~~~~~~
When Roopa got up the next day, finding Raja Rao staring at her longingly, she felt as if she woke up from a dream.
‘Why stare at me,’ she said, getting closer to him, ‘as if I’m new to you?’
‘I’m not able to believe that all your beauty is mine,’ he said, blowing into her navel.
‘Worried about the void you would leave in my life,’ she said pensively, ‘I couldn’t sleep for long.’
‘Won’t I be back in your arms before your love bites would lose their traces,’ he said baring his chest.
‘How I wish I were a vampire,’ she said biting him to the bones ‘to live on your blood till then.’
‘Ooh.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘You know Sandhya’s delivery time is nearing,’ he said still in pain. ‘Don’t fail to make it to the barasala at Kakinada.’
‘If it were with you in a 1st Class coupe for two,’ she said, and got excited about it, ‘while make some coffee for us, think how to go about it.’
While preparing the coffee and picturing their togetherness on the train, she recalled her weird experience in the coupe, and as if the milk on the burner too shared her urge to narrate the episode to her lover, it boiled itself in double quick time.
‘That’s what life is all about, stranger than fiction, as they say,’ he said at her recap, trying to figure out the embarrassment she might have felt then. ‘Do check below the berths before all else.’
‘That is all about once bitten twice shy,’ she said eagerly. ‘But do tell me how we get in there in the first place.’
‘Book a coupe for us in the Godavari, party joining at Kazipet,’ he explained as they had coffee. ‘You ring me up so that I too can book my ticket as well. Since, Sathyam would be with you till the train moves out, you book another ticket for you by sleeper class. Then at Kazipet, we would move into the Cupid’s Corner.’
‘What a love on wheels that would be!’ she hugged him, spilling the dregs on him.
‘Haven’t you made it memorable even before we got started,’ he said rushing into the bathroom.
When the clock struck eleven, it occurred to her that in its forward march time would abet her lover to leave her for his wife’s place that evening, and that made her morose.
‘Cheer up Roopa,’ he said at last, ‘If you sulk, that would only make it worse for me.’
‘Maybe, you can measure my love on the scale of your misery,’ she sighed.