Nimita's Place

by Akshita Nanda

  “I asked her to join us for dinner but she’s busy. She goes to her mother-in-law’s place on Saturdays.”

  “Go for your bath, Chia Ying,” I say.

  I wash and stack the cups neatly in the kitchen, ready for use. Chia Ying bathes and I bathe too. We switch on the lights in the living room. Everything looks really nice.

  “Why don’t we do this more often?” I say.

  “Because it’s so troublesome,” Chia Ying says. “You even bought potted plants to put outside the door.”

  Santha and Krisna are the first to arrive, on the dot at 7pm. They take nimbu paani and large handfuls of the crunchy potato-nuts-raisins mixture I got specially from Mustafa Centre.

  Siddiqui and Rehima, who come next, opt for the lassi and coo over the photos of Kishmish, little Urmila Maithili Sachdev as she is now named. “Our Meher did the cutest thing this morning,” Rehima says, making me watch a video.

  Dr Alagasamy has lassi. His wife, Raanjini, with nimbu paani in hand, says how much Kishmish looks like me. She is very good-looking, like a dark-skinned version of the actress Sridevi.

  “So nice to meet you,” she says. “I know my husband is very excited about your research proposal. You must be nervous, yes, with the due date coming up.”

  I am very nervous. We should know the outcome of the proposal by the beginning of April. By end-April, I will know if Dr Alagasamy will renew my contract. I want to fall on Raanjini’s pallu and beg her to convince her husband to keep me employed, but I don’t. I just say: “Fingers crossed. Have you tried this potato mixture? It’s a speciality of Maharashtra.”

  “Of course.” She takes a large handful. “I grew up in India, you know? This was quite a popular snack in Chennai. I went to university there.”

  Wow, South Indians eat Mumbai snacks? I never knew. Then again, I like masala dosas.

  Irving has not arrived by 8pm. Chia Ying talks to everyone while I run into the kitchen, heat things and bring the dishes out. “Buffet style, please help yourselves,” I say and hope nobody is too upset because there are no parathas.

  “I thought there would be parathas,” Bala says and Letchemi pinches his arm.

  “This pulao is excellent,” she says. “You use cardamom to flavour it? And basmati rice, of course.”

  Rehima says: “This saag paneer is very good. You must tell me the secret.”

  I will die before telling her the secret is to buy those British packs of pre-chopped spinach so you don’t take forever blending it before cooking.

  The pulao and raita and mattar aloo also get good reviews. I go back into the kitchen to refill the platter of rice when Chia Ying rushes in.

  “There’s no salt in the dal.”

  “Oh my god.” Salt is kept in a big glass bottle that was once full of coffee. How low-class to take that out to the guests. “Look, I’m putting some salt in this pretty bowl. Can you take it out?”

  “Roger.”

  I take a look at Irving’s desserts before heading out as well.

  Dr Alagasamy takes two helpings of everything and so do Bala and Siddiqui. Krisna reaches for a third but Santha elbows him.

  “No, let him, na, he’s enjoying,” I say.

  Raanjini and Letchemi and Santha finish one helping each very slowly. Rehima takes two of the saag paneer.

  “More ice water? Lassi? Nimbu paani?”

  Dinner is almost over and Irving isn’t here yet. What to do about dessert?

  Chia Ying whispers: “There’s a tub of vanilla ice cream in the fridge. Don’t worry.”

  Vanilla ice cream!

  Just then the grille door opens and Irving walks in, alone. “Sorry I’m late. Hello, everyone.”

  Santha and Krisna and Bala and Letchemi all begin talking to him at once, telling him how much they enjoy his food blog. Raanjini is also a fan and explains IWan2Eat to Dr Alagasamy. I clear the table.

  Irving comes in as I’m stacking the dirty dishes in the sink.

  “Did you touch my dessert?” he says.

  “I did not touch your dessert. Where’s your friend?”

  The freezer tray rattles as he takes out his dessert. He puts the tray carefully down on the counter. He looks at the sorbet as though it is about to speak.

  He is quiet for so long that I have to say again: “I did not touch your dessert.”

  Irving nods without turning his head. He opens the fridge again. His hands come out with a bag that looks like icing.

