I love you

“I love you,” he whispers.

The look in his eyes make my insides melt into a gooey pile of rotten apple pie. I smile wide, my lips stretch from one end of my face to another in a grin that might look grotesque to any other man, but not to him.

“I love you, too,” my raspy voice manages to spit those words out before I pull his bleeding finger in my mouth. He winces, my sharp teeth dig into his skin, but I am careful not to break the surface; like a wolf carrying its pup, I pull the finger all the way in, until the beginning of his palm.

His skin tastes like coconuts, red chilly and salt, but it is his blood that makes me push back my head and close my eyes. I moan at the ecstasy of sucking on that sweet, red juice that reminds me of crushed berries on summer evenings, our mouths dripping in crimson, leaving trails of deep kisses along each other’s bodies.

The closeness to him makes my head swoon, his jugular, pumping like drums in the wild, engulfs me with his smells; sweat, desire and hunger create a heady mix for what’s to come next.“Are you ready?” I look up, his finger still wedged deeply in my mouth, his life force still trickling down my throat to warm my insides.

“More than ever,” he pulls me towards him, his body hard and unyielding, my head nudges perfectly in the crook of his neck as I breathe in the heady scents. I can feel my resolve getting stronger as his mouth finds my ear lobes and his tongue tangos with a frenzy brought on by fervid craving.

I open my mouth wide as his free hand pulls me tighter towards him, his three fingers bury inside my back and he braces himself as my mouth clamps down on the finger in my mouth, my teeth digging through the epithelial tissue, sawing through his bone and chewing the finger clean off his palm. Blood sprouts from the hole that used to be a finger, it sprays across my face like rain after a parched summer and my mouth opens in a gaping hole to take it all.

When the blood reduces to a trickle down his hand, I suck on that hole to ensure none of it goes wasted.

When I am finally done, I notice that he is unsteady, with only his big toe left on both his feet, I am not surprised; I grab him with my hands and gently lower him to bed. Before he closes his eyes, he looks at me one more time and says, “I love you.”

Let’s get you laid

I get it. I mean as a man you probably have one or maybe two matches on Tinder after swiping right for every single female profile, even if she looked like a gorilla mated with a coyote and produced a llama.

Then you decide not to put all your eggs in one basket, you download Hinge, Bumble and Truly Madly. You spend an hour a day on all four apps swiping right on every single woman that’s shown to you. Because, well, beggars are not choosers and if horses could fly, beggars would ride. You know, yada…yada!

The highlight of your day is when you get a match in one of those apps, but then the low-light of the day is that even though she’s swiped right for you, she refuses to respond to your messages.

I mean, I agree. men are pathetic. They lead lives constantly seeking for validation. Don’t get me wrong, I am a man too. But brothers unlike you, I have cracked the code.

The code to get any woman you match with, to speak with you on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Truly Madly, whatever, pathetic dating site you are on. Heck, I will even throw in tips on how to pick up girls from a bar, if you pay me enough.

You see, it is not about how you look, it has never been about how you look. I mean look at my face here in this video, I look like a well dressed spastic, orangutan. But that’s the thing, unlike us men, for a woman, our looks won’t be the reason why a she sleeps with us.

Women are simple beings, like wild cows waiting to be domesticated. Waiting to be milked and then tied to that shiny pole, while you go out in the farm chasing all those chicks, having a testosterone showdown with roosters.

The Duel of Derika

Derika dragged her feet and groaned as she glimpsed the looming shadow of the arena. It’s massive iron gates slowly, reluctantly, grated open, perhaps as reluctant to let Derika in, as she was to get into the arena.

Her father walked, proud next to Derika, a whole five inches shorter that her.

The duel was set and Derika was expected to defeat the mighty Amazonian Princess, Ina, if she every hoped to marry Prince Sebastian. And to be honest, Derika was more than happy to lose that match. It wasn’t that Derika had anything against the idea of marriage, but then it was against the idea of marrying Prince Sebastian.

