Wife material

A marriage begins to fall apart when a man threatened by his wife’s sudden confidence, starts to dig into her past.

“Veg or non-veg?”

“Do you like the rains or do you prefer winter?”

For three months I met Janani for coffee at 4:30 PM at an Ananda Bhavan close to her office. In the bustling air of that joint our dates had an officious quality where we fired multiple choice questions at each other in an attempt to become friends.

Our answers were so fluid that our personalities remained indistinct despite the very specific nature of these questions. What her eating habits (“veg but I eat fish sometimes”) or my preferred kind of weather (“I like early monsoons and winter mornings”) would’ve revealed about ourselves, we didn’t know. But the morning of each meeting, I’d wake up with a new set of questions for her.

One day however, our usual pattern was disrupted when I got a phone call from her. Seeing her name flash on my phone for the first time, I felt a curious mixture of panic and excitement. We weren’t on phone call terms yet, so I didn’t answer for quite a while. Instead, I watched the letters of her name pulse on my phone and felt that ‘Janani’ seemed familiar, a name that could perhaps belong to the list of five regular phone calls I received. I answered the call at a careful distance from my prying mother, walking towards the dappled light that fell through the grilled windows by my building staircase. I settled on a stair anticipating more questions, even long, shy silences. But Janani surprised me by getting straight to the point.

“Would you like to meet for dinner tonight?”

I had a fleeting thought then that she had never really been shy.

“Uhh…yes of course, where would you like to go?,” I managed to ask.

“I know a place in…”

I was silent for a bit longer than she expected so she hurriedly continued, “listen…I think we need to really get to know each other, otherwise this is going nowhere…”

“I suppose…”Until then I’d presumed things were going well and felt mildly annoyed. “Ok, let’s do it,” I agreed. Perhaps I felt cheated out of an opportunity to ask her out to dinner or I thought her too forward. But I remembered then that I had told my mother I did not want to meet a traditional, conservative girl. It appeared that my mother had done her homework.

That evening, Janani’s curt queries loosened themselves into long-winded questions that offered fleeting glimpses of her. When she asked me if I liked watching romantic films, she meant to tell me that she hated the idea of being manipulated into feeling something. “ But I suppose I like romantic films, just like you,” she said, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. She had swapped her tailored pant-shirt outfit for a powder blue kurta that made her seem warmer, more approachable. I watched her lean in to ask more of those leading questions and found myself studying the curve of her mouth, which was soft and generous.

Within the next three and a half months we were married in a traditional ceremony, where I sat down like a wound-up toy at whatever ceremony my parents subjected me to. When I finally saw Janani at the mandapam, on our wedding day, she was unrecognisable- her face weighed down by a stiff bun and hidden under layers of make-up. I felt a sharp stab of fear and sadness, I was marrying a stranger. When she smiled at me, I didn’t find it in me to return her smile.

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“Chitappa, close your eyes and eat this medicine.”

I obediently did as I was told and bit into the hard plastic of a Lego cake.

When I opened my eyes again, my niece was peering down at me with concern, as I lay flat on a straw mat in the lawn. In the distance my sister’s voice drifted towards us carrying words like “athimber” “raw silk”, sometimes my wife’s laughter would chase these words, a high pitched tinkle that sounded like someone had left the tap running.

“Better no?” said my niece, and I, tired from the long drive, sank back into the straw mat and watched the branches of a chikoo tree overhead.

“Yes, but let Chitappa sleep and digest the medicine.”

As I tried to sleep the child tried to pry my eyes open and asked, “if I open your eyes can you still sleep?”

Eventually she went away and I woke up to a kiss from my wife. She mussed my hair and asked me if I was still tired. I studied her face from below, an unattractive angle where her chin sank into her jaw without a break and her nostrils flared displaying a glint of the screw of her gold nose pin.

I sat up then and smiled at her, I hated to see her in ways I didn’t know. And upright she seemed like herself, soft lips, a pert, pointed nose and wide, round eyes. We had come away with my sister’s family to a resort in Chikmanglur, and turned a three day work holiday into a family gathering.

Janani pressed the open jaw of her plastic clip into the skin of my upper arm, the clip’s teeth dug in giving me a pleasant sort of pain. I looked at her face which was scrunched up to mimic the pain she intended to inflict.

“Your sister…pah!” said Janani shaking her head in exasperation.

My sister and my wife didn’t get along famously. Since we’d had an arranged marriage, I think my sister felt the need to establish her authority as a senior member of the family. But Janani didn’t care much for being told what to do.

“What did she do this time?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter, I’ll deal with it. What do you want to do with this afternoon?” she asked.

I suggested going indoors, the heat was getting to me and I was keen on making the most of this holiday as we barely got to spent time together.

