by Haritha Chandran

Six men and a woman are confined in a single room, unaware of why such a conundrum came about. All men, free and mobile; woman tied to a chair, mouth covered, mute. The Stage is set for the ultimate crescendo of the act.
The woman is lean and thin, collar bones tenaciously protruding out of her ebony skin. She possessed no tantalizing allure of voluptuous Malabari beauty, neither the grace and vigor of a Malayali Kettilamma. But the universe bequeathed her with a salacious pose. Her cheekbones, razor-sharp, ready to cut diamond on its will, willed you to contemplate stroking them. The nose, an over-drawn canyon, is slightly crooked to the left. Eyes, a tint of lackluster lethargy, processed a nonchalant sexiness and reigned an extraordinary persuasion power. Her upper lip, a hue darker than the lower one, threatened of utter dominion. What she lacked in outlines, she made up on details, none of which are visible now under the fabric that covers her mouth.
Men, all six of them, recognized the woman, but not each other. Confusion reeked through their pores, and bristles that cover their arms stood erect in wariness. An eerie ring of agitation lingered in the air.
One of the six men encountered
“Who are you all?”
“Who else do you think we are? We are all lovers of hers!”
“All of us?” The man with broad shoulders and pensive gaze exclaimed!
“It can not be! The girl I knew would shy away from looking at men! “
the bitterness of deception precipitating at the end of his words.
“Where is this guy coming from? She did way more than just look at men when I knew her!”
“She was my first love! She was a Devi!”
the tone of his voice, the curve of his mouth gave him away. The barren words suspended in the atmosphere in disbelief.
The figurine of the goddess was shattering down and causing clamor within him. The clamorings came out on the surface as rumblings on his stomach.
“Naah, bro! Don’t take her name with a goddess in a sentence. She is a pure slut!”
“Don’t call her slut! Sluts charge money for sex. She would do it for free. Just tell her she is pretty!”
“Bhagavane!! All these fifteen years, I often wondered how she is faring. Not in my wildest dreams could I conjure this!”
“Why would you doubt this brother! I would be surprised if she didn’t have more!”
A general accord was forming between the men. Voice belonged to the man with deepest eyebrows and lips curled in permanent mockery.
“When I met her for the first time, she was drunk to her bones! Couldn’t believe my luck when she agreed to come to my house. She was horny as fuck, I tell you.”
That night, he perceived in her a certain cacophony of brokenness behind the clamor of rhetoric that prompted him to make a move. This was not out of empathy but out of a premial instinct of a hunter. He told her how she was the most beautiful girl in the room and offered her sex as a remedy to forget a recent breakup. He couldn’t believe his luck when she agreed. He felt a hefty conviction that these two people’s meeting at this fork of life occurred out of a sliver of fortune and later of it because of her waywardness.
“Did you get much action, brother?”
“You bet!!! I fucked her brain out before I felt” His eyes beamed with crawing pride. Swagger gave way to relief.
” Thank God I met my wife by then. Or I would have got stuck with that bitch”
“Well, she would have had a thousand lovers, with that pouty mouth of hers. But I popped her cherry. She was timid as a cat. It was me who taught her how it is like to have a man inside of her!”
All men turned in search of the voice and found a man with mean eyes and long fingers.
The matter at hand was this way that when he entered her, condescendingly for being a virgin, hibiscus of pain had blossomed in the sheet. Her ordeal ended soon when he climaxed fast and left her bare, malcontent.
“With all her intellectual jargon and talk of emancipation of women and whatnot, she chose me!! I was just so cute to resist. I see she got so much action after me.”
On the gauge of conquest, his stylus pointed highest; In the pavilion of these six men, his head towered highest.
A man with the posture of a kind heart and placid demeanor, now full of loathing in his otherwise kind eyes, exclaimed
“No wonder here! She deserved the lot of you. I should have known what would be the end be of jumping into a shipwreck like hers!
“Now, what is this guy’s problem?”
“Unlike you all, I loved her!” He cackled
” Loved her too much, she said, that she ran away.”
The first night they met, they had agreed that they were two sinners revoked from heaven meeting each other at a crossroad to hell.
He said as if in a reverie, not particularly to anyone
“She said she felt hollow after telling me about the lots of you on the first night with me. I thought she would be different with me.”
Alas, the abhor of unrequited love is hotter than a simmering volcano. He muttered, full of anger.
“She did not deserve my love. Apparently, I suffocated her! To hell with her! I wish she die!!!”
Men no longer took notice of her presence in the room. For all, they know she could merge into the wall, and they won’t bat an eye.
“You act like you are beyond all of us!”
Someone sneered.
“Ohh please! None of you were better than her. For God’s sake, even she knew it. She didn’t have a good taste of men before she met me.”
Voice belonged to the tallest man in the room. The man had a slender nose, silver of hair slither through the sea of black hinting either of him growing old or turning cold, eyes; a narrow slit of merciless candor.
“Ohh, who the fuck are you!!!”
“Unlike you, I was a match to her intellectually. I knew all about you all. I knew she was a whore! But a whore who can carry a conversation!”.
Love had blossomed between them on the footing of how he was perpetually surprised at finding a woman who can carry out scholarly discourse. He immensely enjoyed her company. But undeniable confidence of her immoral character persisted, for he was aware of all her past lovers.
“And what is your story, brother?”
They turned to the last of the six.
The man stood fidgeting at a corner of the room.
“As you all said, she is a slut!” was all that he could utter.
He had cheekbones that gave him the expression of a sulking child. She was his concubine while he publicly loved another. Unironically he was the jealous one of them all, resenting her for being wiser and wittier than him, dubious of all men she talked to. Pity for him and the world around him runs deep through his veins—a strenuous dichotomy of modernity and patriarchy pulsed within him.
“Don’t any of you act like you were saints! We all knew what we signed up for.”
“it’s not like we took advantage of her. She never wanted marriage and kids. She never dreamed of ordinary life. Why are we to blame for her virtues?”

