the card reader...

After having three sessions at the evening Ayushi was definitely pissed off. She had started the Tarot session this evening at five thirty and now it was almost eight. The last client was a bit of a nagger. She was not talking properly. She was so confused about her goals and objectives that even after trying several spreads to get to some plausible result, Ayushi was coming out with confusing ones.Sometimes these things happen. But then it was her profession and she had already earned a name for herself in the circuit of Tarot numerology. So she kept on spreading the decks and asking queries. But in between she was was getting distracted by the social network updates that came pinging every now and then.She often tapped mildly on the screen of her cell to get hold of the updates coming from her online friends and relatives.
After the separation with Rajat, Ayushi had taken up these two things quite seriously... her card reading session which was purely professional and the other, an amateurish one,her online blogs where she writes her mind and links them up to the social networking sites. These two had suited her fine. And then there is the little monster back home...her son...her apple of eyes...her full time engagement...her only son of six years...Raul.
As soon as she would wrap her sessions at her office set up at the front portion of  her ancestral house, she would go indoors, only to be greeted by either complaints about Raul's excesses or  heaving praises, usually by full time maid and caretaker Shraboni. Shraboni had been staying with her for the last four years... since Ayushi's separation.Widowed at the age of only thirty five, and being childless, with nowhere to go, Shraboni found a perfect refuge at Ayushi's place.
'Okay...let's do one thing...give me another session...day after tomorrow? at this hour?'
Ayushi yawned and asked her client, feeling tired.
'Today has been outrageously hot and sultry...' She thought looking at the fluffy eyes of her upper middle aged client, Mrs. Agarwal.
Mrs Agarwal looked at her with a sense of idiocy, a kind of dumbness, which only supplemented Ayushi's reading of her character...a bore...a great worthless, goalless, mother of three with a big fat bullish husband-a businessman making spurious products...and earning a lot of unaccountable money.
'Thik hain...'
Mrs Agarwal stood up with a lot of effort.
Ayushi noticed the grimace upon her face...she must have got arthritis...
'You should consult a doctor madam...a physician...probably you got problems in your knees...'
Ayushi remarked non nonchalantly, smiling.
The remark only made Mrs Agarwal surprised. She gaped at her with a sense of wonder for a while before paddling out.
Ayushi called Shraboni to close the door of the office.
Just then her cell phone's screen glowed.

'Good work! liked the way you presented the idea of being with someone never seen by you... imagined it really well!'
That was a comment posted by someone underneath her post which she linked to the social networking site this afternoon.
She sent a smiley.
Then opened that someone's own profile page.
'This man is seriously a great object to be cultivated...'
Ayushi thought looking at his posts...
'He has posted three in a single day! has he got no work? oh! it might be his summer vacation is on...'
Ayushi thought.
This man has no profile picture, but has clearly visible info on his social, professional and personal areas.
'A teacher by profession...a scribbler by mind...'

Just then there was a loud noise of thunder, cracking in the sky.
'Aha! it is going to rain!'
Ayushi thought and hurried indoors.
Raul was watching t.v., sitting on the couch in the living.
'Momma...I'm hungry!'
Raul declared as soon as he saw Ayushi.
'Shraboni! set the table ready for him and me...I'm also hungry!'
Saying this Ayushi went to the bathroom to get freshened up.
Just when she hit the shower, it started raining hard outside with crackling sound of thunder and lightning.
The water cooled Ayushi.
She started crooning a song: 'Rim jhim girey sawan...sulag sulag jaaye maan...'
She herself got surprised so much singing only the first line of the song of a Bollywood film that she stopped, thinking awhile, why actually this song laced with a longing cropped up into her mind suddenly.
'It must've been the rain...'
Ayushi thought, looking at the foams dripping off her skin.

After dinner, when Raul slept off, Ayushi opened her scrapbook.
The rain had receded but the cool air was still blowing.
What could possibly be a better time than this wet air filled night of a day to write a few lines...a few lines of poetic procreation...a few lines that could set her mind free from all hazards of life...of her daily drudgery...a writer always leads two lives...and it is so good!
 Ayushi thought all these as she looked at the tip of her pen poised with certain eagerness to scratch on the white paper...as if those scratches would soon turn into something very meaningful...something very elegant...lustrous...
And soon the pen started moving...
Soon word pictures were drawn on the page...
Ayushi got submerged into her creation...
And the night also started waning...
At eleven she posted the link to her social networking profile, after it appeared set in her blog.
The cool air, the halved moon, the wet street outside, and the pervading silence...all these set into her mind a longing...a serious longing to have someone by her side that night...to cuddle her...to plant a goodnight kiss on her lips...
'Sex starved...am I?'
Ayushi thought... 
'Rajat had gone so far away...from us...he might be having a great life...why am I not remarrying? But Raul...would it help him? Raul...'
Ayushi turned to her sleeping son. Looking at his calm face, Ayushi felt sorry for herself...for him.
'I love you dear...I love you...'
Ayushi murmured and tears started flowing down her cheeks almost imperceptibly...as if she was not conscious of the fact that she was crying.
With sleep gone from her listless eyes, she switched on the bedside lamp and thought of reading a book.
A pack of her tarot cards was also there on the table.
She picked up the pack...she placed them on the table in a certain spread...and thought of honing her skill by playing a card reading game with herself.
She placed cards bearing numbers one to five in the middle in a linear form and then placed sixth, ninth and tenth cards above the horizontal row in a triangle and eighth and seventh card below the row.She knew that the sixth card held the most important place in the spread as it represented her attitude. She looked at the card, placed in the middle of the spread.
 It is the fulcrum...
Ayushi thought before asking queries to her self.

She kept on shooting queries and answering them, as faithfully as she could, kind of alienating herself from the play, as if she was genuinely a querent.

The session continued for quite sometime.

She looked at each card and tried to interpret meanings of each of them. Each card always bears two initial meanings or connotations-one based on its position in the spread and secondly, meanings assigned to or imposed upon it by the other cards on the spread.
She shuffled the cards and kept on spreading them. One by one the positions were getting illuminated....she moved on from one position to another...and every time one position was illuminated, she noted down the card's name, position and possible significance...she continued...as if she was getting deeply engrossed with the session...
It is not that she had not done this earlier...in fact she had done this several times in the past...to hone her reading skills...but this time...she felt, it was different...she felt she was possessed...
Finally she got the outcome card illuminated...
She was at shock initially looking at the card for it had two trees depicted on it...one with flowers and the other with fruits...
She knew what it meant...the tree of flowers was her original path...but the fruit tree...it is tempting...it is asking her to take a new road...the fruit tree...it is so alluring...it is her future...

Ayushi closed the deck...
She got prepared to cry...like several times earlier she did in the past...for the last few years...since separation from Rajat...