The Cheapskate - Sreelekha Chatterjee
Varun saw Neela after a long time, perhaps 10 or 15 years. They’d lost touch ever since she’d come over to his place pleading for monetary help. Her husband suffered a spinal injury, and the doctors advised a critical surgery. Varun reckoned that she’d come up with tall tales, an emotional blackmail to extract money, under the flimsy pretext of a burglary that robbed them of their entire wealth.
Was it possible for the thieves to steal away their riches at one go? She, being the only daughter of a wealthy businessman and wife of a rich man, needed money to save her family from a calamity?
He couldn’t trust Neela, one who never spent money on books, clothes, entertainment, feelings, emotions... Her heart wouldn’t melt to pass on a single penny to a needy friend, or a beggar asking for alms at the roadside. She was never destined to change, not the kind of transformation that Varun imagined.
Now she was there, crossing the road, in a pale green, soiled saree, face lowered onto her neck, a dust-laden handbag on her shoulder.
Varun called out to her. She was hardly recognizable—a scary figure, with disheveled hair, dark caves around her eyes, sunken cheeks.
“I haven’t eaten for days”—the words came out from her in a rush.
Same old tactics, Varun thought—a cheapskate who tricked her friends into paying on her behalf whenever they accompanied her to restaurants, markets during old times. “Forgot to bring my money bag,” “lost all my money”—usual set of excuses which worked each time, always fooled around with her neat schemes to exploit friends.
Varun took Neela to a nearby restaurant; her appearance disconcerted him—Was she the same person he knew?
He ordered sandwiches. She dug into her plate as soon as it arrived—unmindful, hungry to the core, oblivious to him.
Varun couldn’t help observing her closely as she continued devouring the food voraciously—her emaciated dangling arms were trembling in excitement, or perhaps in embarrassment, he didn’t know.
She wasn’t wearing red-and-white bangles like all married Bengali women.
“How is your husband?” He asked suddenly.
Neela looked up, her mouth half-open, a piece of saliva-mixed sandwich fell on the table—an incomprehensible stare, painful to behold.
“A miser once buried a lump of gold in the ground, which was eventually stolen. On seeing him lament over it, his neighbor suggested that instead of grieving, he should bury a stone in the ground and imagine it as gold. He never made use of it when it was there. A moral lesson from Aesop’s fables…” She started laughing hysterically till her eyes watered.
“Your husband…”
She stopped laughing, gazed momentarily at the sky, eyes searching for someone, and resumed after a meditative pause, “When the money was gone and I really needed it, nobody trusted me.”
A drop of tear fell on her saree and mingled with the fibre as a dark wet spot.
“Sorry to learn about your husband. When did it happen?”
“You mean our divorce? That was long ago. It has been almost a decade. Forget it!”
Varun choked, started coughing violently. Neela got up from her seat, bent a little and thumped on his back. A movement of a shining object caught his eyes. It was a gold chain with an expensive diamond pendant that hung from her neck and dangled in front of his eyes.
Stupefied, he stared blankly at her.
“What’s wrong?” She asked.
“Nothing…”
At times it was difficult to comprehend what was wrong—the situation or our perception of it.
Originally Published by eFiction India Magazine, 2015
Sreelekha Chatterjee’s short stories have been published in various magazines and journals like Flash Fiction North, Friday Flash Fiction, Borderless, The Green Shoe Sanctuary, Usawa Literary Review, The Wise Owl, Storizen, Five Minutes, 101 Words, BUBBLE, Indian Periodical, The Chakkar, The Hooghly Review, Bulb Culture Collective, Prachya Review, Creative Flight, Literary Cocktail Magazine, and have been included in numerous print and online anthologies such as Fate (Bitterleaf Books, UK), Chicken Soup for the Indian Soul series (Westland Ltd, India), Wisdom of Our Mothers (Familia Books, USA), and several others. She lives in New Delhi, India.
Facebook: facebook.com/sreelekha.chatterjee.1/, X (formerly Twitter): @sreelekha001, Instagram: @sreelekha2023
