Married Woman Read Free

with her and her friend.
    ‘Of course hell go, won’t you, Bunty beta?’ boomed his father.
    ‘Th-Thank-you, Uncle‚’ stammered Astha, not looking at Bunty.
    Bunty seemed stiff and bored through the film. Gayatri chattered gaily in the interval, while Astha gritted her teeth and waited for the nightmare to end. Words rushed around in her head, words that would show how clever and interesting she was, but when she actually looked at him she could not speak. She wanted to never see Bunty again. She hated him. She wished his holidays would quickly end.
    *
    They did, and Astha grew desperate. The point of getting up every morning had been the hope that she would be able to look at him, feed on a glance, a word, a smile. Now her rich inner world would become stale with nothing new to add to the store.
    ‘Suggest writing. You know, like pen pals‚’ said Gayatri.
    ‘No.’ Suppose he laughed? Looked contemptuous?
    ‘What do you have to lose?’
    ‘Why should he write to me?’
    ‘Why not? He does drop by, and you also visit him.’
    Astha hesitated. ‘That means very little‚’ she pronounced finally, thinking of those visits, the long pauses, she pulverised with emotion and Bunty shifting about in his seat, saying from time to time, ‘So what’s new?’
    Gayatri pressed home her point.
    ‘He does talk to you, and objectively speaking, you’re not bad looking. You have no figure, but your features are sharp, you have clear skin, and high cheekbones. If your hair was styled instead of pulled back, it would help, but still, it is thick and curly. You are on the short side, but tall men like short girls, that is one thing I have noticed, time and again.’ (Gayatri herself was tall.)
    ‘I can’t just walk up to him and say give me your address, I want to write to you.’
    ‘It’s not anything so great you are asking. Once you write, he will write back.’
    ‘He may not.’
    ‘Then he is no gentleman‚’ said Gayatri severely.
    Eventually Astha blurted out the request, shoving her diary and pen at him.
    *
    She wrote, and he did reply, weeks later.
    ‘Who is this from?’ asked her mother, holding the letter away from her.
    ‘How do I know?’ demanded Astha.
    She snatched the letter and tucked it into her school bag. It was from him, she knew it was. He had written.
    Dear Astha,
    I received your letter a few weeks back. We do not really get time to write, we are very hard worked here.
    Tomorrow, I am leaving for camp. There is much work to be done; we do a lot of studies on tactics and strategy of defence and attack. We leave early in the morning, first marching 20 miles, from where we will be transported another 80 miles. At the end of it all we will land in some remote village. After lunch, which we carry, we will ‘dig-in’ for the night to carry out a defence exercise. Digging trenches in the Deccan plateau isn’t quite as easy as you might think. Each one takes 3 to 4 hours. We shall also have to climb Simhagarh, Shivaji’s famous fortress, and incidentally the highest one. At night we shall ambush and patrol, the sole difference between this and a real war being that we shall fire blank rounds at each other instead of live ones.
    And so on. It was a soldier’s letter, what else had she expected? If the reality of Bunty was a little flat after her image of him, her love could take it. She re-read it all day and the days to come, till she got his next.
    It turned out Bunty liked corresponding. Through the year Astha heard about his friends, the war with Pakistan, Lal  Bahadur Shashtri, his academic subjects, his service subjects, his feelings about the Indian Army in general, and cadets in particular.
    And Astha, Astha was witty, clever, chatty, all the things she could not be when he was in front of her. Her writing was laced with little drawings which he found ingenious and talented. She started flirting. Letters were safe.
    As the correspondence established itself, so did the mother’s