When the broad head of him pressed against her she bit her lip. When it pushed in, a quarter of an inch at a time, her eyes flew open and her mouth fell wide, and still he held her gaze.

"Dard?" he said. Does it hurt?

I had to rewind it to be sure he'd said it.

She shook her head on the pillow. "Nahi. Bas… bada hai."

No. It's just… big.

He laughed, softly, a laugh I did not know, and pushed in further, and she cried out, and her nails dug into the white sheet. Then he began to move. Long, slow strokes. The whole length of him sliding out until only the tip held her open, then back in, again and again, an even, unhurried tide. The bed creaked under them: the same bed I had slept in the night before, with my arm thrown across her waist, thinking she was asleep.

"Aah," she moaned. "Aah… Lakhan ji…"

He kept the pace, deep and slow, and with each stroke her hips began to lift to meet him, a little more and a little more, until she was moving with him, her heels hooked behind his thighs, her breasts shaking, her mouth open in a long unbroken moan. The sound the two of them made, the wet, rhythmic sound of it, was the sound of the thing I had never managed to do, which is to make a woman want to go on. She came again, harder, with a cry that went up and cracked, and her inner walls clenched so tightly round him that Lakhan's head dropped and he groaned out loud.

"Aise hi," he muttered through his teeth. "Aise hi…"

I counted. By the time the clock in the corner read 2:03 she'd had three. I have no other word for what I felt but outclassed.

At 2:04 he stopped, deep inside her, and held still. He bent and put his mouth against her ear, and said something I could not hear. She shook her head. He said it again. She shook her head again, and then, slowly, she nodded.

"Bol," he said, aloud this time. Say it.

"Aap… aap ruko mat," she whispered. Don't stop. The tears were running from the corners of her eyes into her hair. "Please. Ruko mat."

He began again.

He pulled out just before he came. I saw it: the quick, almost reluctant retreat, the thick head dark and glistening, and then he was spilling across her stomach in long hot ropes, his face twisted, a low growl in his chest. He had remembered the pills, or he had remembered her scream on May 2nd, the Nahi, andar mat he'd punished her for. Either way, she lay beneath him with his heat running across her belly and her chest heaving and her eyes on the ceiling, and she did not cry.

That was what I noticed. After forty minutes, forty by the clock, she did not cry. She lay there glistening and stunned with her legs open and her hair spread across my pillow, and the corner of her mouth, ever so slightly, curved.

Lakhan wiped his hand on the sheet. He did not wipe it on her. He rolled off her and lay on his back with one arm flung over his eyes, breathing like a man who'd run up a flight of stairs, and for a while neither of them spoke. The light moved a little on the carpet. Somewhere in the building a woman was calling her children in for lunch.

"Kal bhi," he said at last. He didn't take his arm from his face. Tomorrow too.

She did not answer for a moment. Then she turned on her side, toward him, and I saw her lift one hand and, with an infinite tentativeness, lay it flat on his chest. His heart was going hard. She could feel it. I saw her feel it. Her fingers spread a little, as if to take its measure.

"Ji," she said.

He grunted. He stood, pulled up his trousers, buckled his belt. He looked down at her for a long moment as though there were something he meant to say, and I saw him almost say it. Then he picked his shirt up off the floor and went out, and I heard the front door close.

She lay there a while. Then she touched the wet on her stomach with two fingers and looked at it, and I saw her do something I have never been able to forget: she lifted her fingers to her face and breathed in, and shut her eyes.

At 2:55 I realised my hand was inside my pyjamas.

I took it out as though I had been burned. I looked at the frozen frame, Lakhan's mouth open on her breast, her fingers knotted in his shirt, and I saw something it would take me weeks to name: the first thing in the whole archive that I could not call bang. She had asked. She had stood in the doorway of my bedroom and asked him for it, in her own words, on her own terms. She had folded her clothes. She had said, Ruko mat.

Pleasure is just a byproduct, like engine smoke. He had said that on April 28th. And on May 4th he had spent forty minutes making smoke.

I watched the rest of the day at high speed, because there is only so much a man can bear in a sitting. She bathed. She washed her hair. She did not scrub herself raw; I counted twenty-two minutes in the shower, an ordinary woman's shower, and when she came out she stood in front of the mirror for a long time with the towel slipping from her shoulders and looked at her own body as one looks at a stranger's. She touched her stomach. She touched her breast, the mark of his teeth, a faint pink crescent. She smiled, and then, abruptly, stopped smiling, and covered her face with her hands.

She did not cry. She put on a blue cotton salwar and made my dinner.

At 6:34 I came through the door, whistling, with a packet of kachori chaat, the paper dark with oil. "Dhristi! Dekho, kya laya hoon! Abhi bhi garam hai!" Look what I've brought! Still hot!

She was at the stove with her back to me. For a second she did not turn. In the corner of the screen I saw her shoulders tighten and then, with an effort I could see all the way across a screen and a month, loosen.

"Aap bhi na," she said, turning, smiling, taking the packet. "Aaj to bahut khush lag rahe ho."

You are too much. You look very happy today.

"Haan!" said the idiot in the doorway. "Lakhan sahab ne aaj meri tareef ki!" Lakhan sahab praised me today!

She laughed. She laughed, and her eyes went to the floor, and she said "Achha hai, ji," and carried the chaat to the table with both hands as if it were something sacred. We sat. We ate. I told her about the freight rates. I told her a story about the peon, Ramu, who had dropped a whole tray of tea on a visiting supplier. She listened with her chin on her hand. She was kind. She was warm. Under the table, I could see on the lower camera, her bare foot was pressed against mine.

I thought she was happy to see me.

At two in the morning, in the study, I opened a spreadsheet. I don't know why. I think my hands wanted something to do that was not that. I made two columns, a date and a file size, and typed May 4th and 1.9 GB. And then, because I am the sort of man who cannot leave a thing unlabelled, I added a third column, and in the narrow box at the top I wrote mood.

I looked at the box for a long time.

The thing about a ledger is that it forces you to say what happened. You cannot write something shifted in a ledger; you must write a figure, a name, a reason. I put my cursor in the cell beside May 4th and I typed, in a lowercase I'd never use at work:

she did not cry.

I saved the file. I closed the laptop. I sat in the dark with the fan going and heard, in the silence of a house with no wife in it, the sound of a single word I had not let myself think all day, and I understood that it was not bang and it was not adultery and it was not even Lakhan.

It was tomorrow too.

I did not know yet how many tomorrows there were.

End of Chapter 31.

[shivanikaur2]

Dhrishti on 4 May