[Copied over from my earlier blog - storyteller.blogspirit.com]

Shubha looked out of the window on her third floor apartment. She had heard the sound of a car being parked. But she could not see much. She came back to the living room and sat down on the sofa. She waited for the elevator to make its beeping sounds on stopping at her floor. It did not. Kailash was not home yet and it was almost ten o’clock in the night.

Shubha had a mild headache when she woke up this morning. She wanted to stay in the bed for some more time. After all it was Saturday and there was nothing to rush. She felt for Kailash on the other side of the bed, her eyes still closed. He wasn’t there. She opened her eyes. She could hear him in the kitchen. ‘Was he making her breakfast?’ she asked herself. She tried to think of the last time he made her breakfast. She could not remember. She pulled herself out of the bed and walked over to the kitchen.

Kailash was dressed up. He was wearing her favorite striped blue shirt with khaki trousers that did not match at all. She walked to him. He was toasting bread, with his back to her side. She put her hands on his shoulder and rested her head on his back.

‘Are you making us breakfast?’, she asked, almost in whispers.
‘Yes, I am’, he replied. She smiled.
‘What do I eat this morning?’
‘Toast and hot chocolate milk’
‘Hmm. And why are you all dressed up?’
‘I need to go to the office. Will be back by two.’
She pulled back. ‘What? Why?’
He turned towards her. ‘Some work has come up. Javed called sometime back. It’s urgent’

She was fully awake now. She was upset. Then she remembered the mosquito nets. They had scheduled a pest control appointment today. The pest control people were to fix mosquito nets on their windows. Kailash had talked to them on last Wednesday to fix the appointment. She was now irritated.

‘So who will manage the fitting of mosquito nets? She questioned.
‘What mosquito nets?’ Kailash asked back.

He had forgotten all about it. Then he remembered. He realised that he should not have said this. ‘She’ll explode now’, he thought. He reacted quickly, ‘I’ll try to get back in time.’ He stretched out his hand like a dance step and pointed to her. ‘But anyway you can manage without me, I know’ he said. He tried to be funny but she was not amused.

She was feeling full after the dinner though she did not eaten much. She waited for Kailash till eight but then she could not wait any longer. It was a bowl of plain khichdi with lime pickles on the side.

The pest control people didn’t show up till noon. Shubha called up Kailash at his office and asked him to check with them. An hour later, Kailash still had not called her back. She rang him up again.

‘What, it been an hour, did you ever call up that pest people? She asked him.
‘I did immediately after you called. They said a person will reach in fifteen minutes’ he replied.
‘No living soul has turned up’
‘But I called. What else can I do? I can’t follow him to the house. He might be on his way.’
‘At least you could have called me up and told me he was coming. You could have checked whether he came or not. You just don’t care, do you?’

The thought lingered on her - Kailash didn’t care. Had she made the right decision in marrying him? He still was the same person she had fallen madly in love with. He hadn’t changed, though she had hoped he would.

He didn’t care much when she first met him at aunty Sujata’s place. She was visiting her aunty during her vacation from work. One evening, aunty called up her close friends and some relatives to meet Shubha. Kailash came that evening with his parents. He too, incidentally, was visiting his parents during his vacation. This coincidence became the excuse for both of them to start a conversation. Aunty was an awful cook but she insisted on making the dessert that evening. Evidently not much of it was consumed though everybody made sure that they complimented Aunty on her kheer. Kailash was the only one who didn’t. He had two bowls of Aunty’s kheer, which apparently was more than half of the total kheer consumed.

‘You, it seems, are the only one who did not like the kheer’ Shubha said to Kailash
‘No, I liked it. It was good’ he said
‘Really? You don’t have to pretend. Did you even have it? Nobody I know here had a drop of that kheer’
‘Yes, I did have two bowls. Well, honestly, I didn’t like it too much though’
‘Then when did you have the second bowl?’
‘There was nothing better to do’

Shubha could not help but notice Kailash’s casual disregard for something apparently as mundane as ‘taste’. She even liked it.

It was not love at first sight. Kailash changed his job and happened to meet Shubha in the new city. They met, and then met often and she found him irresistible. She never knew if Kailash also found her equally irresistible. She wondered if he really loved her as much as she did him. He spoke so little about how he felt for her.

Two years into their marriage, the ‘disregard’ that she had liked at first had now started upsetting her. ‘Is he upset too?’ a sudden thought crossed her mind. ‘Is he late because he does not want to come back?’ The lingering thought left her. The converse of it gripped her now. ‘Does Kailash feel that I care for him enough’ she asked herself. ‘What if he too is asking himself whether marrying her was a mistake?’ She panicked.

She got up from the sofa and walked to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and took out her water bottle. She gulped down the water from the bottle till its chill made her mouth numb and it became impossible for her to drink anymore. She gave it a moment to flow down her throat. She felt relaxed.

Around same time last year she was down with viral fever for about a week. That was the longest period she could remember being sick after getting married. Kailash had to take that week off. There was no one else to take care of her. He gave her whatever she asked for – water, pills, and soup. When she asked for nothing, he either read or watched TV. She had told him that her sickness was his vacation and laughed. He just smiled. All through that week, everyday just once around midnight, he would get up and place his hand over her forehead to check if she had fever. Then he would run over his hand through her hairs and pat the pillow very slowly. He always thought she was asleep but Shubha she was always awake.

She kept back the water bottle and closed the refrigerator.

The door bell rang. Shubha walked swiftly towards the door. She looked through the peep hole. It was Kailash. A drop of tear slid through her eye and hung on her eyelids. She opened the door. She felt an immense rush of love, such that she had not felt in a long time. She threw her arms around him as soon as he stepped in and held him tight.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

She drew back and looked at him. The selflessness of her love stared at him though her moist and beautiful eyes. Kailash looked into those eyes and for a moment stood mesmerized.

‘At least you could have called and informed me that you would be late’ she said and pretended to be angry.