Black Widow

‘Sorry, I am bit late. Can I sit here?’

The woman donned in black from head to feet carrying a queer smile in her glistening face.

‘Of course.’ I replied intimately as if I had been waiting only for her.

‘Thank you.’

She took the chair right in front of me.

Ours eyes met and remained fixed to each other for some time.

She lit up a cigarrete before I offered her a drink.

‘Hope you don’t mind. I am not a regular smoker but this time I badly need one.’ She said with a funny wink. ‘A sweet martini is fine with me.’ She made the smile broader. ‘Thanks for taking the trouble for me.’

I was still trying to catch her perfume. It had an unusual smell, but thoroughly mind-trapping.

‘So you like to marry me, right?’ her eyes twinkled for a moment.

‘That’s why we are here, I suppose.’ I replied swiftly. ‘I liked your status in the matrimonial site. Probably you were the one I had been looking for.’

‘Probably?’ She raised her shapely eye-brows.

‘Life flows only on probabilities. Nothing is hundred percent guaranteed.’

‘What if you see me a complete mismatch after the marriage?’

‘I don’t believe in fake relationship. If such situation ever appears I won’t force my partner to live with me.’

She sulked for few moments and said in a rather sullen tone, ‘But I differ from you in the sense that I can’t get out of a fake relationship so easily.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I punish my partner if he messes up with me. The relationship breaks only after that.’

‘Punishing your partner?’ She surprised me hell of a lot.

‘Simple! Once I caught my partner f*****g a street-side w***e inside our bed-room. I ended up bobbitising him. He survived but with a prosthetic penis.’’

 

‘That’s interesting. I like that.’

‘Another of my partners had stuffed his lap-top with filthy porn materials. I made him permanently blind.’

‘Superb. I like that as well. The cheaters should never be spared.’ I responded overwhelmingly.

‘But the third one received the most brutal punishment from me. I poured acid on his face. He was a deadly handsome man. His life was totally ruined just in a matter of few minutes.’

‘What was his fault?’

‘He was freaking out with his secretary. I caught him red-handed. He paid the price.’

‘Any inappropriate behavior from your side that cost a relationship!’

‘Just once,’ she said amicably. ‘I ditched a nice, decent guy. He had a mind of gold.’

‘Why you cheated on him?’

‘I never cheated on him. I broke up as he was not among the rich people I used to always adore. That time I did value money a lot. Later on I realised that money can never be bigger than a genuine relationship. I repent for him till now.’

‘You wrote in your profile that you are a ‘black widow’. Is it because you lost him in your life and could never get over the loss?’

She didn’t speak a word this time. Her eyes were soon filled in tears.

‘My life has become black since I ditched him.’

‘Why widow?’

‘Because he killed himself a couple of days after I had ditched him.’

‘Oh no…….that’s quite sad.’ I said in a consoling voice.

The drinks were served. Her sweet martini and my double large Black Level. She left the half-lit cigarette inside the ash-tray. Her look all on a sudden became vacant.

‘The dark phases of the past are difficult to erase from your mind but that should not spoil your present time.’ I placed my hanky on her hand. She wiped off her eyes and returned to me with a mild ‘thanks’.

‘Let’s talk about the present.’ I pinched her, ‘may be also a bit future.’

‘It’s your turn now to open up. Tell me about your relationships and break-ups.’ She raised her eyes to me. She suddenly looked pure and enthralling.

‘I had relationships but no break-up.’

She frowned keeping the straw apposed between her velvety lips.

‘I got married to one of my class-mates soon after our engineering graduation. We got jobs in the same company through the campus interview. It was like starting the life with a bang. She conceived three years after our marriage. The happiness was indescribable.’

She was listening to me quietly.

‘One day she had left.’

‘Left for where?’

‘I had no idea. I couldn’t find her anywhere, not even with her parents, close friends or relatives. She was simply vanished with our unborn child.’

She seemed to get struck by complete astonishment. ‘A pregnant woman with a promising future and loving husband left without any valid reason or prior notice? How was that possible unless there was foul play which might have caused her life?’ She reacted in a dubious voice.

‘You mean to say that I was responsible for her mysterious disappearance? She was my wife, more than my life! We were deeply in love! She was about to give birth to our first child! Why should I? What for?'

She stopped me in the middle. ‘I never meant that. She might have fallen in an accident which remained unnoticed and cost her……..’

