(A9) Chapter 9 Resolve
As the scenes from the past flashed across Kuntal’s mind, he re-lived his life as episodes that competed with one another to play on the canvas of his consciousness. The most pleasant of these episodes was the night he had spent in Sheetal’s arms. He would often joke to her that he would one day take her away to a jungle and have her entirely to himself. She would parry the suggestion with a counter-joke and he would persist in invoking the imagination of a night with her. But both knew that in our conservative Indian society, such an experience before marriage was not easily possible. She would mischievously put her forefinger on his lips and say, “You should thank your stars for whatever little you are able to get of me and wait for the big day till after marriage.”
“What if I die of waiting?” he would say.
“Then, there is always a next life!” she would tease him.
And then this opportunity befell them unexpectedly. It all happened about a month before Rashid’s murder and Kuntal’s escape.
Rohit and Sheetal’s class of students went for an educational trip to a hill station. It was a botany class and the purpose of the visit was to collect plant varieties. The teacher, an old woman, took the students to the hill-side and the students scattered all around to locate and collect plants.
For Sheetal and Rohit this was an opportunity to lose themselves in each other’s arms. They deliberately strayed away from the group in search of loneliness and soon came to a hollow cave where there was none to watch them except a few colourful sparrows. There, in the sheltered loneliness of the cave, their love for each other and the bursting instincts of their youthful bodies overpowered them and they moved physically, emotionally and spiritually into each other till both forgot their separate existence and became one body, one mind and one soul. They loosened their clothes just enough to give to the other to those parts of their bodies where the man-woman instinct resided in all its intensity. And as they touched each other in those parts which had thus far been beyond their reach, their bodies writhed, their breath struggled to find space and the lips, tongue and mouth of each strove to expand the area of contact with the other. Finally, a moment came when instincts acted freely and they watched helplessly. The essences of Rohit’s blood, squeezed by a pleasant pain, squirted and passed into Sheetal’s entrails, warming her insides with a sensation she had so keenly yearned for. Their lips came asunder and they looked at each other in a manner they had never looked at each other before.
For a long time, Rohit and Sheetal remained clinging to each other, trying to recover physically and emotionally from the experience they had had for the first time in their lives. Then, they covered the parts of their bodies that they had bared for each other’s pleasure and moved out of the cave.
The intoxication of the experience kept their head reeling for many a day after this. Then, one day, Sheetal told Rohit in a tone of anxiety, “Rohit, I have not bled this month so far. I am worried about that day. What if something happens? How are we going to explain it?”
Rohit tried to make light of the issue and said, “That will only hasten our marriage. Once you become the mother of my child, your parents will have no option but to marry you to me.”
Within a few days of this the rape attempt on Sheetal occurred and Rohit escaped after murdering Rashid. He kept wondering whether Sheetal had become pregnant. And now when he met her as Kuntal, saw Naavika and calculated her age, he was convinced that she was his daughter.
As he sat now alone in the darkness of the night and sipped from a glass of liquor, the memory of his physical love with Sheetal and the belief that Naavika was the product of that contact made his head burst with pressure.
Kuntal muttered to himself: “Why the hell should Rajesh be sitting as Sheetal’s husband? I ruined my life for her. The daughter she has is mine. She loves me and I love her. We have loved each other from days when Rajesh wouldn’t have even dreamt that a girl by that name existed. What, then, gives him the right to possess her more than my right?”
He tried to imagine Sheetal lying by his side. He moved his hands on the pillow as if running his fingers in her hair as he had done when she came to him after the attempt of rape on her. He felt her absence more than he had ever felt before. For many years he had lived peacefully without her, thinking that she had moved out of his life for ever to some unknown space where he had no relevance. Now, he suddenly realised that the man who called himself her husband was in fact the irrelevant one.
“Why should I live a lonely life?” Kuntal said to himself. “Why can’t Rajesh live it? It suits his personality too. He is a philosopher and a slogger. He is hardly a man of this world. He is too decent and too divine for this wily world.” A chuckle, typical of a drunkard, appeared on his lips as the thought of Rajesh’s divine nature crossed his mind.
For some time he stared at the ceiling where the fan was running unconcerned with the goings-on in his mind. Then, he gulped down the remaining part of the liquor in the glass tumbler, as if to perform a ritual for a resolve, and murmured, “From today starts the greatest project of my life — PROJECT GET-BACK SHEETAL. Rajesh, my friend, you’ll have to move out of the circle of my life. Look, man, don’t be obstinate. You know I am a murderer. Fear me, man, fear me!”
Kuntal let out a fit of devilish laughter and reveled in the sound of it. His whole body convulsed as he laughed at his idea of himself as a wicked man up against a saintly Rajesh. The glass tumbler fell from his hand and broke into a hundred pieces. He slumped on the bed, said with devilish joy, “It is all going to be fun!”, and began to snore loudly.
