Pest Control- 8

Read part 7 - here

---------------------------

She was shuddering with hate, undisguised disgust seeping through her contorted features. Uma bared her teeth with contempt, nostrils flaring with anger as she held the phone near her ear wishing she could reach a hand through her phone and throttle the bastard who’d so casually cited his demands.

She had on many occasions during moments of idle malevolence thought up of scenarios where she’d get a chance to find the bastard tied to a chair inside a garage and how merrily she’d saw through him, slice him to pieces, chop off his legs and put a bullet in his head while he stayed gagged, begging for mercy, crying, dying; oh she’d thought of pushing him over a cliff while no one watched, of sniping him, garroting and kicking him to death yet they were just idle thoughts and now that he nonchalantly spoke on the other end of the phone, Uma knew all her fantasies were just that. 

None too practical.

How would she ever find such a scenario to put her far-fetched schemes into action. 

What was she thinking?

‘I want you Uma. I want us to be together as we always were. Happy.’

At this sentence Uma snorted, in fact, she laughed and that idiot laughed with her. 

Stupid bastard.

He spoke to her like he hadn’t just a day before stuffed full every mailbox in the building with her almost naked pictures.

‘Oh come on Uma. Are you upset about those pictures? How else would I have got you to pick my phone-call?’ he chirped.

He sensed that she was upset because of his little prank but he assured himself that she’d soon get over it. ‘Look, the pictures didn’t have your face on it and weren’t very clear either.’ He spoke by way of clarification, pouring himself another glass of whiskey the bastard was exhilarated to have spoken to her after so long. 

He had missed her voice because seeing her almost every day from a safe distance while sitting in his car outside her residence compound had limited his listening ability and he was no fool to let her on what he was up to. 

Uma had a tendency to be impulsive. She could out of some imagined fear have called the police or told her husband about him which would have rendered all his plans futile.

The trick was to slowly creep up so she was always fearful because he knew exactly what she was afraid of..her good reputation.  

Uma heard the distinct click of a lighter followed by a crisp crackle resulting from a long cigarette inhale.

He still smoked.

His smoke stained breath was the one reason Uma had quit smoking. A lingering ashtray stench always clung to him supplemented with a sour alcohol reek that served to add to his gruesome personality a touch of sickening hideousness. 

She could still smell him as he spoke and added to her macabre imagination another visual where she stabbed his eyeballs with lit cigarettes.

‘Let us meet’ he said.

‘I’m busy.’ she spoke through clenched teeth.

‘Oh.’ he said in a level tone. ‘Of course. In-laws and all. I understand.’ he spoke between sips and exhales that lent a thick graininess to his greasy voice. 

Alarm bells. 

Uma’s chest was about to explode. Her beating heart had somehow begun to clang against her breast and wanted out. She found the blood beginning to rise and colour her face, her cheeks grew hot and her spine tightened, tingling with a pressure that began bunching on her shoulders. 

‘What?’ her weak voice found his ears.

‘Listen’ he said emptying the last dregs of the bottle in his glass and licked its rim to not let the spirit waste. ‘We can’t play this game too long. You have to sooner or later, though I prefer sooner, even immediately come back to me, and..’

‘I will never come to you, you bastard.’ Uma found herself snarling into the phone. ‘leave me alone and never come back into my life. Get lost you piece of..’ but he’d hung up.

The bastard smiled. ‘She’ll never change.’

Uma shook with fury and tension. She had to focus her thoughts that ran in a dementia of fear.

He knew about her in-laws, that they were here because of course, he knew where she lived, how else would he have put the pictures in the mailboxes and he’d kept a constant vigil on her from somewhere outside. From where though?

Her phone rang again.

Bastard calling.

She said nothing.

‘You dare talk to me again like that and I will come and smash your face in front of your in-laws you bloody whore.’ he screamed.

Uma swallowed. The darkness spilling around her. Something wriggled within, polluting her insides, choking her in a slimy grip.

‘I know where your husband works.’ She heard another cigarette crackle and all that was broken inside her soldered into a ferric resolution.

