Blog story on love and loss

…Years later, when the telephone rang on a warm, sticky afternoon, she answered the call while her hands were still wet from the household work. Except for the soft curl that took birth from the parting of her hair and fell across her lips that gently quivered, her body had been lulled into the darkness of a quaint passage that was filtering light through its dusty, broken window. In her mind she was marveling at the richness of the voice on the other end of the phone that hadn’t been altered.

Swaying her thick, plaited hair, she would walk through the college corridors, stealing glances at him. In the midst of his friends, he would cite poetry verses, the smoothness of his voice sculpting a hero out of him. How she would then imagine wiping the sweat from his forehead with the corner of her cotton saree and praise his majestic moustache!
“Igniting minds a little too much?” She finally told him one day while, sitting at the farther end of the corridor, she could see him making rings of smoke with a cigarette.

Thereafter, love was etched on the pages of a blue diary that, apart from the rabble-rousing creations of the gentleman, had many a message inspired by the cut of her chin and her deep brows.

“Hello, Amravati? Is that you?”

Of late, the telephone connection had been acting up. Raju had come the other day to fix it but to no avail.
“Madam, bas aur kuch din,” he assured her while digging into some fine-tasting kheer.
“Hello, Kabir here. Can you hear me?”
Her face, by then, had been streaked red. While wiping her tearful eyes, she had ran her hands across the giant vermilion bindi. Dizzy, she felt for the bulge in her stomach.

‘Click’-she put back the receiver. Perhaps, the telephone needed to be replaced. Perhaps, Raju had to be summoned soon. Perhaps, her husband waiting upstairs was longing to smell the borders of her saree.