  He holds one wrist steady with the other while making a dot on the first sorbet. “Crap.”

  I hold my breath in case it disturbs him. He puts the bag down, does pranayama breathing and then tries again.

  Only after all the sorbet are decorated do I dare ask again: “Where is your friend?”

  Irving turns the tap on to wash his hands. “He’ll stop by after the party.” He splashes his face.

  Everyone oohs and aahs over Irving’s coconut ice cream and pandan jelly. Many photos are taken and all from the same angle, but somehow, the one Irving posts on IWan2Eat looks completely different.

  “Professional secret,” he says.

  He serves coffee in Hafeezah’s cups, grinding roast beans in a small steel apparatus that looks a little like a blender and then pouring hot water through it. “Moroccan,” he says.

  Bala tastes a sip. “Tastes just like filter coffee,” he says. “Can I have some milk and sugar?”

  By 9.45pm, the guests are ready to go. Siddiqui and Rehima are antsy about Meher and leave first, after Rehima gives me a big hug. Dr Alagasamy shakes my hand and so does Raanjini. “Thank you for a lovely meal,” she says.

  Bala and Letchemi next, then Krisna and Santha. Santha, for the first time in more than four years, gives me a hug. “This was very nice,” she says. “Thank you.”

  I wave them off to the lift and return to the flat where Chia Ying has collapsed onto the sofa and Irving is sweeping around the table. “That was successful,” he says.

  “Thank you, guys.” I punch him on the shoulder and hug Chia Ying. She shakes her head.

  “No, I am not going to do the washing up.”

  “I’m not asking you to,” I tell her and go into the kitchen.

  I do the delicate items first, the plates and Hafeezah’s cups. Then I clean the kadai and rice cooker and pressure cooker and find places in the fridge for the leftovers. Not much, just enough for one lunch.

  The grille door opens. Okay, enough for one late supper if our guest is hungry.

  “We were in school together,” Irving is telling Chia Ying as I come out of the kitchen.

  The guest has his back to me but turns as I come out.

  I see his face.

  “Nimita, this is my friend Vikram Malhotra, though everyone calls him Vicky. We were in school together,” Irving says. He says it very calmly, because, of course, how could he know?

  I should move. I should go back into the kitchen. I should do something, anything except stand like a stupid statue. But when I open my mouth, nothing comes out, no air goes in.

  I feel like I have been punched in the stomach, a feeling I have only had once before in my life.

  Then Irving says the one thing that sucks all the air from the room.

  “I believe you two know each other.”

  I think that’s what he says but how can I be sure? My ears are pounding so loudly.

  “Hi,” says his friend, Vicky Malhotra. After eight years, Vicky Malhotra is standing in my flat, in my home and looking at me.

  The first thing is to breathe. The first thing is to inhale, to open my mouth, to let the air come in and go out of my body. But I have been punched in the gut and it hurts so much and all my body wants to do is make itself smaller and tighter and impossible to destroy.

  “Nimita?” Chia Ying comes around the sofa. I grab her hand. It helps me stand.

  I have to stand in front of Vicky Malhotra.

  “Hi,” he says, like it’s the most normal thing in the world for him to be
here, in my home.

  In and out now, in and out. Pranayama breathing like I have practised and practised in the last eight years when the walls close in and I wake up in the dark choking because the ceiling is falling in on me. One breath. Three. Five. Seven.

  By eight breaths I can look at Mr Hong-Kong-returned Vicky Malhotra. His face is still the same. Those sharp Punjabi features, those light brown almost-grey eyes that make him look so fair and lovely. He has a few white hairs above his ears. The same ears that are so ticklish.

  Ten breaths. Twelve. I swallow and inhale.

  “You can’t be here.”

  My voice is perfectly normal. I am not shouting.

  “Nimmy,” he says.

  “Don’t take my name. Chia Ying,” I turn to my friend whose hand I am squeezing so hard and I tell her, “Chia Ying, he is not allowed to be here.”

  She opens her mouth. There are little lines of pain in her forehead. I look at her and I beg her with my eyes because I will not beg with my voice.

  She says to Irving: “I think your friend better go.”