The bastard was in a state of frenzy. He’d smashed the empty whiskey bottle on the floor and opened a new bottle that could have been any colourless alcohol and filled his glass to the brim, spilling it while he screamed into the phone.

Something had seized him after he hung up. He’d been too polite, too kind, too merciful. She wasn’t used to niceties. She belonged to him and he’d take what was his.

He’d called her again to remind her that, of what she was and what he was capable of. 

She’d always been so afraid of him doing something that would besmirch her good name and that had always been his winning card.

Uma was too nice to her disadvantage. Too bad he'd thought. 

He was snapping his fingers. It felt nostalgic, the way he sounded; so much like the old him, the confident him, the real man who knew how to tame a woman.

‘I’m willing to forgive you, but next time I call, you’d better have a date fixed for us to meet up. If not then you watch out.’ he snapped his fingers vigorously as a way of threat, like he always did but this time Uma didn’t crumble into a sorry state and fear what the outcome might be. She didn’t look around her office and worry that the bastard might create a scene in front of her colleagues, instead she pulled out her schedule diary, flicked the pages to a not so far off date and under the list of few things she’d planned for that day Uma added a small note which read “Kill the bastard”

Pest Control- 7

Read part 6 - here

-------------

She’d been walking aimlessly. It felt so good to be alone. For the first time in months she’d breathed free but this short instant would soon come to pass when she’d go back to work, go back to the abominable life that had fashioned itself around her.

Her parents had wondered and worried about her drawn face and near emaciated frame.

They’d urged her to quit her job that had pinched her features into an exhausted expression. 

She didn’t need to work herself to death. She was always welcome to live with them they’d told her and for a moment Uma was tempted. 

In fact, she was so sure of doing exactly that, that she went out for a walk.

The evening had descended into a lovely dark night. It had rained and the wet streets reflected an almost neon version of bright lights.

Uma felt her heart burgeoning with relief. She’d decided that quitting her job would be the first step she’d take. He wouldn’t be able to locate her and she’d mysteriously disappear and that would be the end of..of her miseries and pitiful life.

She quietly mused at this stellar plan, distorting the reflection of myriad lights from buildings and houses on the road by stepping on them, splashing puddles of water to break the silent monotony of abstract yellow and green images on black streets in this beautifully damned night.

There was a big splotch of yellow that seemed to glow out of a thin film of water on the road that suddenly turned a livid dark.

Blood red it shone and she looked up to see a red light, burning like a bright scarlet drop stuck high up in the middle of that black night telling her to stop.

The hideous wet night which was silent and aloof because no one in their right minds ventured out during rains and yet there she was, seizing a chance at being free that felt like such a privilege. 

Self-loathing hurtled down her, beat her into the colourful roads, melting her into dark shadows that didn’t deserve light.

Uma was shirking away from herself but she was not this person. A justification to be free? She didn’t need that. 

She wasn’t going to run and hide from him. She would do what was right and get away to make a life of her own, one that she always wanted for herself and he’d never be able to take that from her.

‘’I’ll get a new job.’ she told her parents. ‘In a different city’.

After nearly two years of looking for her, calling almost every designing company and getting no helpful answer from her friends he married.

The bastard found himself a wife, introduced by his parents who knew nothing of his grotesque. 

He wasn’t close to her, fortunately for the wife who never once found herself at the deranged end of his beating and abuses.

She’d tried to befriend him, to be a part of his everyday life but he’d thankfully ignored her not that she was happy about it.

There was no joy for her in this loveless marriage, even the birth of a beautiful daughter failed to restrain him in domesticity and his wife found herself isolated evermore.

If he was ever enthusiastic to see her or their daughter the bastard never showed and the frequency of his meetings had increased over the past year.

He’d told his wife not to disturb him when she’d shown him a picture of their daughter walking for the first time but to his credit, he’d actually looked up from the screen of his computer in which he seemed to reside the past couple years.

It was either that or business meetings of which she had begun to grow suspicious because as family businesses go most of his family seemed to be unaware of where his particular business was and so one day while he was away on some errand, she stole into his study and did what any suspicious wife of acute astuteness would do.

She checked his browser history and came away in a daze.

