It was a warm Wednesday. After a two hours long lecture on her favourite poet, Keats, Ritwika was unwinding with her coffee on the parapet. Vihans walked upto her and asked her if she had anymore classes for the day. Ritwika could merely mumble a no. He asked her if she wanted to accompany him to Humayun's tomb. She looked at him with a questioning air. He merely gazed at her for an answer. In a helpless yet careful response she said she had to meet Dhritiman, her new suitor. Vihans nodded and gave her a squeeze on her shoulder.
They sat there sitting for hours on a stretch. The sun had cast a soporific opiate on the senses by now. In the yellow, red, orangish, brick vision of the grass from the parapet one could see the February sun melt and mould the morning mist on the blades of the grass into a moistened expanse. The college was busy with the annual fest. The parapets were abandoned in want of serious mugging up sessions during exams. Vihans sat with Kafka on his lap while Ritwika drank the dewy wine of the nightingale's voice in the Keatsian ode. She looked up to find Vihans immersed in his world. May be he was looking for K or searching for a meaning in the Kafkaesque prelude of the funnily ordered universe. May be he had already mounted on his existential sojourn into the hundred years of damned love/lust/affection/romance. The stubble on his gaunted cheeks looked green and inviting.
Ritwika leaned in and said. We can go for a short drive around the city before i meet Dhritiman. Vihans nodded and they moved out of college. In the car neither of them spoke. The song 'Bawra mann' floated around this strange yet familiar air between the lovers(once?). Each word in the song seemed to mock and tease and tempt and cajole the girl sitting near the window. Her kohl had spread around her almond eyes. Ritwika could only feel her incessant tears wet her face. She did not know for how long she had been crying. All Vihans could say was a sorry. On descending down the roads on the outskirts of the city, Ritwika gently pulled him towards herself and kissed him on his lips. With each delicious touch of her tongue on his skin, he could almost feel her detach herself in these intense and passionate gestures. Each nibble on his chin and each caress on his bare hands and shoulders make him almost frightened by her insanely cold conclusiveness. It seemed as if in each of these deliberately calculated moves she was articulating a finality, signing a good bye note.
This woman at once seemed too unfamiliar to him. Vihans had once told her that each word she breathed became a delicious feast in her mouth. He said her voice had that velvet, silken quality that lisped and relished each word to articulate all she wanted to convey in her deftly controlled intonation. At the moment, in the here and the now, he could almost see that savoury language unravel itself to him. But when have words been fidel to what they ever wished to convey? Ritwika spoke and unspoke at the same time. The hot flush of blood on her cheeks, the thin, almost translucent veins on her wrists, the crevices on her neck and shoulder blades drew Vihans in and by the end of their passionate love today, he was convinced that Ritwika had made up her mind in this act of her allownace. He was convinced that he had lost her in the very act of possessing her like this.
He kissed her and asked her to take care of herself. He said he would wait for her as always, and that he was always there for her, mumbling a sorry yet again in a choked, apologetic voice. Ritwika could merely give a mirthful, full throated laugh.
She said, 'Vihans, you were an awesome lover until today.'
It was already past two when Dhritiman and Ritwika met at the UCH in Connaught Place.
To be continued...
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