The house was almost half-way up the hill and sitting in the lawn of December green he saw the hill rise higher and higher behind the house, turning a dark, then a darker shade of green, and ending in a fringe of bottle-green trees standing brave against the arching sky. The sky was a sharp blue punctuated by stray fluffs of cloud.
She sat on a cane chair opposite him, wearing dark glasses. She wore the pair whenever she came out of the house; her eyes were weak and the glare hurt.
But now the winter sun had no glare and she wore them for a special reason: because she felt that her eyes were the only feature of her inscrutable face over which she had no control. She confessed she could do nothing when her eyes poured love, love for him. Of all the people she didn't want her parents to see the betrayal. And they were just a few yards away in the living room, behind a narrow porch opening to tall, wide doors.
“I love you, Ranjit" she whispered and felt her whole being melt in that moment of inadequate expression.
His eyes softened too. The words rose from hidden depths within him, "I love you, Lucy". Her name was Lakyntiew Marbaniang but everyone called her Lucy.
She looked down the slope. Brilliant white walls and red roofs nudged each other through broken lines of pine trees.
She knew that he was supremely happy, as he always was these Sunday afternoons when he came over. Both taught in colleges across the town square. To her parents it was still an academic calling on a fellow-academic, as it really had been once, the staple of conversation their common subject, their teachers' problems, their relationship with students, topics to which they cleverly switched when either parent approached within earshot.
She was still looking down the hill when he spoke, the words floating through a smile: "What proof do I have that you love me?"
"No proof. And don't intend to give any. What proof do you give me?"
"Who anyway told you I loved you?"
"And who told you I loved you?"
Although the sky was a porous blue, the sunshine metallic bright, the air was cool. By and by he felt his skin tingle beneath his double-knit pullover.
"When you'll be married to the girl your parents arrange for you, you'll forget me," she said.
"I may," he said
A whole rush of thoughts and images came into Ranjit’s mind. What his mother had said the other day. What Lucy had told him about what her father had said. And what so many others had said. But because they were unpleasant he banished them. Banished them because Sunday didn't come everyday and everyday he didn't sit in the sun watching the distant darkening hill slope, with Lucy dark- glassed before him.
"You'll forget me when you're married to a man your mother approves of, a man from the same community, the same religion."
"Perhaps," she said.
"And you'll tell him he's got lovely hands like you tell me."
"I may,"
He held out his hands, palms downward. The fingers steady, self consciously shy in their plainsman’s brownness. The fingers were thin, rough, slightly knotty.
"They are beautiful hands."
After a pause, she continued,”Your hands, they're mine."
An impulse, quickening and throbbing, possessed him and he longed to take her into his arms and crush her.
“You'll tell him, the man they choose for you, to dress more carefully, more smartly “ Ranjit said
"I may."
"You'll nag to get him knot a tie straight."
"You never know."
Every Sunday they waited for the black shadow of the porch to move, shifted imperceptibly by the sun, from one side of the green lawn to the other. Ranjit contemplated its shrunken shadow under the overhead sun and knew that evening and the time of his departure were far away. His eyes strayed to her dangling creamy-beige legs crossed over the knee. The legs were shapely, muscular but not fat. The skirt rode high and cast a shadow on her flesh as the thigh tantalizingly withdrew within, a deeper creamy-beige shadow. That sensation of melting he had experienced earlier came on again, more intense, almost stifling.
She was thinking how she felt whenever she indulged in her habit of scribbling “Ranjit”and then slowly adding "Lucy" above it on bits of paper, staring long at the words and then tearing up the paper.
"And you will tell her about us," she said.
"Why not?"
"And you'll whisper all those things to her? All those lovely things you say to me?"
“Why shouldn't I? “ Then after a pause, “Any objection?"
A pause. "None" she said.
A huge cloud coming out of nowhere cast a huge shadow on the hillside above them. He asked her to look at it and as she turned her head to see, the same thought occurred to both of them: like the shadow that exists over us. The cloud moved rapidly, diagonally, across the hill, leaving it clear, washed, and dark green again. As the sun re-emerged, Ranjit felt a shiver of warmth penetrate his skin.
The dark glasses on her expressionless fair hill woman’s features were like a ribbon across a mannequin's face. He knew she was looking at him.
"The shadow of the roof has moved," she said.
"Don't try to change the subject. We were talking about ..."
"I'm not."
Two crows, black outlines in the bright afternoon, sailed downwards, wings out flat, unflapping.
"How will you react when, if, we happen to meet. Years later?"
"I'll introduce my husband to you. ‘Meet so-and-so; so-and so. Used to teach in the college across. My husband’." she made a small delicate gesture of mock-introduction.
"You? What will you say?" she asked.
His eyes stretched away reluctantly from her creamy-beige legs crossed over one over the other.
"I'll say, meet Lucy Marbaniang, sorry, Lucy whatever your-husband's name will be."
"And I'll ask you how many children you have, and tell you how many I have."
"And both of us will know how happy the other is."
After a long pause he said, "Our whispering might make them suspicious. Let's talk about the college." Ironical that the prejudices of community and state and religion hung over their lives in this so-called liberal society.
"Right now I don't feel like pretending. How long are we going to carry on pretending?"
The outline of the hill stood darkly, boldly, across the arching sky. A slight haze, muslin-like gossomered the fringe of trees to the sky. He was happy: and feeling happy was like being empty of feeling.
He sat watching the expressionless creamy-beige face with its dark glasses looking down at his thin, long, bony fingers and vein-woven hands in the cold brilliant sunshine, empty of feeling.
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