Anil was younger than Surita by four years, but the age difference was inconsequential, as far as the two lovers were concerned. Surita wasn’t overbearing or dominant; in fact, she adored Anil to such an extent that she was prepared to do anything for him. He was only sixteen when they had first met, but he was one of those young men who matured sexually at a very young age.

Neither thought about legalities or “statutory rape” when they first befriended each other. At that innocent, sweet stage it was about a blossoming friendship between a tall, dark and handsome young man and a kind, generous and exciting older woman. The friendship bloomed into love and soon the two were making out like bunnies on overdrive.

“Won’t we get into trouble for this?” Surita asked Anil on the first occasion they had sex. He was seventeen at the time and Surita was twenty-one. Surita had thought she would have to guide Anil in the lovemaking, but she discovered to her unmitigated pleasure that he was an experienced stud who knew just how to give her body exquisite pleasure.

Anil was fully stretched out on Surita’s bed, completely at ease and feeling extremely satiated. He smiled at Surita lying with her head on his bare chest before he said, “For loving each other? How can this be wrong?” he asked in all innocence, then drifted off into sweet slumber.

Anil had dropped out of school earlier that year, as he had been struggling to cope with his studies. He was quite the charmer, well-spoken and a smooth operator who had a string of adoring female (and male) fans who wanted to sample what he was obviously putting on display.

“Aren’t you in a relationship, Anil?” his closest friend, Rowen, asked him when Anil once again regaled him with the sordid details of an encounter with a nubile girl. “I thought you loved Surita and didn’t need to bang other girls anymore.”

“What? Are you nuts?” Anil said.”You know I can never turn down an offer of sex! So what if I’m dating Surita? We’re not married, dude,” he joked, not even feeling the slightest twinge of guilt.

Surita was blissfully unaware of his transgressions, completely convinced that Anil belonged to her and her only. Soon after he had left school she had employment him in her Internet Café & Coffee Shop, giving him cash whenever he needed it in addition to paying him a monthly salary. It was at the café that he discovered how irresistible he was to the female clients, and also the place where he often engaged in “a piece of action” while Surita was off on her business rounds.

In turn, Anil wooed Surita to within an inch of her life, being affectionate with her at every opportunity, bedazzling her with his sweet mutterings, hungry kisses, desperate gropings and bedroom expertise. It wasn’t long before Surita thought about marriage, but Anil wasn’t of the same mind.

“Why the hell do we need to legalise what we have?” Anil shouted at Surita. When he was angry, he often resorted to shouts and swearing. Surita only worsened the situation by remaining calm in an attempt to soothe his fury.

“Babe,” she said, “it’ll be good for both of us. We could benefit financially, too, if we’re legally married. Plus, you know how your parents give you a tough time whenever you want to sleep over, so if we get married that won’t be an issue anymore.”

Anil paced up and down the shop, smoking furiously and not looking at her. He had started smoking at the age of sixteen and by age twenty he had for all intents and purposes become a chain smoker.

“Listen, I don’t give a shit what my parents moan about. I still sleep over when I want to, don’t I? I’m not ready for marriage. Don’t you fucking get that?” he asked as he finally turned to face her fully. It was then that she dropped the bomb that would ultimately destroy them.

“Anil, I’m pregnant. I think I’m already three months pregnant,” she revealed. Anil looked at her in astonishment. Inexplicably, he suddenly grinned hugely, making Surita weak at the knees.

“You mean I’m going to be a dad?” he exclaimed in delight, lifting Surita off her feet. “Of course we have to get married! Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?” he asked as he laughed and whirled Surita around the shop. Surita was speechless with joy which soon turned into relieved laughter.

They were married within a month; three months later, Surita gave birth to a son. The baby lived for only a week before it died because of health complications. Anil was devastated.

At the funeral of the tiny infant, Anil was an emotional wreck. “No! No, don’t bury him. Please, anybody! Don’t put my baby into the earth,” Anil shouted as the tiny bundle was being lowered into the waiting hole.

