Glaring Shadow - A stream of consciousness novel

Chapter 15 - Brink of Incest

 "Once Raju and I had become classmates, what a lovely time we have had!" he continued the recap of his times with his cousin. "His boisterousness proved to be the perfect foil for my adventurism, he had his finger in every pie and I too poked my nose everywhere. Though we got into trouble often in and out of school, if not his bluster, it was my wits that used to save the day for us. Whatever, to the delight of all, we were on target when it came to studies; but once we made it to the college, we began to drift apart; he focused to excel at studies and I meandered on the path of adolescence, I say the defining phase of life; while the hard-nosed and the dull-headed escape its snares, the romantics sucked in by its charms make the bottom rungs of the merit ladders. Didn't I say, if only there were to be a five year adolescent recess between the high school and the college, the toppers' list in higher studies would be topsy-turvy. Still to begin with, like me, Raju too struggled to get a breakthrough but unlike me, his career graph had plateaued well below the half-way mark, maybe for want of the proverbial ounce of luck. But, as I came to realize later, life made it even for him all through before death snatched him away in his mid-course, and on the contrary, fate led me to the highs of life before pushing me into its lows; well making it meaningless in the end. Maybe it's the way of life that the flood of it gets balanced by the ebb of fate; wonder what's the so-called 'gaining the upper hand mean?"

"That reminds me of Raja Rao's observation in Benign Flame - it's a peculiar feature of human nature in that we love to see those close to us climb up the staircase of success, but, behind us; if they happen to catch up with us, needing to share the space with them, we feel choked, and were they to overtake us, we feel morose, though they might remain friendly. It is because, used as we were to condescend to descend in our affections, we lose countenance, not counting our jealousy, that they too might seem patronizing from the altered stations."

"How can I differ with that after what life had taught me," he said, and continued after a long pause. "There are things in life that are better pictured through symbolisms; in those days of thrift, it was a case of loose dresses for the kids to serve them well into adolescence. The college going boys though were allowed to kick the bulky knickers to wear narrow-cut pants that were in vogue then, but for the girls, their 'menstruation to nuptial' long skirts had longevity of their own, shortened though by early marriage. However, in time, the so-called bell-bottoms came to shape man's trouser; it's as if all vied with each other to ever widen its bottoms; but then, after those stints with the narrow-cuts and the bell-bottoms, as if men realized the futility of triviality in their own world, they had been sticking to the formal wear of the normal trouser. When it was time for me to make it to college, it was time to learn cycling, which is like learning to walk, and both involve false steps but with a difference; while a kid's missteps won't break its bones, a cyclist's learning curve is generally drawn in his own and others' blood as well. Whatever, soon I began pedaling my Raleigh into the arena of youth only to break my heart."

"Isn't it said devoid of calf love, of what avail is youth."

"Maybe all are not made for romance, and youth was still some way from me then," he said and continued. "Before I could acquire my sense of adolescence, I would've probably begun my sex life in incest; some six months shy of being fifteen, I became friendly with a newly married cousin on a family visit, who made me privy to her dull married life, and one evening, tired for her window-shopping, she asked me to massage her legs to relieve her fatigue, and when I expressed my surprise at the softness of her being, she told me that is the way women are made. After a couple of days, she moved to an old couple's house to be with them for a week or more, and that evening when I went to see her, she asked me to stay back for the night as she was bored to death with the oldies. After dinner, when we were alone, complaining of shoulder pain, she asked me to massage her nape; as I was tentative in my reach, she slid the pallu off her low-neck blouse to unveil her fabulous boobs and the fascinating valley as if to afford me the first flesh feast of my life, oh how tempted I was to lay my hands on her heaving bosom! Well, I was too young and inexperienced to advance farther down and she too might've felt it delicate to goad me to be geared up for her final favor. Maybe to pick up the sexual threads that we both had half-heartedly left that night, she sought my company the next night as well but my father didn't approve of that for he could've smelled incest in the air from her demeanor; if not, who knows, the next time, I would've dared to advance deep into her valley or she might've been forthright with her eagerness for sex. Then I was too raw to know what I had lost but when I came of age, I was wont to wonder whether that bout of massage would've led us to the bed of incest that is had I crossed the threshold of her bulging boobs. Whatever, I could never figure out whether I should thank my father for saving me from committing a possible incest, or curse him for having robbed me of sex with a voluptuous woman at her youthful best."