‘No…’
‘Then?’
‘I don’t have a problem with any of the things you have mentioned, except the large bedroom of that large house.’
‘You mean…’
‘Yes, I mean just that, Ma.’
‘Look, you have to settle down at some point, you know.’
And the same exact conversation would repeat every two days.
By her twenty-fourth birthday, Jasmine had had enough of her mother. She moved back to Delhi to be as far away from her as was physically possible. Not that that changed things much.
‘You have to settle down, you know,’ was typically how the mother–daughter conversations would begin on the phone. Both women would manage to tote up massive STD phone bills month after month.
Eventually, the mother’s constant pressure started to tear down her resolve.
‘Maybe Ma is right. Where is the harm in dating? To have a good time with someone who is not pushy. Someone manageable. Carry on for a while and then dump him when he tries to get frisky,’ she thought as she lay in bed in her barsaati in South Extension.
The freelance marketing and sales job that Jasmine had taken up when she returned to Delhi was interesting and well-paying. She was tasked by various NGOs to ‘sell’ their charitable causes to the city’s well-heeled. Most rich folks were instinctively inclined to keep their purse-strings tightly closed, but there were still plenty who could be cajoled into making donations. One just needed to appeal to their hearts the right way. Some opened their chequebooks willingly because they were naturally endowed with a large, generous heart. Others did so only when they were shamed for the smallness of theirs, especially when compared to the largess of others in their social circle. ‘Mrs Khatri has promised 1,00,000 for the Sampoorn Cancer Fund. I think she could only afford that much. How much do you want to pledge, Mrs Taneja?’ The ploy usually worked. Jasmine’s commissions at 10 per cent were substantial.
Jasmine got to meet plenty of male clients as well. With them, the strategy that worked best was to be funny, flirty and flighty. No matter what their age, most fell almost instantaneously to such charms. Jasmine would lead them on for weeks, taking ‘favours’ (like dinners and gifts, nothing too elaborate or complicated) that the men were gladly willing to invest in—only to drop them when the scene got ‘hot’. She did go to bed with one such client once, strictly as an experiment. The experience was not horrible, but it was no match to the rapture she used to feel at Amarjit’s touch.
Then, one day, Jasmine met Joginder ‘Jolly’ Singh Bhatia.
‘Not particularly,’ Jasmine had responded to her mother’s direct question asking whether the man was goodlooking. ‘I mean, he is no film star or anything like that!’
‘That’s good. It’s good for a woman to be with a man who is not in your league. He will always remain in awe of you.’
Jolly was a Sardar with sparse facial hair smattering his angular jaw. He was reasonably tall, somewhat lean, but with the beginnings of a paunch. The bulb-shaped nose was probably his worst feature, but his light brown eyes made up for that flaw. Jasmine had never seen a light-eyed Sardar before. But there was something else about the man that Jasmine had found even more unusual than his physical attributes. It was his maturity. Jolly had seemed—settled, grounded. Jasmine knew from experience how the brains of most men dangled between their legs, from where they took most of their life’s decisions. That didn’t seem to be the case with Jolly. Here was a calm young man with his head screwed on straight.
Jasmine enjoyed spending time with Jolly. The man treated her like a feather and she returned his treatment in kind by upping her flirtatious countenance. Soon, this kind and polite man was so besotted with her that she was tempted to take her flirtations beyond the boundaries she had set for herself. To any other woman, Jolly would have been ideal husband material.
Her mother, who’d never seen Jasmine show this much interest in a man, knew this was an opportunity she had to make the most of.
‘What’s the worst that could happen with marriage, dear? If anything, things always get better for a woman after marriage. Remember, men lose interest in doing all that touching within a few months. And in a few years, he will grow fat and impotent too, they all do. So, just think of all the good things that become yours the minute you say “Yes” to him, and don’t bother with the rest of it!’
Jasmine sighed.
‘I know you agree with me, don’t you, dear?’
‘Even if I did,’ Jasmine spoke slowly, ‘the fact remains that he thinks it will take a few years for him to put together enough money to start a restaurant. He doesn’t want to get married till then anyway.’
