Rajmahal by Kamalini Sengupta

milk at the threshold of her new home, to the lusty blowing of conch shells and ululation of the females of the family. When she held the fish in her hands as custom demanded, she cleverly slipped it back before it had a chance to flip out of her hold, thus ensuring a faithful husband. But the house mourned when the symbolic ritual failed to give them the blessing of fertility.
    Mohini and Proshanto settled down to a comfortably compatible sex life, with a passion fired by pill-less, condomless concerns because it was Proshanto who was sterile though far from impotent. But it was intensely galling to Mohini that he got carried away by any new belle he encountered well into their married life, and that these belles were always in their twenties, while the two of them grew older and older. “Can’t even get me pregnant, and he’s off every week on some new crush!” she thought angrily. She wasn’t to know he never carried his crushes further than the moony behavior. Ever polite, Proshanto had suggested adoption. “Why don’t you stretch the limits of politeness and hire a stud for me then?” she almost said.
    She had once allowed imaginings of such a stud to manifest. The medical facts had just clarified, and then Proshanto had gone off over a nubile newcomer. “How dare he when he’s the one with the shortcoming!” snorted Mohini. She knew Proshanto’s sterility, or his presumed infidelity, were strong grounds for divorce. But it was still the early days, and revenge seemed sweeter. Her French class provided the chance, with the stud manifesting as a co-student from, of all places, Bulgaria.
    â€œWait till I produce a blue-eyed baby!” fumed Mohini. “What on earth made me think I had to depend on that dolt of a husband!”
    The Bulgarian sat next to Mohini, then a voluptuous young woman with an enchanting smile and glossy black hair which flowed down her back. Her large eyes turned soulfully toward him often, and he found himself stutteringly addressing her at any excuse in his poor English and poorer French in order to have that pleasure. Mohini at first found him hilariously funny with his easy blushes, but when she saw the unmistakable invitation in his blue eyes she felt herself blushing back. The Bulgarian became more attractive in a flash when her thoughts of revenge clarified. She allowed their arms to brush and soon, the pleasure of this contact became a game with them. One thing led to another and, heaving with guilt and excitement, she found herself one day in those familiar arms in his lodgings. The Bulgarian,
no fledgling, plunged into the sexual rites he was used to, and before pulling her down on to the bed put a hand on her breast and brought his face close to hers with his tongue suggestively darting in and out. Mohini kept her lips tightly sealed and held her breath, fearful that the Bulgarian would have stinking breath with shreds of beef rotting between his teeth. And suddenly, his appearance became so abhorrent, the satyr grin on his face, the darting, snakelike tongue, that she panicked, picked up her things and fled. She was reminded of scenes of bacchanalia from the paintings of the European museums, and the Bulgarian was transformed into a hairy Pan whenever she thought of him. She never went back to the French class, terrified of encountering the poor puzzled Bulgarian again.
    Dream mirages of the Sardar Bahadur’s mistresses, whose bedroom the Mojumdars now occupied, evoked bawdy scenes from the Arabian Nights of Mohini’s mind. Her psychic vision was especially activated when old Inderjeet Kaur’s ghost arrived all the way from Amritsar and appeared in the ceiling mirror above her head. One night, when the mirror clouded and frothed with white clouds, partly the mosquito curtains of fact, partly the fumes of delusion, while pink and silver flashed in the dark, Mohini nudged Proshanto awake to share the vision with her. He opened