Clean-up

Sunday mornings have always been cleaning up days for her. Unlike other couples who sleep on till noon on weekends after partying until the wee hours of the morning or staying up to watch a movie, she would wake up at 2 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday mornings to shut the door so that he could leave at an unearthly hour for work to avoid the early morning rush in the local trains. Unlike others who work five days a week and sleep till late on weekends, he worked only on weekends. ‘So that one of us is always home to look after the child,’ he reasoned with her and talked his way into letting his employers let him work from home way before working from home became a universal practice.

It was a Sunday. Like all other Sundays, she began the day with the weekly chores beginning with the mile-long milk run followed by the visit to the weekly farmer’s market to pick up freshly picked  organic vegetables and fruits. A short detour on the way back home through the neighbors’ back door to share a late breakfast of freshly baked buns with piping hot cups of pure Darjeeling Tea and the latest gossip in the small town. Her neighbor would have been the police investigation team’s delight as she had a knack for snooping on every household in the neighborhood without even stepping out. As usual, she had some juicy bits to share on that fine day. The new neighbor next door had apparently been dating one of his students and had brought her home after a secret marriage in a temple like they do in Hindi films. The lady in the house next to his was a complete dimwit. The man in the house opposite hers had been battering his wife on Saturday night again going by her midnight screaming. She wondered how she, who lived right across the road or next door, missed out on all these happenings. Little realizing that it would be her turn to be the subject of her gossip in a few days from then, she smiled and nodded at all the neighborhood news that was relayed to her within the short span of half an hour. Her neighbor’s witty comments were always a welcome diversion.  But she also looked forward to the brief brunch break before she turned to the next lot of chores to be completed. She crossed over to her side of the road making a mental note of the sequence in which she would proceed and unlocked the gate.

It was a sprawling, dilapidated bungalow that took hours to clean up. Having settled the little one with a new adventure tale, she changed the sheets and soaked the discarded  linen in boiling hot water and turned to complete the dusting.  It took her close to an hour to dust every room when she decided that it was high time, she removed papers from the glass shelves and gave them a thorough wipe. She would never get another chance since he had specifically forbidden her to touch his papers. She would put everything back in the same place she told herself and he would never know. She began rifling through the sheaf of papers on the top shelf. Electricity bills, gas papers, grocery receipts, scraps of paper with poems that he had taken to scribbling in his spare time and would often share with her to seek her opinion. No harm in a sneak preview of his latest offerings before he felt confident enough to read them aloud, she told herself. She found odd scraps of paper with poems and poetic prose pieces scribbled in his neat handwriting and began to read them with her trained critical eye. 

These were love poems for a beloved, a beloved who had absolutely no resemblance to her. They appeared to be the outpourings of a lover pining for his beloved. She cast her expert eye to assess their suitability for a literary magazine even though some of the phrases seem too contrived for her taste. Some contained veiled suggestions for trysts at the beloved’s place; others spoke of moonlit walks by the riverfront. Leafing through rhyming verses that spoke of the desire for in vitro insemination and prose that begged the moon and the stars to carry the message across to the beloved, she found an unflattering description of a character who appeared to fit her. Was this how she appeared to him now? She could never have guessed from his affectionate behavior. They say men cheating on their partners grow extra nice to cover up their guilt.

Her sixth sense was warning her that something was amiss. Her suspicions were confirmed when she untied the strings of the soft fabric wallet in which he would keep cash for house running. They came tumbling out, four airmail letters that he had preserved as a keepsake. She didn’t have to read the letters sent to his work address to know what was in them and who wrote them. But she did open them to check if she had guessed right. She was dead on the mark. It was the friend’s visiting sister who had fled overseas to escape an arranged marriage and who he would often mention in passing. Everything fell in place, the nocturnal walks, the mid-week visits to the workplace on some errand or the other. He had even persuaded her to accompany him on the pretext of taking her shopping (since you love doing that he had said) and even taken to her to a fancy salad bar where he had probably met her on a lunch date. Trusting him completely, she had been so charmed by the return of romance in their lives that she had not wondered at the frequency of the work trips. To think that he made her accompany him to another city so that he could pick up her letters from his workplace and she had been so grateful.

The earth literally shook under her feet. Her knees appeared to buckle under her. She didn’t know what to do. She was in an out of the washroom almost five times in the next half an hour. The little one was clamoring for her attention. She gave him a quick lunch and patted him to sleep. Then she returned to pour over the diaries and the correspondence. She found the writing very infantile. How could a grown up write letters with hearts all over? Her expressions were so trite and cliched. How did she look like? Was she more beautiful than her? How did she dress? A million questions ran through her mind. She began to feel ugly, unwanted, unloved. Who was she?

She pondered for nearly a week. She found that she did not know who she was. She dressed the way he wanted her to. She carried herself the way he wanted her to. She lived the way he wanted her to. She even thought the way he wanted to her. She had let him take complete control of her life. She had forgotten what she liked eating, what she liked reading, what she liked doing. She was his creation, a creation he had gotten bored with. Over the next month, she gave it a lot of thought. She tried to find out who she was. She discovered that she was a person different from the one he had created. She wanted to find this person again for better or for worse.

She mustered the courage to confront him with the letters. Like all cheating men he denied it altogether; said it was a figment of her imagination. But she couldn’t trust him anymore. Each time he stepped out, she imagined he was out with the other woman. Each time he looked at her, she could feel the other woman’s presence. Each time he spoke to her, she heard the paeans dedicated to the other woman. The house was getting too messy for her liking. She decided to give it a final clean-up. She folded all the scraps, the sheaf of paper, aerogrammes in the cloth wallet and sent him packing.