The last bit left was the easiest to lose. Staring blankly into the face of empty air, he fancied it had sparkled in the shade of black that formed her eyes. He fancied it had the same depth, the same softness of compassion and love…and then it was not just a decision but an urge, an irresistible passion, to jump right into it…and that was all that he had to do. Layers and layers of cliffs could have gone by; his white shirt now a red. It was the same red as the vermillion on her forehead, a lovely red of the mehandi on her palms.
She did not know when she had slept the previous night. Hours at end she gazed at the thatched roof of the hutment, dwelling on one thought after another. It was well past dawn when she woke up and she rushed to the kitchen, after her bath, to make him his cup of morning tea. At the kitchen, she was greeted with the scowl of his mother and sisters. Paying no heed to it, she shoved the firewood into the stove and blew into it. ‘It will all be over soon,’ she thought to herself as she took the tea to the verandah where he had already woken up and was sitting on the mat. He took it from her without raising his eyes to meet hers. He too had been thinking.
Three years ago when the two most powerful men of the village had considered it necessary to forge a tie with each other, they had decided that their children were the best investment they could put into the deal. So the two youngsters, hardly out of their teens, were married off in an elaborately planned rustic wedding. As days rolled into months, the two youngsters seemed to have taken a genuine liking for each other as they joked about and laughed at each other’s earlier hesitation at conversations – his attempts at impressing his father by giving her as little notice as he could when the old man was around, and her absolute fear of having to even meet his eyes. But just as everything was falling into place an accident quashed their dreams of having a family forever. At the end of a couple of years, everyone in the household had understood what was wrong. Physical and emotional abuse followed them both thereafter to an extent that she begged to be allowed to go back to her maternal home. Her family refused to take her in since her husband was well alive. She returned to further and further degradation. He sunk lower and lower into silent sympathy. The point had reached when his family decided to look for a new bride. And a gangster was handed the job of killing the old one.
If indeed their material bodies and mortal lives be present as constrains in their promise of an eternal love, they had made their decision.
The glide was simple, relieving. The taste of salty water in his mouth; the smell of burning clay filling her nostrils. The rough rustle of seaweeds against his wounded skin; the approaching overwhelm of smoke she was witnessing. The burning sensation that overpowered his eyes and her eyes brimming…and a slow drift into a something neither could any longer feel…as sweet as a deep slumber after a very tiring day…the rush of water first filling the eyes, then blurring images around, a sudden tightening of muscles and sinew, and finally an ocean of seamless darkness and calm. The two strangers had indeed won.