Nimita's Place

“You really shouldn’t mind it,” she says, swallowing.

  “Sorry?”

  “Those people at Hong Lim Park. They are just talking, verbal diarrhoea. See, hardly anyone came today. Last time, there were six thousand people.”

  I wave my hand. “Santha, I’m from India. Every second day some guy is saying some rubbish on the street.”

  She nods. “They don’t mean people like you, you know. Here so long in Singapore already, apply for PR, right?”

  If I am a permanent resident, I will not have to leave Singapore even if I lose my job.

  My stomach relaxes. Good old Santha. She’s given me a great idea already.

  Santha is a good person to make friends with. Her recommendation can make the difference between a B+ and an A rating in the annual appraisal, between Dr Alagasamy pushing HR to give you a salary hike and letting you get a smaller bonus.

  Until 2011, Bala was Santha’s best buddy in the lab. They should have become closer after his marriage because Letchemi is Santha’s distant cousin. Then the usual thing that happens at Indian weddings happened. Santha’s family didn’t receive enough invitation cards, or they were invited only to the temple ceremony and not the hotel reception, or the other way around. So now Santha’s side of the family is not talking to Letchemi’s side and Bala gets his reagents in boxes labelled “Bata”. If he gets them at all.

  “So how, your appraisal?”

  Santha already knows so I spread my hands. “Bad. I really need your advice.”

  Santha beams. She likes it when people defer to her. Bala and Dr Alagasamy never do. She crooks her finger. “You read about Tan Ah Kow?”

  “Who?” I read only the property section of The Straits Times. “What happened?”

  It seems a famous billionaire has died and left a lot of money to the hospital for research. Every lab is going to submit proposals hoping for a million or two.

  “Boss wants to do diabetes and cancer,” Santha says.

  Fifteen dollars wasted on buns. It is the obvious choice. The billionaire died of diabetes-related complications. One Australian lab this year found that diabetes can lead to more cancers than the obvious pancreatic tumours. Boss must be planning a follow-up.

  Santha packs the buns into her handbag. “I told him, ‘Boss, everyone will be thinking diabetes because of how that man died. Every lab, not only ours, will go on that track.’”

  Good old Santha. I should have bought her more buns.

  “I told him, ‘Boss, do something with mass appeal.’”

  She looks at me. I look at her.

  She coughs. “My throat so itchy today. Got haze again.”

  I clap my hands. “Santha, that is so smart! Haze and tumour formation. Haze and throat cancer links.”

  Santha smiles. “Haze sure got mass appeal. It was so bad last year.”

  “Worse than Mumbai.”

  She looks at me. “Cannot be worse than Mumbai.”

  Yes, it was. Mumbai has smog and pollution from traffic and factories, which is why we always go away to Lonavla for the weekends, but the Singapore haze is something else entirely. I woke up one morning and the air was grey. Everything was grey because of the smoke and dust blowing in from Indonesia, where companies set fire to jungles so they can grow palm trees for cash.

  Haze’s effect on cancers of the lung, throat, nose. Link between particulate matter and tumour formation. Early-warning markers that can be detected from spit? So many ideas. I need a hospital computer to research. Not the lab computer where everyone can read the screen. The minute I finish today’s experiment, I’m going to the staff library.

  I can outline a proposal by the end of the day. I need to meet boss fast and impress him.

  “Does boss have time to meet me this week?”

  Santha looks at her phone. “This week, this week—oh.”

  I read the screen upside down. Today’s entry says: “Review—Si.” Tomorrow’s entry says: “Review—B.”

  “Review—N” is for next week. I’m usually last because I’m the most junior.

  I crinkle the plastic wrapper the bun box came in. “You want more tea?” I ask Santha.

  She looks at her phone again. I pretend I’m not reading it.

  “Tomorrow can?” she says.

  “Perfect.” I look at her as if she is a ripe Alphonso mango. “Sure you don’t want more tea?”

  When we return to the lab, Siddiqui and Dr Alagasamy have just finished their meeting. “Ah, Nimita,” boss says. “How are things going? Good? Good. Listen, I’m leaving for Thailand day after tomorrow so we’ll have our chat next week, okay?”

