A Space of Shadows

Iravati's Face:

Kabir Suleiman was the half-yearly neighbour. One look at him during the vacation and she was instantly catapulted to the gates of desire. Each awaited moment only enhanced the attraction. For eight long years she had been harbouring the silence of a fool, the silence of the cowardly, the silence of the window bay and the silence of the terrace corner. She turned twenty nine this June. The nameplate outside her door now reads Iravati & Bodhisattwa Mitra. As was expected from the advertising community, they married. He shifted into her flat, allowing for her memories to remain as pungent as ever. With the sea-facing curtain flaying on caffeine clad dusks, Iravati circled the rim of her cup and wondered back to pasts that never wore the colours she saw them in, or traced time forward to intangible spaces left untouched.

Kabir's Face:

Iravati was a sultry skinned, irresistible woman, lapping in the warmth of one Bodhisattwa of the intellectual extravagance. Since the last eight years of his parents' divorce, the only reason he returned to his father's flat, in the name of a vacation, half-yearly, was to try and win over the line of smile to words. Smoky evenings on the terrace were because she was, on the other side, a silhouette of desire. Kabir was thirty two and doing exceeding well in his wildlife photography. His visits were shortened and even more since the year the nameplate outside her door read Iravati & Bodhisattwa Mitra. With his father's death, all that remained of that flat was gone. He put it up for sale and curiously could never be satisfied with the heaviest of offer. One of such a morning of negated negotiations later, he opened his door to Iravati.

Space of Shadows:

Their awkwardness was not unlike those of teenagers, their conversation like an unsure breeze. He agreed to sell her the space. Sell. The word had never once occurred in his wildest musings over Iravati. Buy. The word had never once occurred in her deepest longing for Kabir. The space of togetherness came alive in vacant souls. The wall between the two apartments broke, as a wall came up between silence. Ever frozen. In aching forevers, and the pointed guilt of reticence. It hurt those who left, it hurt those who were left back.