The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes in the morning was the dressing table, erect against the wall, the sunlight bouncing off its three-fold mirrors and trickling down the intricate carvings of the woodwork. Its queenly pride never failed to fascinate Mrinalini and she lay curled into her pillow, gazing at it for just a moment longer.
“It is beautiful,” agreed her young husband, following his bride’s sleepy gaze. He still liked to think of her as his bride, even though more than a week had lapsed since their grand wedding.
“She,” said Mrinalini, looking up, a trifle annoyed. “She.”
“Alright. She. She’s beautiful.”
Vinayak ruffled her hair and snuggled into her bare shoulder. She let him breathe into her skin, even though she didn’t particularly enjoy being prickled by his morning stubble. Her eyes drifted back to the dressing table. Every night she remembered to keep the curtains open just a crack so that only a ray of light could steal into the room in the morning and light up the brass handles of the drawers. She was magnificent.
“Well I have to be off,” yawned Vinayak, rolling out of bed. “Breakfast for you?”
She shook her head. “Later.” She liked to watch his reflection in the mirror as she lay in bed, while he fixed his tie and smoothed his hair. She wondered what course her life would have taken if she had refused to meet the “lawyer from Yale”. She had protested but had allowed her mother to bully her into wearing the flattering green sari that day, to meet the prospective groom. Vinayak himself was in a blazer and a crested tie that her father had admired very much. “Bhadro chele,” he had said, later in the car. “Yes. Nice boy,” her mother had said, looking meaningfully at Mrinalini, who had already decided to marry him. An ivy-league educated husband was an exciting prospect, especially since her cousin had recently married her ordinary boyfriend from St. Xavier’s College with the ordinary chartered accountancy job.
He smiled at her through the mirror and she smiled back, wondering just how much in love with her he was. He was such a nice boy, with an almost good-looking, nice face. She tried to feel lucky. Their love-making had been nice too. She shivered a little and pulled the blanket closer around her body. Nice. She’d always considered that word to be the most vacant adjective in the English language. And yet, everything about her husband, she found, was nice.
After Vinayak had left for work, Mrinalini slowly dragged herself out of bed and called for Mukul to bring in her milk and hot buttered toast. She still preferred milk to either tea or coffee, a habit she hadn’t been able to rid herself off since her schooldays. Nothing made her feel more wakeful in the morning than a glass of warm full-fat milk, without sugar or cocoa. Amit had howled with amusement when she’d refused his offer of tea, that first afternoon when she’d helped him move in, and asked for milk instead. He had ruined it though, by adding Hershey’s chocolate syrup.
While she waited for Mukul to arrive with the breakfast tray, she perched herself on the low stool in front of the dressing table and ran her fingers through the tangles in her hair, trying to press her asymmetrical bangs into place.
“Well aren’t you a modern little thing?” Amit had said, when she had traipsed in after having acquired the new look. “Well aren’t you an old-fashioned old fogey?” she had retorted, tossing her head at the mirror on his dressing table.
He had looked up from the notes he was making from Aristotle’s Poetics for his lecture the next day, and smiled. “The old girl likes you,” he had said, as she stood looking at her reflection.
“Old girl?”
He had risen from his desk and patted the dressing table. “This old girl. Me, she’s not crazy about. I see a grey hair too many. But you, she makes you look good.”
She had to agree. Even in the morning, unwashed and without kohl in her eyes, the old girl made her look good.
“So she’s a girl, is she?” she’d asked Amit, amused.
“Of course. That bureau over there,” he had turned to point at an oval shaped writing table with an intricately carved top. “He keeps himself in such a mess, he’s most definitely a man.”
She had laughed. Amit…Amitda had been the funniest person she had known. He had also been the only tenant she had ever deigned to acknowledge beyond civilities. The Dasguptas had been a loud family with filthy habits, the Barat couple had spent all month screaming obscenities at each other until her mild-mannered father had been forced to ask them to leave and Kautilya Biswas had been a bit of a loner, who mostly stayed inside, smoking weed in his room. But Amit, with his gender-specific antique furniture and his non-descript but pleasant face had aroused her curiosity. They had met when he had found her prowling around the furniture that the movers had left stranded on the landing. She had helped him move the pieces inside while he listened to her prattling about her approaching wedding.
“Sounds like a nice boy,” was the only thing that he had said. Mrinalini bit into her hot buttered toast and grimaced.
