The Other Woman

(Before you'll get all het up over this one - this was a failed and much attempted work of fiction a column for a friend - by attempting to get into the mind of 'the other woman' - i was writing a series for a local paper on Germaine Greer, Women in Mumbai and Sex in The city was a rage. This is the failed outcome)


No, I own no manolos, unless you’re counting that gorgeous blond I met on Lake Garda two summers ago, but he just drove my bus, and nope, that’s not figurative, just wishful reality. But as the other woman of long standing, as Greer would have put it, and the appearance of one far too dumpy and dull—(I take the BEST to work every morning wondering if the women I jostle against can tell I spent last night discovering he on page 3 just doesn’t have the right moves)—to lead the exciting double life I do. I who own no Channels, Pradas or Guccis, no tell tale multiple rings on multiple fingers, and who for effect, wear sneakers with silk skirts. I, who have, not been anywhere abroad on vacation for over four years now for pete’s sake, yes I hold secrets and the living hope that I won’t get bumped off for them. Single mom, stunning divorcee (yes, I got attitude, you got a problem with that?), trudging employee, wishful and wistful wannabe by day, by night I move from popping TV dinners in microwaves and wiping my child’s burp off my only Laura Ashleys discount as they may be, counting my pennies on to a fishnet stockings and gauloises, a gift from my previous French lover at the millionaires club by the South Bombay seas.
I stalk the lives and dreams of millionaire men by tapping, or so I have been told, their nurturing instinct. I am their Lolita, their darkest secret, the woman with socks around her ankles to whom they regress from their overtly spotlight ridden and cleavage-besieged lives. I do not have time for their stabilities, and I scorn who they have become, so they stop and wonder what it is that can allure me at all, if all they have, is never enough. The allure is that they can catch me not. That and the comfort of offering me their lives and bank balances, secure that a withdrawal, emotional or otherwise, will never be made.

The next time you step on my foot in a crowded bus, look at me. I look like you. And yet, I am the woman who cringes when Oprah stares at the line-up of cheating husbands, recognising the lack of understanding of the phenomenon in her eyes. It’s one thing the woman doesn’t get. I am also the one looking at the straying husbands’ self flagellation made palid on screen, thinking men are dogs—spineless for a meal. If only their wives knew what they became when they were with me. The purity of pride, the love, the emotion- have you seen a man believe in himself? Never, I bet you, as when he does in his secret world. The mistress sees what a wife never does—that spark that makes the dream of a man, even for a moment in time, his reality.
Maybe it’s the famed je ne sais quoi that gets them to me. Like the millionaire and the hooker story, maybe it’s the hope that I will never be in a position to reveal all. The commitment phobia that I might be responsible for the success and security of my own domestic turf is a responsibility I can do without comes through all too clear. I like them coming to me ready starched and fed. I smell the washing powder on their socks as I make love to their feet. Do wives not know? Do they not sense the otherness in their man’s eyes? I walk into PTA meets and wonder, as one boyfriend once told me, do so-upright teachers and work-worried ‘other’ women smell the smug satisfaction of satiating sex on me? It’s the scent I wear.