‘Why didn’t you take off your engagement ring yesterday night when we were in bed?’ Sameer asked Mia. They were walking along the flowerbed-edged path that led away from Sameer’s farmhouse.
‘What does it matter? Wasn’t I with you?’ she said.
‘That’s the thing. Part of you was locked up in that ring.’
‘You’re so imaginative.’
‘I’m being serious.’
‘And I’m complimenting you.’
‘Seriously, Mia, do you think you’re being faithful to him as long as you have the ring on your finger?’
She looked away into the distance, and he wondered if he’d said too much. But then she laughed a single bark of a laugh.
‘Something like that,’ she murmured, more to herself than to him.
Mia had known Sameer for a year as the closest friend of her fiancé, Vineet, who was in New Delhi attending a bankers’ conference. Mia and Sameer had been driven to Sameer’s farmhouse in Panvel, outside Mumbai, yesterday afternoon. They had consummated their feelings for each other for the first time yesterday night.
The sex was good, not great. Much to Sameer’s discomfiture, Mia had kept her engagement ring on throughout; its huge diamond had scratched him twice.
Now Mia asked him, ‘Why does the ring bother you?’ She ran her hand on the day-old stubble on his cheek.
He remained silent. He found himself unable to tell her he wanted her all to himself – as a ‘partner’, as something reassuringly undefined.
‘Well,’ he tried to make light of it, ‘The ring did scratch me a couple of times.’
‘Poor you,’ she said mockingly, and kissed him softly on the lips.
They heard someone giggling, and turned to see a girl in a blue and white school uniform scamper away into the caretaker’s cabin along the path.
Sameer said, ‘That’s Jui, the caretaker’s daughter.’
‘She’s a cutie,’ Mia replied. ‘But she might come for another look, and I plan to kiss you lots more. Let’s walk on.’
They neared the cowshed. Sameer kept three cows of an Indian breed, mainly for sentimental reasons; his forefathers had been dairy farmers.
‘Do you like cows?’ he asked Mia.
‘Adore ‘em,’ she replied mechanically, gazing at his high cheekbones.
‘Let’s go and pet them,’ he said; anything to get her off the public display of affection, which he had never thought her capable of. She had never been physically affectionate with Vineet in front of Sameer.
‘Okay, mister party pooper,’ she replied in a flirty voice that made his groin melt.
The Mangalore-tiled cowshed was dark, and Sameer turned on the single lightbulb; it lit up the three cows, which looked at the visitors with anticipation.
‘And do they have names?’ Mia asked Sameer, playing with his shirt button.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I’m sure the staff have given them names.’
After a while, he asked her, ‘Do you want to feed them?’
She smiled and said, ‘I’ve never done that before.’
‘It’s easy. Take a little grass from the pile at the corner and drop it into their feeding troughs.’
And so they did. Mia took the cow on one side of the shed, Sameer the two cows facing her. A minute later, though, he jumped and whirled around when he heard Mia scream.
‘Mia, what happened?’ he asked, his heart pounding.
‘My ring!’ she shrieked. ‘It’s fallen in the trough!’
‘Where?’ he asked, bending over and peering into the trough. There was nothing but grass there. He straightened up and looked at Mia. There was a stricken look on her face.
She said, slowly, ‘It swallowed it.’
He opened his mouth a couple of times before the words came. ‘Who swallowed what?’
She said, in a loud whisper, ‘The cow. The ring.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I am, Sameer,’ she hissed. ‘I saw the cow swallow the ring.’
‘Holy cow. I mean, holy shit.’
She glared at him, and said slowly, ‘Are you trying to be funny?’
He thought to himself that the cow’s swallowing the ring was funny in itself. ‘Of course not,’ he replied.
‘What are we going to do, Sameer?’ She grabbed at his shirt.
He gently pried her hands away, and held them in his. ‘We wait,’ he said.
‘We wait?’ she repeated.
‘The cow’s got to poop it out some time,’ he said, in what he hoped was a reassuring tone of voice.
She made a face, expressing distaste. She said, ‘When’s that going to be?’
He looked upward at the roof of the cowshed, trying to figure out how often cows pooped. He shrugged, and said, ‘It will take hours, if not a day.’
‘What!’ she exclaimed, shaking her head.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘We have to leave this afternoon if I am going to be at home when Vineet arrives.’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said helplessly.
‘What can we do?’ she asked him, her voice rising several notches.
‘There’s nothing else to do,’ he said.
Mia was now crying hysterically.
Sameer said, ‘Why don’t we leave without the ring? I’ll come back after dropping you, collect the ring and give it to you later. I’ll tell the caretaker Vishnu to sift through the dung and find the ring. He’ll return it to me. I trust him.’
