June 2011……

“And now for news breaking at this very moment at The Hague……. Nearly twenty years after the opening shots of the Bosnian War rang out, former Bosnian Serb military commander, Ratko Mladić, known among the families of his many victims as “The butcher of Srebrenica”, is finally being tried by the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, on 11 charges of genocide and crimes against humanity…..”

Rose was standing by the dinner table and as she listened, CBS Evening news anchor, Scott Pelley’s words seemed to fade out, while his voice seamlessly dovetailed in. His – Carl’s….. “I have this insane urge to hold you in my arms and comfort you…”. The soup spoon slipped from her hand and fell into Rufus’s plate.

“Mom! There’s soup all over my pasta!” Rufus said. Damn! The tremor in her hands passed. She took a deep breath, steadied herself and started preparing a fresh helping.

Just a few meters away, in the hall, her husband sat sprawled in front of the TV as a 1995 video of Mladić flashed on, showing him inspecting a crack unit of the Serbian Army Special Forces, ‘the Scorpions’, on a rain-swept hillside just outside the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, on the eve of the massacre.

Stanley had his laptop open as usual, his fingers paused, to take in the news video. He turned and looked at Rose as she rescued the soup spoon from Rufus’s pasta.

In spite of the clatter of the spoon, she raced back into the crevice again, to the first time Carl had unfriended her – their first interaction, two months prior. He’d unfriended her just an hour after she’d accepted his invite. Puzzled, she had messaged him, “Hi, it’s your business of course but it’ll be nice to know why you unfriended me…”

“Hello”, came the reply, almost instantly in measured tones,”I unfriended you because there’s just nothing on your page. No info, no wall, no photos, no friends list. You have friended me but denied me access to virtually everything. It’s demeaning and frankly, I don’t have time for this. This won’t work, thank you and good bye”.

Rose realized that her fb settings needed to be reconfigured. She decided to reach out once again, a trait he later came to adore in her. She hurriedly replied, “So sorry about that. I didn’t know my settings were that way. Have fixed it now.” She sent him back an invitation without ado. He accepted.

In the beginning she’d been reserved, hesitant about talking of herself. Most women create a sort of inadvertent levee when they begin any social media relationship. He was an unknown strange man who wrote outrageously funny notes that made her burst into laughter. As the days went by, though, that levee seemed to look like it was made with cotton candy. She began to be excited every time she saw his message waiting when she logged on. Oh, he had this wonderful old-world graciousness and oodles of charm and he made her feel so so good.

“Mom!…do you mind not staring into space with a spoonful of pasta, that’s also in space? How about dropping it back to earth and my plate?”

“If Mladić is actually pronounced Mladich, why can’t they just step up and add the ‘h’ to their names, for Christ’s sakes?”

That was Stanley. A top-knotch cyber security brain, Stanley had started off as a contributing member of the ‘hacktivist’ group, Anonymous, while still at MIT. He couldn’t stand anything with hidden tones. Everything had to be either black or white for Stanley Tuppins. Zeros and ones. “Life, simplified,” would be the title of his book if he ever chose to write one. Painfully shy, perpetually immersed in solving knotty spyware issues, Rose felt lucky if he said more than two words at the dinner table.

“What did he do?” Rose was referring to Mladić in a desperate bid to stop her mind from sliding further back into that crevice which had suffocated her a minute ago and caused the soup spoon to slip from her fingers. Please, Stanley, keep talking. Don’t stop. I don’t want to be alone with him anymore.

“What did he do? He slaughtered eight thousand men, women and children in one night in a small picturesque mountain town in Bosnia. Right after he’d given the UN peacekeepers his word the day before that he wouldn’t go in. Mladić is the father of the term, ‘ethnic cleansing’.”

“1995…hmmm…let’s see now, where was I then…” Rufus began, tapping his fingers on his lips, trying to establish his whereabouts at the time, almost 18 years ago, while shovelling pasta into his mouth. He was going to be 8 next March.

“You were a doddering old Mongolian sheperd with two billy goats and a horse, who’d just been to see his married daughter in Ulan Bator, darling,” Rose said, as she rose and engulfed him in one of those comprehensive all-season squeezes that only mothers can impart. “Ugh,” she made a mock grimace as she held him tight,”Correction, you can’t be the sheperd, you must be one of the goats. You smell like them. To the showers right after supper, billy goat, and I won’t take no for an answer.”

Later, as she rinsed the dishes, Rufus and his Ipod having retired for the night, Rose heard the TV being turned off and felt the armchair in the hall creak. Slippered footsteps flopped up to her and stopped right next.

“Here, let me dry them”. Sukumar took a clean towel and reached for a plate.

Rose turned. The man standing next to her was tall, crew-cut, clean. A mild shadow of a beard covered his lower jaw. He looked solid, simple, honest, wholesome. Just as he’d been, since the first time they’d met. She reached up and laid her head on his chest, the sobs breaking out, shaking her whole being. He dropped the cloth on the counter and just as her body went limp, he drew her up to him fiercely, till she was on the tips of her toes, her breath gasping upon his cheeks. She tried to open her mouth to speak through her tears. To tell him. Everything. But he laid a finger gently on her lips with a ‘ssshhh’. Holding her close, by her shoulders, he placed one arm just below the round of her buttocks, lifting her off the floor effortlessly and turned purposefully toward the stairs.

“Welcome back, darling,” he whispered.

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This post celebrates Women’s Day. Women are complex. Don’t try to understand them……. Anonymous

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