Mirage (Part Three)

It has been 2 years and a few months since that first time. Her life is going on; sex and beating are two things that happen like clockwork. Her mother in law is mostly bed ridden now, it’s not that she can’t get up, but she is too weak to do anything more than her basic rituals. For about three or four months this has been the case, and so she has to look after two cows, a calf and her mother in law, plus all the chores that she used to do before. These chores are not a big deal for her; she is used to it by now, more of a muscle memory than anything else. But the beatings and the sex, she just wonders if ever a time comes when she could start feeling about them as blank as she feels about the chores.

Her husband, these days are becoming an expert in finding her faults. All he needs to do is walk into the house in the evening and he would have already found them. It seems to have become a sort of muscle memory for him now. He is so good at it that, even after she spend half an hour or an hour of her tight schedule inspecting the house and everything about it and her to make sure nothing is wrong, he will find something in a moment’s notice. Or there would have been something in his mind, some wrong that she did in the morning on the night before. Anyway, even after two and a half years of marriage, she is still trying to figure out a way to be on the good side of her husband.

Another noticeable factor about her body is that, it is getting lingered in scars. Have you heard about scars telling stories? No, right? Well, hers does, in fact they sing epic stories. Each and every one of those scars come to life and tells a tale. One sings about too much spice in food, another about not waking up in time, yet another about making sound or screaming or crying in sleeping, so on and so forth. Some of these stories are so long, elaborate and complicated that any person with an average or above intelligence quotient fails to makes sense of them. Not that the simple stories made sense.

One scar in particular, starting just below her hairline on the side of her forehead, it continues inside her hair for another couple of inches. It sings about a girl, may be four or five years older than her, who, she was told, was her husband’s ex-wife. May be eight or nine months back, she was told about the elder girl by some girls on her way to fetch water. She did not get the whole story, something about continuous bleeding or so and she going away, the story ended there.  That was all those girls knew, that was all she knew. She was intrigued; she wanted to know who that elder girl was, where she is and what happened to her. But, her bed ridden mother in law was not of much help. So she asked the only other person she knew who might have known something about it, her husband.

He was washing his hands outside their house after dinner when she asked this. He stared at her for a good long minute. She was petrified by the look, she knew what was coming next and she was preparing for it. After a good minute or so, it came, a steel cup that he had in his hand came crashing on her head. Once it landed, she fell on the dry ground like an axed tree. She blacked out instantly. She woke up a while later, don’t know how long, but there was her mother in law sitting beside her and the village doctor had put something on her head, stopped the bleeding and had left. Her head was hurting like hell. But she was aware of the surrounding, when she saw her husband’s shadow outside, she picked herself up as fast as she could, ignoring the objections of her mother in law, went to him and apologized for her bad behavior. She did something 'wrong' and he 'disciplined' her. He has got the 'right' to, hasn't he? She tried to held tighter to that 'logic'. Her mother had taught her that!!!

Like this, all the scars sung a song. All you need to do is listen carefully.

                                                               (To Be Continued)