‘Whatever,’ he said, ‘it’s the woman’s whim that prevails in the end, isn’t it?’
‘You shouldn’t grudge us our only advantage,’ she said while picking up some bananas from her basket. ‘Otherwise, are we not at the receiving end, in every way?’
‘I haven’t seen you reading any Telugu Weekly before!’ he said, finding an “Andhra Pathrika” therein.
‘I picked it up at the Higginbotham’s to keep my anxiety at bay,’ she said, giving him a banana, ‘I read a couple of stories, but I felt the characterization was poor.’
‘Characters of fiction are authors’ children and critics’ neighbors,’ he said enigmatically. ‘Even if we perceive them as inadequate, nevertheless, we should appreciate the fact that they were the products of someone’s imagination, however limited that might have been. It’s not often that you come across a book from which you could quote much.’
‘That’ true, but in these writings, I find only the phantoms of wishful thinking rather than any products of imagination.’
‘Do you have some more?’ he asked her, having helped himself to a couple of them by then.
‘It’s the last one,’ she offered him the one she was having.
‘Never mind,’ he persisted, ‘you have it.’
‘You know that my preference,’ she pushed the banana into his mouth as a prelude, ‘is for the one with the skin.’
When they savored the meal that she brought along with the saada paan for them, which rejuvenated them for their nocturnal exercise, so much so that when the Godavari approached Eluru at three, unable to part from one another, the lovers were still at caressing each other.
‘At this rate you may be sending me to Sandhya’s bed just to rest,’ he smiled in the end.
‘Why, hasn’t she a clear lead of a year,’ she said winking at him. ‘That is, accounting for the off days. Let me get even before you can be even handed.’
After that journey of ecstasy, they reached Kakinada in the morning. At length, when they got to the exit gate of the Town Station, for appearances sake, they went their separate ways - he in his in-laws’ car and she in a rickshaw.
While a hiatus after lover’s jaunt is welcome prospect for that would afford sweet reflection upon the amour what is unwelcome is a long separation that entails painful craving for their reunion.
~~~~~~~
While the rickshaw-puller was peddling her home, Roopa tried to speculate about his wife and their life.
‘Would their married chores be any different from the middle-class mores?’ she wondered. ‘Maybe, for want of space in the slum life, liaisons could be but a handshake away. But won’t that take away the pining from love as well as the exhilaration in union? How am I to know?’