the smashed eye

[note: another short story I must finish]

Usha wished she could find a way to tell Ramesh that she didn't want him to buy a camera. He bought it anyway, but he vacillated for days, pretending to consider her weak objections: but what if it gets stolen? what if you break it? But the real and unspoken questions were: will you use it? whose pictures will you take? They went to one electronics store where he compared lenses and shutters and flashes, and each time that he gave Usha a camera to consider she held it firmly in her hand just to prevent herself from smashing the candidate onto the ground. Then they went to another shop. At each place Ramesh chatted with the salesmen but reserved his thoughtful consideration for the salesladies as they tested the cameras for him on their own slim necks, clicking picture after picture of him and a disgruntled Usha. She retreated to the edge of each frame. At one point she left altogether to stand in front of the store, her back a sweaty spot against the twin glass doors and her dark arms exposed to the sun. She told Ramesh that the air-conditioning made her head spin.

Ramesh met her a few minutes later searching inside his wallet. He drew out a foil packet of pills. You want Crocin? he asked.

She took a Crocin from his palm and swallowed it against the bitter taste.

They have water inside, Ramesh said.

So they examined more cameras as Usha held a cup of hard water high above her head and swallowed half of it in clean spurts. If she spilled the tumbler into a camera, would it stop taking pictures? Usha imagined a fresh-from-the-box camera fizzling out, the flash spastic as it struggled to work and then died. She drained the glass before she could spill anything, fiercely gargling the water in her mouth. Ramesh pinched her arm thickly until she swallowed. The woman behind the glass counter let Ramesh hold the camera and told them that the manager would cut an extra ten percent if they'd agree to make the purchase.

Usha took Ramesh's hand and smiled.

We need to consider, she said.

Ramesh put the camera down on the glass counter and told the saleslady to keep it for him. They promised that they'd come back for it. Usha wondered if the woman stored the memory of this encounter. Was there any room in that empty head, covered in kilos of oily hair? It disturbed Usha that they were close enough to her to know that she used coconut.

She was a nice girl, Usha said when they left the counter. What was her name? He told her that it was Shilpa.

When he came home from the office the next day Usha was waiting for him in his grandmother's flat. Ramesh called her the Old Lady and she was visiting relatives in Vizag. While she was gone the place was dark and empty for months except for the servant who swept the floors and sometimes surfed the channels for action scenes.

Usha knew that Ramesh went back to the store and bought the camera. He must have walked into the store and found Shilpa with the hair along with her grand promises from the manager. If he had not bought it he would be waiting for her on the sofa, his hands twirling the cord of the phone, discussing Dhoni and Tendulkar and what Mahinder, a mutual friend, did in Goa.

Maybe today Shilpa decided against the plait and instead combed her hair until it became a placid fan down her back. Did she think that the braid did not suit?

She fought to shake off the endless hypotheticals.

There had to be a point where this stopped.

Usha knew that she noticed Shilpa's plait because Ramesh loved hair. Of the women on television he preferred those with longer, thicker hair. His very favorite was a very young starlet -- Menaka, Manjula? -- who always chewed her the tip of her ponytails until it leaked saliva onto her collarbone. She was best known for her wet sari sequences. Under the waterfalls, her hair became a soggy cape against the back of a backless blouse. Whenever Usha saw her on screen she repeated the mantra: she is Just a Girl. Not even eighteen. These actresses always lied about their ages, and Menaka or Manjula looked less eighteen than Usha did when she was sixteen.

Her own hair was thin. It was genetic. Usha's mother had huge gaps in her hair and colored her scalp black to hide them. Around Ramesh, Usha let her hair loose to give it the appearance of thickness but it fell flat across her face and scratched her shoulder blades.

By the time he arrived she had been waiting for an hour. During that time the servant came and she asked him to fetch her a bottle of Thumbs up so that she had something to offer him when Ramesh came back. It was still cold when he turned the knob and walked in. She saw the plastic bag with the camera in it even before she saw him. His jagged fingernails needed to be cut. There were faint hairs on top of the hand that held the bag. The receipt was crushed in his fist.

It was still the same price? Usha asked.

Ramesh sat next to her on the wicker sofa. He stretched his legs and rested his feet against one another. The camera lay between them. She lifted it up so that she would have something to do with her hands. Ramesh laid his fingers over hers and showed her the buttons: this one turned it on, this was the screen, this one made the lens zoom forward -- she resisted the movement with the palm of her hand, which Ramesh pulled away. You'll get prints on the lens, he said. Usha smacked her hands onto her lap.

Have you tried it out? she asked again. She gave the camera to him as soon as she could. The urge to drop it was too strong.

I took a picture at the store, he said. By now an expert, he jammed a thick thumb into two buttons and showed her a picture of Shilpa, her hair down in a half ponytail, neat at the temples while long in the back. Something to remember her by. She took the camera and tilted it until she could see the [tbc]