‘The cops couldn’t find her trace anywhere. She was just vanished in the blue. We never met again thereafter.’ I said in a broken voice. ‘My life was doomed.’

‘This is very strange. Unbelievable!’ She sounded genuinely concerned. ‘I pity you.’

‘The next ten years I lived like a machine. The charm of life was gone. It was living for the sake of living.  But then someone stepped in my life.’

‘Amazing! There was love again in your life?’ She brought out her pleasant smile.

‘Yes. There was love again in my life. She was one of my colleagues. We were working together in the same project for pretty long time, spent hours in travelling and field-work and became good friends. Love was outcome of a friendly relationship. She was also a divorcee, so single.’

‘Did you marry her?’

‘No,’ my voice turned flat again. ‘I did never get the chance.’

‘But why?’

‘She had passed away before that.’

‘Oh my God! How?’

‘In the terror attack of Mumbai in 2008. She was inside Taj to attend a conference. The killers didn’t spare her. One bullet passed through her heart and the other massacred the brain.’

‘This is so sad!’ She responded bringing back the sulkiness in her tone which sounded genuine.

We didn’t speak for a while after that. Soon I felt the warmth of her hand on mine. ‘I have no words to console you. What a trauma you had gone through! I can’t even imagine.’

‘But there is a story number three in my life.’ I normalised my voice as much as I could.

‘Don’t tell me you were in love again after all those mishaps!’

‘The story number three is yet to take off. I believe it would be with you.’

‘How are you so confident?’ She still kept my hand on mine.

‘I can very well see your love for me in your eyes. Can’t you see the same in my eyes for you?’ The most romantic moment was created by my most soothing voice.

‘You sound like a novice flirter!’ said the Black Widow. ‘I rather expected a little more matured behaviour from you.’ She smiled ironically.

‘Flirting adds spices to a relationship which you may not like sometimes but can’t ignore it completely. A flirting man is always preferred over a farting man.’ I reciprocated in a serious voice.

She burst into loud laughter. ‘So you want to say you don’t fart at all?’

‘Farting is biologically essential but flirting is essential in terms of winning a tender and turbulent heart of a beautiful woman like you.’ I said fervently. Her eyes were twinkling for a moment.

‘You are an expert weaver of words but with not a good lady-luck so far.’ She said in a rather unimpressive voice. ‘How do I know that you had no direct hand in eliminating your ladies from your life?’

‘That’s funny! You meant to say I deployed the terrorists to Taj to get rid of my woman? You meant to say it is me who pushed my pregnant wife into a phase of no return?’

She raised her well-decorated eye-brows as the hint of valiant doubt.

‘Don’t you think you are trying to put me into a highly deplorable situation?’ I objected softly but firmly. ‘Is it because you are equating me with the same level of dynamics you shared with your own ex-partners? Bobbitise, pour acid on the face, scooping the eyes out! I really don’t understand how you could escape the law after such atrocities you displayed against those poor guys!’

‘You believed that I spoke you the truth so far?’ She said in a weirdly vacant voice.

‘That’s what you expressed in sheer confidence few minutes back!’

‘They were all blank lies.’

I laughed loudly this time. ‘Why you want your cover your face meekly now? I had appreciated your version of statement minutes ago with the belief that you are too bold to take the things granted. Why suddenly a hundred eighty degree turn?’

‘I wish I could actually do to them what I had expressed minutes ago.’ She said with a deep sigh. ‘Every time it was me who had to silently walk out of a relationship being thoroughly cheated and ditched while my partners continued their two-timing without a flicker in their dissolute mind. I felt like cutting them in hundreds of pieces but my desires never found the way of execution and soon became part of my self-defensive fantasies. I became so obsessed with them that they were even reflected in my profile of the matrimonial site. As a repercussion I could never find a matrimonial proposal so far as the men were too frightened to link up with me. Frankly speaking, you emerged as an surprising exception.’

‘You know what?’ I said to her in my most assuring voice. ‘I knew well from the beginning that you were telling me blunt lies. A woman with such tender and soft eyes can never reach damage to her philandering partners. She can only go for a tearful but quiet break-up and move alone on the way of her life.’

She didn’t speak a word. Drops of tears rolled down her face to fall on the table. I wiped them off with my hanky this time and said politely, ‘You don’t deserve what life had offered to you so far. I will bridge the gaps of your life. Can’t you give me a chance?’

