Asrar sat down and Shanti drew the curtains again. She sat on her knees across Asrar on the bed. She removed his clothes and wiped his chest. Asrar stood up and removed his trousers. He took out his wallet and gave Shanti two Rs 100 notes. Shanti kept one note under her pillow and the other under one corner of the mattress. Shanti smiled looking at him and he smiled back. In that exchange of smiles Shanti was much more than a prostitute and he was not just a customer. There was some relationship between the two which they had experience at their first meeting itself. Seeing Shanti wipe his body gave rise to a weird feeling in Asrar’s heart. He sat up and said looking into her eyes, ‘Bas bas! Itna koe karta hai kya? (Enough, enough! Who does so much?]’

Shanti said, ‘You are not like a customer.’

‘Then …?’ He stopped midway. Shanti was amazed by what he said to her after a few minutes.

He told Shanti that for the last 4–5 years he had been seeing dreams of the same kind. The dream had caused him grief each time. He felt that no one else but he saw such dreams in this world. Many a time, the dreams revealed the identity of the woman who had sex with him in various disguises and loved him too. He told her that these dreams were disturbing him. Even after opening his eyes, the pain continued. His heart wanted to cry out loud. Shanti had lost her strength to speak after hearing all this. After a few moments she said in a grief-stricken tone, ‘You have forgiven the person who had hurt your soul so much.’

Asrar was astonished to hear this. He wondered how Shanti could have known the most well-kept secret of his heart. He kept looking into her eyes. Before he could ask anything, Shanti told him that she had been seeing such dreams for quite some time too. She had reported this to a doctor who worked for the welfare of sex workers and was a social worker herself. She had told Shanti that seeing sexual intercourse with a close relative is a sign that people who are closest to us give us the most sorrow, but we have forgiven them. Asrar lay down after hearing the details. She bent over and kissed his lips. It was the first time that she had kissed a customer on his lips. In this kiss there was confession of a mutual pain. It was the cause of an existential ache. Both remained silent. Both were sad in the core of their souls. Both their souls were wounded. Both of them had apparently forgiven those who had hurt them the most. Despite that, this wound bled in the darkest corner of their hearts. If in the darkest corner of the heart an unseen wound bleeds for long, the soul becomes tormented.