  Santha says: “Tomorrow, boss. You’re seeing her tomorrow.”

  “Really?” Dr Alagasamy checks his phone.

  Hooray for Google Calendar. Santha has already updated it.

  “Oh, yes, my mistake. Great, get your notebook ready.” He turns to Bala. “Bala? Bala, listen, I have a meeting in Thailand, so we’ll have our chat next week, okay?”

  “You look very happy,” says Siddiqui from the other half of our shared lab space. “What has given you such a big smile?”

  “Buns,” I tell him. “You have to try this vegan bakery I found today. Pure vegetarian, suitable for everyone. The effect is bunbelievable.”

  5.

  At 4.30pm, my cellphone alarm vibrates. “Starbucks Clarke Quay 5pm!” it flashes again and again.

  Santha passes by on her way to the sterile chamber. “Today’s the hot date?”

  “Oho?” Siddiqui looks over.

  “Just someone my aunty wants me to meet.”

  “Oho!” Bala’s turn.

  The three look at each other and wiggle their eyebrows.

  Unbelievable! Bala has not even looked me in the eye for weeks, ever since I presented my ideas to boss about tracking methylated DNA in haze-related tumour formation.

  “Not bad, Nimita,” Dr Alagasamy said then. “Real potential here. Write up an experimental plan.”

  An experimental plan! Me! As if I’m a second-to-the-principal researcher, just like Siddiqui! Who, by the way, congratulated me on my success, unlike Mr Bala.

  If not for this Gautam Bhatia, I would be a very happy person today. I do pranayama breathing on the train ride over to meet him. Scientific research shows that even forcing yourself to breathe slowly can calm the body.

  Chia Ying is on standby even though she doesn’t understand why I’m so worried about tonight. “You’ve done it before,” she says.

  True. I came to Singapore to avoid the bachelor parade but the first year, Itty-Bua’s best friend’s nephew, Satish Mehra, stopped by on his way to Australia. Then Pritty-Bua’s husband’s college friend’s son, Tapan Gujral, stopped by on his way back to India from China. Shanti-Tayee’s friend’s grandson, Bhushan Raheja, met me while in Singapore on a short-term project. I had to meet them all, otherwise people would comment.

  All of them were Punjabi boys with post-graduate degrees and bank jobs. All were tall, fair, single and from good families. On paper there was no reason to reject any of them.

  In person—the best or worst was Bhushan Raheja. “You’re wearing a skirt,” was the first thing he said to me. “Do you have a car or do you go around on public transport in skirts?”

  Satish Mehra said he liked movies but he hated Pinjar, which I think is Urmila Matondkar’s best film. He did not see the point of a movie about how Partition tore apart the lives of so many women. “Nothing nice happens. There are no item numbers also,” he complained.

  Tapan Gujral showed me the photo of his Parsi girlfriend, which he secretly carried in his wallet. He wasn’t sure he could stand up to his family.

  “You must stand up to your family,” I told him. “Love is the most important thing. If you don’t try, you’ll probably regret it all your life.” I then called Mummy on Skype and asked her to tell Pritty-Bua that her husband’s college friend’s son was in love with someone else. “Don’t worry, it’s a girl, tell her,” I said and Mummy l
aughed.

  But this Gautam Bhatia… I avoided him by coming to Singapore and four years later, he’s still single and interested?

  “Some people would find that ,” Chia Ying texts back.

  I reply with a .

  Gautam stands up when I reach the café. “Hey! How are you? Get you a drink?”

  “Mocha vanilla frappe?”

  He comes back with two. Mirroring behaviour, showing he wants to make a good impression.

  That does not make a good impression.

  “So you took my suggestion and came to Singapore,” he says.

  My mouth falls open around the straw. Your suggestion?

  “How are you liking it? It’s a very different environment.”

  I close my lips around the straw and take a huge, cooling gulp of iced coffee. “It’s great.”

  “Yeah, Singapore was really where I found myself, you know? It’s a great country. It’s a bit small but very Western.”

  “Yes.”