She walked into the arena, just as thunderous applause rose all around her. Chants of ‘Derika’ ‘Derika’ roared in all directions and a shiver passed through her bones.

Would she…would she really lose a duel on purpose and let her people down? She thought. But then her train of thoughts was interrupted.

“Oh my liege”, said the Inn Keeper who also moonlighted as her family’s professional ass licker, “My liege, with legs as strong as a thousand donkeys, hair as long as the longest serpents and lips as thick as a baboon’s ass. What wondrous thoughts run through that tiny, delicate mind of yours?”

Source: https://andantonius.deviantart.com/art/Amazon-124185435

Derika often wondered how competent was their professional ass licker was in actual ass licking, because she had her own doubts about his competencies.

“I’m not sure about this fight, Inn Keeper. Do I really have to? Can’t the benevolent Princess Derika let Ina, the Amazonian Princess, have Prince Sebastian?” she said.

“But petite brained, Princess Derika, do you see the crowd? Every single one of them has paid for the tickets with either their lives savings, or their organs. Now, how can the benevolent Princess deny them, their one arm’s worth?” He whispered, his tongue, almost lapping up Derika’s ear lobe. A pungent smell of pork, chocolate Ice cream and garlic wafted near her nose and she almost gagged.

Blind Date

Nisha could hear them talking about the wedding already. She plucked silk threads from the pallu of her saree. She could not remember the last time she felt her parents had been inconsiderate of her. She had always brushed aside the issue of marriage, but arriving back from work and finding a family sitting in their living room had shocked her. She had not realized her parents were so keen on her getting married. Not that she didn’t look forward to it herself. But a heads up would have been good.

When she had entered the house her mother had hurried her into their bedroom and handed her her mother’s favorite silk saree, the one with the swans swimming along the pallu. That was when Nisha knew they were serious about this. She had expected to be called into the living room for a while now. And having waited for a while she was getting restless. She paced up and down the bedroom and put an ear to the door to try and hear what was being said. When she heard words like ‘dowry’ and ‘cooking’, she shook her head, opened the door and walked into the living room.

Nisha walked directly to the empty sofa opposite the prospective groom and sat down in it. An awkward silence followed in which the prospective groom and his parents stared at Nisha and her parents as if to ask how she had walked into their conversation unassisted.

Nisha folded her hands and raised them to the groom’s parents, “Namaste!” “ Hello…” she said to the groom. They seemed too dumbstruck because no one said anything.

The overhead fan could be heard creaking in the awkward silence. Her mother’s bangles clinked as she folded her hands nervously.

Trail by combat

I unsheathed my sword and rubbed it against my chest, ensuring not to break eye contact with my nemesis. My husband, stood next to her, massaging her shoulders, rubbing her arms, whispering words of motivation into her ears.

She kept nodding while staring back into my eyes, a miasma of fear and determination swirled like deep pools of unrest.

I stepped forward indicating that I was ready, and the crowd comprising of every single individual who lived in Fulton Street, burst out in a cheer, that especially rang from the right. A smirk lined my lips, and a jolt of pride rocked my insides. Of course everyone championed for me, I had grown up with these folks, and that bitch standing opposite me, with her ass being massaged by my husband (John, the prick who needed tantric sex to get it up), had only entered the scene a year ago.

Taking my cue, as always, Wansi, the unoriginal bitch, stepped forward. And suddenly I could hear a cheer louder, much louder than the one that came when I stepped forward. It rang from all around me, and I stared at my neighbors from Fulton Street in disbelief.

The realization that there was massive crowd support for my nemesis was a small bump, and it wasn’t going to stop me. I had known for more than six months now that it would come to this, to this barbaric fight until death. Plus it was almost as if she had literally begged for it.

I mean, it would have been all-okay, had she just been content wrapping my husband of eleven years into her tentacles and having tantric sex with him night after night.

In fact, I remained a modicum of classy dignity even when she grew her hair and colored them to a mahogany red, just like mine. Or when she suddenly decided to start wearing light green contact lenses, just like the color of my eyes.

