Neil didn't seem to care two hoots for his newly-wedded wife. Theirs was an arranged marriage. An advertisement for a bride was run in a local paper prior to his arrival back home in Kolkata for the vacation. Parents of some 120 prospective brides responded immediately. Neil, at the request of her only sister, Rita, had to visit some fifteen residential houses to have a measure of his future wife. No one appealed either to him or his sister.
A few days before his return to his workplace after the Winter Break, Rita called Neil asking if he was free. Despite his reluctance, he had to accompany her to the house of one more girl. This is how Neil met Sonam. It was love at first sight. Their marriage turned out to be no less than a whirlwind affair as they got married within a week of meeting one another.
On their first night, Sonam told Neil that she was not a virgin.
"Why did you marry me if you loved someone else?"
"I didn't love him. He took advantage of my innocence.. "
"Isn't that the expected reply from every girl who has lost their virginity?" Neil asked her tauntingly.
"I…I never wanted to marry but my mother was adamant. She told me that I couldn't spend the rest of my life as a spinster. It's simply not the in-thing in our society."
"Why did you choose me, of all people? I'd have been happier without your presence in my life." He retorted with a lot of hurt in his voice.
From then on, it was sheer hell for Sonam. One afternoon, he came back from school. It was the Pay Day. With his shoes still on, he sat down on the bed in the outer room and counted the money while Sonam was busy preparing tea and snacks for him.
"I'll go to the bank to deposit the money. As the school bus is going right now, I've to skip tea."
He left without letting her put up a semblance of a protest!
Next day, as he was getting ready for school, he put his hand in his shirt pocket.
"Where's the 450 rupees I kept in my pocket? Who could've taken it?Did you take it?" He yelled at his wife, forgetting in the process that he had paid the Electricity Bill on the way back home from the bank the previous day.
Sonam, sitting nearby, stitching the missing button back in her husband's pants, looked utterly distraught.
Another day, Neil retorted to Dev, a friend :
"Like-minded people always have a great sense of respect for each other," when Dev asked him not to besmear his wife publicly.
Relationship between the couple was far from normal in the months following. Things worsened when Sonam got in the family way exactly nine months after their wedding.
"Are you sure the baby that is coming is ours?" He asked her bluntly.
"You can go for the DNA if you have any doubts," Sonam replied, fuming.
The years after the arrival of the daughter were no different and a sheer torture for Sonam. The only reason why she refrained from retaliating was her daughter, Neilam.
"How can you put up with such a monster of a husband, Ma? " Neilam screamed for an explanation from her mother the day Neil had nearly kicked Sonam out of the quarters.
Had Sonam been not there Neil would have slaughtered his daughter that day.
Sonam stayed with Neil for twenty three years despite the torture, despite her aged father asking her to come back home, despite Neilam threatening to cut off all ties with her mother if she did not move over to Neilam's rented flat once the later got employed.
"I've to be true to my salt. He has fed, clothed, sheltered me for over two decades after all. I can't leave him when he is old and infirm." Sonam would tell her daughter.
One late evening Neil came back home to find Sonam lying in bed, moaning. He switched the light on and said, "It's almost seven. Won't you get up to make tea and dinner? You seem to be getting into the habit of taking an evening siesta frequently lately."
Sonam tried to open her eyes but could not. She whispered something incomprehensibly. She was visibly in pain, frothing from the corners of her mouth. Neil called the doctor all right but, by then, it was too late.
Sonam finally left her husband for the first and last time, exactly twenty three years after she had slipped into his life.
After the funeral, as Neil got back home, home did not feel like home anymore.
There was no one to hasten to the kitchen to make tea for him.
No one took his sweaty shirt away and dumped it in the washer. No one asked him about his day at school.
As he crawled his way back to the bedroom, Neil could already feel the heaviness in his heart, finding the double-bedded room in disarray. The bed cover was not as neatly tucked in between the cot and the mattress as it was done normally.
There would be no one from now on to rub his back lovingly as he turned to the wall on his side of the bed.
Neil took off his shirt absentmindedly and threw it on the chair. He walked across the room to look out the window at the city coming alive, buzzing outside while everything inside his room, in his heart was as dark as dead.
"I love you, Sonam." Neil heard his heart wailing out. "I wish I could tell you that when you were alive. "
DoubleSpeak 