Does every couple have unspoken gestures that suggest sex? I can’t recall what our gestures were, perhaps they adapted to spaces in our home. If we lay in bed together, I would find myself attempting to kiss her and usually she’d respond favourably, returning my kiss, letting me run my hands over her body. Once when we watched a film wrapped around each other on our narrow couch, I saw my wife’s painted toes curl slightly during a particularly steamy scene and I knew she was aroused. At some point in our courtship, we had exchanged kisses on an auto ride home that I didn’t particularly warm up to. My eyes kept drifting to the rear view mirror to find the auto driver’s slit eyed smirk. Janani however was oblivious and surprised me with her lack of restraint. I had tried to erase some aspect of that night from my memory but it came back to me that afternoon in Chikmanglur when my wife asked me to pull her hair as we had sex.

I could see her reflected in the mirror in front of us, one of her breasts almost pouring out of my palm and the other swaying to the rhythm of our bodies grinding together. Her hair hung down her back, damp and wavy, my other hand held her waist, and her frame rested against the side of the bed. “Pull my hair, yank it,” she said. I did as I was told, letting go of her waist and gripping the end of her hair and it felt good, I can’t lie. And I knew how much she liked it which made it even better somehow.

But as we lay spent, her body concave within mine, my nose buried in her shoulder, as she tried to pry herself loose from my hand which held her far too close for that warm afternoon…I wondered where she’d learnt this.

Perhaps it was around then that I began to study my wife in bed like an observer rather than a participant. She was unabashed in her desires, the old shyness that I suspected her of was truly non-existent, she not only knew what she wanted but she regularly surprised me with the vehemence of her desire, the plain knowledge of what would bring her pleasure. And it was a remarkable thing- her pleasure. It would arc and soar and her moans, loud and unrestrained would sometimes hit me in a sharp mixture of pride and shame.

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People will tell you about the exact moment when things began to unravel for them. They either have an ominous feeling or the trauma of the incident is so strong that they’re unable to forget the day, the minute and the moment things started to fall apart. I have an uncle who lost his daughter to an accident, he could recount the afternoon she died to the very moment she entered her red Maruti 800 and waved to him before leaving. She was wearing a floral pink salwar kameez, he’d keep saying, as if this particular detail mattered more than the others.

I watched Janani lean into her colleague, tap his shoulder lightly, and whisper something in his ear, I can picture them laugh even now, when they laugh their eyes meet- sharing a secret that I can never know. That was the moment for me. I remember the taste of what I was eating, the crisp end of an overly red chicken tikka. I don’t remember details of the place, but we were in the ballroom of a grand hotel attending a party organised by Janani’s workplace. I don’t know much else about that evening, just that I felt an uncomfortable simmering within me. It wasn’t jealousy as much as the relief of finding out something I had been wanting to know for quite a while.

We were married for nearly six months by the time I started all that business with Sneha. Until then I had simply been keeping an eye on Janani. When she’d shower I’d check her Whatsapp messages for as long as I could hear the shower water running. I’d surprise her at her office sometimes pretending to be in the area on work. But none of these things gave me more than a glimpse of the world outside the one she shared with me. Sometimes I felt that she laughed differently in the presence of friends, with them she shared an easy intimacy, they knew things about her that I didn’t. For instance at one such impromptu visit to her office her colleague told me I’d find her in the conference room doing the usual thing- he laughed as he said this, as though I should know by now. But I had no idea, what were the usual things typical to her? I tried hard to form a set of her habits- she liked reading her phone at breakfast, she didn’t like tomatoes- generic pieces of information privy to any roommate I supposed. But it turned out that my wife tended to nap every afternoon at 3:30 for 15 minutes in the conference room. Who knows how many such character quirks, naps, laughs and lovers she’d kept away from me?

Sneha: Hi Janani. Remember me? Nice to find you here.

Janani: I’m not sure…

S: We met at your wedding? I’m Karthik’s old college friend?

J: Sorry the wedding was such a blur…

S: Don’t blame you, I don’t even remember my husband’s face from my wedding…

Janani: LOL. Good to find you here anyway ❤ Following back!

Sneha had 45 followers in a private profile on Instagram where she shared photos of a cat, a baby and shadowy selfies in the mirror where she could barely be seen. Sneha’s bio read: Part-time Mom, Full-time Book Lover. Sneha was me.

Over the months Sneha blossomed into a person who sometimes felt more real than me. Through her I didn’t snoop on my wife as you may imagine, but I simply tried to get to know her better. I tried to befriend her, coax her into telling me things about her past, about our shared present. None of this cast any shadow over our relationship together. What it did do was strange and unexpected. I found myself falling in love with my wife as a woman, or more accurately a friend. The things the regimented circumstances of our arranged marriage had not let me discover about her, tumbled out under the guise of an easy friendship. I did not have to fire questions at her, she did not have to perform for me, we fell into seamless conversations that had no agenda but held a lot meaning.

