The affair
Vivek leapt back up the stairs. He had forgotten to wear the mask. Strange, he thought to himself, how could he forget something so integral, so symbolic of the incredible disruption of life known to man. He turned his key in the door and stepped in.
“What did you forget?”
She didn’t look up from her laptop before asking. After 14 years of marriage, she didn’t need to. Then, as Vivek picked up the mask from its usual home, she looked up and smiled at him. She beckoned him with her fingers and pulled him down when he reached her. Sticking her tongue in his mouth and grabbing his balls. Vivek didn’t endorse but neither did he resist the action. Within moments, she pushed him away.
“Ok, I need to send some urgent mails. You get back from the store as fast as you can, it’s still not completely safe out there”
Vivek stood there for a moment as if mathematically deriving what to say next. Then, jolted back to a bigger purpose, he headed towards the door.
“I still don’t understand why you can’t just order supplies via phone” Neera strained to make a point.
“Not just the fingers, I’d like to occasionally put my legs to use, too”
“Whatever” Neera gave up and went back to her laptop. Then just as Vivek pushed out, “I’m making Thai curry…don’t eat out!” she leaned with a domestic ring.
Even in their late 30’s, Vivek and Neera were a highly amorous couple. Way more than their friends anyways. They didn’t have kids, so that certainly helped. But it wasn’t a decision they had made. They had just gone about their marriage without deciding, or even so much as discussing whether they wanted to have a child, it simply never happened. It was only last year, and more because of their family and friends’ constant reminders that they hadn’t conceived despite their insatiable lifestyle, that they decided to get themselves tested. Turned out it wasn’t one of them, it was both. In a strange, couple-y way it made sense to them. Perhaps, they were just meant to ravish, satisfy, and eventually totter through life both physically and sexually. They were both absolutely fine with it.
Vivek and Neera had been together since their early 20’s. Together they had romantically idealized life, been uncertain regarding it, and a few years ago, settled for a predictable familiarity about it. There was nothing that either didn’t know about the other, not just in facts, but in each other’s fiction, too. But today, for the first time in years, things were going to be different.
Vivek stepped into the soft rain that was about to get decisive. He struggled to adjust his mask with an umbrella in hand. Despite wrapping his face for over a year, Vivek still hadn’t mastered the art of masking. He knew the reason was psychological, not technical.
“What’s the point of walking on wet grass without its fragrance?” he had told Neera the previous year, just as masking was becoming mandatory.
“There’s no poetry in death” Neera had shot back.
Vivek made his way past the small park around the corner, its soft, wet mud selling the aroma of the first rain. But like small, roadside businesses that fell to the dwindling traffic in a pandemic world, there were no takers for nature’s wares as well. Not one meant for the nostrils at any rate.
Nonetheless, Vivek was thankful for the gradual lifting of restrictions on life outside. The city was in between waves, the experts warned, and so going back to business as usual was not an option, but people could take things a little easier if they were highly cautious. Oxymoronic as the advice sounded to Vivek, he was willing to pay it heed if it meant he could at least walk in the fresh air, if not yet entirely permitted to breathe it in. Finally, as Vivek turned around at the end of the block, he noticed him, sitting outside in the “outside-only” coffeehouse, a mug in hand, fingers scratching the curve of its body.
Vivek walked over and took the chair six and a half feet from him.
“It’s not like…I mean it’s not what you think” Alex hurried, betraying the anxiety within.
“You mean you didn’t sleep with my wife?” Vivek replied calmly.
Alex’s gaze dropped. Vivek ordered his coffee. Alex, about the same age as them, was a mutual acquaintance of both Vivek and Neera. He was the friendly redhead who breezed in and out of their lives. Vivek had never really given Alex much thought, but in their occasional interactions, he had always found Alex to be a genuine and likeable guy. Alex lived down the road from them and came from money. His family owned a couple of buildings, and while he said he was in real estate, which was true, it was more like he did whatever caught his fancy at the time. Over the last couple of months, as it turned out, that happened to be Neera.
Vivek kept his gaze at Alex while they waited for his coffee to arrive. But the gaze didn’t say anything. Alex, on the other hand, was uncomfortable by every measure of the word.
“It was only once. And…”
The coffee arrived. Vivek took a packet of white sugar, stirred it in, and sipped. And waited for Alex to continue without a word. Without a hint. As intended, it only made things worse for Alex.
“And…nothing happened” Alex, stumbled.
“You mean after that?”
