Free French Lover by Taslima Nasrin

glittering gold. He probably thought that streams of joy flowed from the gold and held his daughter in its grip. Every Indian woman was attracted by gold, as was Nila. But she wasn’t interested in buying the reddish 18K gold.
    She wanted to buy perfume. In the perfume section she lost herself. There were so many perfumes in the world! This was the birthplace of all perfumes. Nila liked Givenchy’s Organza and Kishan voted for Christian Dior’s Poison. So which one should they buy? Easy—they’d buy Poison.
    ‘Why is Poison so expensive here? It’s much cheaper in Calcutta.’
    ‘That’s because those are fakes. Here they are real, okay?’
    Nila floundered in the crowd of ‘real’—everything was real, good and pretty.
    Although they bought the perfume, Nila didn’t want to budge from there. She was looking for a particular perfume—Evening in Paris. Although she hunted high and low, she couldn’t find that tiny blue bottle of Evening in Paris. Instead, her eyes fell on a bottle of Chanel no. 5. She’d buy that, with her own money. Kishan was surprised. ‘For whom?’
    ‘For dada.’
    Sunil had told her that a friend of his was going to Calcutta and she could send something if she wanted to.
    Kishan said, ‘For Nikhil? Why don’t you pick something from the cheaper ones?’
    Nila was adamant; she’d buy Chanel no. 5 because that’s what he liked. Kishan took the bottle from her hands, returned it to the salesattendant and dragged her from the shop. In an undertone he said, ‘You have no sense at all.’
    Nila spoke calmly. ‘Actually dada had given me two hundred dollars to buy just this perfume and send him.’
    ‘Just this one and nothing else will do?’
    ‘Yes, this and nothing else.’
    Nila cashed her dollars and bought the Chanel no. 5. She found it gave her a strange kind of pleasure to buy something with her own money. It was much more than getting a bag full of gifts from Kishan.
    When they returned, Kishan sat with his Scotch and Nila doused herself with the Poison as she hummed, ‘I’ve drank of the dreaded cup, knowing all too well; I’ve waived away my life in the hope of living.’
    ‘What’s that song?’ Kishan asked.
    ‘Rabindrasangeet.’
    ‘That Bengali chap who got the Nobel Prize?’
    ‘Yes, it was written by that Bengali chap. That same guy wrote a beautiful song about this same poison and I’m singing it.’
    ‘This same poison?’
    ‘The very one.’
    ‘Why don’t you translate it for me?’
    Nila laughed and said, ‘There are some songs that are untranslatable.’
    Kishan sighed and said, ‘There are some people who are untranslatable.’
    Nila stood by the kitchen and as her perfume wafted all over the room, she said, ‘There are some people who can be translated very easily.’
    When Kishan finished his dinner and went to bed, Nila sat down to write to Molina.
    ‘You’d wondered how I’d run my home all alone over here. Just come here once and take a look. True, there are no maids. But there’s no need either. The place is full of machines and the only work is in switching them on. Do you know Ma, I cook. But don’t worry too much. It’s no trouble at all. Today Kishan has bought me many thingsand made it very clear that
he
has bought them. That’s life, isn’t it? We are almost prisoners of these “things”, aren’t we? I’ve seen you too—if Baba bought you two saris you’d be over the moon. You would cook him something special, serve him and sit by him when he ate. Perhaps you did it for love and that can’t be bought with things. Or can it? I don’t know. Tonight I cooked daal makhani for Kishan. He really loves it.
    ‘Paris is a stunningly beautiful city. Today, when we drove past the opera I thought it’s a good thing I got married to Kishan or I would never have seen this city. And it’d be a shame to die without seeing this place.
    ‘Ma, you have wasted your entire life trying to please other people. Now you should think of