(Inspired by and dedicated to DAB32697)
As long as I can remember, my parents have been viciously quarreling for the entire twenty-two years of my life. The quarrels did not flare up to nasty bloody nose levels, only because my father is a reticent and inward-looking recluse. With a cold shrug, he used to suffer it all, almost with an innate dignity. This stoicism and detached indifference ofttimes made me wonder who was really at fault.
Their late-night arguments, very often beginning with some petty, trivial domestic issues such as my education, salary bills, remittances, home maintenance, social issues, etc., almost always gravitated to one fissile and incendiary issue, the mysterious girl my father was in love with during his university days. Suddenly my father would barricade himself with his sporulating silence. He would act dead to her verbal fusillades. She would insist that he was still having his liaisons with the slut behind her back.
She, time and again, made me believe that he was a fraud and a traitor, that he was channelizing his hard-earned money for the benefit of an evil lady he is infatuated with, that he goes out of town to have his quality time with his secret lover. In my childhood he used to defend himself, swearing that it was all her imagination, that he had never met her or made an attempt to meet her, after the marriage. His defensive measures would make my mother flare into a fury.
One night, I was suddenly woken up by a racket. They were into it again.
'If your slut of a bitch has 'so delicious and perfect breasts,' why the hell you should bother mine?' she was ranting. My father suddenly dived under his blanket just like an ostrich. Then, somehow, I got the idea that somebody's breasts were standing in the way of their relationship and that breasts could play an important role in conjugal life.
My mother, who is a primary school teacher aged forty-five, Is fairly beautiful. She measures 5'6'' with a pair of beautiful 34C breasts. She has thick and flowing hair running down to her waist. Her cute round face would certainly qualify her to be a film actress. I have always wondered why my father is not happy with such a beautiful lady.
Theirs was a beautiful life in the beginning. He was a handsome and highly educated college teacher, respected by all, and she was a good match for him. Ours is an old house with huge stacks of books and documents, which are not managed or organized properly. My mother tried to put the house in order when she was married into this family. She had to deal with thousands of books and artifacts, gathering dust, or borrowing by silverfish. Thus, one day she accidentally stumbled on a private diary of my father, the entries were largely in English, but some pages were in Malayalam, which contained compromising information. She viciously memorized many of the sentences and passages and showered them on him as if bathing him in sulfuric acid.
Note: before getting married make it a point to destroy your private notes, to be on the safer side.
They were spicy descriptions of the mysterious woman's anatomy, especially of her breasts. Anyway, I was conditioned to hate my father tastefully. For more than a decade they have been sleeping in separate rooms. And for the last couple of years, my father is mostly out of the station. He wielded his connections to get a long-distance transfer and is now teaching at a college some 400 kilometers north. Once in a month he would come home and would stay to himself or visit his friends. He immersed himself into his teaching career and was least bothered about home. His inner peace was more important to him, and he was not interested to listen to his wife's long speeches on her virtues and purity and how he was unworthy of her. Here stormy acidic berating bouts made him more of a recluse. When everybody was dying to get a transfer to a location near home, he preferred the other way!
During my college years, I made it a practice to surreptitiously steal into his notes. I was gnawed by a burning curiosity about how and why this mysterious woman made a difference. My mother could burrow deep into the Malayalam notes only, I could read the entire thing. His hand was difficult, but by practice, I could read it as easily as a printed note.
The woman in question was two years junior to him at the university and she belonged to upper class Hindy community. Whereas we belonged to Syrian Christians, a progressive minority in the state. Probably this religious wall standing between them sabotaged their union. More so, given the inward-looking nature of my father. Many pages of his private journal were filled with politics, social developments, geopolitical analyses, poems, and philosophical thoughts. But in between, in his romantic mood, he waxed eloquent on the charms of his lover. He was very generous in showering praises on her anatomy. Her hair, her eyes, her nose, her lips, her breasts, her hips, her legs, her fingers, her feet, her dress, everything happened to be the subject of his devoted meditation and romantic eloquence.
From the pen picture he had assiduously created, I gathered that she must be around 5'8'' tall, an unusual height for women in the region. The kind of breasts she has, nobody has ever had. Her presence has a profound effect on the people around her.
After my graduation, I joined the technological university in Cochin, the most important commercial and industrial city in the state. Apart from pursuing my M.Sc. course, I had a secret mission to trace out the identity of this mysterious woman, who is purportedly the paragon of womanhood. It was not an easy task. By the end of the first semester, I understood that a girl named Usha Menon did indeed study on the campus, in 1992 she had left the university after graduation. After twenty-three years, I had to retrace a nebulous path, steeped deep in uncertainties. Fortunately, there is a very vibrant alumni association on the campus. But I did not have the connections to contact those people.
The university union elections are a time of dynamic campus politics. The vice chairman's post is by convention, reserved for women. More than politics, the beauty and charm of the candidate mattered in winning votes. Given my physical charms, one of the fronts chose me as the candidate and I won! This development offered a better chance to burrow deep into the past. After some systematic research, I found out a few people still on the campus as teachers, who were her contemporaries on campus. They have now become professors and deans.
After some soul searching, one of the teachers, recollected that Usha Menon is still in the city, she is a very successful businesswoman, she is an industrialist. I was preposterously zeroing down in on her. She is the CEO of Usha Cotton Limited, a very successful brand, Usha inner wear for women is mostly catering to the overseas market, especially in the US and Western Europe. The brand had been growing exponentially over the past decade and its annual turnover had crossed the hundred million benchmark long back. The company has a head office on Marine Drive, Cochin and the production units were in the eastern suburbs and Tamil Nādu. I was dying to get a glimpse of this enchanting woman.