Later that afternoon, while she was painting her nails with Revlon’s new Coral shade, she accidentally dropped a bead of pink polish on the white lace mat on the dressing table. She whipped it off immediately to reveal a small faded patch of wood. She touched it gingerly. The scar had not been caused by her nail-polish. She had once been unmindful of the tea-tray that Amit had placed on the dresser. His sudden flash of anger had caught her off-guard and tears of surprise had sprung to her eyes. She had ruined his grandmother’s table, he had raged, frantically mopping the tea, she recalled, with a dirty rag that he usually reserved to shoddily wipe his shoes. “It’s only a pile of discarded wood anyway!” she had retorted, mortified at the tears that were brimming over. And then, she remembered with a flush of shame, she had made a snide comment about how The Girl At The Bus Stop had left him because he showered all his love on inanimate objects. She had fled his apartment then, sobbing, horrified at her own cruelty. She did not know that Amit had remained very still in front of the dressing table for a long while after she had gone. More than a day later, when she had been pacing the corridor outside his apartment, debating whether or not to knock, he had opened the door, grinning. “I thought I’d see you today. I stocked up on milk.” She had flung herself on him, with a strangled noise and he had returned her childish embrace with a boyish laugh. He smelt nice, she had thought as she had snuggled against his neck. Not of expensive cologne or fragrant aftershave, but of solidness and dependability. When she had pulled away, he had patted her cheek fondly. Unspoken apologies had been exchanged and she had never been happier.
Two nights ago, Vinayak had found a faded photograph of a woman, wedged into the drawer of the dressing table in which he kept his cuff-links. He had tossed it over to her. “Must belong to the previous owner.” She had recognized immediately The Girl At The Bus Stop. She wondered how the men whom she had hired to have the dresser polished, had not found the picture. She was exactly how Mrinalini had imagined her to be. The red bordered white saree only served to enhance her old-fashioned beauty. She wasn’t smiling but she didn’t look unhappy. “Ah. School!” she recalled Amit’s words from that Tuesday afternoon, when she had cancelled her lunch date with Vinayak because Amit did not have to go the University. “When the only things I lost sleep over were undone assignments and the girl at the bus stop who refused to look at me.” He had laughed, but rather unhappily, she had thought. The faded wedding band on his finger and the absence of a wife told a tale of a romance gone awry. “Did you love her?” she had asked him once, unexpectedly, in the midst of a discussion on The Beatles. “Not enough,” he had replied, after a pause.
There were no photographs of The Girl At The Bus Stop. It was as though she hadn’t existed at all, except in the shadows of his eyes. Mrinalini hadn’t been able to take her eyes off the woman in the picture, with the gold bangles on her wrists and the streak of red vermillion across her forehead. She wondered who it was that this mysterious woman reminded her of. The expression in those kohl-lined eyes held a secret that only Mrinalini felt privy to, as though she was back in school, whispering secrets to her best friend while the Principal lead the Hail Mary chorus.
She didn’t think of it again until a week later when Vinayak and she were dressing for a puja at his sister’s place. She was carefully arranging the pleats of the red bordered white cotton saree that traditional Bengali women reserved for such occasions. Not that she was a traditional Bengali woman, she thought, as she pinned her bangs away from her face.
“You look nice in that saree,” said Vinayak, stopping to kiss her neck as he crossed the room. She grimaced. Nice, he said. Always, nice. “You should wear it more often.” He paused. “You know, you remind me of that lady in the photograph. The one I found in the drawer last week.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “You do?” she asked, casually, but trembling a little as she fixed the last pin in her saree.
“A very slight resemblance. It’s probably the clothes.” He looked up at her. “And the eyes,” he added. He dropped his comb and took her in his arms. “I bet she didn’t smell quite as heavenly though.” He nuzzled her neck. She squirmed.
“Vinayak! Stop!”
“Alright alright! Later then.” He grinned mischievously and kissed her.
Amit had liked that particular perfume too. He had expressed as much that Sunday afternoon when she had skipped down to his apartment to invite him for dinner with the family that night. She had found him on the sofa and Kafka on the floor. He had never looked so very old before.
Mrinalini had perched herself on the edge of the couch and picked up the book. ‘To Amit, With Love’ read the first page, in small neat writing. She had reached for his hand. “The Girl At The Bus Stop?” she had asked, moved by the anguish in his face. He had struggled to sit up. “Don’t let it bother you,” he had said with a twisted smile.
“But it does,” she had whispered and pulled him into a hug.
He had taken a deep breath. “Your perfume…it…”
Even now she could not be sure who had made the first move. It didn’t matter who had kissed whom. They hadn’t broken their embrace until he had torn away from her breasts with a tormented cry. She had begged him to continue but he had sunk into the sofa, wracked with sobs. She had held him until he had regained his composure and had left only after repeated entreaties. He hadn’t appeared for dinner that night and her father had informed the family the next morning that Amit had moved out, to an apartment closer to the university. She had stood, in stunned disbelief, in his empty apartment; empty except for the magnificent dressing table that stood proudly in the hall. ‘This old girl chose to stay with you,’ he had scribbled into the dust that had collected on the mirror. She had smiled, tears pricking her eyes. She was going to be a bride in a week.
There were no photographs of Amit. It was as though he hadn’t existed at all, except in the sunlight that bounced off the three-fold mirrors of the dressing table and trickled down the intricate carvings of the woodwork, every morning. As she slipped her wrists into delicate gold bangles and streaked her forehead with red vermillion because it would please her mother, she looked across at her nice husband, struggling with the convoluted folds of his dhoti. And she smiled, for she had a secret.
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