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Eternity

Posted on May 26, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

All he really wanted her to do was shut up. It didn’t seem like too much to ask but there was no silencing her even when she was asleep. He had lost count of the nights he had been woken by her inarticulate ramblings. Sometimes she hit out in the dark. Rarely connected with anything other than him. He had woken up with some wicked back pain and on one occasion his ass hurt. It didn’t make sense. What could he possibly have done in his sleep to make his ass hurt. But it did and that too only the left cheek. The best way to describe him was to call him ‘long suffering.’ Everybody he knew called him an asshole and a pussy, mainly because he hadn’t tossed her talkative ass out on the street. But long suffering was more polite.

They had been married for thirty-one years. Most of the people who thought those were thirty years too many were long dead or getting there. At that age an opinion is all a person has and an opinion is all a person can trade. The stock value of Paresh-should-have-left-Amrita-a-long-time-ago was sky high. If people had money in it they would have been rich. Their families wouldn’t have deserted them for being old, and the wealth would have put a spring in their step that wasn’t even there when they were young, healthy and stupid.

Nobody, not the men and definitely not the women were of the opinion that it wasn’t Amrita’s fault. Short, stout and combative to unusual lengths she was the beast to Paresh’s beauty. Even at sixty-six he was handsome. Any attractive forty-year-old divorcee would have married him in an instant. The girls his sons dated hung around to catch a glimpse of him. If he acknowledged their presence his sons were guaranteed entry to whatever base was next in their sexual adventures with the girl of the moment. Naturally Paresh had no clue. He was just content to endure in his own personal hell. Atoning for a mistake he had made twenty-nine years earlier.

As he remembered it Amrita hadn’t always been the bitter shrew she resembled. She had been kind, gentle, in possession of a wicked sense of humour and capable of understanding him when everyone else was ready to throw in the towel. Then she got pregnant and an imbalance of hormones or something else turned her into a short-tempered beast. Small built until the day his seed began to grow inside of her, Amrita ballooned into the rotund woman she remained ever since their first son was born.

Unconsciously she blamed her husband for the loss of her girlish figure. She also sensed, as women will do, that he wasn’t completely prepared for the mantle of fatherhood. It wasn’t deep-seated emotional damage or anything, because his relationship with his father was fine, or as fine as such a thing can be. He just wasn’t prepared for the prospect of caring for a bad-tempered wife or a demanding child. In a weak moment, without the aid of alcohol or any other substance that can legitimately be blamed, he strayed.

While his wife was struggling to lower the toilet seat and so that she could go to the bathroom for the third time in one hour, he engaged in carnal union with a co-worker. So great was his regret at what he had done that the young woman never pressed the issue with him. She hurried to assure him it was okay, not entirely his fault and that she was sorry it had happened.

Paresh never forgave himself. All those years later, he bore his burden without complaint. His friends didn’t understand, neither did his family. He didn’t expect them to.

But just once in a while, he wished she would shut up.

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