By

Sanghamitra Datta June 2012/March 2021 Bangalore, India, Coventry, UK

Part 1

 The Object of Desire

There it was! Inside the display window of that large bright boutique coffee-shop. It was a big shop now, the ones which sold everything, from exotic soaps to scented candles, things for every room in your house. And beautiful items of semi- precious jewellery and silk scarves. The display was beautifully done in the rich festive colours. It was a few days before Christmas after all.

 Through the window one could see inside. The fat women in plush hats, doing their afternoon gossip rounds at the coffee shop tables, while the dried up spinsters pretended that that the coming winter will only bring joy to their lonely lives. I could spend hours observing people. Just a bit of observation. It’s really quite easy to read people, Mary doesn’t think so of course, but Mary always thinks too much. I am an old hand in figuring out, especially people. The clothes, the shoes, the body language.

 But I digress. Now that window…where is it? Ah! I see it again. Yes I can see the object of my desire. For months now I have been saving up to buy it for Mary. For Christmas, you know. It was beautiful, that brooch in the window. It was a classic Art Nouveau Dragonfly brooch, pale gold filigree with Cloisonné wings in iridescent blue green and flashes of flame.

 There were opals, warm Citrines & Amethysts. The piece was perfect. ‘Ode to Lalique’, was the title of the piece in the window! I have looked up Lalique in the town library a few weeks ago. So this brooch was not an original Lalique, but a very beautiful and creative copy. This too was expensive. I had to look up all the names of the stones as well. Nice names. Citrines-felt like oranges and lemons, and summer.

 I have been saving you known, through summer, but till then I hadn’t seen the brooch. But just a few weeks ago, walking down the High Street, I noticed this new Boutique. It had a very fancy name. But, it wasn’t the name, instead it was the window, which caught my eye instead. In that glowing satined rectangle, glittering beautifully, with the spot lights on it brooded that hypnotic Dragonfly. That moment I knew that this was the gift I must give Mary. Nothing else would do. Nothing else, ever again.

 As I stood at the window, drinking in the beauty of the Dragonfly, my weary fingers found the bundle of notes and assorted coins, what I had been saving from my pension from the last six months. One more week and I would have all the money to buy the Dragonfly. I had thought a few times, of walking in, making a part payment and reserving the piece you know. Walked up to the huge brass and glass portals of the boutique, but at the very last moment, I lost my nerves. Suppose they laugh at me, or my clothes. Suppose they refuse to sell it to me. Suppose they throw me out. Suppose…I chose to be secretive and day dreamed instead. At my age that is the most wonderful activity.

 This Dragonfly would be like the gift of a warm alive summer at Christmas. Mary loves summers, the fresh greens, the buzzing throbbing world, the long hours of sunlight, the cosy evenings and of course the warmth. Summers meant maybe a small picnic away from our medieval mining town of Middleston, into the countryside, to see the birds chirping and flying in colourful schemes and thousands of flowers. Butterflies, beetles and dragonflies, hither and thither like glittering jewels. Ah, beautiful summer!

 As I day dreamed, I sat on the bench opposite and watched the brooch. I was a sentinel guarding my Mary’s summer. A dashing bodyguard of dreams and dreamers if you will. Every day for the past few weeks I have spent my lunch breaks here. Watching and dreaming. It’s been a while, since I ate lunch, but it was no sacrifice at all. Come Christmas, Mary would be over the moon with the gift.

Suddenly, an attendant reached into the window, my window with my Dragonfly in it! Stop! Stop, what are you doing? She then proceeded to unclip the brooch from the cream satin. Then she stepped back into the shop. Through the glass I saw her polishing gently Mary’s Dragonfly with a delicate felt cloth, putting it on a velvet tray and turning it towards a customer. For a moment there I almost felt myself standing there next week, and the attendant going through the sales and display ritual for me. But that was to happen in the future. What is happening now?

