Forbidden Love Story

At the sound of the iron gate at dusk, Bruce Gomez, a college professor, bachelor, at the window, watches the lithe figure of his student walk up the driveway to my house. Once he has opened the door, stepped aside, he leads her towards the bedroom. Knowing the routine, she begins pealing his tee, unbuckles the belt of his faded jeans and without any hurry, gently pushes him into the bed. Unbuttoning her shirt, she comes out of her jeans and slides into bed. Next to him.

The bed cover is soft brown, and the mellow-yellow glow from the twin table lamps rests on the soft-yellow walls. Her dusky body writhes in mermaid-ian style; it is flawless save the little scar on the left thigh. His eyes on her thigh, he picks up the ink pen and words in black begin to be born on the duskiness:

Flow with the river, /don’t be a Crusoe /and build a home. /Home is within you.

This is a recently-composed piece; a philosophy. He reads out the lines, his husky voice dominating the room; run his hand over the scar. He caresses her. They make love.

Dores lives several kilometres away from the college campus. The authorities don’t get (have not yet got) a whiff of the whereabouts of some students living double lives: students by day; call girls by dusk. Inversely (ironically is not defined in my personal dictionary), they don’t know that a professor is in a physical relationship with his student. A brand new student. Delectable bread fresh from the oven of youth.

But though Bruce has been leading an active sex life with her, he has, lately, begun to grow affectionate towards her. Affection, his firm belief is, sunlight imperative for the growth of the plant called love.

Dores, yes, calm, in bed, possesses a sharp contrast to her age when girls, at eighteen, burst with excitement, accompanied with occasional clawing. He wonders at her quietness, though her silent, yet observant eyes do most of the talking. It appears she understands why the plant near the bed lamp is a croton and the reason for the Erika palm a guard near the doorstep. She dislikes judges on reality shows smirking on contestants shaking their buttocks jelly-like and spreading their legs in mid air. “Their sense of art is so perverted,” she remarks. She stares at the switched-off T.V. on the wall as if the reality show is on and the judges are in the midst of their remarks. “Art crosses all barriers,” she says, eyes at the coffee cup on the table. “I’ve doodled with my menstrual blood. Played knots and crosses with it on the washroom floor.” She pauses. “That’s art to me.”

A part-time creative writing instructor, his profession does not cut him into a professional figure. He teaches to sustain himself. Primarily, he is a poet. While in college he is an instructor and poet, but no sooner does his teaching hours end than he is a poet.

Poet.

POET.

He appears in college in frayed jeans and kurtas and loves wearing cigar scented deodorant. His mind is always weaving poetic lines for he has been writing poetry since as far back as twenty-eight years. But inspiringly, his blood stream teems with poetic genes. His uncles and aunts are quite a known figure in poetry circles, and his cousin too cannot be ruled out. His own first book of poems appeared when he was twenty-two, and during then and now, at forty, he has already crafted seven books of poems, had been an invitee into prestigious world poetry societies within the country and overseas, and has been conferred with honorary D. Litt. and other such-like recognitions from equally prestigious universities and organizations as old as the hills. But writing poetry does not make one a poet. His definition of a poet is one perpetually basking in a poetic world. A poet reads fevered lines in his meal; in the midst of incessant rain, he sees a patch of sunlight; the pain of the roadside beggar becomes his when his eyes fall on him.

A poet is he whose soul is in constant search for truth, and when he discovers it, he hurls himself into the pitch black but colourful pathway to look for more truths hiding there, desiring him to seek them out. All in all, his soul is a desert eternally thirsting for rain. Even during such a time as with her, he needs poetry to do the foreplay.

In class, during his lecture on creative writing, Dores, admitted two months after the freshers’ welcome, sat quietly, head down, eyes in class, but mind in a land far away. And that is what attracted him towards her, sermonised to him in one sentence: Drop off your protective robe, scrape out from your skull this stubborn protective nature. He is under the firm belief that his protective nature has given rise to his temperament.

