CLOISTERED  CRAVINGS

1

            As usual, he kissed his wife lightly while brushing his fingers against her backside. It was a perfunctory ritual which he followed dispassionately each morning, before walking out of the front door. Eleven years ago, the kiss would have been more ravenous and his fingers more groping, gripping, with cravings and ardour for making love to her predominantly on his mind – but now, it was only a mechanical errand which he completed like other chores such as collecting milk and newspaper from the front door each morning.

            He walked down the street nonchalantly, watching the school children boarding their school bus. Once he had been of their age, boarding his school bus from the same bus stop. He had spent his entire life in this middle class locality in Delhi. The house in which he resided had been built ‘brick by brick’ by his late father. After his parent’s demise, the house had been inherited by him since his brother was not interested in forging his blood ties with the family – having settled and married in Canada. It was a small house with two bedrooms, but met the couple’s frugal requirements since they had no children even after eleven years of marriage.

            The first year of their married life had been a zany one – filled with passionate, incessant lovemaking, and, punctuated with wrangling over trifle issues and subsequent yearnings for togetherness. However, after the surreal first year of marital stupor, the harsh reality of his wife’s inability to conceive started gnawing at their relationship. After the failure of initial medical advisories and treatment procedures, they made numerous trips to diverse religious shrines – typical of the Indian mindset – hoping for divine intervention in order to achieve an offspring. But all their endeavours ended in vain. His wife had to bear the brunt of being labelled infertile in the quintessentially chauvinist Indian society. She emotionally cloistered herself from their marriage and started physically to drift away from him. Their lovemaking   became infrequent and mundane. He tried to do everything to pull her back from the emotional precipice, but even lost her physical company. Deprived of his wife’s body, his carnal longings became more prominent –in his mind as well as in body. He began to hold her responsible for his deprivation which found no other vent. Slowly and surely, the love they had avowed to keep alive in their hearts, disappeared from their lives. Now, after eleven years of marriage, he couldn’t even remember the last time when they had made love, or even hugged each other snugly.