The Half-Burnt Cigarette : A Short Story

by Awais Aftab

He took a puff of his cigarette, blew the smoke and observed with purposeless acuteness the amorphous wisps of smoke diffusing into the air, thinning out of existence. His lifted his gaze to a yellow taxi, a few cars ahead of his at the traffic signal, to make sure it was still there. ‘Yellow, yellow like guilt,’ he thought, taking another draw. His eyes fell on the rear-view mirror, and he saw a partial reflection of his own face: black, warm eyes; a handsome charming face in the early thirties. His wife, his former college fellow, had often told him how he used to be the crush of a dozen girls during the college days. He had felt a strange, meaningless pride in that revelation by his wife before, but at that moment, as he recollected this memory, he felt doubt. ‘Could this be a lie too?’ he thought. Doubt— a monster which was engulfing his whole life, his whole mind, robbing him of even a single moment of peace; doubt of his wife, doubt of her fidelity. He looked again at the taxi and saw a brief glimpse of her auburn hair. In the past when he nestled his nose against those silky strands, their pleasant fragrance used to fill to his whole body. But since a few days, after he had become a victim of doubt, that aroma had become a pungent odour, setting his soul on fire.

He had never thought of himself as a jealous, possessive husband. ‘I am an educated, cultured man’, he used to say to himself. But time knows better: that even thousands of years of social evolution is not enough to counter an atavistic impulse that runs in the very blood of one’s veins. He believed that he had always trusted his wife, but everyone can trust when times are cordial. It is only in the clash of suspicion and faith that the strength of trust is revealed; like yanking a sheet off a naked body. And it was only when those silent phone calls and wrong numbers started coming that he came to realize that he had never trusted her, never even for a moment. It was all an illusion.