I remained a stoic figure of wisdom and tolerance when she started posting images of her Cheesecakes all over social media, knowing that I was the reigning queen, and had an existing brand of cheesecakes named after me.

Even though it chipped my saintly demeanor in various places, but I attempted to tolerate her less than basic attempts at poetry, knowing that she was only attempting it because I was a well-known poet.

It wasn’t until last week that my fraying thread of patience with my husband’s mistress broke.

After a long week of baking my famous cheesecakes and writing my famous poetry; my feet felt like they had run a marathon and what I really needed to end my Friday was a foot spa.

So, I walked into my favorite Spa and Massage parlor, Happy Endings, and asked for Fabio, my fabulous masseuse. But then to my utter horror, the staff at Happy Endings told me that Fabio was pre-booked.

No one pre-booked Fabio, especially not on a Friday evening, especially when they knew I was a regular.

“What do you mean pre-booked?” I shouted. “The entire Fulton street knows not to pre-book Fabio on Friday. WHO. BOOKED. FABIO?” I screamed and flicked a hair off my forehead. I took in a deep breath and realized I needed to maintain my calm.

The girl at the reception had gone pale.

“Mam…I…I’m sorry. I can’t tell you that.” She said.

I walked across the reception, almost a hair’s breath away from her. Lowered myself to her barely five foot stature, looked into her uninspired, dirty brown eyes, and whispered, “Your pathetic existence makes me want to throw up. You will redeem your existence by telling me who pre-booked Fabio. Now.”

“WANSI!” She almost jumped and whispered, loud. “Miss…miss Wansi, pre-booked Fabio.”

“That tantric whore!” I muttered under my breath and stomped in. I knew that she just hadn’t booked Fabio, she would have also requested for my favorite room. The one with a view of Fulton Lake.

And I was right. Standing outside the Platinum Spa room, I heard Wansi flirt with Fabio and both of them giggling over something, that I am almost positive were jokes about me.

That moment, I walked up to Fulton Street Municipality office and put in a request for trial by combat. I wanted that bitch to die, and die at my hands. I wanted her blood to run though my skin and drip, drip, drip down to the ground.

She had broken every single barrier of my patience by stealing Fabio and the Platinum Spa Room from me.

The cheering from the crowd finally subsided, and I took my stance. Wanda ran towards me, screaming like a warrior, her mahogany hair flying in the air, and her ample boobs bouncing as she ran; and her eyes, with light green lenses watering, because lenses hurt.

Just as she came close to me, close enough to pierce the tip of the sword, I stepped aside and let her trip on my foot. She fell down on her face and the arena fell into pin drop silence. The temptation to then bury my sword into that ass which my husband just finished massaging was too much. But I resisted.

I needed to give these people some drama; I needed Wansi to lose miserably. So pathetically, that there wouldn’t be a single person who would blame my victory to luck…

The family outing

Take your hands off him!

 “I am sorry. Did you say something?” ‘The woman’ turned around and looked at me. Her green eyes wide, almost seeing through my soul.

“Nothing…just that you look really pretty today.” I said, plastering a fake smile. She went back to holding Sammy’s hand and walking ahead. Tall, taller than me, she made me feel smaller than I should have.

We were on a family outing, an experiment suggested by ‘The woman’, a step in promoting harmony, for Sammy’s sake. And I had to keep reminding myself to behave, to keep my emotions in check, to maintain dignity and class. But all I could feel was my entire existence falling apart. The simple act of putting one foot in front of another became increasingly painful. Breathing became a chore and my breaths came in raspy successions.

“Are you alright?” A male voice beside me asked. Perhaps genuinely concerned, I couldn’t say for sure with the loud ringing in my head that seemed to be eating me alive from inside.

The Date

“You look lovely, by the way. The profile picture, doesn’t do you any justice, you know.” He says.

Ah fuck, the hopeful look in his puppy dog eyes tell me that I need to return the compliment. I scrutinise him hard, I mean, there must be something I could compliment him on.