“No…even that. I…I couldn’t do it”
Vivek wasn’t a shallow person by any standards. Especially not the kind to seek pleasure in someone’s shortcomings. But this satisfied him.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I couldn’t do it. I tried…we tried…but I couldn’t”
Vivek’s satisfaction evaporated. The image of his wife vigorously jerking off a foreign penis, trying to get it hard, so it could penetrate her ran riot in his mind and all through his veins. But he held on to his lack of expression.
“I’m really sorry, Vivek” Alex said, pronouncing his name with the annoying anglicised twang, where they shorten even the shortest of syllables.
“What about the other times?” Vivek pressed.
“What other times?”
“The encounter you are speaking of is 2 months old. And I know for a fact that you guys have met in secret, at least on 3 more occasions since”
Alex was silent. “Yes” he finally replied.
“Were you able to do it then?”
“It wasn’t for sex. Well, it was. But…Neera was coming with me for counselling sessions — I mean therapy”
At last, this did get a rise out of Vivek. “You mean my wife’s taking you to the shrink ’cause you can’t fuck her?”
“I told you…it’s not like that. I mean…it’s not like…I mean she’s just being a friend”
Alex could see Vivek was far from convinced by his line defence. To gather both courage and his thoughts, Alex picked his mug and vaulted it to his mouth. He held on to the position, waiting for every last drop of the macchiato with Madagascar Bourbon vanilla, finished with a drizzle of sweet, brown sugar to hit the back of his throat.
“You’re right” he finally said. “What happened was wrong. I wronged, you. I’m sorry. But the only reason the other times had to be a secret was because, well, what could we say to explain it?”
Vivek had a problem. He wasn’t reacting the way he had assumed he would. Seeing reason in a man’s argument who had had sex with his wife, or at least tried to, was deeply uncomfortable and decidedly inconvenient. But try as he may, Vivek couldn’t find the fire of anger within him. All he could see was a guy he had always liked hanging out with, a nice guy, who had made a mistake, and who now truly regretted it. And Vivek had always prided himself on being a reasonable man. And the situation, incredibly, inexplicably, seemed rather reasonable to him.
“If you’re not doing it, how would you know if the therapy is working?” Vivek finally came back, a reasonable question in the context, indeed.
“I…I have tried a couple of times with a prostitute…I mean not really…she’s a Ph.D student…”
“…who sleeps with you for money? Yeah, that’s a prostitute. Go ahead”
“I did try with her…it’s taking time…I know it’s easy for you to laugh it away but you’ve no idea what a person suffering from it his entire life goes through”
It was reasonable to feel bad.
“I didn’t mean to…” Vivek began awkwardly.
“No. It’s O.K. You don’t have to explain. Irrespective of anything, I did wrong you. And for that I am truly sorry”
“You didn’t wrong me as much as my wife did, Alex. It’s her failing, much more than yours. I just…I guess it’s naive to be completely sure about anything in life, but I thought Neera was that one aspect of my life it didn’t apply to”
After a pause, Vivek continued. “Why do you think she did it?”
“Curiosity” Alex surprised himself as well at the swiftness of his response. Vivek just stared back at him, weighing, studying its meaning.
“It’s boringly simple, really” Alex continued. “You guys have been together for…what…18 years or something?”
“So what, there are many couples who don’t…”
“And many more who do. You guys are just one of those who did”
“So…it didn’t mean anything…is that what you’re saying” Vivek questioned mockingly.
“Of course it meant something. People don’t get physically intimate for nothing. So, it probably did mean something…physically, psychologically, emotionally, even. But it meant something at that time. In the larger scheme of things, that one momentary lapse from the norm…I don’t think it had any impact on her. That I do know”
Vivek knew this to be true. Neera always could compartmentalize her feelings, a quality that makes one adept at emotional thievery. However, knowing her as well as he did, Vivek could catch the slightest of shifts in her conscience. And this time there wasn’t any discernible shift, none whatsoever. Which, of course, could mean only one thing, for Neera, that one moment with Alex, was genuinely only that one moment with Alex.
“I know it’s not my place” Alex nibbled at the words. “But, does it change things for you? You’re still everything to Neera, I know that for a fact”
“We don’t know anything for a fact, Alex”
Both were silent for a while. A pug waited at the pavement next to them. He was waiting to cross the road with his walker. For a moment, Vivek’s world telegraphed into the pug’s. There was nothing more around him. The pug, it seemed was also impacted by the moment’s energy. He started looking around for the source of this magnetic pull. And their eyes met. Time dilated. Finally, an impolite tug by the walker broke the moment.
“Give me her number” Vivek said.
“Whose?”
“The prostitute’s”
“What…why?”
“I want to understand her Ph.D thesis…why do you think?”