 He was a fat man in a brown fur coat. Look… he was picking up Mary’s Dragonfly with his pudgy short fingers. He had a florid, chubby face. I couldn’t see much through the glass. But I could see that he had thinning hair. It was almost obscene to my eyes, the way he caressed the Dragonfly and smiled. He continues smiling and nodding and asking questions of the attendant. The attendant kept smiling and giving apparently highly suitable responses. At one point I noticed that both the fat man and the attendant were quiet and simply contemplating Mary’s Dragonfly. Then he sighed deeply and nodded. The assistant smiled.

 She bent down below, the counter and took out a square deep blue leather box. She then fitted the now struggling and helpless Dragonfly into it and gave it another final polish with the felt. For some strange reason, I was holding my breath. There was a strange and unexpected sense of panic and loss slowly uncoiling inside of me. I actually stopped thinking for a few moments.

 Part 2

I Despair

 She tore some gold wrapping paper from a roller while the florid man with pudgy face looked on. I hated him. Sick! Sick, it was the way he gloated and licked his fat pink lips, while the assistant wrapped up the Dragonfly and tied it up with a silver ribbon. He said something to her while counting out all those crisp, new bank notes and placing them carefully on the counter. My heart was thudding really loudly. These days our lives are so drab, that there is hardly any occasion to have increased heartbeats. Some days I almost had to pinch myself to check if I was still alive. But apparently today was not such a plain day.

 The attendant, took out another more plain brown box, a little larger than the blue box, placed the blue box inside it and then further wrapped it up in plain brown paper. Then she got a plain white card and an envelope and handed it to the fat slob. The florid man then pulled out a gold pen. It looked expensive, like the rest of him, expensive and underserving. He wrote a longish note in the card. He slid the card into the envelope and then licked and glued it. He wrote on the envelope as well.

 I was feeling numb. I am not sure why. There was a buzzing in my ears. Blood was rushing to and from my ears. I was turned to stone, almost frozen in that December wind, at my spot by the display window. I could feel nothing. The slicing cold wind was sharper in the narrow darkening streets, lined with inexpressive wooden buildings. It was the first time in many years, I felt an indescribable desperation.

 My soul, it seemed at that point was tuned in only to the obese, grabbing man, who I suddenly noticed was leaving the golden shop of my dreams. He was carrying Mary’s summer away with him in a brown box. The moment he stepped out onto the pavement, like an automaton I started following him. I didn’t know why, of course, then.

 My fingers found my now worthless bundle of notes and coins I had saved. All the meals I had gone without had morphed into that bundle now. Just one week more and it would have been me walking out with a gift of summer for my wife. It would have been me. I, the most hapless of all husbands, the most worthless. I would have done something for another person. The most important person, my dearest, delicate wheel chair bound Mary. Just once, in my grey life, locked in a grey town of no special charm, shackled to our tiny grey home.

 I just kept following him, not noticing where we were, in this year-end city. My eyes only sought the thick obese and suddenly hateful figure of the man in his fancy tasteless fur overcoat. I wondered who he had bought the brooch for, surely not for anybody like my Mary, who loved summers and music and dancing and laughter.

 Must be someone just like him, fat, greasy, with a layers of stale make-up, fat lips sticky with cheap lipstick. I hated that invisible person as well, along with that florid faced man. I could almost feel the sour taste of my rage. I had this sudden feeling of bubbling, boiling anger, and sorrow with an urge to sit down and cry. But the tears did not fall. They steamed away on the edge of my eyes from the heat of my anger. My justified anger.

 If that overcoat was anything to go by then he obviously had such terrible taste. How then did he hunt down the beautiful dragonfly in this drab old mining town? He could have brought anything almost at the biggest shops in London. Then why did he have to come down here to this drab grey town of Middleston to steal my gift of summer? There was a hurricane in the ocean of my soul, with a pointless rage for a stranger and his invisible lover. Yes I read people well. Had to be a secret lover. Someone who he visited away from his wife. He seemed to be an unfaithful fellow. Too much money and no good sense. I could actually see clearly how he met his fat, vacuous mistress, dressed cheaply, eating chocolates and casually throwing Mary’s Dragonfly on to a gold dressing table. I could see the Dragonfly, lying forgotten, gathering dust. A wasted gift. A useless gift.