His one time girlfriend had vanished one day. Though that was around eighteen years ago, women had been falling – making their exit and entrances – in and out of love with him since then; every fortnight for that matter. For a while girls served his soul – or is it his soul served girls, he wondered at times. He needed the company of women but somehow the protective feeling held him full throttle, refusing to take the right turn to the road called Mental Direction. The sex-less days have now become an appetizer. He has already realized that girls come to him as easily as poetic lines, for girls are nothing less than poetry to him; the potted plants of his verses. He has confirmed to himself that his respect for females is of the highest category as the poems his heart gives birth to.

Dores, his student, will satisfy him. Emotionally, as well as physically. Perhaps. That is his conviction.

“You possess interesting thoughts, given the fact that you are quiet.” He had asked her once, when, after an evening of heated love making, they lay spent next to each other. “Are you always like this?”

She had only looked into his eyes, her face marked by an unexplainable expression.

*

The next afternoon, Bruce saunter into Bob Dylan Cafe across the massive park, inhaling and exhaling the fresh breeze from the city’s only lung.

Pushing the glass door, he chooses his favourite corner, the left corner of the double cane couch facing the road. He always keeps the right side vacant for Aryana (his one-time girlfriend), though he wonder if she will ever return. But love is love, followed by a strong recollection, like the strong aroma of the beverage floating inside the shop.

A man of forty, he is five feet ten inches in height with Roman chiseled features: high cheek and jaw bones, a sharp nose and semi-thick lips and with a slow un-swashbuckler walk.

He loves this part of the time in the café. His freedom tingles within him when the students vacate the college campus. Teaching for the day is over, Bruce, eyes closed, He telle himself. And now this silence and solitude inside is my sole world.

The cool atmosphere soaks his mind. Aryana is sitting on his right as it was eighteen years ago. It was the best six months of his life. Sighing, he opens his eyes and turns the pages of the book, settling his mind to the out-of-body experience the strange man was already experiencing in the pharaoh’s tomb.

He barely finishes the first two paragraphs when he dozes off. Soon the coffee table suffers a slight shiver. His eyes fall on the double cane couch across, and his heart jumps to his Adam’s apple.

Covered in columns of mist and smoke are a man and a woman. The man’s flat cheeks, a medium-sized nose and soft grey-coloured eyes stand out in prominence. His smooth hair, closely cropped, with a few streaks falling over his forehead in a careless fashion coupled with his light-bronze complexion gives him an air of a macho man. A silver stud glints from his left lobe.

The woman, younger, straight-haired, slightly thin, with a small pretty nose, smooth and straight cheeks, and a pair of black eyes, throws him a clam look. All in all, her face is sweetly innocent, and covered all over with honeyed skin. The two-inch ear-rings spray-painted into a gun-metal colour with the emblem of a scorpion, embossed, dangle from her lobes. A gun-metal choker loosely clamped to her throat with an embossed scorpion flings a dull gleam.

Though Bruce shakes his head to ward off the vision his mind had tricked him into seeing, he still finds them sitting across. Holding some playing cards in their hands, the misty man throws a card. The woman looks at the fallen card, runs her eyes over the cards in her hand, and picks one before throwing it on the table. It’s a game of Matching Symbols and Colours.

They stop in the middle of their game and the man picks up the video camera from the table. They look up at Bruce from their smoky covering.

“You are a university teacher of English at the Kingston College.” The lady’s eyes continue the soft look.

“You left freelancing for the papers.” The slow and husky voice of the man gently presses his brain.

Bruce’s eyes widen, his mouth opens and freezes.

“You scribble on Random Thoughts,” the lady continues.

“You are on your own.”

“You will fall in love…”

“…with your student.”

“Who are you, and from where…?” The open book slowly slips out from Bruce’s hand and falls on the table.

But before Bruce can complete his queries the misty beings join together, melting into oneness and finally thin into the air.

He suddenly jolts out from his day dream, he has been hit by a daze. How can a pair of cloudy beings appear in this modern age, and that too sit across a table and rattle about his past and predict something inane about his future? Don’t they know I’m looking out for Aryana?

His face turns sudorific, the canned air from the air-conditioner falls short in cooling him. Bats swirl in a mad fashion inside his head, spitting out high-frequency soundless sounds.

The vision. And the voices. All nonsense. Aryana is whom I know.

Finishing his coffee in one long sip he steps out and takes the path homewards