“The Lotus Eaters”

Verdant hues of slow time

The morning light filters in through the white curtains with thin gold patterns in the bedroom. It is unusually bright. The light bounces off the white and pale green walls but doesn’t hurt her eyes. They see a pleasant saffron on the inside. She opens her eyelids and checks her phone for the time. The unicorns in the painting on the wall opposite gleam gold and purple against their dark backdrop. She marvels at the oddity of unicorns in the artwork and that painting in that sparse rental where everything is modern, every appliance up to date—was this inclusion intentional somehow? She likes things to have meaning. She is used to a clock in every room at her house and the absence of it here is almost a wilful suspension of time. She knows that she’s not running against time today. All she has is a leisurely day ahead, away from yesterday’s hurry, when months of sweltering passion gave way to unseasonal rains. But she also knows the days of leisure to pass sooner. Time is always ticking when borrowed. They are living on rented time. 

Her usual disorientation at a place that isn’t home doesn’t descend on her here. She smiles to herself. It’s 6:30am and the man softly snoring beside her with a gentle frown on his swarthy face is not the man she usually wakes up to. She knows he is not used to early mornings. She knows the curtains need to be denser but the sheer gossamer feeling it gives is somehow uplifting. She looks at him and all she can do for now is gaze at his sleeping face. A curious tenderness fills her being. She suppresses an intense desire to roll over and kiss his face. The feathery dust gathers a golden hue in the easterly light, travelling the length of the room, and she sighs in happiness. Next to her, she hears a rumbling stomach.She smiles at his hunger. She knows it is time for his morning medicine and that he will wake up soon, devouring that tiny pill with a packet of Oreo biscuits and some water. He will probably sleep after, like he usually does, and she will have some time. She likes having this quietude, the fan whirring busily overhead, a deep silence, a bus groaning at a distance, birdcalls nearby, her own breath magnified in her chest somehow, the sounds coalescing in harmony inside her mind. 

Her eyes travel the entire stretch of him. He somehow fits in this queen bed and the expanse of him seems comfortably at rest. Unlike her, he sleeps without his shirt, his skin still warm, while she’s always covered in a thin sheet, much like the thin film that covers her glasses, her mind afraid of taciturn weather. The large unkempt mole right below his left shoulder seems oddly like a kidney bean, an unusual lump on his fuzzy brown skin. She gazes at it and has a sudden desire to take a knife and slice it clean. She wonders what it would taste like and imagines the flavour of cinnamon bark when she first took a bite. Somehow, he always evokes a potent spice blend in her mind. A heady mix of cloves, cinnamon and cardamon with a touch of mace thrown in. 

His skin has different geographies. It has the salt of the sea, its deep tan on his neck, although he is a man of the hills and detests the sea. Yet he always feels like the sea to her, waxing and waning in his sultry moods, on whose waves she lies floating aimlessly, buoyant and sated. His open armpits give out a peppery odour that deepens in its musk as the sun stretches above. And right after a shower, she smells on him the bark of a tree, a hilly tree, not a pine, but a deep, earthy, brown smell 

that makes her think of forests and sappy greens. She always thinks of him in terms of smell. That’s what she carries with her when he gets back to where he belongs. 

She never truly understands how he reads her mind. Surely, it’s a magical thing,to be able to discern what another person thinks. And she thinks rather childishly. If everyone had that vivid understanding, wouldn’t life be easier for most, especially with the world ripping itself to tiny shreds with each passing day? He turns to her side, his eyes a little bloodshot from lack of sleep. She knows he’s been watching her sleep at night and that knowledge fills her with a deep calm. He lifts his long body on his elbow and starts kissing her mouth. She considers her morning breath for the slightest second before her desire for him douses any residual insecurity. She finds his touch extraordinarily evocative. It never ceases to amaze her how much of her own desire she had bottled in the first half of her life before opening that jar of secrets. 

She often thinks of herself as something edible these days. She gave up her reticence on food earlier than she forsook her shame of her body. For most of her life she heard her slender mother bemoan her dark skin and meat in all the wrong places. She found she was too lazy to actually try very hard to lessen her meat. When she was poked and prodded in unusual places, she found her meat a reverent buffer from the outside world. She liked it there. And she liked food. The tastiest murabbas that her granny made, thick, gelatinous and glowing amber discs of sugary mango with speckles of fennel and sometimes a kick of unexpected heat. That is how she saw herself as well. 

The day they first made love,outside their homes, in her city, in a rental of their choice, they had made lunch together, a simple meal of rice, moong lentil soup and pointed gourd with mustard paste. Their hunger for meat was stored deep inside their own flesh, rumbling appetizingly in the pit of their stomachs along with the boiling rice and simmering dal. When he smeared that cooked mustard on her neck and ate it off her in sharp hungry bites, she thought of herself akin to that soft, meaty vegetable, pliably cooked in that yellow heat. She considered it a fitting preamble to what would follow. 

In an inexplicable desire, his mouth on her flesh made her want to taste her own flesh.

A deep carnivorous yearning for her own self, bordering on brutality, its ruthlessness taking her by surprise. She closed her eyes and imagined the Coca-Cola and the orange drink in the fridge mixing and mingling, the bottles frothing at their mouths birthing a dark hue with an orange undertone A peppery drink, unfamiliar, exotic, addictive, her palate unusually wakeful. As if reading her thoughts, he smiled, and as his teeth dug at her flesh, she relented her bashful consciousness of her body, her shame and her guilty affection of her own flesh. 

Lying on that bed now, she stares at the white walls while he moves and shifts beside her. Her mind travels back to the time she read Tennyson’s poem “The Lotus-Eaters” when she was younger. She had found it alien that a group of sailors would choose to stay back on an island, drugged on the lotus fruit, for a state of impermanence, ignoring ambition, relegating life, home and nation. She looks around the walls as his face digs deeper into the crevice of her neck, her body slowly awakening, and she wonders if the walls don’t resemble white sands, if his low garble doesn’t sound like the pull of the sea. 

She watches his face suffused with passion, his eyes watery and soft with an entreaty to surrender her being to him. She unravels herself the way the areca palm in her balcony opens its fronds, tightly knotted in a thin straight line, one leaf at a time, slow, stuck to one another and then all at once in a glorious abandon, fluttering vibrant green in the breeze. Desire is deep and easy. Love is more complex than that. She knows that he is her last attempt at love. Love exhausts her. She has loved 

all her life in various measures, and she has had enough of it. She loves him deeply. 

But this love doesn’t come with the usual cornucopia of shame, fear and doubt. It’s strangely familiar and, although this is the first offering of its kind, for her it feels primeval, something outside of time and space, just like this rental with white and green walls. 

She clutches his hair and buries his lust to her being. She holds on as he excavates her body for some meaning, and her skin, scoured with a million goosebumps, brings back something of the girl who had desired for the first time when she was young, fed on romance, when she knew of no discounted way of loving. She looks at the knife kept stashed among other utensils on the kitchen counter, at the greenery outside the window, and she wants to stab time in its back. She understands the lotus eaters. Aren’t the two of them just that, standing at the brink of the point of no return? She wants time to shrink and never unravel. She wonders if he wants that too. 

The Infinite Blues Review, Issue 5, Assimilation, October, 2025

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