“Look…Vivek…” Alex tried to defend his friend
“It’s not revenge. Really. I genuinely just want to see what it’s like to sleep with someone else. As difficult as it is to accept, I’m beginning to understand why Neera did it”
“Come on…you can’t expect me to buy that”
“I’m not selling it. I’m just saying. I’ve forgotten how it is to be naked in front of another human being for the first time. I want to see…if I can do it with another person”
Alex’s mind framed another argument, but by the time it got to his mouth, his mind relented. He took out his phone and twiddled the screen. Within seconds, Vivek’s phone buzzed. He picked it up and nodded.
“What now?” Alex’s voice had a sense of resignation.
“Pay the tab and help me buy groceries. I need to hurry home, Neera’s making Thai curry”
Vivek did call the prostitute earning a doctorate. She was Korean and rather unimaginatively, named Kim. The sex lasted all of four and half disappointing minutes. But the encounter itself was rather pleasant. For one, they met at Alex’s place, much to Alex’s displeasure, which uncharacteristically pleased Vivek. For another, Kim was far from a damsel in distress, selling her body to earn an education so that she and her family could escape the clutches of poverty. Her parents were both doctors, and she in turn was comfortably off, it just so happened that she loved sex. And not the monogamous kind. But Vivek found intercourse with her mind a lot more pleasurable than her vagina. Her thoughts, her opinions, her points of view on living itself, was the least muddled of anyone Vivek had come across. It wasn’t always right, but exceedingly clear in its premise and its affirmations. Kim didn’t imagine herself married but was fairly confident of adopting a child sometime in the future. Raising a child, she believed, was a way of giving back to society. She was a devout Christian who saw no conflict between her faith and her lifestyle.
It wasn’t long before Kim, Alex, and Vivek started hanging out together. First, she would come over to help Alex heal, and later Vivek would arrive to complete the transaction. Within months, the exchange involved no money. Their relationships became three soon-to-be-great friends, in a weird, sexual triangle. In fact, it was more of a weird, sexual rectangle. That’s because, in parallel, Neera continued to accompany Alex for his therapy. Vivek knowingly chose not to know about it. And Alex gladly obliged. Occasionally, Alex and Neera went at it in the car, he was indeed getting better. On the other hand, Kim enjoyed being with Alex and Vivek so much that she decided to give binogomy a shot for a while. Meanwhile, Vivek and Neera experienced a predictable fallout of their mutually beneficial shenanigans — their sex lives improved immeasurably. But all good things must come to an end. Or perhaps, they remain good precisely because they come to an end.
Kim’s PhD thesis on Pathway inhibitions of Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis was a piece of marvel. It catapulted her into the Neurological industry limelight almost overnight. Before long, she was offered a highly lucrative R&D position in another city, and she decided it was time to end her relatively non-promiscuous sexual experiment. Kim wanted a threesome for her farewell present, but the men were too timid to grant her wish. They bid her goodbye one after the other. Kim did stay in touch with both for a few years. She regaled them with her experiments and escapades. For a while, she was in a relationship with another woman, the only serious affair of her life. They even contemplated adopting together. However, after it ended, Kim went ahead on her own. For all her quirks and uniqueness, she stuck to her family’s unimaginative naming tradition and called her daughter, Kia. However, slowly but surely, correspondence from her dwindled. Calls became infrequent, the raunchy pics of herself she used to send them both for fun stopped, and before long she completely fell off the social wall of Vivek and Alex’s life. What was worse was that it happened too gradually to be stopped. Without either of them noticing, Kim disappeared from their lives.
But that was still later. Once Kim had moved cities, Vivek and Alex seemed to reach an unspoken agreement. Alex, having psychologically and medically healed enough to attempt a normal relationship, ceased his adulterous romps with Neera. He began dating with intent, and Neera in turn was genuinely happy for him. Moreover, during the time Kim was updating them of her adoption formalities, Vivek and Neera discussed the possibility for themselves. But when they placed the discussion in front of Alex, who by then was a regular at their house, he was rather plain in his commentary.
“I don’t think you guys are parent materials” he said with polite conviction.
“Why would you say that?” Neera emoted.