  It is like making a magnet avoid a steel nail, but I look at Irving instead of at Vicky. Irving is not smiling. There are two lines in his forehead and his spectacles are halfway down his nose.

  My throat is so dry. Have I drunk anything all evening? There is a bitter taste in my mouth. Irving’s coffee was black but sweet and now the sweetness has gone, leaving only the bitterness of the coffee behind. “How—?” I ask but the rest of the sentence can’t come out. How long have you known? How much do you know?

  If you knew, then why bring him here?

  Vicky makes a move and even though there is a sofa between us, I step back, dragging Chia Ying with me. I’m squeezing her hand so tightly my own wrist hurts—the right wrist of course, so I have to massage it.

  Irving steps in front of Vicky. “We’d better go.”

  “I just wanted—”

  “Bring him out, Irving,” Chia Ying says. Somehow I am in a chair at the dining table and she is standing in front of me so my view of the two men is blocked. Which is good, which means Vicky can’t see me either.

  I hear the grille door open and close. “Let’s go,” Irving says and I hear Vicky’s voice saying something. What, I don’t know, because the blood is pounding in my ears.

  “Drink this. Breathe, Nimmy. Drink this and breathe.” Chia Ying is holding a glass of cold water to my lips. I drink, splutter, drink again. “Slowly.”

  She rubs my back while I finish the glass. “More?”

  I shake my head.

  “Okay.” She exhales very loudly as though she is the one doing pranayama breathing. “Can you—do you—can you tell me what just happened?”

  My teeth are chattering now because the water was so cold. Chia Ying goes into her room, brings out a blanket and wraps it around me. She goes into the kitchen and comes out with biscuits. “Eat these.” I hear the Nespresso machine brew. “I’m making mocha. Sugar is good for shock, right?”

  I hiccup. Then laugh.

  Chia Ying holds my shoulders. Her eyes are wide, her lips pressed together. Don’t look so scared, I want to tell her but nothing comes out.

  Eight years. A different country. And Vicky Malhotra finds me anyway.

  “Who was that?” Chia Ying is asking. “Who was that guy?”

  “School friend,” I tell her.

  “Yah, Irving’s classmate, so?”

  I shake my head. Not Irving’s.

  Mine.

  When I had finished 12th standard in Alexandra Girls’ English Institution in Mumbai, I knew I wanted to do science. I was not as good at maths as Romy-Bhaiya, but I loved biology. It was my best subject and I could spend hours reading about genetic engineering in Popular Science magazine.

  Dadi told me: “Beta, you want to study Biology, you can also go to the States. Go to Cornell or University of London. Our job is to make our children’s dreams come true. I could never study where I wanted, it is my dream that you study wherever you want.”

  I was not like Romy-Bhaiya. I wanted to try living away from the family, yes, but not the US. Pune University, two hundred kilometres away, seemed about right.

  The Pune University campus is a green heaven with huge banyan trees and patches of lawn that you can play frisbee on. Best of all was the brand-new centre for cell and molecular biology started by lecturers like Dr Savarkar. She did her post-doctorate in the US and then came back to India. For years she met politicians and got journalists to write articles until Pune University finally got its molecular biology programme.

  The outside of the building looked like a cell had oozed over the roof and dropped blobs of protoplasm on the steps but the inside was beautiful. There was an electron microscope, centrifuges from micro to mega-size, and a budget to upgrade as necessary.

  My selection for the BSc (Mol Bio) programme made Dad walk taller among the parents of Modern Colony when they went on their evening strolls. It was the first BSc by research in India so students had to be more than memorising and copying machines. It wasn’t enough to be a topper in 12th standard. The professors interviewed us individually and made us solve crazy problems before we were accepted.

  Now when I think about it, I’m amazed any of us got in. I did my 12th standard from one of the best institutions in Mumbai, but the closest I got to a pipette was a long glass tube from the 18th century, something Joseph Priestley might have used, not even Rosalind Franklin.

  By 12th standard, I knew a lot of theory but had never put half of it into practice. I knew how cells divided and how bacterial cell division was used to amplify gene sequences, but I had never actually extracted bacterial DNA.