Her unfettered husband had almost every single day of the week gone to find solace in the arms of anyone who’d been paid in advance.

Those business trips were indeed only business and expensive at that.

Folders and files full of photographs, details and names of professional women who’d agreed on nightly trysts.

Perhaps she’d been willing to ignore as a foible were it a one time or a one night fling, need or affair. She had no idea how one should correctly allude to such rendezvous but there were if she wasn’t mistaken hundreds such women who’d been neatly catalogued with their names so-called, rates and services provided.

Wasn’t she relieved to know that he barely touched her? 

Maybe she needed a release, to cry and aggrieve the death of her marriage that she’d since childhood framed into that picturesque image or perhaps she just wanted to close all avenues for any excuses that a mother and a wife was wont to make in an effort to keep the marriage intact that she checked a particular date one on which she’d waited for him to come home through the night, one on which he’d not broken character and had successfully disheartened her as usual one which was their wedding anniversary and she wasn’t disappointed because he had been the bastard she’d thought him to be because that particular day he’d met not one but two different business partners.

She was recoiling with undisguised aversion from the man she’d lived for four years; the printer worked hard and she began gathering evidence.

Detachedly she browsed for every detail and laughed caustically at this ironic twist of events because this had been the only time that her husband had managed to entertain her..unknowingly.

Her marriage had been a joke and she was willing to smile at her expense, even his, going by the amounts lavished on these fleeting unions, however, there was this one name that showed up far too often to ignore. 

Her husband seemed to be frantically searching for someone nearly every hour it seemed, a name he’d assigned to his every nightly tryst, his obsession with role-playing and his persistence at addressing all those women as Uma.

Whoever the hell she was the solemn wife couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.

Pest Control - 6

Read Part 5 - here

--------------------

This was the third time since yesterday that Uma’s mother-in-law had made acute observation on her sudden gaunt face. 

‘You’ve not been eating’ she said while scrutinizing her daughter in law at the breakfast table who was quietly staring at her phone. 

Uma tried to feign surprise and searched for an excuse but gave up after raising her brows to look shocked. She muttered something about feeling ill but the voice weak and unsure never found its way amidst the commencement of another conversation regarding the sudden pleasantness in weather.

All the better for her she thought.

Uma didn’t want anyone suspicious of the sudden headlong dive her happiness seemed to have taken. Her short run of luck had finally run out and the spluttering fumes of leftover kismet weren’t enough to push her heavy wagon of life that seemed riddled with excess baggage. 

She’d never told Manu of the curse that once blotted her life and didn’t intend on doing so now.

‘Don’t get upset about what mom said. You look pretty as ever.’ Manu spoke with a soft smile and left for work shortly after which Uma found herself staring at her computer screen.

The events of the past days had congealed her ability to do anything other than obsessively thinking of the possibilities while chewing her nails to a tattered stub. She’d begun peeling at the cuticles while ferociously imagining, presuming and deducing her next step.

Uma had decided to pick up the phone when it rang next and speak to the bastard asking him what was it that he wanted. 

Annoyingly she was curious to know how he’d found her and decided to ask him that as well, but rethinking these questions she realized how moot they were because whatever his plan was he’d actuated it by sending the photograph.

That man was capable of so much worse and the myriad probabilities of what he could do next physically stung her heart. She was exasperated at her imagination that took her places of no return. The thoughts were chafing inside her head, maddening her and she furiously punched a wall in frustration, silently screaming at the pain of feeling cornered.

Of course, she could just tell Manu and that’d be it. They’d brave it together and, oh god she didn’t want to tell him. 

He should not have to know any of it. Theirs was an unblemished velvet garden of primrose bliss. To have it tarnished, to have a stray thorn compromise the careless pastures of uninjured freedom was not an option, not now not ever. 

But then what? What was she to do? Uma quietly screamed as her fist thudded against the wall, tearing the thin skin on her knuckles to draw a small wound that slowly oozed scarlet.

If this had been his face I’d have happily bashed it inside his skull.