“Well, what bonds you guys together is the impossibility of gaps in your relationship. And a child will always crack a gap between a couple. The joy of parenthood is usually enough for most people to tide over this, but you guys overlap each other too much. It will break you both”
As cold-hearted logical as Alex’s analysis was, for a while both Vivek and Neera were determined to defeat it. However, in the end, they decided against adoption because they couldn’t decide for it. They realized it was the victory over an argument they were chasing and not a baby. Thankfully, there were other distractions. For one, Alex and his current girlfriend would often double with Vivek and Neera. This happened so frequently and that too with new women, that after a few times it felt less like a double date and more like the three of them interviewing a potential candidate for a fling with Alex. Occasionally, Alex’s condition caught up with him, but with Neera and Vivek’s emotional support, he was always able to rise above it. Without anyone deciding so, Alex became an extended member of Vivek and Neera’s marriage, not sexually any longer, but with each passing year, the three of them fused stronger in an emotional bond. It was legitimately a marriage of three. This legitimacy played out even at a practical level. Household chores, accompanying each other for doctor visits, vacations, life decisions — pretty much all of life was a three-way affair. Once when both Vivek and Neera fell ill at the same time, it wasn’t even an ask of Alex to move in to care for them. And for a period, things were indeed grim. The fear of another pandemic, more than ten years after the first one wreaked havoc on the world, was palpable. Thankfully though, it turned out only to be a pollen infection that impacted a bunch of people in an extended area. However, Alex was there. From medicating both Vivek and Neera, to cooking all meals, to keeping the house. For a few days when things hit their lowest point, he even sponge bathed both, cleaned after them, and changed them down to their underwear. And just like a strong marriage, there was no shame, no guilt, only the right amount of taken for granted.
“Does it feel like Vivek and I are in an open marriage?” Neera once asked Alex.
“Quite the opposite actually. Vivek, you, and I are in an extremely closed one” Alex, quipped. Though both of them could instinctively relate to the underlying truth in the witty remark.
One year, the three-way marriage was threatened when things got serious between Alex and a woman named Nidhi Jain. They were compatible in every way possible. Vivek and Neera, too liked her a lot. Alex had met her in the course of his occasional business meetings. Nidhi’s family, also moneyed like Alex’s, was into construction, and Nidhi who had recently taken over from her father, was interested in repurposing one of Alex’s buildings into an office space. The partnership never materialized, but romance bloomed. It was a shared timidity about life that both instantly connected with. Within months, they were travelling the world together, Vivek and Neera joined them on some parts, but in most other places it was just them. Things made sense all around, so much so that one would’ve been right to be suspicious. Reality, after all, invariably tempers possibility. And it did. Out on a beautiful day in the park once, Nidhi fainted without warning. She was rushed to the hospital where even after regaining consciousness, Nidhi was unable to move. Every medical test known to science was run on her, and then some. But every single one came back negative. The entire medical community seemed puzzled, but the one person confident of her affliction was Nidhi herself. All of them knew Nidhi to be a devout follower of Jainism, she was not only a vegetarian, but also didn’t consume root vegetables such as potatoes, onions, beets, etc., but none had imagined her faith to be anything more than a culinary inconvenience. However, Nidhi had always struggled with the materialistic morbidity of living and sought more meaning in a life beyond. In fact, it turned out Nidhi had wanted to become an ascetic when she was all of 14 but was emotionally cajoled into remaining a daughter. And as a caring and giving person, she had fought the urge to leave the mainstream ever since. In hindsight, Alex realized, their around-the-world sojourns, sexual experiments, and the likes were little more than a fighting distraction for Nidhi. But as it turned out, it only exasperated her conflict within. Laying immobile on the hospital bed, Nidhi informed her loved ones of the impossibility of her continuing with the ways of the world, and that she had to embrace her calling. For her part, she tried to make people aware of the implications. However, given her condition, not a soul fought her decision, getting her back on her feet took precedence over everything else. Then, within a week, she started recovering, it was just as inexplicable as her collapse. The more experienced doctors accepted her illness and her subsequent recovery for what it truly was, medical science’s lack of sophistication in understanding the human mind. Once out of the hospital, Nidhi almost immediately began her path to purification. In Jainism, it is most commonly expressed through different levels of fasting. Nidhi, now with clarity of mind, and a lightness of acceptance, went all in. She began Maaskhaman, a brutal month-long fast where nothing apart from boiled water is consumed. Everyone around her was up in arms about the damage it could cause to her already frail body, but Nidhi was already beyond earshot of everyone. As the rain poured outside, she dived into a deep penance to unburden her soul of material contamination. Her one month was over in no time. At the end of it, she looked pale but content. She was truly on the path that was meant for her. Soon, she began the process to leave life as she knew it behind. Her head shaved, possessions given away, her extensive wardrobe exchanged for pieces of soft cloth, and her voice surrendered to a vow of silence. Alex watched her through the rituals, in denial at first, and eventually resignation.
