THE RED DRESS The rain has stopped quite a while ago but one felt the remnants of it dropping from the trees and the tall buildings. Plop lands a fat drop on a passerby, a man with glasses gets a glob on his lens that gives him a sudden and distorted yet magnified view of the city of his habitat, a drop on a red dress turns black and makes the happy mood turn to a grim darkness. The man sitting on the pavement stool, sipping a cup of extra-sweet tea and smoking a cheap but filter-tipped cigarette, looks and thinks of his wife, living in a village tending poultry, the homestead and the children; her dirty saree with breasts sagging already at mid-thirties, not a sign of allure left in her. The man, a security guard, looks at his uniform and feels that life has passed him by and he is yet to be forty. A pall of gloom descends on his face in the bright sun that has come out after the rain. A religious man walking down the same street and still holding his umbrella open over his head, looks at a spot of red. He is hypnotized, forgets his destination, forgets the divinity he seeks all day and stands still, the umbrella now stopping hot beams of the sun instead of the rain. His eyes follow the red dot moving on the other side of the street and he feels the urge to follow her till the end of time. He becomes a spectacle to the other pedestrians who are following the tableau and making a snide remark or two at the perceived feckless behavior of ‘a holy man’. He is oblivious to all but the red spot that has kept him enraptured and rooted. On the street pavement is a tea-stall. There, on the sidewalk, squats a man chewing betel leaf and smoking a bidi; he spews a stream of red liquid on the street and gives a long puff on his bidi and thinks about how the breasts would look without the dress, he adjusts his member in open view, he was wearing a dirty lungi. Beside him sipping a cup of tea is a young man, a new initiate at a madrassa, he believes in the revival of the Caliphate. He looks away and tells the tea seller that women should not go out of their houses without male escorts; he then gives a lecture of the faith and its diktats to which no one pays any heed. Not least the young man dressed in a bright shirt and jeans, with deliberate fade patches; a virgin teenager who started sweating profusely and put his hands in his pockets, as is the wont of the shy. She is a young girl in her late teens; one may call her a woman in this country of child brides, and works at a garment factory with a meager compensation. Life is a day to day struggle with her ailing father and housemaid mother, not to mention the three other younger siblings. She is wearing a red top, which she recently got as a gift from a boy he likes a lot and to whom she has given her virtue in a factory nook. She is wearing tight jeans with her red top and is not using a wrap to cover her ample bosom and her head full of oiled luxuriant hair, he wants it that way. Today she is carrying a bunch of roses, clutched too tightly with one hand, the unshorn thorns cutting into her skin. The tryst is to be in a park. She walks confidently in spite of all the stares, the rapes men commit with their eyes, the judgment that pours from their mouths; she doesn’t care, she is headed to the embrace of love, the world can go to hell, for all she cares. She reaches the park and sees her man sitting on a bench but he is not alone; he has an older gentleman sitting with him. She felt a shudder of premonition, a sigh of disappointment; the world belongs to the two of them, doesn’t it? Thinking of the gentleman as a relative, she composes herself, approaches the bench and gives her lover a smile and a respectful address to the older man. The young man tells her to sit between the two men and she hesitantly does. He then talks on his mobile phone and tells the girl that he has urgent business and has to rush off. He tells her that ‘uncle’ will take her to dinner and then to home. She wanted to ask, “Whose home?” but the young man is taking long strides out the park gate already. The ‘uncle’ gives her an ugly suggestive villainous smile. She starts to hate the red dress, she feels naked without the wrap and she realizes that she is just a commodity like the shirts she makes at the factory. She clutches the roses harder and spots of blood appear on her hand. Dhaka 22nd August 2014. © S M Shahrukh and Traces of Orange, 2014 tracesoforange.wordpress/2014/08/22/the-red-dress/
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 07:07:56 +0000
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