Sweet 'n' Sour | ✔

forty-one

40. kala ho tum, ek jeeti jaagti kala. (You're an art, an alive and breathing art.)

warning// sexual content ahead.

•°•

For the last few weeks, I had been fighting an internal battle. I couldn't go to back being normal with her no matter how hard I tried. I snapped, ignored, avoided, and basically acted like a certified douche towards her. I was hurt, hurt beyond belief, but that gave me no right to treat her the way I did. What stung me the most was the fact that the one person I strived to be perfect in the eyes of, must have deemed me nothing less than a loser. The feeling of being unwanted by your wife, to the extent that she was ignoring you, honestly shoved me so deep down into the insecurities I couldn't find a way to crawl back to the surface.

I needed time alone, but then I realised running away is no more an option. I have married her, and vowed to stay by her side for the rest of my life, through thick and thin. She is my responsibility, and there are many things Aditya Shrivastava is incapable of, but abandoning his responsibilities isn't one of them.

The time I sulked in my own pitiful cocoon, I blamed her for everything. For hiding things from me, for lying to me, for not telling me the truth every time I gave her a chance, a choice, and for making a fool out of me. She may not have thought it the way I did, there's no way she did, I know, but I couldn't help the feeling. I felt incompetent and lacked, and I found her easier to blame since she was the perpetrator.

What I missed was that she suffered just as much as me if not more. First, she had to suffer the agony of painful sex, then lie to me for my sake, and then live under the constant stress of not only going through all that over again but also the fear of getting caught and hurting me in the process. I don't condone what she did, but I can understand her.

The text message was the last straw.

I had been missing her badly. When mom told me she won't come home for another week, it struck me how habitual I've grown of her. I need her around, just to look at her if not share any verbal responses. I realised I was starting to take her for granted, and it made me feel like an asshole. She is so devoted to me, so kind, so giving, that I forgot she is just a human, and she has her limits. Which I was afraid had been crossed. So when I called her, adamant again about not letting her hear the shakiness in my breath, I heaved a sigh of relief when I realised she hadn't really meant anything bad for not letting me know about her whereabouts. I was hurt though. The last person I had expected to know everything about my wife but me was my mom. Yet they had grown closer in the time we had drifted apart. It settled me, at least my mother was not as heartless as me to shun the new family member.

Reading her text that night, when half of the world was asleep, but she was awake, just as restless as me, had me smiling like a lovestruck puppy.

I had spent a week trying to gather enough courage to face her. I was practically counting hours by yesterday. When Preeti called me this morning, I made up an excuse to not sound desperate but had fretted for almost three hours on what to wear. Then my eyes had located the black suit and I remembered the way her eyes always lit up upon seeing me in it.

Today had been one of the hardest on me. I didn't know what to expect, so I was shaking in my boots on the way to her old house. Even the cab driver had asked if he should halt the car on the side of the road because I looked pale and sick and he was afraid I would spoil his seats. As embarrassing as it was, I would be ruining it for myself if I keep up with the overthinking. That had me swallowing another stress reliever just to get my nerves in check.

But Priya's response to my arrival was a pleasant surprise. She looked starstruck and I knew I had the suit to thank for it. Then she had walked up to me, timidly as always, with her hair going awry in all directions and her clothes smelling of dishwasher and spices. Not the best combination but watching her fiddle clumsily like a squirrel under my gaze made it all worth it. She didn't ever look like that back home, always making sure her hair was tangle-free and her saree draped sensually around her curves. The fact that she does all that for me when she could have been as comfortable as she is now made me feel a juxtaposition of wild emotions.