 A passer-by stared at me strangely as he went by. Jolted back to reality, I realized that I was sweating heavily, in that icy cold wind and there was a sneer distorting my face. Even my limp was playing up badly in my rush to follow the fur-coated man. My knee was hurting and I was leaning heavily on my cane. I was breathing in staggered gasps. My mouth was dry in that biting cold wind.

 The florid faced fellow walked in through a doorway. I stopped, when I realized that it was the post office. The windows were covered up, I supposed on account of the steadily dropping temperature. I couldn’t see anything inside, so I decided to wait outside and catch my breath. I sat on a bench and leaned on my cane and thought in a mad rush about our life, till this desperate moment. I wondered of all possible ways of asking that obscene ball of lard, to please let me have the brooch. I would give him all the money I had saved up in exchange for it, of course. I would threaten him, coax him, dance a jig for him if he so wished. I would do anything at all, for that little piece of summer for Mary.

 Yes, I will tell him how I had been unable to buy a single Christmas gift for Mary in the last ten years. I will tell him everything. About our accident ten years ago, my lost job, Mary’s lost legs, the double disability pension dwindling into nothingness. I will tell him about our dead children. Though I didn’t know why I needed to tell him everything? Just a simple request should work, any decent man would immediately respond and be the bigger man.

 But then of course my knowledge of people told me that he was not like other men. Maybe he would laugh at me. Or rudely push me away. Yes, so the best way was begging and sympathy. Yes the fatso will feel good if I begged. An old, crippled man begging, yes that would boost his ego. I know. I know, people such as him felt good at acting benevolent at people’s misfortunes.

 That terrible boating accident so many years ago when our picnic boat suddenly hit a hidden sandbank in the river and over turned. There were two families in that boat that day. It was piled high with food and drinks and there were seven children and six adults. One moment we were all laughing and shouting and talking and pointing towards the little picnic island in the middle of the river, and the next we were all in about eight feet of rushing river! By the time we got everything out of the water, Jasper and Jade our twins, eleven years old that spring were nowhere to be found.

 How we searched up and down that river, dark with undercurrents. We stalked the banks on both sides. We had the police and the local authorities checking right down to the weir thirty miles downriver. But nothing. But Jasper and Jade were never found. Mary in that shock took to her bed. She hasn’t used her legs since fully. From a complete paralysis, after a few years she could hobble around our grey little cottage or use the wheelchair through winter. When the kids were there that cottage seemed bright and airy. But now it seems really dark and small, with smoky windows. Everything is monochrome now.

 Mary insisted on cooking our meagre meals. We had a sumptuous weekly menu, comprising mainly of cabbage soup. Some days with few scraps of meat which I bought with a few pennies. On other day’s just soup with salt, and on Sundays it was with pepper. Christmas dinner usually, I got some good bargains from the supermarkets on ham and some puddings. The cold biting wind jerked me back from my reverie of a scrumptious dinner. My mind wandered a lot these days.

 After that horrible summer, there was a recession and thousands lost their jobs. I was happy that I still had my job. I was a manager for a mill owner just outside of Middleston. That autumn, I was cycling back home and the road was slick with rain. I slipped and fell on the side of the road. In the fall I passed out. When I woke up, I was in the hospital. A passing farm truck had ran over my leg, now permanently twisted. I was no longer able to walk around the mill and manage. My employer was a kind man. He gave me a few months’ wages, but I lost my job. I have been traversing an ocean of despair since then. I work as a gatekeeper for a few days a week at a nearby meat packing unit.

 Till a few weeks ago, my despair lifted when I saw that glittering Dragonfly at that window. These last few weeks I felt lighter, brimming with a surprise for my delicate greying Mary. I cannot begin to describe how quiet I had to be, to save up that money. Mary would have put it all away in the tin cash box, we kept our money in. I was feeling secretive and mischievous.

 Yes he had to know everything about us, the hunger the pain, the anguish, the privations, the fall from grace of a complete happy family to drab greyness and unending cabbage soup. It wasn’t as if I was about to rob that fatso. I was an old man, in a small town, desperate for a slice of summer. That’s all. I leaned heavily on my cane, couldn’t figure out what was taking him so long inside the Post Office.

