Once the moment passes

Since my other blog GHATOTKACHSERIES II is all about economics, politics, current affairs, defence...I have decided to revive GHATOTKACHSERIES herewith. I find there are still a lot of readers for this blog about a year on if my visit tracker is to be believed.

But now, instead of earnest essays, I'll be putting down short stories,poems, sketches, and other bits of fiction. Don't forget to email or leave your comments as you like. Best, G





Short Story

Once the moment passes


She still had her pretty face and those limpid, kohl-rimmed eyes. It was a peculiarly ethnic way to make-up, after so many years abroad, but it suited her. The dark hair, the no-grey gloss, was styled into a dolly-bird helmet, close, with a series of contrived bangs across her upper forehead and others that meandered down the nape of her neck. It was a look frozen in time. Perhaps, in her neck of the woods, amongst the émigré Sri Lankans she lived with in North London, it was fine to look like a yesterday from a long time ago. It was an easy maintenance hairstyle, evolved in the “Prudence and the Pill” Sixties, captured by the Giles cartoons of working class English people in Swinging London of the time.

Her hair was like the one on the young bird, whom Giles often drew in a skinny-rib roll- neck sweater, with those slight, slightly saggy breasts, a peace sign pendant, a toothy smile and moderately heeled go-go boots. But this, after all, was 2009.

I had to admit she was still slim, held herself erect, and was much better preserved than she might have been, even with her fuller breasts sitting heavily in her bra. After all, thirty years had passed incommunicado.

For the rest, she was wearing black trousers, straights, with heels under the straights so that she looked a little stilted, taller than I remember her, unlike herself in bare feet. Her arms, displayed unnecessarily, were fatter and had no muscular definition. She had mum arms now. And in a time when she might have aspired to ones like Madonna.

Particularly, since I knew she liked to exercise. That would account for the flat stomach even after two children. But those soft arms told another story, of helplessness and defeat. Apparently, her housework didn’t involve any lifting and carrying and she probably didn’t do weights.

Looking at her now, with her pretty face and dated hair, there was definitely a problem of taste. She wore a peek-a-boo cut-out in her black blouse that showed a bit of dusky cleavage. The effect, in league with those arms and the trussed-up breasts, was not alluring. But she didn’t seem to know it, or perhaps liked projecting this mild vulgarity, in a kind of shop-girl insouciance chic. But at least she wasn’t wearing tiger or leopard print stretched across her buttocks like the young bird in Giles, and spoke in a well modulated voice, shades of Thatcherism, middle class effort at loggerheads with her professed Left-Activist views and their old, largely discarded, have-not Labour Party underpinnings.

But having taken it all in, these multitudes of non-verbal signals, I was ready to go already. I had seen her and where she was at now. I was even a little angry with myself for being disappointed in my right-of-centre sensibilities, my little bit of prosperity that I wanted to show-off. I couldn’t really brag, nor could I leave. I couldn’t just amble out, moments after arriving, without being ostentatious, without betraying emotion that I certainly didn’t want to put on display. But really, I had nothing to ask of her and even less to tell her. It would only lead to sniping, guilt-mongering and resentment.

But still I stayed and talked to her in the shadow of difficult, irreconcilable memories that refuse to match, and was introduced, once more, to her now decrepit, near-deaf father, shambling about on his walking stick. This sorry creature was the very man who had caused me grief with his relentless opposition, his telling innuendo and subversive condemnation those very many years ago. And here he was, like a knackered creature. I was surprised and a little annoyed to see him, indecently alive, lurking around his indulgent fifty year old offspring. He looked like a revolting, geriatric, superfluous relic of his former self. Of course, all I did was smile at him and then at her, nodding my apparent pleasure at them, unwilling to let them know, or surmise, anything of the bitterness they both evoked.

I felt trapped though, like a man tricked into a straight-jacket. I wanted to leave but propriety called for the room to fill up a bit and someone else to come up and talk to her. In the meantime I tried to look happy as I drank my black coffee and made small-talk. But yes, she had smiled happily, with real joy in those kohl-rimmed eyes, when she first caught sight of me as I came into the room. That was real and I recognised the old smile that I once dearly loved. So I clung to its memory as the only familiar in this arid reunion of lovers once, now strangers, circling each other to find vulnerabilities to wound, pain being the only intimacy left to us, now that the moment had passed.

(811 words)

22nd April 2009
Gautam Mukherjee