Sharda presumed the letters were for her.
For milliseconds, her heart was fooled into a whorl of wild, tropical joy, into a spiral of luminous hope, into becoming a living labyrinth of spinning, concentric, elliptical coils.
Her realization of the messages being for another folded her fleeting sensation of being in a happy surge.
The ‘S’ stood for Shoma, not Sharda.
Rummaging through the chest of drawers for their marriage certificate, for an update to her passport, she stumbled on her husband Siddharth’s captivation with Shoma.
His letters were lined one below the other and organised by date, typical of his orderliness, his precision, and lay beneath a stack of sonography machine manuals that he used for work. Was it a front for his mildewed memories? His current allurement? I will never know, Sharda thought to herself.
“Your sultry look was the beginning of my fervor,” Siddharth wrote in his first letter to Shoma. He began each of his addresses with the same words: ‘To My Beautiful S,” which is what Shoma means in Bengali and ended them with “From Truly, Madly and Only Yours, S”.
Written in black ink, the stains of his firm, elegant, cursive handwriting were deep and indelible. Sharda was convinced they were imprinted within him and Shoma for life and now within her by default.
The next hour for Sharda was a peel back into their ardor, or really his. One that was let loose upon sheets of coarse-grained, hand-pressed, deckle-edged, 100 percent cotton paper. “Its textured feel is perfect for his serrated hunger, its raised grains for his spontaneity and its shadows just right to camouflage his carnality, lest it frighten or repel her,” she mused aloud.
Sharda often talked to herself; aloneness shaped her alter ego into an active companion, a tangible and sustaining insider.
Sharda noticed his letters were short as if by intent, “Maybe to let his words percolate and remain with her,” she presumed audibly. “Was this their deliberate anomaly, a whimsy ‘their thing’, to pen letters rather than emails or texts?” she wondered in an intense voice.
In his second letter to Shoma, Siddharth talked of her being “a dynamo, an extraordinary surprise”, in the third of her having a “crimson space within that frees the imagination and stokes everything”, in another of her “fragrance being natural and enchanting” of “her thick mass of black hair being more alluring than anything he ever knew”, and of “the fine line of her jaw, striking straight nose and poise.” And in the following ones of her leaving him “bereft of words ever so often”, of her “being just herself, never following the timetable of fashion” and of her “feminism being free-wheeling and boisterous.”
“Shoma seemed to have built her whole young life on being lovely and exerting her fascination on others, hadn’t she?” Sharda said cattily to her image in the mirror. A feminine camaraderie, one with naughtiness, lit up between them.
A steady, hot breeze blew across from her New Delhi apartment balcony, in the west of the city, to where she sat in her bedroom, carrying the scents of vegetation and that indescribable yet particular sun-baked smell of the capital.
But it was not the summer heat that flushed Sharda’s face and body but the overspill of her husband’s sexual want of Shoma, his uncontained need of her, for his “firefly in the dark” as he called her. Her mirror image fixed on her inner burning so penetratingly and with such an unwavering focus that she felt naked. Sharda suspected her mirror clone was mocking her astringent solitude, her spare, un-instinctive interludes with her spouse and the miles between them. She scalded with shame but let it roll over.
Jealousy, in all its loathsome dampness, quickly settled in the empty spaces within. “He has never tunnelled into to me as he did with her, in that hot, intense, magnetic manner in our two years of marriage,” Sharda mouthed constrainedly into the mirror that steamed up with her raw, jolting breaths. Her identical sister now shook her head, tactfully, considerately from behind the mists of the polished surface as if she felt her jeopardy.
Then, in a muffled whisper, as if to dull her indignation, her envy her shame, Sharda said, to the already-fogged mirror and the presence within it, “He has never hand-written me a single line, not even a post-it on the fridge, and I would never have known of his felicity with words if not for this.” Her lookalike considered her words sadly, her head tilted in sympathy.
When the shock of this thought sunk in, Sharda continued conversing with her fuzzy reflection, who was now regarding her stoically, “Perhaps my quietude pales against her sparkle, my milky fairness and green eyes against her burnished gleam and my plain name against the voluptuous lure of hers.” There was a blurred silence at her duplicate’s end.
As an afterthought struck, she conveyed it to her counterpart in a hurry, her words tripping, her tone rasping, “In comparison to her, every action of mine seems somehow incomplete, each pushing a different vulnerability, its spirit leaking away before completion.” Her silent companion stared sightlessly through the haze, almost like a warning signal.
It did not, however, deter Sharda. She was proud of the pure aim of her words which she felt struck at the heart of her reality. “Despite all this, I do know I have spunk,” she told her mirror companion, as she wiped down the glass, from edge to edge and top to bottom, her tone metallic. Without warning, the mirror summoned an incredibly angry woman, a chiding and severe sister.
