Dud Sea Scrawls The Writing, clearly, is not on the wall!

“What are you making for dinner tonight?” is the first question that greets her as she walks in through the door. She looks as his silhouette against the wall, his crumpled shirt rolled up at the sleeves, the glasses perched on his nose,the shock of untidy hair over his forehead and she understands suddenly why familiarity can be as bad as predictability. She manages a smile and carries on a conversation that she could have with the old man at the bus stop, with the door-to-door salewoman or with the guy she meets often in the lift.

She chops up the beans and starts with the rice. She washes it first like she she has been taught and lets the starchy,milky water from the rice caress her hands as she pours everything into a colander. She steps back from the fry pan as the spices sizzle and she watches the weather forecast with him. “Did you have a good day?”, he asks and she wonders if a day is good enough when your ex-lover called you and said he wanted to catch up; when you spent the afternoon with your present lover, and when neither of these loves is the husband that you are talking to right now. She nods absently and runs a finger down her bare arms where the present lover has kissed her passionately all afternoon. She doesn’t like the sound of the word lover…a soul mate is more like it, she will think of her lover as her soul mate from today. And then she laughs inspite of herself, because she can see him shaking his head and asking her if she has had one drink too many, to be caught up in what he calls a sentimental debris.

She wonders if she will ever get around to telling him that sometimes a touch can seep through the flesh and make its way to the heart, that physical love can transcend boundaries and end up where it was never supposed to be. She knows as well as he does that it wouldn’t change a thing and she decides that some burdens only double when they are shared.

She gets the fancy china out for the dinner, she sets the table for two and lights two candles with tapering wicks and again neither of them is for him. He doesn’t notice the candles and she is convinced that you only ever notice what was meant for you, the rest of the world is supposed to pass by a blur. She offers to do the dishes and wonders absent mindedly if the thyme flavoured dish washing liquid will wash away the kisses and the scent of the afternoon…she sniffs at her hands through the soapy suds and wonders if you ever really outgrow your teenage. Wasn’t the deal with becoming an adult supposed to be that you became more accepting of the fragility of relationships as time passed, that you were meant to understand that you could survive any loss without losing anything from your heart? And yet as she inhales the thyme, she smells the traces of the afternoon camouflaged behind the lather and she wonders if somewehere far away, he is thinking of her too.

Her mother calls just as she has finished stacking the dishes. The voice is low-pitched as ever and the conversation traverses its familiar paths before they come back to where they had started. “What did you cook for dinner tonight?”, her mother asks her and she dutifully repeats the menu adding that her husband seemed to have liked it. She hears muffled sounds in the background and knows that her father must be home, she can feel the stifling silence that is beginning to make inroads into her mother’s conversation.

“I can’t talk for long, your father is home today and it will be his dinner time soon”, her mother offers by way of explanation. She can see the scene unfolding , her father tapping the floor with his shoes impatiently, her mother scurrying over to meet his every demand, the harsh, emanating glare from his steely eyes, the “never good to be good enough” pity dripping from her mother’s eyes, the endless fights, the never ending accusations and the sorry apologies for a relationship long dead. “What else have you been unto?”, her mother asks her as she begins to wind up the conversation and for a mad, irrational minute, she wonders if her answer should be the passionate afternoon, the facade of deceit and the lure of an old love that seem to be crowding her life right now.

For one dangerous moment, she wonders if her mother would understand her and if in that sacrosanct entity of time, they could create a space that a woman can share with only another woman…a bond between two women made tighter by the men in their lives. Instead she simply mutters that she hasn’t been upto anything and asks her the mother the same question even as she knows that her mother will not share her saga of insults, tears and a self convinced worthlessness. The low-pitched voice changes tone as her mother says brightly “Oh, I am cooking some green beans too, tonight, now aren’t we ever so similar!”.

And for once and for the first time, she wonders why she missed the fact that she does have a bond with her mother…for they do share a sacred space where the most important things stay alive and mute and well hidden behind time-tested masks of mundanity.

“I added some tomatoes to the beans, you should try that”, she answers even as the smell of thyme overpowers her.