‘And how is putting together money a problem for you?’
‘What do you mean, Ma?’ Jasmine asked.
‘Don’t you make a living out of making people write cheques, my dear? Tell me, does all that money really need to secure a better future for only bhooke-nange kids? I am sure some of that money can be, you know, adjusted…’
Jasmine was silent for a minute, surprised by what her mother was implying. Surprised, and intrigued.
‘All I am saying is,’ the mother continued after Jasmine’s prolonged silence, ‘there is need all around the world. If some of that money can secure a better future for you too, where is the harm? It’s not as if you are adjusting tens of crores anyway. What’s a few lakhs? Twenty-five? Thirty? Chalo, fifty even? No one except you… and Jolly… need to know.’
Jasmine’s silence continued on the other side of the line.
‘I don’t see any problem with this scheme, my dear.’
‘But, Ma…’
‘… and,’ her mother interjected, ‘I don’t think a bright man with big dreams will either.’
Jasmine was quiet again.
‘Besides, could there be any better way to keep your man’s reins firmly in our hands, my dear?’
Two months later, Jolly was able to suddenly find the money he needed to make a substantial down payment towards his first restaurant in Green Park. The illicit nature of securing those funds were to forever be the secret between him and Jasmine.
A month later, Jasmine and Jolly were married.
In this game of chess, the King had willingly allowed his own Queen to checkmate him, without even realizing the consequences of defeat.
The sham of what his married future was going to be was revealed to Jolly immediately after the wedding. In all their married years together, Jasmine and he had sex just three times—twice before they wed, and once during their honeymoon in Hong Kong.
Ten years of loveless marriage went painfully by. In those ten years, Jolly threw himself into his work, since there was nothing to throw himself into at home. He grew richer and more successful. Jasmine basked in the monetary glory of her husband. And her mother reaped the benefits of an affluent daughter.
In their large, gleaming house that never felt like home they would meet for the occasional breakfast or dinner and attend social functions together. They didn’t speak much but weren’t openly rude to each other either. It wasn’t good but Jolly could just about live with it. He was about to discover though that he didn’t have to.
Five months before Sumi’s death, Jasmine received a short, one-line email in her Hotmail inbox.
‘Hi Vagimine… do you remember me?’ the email said. The email ID belonged to someone called [email protected]. There was only one person in the world who had ever called Jasmine by that name—a unique combination of vagina and Jasmine.
It was a blast from the past.
The email was from Amarjit, her lover in college.
The rains had been particularly nasty that monsoon season, but that was hardly going to put a damper on Jasmine Bhatia’s social plans. One of the events that she was planning that season was to throw a big party at her Panchshila Park home to celebrate her good friend Neha’s fortieth birthday. The caterers, DJ and decorators had already been organised through Jo
lly, but there were a million other small but vital odd jobs that still needed to be managed. Deepika had been pulled out of school completely now, and even Jasmine had to admit, not to her of course, that she was proving to be crucial to her boss.
One rainy afternoon, a couple of days before Jasmine’s party, Deepika had been dispatched to the Fabindia store in Vasant Kunj, where she was supposed to pick up specific blue linen table mats that Jasmine had pre-ordered a few days earlier. By the time Deepika finished the errand and returned, she was soaking wet, despite the fact that she had used Jasmine’s chauffeur-driven car.
‘How did you get so wet?’ Jasmine screeched when she presented herself to her. The drenched girl had begun to shiver in the room’s strong air-conditioning.
‘Are those all the pieces?’ Jasmine asked, not bothering to hear why the girl looked the way she did.
‘Yes, Didi, all forty-eight,’ Deepika said as she placed the heavy parcel on the couch in the bedroom.
‘OK…’ Jasmine said. She felt a tinge of pity at the piteous sight of her. Also, if Deepika fell sick, it would just be an endless inconvenience for her.
‘You can go into the bathroom there. Take the towel lying next to the basin and dry yourself. Let me see if I can find some clothes.’
