Chapter 3: Chapter 3: Jab We Met, Part 1
Kavita scrolled through Pari's selfies on her phone and smiled. Tens of them. Tongue sticking out and eyes popping, lips puckered in a kissing pose, making a victory sign with Sameer, cuddling with Kavita. She stopped at her own photo and enlarged her image.
A middle-aged woman, a trifle tired. There were beginnings of laugh lines around the black oval eyes, the texture of the skin grainy to her touch. She looked at her hair. She had refused to dye it when it had started turning grey. And now it was more white than black. She remembered a line from W.H. Auden, 'My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.' She switched off the phone.
The wall clock, an antique wooden piece with a cracked minute hand she had bought scouring the streets of old Delhi, announced it was one in the afternoon. Another two hours before the kids came back from school. Ammaji had made dum aloo and palak mushroom for lunch. Tania would be pleased.
She walked to the living room where her book collection was displayed in two built-in pine book cases. Sameer used to joke she loved her books more than the kids. She pulled Poisonwood Bible, one of her favorites, and opened the book at a random page. Orleanna, the mother, responding to her daughters' accusation that she never had a life of her own, but had given everything for either her husband or the girls. I get you, Orleanna.
The touch of her hand on the cool page felt good. Each book reminded her of the time when she read it. Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind reminded her of her honeymoon in the backwaters of Kochi, she was reading it when their slow boat had camped for the night under a starlit sky. The Color Purple of newborn Tania, she had been reading it before she went into labor. Philip Roth's Operation Shylock of Pari's first day at school, she had read it on the way to pick her up. Many of these stories were real to her. She had laughed, cried and despaired with them. She put the Poisonwood Bible back to its assigned space on the book shelf. The books were arranged in an alphabetical order by author's last name. Kingsolver, Barbara.
The night before when Sameer told her about the new Financial Controller not having been announced, she hadn't known how to react. Should she have told him he would get it? Or told him what she really felt that all of this chasing these imaginary rungs of ladder didn't matter. All that mattered was his being happy and he could find happiness in the here and now if he tried to. But Sameer seemed to live in a state of constant anticipation.
The living room was lit with a soft golden glow the sun imbued through the sheers; the heavy jacquard curtains had been drawn apart over the glass doors that opened to the balcony. The rays filtering through made a neat trapezium on the wall opposite that was full of family pictures. Kavita had made a conscious effort not to clutter the space this area afforded. Four pieces of green chenille sofas a three-seater, a love seat and two singles faced the plasma TV on the far wall, in a semi-circle. A triangle shaped glass topped coffee, with sleek teak legs, over an area rug of blue and grey waves, sat between the sofa and the TV.
She turned on the record player, an artefact of a bygone era. Her father's wedding gift. They had both loved listening to music together and it came to represent the good times they shared. She still had some vinyl records, carefully wrapped in plastic covers, songs from movies of the sixties and seventies. She sifted through the records and selected one. Aandhi. R.D. Burman. She sat down on the sofa as Kishore Kumar's sonorous voice filled the room.
Tere bina zindagi se shikwa to nahin.
She closed her eyes.
Gifts
-- Gift
received Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone