This is an English translation of “Thiratchai Manam Konda Poonai” a Tamil story written by Thiruchenthalai, a promising face in Tamil literature. Translated by Saravanan. K.
***
The bunch of keys, dropped with a clink on the floor immersed
in darkness, slid on it and stopped near the leg of the cot. She could feel the
key bunch sparkling without opening her eyes amidst the heat still permeating
in the darkness that had gathered thickly around her. Despising visuals, her
eyes preferred to remain floated in darkness. It seemed that even the tiny
sparkle from the key bunch could hurt that darkness. She was lying down,
totally absorbed with the bliss of coition. Her reflexive hands gently stroked
the remains of pleasure in the curves and bends of her body and made them
fragrant. The image of his face looking into her eyes in orgasmic fits of
ecstasy coupled with the bestial frenzy was still floating around in her
memory. She relished bringing in the pleasant grudge found on his image, the
one she hadn’t experienced so far, into her thoughts repeatedly. Each time she
enjoyed savouring it, her fingers groped for a fleshy part of her body, pinched
it gently, treating it like another body. ‘How much of a childlike passion
one is able to witness in the craving of a male body that wants to cuddle her
very tightly so as to melt her into nothing?’ Her eyes kept bringing in
every expression that he displayed, being oblivious of himself during sex, into
her thoughts in sequence.
Cuddling his melting body, tight holds getting softer, she
had kissed his face, which seemed to have been born anew in sweat. His face
carried a pleasing charm as if he was born in a plain. Lying in the dark, she
wanted to remember that face again and again. At the same time, she wanted to
make it sure, repeatedly though, whether the traces of emptiness one would
normally experience after two bodies mutually expressed their secrets got
reflected anywhere on that face. No…it wasn’t. There, found nothing other than
the pleasure of fulfilment. She was very happy, but it equally concerned her if
he had also gathered similar memories.
The sparks of lust they encountered whenever their bodies
came to brush against each other in unexpected situations during their days of
wait for this intimacy had now become non-existent. With insensitivity towards
immoral aspects of relationships remaining absent, they were now impregnated
with colours like strings of musical instruments.
She discovered his relationship like a tiny flower during her
days of emptiness. It didn’t necessarily mean that she was wary of emptiness
and its resultant loneliness. To be very sure, it could well be concluded that
she, in fact, preferred to spend her loneliness, which wouldn’t necessitate any
conversations with anyone. Her husband too didn’t pay much attention to her
when she spent all her days roaming anywhere she wanted as if sitting inside a
water bubble. A sort of embitterment akin to a snowfall falling silently in the
night had brought in a mutual loneliness and distance between them. Both of
them were passing their days as mute spectators, staring at the furniture of
their house like museum lizards roaming in the ceiling.
It wasn’t very certain if she had a desire to convert her
mundane into something naughty by indulging in a new relationship. It was on
one such day when she was fantasising as to what would happen in case she had
any such thing in life; he entered her life with ease as if entering through a
window curtain.
Through that newly found relationship, which had just started
unassumingly over some cups of coffee, they had crossed their set boundaries
very quickly. Both of them liked the pleasure of teasing their body with the
words they shared during their midnight chats after everyone slept. It was
indeed a safe game. Wasn’t it? A game of deceiving the body with the help of
wits and fantasy. But the body is a stupid animal. It is very easy to set it
aflame. But without leaving, at least, a deep bite of teeth on the shoulder
blade or clenching the suppleness of flesh like a fruit squeezed insensibly,
its savagery would never get subsided. At the end of this game of teasing,
there comes a point where the body would throw away all its fetters. It is the
time when every moral standard would surrender and pave its way.
To be very precise, he was not gifted with an aesthetic
sensibility like her. His crude licentiousness was too much for the grandeur of
her sensibility, as the latter couldn’t stand against the former even for a
second. She was very much interested in the soft foreplays of lovemaking. But
he couldn’t endure it beyond a limit. At the end of all lengthy conversations,
he would end up manifesting his lust stemming out of him to swallow her up,
without even trying to hide it. Even though she grew visibly uneasy at it,
something invisible in her would assume mammoth proportions of pleasure before
it got diminished.
Their sexual encounter was the quickest considering what any
conventional assessment of instances a couple used to avoid before meeting each
other in bed would tell. Like a parakeet picking up a rice grain along with a
finger at an opportune moment with its red beak while being played with truant
fingers, an easygoing conversation that had started at some point had brought
them together till the bedroom today. She was aware of the distance she could
roam around in places whose boundaries were not defined. Today she had lost her
senses and stood submissive. A red beak had pulled the fingers inside.
