‘You look tired. Go and
rest in the bedroom,’ her half-day-old sister-in-law suggested.
‘Rest for…?’ she
wanted to ask.
Instead, she smiled
shyly. She made a mental note of ‘the’ bedroom, not ‘your’, not ‘his’, ‘the’. She
was bored, not tired. Isn’t he supposed to be with her tonight? She turned to
her mother-in-law.
The older lady nodded
kindly at her. ‘You go ahead, dear. It is the room on the right.’
It was a decent bedroom.
A bed, dressing table, chair, an attached bathroom, air-conditioned too. Someone
had deposited her suitcase there. No cabinet or cupboard though. Where should
she hang her clothes? The chair should do for tonight. She had a quick shower and
put on a new nightdress. Was it too frilly, a bit too daring? She sat on the
bed. Too firm, coir mattress was it? She tried bouncing. She moved to the
window. She looked best there, she thought. She got tired of standing, sat on
the bed again, near the edge, ready to rise quickly. She crossed her legs at
the ankles, and presented her profile to the door. After a while, she lay back
on the bed, daintily on her side; then sprawled on her back, hands and legs
apart, a near-perfect X right in the middle.
She did not want to nod
off. That would not do.
That might make a
cute story, but it would not sell with her gang. The veterans would say, ‘Yeah,
get used to that.’ The unmarried would call it uninspired. She did not want to
be the first one without a proper first night story.
The custom started with
Nirmala. They were nineteen when she married. Nirmala had told her parents that
she did not want to waste life studying. They immediately got her married to a
28-year old engineer in the army, tall, dark, handsome, terribly bald too.
‘Did you carry a tray
with a glass of milk and a banana to the bedroom? Did you share it
fifty-fifty?’ the gang wanted to know.
‘You idiots,’ Nirmala
had laughed, ‘that’s been scrapped.’
‘How can tradition be
scrapped?’
‘Who takes foodstuff
to the bedroom? Do you want ants on your bed?’
That touch of reality
set the mood.
Nirmala recollected, ‘He
had one condom. He struggled a lot to open the packet and made a hole in it.’
They had laughed. ‘What to do, we used it.’
‘How was it?’
‘Pregnant, am I not?’
Supriya married two
years later. Her first night was in a hotel room. Not enough space at home. He
had a few pegs of whisky. She was allowed a sip or two. They sang songs. She
made it sound very romantic. Nice story but sounded fictitious, they had
concluded.
Anandam was next, at
twenty two and a half. She reported that she was molested. It was hard to
imagine her skinny, asthmatic husband forcing himself on her. She used to be
the shot-put champion in school. None of them dared to voice their doubts about
her tragic drama.
Jasmine’s story was
hilarious. They had used oil, she whispered, blushing.
‘Massage…?’ a naïve
unwed asked.
‘No… you know… for
that.’
‘Oh…’
They had surreptitiously
taken the bottle of oil from the storeroom. It had the label of J&J baby
oil, but the bottle they had had oil that had been used to fry chilly or
peppers. His mother liked to conserve oil. Jasmine joined in the gang’s
laughter over her story with ‘burning private parts’.
She had no hope of
matching Jasmine’s performance but a half-decent story was the night’s first
imperative.
He turned up one hour
later, looking haggard.
‘Those damn aunts!
Last night they took my room and I had no place to sleep. Tonight, they wanted
me to drop them off, no one else would do. Bloody aunts! I am knackered.’ She
sat up in bed, rather ungainly from her pose of crucified suffering. He
continued, more gently, ‘Don’t bother. You lie down. You must be tired too.
Sorry for the delay. Why don’t you turn off the lights?’
Turn off the lights,
indeed! Was he trying to finish off the night? The situation seemed grim. Will
she have to do a strip-tease? Yeah, right, she could imagine his amazed look.
He might exchange her for those aunts.
She was standing by
the bed when he came out of the bathroom.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
He came to her side, looking alarmed, protective, ‘Did you see it?’
‘Huh?’
‘The spider…’
‘The spider…?’
He took a torch from a
drawer of the dressing table. He squatted on the floor and surveyed the scene
beneath the bed. She joined him.
‘I have seen it once
or twice, quite colourful one, you know, the huge variety,’ he informed her. ‘I
have not figured out its hideout.’
She looked
interested.
They stood up.
‘Which side do you
want?’ he asked.
‘Huh?’
‘Which side of the
bed?’
‘Oh… you choose… I am
fine anywhere,’ she was back in the shy mode.
‘Ok, right for me.
Let me be your right hand.’ He found that funny. She looked at him. He looked
incapable of double entendre. It was just nervous, bad humour, sadly.
He flopped down on
the right side of the bed. She went to the other side, lay down and waited for
his next move. He reached towards her, leaned further for the switch which was
on her side and turned off the lights.
‘I am definitely
knackered,’ he mumbled, speedily slipping away into sweet slumber.
‘Oh no, don’t do
that, you fool,’ she wanted to scream and shake him awake.
She thought she heard
deep breathing from his side.
She turned to her
side, facing away from him, disappointed.
She felt fingers on
her shoulder. She smiled. There he comes!
The fingers moved
lightly on her shoulder, to her neck, back to the shoulder, down her arm, back
up again. It skirted past the thin strap of her nightdress. Push it down, she
felt like urging. It moved away, down her back and away. She thought deeply,
lying perfectly still.
What if that was the
spider? She felt gooseflesh first and excited thrill next. What if she turned
and found it on his face? How will she displace the arachnid?
She paused when a new
line of thinking troubled her. What if her gang had set her up? What if they
had told him about the story pact and that’s how the spider entered the scene?
Will they do that to her? No, she decided, they were not that imaginative. She
decided to try it out on the next one in her gang to get married.
She reached down and
picked up her bedroom slipper. Soft but firm, that will do. Spider or no
spider, her story needed a good ending. It should feel like a smack to the face.
