( I have this novel gnawing at my head but all the publishers want, without bothering so much to take a look at the manuscript, is how much there is in my pocket! I am being hopeless. Please look at this chapter from the novel and let me kindly know if you consider this worthy of a novel or not. This is, by the way, my 9th unpublished novel! Stay safe. Stay blessed.)
Ratan Babu was going back to his working place, Bhutan, right after his marriage. He wanted his wife, Chhalona, to stay with his aging Ma but his pretty-faced wife-to-be said in a singsong voice over the phone, “Jar sangay ghar koretey jachchhhi, agey se kirakam achhey ta dekhbo na?” Shouldn’t I see how the man I’m gonna marry, stays at his workplace?” That settled the matter.
Ratan didn’t find anything wrong with the request of the pretty-faced wife to be. A couple of days after his marriage, he left with the girl, who he thought would be his brand-new wife. In those days he would travel to Bhutan by The Royal Government of Bhutan bus. The luxurious cream colored bus with the touch of green in the middle, would set off from Esplanade at 7 p.m. and was supposed to reach Phuentsholing, the border town, by 10 in the morning. That it never reached there, due to the pathetic road conditions in North Bengal before 1.30-2.00 p.m, is another matter.
As the relatives hugged them and said their final “good byes” at the bus station in Esplanade, Ratan turned to his wife in the semi darkness inside the bus, she looked beautiful.
Ratan, a teacher by profession, talked nonstop. He was possibly too excited to get married finally at 39 to take note of how preoccupied his wife was.
Ratan remembered the bus stopping near the Petrol Station and him getting off the bus to see if he could get some coffee or tea for his newly-wed wife. There was no tea-stall in sight. All he could recollect was how, as he kept talking to his wife from below the window side, his wife just said one sentence at last. She had lost her expensive watch, a gift.
Ratan got back in the bus and looked under the seat, having asked his beautiful wife to move to the window for a while. He looked everywhere for the watch but the watch had simply vanished!
The rest of the journey was spent in having home-cooked dinner and him narrating some of the stories he had either read or authored himself. His favorite story was “The Slap” though. It was a story of immature love of a boy for someone older and close to him, and how it all ended with a solid slap across his face.
His new bride was surprisingly quiet all the way. Perhaps she was taciturn by nature, not given to talking too much like he was. In the morning as the bus was racing along the highway towards the border town, something or someone rather, caught Ratan’s attention. She was sitting cross-legged on the seat in front. The bus by then had got inside the terminus. The woman sitting in front, couldn’t have been more than 35. She was a stunning looking woman with large large, doe-like eyes (she had turned her head towards them at the back once) and curly, wavy hair arranged in a bun. What surprised Ratan immensely was the sad, painful look on her face. It was like something had died in her along the way. Her husband, much older than the wife, was out of the car parking area by then. He was completely bald. The man was walking with his back as straight as he held his head high.
Now, Ratan was a very emotional, superstitious man in general. He believed in God and His benevolent nature. Ratan believed that God always gave you a second chance. Before something untoward or bad was about to happen, He always threw some omen on your way. The sight of the woman, with the dead look in her eyes, her head bent and the bald man with the straight-back walking along the path outside the terminus, struck a bit odd to him. Why wasn’t the woman looking out the window at the figure of her husband and how could the husband leave such a stunning looking wife behind without bothering to look back from time to time at her sitting lonely in the bus?
Though Ratan had his wife to take care of at that moment, the sight of the odd couple was to come back and haunt him frequently later. It was like a signal at the beginning of his married life that the day was not far when he would walk along the path all alone like the bald-headed man on the road, and his wife? He dreaded to think of his wife with that sad, painful look in her eyes, as if for her Life was as good as dead, her head bent like all she wanted was to implore Mother Earth like the great Sita had done in the Hindu Epic, to let her (Chhalona) get in to get to her bosom ( the bosom of Mother Earth) by removing the soil underneath her feet!
Ratan had a shocking experience while taking her beautiful wife to the Immigration Office. Thanks to a distant uncle of his wife, finally they could proceed up to Thimphu, the capital city of Bhutan. The shocking experience stayed with him for years. I will come to that later.
They reached Thimphu by the afternoon. After a thorough search, Ratan found a hotel that would be the right one for his wife. In his 7 years of stay in the country, on his irregular, to and fro journey to the city, he would always prefer to stay in one of those grimey, grim-looking hotels where the room was quiet cheap. He would have to pay rupees 300 for one night stay at the most. This time, he was paying almost triple the amount. How could he not when his beautiful wife was leaving all her near and dear ones behind to spend the rest of her life with him?
They had dinner at a hotel at the turning with the recently coming up glassy gymnasium on the first floor. One of his former students was working as a staff there and therefore, the food, inspite of being expensive, was good.
He chatted like a 15-year-old on the way back. He had been waiting dreadfully for the moment when he would get to bed with his lovely wife.
He was dead tired on the wedding night and so was she. Naturally, both of them didn’t feel like love making. His wife was under the blanket by the time he came out of the attached bathroom at a corner of the spacious room. She looked, what did she look like? Not nervous like he was. Just on the night of the “Madhujamini”, the mating night, if you would let me – he had spent talking nearly an hour with his brother-in-law, someone he idolized, about how to do ‘the thing’ and how he fancied girls and all that staff, to the utter dicomfort of his brother-in-law.
Not that he didn’t know what a woman without clothes, looked like. In his youth, he would hesitatingly look at those porn-mags with the pictures of gorgeous, naked woman from behind the curious heads of his friends in the club room. He had a dalliance in a dusky corner with a much younger girl in a wedding house where she took his hand playfully to her breast, even then he was a virgin and never took a woman to bed before the night of his wedding.
In trousers, he looked thinner than usual. His beloved wife had her mesmerizing eyes kept on him all the while. Shakily he got under the double-sized blanket beside her. She had already taken off her clothes. Ratan felt Ill at ease. Wasn’t he supposed to unclothe his beautiful bride? And why didn’t she look shy to the point of being coyish?
He cast a sidewise glance at her naked body. He wasn’t prepared for what he was to find. He was blabbering and bragging all the while about how much he learned about intercourse and all that from his local friends. She didn’t respond but kept quiet.
What transpired between them that ill-fated night, was anything but heavenly sex. He was confused and kept whisperingly apologising to his beautiful wife at the end of a rather dull, unexciting act. He kept talking to his wife till the early hours of the morning.
As the daylight entered the room through the chinks in the window-curtain, his world came crashing down when his wife, the beautiful girl he had chosen for himself, finally uttered the most shocking statement, yawning.
I’m sorry if what I’m gonna tell you, hurts you and if you couldn’t enjoy me.” She looked upto him as he was getting into his trousers. His eyes glossy and his legs trembly.
With eyes fluttering, Chholona whispered soullessly :
“I never said I was a virgin.”
The End
RNB's 