Adultery

Seventeen long summers ago, when I got married to the love of my life, I thought I had the skies and the stars at my feet.

Seventeen autumns later, I still love her.

The boy struggling his way to manhood had finally made it. The dreams that lived in the eyes of a twenty-four year old have crept into the an everlasting sleep in the ill-timed wrinkles of forty-one. The rebel has auctioned his soul for bread. The poet has pimped language for survival.



When I first met her, we both knew it was too uneven an equation to ever fall in place.

She was eighteen. I was thirty-eight. Different worlds. Different generations.

The raunchy idea of a demented togetherness haunted the differences.

A literature major and a lost minor poet of the yesteryears, the math wasn't biased, the chemistry was.

Have you ever watched the dusk smother the dawn in his contoured arms?



But, where did the love of almost two decades go wrong?
It didn't.

I was a loving husband, and a doting father, as one would observe. But then, why would I ever contemplate cheating on my wife, who had weaved her world around me and our ten-year old daughter, Nisha?


If you loved novels and poems alike, would that mean you were cheating on one with the other?



She wasn't different. She was too familiar, somewhat like the living reminiscence of the pages I had torn off the very heart of a book, years ago. She was the dreams I had swallowed in the lump of my throat. She was the revolution I had exiled me from. She was family. She was me.

She was death.


And, I turned a moth, fluttering his proud wings around the bickering flames of the untamed temperatures she carried in her skin.