Serve you right, you stupid bitch.
Oh, go ahead. You think I don't sense you judging me? Your thoughts crawl up my back, tiny serpents hissing disapproval as they strive to burrow under my skin. I'd prefer it if your eyes gaze into mine and your body recoil, like a mimosa leaf shrinking from even the gentlest stroke. But that will never happen now.
I had a tender touch too. A hard stare yes, but always followed by a gentle caress. You might find this difficult to swallow, but it's true. Ask my mother. She'll tell you.
My eyes first discovered you standing on the platform, apart, aloof. As aloof as is possible when you are surrounded by a mass of cotton and synthetic. Even as you are being jostled from all directions by the swarm of female bodies, trying to protect their oily heads from the rain dripping from the distressed corrugated sheets above without conceding their position. You kept fidgeting with an umbrella; the faded black cloth refused to stay attached to the rusty spokes, bent out of shape. You stood out among the throng in the way your shoulders curved inwards, yielding that extra inch of privacy. The train pulled in, and you vanished from view. You must have abandoned your wish for isolation and joined in the scrum, your body straining against other bodies, against heaving breasts and thrusting elbows. I know you must have succeeded because I couldn't find you after the train pulled out.
I knew I would imagine you again that night, when I turned towards the peeling wall in the gloom as my hand stroked away my loneliness, the strains of the latest hit song floating in through the bars of the splintered window frame. But I didn't know I would see you again the next day. You carried the umbrella, even though there was no rain. Your hair was still in its single braid, but with a coral ribbon today, to match your sari, pleated to perfection. You were a fresh Himalayan apple I ached to peel.
My eyes grew addicted to looking for you. The days they didn't spot you were my fault; I was late getting to the station. Only once did I not find you even though I arrived on time, and I waited over two hours, but you never appeared. I tried to conjure up every detail of the last time I had seen you, just the day before, stretching out the two minutes into a constant rhapsody tinged a peacock blue, the color of the border of the sari you had worn.
I wondered if I would ever see you again.
The next day, there you were, and it was as if I could breathe again. I looked for signs you had been unwell; it had been raining hard. You blotted your brow with the small white handkerchief with pink flowers, and you crushed the moist folds in your hand.
After a few weeks of staring at you from afar, I gathered my nerve. I had spoken to girls before, but they had to interact with me, as we were related and all. Their eyes fluttered to their feet, for I was perhaps the only young man they had ever talked with in all their tender years. Their touch, as they tied the special bracelet around my wrist every year at the brother-sister festival, felt soft and tentative, a cool and moist towel on a raging summer day.
It took fifty-seven steps to climb the overhead bridge with the flickering tube lights and dank with the stench of stale urine, to cross the tracks to get to your platform. And they seemed to take forever. I waited there, the one male form among a sea of women waiting to board the ladies compartment, a lion amidst a large pride. I gazed at your back, the skin exposed by the cut of your blouse, and I stood close enough behind you to notice the pearly sheen of sweat on your nape. Perhaps you sensed my gaze on you, for you dropped your umbrella, and its wooden handle is where our hands first met.
Your voice as you thanked me was as sweet as I had imagined. My ears, parched to hear more, babbled on and on about the umbrella, my unwitting accomplice. I do not recall what I said, but it made you smile. Just then, the train arrived, and you turned away, the human flood that cascaded through its doors swallowing you in its current.
My body floated on air the whole evening, and the tepid night brought fragrant dreams of you.
I walked fifty-seven steps the next day, and the next. I would drop a coin into the tin of a beggar who used to squat on the overhead bridge, using his tattered rags and his stumps for limbs to elicit guilt and penance from passerby's. The clink of my rupee into his can was not to negate a prior infraction, but for luck.
On the seventh day, I bought you a new umbrella, bubblegum pink. You demurred from accepting. I tried to convince you it was just something I had lying around at home, but you still would not accept it. I was both proud of and annoyed by your stubbornness.
Emulating the hero from movies, I wrote you a letter. I considered writing it in blood, but when I pricked my finger, the red bead that welled up was tiny. A toothpick I snagged from my uncle's box and tried to use with the blood to write with didn't help either, because by the time they dried, the letters looked an unappetizing brown. So I stuck to regular ink, but I borrowed my neighbor's daughter's felt pens to draw flowers in the margins.
