By Kanishka Jain
Chopping noises of slicing onion on the chopping board and sizzling voices of the temper mixing with tomato sauce. One could smell all the fragrant Indian spices as this is a usual base for any Indian curry. Jazz romantic songs playing at one side of the kitchen by the radio kept on the white marble slab. “When the marimba rhythm stars to play dance with me, make me sway.” comes out the voice on the radio. Raman joins in by singing, “like lazy ocean hugs the shore…” Siya completes, “hold me close, sway me more.” While she holds Raman’s hand and swirls around his back and reaches to the sink to clean the knife. After that Raman pulls her back near him by rolling her around his hand and puts the curry in her mouth by a spatula.
Siya tastes it and looks with confused face and disappointed eyes, “You are missing something!”
Raman asks with innocence, “What?”
Siya says romantically looking into his eyes and while putting the onions in the colander of the sauce, “Me!”
Both giggle and kiss.
After performing the great Sunday morning cooking and eating ritual. They both go shopping for Siya. As they reach a windowsill of a ritzy branded showroom. Siya’s face turns into a child looking at a chocolate as she sees a magnificent glass embroidered white dress. Shining all around the showroom and vividly telling that it was a sunny afternoon. Raman sees her smile and couldn’t help his urge to be the reason of her happiness.
He pulls his girlfriend in the showroom and make her stand right next to the dress and asks, “Sweetheart, do you want this?”
Siya replies excitedly, “Yes!” widen her eyes and nodding like an unstoppable machine.
Then she goes and tries the dress, and Raman buys it for her. After that whatever struck her eye from matching boots, hat, overcoat to perfume. Raman bought it all. And one thing leads to another, they see half of the showroom products in shopping bags held by Raman.
Now they reach home, as Raman puts all the bags down in a tired manner from all the way up in the air to the ground. A clink sound comes, then everything gets wet, suddenly everything smells like musk and flowers. As fast the odor reaches to the other room of Siya, she comes in the room in a blink of the eye like the Flash from Marvel and starts to yell at Raman and then cries her eyes off holding the dress as she shouts and yelp, “You can’t put some bags straight! Do you know how unique and inexplicable is this fragrance that you wasted in seconds, it is one its kind edition! You ruined my dress, soiled my criss-cross leather boots and my lovely real fur made overcoat. Everything I ever loved in milliseconds. Why do you hate me so much!”
On one hand she was mourning what she bought minutes ago and other hand she was actually losing what she had for years, the relation with Raman. As he couldn’t believe his eyes, he looked at Siya with an astound face, that’s when it hits him. Siya loves the products more than him. She was never looking behind the reason he always bought stuff for her like this Sunday and every other.
Siya walks out of the room and Raman remembers and analysis everyday of his life with Siya in the silence. How Siya always asks for stuff before him as he reaches home, how she always looks for the welfare of objects before him in a crash. He ignored all of this before and never cared to observe this about Siya as he was lost in the purpose of his life to make Siya’s happy and her life the best.
After a while, he realizes so how he can back down this time and not help Siya get out of being such an avaricious person. He got a plan…
Next Sunday, Siya and Raman reach another spectacular and expensive showroom but this time Raman doesn’t answer any requests of Siya. This makes Siya crazy. She looks at everyone’s eyes in the showroom judging her as if she is nothing without her boyfriend. She gets angry and pulls Raman out of the showroom and screams at him at a lonely spot, “What’s the matter with you? Why are you behaving like this?”
“Like what?” sarcastically asks Raman, testing her patience.
“Like you don’t care about me. Why were you not answering my questions in the showroom. You know how embarrassing it was?” Answers Siya with read face and finger pointing towards Raman.
“And do you know how it feels to know that your love of the life loves objects more than you!” Raman yells back. “How it feels to see your girlfriend being absolutely inconsiderate of your feelings when it comes to …. Some objects! And she loves them more than you!” Raman somehow completes his sentence and steps to leave from there hiding his tears.
That’s when Siya pulls him back and speaks in a screeching voice, “And it was easy for me to watch my boyfriend give me lesson by being rude on me instead on communicating his feelings directly to me! I maybe be materialistic person but you value others more than yourself or you would not have tried controlling my life and wasting yours.”
Stunned Raman stands there still and froze and Siya storms off angrily with tears in her eyes.
Both of them don’t talk for several days. Now whenever Siya comes across a beautiful dress, her face still turns like a kid but then she asks herself does she need it. All this as she realizes Raman was right. She learned this in a shopaholic rehab. Whereas Raman goes to communication classes to understand how to speak his point instead of imposing his opinion and wasting his and others time around him and he learns how to give others their space to analysis and understand his point and express theirs in meditation classes.
Now on next Sunday after the eating and cooking ritual. They go to a place to serve the poor where Siya gives up her unrequisite and expensive stuff for better use and Raman cooks and serves the poor as he likes to help and realizes the real meaning of helping is to give to the needed. Both of the smile as they look into each other’s eyes from far loving living in this miraculous presence of pure love between all.
By Kanishka Jain
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