Possessed
The girl was nervous. He could see that. She kept pulling in her upper lip and lowering her eyes as if she expected something dreadful to happen any moment. It made her young face seem younger, like that of a frightened child. She was not particularly pretty. But she had a softness to her that hadn’t come through in the pictures. Soft round eyes. A soft fleshy mouth. Hair shiny and soft and hanging about her shoulders in gentle waves. The backs of her hands smooth, satiny and unmarked by veins. The hands of a baby, thought Prof. Sinha. When he walked up to her at Nehru Place metro station, he was struck by how lost she looked. She had come a long way to meet him — all the way from Shahdara. She had told him that she would be wearing a pair of blue jeans and an orange top, and he spotted her at once — bright as a popsicle amidst the drab swell of crowds. The thin strap of her black sequinned cloth bag lay diagonally between her small breasts, pushing them out against the cheap synthetic material of her top. Oh my, Prof. Sinha said to himself, as he approached her with a slow, reassuring smile.
He led her into an eatery amidst the warren of subterranean restaurants that hugged the metro station. The food court would not do, he had decided earlier. It was too noisy and harshly lit. A cool, shaded place with good food and soft music was what was needed to put her at ease. He noticed that she was sweating in spite of the air-conditioning. Her upper lip and forehead were pearled with perspiration. She sat tensely at the edge of the deep upholstered seat, twisting the white napkin with her fingers. Her nails were painted a torrid blue. And the sleeves of her tangerine top were scooped away in the current fashion to reveal the gleaming lozenges of her shoulders. Prof. Sinha tried to look away and asked her what she would like to have.
“A hamburger and a Coca Cola,” she said promptly.
She was 15. At least, that’s what she had told him when they got chatting all those weeks ago. He saw no reason to disbelieve her. She, on the other hand, was probably wondering how old he really was. She had looked surprised when he introduced himself to her at the metro station. He had told her that he was 28, but now that she had seen him in person, he was sure that she thought him older. While he was a trim, well-preserved 46, he knew that no one would mistake him for a 28-year-old. Naturally, he had had to lie about this as about many other things. When he created his fake Facebook profile almost a year ago, he gifted himself a fetching new identity. Ashok Mathur, self-employed, was young and light-hearted. He posted amusing stories and wacky videos and memes. He knew all about the latest movies and music and posted witty comments about them, comments which he usually stole from elsewhere. In fact, whenever he had a little time, Prof. Sinha scoured the internet for material to finesse his new persona. He played to the interests of the young. In the early days he used to be a bit embarrassed about the vulgar mishmash of the stuff he put out there. He was, after all, a man of refined taste. He had read English and Classics at Cambridge and considered himself highbrow. And though he was now a part-time lecturer of English at a rundown management institute in Noida, he had the full-time instincts of a fastidious intellectual who was as contemptuous of cat videos as he was of the latest on Kareena Kapoor.
Still, he worked hard on his virtual identity. If he were to succeed, perfection was called for. Happily, perfection was achieved before long. Young women, many of them school girls, began to accept Ashok Mathur’s ‘friend’ requests because he seemed to be such good fun. When he got chatting with some of them on Messenger, they told him they found his profile picture cute. It was a black and white photograph of himself taken by his father when he was three years old, one where he was holding a toy plane and laughing. His wife or his son might have recognised the picture from an ancient family album, but it was unlikely that they would stumble upon it online. His wife had no time for social media and his son had declared that he had moved on to way cooler stuff than Facebook. In fact, no one who knew Aloke Sinha could have connected him to the happy-go-lucky Ashok Mathur who had quickly secured a large number of ‘friends’ and got a cascade of ‘likes’ on whatever he posted.
The only snag was that most of the girls wanted to see his recent pictures. Well, they would have to meet him to know what he really looked like, he joked in response. “Mayb u r 2 ugly,” some said, shooting off a double row of big grins, winks and smileys. “Oops, you got me there,” he bantered. “Actually, I look like the big bad wolf, with big teeth and bad breath,” he said — and added two tears-of-joy emojis because it was such a grand joke. Sometimes he got serious and told them a bit about himself. The beauty of it was that he could tell them anything across the enabling glow of his computer or smartphone screen. Getting naughty with young girls late in the night, Prof. Sinha, the self-invented internet playboy, spun his web and went on a blithe romp. What a fabulous thing modern technology was, he marvelled. How powerful and liberating. It could tear down regimes and set people free. Just as it had set him free. It had rescued a part of himself that had been smothered under the sorry driftwood of his life.
And so here he was with this girl now, meeting her for the first time.
“I have a confession to make,” Prof. Sinha said to her with his most charming smile.
The girl, whose name was Payal, was bent over the menu and was trying to decide between a Juicy Lucy burger and a braised tenderloin burger with caramelised onion and horseradish sauce. She looked up and Prof. Sinha continued. “I am not really 28, you know,” he said. “I am 32. But you were so young, so pretty, that I was embarrassed to tell you that I was so much older than you.”
At this she tilted her head, looked at him sideways from beneath her short, thick lashes, and gave him a coy, slightly coquettish smile. “I’ll take this one — Juicy Lucy,” she said and sat up straight. Immediately, his eyes flew to the points of her unripe breasts and he felt a flickering in his groin and a fever in his blood that turned his ears hot. His hand shook when he poured the Coke into her glass, and he spilled a bit of the fizzy liquid which the girl quickly mopped up with her napkin.
——
Excerpted with permission from The Possessed, from The Love Song of Maya K and Others Stories by Shuma Raha
Publisher: Niyogi Books
Price: Rs 395
Buy this book on Amazon: bit.ly/MayaK