 Part 3

 The Unravelling

 But wait… he was coming out of the post office now. As he stepped out of the shadow, my heart stopped. His hands were empty! Empty, empty, so empty. He threw away a small piece of paper and it swirled in the thick wind and lost itself in the icy blizzard. His thick lips were parted in a grin, like a slash across his fat face cutting it in two. I realized that the little piece of paper had been the ticket to freedom for Mary’s little Dragonfly.

 As he started walking away, I made up my mind. Yes I was sure. He turned left from the post office, I followed him. He turned this way and that though the winding grey streets of Middleston. I followed him through the gloaming, into the freezing cold.  It became murkier, with light foggy rain.

 He walked on past the old church and the railway lines. The wind got worse, my aching limp became numb, but nothing mattered any more. I followed. He turned into one of the many old alleyways. I could still hear the sound of the train passing by, a short distance away in the misty rain. He was just a few feet away from me. I could see his fat rolled neck and the collar of the fur jacket.

I actually could not see him too clearly either when I started running, all that sudden unnatural hatred crashing and shattering my insides. With the last reserves of muscle in my wasted legs, I ran towards him. He had slowed down, groping in his pockets, for his keys maybe. But I didn’t stop. I hit him hard on his head with my steel tipped cane. Hard crunching blows, again and again. He dropped without a sound. I kept saying, “Now see what you have gone and done, you ugly ball of lard”.

 Then I stopped. I wiped the blood off my cane with my kerchief. I was feeling surprised really. In those ten years past, the thought of such unaccountable violence had never appeared, till now, all for that dragonfly. I have never understood why I hit him, instead of calling out to him. I turned quickly away. But I will always remember his surprised look and his raised left arm, pathetically trying to stop the blows. He had turned around to face me after the first blow. But I hadn’t stopped at that point. I hadn’t noticed it actually till after.

 As reality checked in, I realized that I was in a lane with many windows opening onto the road. The street lights were few and far between. No car had passed us in the last ten minutes either. I couldn’t bring myself to look at that crushed skull and surprised grey eyes any more. I needed to put this incident behind me quickly.

 I then slowly walked back to through the lane, the street lights hazy and far apart. I could hear the television from a few houses nearby and loud laughter. Mary and I don’t have a television. As I walked I felt a little better, though my limp was hurting, because of all that running. I realized that I had to turn right and keep walking away from the railway tracks and go towards the northern edge of Middleston, where Mary and I lived.

 I must have taken the correct route, because I did reach home that night, though I remember nothing. I had a fever that night. Not really high but a definite temperature. My legs were hurting as were my shoulders. Mary smiled and told me to stay in bed as long as I wanted. Two days have passed since. I actually have almost comfortably forgotten about the actual incident.

The loss of the Dragonfly was still bothering me. I went for a walk this morning around the neighbourhood. I read the newspaper at the Tobacconists. I never buy newspapers. The tobacconist is an old friend, so he lets me sit and read the newspaper every day. Yes, there was set of news items about a dead stranger in Middleston. So I read all the bits.  

 There was a small article in the main paper and a more, well researched one in the local paper. Crime, especially murder of strangers is rare in our country. The papers said the man was found dead outside his boarding house, with the keys in his hands. He had died instantaneously of serious head wounds. The police as yet had no clue as to who was responsible for this killing. No other stuff was found in his pockets. The landlady of that boarding house made positive identification after the police approached about the dead man a couple of steps away from her door. It was her who gave the police access to his substantial luggage and files. It was from the passport that the Identification was confirmed. Nothing else was there.

 Preliminary investigations have shown that the neighbours had not heard anything as it had all happened while a popular soap opera was on TV. The dead man was about fifty years old, recently returned from America and his name was Theodore Cox, businessman. He had landed a few days ago at Heathrow, made his way here to Middleston, to die here, in this grey non-descript town. Apparently he was here to start a chain of successful retail stores, similar to those he had started in the States a few years ago.

 Mary of course has no idea about all this, as we cannot afford the luxury of either a TV or of regular newspapers. After my walk around I reached our little grey little cottage. I unlocked the door and walked through to the kitchen, where Mary usually likes to sit. There is a window which overlooks our tiny boxlike back yard with a single apple tree. Now covered with a light snow, it was Mary’s only escape outside. There she was, my beautiful Mary, her eyes glowing with joy at something she was holding in her withered childless lap.

