Pest Control - 3

Read part 1 - here

Read part 2 - here

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The awareness of that day biliously rose to Uma's head. All those memories were part of a grimy swamp, one that she’d almost sunk into but willed herself to swim out of. 

She had felt unclean, unwashed and filthy as those recollections had clung to her years after she’d gotten out of his clutches.

They’d sting her and for longer than she cared to admit she had flashbacks of those three years which she couldn’t justify to herself.

She had been so weak to endure it, so pathetically naive and foolish as to have let herself get fed on like a mute lump of foodstuff that lets a maggot thrive on. An unspeaking reticent host for a soiled parasite and it had taken years for Uma to forget those innumerable moments of humiliation to feel whole again. 

Manu had unknowingly cleansed her, revived and animated her into the person she once was before she’d ever crossed roads with that, that bastard.

Uma couldn’t get herself to say his name and she promised herself she never would.

It had taken a long time for her to recover but she was back to being Uma that is until a phone-call threatened the emotional stability and cohesive integrity of her life which had been steadily strengthening and now the foundations quaked against her palm with the vibrations of the phone.

It was outside a nightclub she remembered. She’d met a group of friends who knew some of her friends. Those days of juvenile complications that were so endearing. He was one amongst them, a friend of a friend of a friend, or so the long chains of acquaintances wound back during those early years when you want to meet as many people possible, know as many names and be a part of as many lives.

Uma had often fantasized of finding a time machine so she could turn back time to that wretched Friday night outside of the club where she met that bastard and delete that day from her life altogether.

How happy would she have been? 

She thought of that now as well when her phone displayed three missed calls. All from the one number without a name.

The memories regurgitated like rotten food and Uma found herself facing the same thoughts of self-revulsion as she once did. The self-blame and disparaging words she often used to berate herself to snap out of her miserable situation came hurtling back, gathering with them almost ten years worth of repressed memories in a mass that promised to knock her over back into the roiling abyss of foul hurt and loneliness.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her and Uma had not once noticed him. She’d been introduced to him but her vision was marred by youthful vanity and vainglorious juvenility which pretty girls that age are often afflicted by. There was no dearth of eyes roaming over her young visage and he was mostly inconsequential to Uma.

She'd thought of it as an act of mercy when Uma finally relented to go out for coffee with him. He’d pursued her, called and left cute messages, none which much appealed to Uma’s sensibilities but he’d been persistent and if coffee was the price to pay to get him off her back Uma agreed.

He was nothing much to look at; standing almost four inches shorter than Uma with a face that wouldn’t be easy to remember and how wrong Uma was because that face had haunted her for years after.

He was charming and affluent but Uma found him boring and he’d looked at her with an awe that she almost found embarrassing and somewhat discomforting and soon after found herself surrounded by him at all times. How he managed to do that was something she couldn’t fully understand until there came a time when she realized they were dating.

She didn’t love him, she didn’t even really much like him. He wasn’t her type at all. Wore too many rings on his fingers, sprayed himself with a sweet smelling cologne that often gave Uma a headache and his speech, personality, vocabulary were not to her taste. 

He was, in fact, all that she didn’t much care for in a man, yet there she was with him and gradually he began unfolding into human glue that had snagged her as his prey.

Like a leech, he had slowly sunk his teeth into her flesh and ate away at her mind, body and soul.

She’d lost her friends whom he didn’t approve of, anytime she wanted to go out with her friends the bastard made sure he was a part of the group.

A designated call each morning inquiring about her whereabouts when she was on her way to work followed by at least a dozen calls through the day to ensure she was at work and not outside of the office in such case that she was then the bastard made it a point to know all about it.

Uma had not realized this slow build up of resin prison that invisibly suffocated her until one day he showed up to her office because she’d been in a meeting with her phone on silent and he’d called her all morning and afternoon. 

She’d told him that night when they’d come back to his apartment after dinner that she’d wanted some space that he was smothering her with his omnipresence that she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to be with him and no sooner had she uttered the last sentence that she found her back plastered to the bed with that bastard sitting atop, pinning her arms under his knees slapping her face with both his hands and screaming while crying at the same time as to how she could even think of leaving him.

It was so sudden that Uma didn’t have a chance to react. She was bigger than him and she’d tried pushing him off her but he’d held her throat and bawled like a child in her face while putting pressure on his clasped hands against her neck, tears streaming from his eyes and collecting under his chin, plopping on Uma’s now battered face until she begged him to release her.

Uma found herself silently crying as she clutched her phone, uncontrollably sobbing at the image; the reemergence of those long dead memories wriggled back to her mind still so vividly clear that she realized she’d been fooling herself, tricking her mind into selective amnesia when in fact she’d only chosen not to remember those moments which hadn’t been buried with time as she believed.

The maggots lived inside her and were beginning to casually stroll around her, treading her life, invading her space because somehow he’d found her after all these years. 

‘Do you want coffee or tea?’ Manu’s voice streamed into her room and Uma swallowed her sobs. She was crippled with fear and helplessness. ‘I’ll make some’ she replied trying to steady her voice and switching off her phone.