‘But you didn’t tell me truth either?’ She raised her eyes to look straight to me. ‘I am sure you were responsible to get rid of your partners. I could read that in your eyes. The eyes of a killer.’

It was then my turn to keep quiet.

‘Please speak out. Your silence will only consolidate my suspicion.’

‘Mita, my first wife was extremely suspicious that I am running a fuming affair with someone behind her back. Her uninterrupted spying left me with an unbearable, horrific situation. I contacted with a Psychiatrist thinking that she might need a mental support. But nothing materialized. Our relationship soared further. She was not ready to give me a divorce under any amount of alimony or compensation. She wanted to ruin our lives with her pathological attitude and destructive mind.’

‘So you took her life, right?’ Her surprisingly cool voice hit me hard.

‘I had no other option.’ I said helplessly. ‘I was not ready to see myself embracing a slow and steady destruction in her diabolical hands.’

‘Was she so intolerable and unwanted to you that you didn’t even bother to eliminate her when she was pregnant?’

‘She was not pregnant. Believe me, I am not telling a lie. We had no physical relationship for years before her death so how could she become pregnant?’

‘It might so happen that she was impregnated by somebody else which you came to know and got rid of her in retaliation in.’ She said in a peculiar voice. ‘She might have become intensely desperate to find out a partner to give answer to your promiscuous behaviour!’

‘Let me tell you that she was not pregnant when I got her killed. I am not a heartless person.’

‘Okay, I believe you. But why you killed your second partner?’ She asked with similar confidence. ‘She was not suffering from Othello syndrome like the first one!’

‘Her death was purely accidental. I hit her head on the heat of sudden excitement during a debate. I never knew that can be so fatal.’ I covered my face in deep despair. ‘It was such a grave mistake.’

‘But you did the entire thing with a composed mind. You carried her body all along to Taj hotel and dumped the body near the place at a time when the hotel was under seize by a group of terrorists. So nicely you made the entire event look like a part of the terror attack. You escaped the eye of law without any difficulty.’ She said striking my heart hard with the intensity of each of the words that she delivered.

‘Do you still marry me?’ I tried to keep my voice unfazed as much as possible. ‘I didn’t hide a bit of truth from you that you had also done to me.’

‘Of course I marry you.’ She placed her hand on mine, ‘but before that I have a responsibility to carry out.’

‘What’s that?’

She clapped to bring out a group of men around my table. ‘Let me introduce these gentlemen to you. They are from Crime Branch who were chasing you for long but couldn’t collect a piece of substantial evidence favouring your crime.’ She opened her hand-bag and handed over a piece of sleek, sophisticated-looking device to one of them. ‘This has recorded our entire conversation from the beginning and his confession of killing his partners. Officers, now you can take him under your custody.'

She stood up spreading the victorious smile across her face.

The men lifted me up from the chair. Soon I felt my hands locked under the hand-cuff.

‘So you are not the black widow, right? Even your profile in the matrimonial site is fake.’ I told her clenching my teeth. ‘Why you did such nasty thing to me? I didn’t reach any damage to you. I didn’t even know you.’

‘Wrong! You know me very well.’ She said in the same tone of confidence. 'And I am the Black Widow. I still carry remorse for the loss of the man who loved me heart and soul. I am still his widow.'

‘Who the hell you are?’ All on a sudden I felt like grabbing and gagging her slender neck.

‘Look at me right and straight.’ She asserted. ‘You might recognise me.’

I couldn’t.

They took me away from her soon.

She didn’t look like Mita. I got her killed by a professional eliminator and mixed her sliced and distorted body parts perfectly with the mutilated bodies lying on a train accident site.

She was never Silk. I made her look like a terror victim after accidentally causing her death.

I was not the man who she stills repents for.

 

The Black Widow remained unveiled for the rest of my life.

   

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

I enjoyed this tale. Strong characters and amazing story line.
"She was never Silk. I made her look like a terror victim after accidentally causing her death."
I did liked the above lines. Left visions and thoughts for the reader. Thank you for sharing the amazing story.
Coyote

[Leslie Philibert]

Liked this. Perhaps a shade too dialog driven, it needs ( I think) more non spoken paragraphs, it
works at the moment more like a radio play.