He is big, muscular. Clearly he works out, a lot. His beard; stands out in a disarray of tiny hair that just could not decide what direction to take. His hair is gelled; gelled to the point that each spike reminds me of a mini Eiffel tower.

He is wearing a white V-neck t-shirt covered with a grey woollen blazer; a blood red silk handkerchief stuffing down his breast pocket.

What is it that the fashion whores call those things? I think. Ah yes, a pocket square.

 “That’s a nice pocket square.” I say. Smiling brilliantly, a smile I am sure does not reach my eyes, hell; I don’t even think it reaches my cheekbones.

“Well thanks, darling. I am glad you noticed.” He returns my smile and speaks in a low baritone that is meant to indicate sophistication and class. He probably expects my knees to wobble, my heart to flutter like a humming bird, my body to surge with electric energy and my pussy to melt on his face.

But all he gets is a smirk followed by a burp.

I should’ve known that, a starter of deep fried calamaris, was a recipe for burps and farts. Already my stomach complains at the onslaught of that sea dwelling urchin and I know I will have to pay a visit to washroom.

What is it that those elitist whores call it? I think. Ah yes, the powder room.

“Looks like the hors d’oeuvre do not agree with you, my love.” He is amused by the burp and the shock on my face there after.

“Looks like you are right.” I say. I am too classy to ask him what the fuck hors d’oeuvre means; but not that classy, because I decide that I will be saving his number on my phone as ‘The French Whore’.

An Old Carton

“Sweets, get going!!  We’re all waiting for you.”

“All?”

“Just come, will you? The heat is killing me, I’m going to kill you if you don’t come over in five.”

Would she be with them? The Chitra Basu. In her faded floral palazzo pants billowing in the warm summer wind, cat-eye sunglasses catching the glare of the sun and her lush locks shrouding half her beautiful face, brushing her supple pink unpainted lips. I picked my handbag, stashed some notes from the drawer, snatched the keys, locked the door and walked out before I could allow myself to hold back and hesitate.

The inherent entanglement of headphone wires

Varun returned to his laptop to find he had another message from Asha and that his headphone wires were tangled, again. He sighed and began to untangle them as he read Asha’s message, “What did you mean when you said that people should not date outside their own leagues?”

Varun was taken aback. When had he said that? Had he even said that? He knew better by now than to ask Asha what this was in reference too. That would only make her mad and earn him a lecture on how he never paid any attention to what she said. It did not matter that her current  train of thought was delayed by a few weeks. He thought back to all of their conversations over the past few weeks trying to remember where this thought was coming from. He looked at the tangle of headphones in his hand. How did it get so entangled in the blink of an eye!

Dopey Hopes

Morning shower used to be fun. Research says that lonely people spend longer hours in warm showers. Now my only sliver of solace and warmth is disrupted by calls from the cab-drivers. They assign a different cab-driver every day and every driver is a new nightmare. Despite satellites tracking and streaming my precise location right into his goddamn phone, the driver inevitably prefers to call me up and – against a backdrop of dire honking – I must explain in excruciating detail the herculean journey he must undertake to reach me at Number 12, 17^th Main.

The commute is too long for the distance but too short for me to listen to music. I don’t like music because music is a lie. When you don a headphone, you’re immersing yourself in a lie but when you must immerse yourself in a lie, it’s a shame when you can’t immerse yourself long enough.

Here and There

“Sometimes, I have these questions,” her father says, looking away from the TV. He has always had questions, more so now that he’s been retired for a decade and spends most of his waking hours in front of the TV.

“What keeps everything spinning? I mean the planets, around the sun, they’ve all been spinning for millennia, haven’t they? What keeps them going? Why don’t they just fall into the sun?”

“They would, eventually, I suppose.” She’s not too sure herself.

