‘Don’t I know what men are like!’ she tried to sum up male proclivities. ‘How paranoid man is for exclusive sexual rights over the frame of his spouse! But which man minds waiting in the brothel for his turn to satiate himself? Wonder where his sensitivity of lone possession goes! And what is the fuss about female chastity if it were not man’s insecurity about his own virility? Oh what if his spouse thinks his rival seemed better in bed? But when it comes to a whore, why should man bother even if it were premature ejaculation? How does it matter for he is her faceless customer, and once out, won’t he submerge in the crowd? In truth, man gives a damn to savor the so-called tainted wife of his but his only worry is how she might've felt about his performance in comparison. Thus, it’s not the moral aversion but the perception of his inadequacy that is behind man’s hurt when he hurts his woman who takes on another, so it seems. Besides, what the aggrieved man could do than divorce her under the guise of moral apathy if not kill her out of sexual jealousy? But then won't man learn to live with his wife paying a blind eye to her paramour.’

‘Now that my life became an open book,’ she thought, applying her theory of sexual desertion, ‘what a let down it could be for all of them to learn that they were not sharing me just with my husband but with all and sundry as well! But how would they ever know that I enjoyed every one of them for what they were worth? Well, they should’ve known that I didn’t hold any scale of virility as they laid me. Had I done that really, how many of them would have measured up to Gautam? Let them go to hell and how does that matter to me now?’

However, she could not help feel bitter about the fact of her desertion by all those who crooned eternal love into her exultant ears.

‘Gautam, how considerate he is as a man and loving as a husband, in spite of it all,’ she continued to review her life and times. ‘But, the inconsiderate world sees him as immoral! What is that society, which denies the genuine their fair share and yet damns the deviants as immoral? If only there were fair avenues for the upright! Well, being on the brink why think about the Utopia? Yet, it all feels like betrayal, but then I have had enough of it. And having savored the scandal for so long now, it’s as if the world too is tired of me. Maybe my death might stir up the hornet’s nest all again, to excite the people for a while. Won’t time bury my memory in a hurry?’




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