Ladies Coupe Read Online Free PDF Page B

he would go looking for it elsewhere.
    So Janaki finally conquered her revulsion, matched his caresses, opened her arms, parted her legs, ground the pain when it came between her teeth, and swallowed it down with a cry that threw itself up her throat. That night, he held her close and whispered against her hair again and again, ‘You are my wife. You are my wife.’
    Nothing else mattered then, she thought, but the knowledge that she was his wife and that she had pleased him.
    In the weeks after she had allowed him access to her body, she began to discover the pleasure hidden in rituals of togetherness. Wearing his old shirts to bed, feeling the fabric slither on her skin. Sharing a cup of tea, tasting his mouth in hers. Bathing together. Splashing each other, the loofah a living creature as their fingers teased and caressed skin. The fluffy white cotton towel was a device that said ‘Look how much I love you’ as it gently wrapped them in a cocoon of warmth, sucking moisture with a thousand lips.
    When did they stop going into the bathroom hand in hand? Before the baby came or after?
    When you have been married long, bathing becomes simply a means to cleanse yourself The rest of it is over with the honeymoon.
    Janaki turned on her back and drew the quilt up to her chin.
    Every night, Janaki lay awake until she heard the bedsprings creak and groan as they accepted his weight. Only when he had settled for the night, arranging his body so as to not intrude into her space, did she allow herself to drift into sleep. He knew that she didn’t like the sheet rucked or the blanket tangled around her legs. So he kept his distance with a separate blanket. He tossed and turned. She didn’t.
In the morning, when they woke up, it was as if they had slept in separate rooms in separate beds.
    Some nights they talked. Random pieces of conversation. About their son. A neighbour. Or, perhaps a film they had seen earlier that night. Sometimes they slipped into reminiscences. Memories that were dicephalous. He didn’t remember it the way she did. But what did it matter? In retrospect, it was the sharing that counted.
    Some nights his body sought hers. His shape moulded hers. Some nights she welcomed him and other nights bore with patience the warmth his skin, lips, hands and thighs inflicted on her so benignly. Later, when spent, they would arrange themselves into separate entities and fall asleep.
    After forty years, there were no more surprises, no jarring notes, no peek-a-boos from behind doors. There was just this friendly love. It was the kind of love advertising companies liked to capitalize on.
    Take out an insurance policy so that the retirement years are spent blissfully walking the dog on the beach, building sandcastles with grandchildren and sipping coconut water. None of those wind-in-the-hair bike rides. Or rolling down a mountainside. You drank your Horlicks and reaped the benefits of your insurance policy.
    Why do they make these years seem like a waiting period for death, Janaki thought. She switched channels each time a life insurance commercial appeared.
    But wasn’t that the way they lived? Borrowing moments from television commercials. The jokes, the laughter, the nostalgia as they looked at photo albums together. Friendly love. The curve of the rainbow before it disappeared into the haze of clouds.
    Janaki groped for her glasses on the bedside table. What time was it? When she put her glasses on, she saw there was no clock; the familiar white alarm clock that stood by the side of her bed at home was absent. Instead there was a rosebud-shaped clock on the wall … She would need to
put the light on. She felt along the side of the table. There was a switch here somewhere. Why couldn’t they make space for a bedside clock instead of all these silly knick-knacks littering the surface of the table? She shouldn’t complain, she thought. This was her granddaughter’s room after all and they were just visiting.
    She