“It’s like someone made me recite all the things I loved in this world, and then went about destroying all of it in front of my eyes”
Vivek and Neera couldn’t help but agree that the entire episode was a cruel twist of fate.
As if to understand the Nidhi affair better, each of them, even without realizing it, started practising some form of abstinence. To begin with, each of them turned vegetarian. It took an entire week before one of them realized it. Sex was another casualty. After nearly 30 years, Alex took up writing, something he had imagined as his career back in school. Neera went back to the canvas that she had traded in for Excel sheets. After a while though, it was only Vivek who resisted the change. However, both Alex and Neera were content to continue. Vivek began frequenting steakhouses, much more than before, as a mark of protest for the sub-standard living conditions. He hung a whiteboard above their bed, documenting his increased masturbatory frequency owing to a lack of penetrative sex. Finally, he took up ganja smoking on a trial basis. Soon, Alex mellowed. He began joining Vivek on his ganja sessions and eventually on visits to the steakhouses. Alex also began dating again. But much to Vivek’s frustration, Neera refused ‘normalcy’.
The three of them were fast approaching the middle of their 50's. As always, Nidhi would get there almost a year earlier than both Vivek and Alex. And with the big day only a few weeks away, Alex convinced Vivek to give Neera more time to come around.
“I want to gift something for Neera’s 55th…” Alex exhaled out to Vivek during one of their ganja sessions that by now also involved stakes. “…but I have to run it past you first”
“You have to run it past me first? If it’s anything sexual, I’ll kick your balls”
Both looked at each other seriously before the ganja smoked out the humour of the moment and both burst out laughing for the next ten minutes straight.
“What is it?” Vivek finally asked, emerging from the haze.
“It’s not just for her though…I want to gift you both a penthouse in the newest building I acquired last month”
Vivek’s spontaneous protest was broken by his cough, which allowed Alex time to complete his say.
“Before you launch into some righteous honour bullshit, I just want to say…I don’t need to do this. Really. I can be at as much ease gifting you both a rubber plant for your 50th wedding anniversary. I know that’s how comfortable we all are together, but I just want to…also because I can do…but if you’re going to take it in any other way, then it’s cool…I can just make Neera spaghetti…I don’t have a problem!”
“How many bedrooms does it come with?” Vivek smiled
“4…but I guess you’re having trouble maintaining activity in 1” Alex laughed out loud. Vivek joined in louder.
“Isn’t this the one that Neera was so taken in by the view?”
“Yeah, you too, right?”
“Totally. So, when can we move in?” Vivek asked in all genuineness.
“Three weeks from today”
Two weeks too late as it turned out. Neera’s sudden dip in libido, which Vivek and Alex initially assumed to be menopausal, turned out to be something unimaginably worse. When she stopped eating on the second day, preferring instead to simply lie curled in a fetal pose, Vivek and Alex knew something was amiss.
Years later, Vivek reminisced to Alex about how for a few moments after the doctor confirmed it was cancer, Vivek withdrew into an untimely thought bubble. He said he didn’t process the next few minutes of what the doctor said, instead, he remembered random scenes from movies, especially of a bygone era, of the 1960s & 1970s, where doctor’s pronouncement of the illness would spiral the characters into a melodramatic overreaction, only for the doctor to subsequently explain what the illness was with poignant flair. Why did people react so violently even before knowing what the condition was?
Things slipped fast. Neera was admitted to the hospital the same day. 2 days later, she was in Critical Care. On ventilator the day after. Dead by the end of the week. It all felt like an amateur attempt at writing a story. Having propped up unjustifiable characters, unwieldy plot architectures, and wafer-thin motivations, all of it comes crashing down in one mess of a paragraph, ending with the words ‘the end’, which by then speaks more of the attempt itself than the end of the story.
Practically, it takes far longer to get over a death such as Neeras. Emotions can’t keep pace with events on such occasions. Weeks after her death, Vivek and Alex were still angry than anything else. Only there wasn’t a target. So they exploded on each other. And before long, they broke in each other’s arms, as well. In the next few months, both of them tried to power through it and in all the predictable ways possible — binge dating, soliciting, intoxicating, and so on. It took them both almost a year to emerge back into society as reasonably balanced individuals. For no reason, or possibly for all their reasons, Vivek and Alex started meeting each other every evening for coffee, at the same coffeehouse where they first discussed Alex’s adulterous affair with Neera. Only now, things were a lot different. The air was breathable again, nature and pavement businesses back in action. The face was free of encumbrances. The coffeehouse too had a new name, a new facade, and new owners. But things also remained the same. The two men while a lot older, a lot closer, sat drinking the same beverages, sharing tales about the same woman all over again.