“Isn’t it fascinating?” He turns around to look at her with an earnestness of a precocious child. He looks older than the seventy or so years he has lived. His eyes have sunk and become dark and stoic. She remembers an afternoon, over lunch, when he’d kneeled down to feed the cat when she’d noticed the first signs of a bald patch. That was years ago when she wasn’t married and had barely just got into college. It was the year when there was a hailstorm in April; the year her mother coughed blood in their tiny blue sink; the year they moved out to the city in an apartment twenty minutes away from the hospital.

He…She

He amused her,

She intrigued him.

He liked to hold tight,

She liked her space in the nights.

They first met for lunch,

He paid,

She ate.

Then for drinks,

And a night of uncomfortable snogging.

She gave it a month,

He gave it a few days.

They gave it another night,

It still didn’t feel right.

They met with friends about,

He had fun.

She had more fun with him around.

Maybe, they thought, maybe there was something like love to be found.

They created a routine,

Of texting, calling, meeting, sleeping.

He still liked to hold tight,

She still would put up a fight.

She had long hair, he loved to wrap around his hands and ride,

He had long legs, she longed to wrap her legs around and sleep.

He insisted on dropping her home every single time,

She cracked jokes about rapists waiting for her in the dark of the night.

One night, after,

He held her and made her laugh for an hour,

She thought this could be what love looked like, when you watched above from a tower.

That night, she did not fight, instead slept in his arms,

It felt just right.

Of ghost towns and empty hearts

Laura drove her four by four, along a path that could best be described as flattened ground on a bulbous terrain, created by the constant patter of horse hoofs, ages ago. With a buoyant spurt of flora along the path, Laura realized that it was she who had revived it for her journey to Animas Fork, a ghost town in Colorado, after what must have been months or years perhaps. Her freshly aligned jeep tires effortlessly trampled every clueless growth along its path, as it made its way through the winding mountain to reach the top.

Just like its name, the approach route forked into sudden directions in an animated ballet of a mischievous elf. Driving up the path was like chasing Johnny across their massive yard that was almost always strewn with toys. You never know, where the boy might turn, when he might turn or how he might turn.

And finally when Laura would huff and puff and shout in a labored breath that she gave up. Johnny would laugh and say, “See how I tricked you, this is how a Zebra’s stripes create a zigzag illusion, Mummy!”

Laura laughed at the memory just as soon as tears trickled down her smiling face. She did not bother to wipe them away, instead she slowed down and she willed time to slow down as well, willed that lifelike memory of Johnny to stay, wished she could live in that memory a thousand years. Johnny was gone, just one instant, one moment when she had looked away, and he had run down the road chasing a kitten; one flash of a truck with the driver distracted by his buzzing phone. One life lost.

Since then Laura’s life had been all about “what if’s”. What if she hadn’t looked away? What if the kitten had decided to cross Johnny’s path a second later? What if Johnny had been distracted just enough to miss seeing the kitten? What if the driver had kept his phone on silent? What if the call had come a second later?

The “what ifs” had haunted Laura for months and they still did. What if Johnny was still alive; she would not be dead inside.

It had been eleven months and twenty-three days now, and she was finally in a condition to take up a solo assignment. It was to create a photo diary of America’s ghost towns. She had already covered Centralia in Pennsylvania; Bodie in California and now it was Animas Fork, Colorado.

The sun had hidden itself behind the horizon of an infinite sky. Millions of stars lit up clear Colorado skies, stars that peeked through tall pine trees lining the woods in a zigzag medley, dangerously claiming the path Laura rode on.

L8 CMMR

‘Why don’t you work from home?’ Sandhya said, her voice drowning in the pitter-patter of the sudden rain and the relentless honking of the stranded vehicles. She said, louder this time, ‘Why don’t you work from home? From my home?’

His fingers tapped on his wrist-watch. He raked a hand through his wet hair and she caught the faintest whiff of sweat. ‘You stay nearby?’ he asked. Why would he ask that? Of course he knew. Although he hadn’t been home, they’d spoken about it occasionally. She’d mentioned how she walked to work and he’d joked how well that had been working for her. When he’d say something like that, she’d kick at his feet, or if no one was around, blow smoke on his face until he backed off, something she couldn’t imagine doing back in college when they were friends, good friends. She regarded him only briefly as he looked away outside the café at the rain and the people scurrying around to take shelter under heavy trees, holding his hesitance. A surge of chill, unaccounted by the cold howling wind, roused her body and she gripped his hand and stepped into the rain.