The razor pincers of past hurt and upcoming unpleasantness clamped through Uma’s innards and the old foul sensation of a turgid worm lurking within her, smearing her skin with its soiled slime, staining her existence resurfaced again.

Uma drew in a deep breath when the phone rang again.

This time it had a name. 

Bastard Calling

She said nothing and waited for him to speak holding the phone near her ear without touching lest his voice dirty her.

‘Uma?’ the grainy, unctuous voice that she wished never knew spoke her name.

Uma winced. The old scabs suppurated; Nausea had found her again. How she suddenly hated the sound of her name.

‘What?’ she growled.

‘Woohoo’ he cried and she knew exactly the facial contours his ugly mug had undergone at that moment.

He sat with a large glass of whiskey. 

It didn’t matter what he was drinking as long as there was a drink and one, especially in the morning, saw to it that his day went by smooth and he’d needed it today because something told him that Uma would finally speak to him.

How her voice hit all the right spots within him.

‘Woohoo,’ he screamed and jumped up spilling the drink all over him. 

‘How are you?’ he happily asked her. Oh, he was happy and excited to finally get to talk to her. Like a long-lost friend suddenly come to life he wanted to ask her so many things. His face was animated with light and he refilled his glass staring at the beaming amber which seemed to echo his brightness but there was no reply.

‘hello?’ he sounded concerned. 

‘what?’ she repeated somewhat tersely, but as long as she said something.

‘Hope you’re doing well.’ he snorted with laughter downing the big drink in one gulp.

‘What do you want?’ her voice sounded angry. Almost like a suppressed scream but he was being silly he knew. She’d heard him after so long she didn’t know how to react.

‘Uma, it’s me.’ he chirped gleefully. ‘What do I want? well..’ he waited for her to guess but seeing no answer forthcoming he said it himself. ‘Uma, I want you.’

Pest control - 5

Read part 4 - here

--------------

The best way to win an argument he had learnt was to beat the person beating you at it, and it helped when it was a woman who was too afraid for her good reputation.

But could he help it? He’d loved her. He loved her so much that the very second he realized that she didn’t want him or the moment she hinted that she hated him he couldn’t bear the thought and was there any other way other than beating that woman, that woman he loved with his life into submission until she agreed to love him, although she lied it was good enough for him.

‘Please lie to me that you love me. Don’t tell me the truth that I’m not worth you because I can’t bear to know that.’

She’d often bled under his beatings, but she more than often retaliated.

She was big, beautiful, taller than him, he hated being shorter than her.

Her punches were strong, almost always knocked him over and that somehow fanned his need to be more dominant because how could a woman that too a woman he loved beat him?

She played fair because she was nice, that’s why he loved her, and that’s why he was unscrupulous because anytime he knew she’d overpower him he’d dole out a knife from the kitchen and slash at her. Once it tore her dress, once he’d hit her with a bottle of coke, was it? no, it was some other drink. She’d fallen unconscious and there was a big lump on her head.

He hated doing this to her but what could he do? She just wasn’t ready to accept him in her life.

Uma had wanted out the very moment they'd started dating.

For what?

Is checking phone a crime? Is seeing what your girlfriend does behind your back, whom she talks to, what people she meets isn’t something a boyfriend should do? 

How can you keep the love of your life from running away from you?

Of course, he loved her and she wouldn’t believe this simple embryonic fact. 

Isn’t that the reason he always cried after hurting her?

She had to know that it hurt him as well to beat her. He was always on his knees, his head to the ground begging her, beseeching her to never leave him then why would she always complain that he was creating a scene?

Just because he did this once at a party, outside a movie theatre, inside a club when they had a small argument that escalated into something so big. Why couldn’t she just agree to everything he said?

She was so willful which is why it was important to tell her to do as he pleased or he’d go to her office and show everyone her dirty photographs.  

It happened just once or twice he couldn’t remember that he stood outside her house after a fight and screamed, shouted for her to forgive him and he might have called her a slut or whore but he never meant that. 

It was the only way she would see him because she was so afraid of scenes and dramas that just to contain them she did as he pleased and this he had found was his trump card.

