Previously
: Hans, a fresh graduate from the IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain was now a young recruit at an European multinational firm with an assignment in a small Asian town; little more than an overgrown village. For eight months, he had endured the rigours of his posting and the continuous efforts of his veiled provocative attempts at seducing a 45-year old housemaid. Finally, the social and language barriers between them had succumbed to the libidinous desires that both had surreptitiously harboured towards each other. The 24-hour tryst with the raw, rustic, voluptuous and hirsute maid had brought him to the pinnacle of hedonistic and decadent carnality. And for her, Matty (real name Maitri,) years of dormant sensuality and lust had erupted into a climactic apogee of sexual release.
***
Now:
Hans waited. It was Saturday again, almost 11:00 a.m. and he was expecting her at any moment. Sitting on the first floor balcony that overlooked a large meadow, he was ruminating about a series of random thoughts that haphazardly ran through his mind. His thoughts went to Matty (he had difficulty pronouncing her actual name Maitri) as he lit his second cigarette after breakfast, taking a tentative sip of the steaming hot coffee he had just made for himself.
Since the previous weekend, Hans had been summoned to his regional headquarters in the capital city for his quarterly review. They had sent him his electronic air ticket on Saturday morning and told him to catch the afternoon flight. His stay at HQ had gone well but he had a lot of difficulty keeping his mind off Maitri. He returned to his little town of work two days earlier and had been waiting impatiently for the time he would see her again, and of course the promise of things to come. His hormones, it seemed, had never raged as much as they had over the previous 48 hours; he had refrained from masturbating, wanting to hold it all back till he had her in his bed.
As he took a last sip of his now tepid coffee, his heart leapt when he spied a figure walking across the meadow about half a kilometre away. He knew Matty often took a shortcut across the green field but not when it was raining, as it had done intermittently in long stretches for the last ten weeks since the start of the monsoon season. He tried to identify the individual crossing the pasture, approaching his house, but could see only from the waist down on account of the large black umbrella that obstructed his view. As the person got closer, he saw the long dress and knew she was a female. But his heart sank when he noticed that it wasn't a saree, the traditional apparel that his maid always wore. Instead, it looked like a long flowing skirt, the fringe of which lightly grazed over the wet grass on which the woman walked.
She also seemed to have on a man's shirt, buttoned down the front and not tucked into the waistband. The shirt was white, and the skirt seemed to be a faded blue; his first impression was that she was wearing some sort of hand-me-down uniform. The hem was a darker shade of blue, probably because it was wet from skimming over the grass. As she got closer, the umbrella covered more and more of his view till all he could see from his first floor lookout was the orange coloured thongs of rubber slippers on rather dainty feet.
Disappointed and with heavy heart, Hans got up from the rattan cane chair and carried his coffee mug back into the airy living room. At the far left corner was the entrance to his flat; on his right was an access door to a short corridor into which he turned. Directly in front was the bathroom, to the left his bedroom, and to the right was the dining room. He walked through it into the kitchen and placed his mug in the sink along with all the breakfast dishes he'd used that morning. Full of pathos and a deep sadness, he aimlessly wandered back to the bedroom and threw himself on to the unmade bed, rested his head on the pillow and stared blankly at the ceiling.
But after a couple of minutes he decided to shake himself out of his torpor and get on with his day. He got off the bed and went to the bathroom where he washed his face with warm water and then lathered it with shaving foam. Matty would come when she would come; she wasn't the most consistent with her timings, Hans thought to himself, so why spend the morning brooding. He worked up a rich lather and inserted a fresh cartridge into his razor.
When he was half way through the first stroke with the new blades, he heard a key turning in the door lock at the entrance to his apartment. The exultant thrill that ripped across his chest almost made him drop the razor. But he decided to act nonchalant at Matty's arrival, thinking that she must have taken the long road to his house while he was observing some stranger cross the meadow outside his balcony. He heard shuffling sounds from the living room as he wondered how his maid would react on seeing him after a whole week; flashes of the previous weekend's torrid lovemaking went through his mind.
"Namaste, Hans bhaiya!"
This time he did drop the razor. That wasn't Matty. It didn't sound like her and she never used the generic term for brother, "bhaiya"
/bΚ±ΙΜ―i.jΙΛ/
, to address him; she always called him Hansa. He picked up the shaving equipment from the floor and peered around the bathroom door which allowed him to see past the corridor and through the living room. He took a sharp intake of breath when he saw a woman wearing a white collared shirt and a faded blue long skirt. He couldn't see her face as she was positioning the dripping umbrella on the landing outside; what he did see was her backside as she bent over and placed her slippers in the corner.
When she straightened up and turned around to come into the flat, Hans' mouth fell open at the astounding beauty of the face as she spoke.
"Good morning, Bhaiya," she smiled, "my mother cannot come today, my name is Rupali. But you can call me Rupa."
Hans finally gathered himself and managed to respond, saying "Good morning. Why hasn't your mother come today? Is she well?"
"Oh yes! Thank you. She's fine but she had to go out of town to her uncle's house, along with my younger sister. She took a bus this morning but gave me the key to your flat so that I could come and do the cleaning. And I can also do some cooking," she smiled that beatific smile again.