Kissing every inch of her nude body, intoxicated, he lay
settled in the softness of her abdomen. While his words were coming out as
mumbles like a colour powder being blown into air, his hands were busy fondling
her buttocks. With an intense heaving of sighs of a python encircling a Chinese
ceramic jar, his lips, which kissed her everywhere indiscriminately, were
trying to open all the keyholes of her body and thus attempting to release the
beast lying suffocated inside her.
She felt that her whole body seemed to be a petty wild twig
wriggling, burning in the intense fire that had engulfed her. A usual guilt one
faces while having sex with a stranger for the first time did question her and
stop her, painfully though. While her body was beseeching that the freedom of a
twig was nothing other than getting burnt in fire, her innate restraints were
violently pushing her body that was burning with desire into the old rusty
doors.
His hands were running through her hair as if they were
trying to hold something. The lively pupils inside the closed eyelids were
trying to see something clearly. Her face that blossomed and shrunk
simultaneously was revealing the traces of her suffocation. The passionate
longings that surged up around her were being crushed on their way before
reaching her fully.
With his body fully bathed in sweat, he was thrusting himself
into her as if all his lust had taken its form into one in him. She found
herself missing something and felt inadequate to match his fierceness and his animal-like
appearance.
She held his face and lifted it a bit. Having drunk the lust,
his eyes were looking like that of an elephant. She sulked at being unable to
find the answers to her quest in them. He pulled her towards him, pressed her
against him violently, whispered, “You are a whore di…” and kissed her. She
couldn’t get his words. Later she understood that they had torn her ribs with
the sharpness of a blade. She was shocked a little. His lips were still busy
kissing her with an undying lust. A new set of moist and hot feathers grew
painfully out of her blood-oozing ribs. He once again uttered the word “whore”
and bit her earlobes. She heaved deep sighs from inside. She felt that
something holding her tightly till now had got itself loosened and fallen down.
She laughed once aloud, very loudly. With the speed of a
sharp arrow sufficient to kill a wild boar, she pushed him aside. All her
restraints had become violent sounds now. She bit his lips, kissing them
violently till she found a drop of blood from it. He felt that the face kissing
him was a gleaming persona of some other woman. After a long spell, he put on
his shirt and readied to leave as the room was still filled with the meaty
odour.
With her eyes still closed, she was lying on the bed, nude,
like messy desert sand. He kissed her gently on her forehead. He was waiting
for her to speak a few immensely affectionate words about their sexual union.
She didn’t open her eyes yet. Her lips mumbled something inaudibly with a mild grin
on her face. He felt his existence a petty ball of flesh in front of her
pleasure in solitude.
He picked a small flowerpot kept on the television, glanced
at it for a second, kept it at the same dusty mark from where it was taken,
looked at her lying on the bed once, and smiled before leaving the room.
The house seemed to have been burdened with the secrets it
wouldn’t be able to accommodate. She got up silently and gathered her dresses.
She could feel minutely the warmth of sex that had filled in the room. She
pondered for a while, smiling, if she could have gotten more from him. She
comforted herself that such trivial sacrifices were necessary as they would
bring good to her at the time of any probable rift in an uncertain relationship
in the future. Such sacrifices would help her by offering a crude form of
self-pity to make her feel moralistic, she felt. ‘Why do these black
kittens arrive in so fast in search of the rotten smell of pleasures that were
born just a while ago?’ - Whining at it, she went into the bathroom.
2
He was standing, glancing at the face of his car, waiting for
the door to open after pressing the calling bell a second time. Though the car
was still hot and lively after its short journey, it radiated a smile hiding
its fatigue.
She opened the door calmly and went inside without even a
smile or a word, not expecting him to speak anything. He removed his beautiful
slippers patiently, kept them neatly in the stand, collected the covers not yet
opened and magazines about cars, and entered home. She filled a glass with
water, pushed it to the other end of the dining table where no one was sitting,
sat by the table, and threw a blank stare at somewhere. He was mildly surprised
at it, entered his room, and deftly cut the edges of envelopes he had brought
inside, took the papers out, and read them, nodding his head in affirmation.
