“Wonder how could you have managed to hide your enamored eye for Ruma from her man’s vision from such a close range?”
“Well I never ceased coveting her and if anything my passion to possess her only grew with each passing moment but then as I developed friendly feelings towards Rajan, I was thrown into a dilemma of dharma. So I kept desisting from my urge to seduce her wondering all the while if I were destined to have her at all. Oh, what a sweet anticipation it was.”
“It reminds me of Sathyam’s words in Benign Flame, ‘my dear fellow, money and looks are okay to an extent to lure women, but better realize that it’s the luck that enables one to lay them. Why, you can’t even screw a whore if you’re not destined to have her; your visit to the brothel would have coincided with her periods, and the next time you’re eager, she could have shifted out of the town itself’.”
“How true it is given my insatiate passions,” he said as his demeanor acquired a disappointed look. “Well, as Rathi was in the family way, Ruma proposed a trip to Ooty for all of us; she wanted us to relive our honeymoon with them as witnesses. I told her that she should have known that her friend made our marriage an unceasing honeymoon, and she said that it was plain greedy for in the relay race that is married love, Rathi should have passed on the baton of bliss to the newlyweds, who followed us in the tracks of love. Maybe for that foul, fate had contrived to pull out Rathi from the course of love with a head-on crash, which ripped the right side of the Fiat apart that was as we were returning from Ooty. While Rajan was at the wheel, Rathi, with his girl in her lap, was in the back seat right behind him, and as if to make her jest come true, fate had taken them together for a heavenly time leaving Ruma and me to continue our mundane sojourn.”
“Won’t her lighthearted remark about your raging time with Ruma make the tragedy all the more poignant?”
“Maybe it was a prophetic jest at its prognostic best to portend the worst for me,” he said. “Whatever, I felt that even as Rajan’s soul deserved the rituals of death, Ruma too needed the solace of her family but all had ignored my invite. Now I wonder why it does not occur to any that life is too short for one to waste it nursing grudges even against those who might have slighted us. However, Raju had prevailed upon my family to retain a hesitant Ruma to be a part of it all, and as he stood by me, I went through the motions for the salvation of the departed. But after the obsequies, as Ruma had shifted to her place and Raju and the others too had left, fending for myself in the voidness of bereavement, I had realized that women are more complete in themselves than men.”