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___________________________Ven
Nandan was a high profile officer in an export firm. He was tall and handsome as his wife Radha was charming and petite. She was a Lecturer in a Women’s college. The report is that he fell for her dimple and ended up marrying the whole girl. A cosy pair, they were. But then there’s no life without ‘buts’.
“Radha is a clever girl”, began my wife. This I knew, is ever a prelude to ‘thereby hangs a tale’. So it did. In her words:
You know Nandan is a fine person but his is enmeshed in a silken web of self and is quite a braggart. His pitch has always been that he is irresistible. Mixing half-truths with imagination he would spin yards about many encounters, but mainly about all kinds of woman giving him the glad eye. Radha dismissed them as absurd boasts meant to tease her. But she wished he would stop it because he was making an ass of himself, when people were present. A line has to be drawn even for harmless bragging. But he was incorrigible. Then one day: (Now Radha’s version)
At a movie the couple met with a young man. Radha and he laughed and chatted briefly. She introduced him to Nandan as a friend. “How do you know him?”, asked Nandan when they went home. “Oh, I got acquainted in my college days. We had slept together once. But that was before our marriage”. She said this casually, without even a tiny qualifier.
Anyone parsing the sentence and knowing Radha would conclude that she was giving him a bit of his own medicine, as a counterpunch to his frequent boasts. But the effect was that she ignited something inside of him. “For God’s sake!”, he exclaimed. He decided to use humour to charm and disarm her. “You must be joking”, said Nandan while all sorts of thoughts raced through his fevered brain. “No”, was Radha’s bland monosyllabic answer.
Here we have got all the ingredients for a domestic tempest, but Radha was composure personified. Having planted a seed, she busied herself in the kitchen leaving Nandan in a froth of suspense. He was seething. “Listen”, he said, “I must know no… I must know what happened…”
“Well, there’s nothing much to it, compared to your adventures”.
“My adventures? You know, I just say things for fun. So, you’re giving it back, are you?”, he asked hopefully. Radha again said :“No, every word is true but there’s nothing to it, really. We shall talk later”. Nandan wouldn’t let go. “There’s going to be no ‘later’. This is serious. I must know, now”, he persisted.
“Okay. You asked for it”, Radha said. There was a deliberate, Hitchcockian pause, with Nandan on the verge of “tearing his hair in despair”, like Sir Ralph the Rover.
And then, Radha began: I was a movie nut and used to go to many movies in my college days and my constant companion was one Rayma. You now, I have this habit of falling asleep during the show. Rayma was the one who gave me little shakes and prods whenever I fell asleep. On one occasion I went to a theatre alone because Rayma could not make it. I spotted this young man sitting by himself, one seat away. He looked decent and pleasant and I asked him for a favour.
“You want me to wake you up if you doze off, is it?”, he asked surprised at my unusual request, “Yes, I’ll do that”.
“Then one thing led to another, I suppose?”, queried Nandan. Her response was to ask him innocently, “Shall we keep the rest of it for later?”. “No, now”, said Nandan, almost shouted.
“Well, the movie was over and people started getting up. The young man (I don’t even know his name) may have woken me up a couple of times during the show and I might have dozed off again. I didn’t remember. Anyway, I thanked him and before I could ask him how much of the movie I had missed, he began laughing and said, “I too fell asleep. We slept together.throughout the movie.. He is the one I spoke to’”.
“That’s all”, said Radha with a naughty smile. Nandan guffawed, a big load off his mind. Le Braggart had humble pie for dessert at dinner that day.