Mia was already shaking her head frantically.
‘It’s Vineet’s dead mother’s ring. He’ll notice it missing and ask me. I won’t be able to lie to him.’
Sameer stifled the impulse to say something cutting. He said, ‘There’s no other way.’
‘I can’t!’ she shouted.
He was taken aback by her tone. He shook his head and said, ‘It’s not about the ring, is it?’ She flinched, as if she had woken from a dream.
‘There’s always another way,’ she moaned, looking around the cowshed. The cows looked placidly at her, chewing their fodder. Her gaze alighted on the pile of grass in the corner of the shed, beside which there lay the heavy sickle used to cut it. She ran to the corner, took up the sickle in both hands, then advanced upon the cow that had swallowed her ring. She said, ‘There’s another way.’
Sameer gasped and said, ‘Have you gone mad?’
‘Look, baby, we’ve got to! Please!’ she said.
‘Why, because you can’t take care of your ring? How’d you drop it, anyway?’ he said, trying to distract her.
‘I ... I lost weight for the wedding, and the ring became loose on my finger, okay? Move aside.’
‘No fucking way. You can’t kill a cow with a sickle, but you will injure it. Give me that thing.’
‘Since when did you care for ethics, huh, Mr Sleep-With-Your-Friend’s-fiancée?’
‘This is different. No killing. No harming.’
‘You didn’t think that when you were stuffing yourself on chicken at our place,’ she cried. The sickle wobbled in her hand. He slowly approached her, and took the blade away from her. She sobbed like a child as he held her tenderly.
‘What’s this really about?’ he murmured, running his hand through her hair.
‘If I tell you, you’ll judge me,’ she said, sniffling.
‘I promise you I won’t,’ he said, feeling very chivalrous.
She looked out of the window of the cowshed, and said, ‘I’m unhappy with him. But he’ll be shattered if I leave him. He can’t deal with emotions, let alone heartbreak. You know him.’
Sameer shook his head, and said, ‘You can’t torture yourself in a relationship that makes you unhappy. It’ll kill you on the inside,’ he said, wondering if he had a chance now.
‘What should I do?’ she whimpered.
He took her head in his hands. He said, ‘Break it off.’
‘What about Vineet?’ she said.
‘You’ll be doing him a favour. At first he’ll be heartbroken, but he’ll recover. Everyone does. But if you stay with him against your will, you’ll end up fighting or be in a loveless relationship. That’s worse.’
She nodded and whispered, ‘Alright.’
‘Alright what?’
‘I’ll tell him I want out.’
All of a sudden Sameer felt like smiling; clichés of happiness streamed in front of his eyes. The cloudy sky opened up and rays of light, a Jacob’s Ladder, lit up the cowshed, even on the inside. At that instant, Sameer told himself he could love Mia. His heart felt full and he felt a warmth in his chest. He said, ‘Oh baby, I am so happy for us!’ and caressed Mia’s cheek with his hand, imagining a future with her.
Mia pulled roughly out of his embrace. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, wiping tears from her eyes. ‘There is no ‘us’. This was just a fun weekend to let off steam.’
Sameer felt a pain in his chest. He said, ‘But you said ... you’re going to talk to Vineet...’
‘That’s different,’ she said. ‘You thought you’d be my partner?’
‘So ... this was just timepass for you?’ he said, his eyes flashing.
‘Don’t be so holier-than-thou. You wanted this as much as I did. And not once in the past year did you propose anything serious to me. You knew what was happening.’
‘I knew what was up,’ he repeated in a flat voice.
‘You did. You did.’
‘Then there’s nothing more to be said,’ he said.
‘Then, fine!’ she said. ‘Now can we leave, please?’
‘The driver will drop you off at your place. I’m staying back,’ he said, looking away.
‘You better give me the ring back,’ she said. ‘I’ll need to return it to Vineet.’
‘There’s another way,’ he replied, looking at the cow as he wielded the sickle in his hand. Something about his tone made Mia shiver.
‘Sameer,’ she said, ‘Give me the sickle.’
He said nothing, advancing on the cow.
‘Sameer, give me the sickle now!’
He looked back at her. She slapped him, hard, once. It sounded like a miniature thunderclap in the confines of the cowshed. She took away the sickle from him, and ran out of the cowshed, crying.
*
Suhit Kelkar’s journalistic work has appeared in Indian and international publications including Al Jazeera Online, Open and Caravan. His poetry has been published in Domus India, Vayavya, Elsewhere Lit, Sunflower Collective, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Speak and The Charles River Journal. One of his short stories appeared in Firstpost. His poetry chapbook, The Centaur Chronicles, deals with themes of otherness and exclusion through a character found primarily in Greek mythology.