As Deepika began to walk towards the bathroom door, Jasmine called out from behind with a warning tone, ‘And don’t you touch anything inside, OK?’
Deepika nodded.
Around ten minutes of rummaging in an enviously well-stocked walk-in closet produced an old caftan from years ago. It had been imported from Egypt, but Jasmine had fallen out of love with it the moment she had seen it hanging atrociously on her own body in the full-length mirror reflection. Yes, Jasmine didn’t need this frightful thing anymore. In any case, nothing else in her clothes collection was sullied enough to be given away to the orphan girl. Not once did Jasmine ponder over the possibility that nothing of hers would have fit the young girl anyway.
‘She can even keep it if she wants to,’ thought Jasmine, as she walked up to the bathroom door carrying her reject. She turned the door handle and walked inside.
Only ten minutes ago, Jasmine had shooed a worthless young girl to her bathroom. The girl had been wet and was shivering, looking like a pathetic mouse with dishevelled hair. Now, as Jasmine opened the bathroom door unannounced, she was heralded with the most joyous sight of nature. Inside the marble palace, adorning its wall-to-wall mirrors, was a partially naked goddess revelling at her own womanhood. Her damp hair was open, streaming over her shoulders and upper back as she tossed it around playfully. The beauty stood in a slant, her right leg straight and carrying the weight of her body, while the left one was bent at the knee. The arc that it created around the waist seemed to accentuate the curvaceous contours of her figure to dangerously depraved levels. Since the girl’s back was towards Jasmine, the enchantress’ buttocks were the first body part that her ogler’s eyes rested on—they formed a perfect figure of a three-dimensional ‘8’ lying on its side. The flimsy back of the thin cotton panties that had been purchased just days ago from Kanchan Pantie and Bra Corner had rolled up into the butt-crack they were purportedly meant to hide, as if hiding there, looking almost like G-strings. From there, Jasmine’s eyes traced the curve of the young woman’s spine, running up one vertebra to the next, like a happy child crossing a shallow stream jumping from rock to rock.
There was even more splendour to be devoured by Jasmine’s eyes. The front was not facing Jasmine directly; yet, flaunting itself unabashedly from the legion of full-length mirrors on the bathroom walls. Together, they looked like a symphony of similar-but-not-same paintings of a single subject. The poser was so full of vitality that she made the paintings seem alive and breathing. The watcher’s eyes moved lower, first caressing the ‘V’ made by the front of the white panties with its tiny red roses, and then the smaller ‘v’ in the centre of the larger one. The top elastic of the panties was three inches above the girl’s most covert treasure, straddling a taut stomach that seemed carved out of the purest porcelain. The navel was inward, round, small and deep—the perfect shape.
The eyes travelled steadily upwards and onwards on their remarkable expedition for what had already been the most gratifying twenty seconds of Jasmine Bhatia’s sexless life. They were bound for the jackpot, the most luscious doublet of perfection that Jasmine was ever going to encounter in her life, but, just then, the person in the painting gave an aggravated shudder and yanked the perfect view from its parched viewer.
Deepika had turned around with a start. She now faced Jasmine directly.
‘The clothes were wet. I thought they would dry faster if I took them off,’ she said innocently.
Then, as if taken by coyness suddenly, she moved her right arm and arranged it at an angle over her breasts. Her right hand was now clutching the front of her left shoulder. Her forearm sat in the centre of her chest, parting what was easily the most beautifully perfect bosom their audience had ever seen. The brassiere was simple and white and clung to its secret as determinedly as a scared child does to its mother during a thunderstorm. The cloth cover rose about three-quarters of the way up to the cleavage, which itself was half relegated under the drape made by Deepika’s arm. Jasmine knew she had helped buy that bra. She had seen it lying crumpled in a box just days ago. How different it looked now, all plumped up, stretched tight, brand new, bleach fresh. She remembered that the bra had no padding. Subconsciously, Jasmine’s eyes searched for the telltale humps of nipples, but didn’t see any.
