BETTER HALF

Am reproducing Uma Girish's short story - worth a read

Six blue china mugs, each with an ivory rim. I pick one up and twirl it. As I cradle it, a rush of memories wallops me. Dev and I spotted the set in a tiny shop in Ranikhet. Six blue mugs sitting prim and proper, on a top shelf. We locked our eyes and smiled: we had it all worked out – even where it would go in our kitchen cabinet.

I spread an old Saturday Times supplement on the floor. I place the mug in the centre and smother it in newsprint. Sitting in our Delhi home, surrounded by cardboard boxes, markers, photo albums, Scotch tape and time, I wonder how I got here. I, who always saw marriage as a safe port from the turbulent storms of life. Maybe my parents’ good marriage had set a bad example.

When Dev stepped into my life one sultry July afternoon and took possession of my heart, it seemed perfectly natural. All my teen life, mother warned me against men she called “silver-tongued devils” and I’d believed I had developed sufficient immunity against the species. Until Dev.

It took me twelve years to catch up, to learn that he was one of them. I can’t put a finger on what drew me to him. His brown eyes, dark hair, intellectual air, natural charm, or the combination? I, who tossed my hair and laughed at typical male compliments, started to feel sexy when Dev spouted poetry about everything, from the shape of my nose to the silk of my tresses. From first encounter to engagement to wedding had taken a mere five weeks. But what weeks they were!! I’d swung between the highest highs and the lowest lows, and Dev was my emotional barometer. I breathed and lived and walked and slept for Dev.

Books and music stitched us together when the magic of first love, became worn with time, like faded denim.

I shake my head free of thoughts and stare at the mess around me. At the debris of a twelve-year marriage; of the task of trying to divide – to separate two lives that lived as one for all these years. The furniture is all his, except the wrought-iron garden benches and the teak bureau with its cubby-holes. He once tucked little love notes into those for me to discover. That was a long time ago, when our love was as magical as something that came out of gift-wrapping, when every day brought a new discovery about each other.

How time slips away. And, a twelve-year-old marriage that kept a man and woman together dies in the fifteen seconds he takes to tell you that he hoped it wouldn’t come to this, that he never meant to hurt you, but he’s found himself a younger someone to share his life with. And slowly it begins to unravel, the love and respect and trust and intimacy you thought were as safe as pearls in their oysters.

But it’s over.

Was I foolish to believe it would never come to this? Our love changed over the years. It grew mellow and calm, free of the rush and desperation of its early form. I never asked why, when my stomach didn’t lurch every time I looked at him, or my heart stopped thudding when I heard the low growl of his car. That is the nature of love.

We started out with two sets of dreams – his dreams and my dreams, which entwined to become our dreams. How do you unravel dreams made together?

Six blue mugs. The cloudless blue of empty skies. Three for him, three for me.

The books. Kafka, A.. J Cronin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Jane Eyre classics and Ernest Hemingway are mine. Tom Clancy, Sidney Sheldon, James Patterson, Stephen King and Paulo Coelho go into his box.

The photo-frames are all now mine. You can keep them, he said. To him, they are memories past their expiry date. A souvenir from a past life, that’s what I have become.

We always shared closet space. The wooden shelves are strangely empty today. His formal shirts, motley collection of ties, Jockey shorts and socks have fled from their restricting confines. As if they couldn’t wait to move to a new shelf, to the smell of fresh paint, sharing space with lacy lingerie.

A lone toothbrush lolls in the mug on the bathroom countertop. Mine. On closer inspection, I see it’s pink. Mine is a crimson red. And then I realize: it is the stringy one he discarded. He has left it for me to pick up and throw away. I can’t believe I’m still picking up and cleaning after the man. Slivers of smell hang about. And then a cloud of smells attack me. His smells, his many, many smells. You can run across continents or try to hide in the anonymity of small-town life but a smell will always search you out. One strong whiff of the past is all it takes to knock you over. Maybe it is rice and fish curry – his favourite meal. Or the hot smell of burning rubber as a motorbike whizzes by and reminds you of the long rides hugging hairpin bends. It could be the smell of the first rains that nudege a memory – of how he led you to the verandah and touched you.

I’m jolted by the doorbell. It is a courier for Dev. Am I still allowed to sign as Mrs Dev Chatterjee? My fingers scrawl something unintelligible. I shut the door and walk to the dining room. Two plates. Two mugs. Two bowls with leftover blobs of mango. I still server two out of habit and eat from both.

I stare around me, uncomprehending. I am packing away a twelve-year-marriage int two boxes – HIS and HERS. The irony grabs me by the throat. How do I even begin to divide? Is it possible to split a life into a perfect 50:50? I place three mugs in his box, and three remain. Ditto for the plates, cutlery and crockery, even the masks from our Thailand trip. And that sets me thinking about how we’d have divided the kids. Luckily, we have none.

My mind travels back to the evening in the gynecologist’s office. Blocked tubes, she said. “Hey, it’s no big deal. You’ll be my baby and I’ll be yours,” Dev had crooned, flicking a teardrop with his thumb. “Just think about it. We have all our lives ahead of us and we have each other. Isn’t that a blessing?”

I should’ve known that promise would go the way all promises do.
I look around the room. I’m almost done but I can’t tear the smell of him from my skin. Nor can I split and sieve the memories in my head.

The ringing telephone interrupts my rambling nostalgia.

“Hello…”
“Hi…it’s me.” It is he.
“Hi…”
“I was just … um … wondering if you’d finished with the papers. My lawyer needs them tomorrow.”

The cordless feels like a dead weight in my hands.

“So …,” he fumbles on, “could you have them ready? I’ll send the driver around.”

“Sure.” I whisper.

I place the phone in its cradle and walk across to the desk. I pick up the form, the one that requests a divorce via Mutual Consent. I rip it neatly into two, right down the middle.

Which half would you like, Mr. Dev Chatterjee? I ask, and hear my laughter echo off the walls.