blue in love(khushboo) "This lamp I bought from Turkey” he said sitting under the dim blue luminance of the study lamp, the one he had bought from the Grand bazaar during one of his postings.
“The bazaar is so thick with aromas of ground spices that it stings your nostrils in a single whiff” he said, as I sat down turning on my Dictaphone.
I imagined him walking in the crowded lanes of the bazaar in the belted cage he wore since childhood. A belt that encased his twisted back and almost looked like a saddle. His condition had rendered him dependent on his four-legged walking stick and the back belt under whose weight this puny man bundled. Resembling a half bent, warped black boned tree he looked every bit lonesome, a pitiful shadow.

I watched him sitting on the creaky rocking chair, his hands on one another, yellowed with time and agony. In the evening of his life, this man looked shriveled like a raisin and wrinkled like the bed of two lovers. His eyes bloodshot red and clouded with melancholia were framed by thick wooden spectacles. They conveyed an agility that his body did not reciprocate. His hair white like froth on a foamy washcloth. The leather frame he wore on his back engulfed his petite structure each rib at a time right up to his sacrum. Consuming this man, life had corroded and eaten its way into him, leaving him weakened, yet only bodily I realized later.

Suddenly he turned around and looked at me, his menacing eyes piercing into me.
“So who do you think you are, an honest man? You are doing wrong right now”.
I looked stunned at the question, it’s timing but at most the tone he spoke in. Such a strong unwavering voice from a weakened frail structure like his surprised me. He asked me again, not blinking even once his slate stare now burning into my brown eyes.
“Who are you?”

“Talk only what you are asked” yelled the constable accompanying me, pushing his chair and digging his legs into the table.
His eyes screamed, like imploring me to stop. And then broke into an intimidating laugh.
“I didn’t do it sir, look at me. I need the help of my stick and an aching half an hour just to answer a freaking doorbell. To think I could run would be insanity. I was gifted this disease at birth as I heralded into this world with a huge cry and was received with shock by everyone who held me. Together me and my disease have lived as partners through thick and thin, through times of love and wars.”
“Talking of wars, I've seen many wars. Few between countries and some worse within ones self”.
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair and looked at his face.

"You had a son didn’t you, what happened of him?" I asked.
He fell silent as though mourning. The constable, an impatient man, gave a rather irritated look and offered to give him a little persuasion with his stick. I stopped him with my eyes.
“You did have a son,” I repeated.
The question kept hanging in the rooms eerie uncomfortable air and the man kept staring at the lamp as though in deep thought. Then finally he cried
“Yes I did have a son, but a lifetime is too long a span for any relationship to be coherent. I raised him to be the man I wanted him to be, but lineage and upbringing aren’t substantial enough to shape a personality,” he said. “Situations determine who you are and make you do what you must and people are not consistent from one situation to the other. People change, people shock you” he said putting his hands on his chest.
From under his thick glasses and his hazy eyes he agonizingly looked up at me and said, “A man is like and shallot, he may look whole and unyielding on the outside but with many layered personalities perfectly encasing each other on the inside. There is a myriad of characters dwelling seamlessly within your deepest deep one beginning where the other ends. To know someone is to slice through this shallot, to rip through these layers, unleashing the many episodes these characters lived and cause havoc in your mind. To your oblivion every incident, every little mishap, shapes someone new dwelling profoundly in your intimate bottomless conscience.
Someone you maybe completely unconscious of and also completely antagonistic of.”
He cringed his crinkled eyelids and narrowed his eyes towards me.
“The fear conceived in the womb of your morality the day your daughter slipped a flight of stairs, or the personality of your own flesh and blood inside the callous exterior of yours that freaks at the first sight of blood”.
He paused as though seeking my response and then laughed again like a mad man.
“What you are is several layers deep and to know yourself truly is to unknow everything you identify yourself with. This pyrrhic journey will not only astound you at your unfathomable boundaries but also make you lose faith in yourself”.

The constable was getting very impatient now, he whacked the obtuse cane on his creased convex back as he squirmed with pain.
“Answer only when you are asked” he screamed.
“Continue sahib” he said to me.

I was unnerved by his audacity, his madness and his fiery stare. I gathered myself up again and asked
"Why did you kill her?"
He looked up at me, his eyes chaotic.
“How could I? I am a slave to this congenital sickness, this malady in my blood and bones.
I was enticed by her at first glance. By her delectable beauty I was wooed.
My love for her is true to every twisted bone in my crippled body. A hapless solitary soul am I now, all my sanguineness gone with her, and to aspire anything but just a quiet end would be gluttony”.