I dressed in my best blue shirt. I washed and oiled my hair, combing it into place with a small plastic comb. I had bought it from the blind vendor on the train, between his off key renditions of popular songs, and I always carried it in my back pocket. I tied my handkerchief like a bandanna around my neck; the style was quite the rage at the moment. I purchased a single red rose from a roadside flower girl, paid full price too. I walked the fifty-seven steps, and dropped five whole rupees into the cripple’s can, dreaming of a time to come when you and I would watch the latest movies together - first day first show - and sip sweet sugarcane juice from one glass, our eyes meeting over two straws.
But you would not accept the letter, or the rose. I pressed them upon you, then tried to press them into your hands, but that fist refused to open, while from the other, your handkerchief fluttered away. The rose thudded to the ground. Unnamed, unwashed shoes crushed it underfoot, the crimson petals dissolving into the muck, relinquishing their rouge to the dirty brown of the sludge and dirt. The letter stayed in my hands. Even as I urged you, the surrounding women closed ranks in sisterhood, shoving me aside and away, chiding me for harassing you, calling me a lout, a vagabond and worse. And you stood there and let them.
My gesture had caught you unawares, I reasoned, as I went over it all that night. I had overwhelmed you and shamed you. Which girl with a good character would be so brazen as to accept the shameless advances of a young man in front of the whole world? I should admire your virtuous disposition, not rile against it.
My new attempt would be more discreet, more worthy of you. I would ask you to go with me to the park, sit you down on a bench, away from prying eyes, and profess my feelings to you. And after, we could cool the blush from your cheeks with an ice cream cone from the hawker who sits with his cart outside the park, and maybe even take a horse-drawn carriage ride before I dropped you back to the station, after having made plans for the next day.
I waited every day at the station, but you never came. I arrived earlier and earlier and stayed later and later, but it was moot. Perhaps it embarrassed you to meet me, but you would get over it in due time. Or you were anxious to look at me because you felt you had hurt my feelings, and you had, but when you met me, you would realize that I was not angry or upset at all.
Almost six excruciating weeks later, I was late to the station again. I glanced at the old railway clock, and there you were. You had your hair in a ponytail, the first time I had ever seen it unfurled, fastened back with lilac pins that matched your dress. You were stiff, your head bowed, your eyes looking down at the platform, your arm clutching your purse close to your body. And then you looked up at the man standing next to you, and you smiled. And he smiled at you, intimate, knowing, even as his hands moved a new, gray umbrella from palm to palm. Your lips were daubed with shiny lavender. You were a vision in purple, but all I could see was red.
I remember the rattling noise the coins made when they tumbled from the can as I kicked it on my way back to my side of the tracks. I might have kicked the cripple too, but I can’t be too sure. Besides, he was so emaciated my foot would not have felt any flesh when it connected with him. And if he screamed, the loud drumming in my ears would have drowned out the sound.
My anger cooled from a hot boil to a slow simmer. After the shock came the pain. The anguish of realizing it was my love you had rejected and not my bumbling attempts to woo you. It took a hard night's drinking, followed by spilling the guts, both literal and otherwise, to old childhood friends who had been watching me spiral into despondency, to set me right again.
“It was your fault," one said. "You've been trying to treat her as if she is something special. She’s just like other girls, flirty and coquettish. All they want is attention, and when you give it to them, they scream 'harassment'. Such girls are not like our mothers and sisters. They only understand one language.”
Another chimed in. “That's right. You should have shown her who’s the boss from the start. What does she think of herself, behaving like she’s a big film star or something?
They were right. I was wrong. Not in my pursuit of you, for that is a young man's privilege. No, I had erred in my choice. You were not what I had believed you to be - a simple girl, waiting for the flower of love to take root in her heart. You were a tease, a flirt who got off on the power you had over men, on the effect your come hither looks had, camouflaged in that middle class downward tilt of the eyes. It amused you to beguile us into believing you had a good character when all you relished was the chase. It was a game to you. I was just a game.
They tell me you can only see out of one eye. Good. Not so easy to ensnare anyone now, is it?
I remember unscrewing the bottle, and the vile vapors emanating into the stifling air. That I was the last thing you saw before the acid obliterated your beautiful face is the only thought that brings a smile to mine.