96!

She had prepared for it a week in advance.

The room was neat and tidy, the bed sheets were clean and white although few strands of hair lay here and there. The house keeping staffs were young, restless and anxious to set a jolly place. The room was silent, apart from occasional swapping of channels before she decided to turn it off for good. She liked staring through the balcony at the distant horizon, the glistening water of the Arabian Sea, the ships that were parked at the harbor, each she thought had epics to narrate. After few days she became good at it, she could say which ship appeared when and which disappeared on which night, some mornings she would just stay there in the balcony staring straight and counting numbers, imagining her to be there forever.

Brunch at Britannia café, a walk down the causeway and evening at Marine drive, she imagined, just when he cancelled the trip, ‘too busy even on the weekend’.

At office she could hardly concentrate on the work.

She acquiesced without giving much thought or none of the thoughts were strong enough to make her do otherwise, the last happy conversation, she remembered was about final revising. She asked ‘towel?’ he replied, ‘no’. And then she rushed to the airport- happy, nervous and excited.

But then stories happen in between, stories of tears and arguments, of pain and rage.

Home she rushed back. ‘Enough’ she whispered.