“Exactly! Expecting pure love from likes of her is the biggest blender possible. I am surprised you went there brother!”
The voices no longer sounded different from each other, as if they were puppets of a single maker preaching synchronized to the last Harmony.
The inevitable contrary rises when men who have slept with the same women are in a single room accumulated in the air. Conflict of it they were better than their belligerent counterparts raised up in their minds. They mentally tallied their merits over other men around them. They snatched glances at each other in hope of an acquittal.
But deep within them, they each carried the firm conviction that had she met them in the right time and right light, she would have turned virtuous and domesticated.
Slowly loathe accumulated on their neurons, bladders filled with envy and suspicion of self-worth caused them to retch and venomous words blurred out of them.

“Women like her is a weight to this world. They litter our verandahs with the filth of their past.”
“She ruined our lives and left scars that never healed. Thank God we saved ourselves from her before it’s too late.”

“Imagine the shame! Marrying the likes of her!”

“No brother! Our parents did not raise us to marry whores”

“Imagine marrying her and birthing kids with her character. What a shame!”
“Worst yet, Imagine our kids meeting filth like her and soiling their innocence!”

“I feel pity to the man who is to marry this slut!”

“Nobody deserves that much bad luck in their life”
Words that the men couldn’t fathom is true were uttered in hate. In accordance with each other, all six men overflowing with detest, they were not sure they were capable of before that stood vindicated.
Someone muttered
“It’s better for the world if she did not exist. No men deserve to suffer for her”
Crowd nodded in unison.
Six is a mythical number. God created men on the sixth day and rested the next day. Hebrew slaves toiled for six continuous years before they were released free. These six men, tormentors who pierced six distinct holes in her heart, self annotated now as tormented worked briskly, like six minions of Satan. They like in a trance, poured turpentine over her, absorbing energy from her muffled protests, chanted ancient hymns of revenge.
The leader of the group, shapeless now, lit the fire and threw it at her. As she smoldered in pain and flame slowly licked her away, a relief appeared on their faces. The balance of the world is restored.

About the Author:

Haritha T Chandran is a Malabari doing PhD in Tu Dortmund. She is interested in writing about Malabari women navigating through different facets of traditionalist society in postmodern times. She has her stories published in various magazines in India.