  We sip a while in silence. Then—how are your parents? Fine? Good, good.

  How are my parents? Fine? Good, good.

  You staying here long?

  “Depends,” he says, and leans forward. We are at a tiny table near the window. So many people are chattering around us that if I want to hear him, I have to lean forward as well.

  “Actually, that year we met changed my life.”

  Cold coffee in an air-conditioned café was a bad idea. Now my wrist hurts.

  “When I heard you were going to Singapore to find yourself—”

  “I found a job,” I say, but he isn’t listening.

  “When I realised you had the guts to follow your dreams and leave India, I thought: ‘What is this job at Kotak Mahindra? Yes, I get 25 lakhs a year, company car and all but what is it really about?’”

  About the price of a high-end flat in Colaba, or maybe that condo in Yew Tee Residence?

  “So I also decided to follow my passion.”

  Gautam Bhatia is an IT nerd who hated his job in finance. “There was a fifty-hour work week, you can’t imagine the stress, you really had to let your hair down afterwards. When I say let your hair down, I meant, you know, I don’t drink. Not really. Just beer. Some whisky. I don’t smoke, definitely.”

  In whatever free time he had left, he got a bunch of coders together to create a brand-new messaging app for the Indian market. Like WhatsApp, it allows free messages and telephone calls over wireless and data networks.

  Unlike WhatsApp, it has an “old-person-friendly interface” with only four buttons. It also has videocalling, with better quality because of a new compression algorithm.

  “I’m calling it Haanji. You know, haanji? Like your mom calls and you say ‘Haan, ji?’”

  Responding with a “haanji” or “yes, respected one” is a Punjabi thing.

  “Okay, listen, you use Skype to call your family, right?”

  “Actually I use WhatsApp calling.”

  “Oh, you have to try Haanji!”

  He insists on installing it on my Xiaomi smartphone and then connecting to the Starbucks wifi connection so I can call him on it. “Android works best but we also have an Apple version,” he says. “Okay, you go out of the door so I can’t hear you.”

  “You want me to leave this air-conditioned place and go out into the heat to try out your app?” I ask him. It takes hours for Singapore to cool down, even in the evening.

  “Yes, just outside. You can just stand outside the glass door. Turn your back so I won’t see your lips move.”

  “I’m sitting against the wall. It’ll be easier for you to move.”

  He looks at me. I look at him.

  “Okay,” he says, getting up.

  I look at my phone. After a while, the H denoting his app begins to wiggle. I touch it.

  “Hello? Can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you.”

  “Isn’t this great?”

  “Yes, very clear.”

  “Let me tell you about the other features. Now, if you look at your phone and press that V on the top, it turns on the video. Press V. I’m pressing V now.”

  I press V. Then M for mute and smile at him and just say “haanji” and “yes” whenever his lips stop moving. Finally he ends the call and comes back in.

  “It’s really hot out there,” he says, wiping the sweat off his forehead with one of those brown recycled-paper napkins.

  “Yes, it is.”

  He sits down. “So I’m staying with my friend. We’re looking up a few contacts, investors, you know?”

  “That’s great.”

  “Then I will go to Australia to stay with another friend. I think Haanji is going to be big in Australia.”

  “That’s great.”

  “There are a lot of Punjabis there and I have this marketing campaign that should really sell it to them.”

  “Okay.”

  “My dream,” he says, crumpling the paper napkin, “my dream is to have Microsoft buy my app.”

  “Maybe they will.”

  “Yes! Because nothing is impossible if you say Haanji!” He brings out his phone again. “Have I shown you my ad campaign? Here, it’s on YouTube.”

  I check my phone while pretending to look at the video. Thirty-five minutes. “Where are you?” I type into the last opened chat window.

  I look up from my phone. Gautam has put his phone away and is smiling at me.

  “So what do you think?”

  “Great ad,” I say.

  “Haanji!” He does a little thumbs up at me.

  My phone rings and I practically cry with relief. “Yes? Hello? Oh? Oh!” I sign off.

  “So sorry, I have to go. Emergency at work.”

  “Oh.” Gautam looks surprised.

