MARRIAGE

Proloy Kundu often thought what it would be like if he slept till ten on a Saturday morning. His mind relished the idea through the tedium of the working week, especially on days he met the municipal authorities. All around, as rickety finances fought losing battles with bulging overheads, he saw himself, as in a vision, content and curled up in bed, his right leg astride a fat bolster. No leaky taps, no clogged drains. Nothing to toss him out of bed unless the house caught fire, but that was a moral crisis beyond the scope of his imagination.

Every Saturday morning, he found himself aloof from that vision, at fifty-three, within sniffing distance of his retirement, stuck in a rented government flat. He sat at the dining table, his fingers wrapped around a cup of black tea, mostly worrying what lay ahead for his three adult daughters once they exited his threshold. He also had charge of his wife's orphaned nephews, so lazy mornings had become as distant to him as space travel. 

His wife joined him, dark brown of complexion, wearing a housecoat tightly fastened over her nightdress. She was a stout workhorse, and this morning reminded Proloy Kundu of a mature tree trunk. At forty-eight, she had one of those determinedly positive outlooks on life he found frightening. The shy, slender girl he had married was but a memory now, tucked inside photo albums. 

She handed him a stash of envelopes, the week's accumulated mail. 

"That's all?" he asked her. The frayed edges of the envelopes suggested he had already given them a cursory look in the course of the week. 

"The light blue one's from yesterday," Aloka replied, stirring an extra spoon of sugar into her milky tea. "Registered post, with acknowledgement."

Proloy Kundu reached out for the paper knife and slit open the coarse-grained envelope along its length. He peered inside, without disturbing the contents. 

"Just the photo," he remarked.

"Rejected?" Aloka asked. "Not even a note?"

"Wait, there's something written at the back." He tapped the corners of the envelope to ease the photograph out. Between his thumb and forefinger, he looked at the image of his first-born, Komolika, or Molly as they called her. She was staring guardedly at the camera, as if unsure what was to follow. She looked dressed for a wedding, draped in an ornate royal-blue silk saree, white jasmine stringed along her dark, flowing hair. 

"Not meeting our beauty standards," he read out from the back of the photograph.