“Love, please. We must be strong,” Surita said. She had to hold Anil back as the small coffin disappeared into the dark embrace of the grave. However, when the first clods of soil hit the top of the coffin, she was the one who fainted while Anil let out an anguished wail. He thrashed his way through the mourners to get into his car and sped off. He returned home after eleven that night, hung over and filled with rage. Surita was asleep when he got home, but his noisy arrival awoke her. She went into the kitchen to find him slouched over the sink, staring at water from the open faucet running down the drain.

“Anil,” she said hesitantly, afraid of his reaction, but also knowing that she needed to reach out to and connect with him. “Love, come to bed. It’s late, you need to rest, please.”

He turned a bleary-eyed gaze on her and gave a bitter smile. “Rest, like my little boy is resting now? Sleep like him, but be warm and comfortable while he’s cold and alone? How can I sleep while my little baby is not in my arms where he belongs? What kind of a god allows a child to be born only to die without ever having experienced the true joy of life?”

With his last question, his voice rose in volume and fury. He stood up straight, his drunken stupor gone as abruptly as a dream upon awakening. Surita expected him to flare into one of his violent tirades, but instead he slumped to the kitchen floor to start weeping like a man who had lost everything. He was wracked with heaving sobs as Surita sat down next to him, cradling him in her arms like the infant too soon snatched from them.

“How are you doing, sis?” Priyanka, Surita’s older sister, asked her when she came to visit two weeks later. Anil had left on a trip to Dubai, for which Rowen had paid.

“Work helps. Immersing myself in it allows my grief to scab over. I won’t allow my sorrow to overwhelm and consume me,” she explained to Priyanka.

“You know you can’t hide from your grief, don’t you? You’re running the café as if your sanity depended on it, as if it’s your lifeline,” Priyanka told her. “You clean your flat as if you’re a maid and not the one living in it. How many times have you rearranged the furniture now? Don’t you see these are all symptoms of your unspoken heartache? If you don’t face your demons of sorrow, they will eventually destroy you,” Priyanka claimed before she left.

Surita’s nights were mercifully dreamless because she was so exhausted from the day’s routine. When Anil returned after two weeks, he seemed like a new man. The first indication that he was indeed “a new man” was when he stopped having sex with Surita. Whenever she initiated it, he claimed he had a headache or he was tired. Worse, when they did have sex, he couldn’t achieve a climax.

It was becoming painfully transparent that the marriage was in dire straits, if not completely sunk already. Surita was desperate to regain Anil’s love and companionship, while Anil was once again back to his philandering ways, seeing a different woman every so often.

“I’m no longer into Surita,” he confided one evening to Rowen. The two men were at a strip club, Anil spending as much time as he could away from home. “She just doesn’t do it for me anymore. These whores here excite me far more,” he admitted.

“Anil, if I were you I would just get out of the marriage, man. You never wanted to get married in the first place, isn’t it? Rowen reminded him. Anil bitterly recalled those words later that evening.

“You made me marry you because you were pregnant, but now I don’t even have a son,” he told Surita after they had had another failed attempt at lovemaking. He turned away from her and said, “I never wanted to fucking get married, but you trapped me into this!”

Surita gasped in hurt and disbelief. “Love, I never trapped you into anything! I asked you if we could get married and you –”

Anil rudely interrupted her, “Whatever. You asked, yeah, but you already knew I would agree if you told me you were pregnant.”

He got out of bed, dressed and left the room. Surita stared at her reflection in the mirror above the dresser until the front door slammed. Soon thereafter she heard Anil speed off in his car. This had become a usual ending to their nights, and Surita finally admitted to herself that the marriage was dead. It had died with the death of their son six months before. She curled into a tight ball of despair and cried herself to sleep.

Anil kissed Farah hard as he viciously penetrated her. She moaned in pain, but he didn’t relent. Her moans spurred him on to a higher level of aggression, climaxing explosively when he tasted blood from Farah’s lips in his mouth. He rolled off Farah and lit a cigarette.

“That bitch has ruined my life,” he swore. “I’m leaving her tomorrow and I don’t care about this sham of a marriage. I can’t stand the sight of her anymore!”

Farah gently touched his shoulder and said, “Don’t be hasty, Anil. You know that you depend on her financially. Why don’t you find a job first before you leave her? Act as if you care about her so that she won’t become suspicious, but as soon as you get a job, leave her.”

