Not so beautiful hookers are often too reluctant when it comes to attempting their way to the groins of super-rich men. They instinctively know they'll fall short. Sometimes even cars are classified and those like Salma have absolutely no hope of finding a buyer who travels in one that doesn't have a flat back. Ordinarily enough, she was pleasantly surprised when a white Audi halted in front of her with a screech and the glass went down.
"Where's Kashmere Gate?", came the man's voice. So she wasn't the chosen one this time around too .Human resolve strengthened.
"You're a bit off-track", Salma said trying to keep her voice civilized but seductive. The man looked on. His features had made Salma go weak in the knees at the first glance itself. The stubble had a neat finish on his fair face. A short but slim nose coordinated magnificently with deep blue pair of eyes. The hair weren't too visible but had a rather ordinary length and styling. He wasn't more than thirty.
"You must take a U-turn from here, go some five hundred meters, take a left and then just move with the road", Salma explained.
Without saying a word the man began rolling the glass up. Salma's heart was pounding with an infantile desire. "Prostitutes can't afford to love", Salma thought, "at least not at first sight." Still, without slightest provocation her aged but serene and steady hand went on top of the three-fourths shut glass. Salma gave the nudest smile possible and chanted, "I won't mind a lift."
For the first five minutes of the unplanned journey, the only thing erect was the damaged half of the windscreen-wiper, stuck at ninety degrees in front of Salma's eyes.
"Would it be too much of a trouble for you if we spend this night together at my sweet little apartment in Gurgaon?", Salma broke the ice. At once, Atul was taken aback by the sheer bluntness with which this woman had been behaving, and now this! But this was no reason for him to skip the opportunity of "shaking off" (as he used to call it) the accumulated stress of long office hours that he had been subjected to for previous few weeks. Another immediate U-turn became imminent.
"So, do you live there alone", Atul queried, "or is it some kind of a thoroughfare?"
"I live with a partner, a female."
"I see. What does your partner do?"
"She brings in her own customers."
Atul was beginning to develop reservations about the prospects, but then, a man in Delhi had nothing to fear.
The next morning saw Atul waking up to the harsh consequences of instinctual decisions.. Salma's corpse was lying right in front of his eyes, her head a bloody mess, her body fully clothed but cold. And next to her was lying the corpse of..
{ Atul went with steady steps to the apartment window and looked out at the sprawling high-rises of Gurgaon. Life had left him breathless. He had so much to think in so little time } ... his own wife.
But again, almost instinctively, he started wrapping up the two bodies in available pink bedsheets and a raincoat. It was at this time that he thought about the woman in his arms. The marriage was arranged by his parents, and though he was never opposed to it, he always harboured a discontent deep within. The events of last night were perhaps just an inevitable part of a long chain of preceding lows. He never shared his earnings with her, perhaps because he thought that she didn't need money. After all, she had to stay at home all day. Atul recalled the argument that broke out last month between them when he refused to let her work in the retail store in neighbourhood. He recalled how he had hit her face with the top side of the steel glass. She was so adamant, after all. The scar was still there. But she didn't have to do THIS, he thought.
For the next three hours, he couldn't make even a single move. The mind had frozen. He had made sure not to let the decay odour spread to neighbourhood but the realization that there was human flesh in a dwelling he couldn't escape made him ever more disillusioned.
Occupying the back seat of the Audi really meant something for Chuck. Despite being the dog of the house for eight years now, he had rarely got the pleasure to accompany his master on his long drives. The favourite human friend to Chuck, however, was the lady of the house. Chuck loved Ranjana more than she was loved by her husband.
After a seventy-five minute drive, Atul was again in the doomed apartment. He locked the door from inside and let Chuck get a sense of the things to come. The dog had been a coerced vegetarian ever since Ranjana fed him his first brown bread. Atul unwrapped the cold flesh twins in short measures and gave Chuck his first off-track meal. Beasts avoid recognizing dead countenances. "At least in the long run", the man thought,"it would reduce the intensity of the odour as well as the quantity of the flesh that he had to carry."
Whenever Chuck was at it, Atul sat motionless, watching with a tired conscience the remorselessness of a perverted food chain. He survived on whatever little he had brought from his home but sometimes a seemingly content appetite of Chuck led him to justify an immediate possible scenario where he could join Chuck in relishing the stinking necessities. But the last resort was to refrain.
Chuck finished the big meal in four days flat followed by Atul dumping the leftovers in Yamuna. He went back, cleaned the Gurgaon apartment of all the traces of the beast's Last Supper and drove towards his home in Punjabi Bagh, returning with what his kids liked the most - chocolates. Chuck, he had thought, could be a potential eyewitness.
Atul and Ranjana had three children - a boy, a girl and Chuck. The boy was five years of age. His hair were curly, sometimes leaving Atul feeling empty about the times he had spent with his "lost" soulmate.
-Vivek Kr. Rana
