Eleventh Hour
All of us live with our past. All of us allow it to shape our future. But some of us know how to shrug the past. I think that is who I am, [*] Chitra by name. But what if past catches up with the present? Well, as the moment of reckoning is dilemma, before I come to that, I will take you to my past.
When I completed my course in fashion designing, fate seems to have patterned the woof and weft of my love life that was a score of years back. Landing up with my first job in a reputed company, so to say, I landed in Gopal’s lap. He was smart and handsome, witty and humorous, enough to enamour women that’s besides his conversational skills. Well, if man dents woman’s heart with darts of his eyes, it’s the tenor of his words that grips her mind. So, at the threshold of seduction, words are weapons of conquest for men that pierce the chinks in women’s armour of chastity! Whether it was his conquest of me or my surrender to him that tended our union is immaterial to my love but it is material to his morals.
As he began courting me, I started taking solo rides into a dream world that is besides our long drives into the wilderness on the outskirts. How the prospect of life as his spouse seemed a dream in itself? Why not, yet to cross thirty, he was the head of fabric design of a blue chip company. Does man’s status add aura to woman’s love? If so, is love as pristine as poets tend to picture it? Or is it that women have an innate weakness for successful men? What about man’s love, isn’t it beauty leaning? The bard said that beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold and it can as well be said that it influenceth men to alter their amour. It’s not as if women give a damn for man’s looks, maybe some of them do, why, isn’t it said that some dames prefer ugly men. Lo, some men, rare though, are taken to mustachioed women, oh, what a messy human emotion, this so called love! Then why blame love for its fallibilities? And yet, if urgency for possession symbolizes man’s love for woman, her prudence lay in not putting the cart before the horse, so it seems. If woman were to serve man on a premarital platter, won’t she let herself bereft of that for which he would die to tie the knot with her? And marriage is no guarantee either for her to keep her man all for herself, as men, rarely, if ever, fail to explore the avenues of fornication for sexual exploitation. And that’s what Gopal did. That I realized long after I lost my virginity to him.