Romantic or retard

You are heartbroken. Again! Like seriously? Again? How can one person get his heart broken so many times? How is that even statistically possible? And yet here we are! You convinced yourself it was different this time. You were sure you had found your soulmate. You were going to make it work this time, you were sure of it! It just felt perfect, different, like it was meant to be. And you ran with it. Of course you did. Like  you have a hundred times before. And it was glorious. It was beautiful. It was passionate, all-consuming. It hurt, but it hurt so good. It had to be true, because it can hurt so much only when it is true, right ? right!

After Sunset

The questions were as stale as their faces. Is it an art or a craft? How much does your fiction draw on your own life? Questions everyone knows answers to, if only vaguely, and all one hopes for, really, is a lucid confirmation from someone older and wiser. When he was younger, there was the charm but in its place had slipped in something far more sinister—a throbbing, almost proud, reverberation of age in his old eroded self.

Each time she met his eyes, she felt a tectonic shift in her being. It lent her movement the grace of a French actress and to her insides, a twisted frustration of a deep sea eel. Every tissue in her body softened, loosened and baked in his warm corporeal presence. The room, dense with perfume and hushed evening breaths, she was sure, was essentially empty but for the two of them. Him and her.

High Tea

“He’s improving,” Ms Chatterjee said, glancing away towards Ketan who sat in the last row beside a kid intently picking his nose. Kalyani looked around at the other kids; with their shirts neatly tucked in, hair neatly parted and shoelaces neatly tied, all beaming and earnest, they were all too delighted to be in their own skin.

Surprise Boo!

Let’s see how this night goes Boo. I know, you will be there tonight, wearing your new pair of stilettos and I will be standing in an invisible corner of the bar, with a black four-four, tucked around my belly.

You will walk in, holding his arms and rush to your reserved table. I will be sucking on my Bacardi. Your lips will glitter with your lip-gloss, which I know, tastes like plum. I have not trimmed my facial hair in past four months, so no one knows who I am. You will shine as a pearl, with every beam of light bouncing off your flawless skin. I will blend with darkness; black hoodie, black pants and black night shades. You will smile, maybe laugh out loud, and turn all the heads in the bar; amazing you. I will be quiet as a church mouse.

You won’t look at me, not even once, just like you never used to, in a busy hall, way before I even met you.

Fact and Fiction

“Kill someone”, Nandita snapped, and reached for more than a handful of potato chips from the bowl in her lap. Ashok, sitting on the other side of the table, watched her as her tongue scoured her cavities and poked against her cheeks. A sleek silver necklace, possibly bought at a flea market, chafed against her neck that glistened with sweat. She sipped from a glass of water and he could tell that she had to exert an effort; the wicker chair creaked as she leaned forward and shifted sideways.

“Kill the grandmother,” she said, “or her rabid horny pet dog, oh wait, kill the grandmother, she’s a drag – always sitting on the rocking chair masticating spite

She would say …

He clutches the packet in his tattered patch jeans pocket. He clutches it firmly, as if it’s a pressure ball. He feels the volume once more; he has enough for the night. He has enough for the next two nights. In fact, he has twice the volume needed to kill one junkie. The junkie, who broke his vows and a few cups in the kitchen, a while ago.

The street is busier and darker than usual; vendors, pub-hoppers, bikers, prostitutes are bustling from every corner­­­, like rats in a dungeon. But he appears to pay no heed and when he does, they don’t ruffle him at all. He hasn’t removed his shades. Not in days or perhaps weeks or months. His eyes are billowy, and his vision is clouded, under those night shades, with those heartaches. He sees no future, or past for that matter. It’s the present, if at all he can accept the way it is, that bothers him.