Marlboro

I live in a city of laborers but I don’t work. Not always. I read, I think and I maintain strong viewpoints on all matters of public importance but I don’t work. Since childhood my only interests have been day dreaming and masturbation. That is not to say I am not important. I am a major attraction at a paan-wala shop nearby. People gather there to listen to my fantasies and offer me smoke and paan.
Sometimes, I work too. Last time I worked, it was for a girl. I was standing in for a friend, a real-estate broker, waiting for a customer of his while he was busy with some other client when I had seen her walk towards me in the yellow glow of a late afternoon sun. She was smoking a cigarette and she walked past me lost in her thoughts. She smelled of burnt tobacco and flowers. She looked right through me.
I started working at the broker’s place. I went around with people showing them houses. I was sent out with people in whose business my friend was least interested. As long as I could see her walk by daily, I did not mind. I could tell when she was sad and I could tell when she was happy. But she never was either. She had the same expression, that of complete indifference, always.
One day after showing a client a flat I locked it, lit a cigarette and stood in the corridor. I saw the spiral-winding staircase and the people in them. People, pushing their rocks up to their homes, knowing that they would roll back down by the time that they would wake up the next day, climbing up the stairs. A door opened behind me. A woman, who must have been in her late thirties, came out. She picked up her mail, looked at me with contempt and went back in. The door opened again and she asked me, without coming out, “What are you doing here?” When I told her she asked me if I could replace her kitchen cylinder.
In action, it was an honest invite. Not a single action or word of hers said that she was not being honest. But I knew I was not going in to just change cylinders. When I had changed the cylinder we did what I had been invited for. We made love. But love had nothing to do with it. I would say we fucked but it wasn’t that crude. So, for want of a better word, we had intercourse. We did it with most of her clothes on and so I asked her, afterwards, if I could see her naked. She did not say yes but did not refuse either. Once I had removed her clothes, her body contorted itself into a shape that betrayed her shame. Not for the act but for the wrinkles that had begun to appear. I thought she was beautiful and had no reason to be ashamed.
As I walked back through filth-filled lanes, awkwardly clustered together buildings and the yellow light of the sun that flooded everything, I thought how, in a way, masturbation was better than sex. How a woman can never be as beautiful as a figment of one’s imagination and how it was true for anything in this world and not just women. Then I thought of the girl who walked past the office daily. I did not want to miss her. I wondered what would she be wearing and if she would give me so much as a glance. She did not. She walked, once again, right through me, leaving me with nothing but scent of flowers and burnt tobacco. And a few moments of ecstasy.