Anil smiled nastily. “Thanks, babe. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. Come here,” he said, pulling Farah roughly on top of him. She giggled in delight as Anil once again started to greedily kiss her all over her face and voluptuous body. His loins were soon afire again and he lost himself totally in the ecstacy.

Surita was oblivious to Anil’s deception while he was determined to go full tilt at it. He knew if he wanted to dupe Surita, he would have to become the loving stud she had fallen in love with, but his underlying and irrational hatred of her caused his sadistic streak to surface in their lovemaking. In fact, he was so aroused by it that it enabled him to complete the sexual act night after night. Unexpectedly, Surita fell pregnant again.

“What? You’re pregnant?” Priyanka asked in surprise when Surita told her.

“Yes, but I haven’t told Anil yet. I’ll tell him over the weekend when he’s usually more relaxed.”

“How do you think he’ll react?” Priyanka asked. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?

“Yes, I am. I don’t know why I haven’t yet told Anil that I’m pregnant, but I know he’ll be just as happy as I am,” Surita said before Priyanka gave her a tight hug.

That night Anil walked into the house as if he were on a mission from which no one on earth could derail him. He seemed cockier than usual, a smug grin plastered across his handsome face. His dark eyes were glowing with an inner satisfaction while his body emitted a nearly tangible force of energy.

“Surita!” he hollered as he went into the lounge and threw himself down on the sofa. He was taking long, slow puffs from his cigarette when she entered the room. The thought crossed her mind that he looked as if he had just had the greatest sex in the world, and then he spoke and brought her world crashing down around her. She stumbled blindly to the ottoman as the abuse poured from Anil’s mouth.

“I’m leaving you. We’re done! I don’t ever want to see your hateful face again. Rowen has made me his business partner, so I won’t be slaving for you anymore. In fact,” he said, “I no longer need your stinking charity. I’m my own man now and you can get stuffed, for all I care.

“You were the worst thing that has ever happened to me! I curse the day I met you. If it hadn’t been for you, I would’ve been far better off and richer long ago, but your needy, clingy ways held me back from my true potential. I see now that I should’ve left you right after my son died, but I was weak. No more.

“Tomorrow, I’m filing for divorce and I want you out of this flat by the end of the week! This flat’s in my dad’s name, so it belongs to me. Take whatever shit of yours you want and fuck off.”

His outburst left him breathless but extremely gratified, especially since he could see the utter horror on Surita’s face. Surita managed to find her voice when she saw how rapturous Anil was. It also finally released the steel that had always been at the core of her, but which she had suppressed all these years because of her deep love for this man whom she now realised was as unworthy of her as a liar is unworthy of anyone’s trust.

“You say I kept you back from your potential? Me? Have you forgotten who it was who supported you financially when you were nothing but a school dropout, who it was who stood by you when your dad threw you out of the house because you refused to go work? Who employed you and paid you when you had no skills whatsoever? And you dare tell me that I held you back? If it hadn’t been for me, you would still have been stuck at home, working in your dad’s plumbing business!

“Without my support and love, you would’ve been nothing. But now that I think about it, what you are is less than nothing, because you’re not the man I fell in love with or adored. It shames me to think I could ever have loved you as much as I did. You don’t deserve one fucking moment of that precious gift!

“You don’t have to wait till the end of the week for me to leave. I’m leaving right now, so fuck you, too!”

Within an hour she was out of the flat. It was only as she was driving to Priyanka’s house that the realisation hit her: she hadn’t told Anil about her pregnancy.

She heaved a great sigh of relief as a wave of serenity washed over her. She was right not to have told him about her pregnancy; he would have waited until the birth of the child before showing her his true colours and intentions. She was determined to keep it a secret. He was never going to have any part of her or her unborn child’s life, not if she could help it.

Early the next morning she called her lawyer and made an appointment for the same day. Anil was caught totally unawares when he received the divorce papers two days later. His wrath was extreme. He demolished the lounge in his rage, but afterwards he calmly signed the papers and sent them back to the lawyer.

When Surita’s son was born, she named him Shakti, meaning “power” or “strength”. It served as a reminder that he was the one who had brought her inner power to light, and that he would forever remain her strength, no matter what.

Anil never discovered the existence of Shakti.

Image: Siora Photography (www.unsplash.com)