  “Lab work, you know, sometimes you have to do things after hours. Even on weekends.”

  “Oh.” He nods. “I know, it was like that when we were developing Haanji. No rest, no time off, barely any time to meet friends. I completely forgot how to talk to people.”

  I look at this man, this tall, fair Punjabi man from a good family who has spent forty of the last 45 minutes talking about his app and maybe five minutes asking me about myself.

  “I guess after Australia you’ll be more relaxed.” Relearn social skills.

  “Oh no, it’ll get even busier after that,” he says very seriously. “I’m hoping to do a TEDx Talk and work on more campaigns. Hopefully get invited to the US.”

  “Sounds really busy.”

  “It is,” he says. “You know, my friends are helping but mostly I’m running around until some big corporation buys Haanji.”

  “I’m surprised you had the time to meet me, given your schedule,” I tell him, getting up.

  He gets up too. “Well, you know. Like I said, na. That year we met changed my life.”

  He grins and my stomach is a hard knot. “So your parents can send your patri to my parents.”

  “What?”

  “Your patri.” He’s smiling into my eyes. “I don’t believe in all this patri-shatri, but parents like to do things the traditional way, na?”

  “You—?” I can’t even say it. After one hour four years ago and this 45-minute meeting all about his app, he wants my parents to send my horoscope to his parents.

  “If our parents are okay with it, I’m totally okay.”

  “I’ll… I’ll talk to Bua.”

  He tries to take my hand and the phone rings. God bless you, Chia Ying.

  “Bye! Good luck!” I say, waving the ringing phone as I run out of Starbucks.

  “Tell all your friends to use Haanji!” he says, smiling and waving back.

  No way, ji.

  Chia Ying is at the entrance to the MRT station with Irving.

  “How was it?” she asks.

  “Don’t ask.”

  “I want to see.”

  “Ssh! Chia Ying!” I try to stop her but lose my grip on her sleeve. My right wrist is throbbing.

&
nbsp; “Relax, lah, I’ll be very discreet,” she calls over her shoulder.

  I look at Irving. “How was your day?”

  His face is red, the short hair on his head gleams. He didn’t spend the last 45 minutes in a freezing café. “I tried a different kind of durian.” He wrinkles his nose. “It was…powerful.”

  “Right.” Chia Ying must be happy to finally have a flatmate who will eat that smelly fruit. She says that in this season, whole families sit down around one of the giant spiky green domes, break open the spines and suck on the yellow seeds. Just like mango season in India.

  “Dinner?” Irving asks.

  “What about dinner?”

  “There’s a Hong-Kong-style dim sum place near here.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You don’t like dim sum?”

  “I like dim sum but that place is expensive. I’ll pass.”

  Our phones beep at the same time. On the Flatmates chat group, Chia Ying has sent a sneaky picture of Gautam Bhatia with his head on his chin, sipping his frappe. “Not bad, what, can be Bollywood star” goes the caption.

  Yes, he can be a Bollywood star. He is tall and fair and has those strong features like every Punjabi man.

  I put my phone away.

  What’s taking Chia Ying so long? I walk a little way and see that she’s in the queue to order.

  I turn around and bump into Irving. “Sorry.”

  “There’s a food court across the road. We could have dinner there.”

  “Okay. When Chia Ying comes back.”

  We wait in the heat. Come back, Chia Ying, before Gautam Bhatia sees that I’m still here.

  “Not your type?”

  “Sorry?”

  Irving holds up his phone. “That guy’s not your type?”

  “I don’t have a type.” I don’t. “Is he yours?”

  He doesn’t answer. I look up to see his eyes are focused on my hands.

  How long have I been massaging the right wrist? It feels like ten thousand rubber bands are wound around the base of my palm. My wrist is tight and hot and ready to snap unless I press and press.

  Part Two

  1944

  1.

  Nimita Khosla waits on the bench outside the principal’s office, trying to ignore the bursts of chatter from the bottom of the stairs. Her friends are waiting below for a treat. Mummy is taking them all to Faletti’s for a full-English tea to celebrate Nimita’s birthday. Today she turns 17.