Do as I say or I’ll beat you in front of your office people, and that’s it. She would do it because she was always so concerned what others might say or think of her. These trivial things never mattered to him, and he only did it because he loved her. How many times would he assert that?

She was once at a party looking radiant and had been too busy with her friends while I stood alone at the bar waiting for her to be with me.

She was smiling, looking beautiful, wearing heels. I despised those things but as many times that I told her to not go out dressed in such clothes with makeup and heels she’d do exactly that and maybe it was the annoyance of being left out which angered me or the fact that she never listened to me that I went up to her, deliberately introducing myself to her friends and held her waist, pinching her so hard my fingers hurt while she kept talking and smiling while wincing in pain and shaking; it almost calmed me.

I wasn’t a psycho like she always said I was. I just wanted her to feel how I felt. I knew she wouldn’t say a thing to me in front of everyone, in front of all her friends, pretending to be happy and fine while I pinched and pinched so hard that it had turned blue. She later showed me the bruise and the clot of blood over it and slapped me with all her might.

I got a knife and tore her dress and mounted her while she cried. But I did it to let her know how much I loved her. 

I love you I told her but she wouldn’t have any of it.

She’d not met me that weekend because she was spending time with her childhood friend in her house and it hurt me to think that she’d rather spend time with someone she knew forever as opposed to her boyfriend. 

Wasn’t it embarrassing for me to beg her for her time while crying on my knees in front of her friend? She looked disgusted and I feared she’d leave me, so I cried and begged and screamed in her house to the point that her friend had to leave.

I really worked hard for her, I did everything I could to keep her. 

Why wouldn’t she want me?

Once I’d opened the door of my car and thrown her out on the sidewalk because she argued with me because she requested me to let her be because she didn't want me. 

You can leave me I’d said to her and threw her out. She was dazed and I worried about her which is why I turned back my car and threw her phone at her so I could call her if she got lost. I was..I was always concerned about her. All the time.

She’d hurt herself a bit but it hurt me more that instead of coming back to me she ran in the opposite direction trying to hail a cab. 

 It was my quick thinking that I came back on time and told her to sit in the car or I’d come to her office and tear it apart laying her in the brickwork.

She believed me when I said these things because I was capable of doing it. 

So what if once I’d emptied a mug of beer on her head in a restaurant? It was her fault. She wouldn’t tell me about the man whom she’d greeted when we’d got in. 

Of course, a small incident like that wouldn’t get in the middle of our anniversary night and that she was wet with beer didn’t matter. 

We still had a good time. 

She often went awfully silent each night when I got on top of her but that’s only because women are shy.

I still keep the hair I’d pulled out of her head in a thick clump from above her ears when she once almost ran out to a policeman.

I’d caught her and dragged her back into the car and screamed in her face while I cried without realizing that I was still pulling at her hair with all my might so much so that I tore them off her scalp.

She’d bled and hit me in the face but I didn’t mind because she was upset. 

I will die if you leave me I’d told her.

She said being with me was killing her.

But that’s okay I’d told her. I’d not let her die because I loved her.

You don’t love me she said.

But this is my love I cried and she laughed while I choked her till she was blue in the face but she kept laughing.

I was afraid that night because she didn’t cry after I hit her. 

The next day on her way to work she disappeared.

She was sly that Uma. Changed jobs while I continued to pick and drop her outside her office thinking she still worked there and just like that she was gone.

Pest control- 4

Read part 3 - here

------------------

Two days had passed. Uma’s phone lay inside her worktable drawer and she’d dared not charge it lest it rings again. 

She knew her work suffered, there were important calls that she didn’t answer and for a second she felt that she probably didn’t care. 

It was this thought that ashamed her. 

Was she still so afraid? She wasn’t twenty-two anymore. That invisible dungeon that trapped her out of fear and shame hadn’t existed for ten years. Ten years is a long time for people to change and Uma had changed.

Her phone came back to life as she plugged in the charger and avoided looking at the screen. 

A small tide of messages quickly began displaying on her now alive phone and Uma decided to brave them.

