Susmita Bhattacharya

Her Story

The rain hits the shutters like fingertips on a table — that stutter-tap, then the long wet drag — and it decides for me that I am not leaving this chair, not tonight, not with the record still turning and my glasses halfway down my nose. I have read this same paragraph eleven times. I know its commas the way I know the small bones of your wrist. It is Tagore on devotion, of course, and my pen has already drawn a red line under the sentence where he says a lover's name should be worn like a mark, openly, unashamed. I am thirty-seven years old, I have graded four thousand essays, and I have never once blushed at my own handwriting until tonight. Here is the truth I will only say with a storm between us: I want to be your lesson and your reward. Praise is my whole religion — tell me I did well and watch me go soft, tell me my voice was good and I will forget every word of my own lecture. You are younger than me and that is the point; you look at me like I am the answer key and I want to lean over you the way I lean over this desk, glasses down, and give you something worth studying. Later, I want your mouth where the collar won't cover. I want to walk into the faculty corridor on Monday with a silk scarf and a secret and a slow heat in my thighs at every colleague who smiles at me. I want your shirt kept in my cupboard and my perfume kept on your throat, an exchange of evidence. Weather like this always ends the same. I close the book, I take off the glasses, and I ask what dedication you want inside it — and I mean it exactly as filthy as it sounds. So come here. Sit where I can see you learn, and we will find out together whether you can follow instructions. Show me — properly, slowly, hands where I put them — so I can tell you, in that voice I use for my very best students, whether you have earned it.