Sometimes the lines blurred like the afternoon we walked past the old furniture store near the flower market. On my bossy sister’s insistence, my wife had been tasked with the duty of picking up flowers for a cousin’s wedding. The flowers were meant for décor and therefore had to be ordered in large quantities. I volunteered to help Janani as I knew she didn’t like being bossed around by my sister. We woke up early and walked into a dark, wet market past flower sellers cutting and stringing jasmine and lotus buds. I watched mesmerised as a man pierced the very middle of a delicate pink bud using a long needle with a surgeon’s precision. There was a sickly-sweet scent of old and dying flowers. I offered to buy Janani a cutting of blue December flowers, and she pinned them on the top of her braid. We were feeling good that day, I reached for her hand, gathering first the tip of her fingers and then holding her warm palm loosely within mine, she could choose to let go, but she held my hand back, her grip reassuring and warm. We ordered a stack of marigolds and decided to walk further down until we found an Ananda Bhavan for breakfast.

On the way we passed an old furniture store, the display at this store had remained unchanged for years, a gathering of beds and one forgotten sofa in the corner. It wasn’t even rearranged, and the furniture dating back to the late 80s seemed to have become a witness to the city’s changing landscape.

“Isn’t this the shop?” I asked her, remembering something she’d told me.

“Which shop?”

“The one you said you passed by on your way to school every day?”

She narrowed her eyes and looked at me quizzically, “How do you know that?”

My stomach dropped when I realised that this insignificant piece of information had not been shared with me, but with Sneha. I fumbled, unable to figure out how to save myself. But for reasons known only to her she stopped asking me anything more about it. We found the Ananda Bhavan quite close ahead and I changed the topic making a mental note to delete Sneha’s Instagram account from my phone just to be safe.

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But despite that cautionary incident, I found myself addicted to being Sneha or knowing Janani as Sneha. I fantasised about meeting my wife as Sneha, imagining the gentle, easy camaraderie that was sure to follow.

As Sneha, I had begun to really know Janani. But my curiosity about my wife had reached a degree that transcended suspicion, it had now become a dark, throbbing force that wished to catch her out. It was triggered by a chance remark to Sneha about an ‘old boyfriend’ Janani still kept in touch with.

I began to carefully watch her interactions with other men. Janani relentlessly lured, teased and provoked any man she came across. Or was I imagining it? I am still quite uncertain of what I saw or what I thought I saw. Sometimes her fingers brushed a shopkeeper’s when he handed her a bag, or I watched her laugh unnecessarily at a friend’s joke her neck arching back revealing the length of her throat. Her movements seemed practised and deliberate. Besides, there was that confidence she had in bed- she did things I had always wished for in a wife but couldn’t quite accept without suspicion. Sometimes I wondered if I hated her, sometimes I told myself I would go through my whole life just trying to prevent her from leaving me.

As it turns out during the short course of our marriage my wife never found out who Sneha really was. What did happen was that she discovered other unsavoury things about me and about us.

Despite my best intentions our marriage began to fall apart. Maybe I surprised her in office too often, maybe I called her a whore in the middle of sex one afternoon, maybe I asked her not to dress provocatively too many times or maybe she was shocked when I crept up on her one evening, after hiding in the shadows watching her unlock the front door of our home.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into those things.

The truth was, as Sneha, I was deeply interested in my wife but as myself, I resented how little she told me- her husband. The resentment leaked into our everyday lives and I began to withdraw from her, to punish her. Our conversations were now limited to necessary exchanges- “I will be late tonight,” or “isn’t it your turn to pay the electricity bill?” There were no inside jokes, no confidences and most importantly, no arguments. We agreed amicably, or compromised uncomplainingly and this unnatural peace drove a wedge between us that no disagreement could’ve managed.

She began to stay at her parent’s place far too frequently, until she simply visited our home and lived out of her parents’. Sometimes I’d stand under her parents’ apartment building and feel her eyes on me, as I stood in the dark staring at the light in her bedroom window. I knew our marriage was well past gone so when Janani left me, I just felt an immense relief.

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Two years later, I heard that Janani had gotten married again to ‘an old college boyfriend she’d continued to stay in touch with.’ My suspicions weren’t entirely misplaced then and I felt satisfied knowing that I hadn’t imagined everything, I wasn’t crazy. Could I have set it right by being balanced and rational, and won her back somehow? I didn’t think so. Somewhere deep inside I’d always known that her interest in me would fade.

But that didn’t stop me, when two days after hearing the news of her marriage, I summoned up courage to write to her.

Sneha: Congrats! I heard you got married J

Janani is typing…

Janani is typing…

I didn’t hear from her for a week until I finally received a message that said quite simply:

Hi! I missed you.