But she did feel her own get taut.
The entire visual miracle had lasted a full minute. Then, just as suddenly as the scene had unfolded, it had wrapped up.
‘Try this on,’ Jasmine said, her throat dry, to the most beautiful creature she had ever seen in her life. She handed the caftan to the nearly-naked girl, turned around, and walked out of the bathroom, leaving Deepika alone again.
Deepika smiled as she took off her bra and panties and put them next to her other wet garments. Then, she wore her new second-hand gift and left the bathroom.
Amarjit’s evocative one-liner was so unexpected that it was bound to cause a tempest in Jasmine’s life.
‘It has been so long!’ Jasmine thought as she read her old lover’s words over and over again. She still remembered every single moment of her life with Amarjit. In fact, she remembered it so vividly that she could perhaps write a book on it! By comparison, the rest of Jasmine’s life, ever since the two women had parted, could be summed up in a single, lonely sentence.
Jasmine recalled the last time that she had seen Amarjit. It was at the dhaba outside college. Jasmine was just about to enter, when she had noticed her former bedmate seated at the far side of the enclosure. The girl was with her new friends, possibly exchanging goodbyes since the final exams had just finished. The bunch would talk animatedly for a bit and then break into loud laughter. Amarjit looked good in her mauve top and her light blue jeans. Jasmine didn’t recall the top from before. ‘She must have bought it after we split,’ she surmised. She remembered the time when the girls shared everything, even their bras. She felt a pang in the pit of her stomach. And yet, Jasmine still hadn’t the courage to walk up to her ex-lover. Anyway, what was there to be said now? Goodbye? That had already been done. So, Jasmine had just turned back and walked away from the dhaba, concluding the sacrifice of her own soul at the altar of her mother’s expectations.
A lifetime had passed since that afternoon.
A lifetime of nothing.
As Jasmine sat and read the brief email one more time, she suddenly felt angry at the life she had led since that parting—angry that it had even been led, angry at all the life-altering decisions she had made living it, and at all the accomplishments and riches she had enjoyed from it. She had a marriage, a position in society, a beautiful house and luxury cars, her own flourishing business, and mounds of cash in the bank. And the comfort of knowing that this arrangement was going to la
st until the end of her days. She had never stopped and pondered over things she didn’t have, nor had she waited or grieved over her losses. ‘I can never have those things, so what’s the use in fretting?’ was the reassurance that Jasmine had given herself for years.
She had moved on. Past love.
But Jasmine’s past had decided to swing by again, taunting her with the curiousity of what might have been.
The next day Jasmine fell sick, sick enough for Jolly to take her to a hospital. The illness was diagnosed as hepatitis which led to jaundice. Her condition got serious, and at one point, liver damage was suspected.
Jasmine recovered eventually, but barely. She was too weak to resume her normal life. So, she decided to take a break, leave her life in Delhi behind, and go someplace else to recuperate.
Jasmine decided to go to Darjeeling.
‘Darjeeling? Have you gone totally mad? I didn’t know Hepatitis damaged the brain too!’ Jolly exclaimed when she told him that she was leaving for a distant town a thousand kilometres away.
‘You should be happy that I am leaving!’
‘Shouldn’t you go live with your mother? It will take time for you to recover.’
‘Don’t worry about me.’
‘But why the hell Darjeeling of all places? Anyway, go if you must, but at least take Prabhu along with you.’
‘No, just leave me alone, Jolly. If you really want to help, keep checking in on the orphanage until I come back.’
Jolly had given up. ‘Suit yourself then. Let me know whenever you are ready to return.’
Darjeeling, and Amarjit, invited Jasmine into their lives with open arms. After graduation, Amarjit had moved to Kolkata, where she had gone on to complete a Masters and a PhD in Psychology, specialising in the behavioural habits of young adults. Later, she had become a successful child psychologist and had continued to live in Kolkata for many years. She had even got married, but when that didn’t work out, she divorced the man and returned to her parents. By then, she had gained academic renown through her two books on the subject of juvenile delinquency.
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