The cover page of the monthly magazine carried the picture of
a car that was recently launched. With a profound masculinity, it was standing
against the backdrop of the setting sun on a road. The evening rays of the sun
falling on it were getting reflected lustrously. The untamed toughness and
sturdy tyres gave it a regal lift-up. Summing up in words, unlike the cars that
compel one to crook his body as if to take refuge inside their cabin, this car
looked like a young wild animal on which one could easily sit astride. His
fingers were moving on the picture involuntarily.
She still kept looking at the tumbler, which he hadn’t yet
picked up. She pondered over why she behaved so rudely with him. His look with
a mild surprise evoked an element of discomfort in her. ‘It was not
normal…not normal’—a’ voice feebly muttered inside her. Everything was
already late by then. She tried to recall whether she smiled at him when she
poured water in the glass. ‘If I had done it, there would have never been a
more foolish act than that.’. He would definitely reach the point of
suspicion by traversing through the differences in behaviour. After all, they
were lizards roaming in their own way in the museum for a long time. Weren’t
they?
Her nostrils were secretly trying to sniff out any possible
remnants of fragrance that might have been left out in the air. Unable to
ascertain whether it was there or not, she remained confused. It appeared that
the items kept in the house were dying to tell him the truth. He kept the book
he was holding on the table and went near to her with an amiable smile on his
lips. His hands picked up the tumbler reflexively. His eyes were examining her
body as if it was new. She tried to bring down the signs of satisfaction her
body was radiating. She couldn’t succeed in her attempt to do that. The body
below the neck is a peculiar type of animal. All her fully endowed body parts
were revealing themselves with the exuberance of youthfulness—the satisfaction
of having completed hunting a while ago. Other than that, the fulfillment
resulting from the new hunt had generated a good amount of attractiveness in
it. It was her face that grew distressed as it was failing miserably in
controlling it.
He drank the water from the glass and held one of her fingers
casually. That small-sized finger, sweaty and alive, was looking like her face
in her youth. Had it been some other time, she would have pulled it back. That
small jerk would have been enough to decapitate the passion built in him. But
she didn’t try doing that now. He gently pressed the fleshy part of her finger.
It yielded into his palm as an extension of her angst. She felt that she had
lost her power to pull her fingers back. It seemed that it was a bit of her
mercy she showed on him in front of his sudden happiness, which he hadn’t
experienced so far. He was encouraged by her newly found passionate longing. He
also felt that he had come to meet his young wife after a long time. The same fright,
anxiety; her body movements like a small animal curling itself inward. He held
her moist finger in his palm. Her face was pale, and whenever the tip of her
finger curled inward, he kept straightening it delicately. The plumpness of her
finger had made it look like a miniature idol of a nude body.
His touch was simply unbearable for her. Her vigil that
nothing should make him suspect her had now metamorphosed into a fear; the fear
was ready to bribe anything to ensure that the suspicion did not arise. A gleam
of lust usually seen in prostitutes had started reflecting on her body. He
kissed the tip of her tender finger. She didn’t pull her finger back. When it
was brought near to his lips, he crushed it tenderly and wiped away its
dampness. Being crushed, the tip of her finger became red again as the blood
flowed to the tip—a pinkish hue of lust. He glanced at her eyes, which seemed
to have recognized all his actions, with a smile. The eyes, which were boasting
to attest to all his actions, did not carry any trace of her old sulking image.
Making his hair disheveled, she caressed it lovingly. She didn’t attempt to
withdraw her finger from him. She pressed his neck softly as he bent forward
towards that finger with renewed vigour.
Presuming the charm she exuded as her willing participation
in action and craving more for the new taste he hadn’t come across earlier in
her calling revealing her hidden elegance, he leaned against her plump, petite
finger.
His consciousness grew softened in their sexual intimacy that
happened after a very long time. He fell asleep as he fondled the softer parts
of her body.
….
He was holding a milky white coloured kitten in his hands,
tenderly stroking it. Its hair, carrying the colour of boiling milk, flowed
like a milky river in his fingers. It tried to lick his body. The chillness
from its lick on his fingers pierced him like a needle.
Closing his eyes, he tried to feel the life in that cat’s
body. The rhythm of its heartbeats was felt like coherent writing in his
fingers pressed against its abdomen. His fingers felt it as its language. Why
this much anxiety in this petite, soft body? His fingers stopped moving in an
attempt to find out the reason for the cat’s anxiety and its mind, which was
trying to hide its hidden secrets from him. The pretensions of the kitten
increased to release itself from his clutch due to the great deal of discomfort
his fingers caused. It sank its body more into his hands and tried to lick his
body, sticking out its tongue with its maximum efforts. It added the scent of
grape into its ‘mewing’ in order to divert his attention from finding out the
secrets.
