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The Valentine Knock : A Short Story by Naval Langa

THE OLD PARENTS, especially having a son or a daughter of marriageable age, whenever see an eligible candidate, start knitting an idea: the age-old idea of marrying their offspring. My mother was not an exception. On seeing Sarita coming early in the morning on my birthday, Mama had begun the knitting, using needle and thread of her imagination. I knew that Sarita and I were living on two different sets of earth. There was no connecting thread. There were needles and needles.

Since I joined my job, twenty-five Km far from the city, I hardly got time to meet Sarita on weekdays. It was different when we were doing our graduation in chemistry. But the weekends were ours. Out of the city drive, walking on the bank of the lake, drinking coconuts, and sometimes sitting in a pocket-friendly restaurant: these were the items on our menu.

She had started attending her factory. Both the chemical stuff were caged into money-spinning machines. For Sarita, it was nothing more than shouting at workers and scolding engineers for better output. She was assisting her brother and father.

“You know Vishal, these workers are born-lazy," she would open her factory premises while sitting in restaurants, too.

“Change the subject, or change the mindset.” I was bound to oppose her because as per her definition, I too would be a born-lazy, late coming, and dim-witted. I was also a worker in another factory.

Neither of us knew about the reason for which we had continued to meet after completing our study. But Sarita’s visits to my home wrote a new chapter. 

“Do you know what your Mama told me on phone today?”

“She is in hurry to find a bride for me.”

“She had found out. It’s me.” I took Sarita’s words as our teacup jokes. My word-decoding machine was not poor. But when I looked at my payroll, I saw that I was a snail on the ground. And Sarita was a fairy, travelling in spacecraft. My mother had seen only her face and her friendly talks on my birthday. She did not know that there were thirty workers like me working under her direct supervision. She was the daughter of an industrialist.

“Then why she comes to meet you every Sunday?”

“Mama, we are friends. Nothing else.” But my words failed to shake her castle of hope. The castle survived until she took her last breath.

******

IT WAS SUNDAY. For some, it begins with a good tea and for some, it begins with a lengthy yawn. My day started with the touch of a hurricane. It was in my one-room apartment. It started blasting in every direction.

“I have not seen a cruel man like you. Where had you been since a fortnight?”

“I… I was…”

“Okay… I am not dying to see you. “

“Sarita I was at….”

“Okay… who cares for me?” She did not give me time to say that I was at my village for some religious rites. My mother’s ashes.

“You are coming to my home. Seven o’clock, evening. Sharp Seven.”

She wanted me to meet her parents. Marriage proposal.

“Sarita, but…”

“Shut up.”  

*******

IF I HAD LOVED any woman, other than my mother, she was Sarita, the woman who was a deputy director of a big industrial unit of the city. Though I knew that no woman could have a fine reason to come to a young man’s home every Sunday evening and remain with him until midnight, I had never fantasized about her. I knew my limits.

On her insistence, I had to go. Her parents knew me. Earlier her father had offered me a job in his factory, too. But Sarita had opposed making me her subordinate. So I had joined elsewhere.

“You know Vishal, she is a little bit immature.” The industrialist father was quite mature—mature enough to teach lessons of economics to a chemistry guy. “She wants to marry you. But she is used to a living that is impossible at your home. You understand what I mean.“ I understood what he meant. The copybook arguments: she was used to spending an amount equal to my salary for her make-up materials; she did not know even how to make tea, and she was used to driving costly cars.

As if it was not enough, he added, “You please talk with her and tell her to accept the proposal from an NRI industrialist. I think you will help us.”

“Yes, uncle. I will.”

 ******

I FOLLOWED THE letters written on Sarita’s home-walls. I had nothing to complain about her father. He had just followed the protocol. He was a shrewd businessman. He even tried to make an anti-virus system out of a virus itself. I was a virus in his system of comforts.

Days became a week, and the weeks rolled out into a couple of months. I tried to forget her face, the hair she kept flying, the lake-deep eyes; I tried to forget her questioning eyebrows and silent lips. I even tried to forget how I liked her knuckles.

The Comforting sun of mid-February was yet to come out of clouds. Dawn, perhaps. There I heard a knock. The knock that I would recognize even while sleeping pulled my woollen shawl. My blinking eyes were astonished to see a face, the face that was imprinted onto my conscience.

With a flash, the pool of light entered my apartment. The cold was nowhere in the air. Her well-plated hair, a traditional dress that was not costly, and a middle-class suitcase in hand: these would have been ordinary things. But for the women before my eyes, it was something else.

She went straight into the kitchen. If a disorder of a bachelor’s house were to be ignored, my kitchen was not a complicated place.

“Let me make tea. ” She said.

The deputy director of a company had put on an ordinary woman’s cloak. By then I had altered my position and stood as near as chivalry would permit. I moved my head up and down, parallel to the movements of her hands fetching articles lying on the shelf. 

“You know Vishal, I have stopped doing make-ups. And I… I have learnt some cooking, too. And I think this house is quite big for us. Isn’t it?”

“Sarita, my dear, please don’t... don’t say more.”

“Oh…” and there was an embrace, the lifelong union.

It was Valentine’s Day.

And the gift from God was under my roof. 

THE END

[Image courtesy Valentine Cameron Prinsep, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

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