On his best days, he called her Thangam. And he would smile at her in that intense way of his, his hair sticking up at the crown, his incisors jutting out a little in a way that made her heart yelp, even after three years of knowing him and being with him.
"Thangam", he called her now and she immediately stopped reading, carefully placed the bookmark just as he had taught her to, curing her of her habit of dogearing the books she read,and closed the book. She kept it on the tiny wobbly sheeshsm desk by the bed, aligned the edges to the book to edge of the table, stood up, smoothened out the wrinkles on her salwar and walked up to him.
The smoke from his cigarette swirled around him and pulled her too into it as she stood next to him.
"Read", he said, shyly pushing his laptop to her to read.
She looked at him, searching, trying to find out the answers in his brown rimmed eyes.
"It's done!" he said. "It's finished."
Her heart lept and plummeted in equal measure.
He had been writing for two years now and today, on her birthday, he was telling her it was done, that he had finished writing it.
"Can I read?" She asked him? Trying to keep her voice steady.
"Read Thangam. I want you to be one who reads it first."
He looked so earnestly at her that she felt tears prick the corners of her eyes.
She knew it was going to be brilliant. She knew it. Because he was brilliant and creative and had a way with words when they came to him unburdened.
She knew the story of course. She had given him a story to read when they had first started seeing each other. He had loved it. He had called her thangam for the first time then. The cigarette balanced perfectly at the corner of his mouth and though the smell had given her a headache, his almost physical reaction after reading the story she had written had sent her brain into a rollercoaster that was sure to have given her a headache anyway. He had stretched out his legs seated on the concrete seat that was too small for his thin long legs his lanky skeletal frame and looked at her in that intense way of his. She had looked down after a few beats, overwhelmed with the entirety of his undivided attention on her.
"You are brilliant."
He whispered that night in his bed in his hostel room, his teeth biting into her neck, sucking, kissing, slowly, intently. His long fingers had slid up her throat as he continued to press his wet lips leaving marks quickly turning red and then purple in their journey towards the top of her breasts.
"You are brilliant, my thangam." he whispered again.
"And beautiful and mine."
He had said. Inserting the f word untidily between the 'and' the 'mine'. When he said it, the word didn't sound as terrible, but she knew she would never use it herself.
"Your story, it is quite something, thangam" he said then, his left hand digging into her bare shoulders.
"But," he said and bit her and she cried out in sudden pain, pleasure, her brain corrected her.
"But, but, but, Thangam..." he sighed now.
His elbows were grinding into her stomach. Pain she thought. Pleasure she corrected herself.
"But?" She asked him.
"Don't write about yourself so much. Can't you see that everyone will know?"
She felt breathless. His fingers around her neck were sliding up and down, up and down, up and down.
"How would anyone know?" She choked out, his fingers were firm, hard, relentless.
His shoulders tensed as he pushed into her forcefully and she gasped at the sudden pain. She had not been ready.
"Anyone would know" he rasped out as he moved inside her.
"H..how?" She panted.
"You bitch!"
His voice was barely more than a whisper. Deep and tunnelly and dark and it kept dipping lower, forcing her to bite back her pain and try to listen to what he was telling her.
"You write about how your character named so conveniently after your synonym of a name was groped in the movie theatre. You write about joining a college in Hyderabad when you are also in fucking Hyderabad. Anyone would know it's you."
"But...it's..."
She was trying not to cry out from the pain and his weight on her.
"...fictionalised....not...really...what happened..."
"Shut the hell up... everyone will now know that someone had you for themselves before me."
"...but...then... what I wrote....It... was..."
"I touched you first. Did I not?"
"You did."
"I kissed you first did I not?"
"You..."
"Say it..there was no one before me. Say it."
"There has been no one..."
"Oh you are so bad at lying. I used to love that about you...but now..I...I...am not sure"
"I..am not lying..."
"Your story is not a story. It's your stupid life. Isn't it?"
The pain was just too much now. But she managed to say "partly..."
"Say it's your story."
Let it end let it end let it end let it end.
"It is."
He collapsed on top of her then and she felt everything all at once; the pain and shame and relief and the weight of him and her lies and truth and his sweat sliding off his body on to hers.
He hugged her close and wiped her hair off her face and smoothened out the worried creases between her brows.
He kissed her nose and her forehead and her lips. Gentle, reverent, seductive.
"I can help you rewrite it. No one will know about you then. I will protect you Thangam. I won't let anyone touch you. You are mine."
She knew the story. She had always known. In her short story of 2354 words, Janaky begins hating the man who calls himself her father and she has not gone back home since.
In his novel of 83862 words, Janaky is now Mythili. Her father is dead and Mythili is looking back at her life from between the bars of her cell of solitary life imprisonment.
"It is done, Thangam. I did it. I finally did it." He says now, ecstatic, his hands around her waist, his face pressing into her stomach as he relaxes and his shoulders droop.
"I have also written a dedication. Guess who it is for? Don't you want to read?"
Thangam and Mythili and Janaky and Vaidehi take a collective sigh and whisper gently,
Maybe not?