  I was a person with a driving licence and no actual experience with a car. And I wasn’t the only one like that in university either. The lecturers were going at what must have been snail speed for them, and my classmates and I were going bald trying to keep up in practicals.

  One time, Dr Savarkar let us run a gel and then asked after an hour: “Don’t you think you should switch this off?” All our DNA had run off into the buffering solution encasing the gel because none of us had thought to add an ink marker to one empty well of the gel.

  You can only see DNA under special UV light. An ink marker moves at the same speed as DNA, and is visible in normal light. It shows you when to switch off the current and check your gel. Nobody likes looking like a fool in front of a teacher. Only one group had put in the marker and that too because only one guy remembered. His name was Vikram Malhotra, he was from Hong Kong, and even his groupmates hated him.

  While I was grinding my teeth under stress, Vikram Malhotra ran gels like a pro. While 19 of us were trying to figure out just how to fit a tip on the 100 microlitre pipette, while we were breaking our heads trying to understand why the DNA solution kept floating out of the well of the gel instead of staying at the bottom, Vikram had finished the experiment and was cracking jokes with the supervising post-grad.

  I hated him. We all hated him. He stood out in so many other ways too.

  He looked like us but he wore branded T-shirts instead of kurtas or bush shirts like the other boys in class. He spoke with some funny accent. Someone even heard him ask for a beef burger in McDonald’s. Beef!

  In the canteen, we sat in groups that didn’t include him. If he came to join us, the person in front of or next to him would find an excuse to get up and go so he was always one seat removed.

  Then one day he got up in class and asked Dr Savarkar: “Ma’am, we need more practice on the basics before we can make good use of what you’re teaching us. Please could we have an extra practical on Saturday?”

  It was sheer genius. Raised his profile with the professors and also made the rest of the class thankful, because he had said what none of us dared say.

  For boarders like me, the Saturday practical meant skipping the weekend at home, but my family understood.

  The first practical began under the supervision of a post-doc i
n Dr Savarkar’s lab. Like all post-docs, Rishikesh Sahni was least interested in teaching us. What if we did well enough to compete for his position? Within the first hour, he had gone off to the canteen for a bum vada. What now?

  Again, Mr Hong-Kong-returned Vikram Malhotra blew our minds. “Right, so this is what we need to do,” he said and, for some reason, all 19 of us listened.

  Not only did he know what to do, he also did a good job of teaching it to us. “DNA is lighter than buffer so you have to add indicator, always,” he would say, or “Half an hour is enough reaction time. After that you can run a test gel. It’s not like we want or need to digest all the DNA, just enough to see whether what’s in the tube is the right DNA.” Things like that.

  By the end of practical one, I had successfully digested test DNA with enzymes, pipetted the solution into a gel and managed a successful electrophoresis separation. All by myself, with minimum spillage and wastage.

  In three weeks, we no longer needed the extra practicals. We were all on the same level as Vikram. But some of us—okay, he and I—were having so much fun playing around with the lab equipment that he cloned the lab key. We would sneak in every odd Saturday to do extra-curricular experimentation.

  Only the most expensive reagents were kept under lock and key. There’s a lot you can do with basic reagents like ethanol and ammonium sulphate. We tested the leaves of water hyacinths on the Mula River for the presence of industrial chemicals. We compared the brain tissue of guppies from the university pond with one from my hostel fish tank for pesticide residue. After that experiment, I started sleeping with a scarf on my nose each time the hostel was sprayed with Baygon during the mosquito season.

  The day I mashed up the guppy brains, Vikram said: “I’m impressed. Not many girls would do this sort of thing without making a big fuss.”

  “Later I’ll cry,” I told him. “Big tears. Where’s the ethanol?”

  Sometimes, during experiments with a long waiting time, we caught a Hindi movie or ate cream bum on campus. It is rare, really rare to find someone interested in the same things as you and yet different enough that conversations are never boring.

  Our first-year results were announced and I missed topping the class by three marks. Ninety-four per cent to Vicky’s 97. He came up, shook my hand and congratulated me with a smile. At home in Mumbai, Dadi talked about framing my certificate while Mummy called Romy-Bhaiya in the US.