Sharda turned numb with shock.
Making capital of her hypnotic state, her mirror stirred many more optical illusions. Fragmented visions that spun their own perspectives and brought to the fore lurking things in her body and mind, things she really did not want getting out. It was a mirrors-upon-mirrors, mirrors-upon-mirrors madness, one over which she had little control. Everything swirled out in new spirals so that everything began again and again.
Word visuals of direct speech jostled with a vocabulary of desire, they clashed like real things, like plastic Scrabble alphabet squares.
Pain built within her, as within the mirror frames, like gouged out wounds and its red hot pulse radiated outward, wounded and bursting.
Almost in rhythm, fear funnelled into the many vacuums of her being, as also into the stacked-up mirror tunnels, and a feeling of floating down into an abyss settled in.
Humiliation followed. This, spurred by knowledge of how Siddharth carried Shoma within him at a cellular level, of how they breathed in the raw smell of each another. And by the awareness of how she was in a deficient space with him, in a corner that struggled for its utility, her determination towards proximity failing each time. The mirror made her run around in dizzying circles in her mind with roaming images of Siddharth and Shoma lovemaking, merging one into another.
Sharda suffocated; she was out of breath. She needed to find her way out of these mirror games. She had lowered too many barriers for her doppelgänger.
She urgently summoned her best friend, her real-life confidant, Sheela, to surface her into wakefulness, to end the dark reflection rituals and to help her rid herself of the poisonous blockages brought on by this secret knowledge.
“I had lost a lot of myself in those moments of reading his letters. As I did the feeling of home,” Sharda confided in Sheela.
“You know I have always wanted romantic love, its impulsive rush, its untamed, giddy tumbles. The dullness of Siddharth’s passion, oatmeal dull, and the fortification of his friendship were never enough, yet I made my peace certain he was incapable of more,” she began, her head on Sheela’s lap.
“In hindsight, I don’t grudge him and Shoma their restless, devouring, fervid and impassioned liaison. Or hate Shoma for she is who she is, and maybe for him now, she is just a fictive dream,” Sharda said, her impulse to talk to a real person growing stronger with the soothing aura of Sheela.
Then, she continued to her friend, headlong, out of breath, “The problem is him, his un-givingness, his inability to hold the hand that I held out for him, his never showing me of my own skin. I am angry that he married me knowing he could not give me anything beneath his composed, imperturbable surface or its habitual, heavy severity.”
After some moments of quiet, Sharda said, “While I know his muted moods, his sodden, unyielding silences and cold blades of observation, he has never cared for the maze of feelings within me.”
“I wonder why he and Shoma parted. A fight? Did hostility become a vital feeling between them, something they could not hoist themselves out of? Did he choose you as a foil to her?” Sheela asked, curious, searching.
“He will never discuss these issues with me, his self-containment being supreme,” Sharda answered.
“What are you thinking now?” Sheela gently prodded Sharda, concerned when she fell silent for a long while.
Sharda looked at her. “Sheela, knowing what I know, I can no longer live with Siddharth’s evasiveness, his withholding, the unfairness of his restraint. Or with a permanent sense of insecurity, joylessness and unfulfillment. And certainly not with his seethed benevolence, one that will emerge if I do confess to reading his letters. I am past catching the certainties of my life with him, its sameness of quiet calm and limitedness. I think our end was written when we started out.”
“What then?” Sheela wanted to know.
“I intend not to miss out on life, its miracles or its insane, raucous, wildcat dreams. I will not give up that space in my life. Or collapse my will to his any longer. I know he is capable of love but he is incapable of loving me, so I will take my heart off his table to look elsewhere for a whole one, one that will awaken, the clamor beneath my surface as the harsh hunger call-outs when one is absent from the other.”
“Think about this carefully, you do love him immensely in your rough, tumbling core and have clung to him like moss,” Sheela cautioned her as she headed out.
After she shut the door, Sharda confronted her mirror.
“A life where I discover more of myself, new parts of me and accept the gifts life has in store, without trying to appeal anymore to my partner, is what I want,” she said to the image of herself in front.
The face in it smiled at her. “You are as I am,” it said to her. Sharda smiled back.
The air outside, blue with the evening, had a bounce to it. At that moment everything felt right and free for Sharda.
BIO
Chitra Gopalakrishnan, a New Delhi-based journalist and a social development communications consultant uses her ardor for writing,
wing to wing, to break firewalls between nonfiction and fiction, narratology and psychoanalysis, marginalia and manuscript and tree-ism
and capitalism.