“Tell me“ I exclaimed “What was she like, your wife”?

The question lit his face up.
“Sheee ...” he said giving a long pause, his eyes looking lost and his lips with a hint of what may be a smile.
“She was like a effervescent, polished pebble with eyes of spar and a thick mat of wet, tangled, voluminous mane carelessly tossed aside” he said looking as though lost in her poetic rendition.
“I'd see her walk bare feet in the mornings on the pebble beach. Her feet stained red with hues of the soil. She would wrap her wild hair with the thunder of her boisterous music. Singing to herself, her own soulful renditions. Lining her eyes with kohl and smudging it on her eyelids, she had the eyes of a dancer. Her exotic smile would spread like wildfire to her lips, her eyes, her cheeks and then to everyone around her”.

“When I first met her, I'd seen her wandering through the streets of a Turkish bazaar, a lapis lazuli necklace traversing across her delicate neck. Her dress left her shoulders exposed and fell below her ankle. She was quarrelling with the vendor in her broken English for a pair of silver anklets.
Man was I floored” he said looking like a maudlin man who had lost everything.
“Her sensual voice and the surprised look in her eyes when she saw me gaping at her unearthly beauty in utter awe, I was captivated” he said pausing for a moment.
“And then we had eventually gotten to know each other over bowls of her favorite curry, baked cookies smothered in fruity butter and glasses of Beaujolais.
We would talk for hours sitting in roadside cafes discussing travel places, her ethereal beauty and her love for jewelry.
I would wake up to the smell of coffee she brewed for me everyday in her favorite blue mugs and cookies that she would smother with butter on a dainty blue painted plate”. He paused and broke into a smile.

“What went wrong then”? I asked him.

“Then”, he paused.
“It happened to her, the treacherous disease” he said as his face crinkled up.
“Afflicting her ravishing face it drove her to insanity.
She told me she saw things.
It gave her nightmares and kept growing inside of her making her hopeless and bitter.
She would wake up in the middle of the night and get startled by me lying next to her.
She would get violent, attack herself and faint from self-inflicted pain. I kept dying on the inside just to see her withering, losing her lovely dewy skin and twinkling eyes.
Sometimes she would leave the bed at night and sit on the staircase in the middle of the night and start singing a painful parody.
At other times I'd find her hiding in my study listening to gloomy, old jazz records.
She wanted it to stop, to drown herself in music and forget what was real.
Sometimes she would say, 'My love, stop the clock and freeze my life. I'd like to be here forever'."

He paused.
A creaking sound distracted me as the help brought butter smothered cookies and three cups of coffee in blue weathered mugs. I looked down at the battered blue ceramic tray, the cookies and the mugs. There was something very eerie about them, startled I turned around and ran my eyes through the dark room.
Every article in the house was in shades of blue, pots, the couch, and the glassware all in hues of blue. It struck me then, the reason he had insisted that our conversation happen in the intimacy of his home, where he felt closer to her. Where he had preserved her unique print in every dim and craggy corner. Her necklaces, anklets all framed in glass and hung across the navy paneled wall.
The place disturbed me and I wondered how this eccentric man who claimed to love his wife could be the savage beast who killed her in cold blood.
There was much more to this cold blooded murder than what met the eye, I thought. Like the man had said, there were several layers to him that he was successfully masking, the leviathan in him behind his weary weakened exterior.

In the summer of June, 1984, I thought to myself, how the morning newspapers had shocked the world. The lewd images of a naked woman sitting on a high back leather-upholstered chair had made the headlines. A huge blue bead necklace around her neck and silver anklets in her feet. A half burnt cigarette stubbed in an ashtray next to her and a glass of Beaujolais on the table next to her.
Her long tresses covering up her slit throat as blood trickled down to her plenty bosom. The world was horrified at this ruthless slaughter and the macabre incident. The murderer had fled after; chased by the police, he escaped leaving everyone shocked.
What was left behind was just the husband’s fingerprints on the knife used to make the fatal incision and a note saying,

“My love,
you are now eternally beautiful.”

Today fifteen years later we were in the same house here where it all happened. The mammoth of the chair sat in the same room where she was found ravaged. This man who had been on a run for twelve years was now pleading insanity.

She on the other hand still lived, well preserved in this very home.

Just to think this over ran a chill down my spine.

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