The bastard hadn’t sent any messages but that did little to assuage her cacophonous anxiety

Unfortunately for her, she’d known him all too well. He was the human equivalent of a chewing gum stuck to the soles of a shoe or hair, horrifyingly impossible to get rid of. 

A spineless nobody who had no will over her anymore, yet she still trembled; her eyes looking absurdly hollow with unforeseen worry, dark circles beginning to mark their territory on her face, a sudden facial smudge that her mother in law noticed almost immediately.

You work too much she’d said and Uma had politely smiled. 

She sat watching Manu slowly sip his tea. This wisps of steam fogged his glasses and he squinted his eyes to see through them. Unbelievable how she’d come to know one so harmless and one so harmful in one life.

Uma felt powerless in these circumstances much as she did ten years ago and the phone calls had served to melt the ground beneath her feet. She was free falling back into the lurid gorge that pulled her more in its depth with each fearful heartbeat and this fear she knew would finish her. 

Uma acknowledged her weakness, the absolutely idiotic feebleness of her mind and frailty in her convictions and lamented the loss of her strength under these circumstances that the bastard had managed to suck away, to feed on yet again.

The unscrewed can of worms within her had wriggled into a nauseous tempo with a phone call but it was the now ringing doorbell and the events that followed that worked to replace her wasting confidence and fear into a resolute decision.

Manu had opened the door to an anxious neighbour who looked like she was barely restraining her agitation. 

‘Hi, hi’ she tried sounding casual but something about her countenance had triggered a bomb inside Uma. 

She’d known the neighbour, an almost middle aged woman of cheerful disposition to not have a worrisome life yet the way the woman stood shifting her weight on both her feet scrunching a paper to a crumple inside her tightly clasped fist that Uma knew something had gone horridly wrong.

‘Uh, can we please talk?’ the neighbour spoke politely but not without a touch of trepidation. 

The floor had begun melting into a swamp and Uma walked through a mass of blubbery tiles with much effort following Manu out into the corridor of their apartment building, slowly closing the door behind them. 

‘Someone is playing a disgusting prank here in the compound’ the neighbour spoke, wide eyed, in a hushed annoyed tone.

She unfolded the piece of scrunched up paper and held it open in front of the couple and Uma slowly shut her eyes. 

She felt an acrid burn, acid singing her retinas to liquid, the whites of her eyes pouring down her cheeks. Should she be so lucky? 

The tears were welling up and Uma opened her eyes to keep them from falling. 

Manu was holding the crumpled sheet of paper which was a pixelated headless  image of an almost naked woman, wearing lacy lingerie and posing in bed, except she wasn’t posing Uma knew she was lying in bed and crying because five minutes before the picture was taken the bastard had beaten her then sniveled on the ground and apologized and cried hoarsely screaming and wailing adding to the silent sobs of the just beaten woman. 

Uma knew all this because the photograph was Uma’s from a different time. It was unrecognizable in its pixelated state but not to her.

‘This picture has been put inside everyone’s mail box.’ the neighbour said appalled. ‘I can’t imagine the wretchedness of some people.’ she continued.

‘Everyone’s mail box?’ Uma found a meek voice slithering out of her mouth.

‘Yes, well of our building..and the worst part is it’s impossible to tell who it was.’

‘Maybe we can check the cameras’ Manu suggested. 

‘We have. Can’t say who it could have been because so many cars and taxis come into the compound and almost always park right in front of the apartment gate. It’s difficult to tell who among them was the culprit.’ the neighbour said thoughtfully. ‘Either that or we check the entire list of visitors and cross check with everyone in the building who had guests, because, well, not everyone can come inside and for all you know one of those delivery boys did it. There are no cameras inside the building to actually prove anything.’ 

A brief silence followed and the neighbour clicked her tongue. ‘Well, it’s hideous this business. Maybe a prank or maybe someone just being bothersome. Well,’ she made to move ‘I’ll let you know if I find anything.’ and with a polite greeting they small company departed.

Manu checked their mail box and sure enough the same picture had wound up there as well. He tore it and threw it in the trash. 

That night Uma stole to the roof, lighting a cigarette after almost a decade, she found the torn up pieces of a prostrate weak willed woman and burnt it to ash.