‘Go have bath and I’ll get you some buttermilk,’ she said. ‘It will make you a little steady at least.’
‘Once in your arms,’ he said winking at her, ‘won’t that be pole ready.’
‘What happened to you!’ she said a little surprised.
‘Have a peg or two,’ he said merrily. ‘And see how you get lifted all ends up.’
As Roopa gave him a sharp look, pleased with himself, Sathyam slipped into the bathroom, but before Roopa could figure out what was happening to him, he came storming into the bedroom. Surprised at his gusto that night, she wondered, ‘When a man on high has it so different for women, how come then that drinking became a taboo with them?’
‘Oh, how nice it felt,’ he said, as he got up at length.
‘Don’t make it a habit for that,’ she said coyly. ‘Why don’t we go to Delhi now? Sandhya wrote again wanting us to make it soon.’
‘You know it’s not even a month since I took over the Section,’ he said putting on airs. ‘I can only think about it a little later.’
‘It appears that we’ll never make it at this rate,’ she said. ‘I better go on my own now.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll make it very soon,’ he said cajoling her. ‘If ever Raja Rao sets up shop here, I think I can be of help to him. You know, now I am getting to know some well placed people.’
However, as the idea of her mediocre husband helping her marvelous lover didn’t appeal to her sensitivity, she thought, ‘My Raja is too smart to need his help.’
She began to wonder at the new sense of confidence in her husband, ‘Oh, what a difference a little recognition did make to his self-confidence! Why not? When a peg or more betters man in bed, won’t a step or two up at the workplace, buttress the feel good of his?’
But in time, as he got hardened at drink, she found him a hard nut to crack in bed. This new feature in her marital life depressed Roopa as her husband’s nocturnal abstinence made her daydream ever more passionately about her lover, the excitation of which brought her deprivation to the fore, making her craving to possess her Raja the mission of her obsessed life.
All the while heady with his newly found power, however, Sathyam had no thought for his wife’s predicament. As if to add insult to injury, he thought it fit to bring the bottle home so as to give a face-lift to their middle-class home. Thus that late summer evening, he asked Prasad to feel at home over a bottle of Glenfiddich.