Pest Control- 7

Read part 6 - here

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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.