His consciousness, which couldn’t trace out the secrets of
the kitten, had now found it fortuitously. The saliva, once chilly, had now
gone rancid. He found out its shrewdness of concealing itself by sitting upon
those secrets weighing nothing. The next moment he took off his fingers from
its body. Its tender bones made him repugnant. Suddenly he threw it away on the
floor. It landed on the floor without getting hurt. Without any visible
fretfulness in its eyes, it stared at him.
There was not a single tinge of truth in every batting of
eyelids and pupil moving with the ease of a kaleidoscope. No signs of humanity.
The cat, which made him shower his love more, had now frightened him. Hiding
his nudity, he was trying to chase it away. His penis, erect when he was
holding it in his hands, was now dangling without any shame. The cat glanced at
his anxiety, teary eyes, and erect penis covered in his hands with an
incomprehensible indifference.
…
He woke up suddenly. A sound of light running into the dark.
His wife was sleeping nearby. The body was full of sweat due to the shock of
the dream. He got up searching for the water jar. He drank water, glancing at his
sleeping wife. Her hands, which he had kept aside away from him, were holding
the blanket, thinking that they were still on his body. She was sleeping as her
hair strands on her face were flowing in the air. Her sleeping face was looking
deeply calm and compassionate.
She felt the signs of deep sleep in the calmness found on his
broader back. She was also happy seeing him. She treated her newly found lust
that day as a very significant aspect of redemption in her life that had stood
handicapped for long. She pondered over how the lust, which she preferred to
consider merely as a medicine for that handicap, could be mixed up with charm.
Unable to make it out, she threw her leg happily on her husband’s body. Her
state of being nude, with her leg on him, gave her the look of an idol of a
deity.
Without making sounds, she groped in the dark, searching her
mobile phone. She switched it on. He had sent innumerable short messages as she
expected. Some sweeter aspects that one would usually miss out on while performing
sex for the first time were reflected as memorable regrets on the screen. His
warm moan proved that his yearning for her body was still undying. It made her
love herself intensely.
She imagined herself as a falls flowing down the hills. The
newcomer was like an herbal plant at the origin of falls. His memories and
kisses had added fragrance to the water. This man, sleeping here, is bathing
merrily as a lonely man in the falls flowing down with all its grace.
She sent a lot of ‘hearts’ with a smile as a reply to his
messages.
“What doing?”
He came online suddenly.
“Mmm...Reading the messages you sent.”
He then sent some ‘kisses’ one after the other. She too.
When he sent some alluring messages describing the
youthfulness of her body and the secrets it was holding in it, she felt happy
and told him about her intimate moments with her husband after a very long
time. In fact, she wanted to convey that it was he who had given her that
sheen. She seemed to have lost even the minimum amount of caution to hide
things like that from him. She wanted to let him know that such a description
would make him feel more wanted in her life, and his presence in her life was
extremely powerful, like an herbal plant that had deeply rooted in her psyche.
A ‘smiley’ came from him. He started diverting the course of
conversation into different directions. But she was still sending the messages
describing every minute of intimate moments with her husband like pictures. She
felt that she grew lighter as she had kept telling him about her encounter. She
was trying to find out the reasons, yet incomprehensible to her, as to how she
had developed a spark of lust hitherto unknown to her with her husband. Deeply
contemplating those reasons as imprints between ‘she’ and her body,
she kept sending messages to him. It was at that moment the words, “You are a
whore di….were found reflecting on the mobile phone’s screen.
She read those words, which let her loose in the depth of her
privacy, again and again. She laughed at his ignorance—that, as he seemed to be
still under the spell of that word and believing that still it was capable of
producing flame-like passion in both of them at the very mention of it. He sent
those words once again. This time, a mild grin with a gentle sulk appeared on her
face. She sent him a toffee coloured ‘heart.’. Those words came again and
again, first with anxiety, then with fierceness, then with tears, and then
ended with helpless moans.
With her body lying without dresses, putting her legs on her
husband sleeping near her, she kept sending ‘hearts’ as a reply to his
words very proudly, very calmly, and very freely, with a smile and tears filled
in her eyes.
***Ended***
Translated from the Tamil by Saravanan. K
Source: “Thiratchai Manam Konda Poonai” a Tamil short
story written by Pa. Thiruchanthalai. The story was published in Kalachuvadu
Magazine (April 2021 issue). It has been translated with the permission of the
author.
