Stories Varied - A book of short stories

As a way out of her drab life, she shifted her focus away from her husband to center it on her daughters. How she wanted to keep them all for herself! But, as they grew up, seeing them getting closer to their father, all the more she tried to retain her mental hold on them. When she realized at length that she had ceded much of her daughters’ emotional ground to her husband, as if to offset that loss on a spiritual plane, she infused religiousness into her consciousness. Besides, by then, as the age gap began the spouses began to take its toll on their connubiality, her newfound spirituality became a tool to soothe her suppressed sexuality. Thus in time, she got habituated to lead her life in a semi-spiritual mode that was before the daughters were married off.

‘How their marriages threw my life out of gear.’ she continued with the recollection of her life and times. ‘With much of his life-long savings turning into their dowries and what with his retirement too round the corner, didn’t he become a pathetic picture of insecurity? And when it was my turn to foot the bill, didn’t I become even more insecure about my own future? That’s in spite of my handsome savings and the remaining length of service life! Maybe, insecurity lies in one’s mind and not in the investment portfolios.’

So, reinvigorating herself on the religious ground, she began perambulating around the deities in assorted temples, praying them for reciprocity in acting as her security guards against life’s vicissitudes. Not content with insuring her life for material impediments, she added numerous goddesses to guard her against feminine turpitudes. Living thus in a man’s world, she managed to keep the womanizers at bay from her exceptional ‘past the prime’ charms.

‘How did the goddesses down their guard that day?’ she thought amusedly as she walked back into her house. ‘Didn’t they also leave me vulnerable to his charms when he came the very next day?’

That morning, when her husband went out to fetch some vegetables, he knocked at the door saying he wanted to peep into their place passing by it. Enjoying his expected lie, she involuntarily said that he could feel at home till her husband came. But when it occurred to her that he could’ve been lying in the wait to meet her alone, she felt like soothing his weary legs by exposing her shapely ones to his thirsty eyes. So, before her husband’s arrival, she conceived umpteen ways by which she slyly revealed many of her sari-clad charms to his feasting eyes. When he asked her cell-phone number to ‘soothe his ears’ as well, she gave it along with a safety manual.