Even as I poured water over my mother’s calculations, how the mob at our gates swelled by the day to overwhelm me! With what fury they began baying for my surplus heart, as they saw it. And they were all members of that star’s assorted fan clubs fanned all over. All financed by him, of course, any doubt about that. That’s not all. The electronic media went overboard in solidarity, ostensibly with its eyes firmly glued on the TRPs. And the celluloid intellectuals and the social activists began vying with each other to juxtapose the star’s philanthropic largesse and my surplus meagerness. Pig heads all. Why one hyper-active TV anchor even dubbed it as my double-hearted weak-heartedness, and no marks for guessing who. Not content with all that, legions of the star’s million fans took to Facebook to bleed my hearts all over it. It’s a mob mob world. So it seems.
Then appeared that fateful post on that very website, “None would’ve cared a damn for Rhea’s second heart, if it were to save the life of a slighted soul, not that of a soulless star.” Well it’s an allusion to that actor’s off-screen omissions and commissions. As that propped up my tenuous position, I initiated spirited chat with him that is without a slightest idea that he could be an impostor! I should’ve known all that glitters is not gold. Lo, he led me to his bed behind the back of his wife that is. That I came to know much later that is as he started avoiding me. What irked me was not the loss of the silly virginity that society wants us women to preserve for the sake of an unknown man. That is until he turns up as husband. But then, it’s his deception without contraception that blackened my face before my mother. Seems like life is merciless to those who fall by its wayside, but thankfully, my mother didn’t make it any worse for me. Well, she left the choice to me. It’s not that I was averse to becoming a single mother but I had no stomach to bear that bastard’s bastard child; so I climbed onto the table.
But what an irony the symbolism of abuse is; even if its object is the male, yet its subject is ever the female! As my mother’s tenderness, contrasting his crudeness, gave birth to my softness to the fair sex, I insensibly began to develop lesbian leanings. It’s as if my mother gave birth to me twice, first as a girl and then as a lesbian. Two hearts and two births! How freak! And yet it took a veteran to spot my proclivity and make me adept at handling the hardware and the software of it. It’s all latent in women but it takes the favour of life to make it more than fantasizing, so it seems. Sadly my first love met with an untimely death but not before ensuring the flame she lit would forever singe in me. My later mates, few and far between, left me at some stage, opting for a male, in marriage that is. Who knows, they saw lesbianism as safe pre-marital sex, and there is merit in it. If only one of them was a misandrist like me, it would have a different story. But why fate brought me all the way from Mumbai to Kodur, and to its Helen in abstinence, may make a different story.