Mr and Mrs Seth

Mr and Mrs Seth

Mr Seth woke up this morning with his head spinning furiously. He had to almost tap his head thrice to get Rumpelstiltskin to stop creating such a ruckus and consider normal things like paying him rent for a change. It was also quite remarkable of Mr Seth to note that it was as though at any minute his brains were about to pop out like an eccentric toaster taken a recent unfounded dislike of the living room upholstery. For him dreams were like merry-go-rounds and sleep an unconditional submission to a carnival land where drinking tea on the sidewalk was highly unadvisable.

Mrs Seth took one look at Mr Seth and shook her head in disapproval. Mr Seth, meanwhile, had crawled out of bed and was caressing his stomach with his hands in order to clear the final belch of the morning, looking quite the other way.
‘What time is it?’ he asked without realizing the slightest hint of redundancy of his question or for that matter turning around. Mrs Seth muttered, ‘seven’, as she rubbed her pale green eyes without casting a single look at the tireless clock that had stayed put on the mantelpiece in their bedroom for more than half a century. She had also been accustomed to the art of time-telling to her husband, who, for the last 20 years, had been repeatedly asking the same precise question at the same precise moment.

‘I’m late then, I suppose,’ he said as he slipped his feet into a pair of blue bathroom slippers. This would have been a clue, but to Mrs Seth it was one of those things old people said to one another, besides she had a long time ago given up the will to read between the lines. She felt it was as pointless as watching television or for that matter knitting.

‘What are you late for?’ she asked as flipped open the Times of India, to the editorial section, an old trivial pursuit of hers to find an opinion that would set the precedent of her day and sprinkle meaning and reason to the canvas of her evening society conversations. An act she had refrained from for a week.
‘I have some writing to do,’ said Mr Seth knitting his brows and avoiding all possibilities of an eye contact.

It was a peculiar moment indeed. And by having said this, it only began to mildly fracture the 20 year old plaster of monotony that the Seths of Mumbai had sustained. There was also an opportunity to split open a vacuum that could suck both of them irrespective of either Mr or Mrs Seth’s sense of immorality or intention. But all this Mr Seth gravely grasped as soon as his words left him.

He felt weak and wobbly as he peeked towards his wife searching for a reaction. He couldn’t help but notice how beautiful she looked after all those years. That despite having been together for long, it was as though he was looking at a stranger in his bed. Those deepening lines on her face somehow traced the map of his life. That he had lost and regained love so many times, the word itself had no meaning for him.

It was one of those days. He had to make up his mind.

It had been a week since the general election results were announced. Mrs Seth had been keeping a bit glum about it, and even though the party she had supported won the consecutive term, the film star candidate of her constituency, had lost, in fact, quite poorly. For most people these were arbitrary facts extremely reflective of the whimsical nature of politics. For Mrs Seth, however, in a fit of declaration she pronounced his win quite confidently over a card game among her kitty party friends.

With age she had commanded a certain dignity and respect among her peers but now the chip in her pride seemed to shatter her glass impression of life. Her stature, she feared, would be reduced to nothing in front of those ever-grudging eyes of her neighbour Mrs Khanna, known to be quite cheeky at times, among others.
Perhaps it’s another fair reason to why her usual dose of anti-depressants had doubled over the course of week. Thus contributing and heightening the effect of her staggering inefficiency in paying close attention to what her husband meant when he said ‘he was going to write’ this morning.

She had practically stayed indoors all week, drinking an Australian white wine, smoking Classics ultra-mild cigarette dangled from one corner of her delicate lips – and now that she had mourned enough, she wanted to arm herself with an insight, hopefully not all had been lost.

It was around at ten, when Mrs Seth heard from the voices on the street what she had assumed was her husband. She was in the kitchen, helping herself to another cup of lemon tea, while listening to old Hindi songs on the radio.

‘Arvind?’

‘Arvind are you there?’

A tide of sadness overwhelmed her, she didn’t know whether it was having used her husband’s first name after twenty years that unsettled her or the fact that he didn’t respond. But it was her hands that gave her away at first. They began to tremble and knot. She felt frail, lonely and cold as she closed her eyes and opened them softly. It took her a couple of minutes to somewhat compose herself, enough to light a cigarette and yet not quite know what to do.

She crept softly up to Mr Seth’s study door, left half-open – the way it had always been. It was the smallest room in the apartment, but it was also the nicest, and perhaps the coolest. And as she entered, she felt as though she was lost in some corridor of time. Of course, it had been twenty years since she had been in this room. The smell of her husband’s aftershave, books, perfumed candles and cigarette smoke caught her in some ephemeral rapture.

The window was open but she decided against rushing to it. She could hear voices of a large congregation below, more clearly somewhat now. She couldn’t bear to see the mess on the street or the faces of people looking up to her.

Something brushed passed her legs. She looked below to see that it was her cat, Margarita, sauntering in with careful steps. Something caught her eye. It was a book, an open book with Mr Smith’s spectacles behind. She slid her hand against the polished oak table that her father had gifted them when they moved in the house. She looked closer to the page, it had a quotation.

‘He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
-- Albert Camus

The doorbell rings. The whistle of the kettle blows.