 I couldn’t see clearly in the gloom. So I moved closer to Mary at the window. Then I saw the deep blue leather box, now open with the beautiful Dragonfly stuck inside it. The Dragonfly was picking up all the lights and colours from all around and throwing it back on the drab walls. The brown cardboard box lay discarded along with the gold wrapping paper and the silver ribbon.

 I am not feeling too well. I need to sit down. The blood is rushing to my head. Mary is saying something, but I am unable to hear it clearly. I must focus. She was waving a piece of card around with joy, and saying, “Look Thomas, look at what Teddy sent me, a beautiful Dragonfly Brooch.!” My throat was parched and my lips dry. It was difficult to swallow.

 I mumbled, “Teddy? “ Yes, yes, Teddy, Theo, Theodore. Don’t you remember my half-brother, I told you about him. Remember, he ran away to America, so many years ago, I think maybe when I was about seventeen or eighteen. Well, it seems he made something of himself out there, he is a businessman now retail shops, he says, all over America.

 “He is now back and he traced me from London, till here. To Middleston. On his enquiries he heard about our accident you see and about Jasper and Jade. He has some meetings with a few people in town till tomorrow. Then he is coming to see us. Of course, to help go to America maybe. He will visit us may be tomorrow or the day after”.

 “You will see Thomas, now everything will work out for the better. There was always a lot of love between Theo and I”, gushed Mary. I sat down. Mary was clutching the card and holding the Dragonfly in its box. If she had her legs, then she would have danced around the little kitchen. She rolled her wheelchair up to me and held up that jewelled insect for me to look at and appreciate. I couldn’t tell her that I had memorised every glittering facet of that jewel. “Oh, Thomas, isn’t it simply beautiful.” I nodded helplessly. My mind slowly slipped out of my body.

 And from far away I could see Mary and myself, an aging couple living in a mediaeval grey box. I could see Mary sitting and waiting at the window for Theo Cox to bring a summer of laughter into our greyness. I could see her with her white hair neatly brushed, wearing her best frayed woollen dusty rose dress, and the beastly gleaming Dragonfly pinned to her dress. Like an angel sitting at a drab square grey window. Sitting on a creaky wheelchair and waiting for Theodore Cox.  Patiently waiting through the coldest days till maybe she could wait no more. I was standing at the edge of a dark abyss. Just barely retaining a grip with reality.

The next day I walked down to the City Centre. On a sudden whim, I walked past the Boutique. As I looked in at the window, that window, I saw another Dragonfly, ditto of the one Mary has imprisoned on her bosom, brooding on the satin cushion like before. My chest felt cold. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing out loud. ‘Ode to Lalique’, and in really small print-‘Limited Edition- One of 300 ever made.’ Small print, smaller print, really why all these weeks of standing in front of the window, I didn’t read it. Why didn’t I? Even everyday reading of offers or contracts I have never read the small print. Why? Because I always felt I knew what was what. Nice. Very nice. That abyss is calling out to me.

Here I am now, with a secret buried so deep in my tell-tale heart. A secret so cruel, so beastly that I am a human no more. I had crossed that fine line and now stood on the threshold of a cold dark eternity. I am to spend my remaining years watching Mary slowly wait and dissipate into a wishful dream. While I, remain trapped in a harsh, malignant, coiling, slithering guilt. Here I must remain till the last day of my life.

In a life together without secrets from each other for almost thirty years, suddenly I must keep a secret of such a shattering nature. It was beyond my baffled mind. I felt a lot like a tent, which was fighting a losing battle with ferocious winds, and slowly, one by one, each peg holding it down to reality popped out. My shattered mind broke free and curled up in a dark wasteland. No visitors here.

That beastly, brooding Dragonfly, slowly throbbed on Mary’s bosom. It was picking up and throwing around a thousand glittering shards of light and colour. It was evil. It was beautiful. It was summer and it was an endless winter. It was the desolate wilderness of the lost soul.

The End

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