Battle for Bittora

by Anuja Chauhan

  He picked up the skewers again

  'I like doing it,' he said, shoving the skewers into the tandoor with the restless energy I remembered so well. I tried not to look at his sinewy forearms. They were affecting me strangely - making my heart pump like that of an aging Praggu cabinet minister in desperate need of bypass surgery. 'And everybody else seems to like it too. So I always do something for family functions, you know?'

  'Wow, I never thought you'd grow up to be so... metrosexual,' I managed to say. 'Cooking and all.'

  His eyes glittered combatively. But all he said, the buddy-buddy camaraderie in his voice just a little off-key, was, 'So, where are your dopey plaits? Did someone die in your stupid Hindu family... or did you just get lice again and have to cut them off?'

  'I hate you,' I said, regressing promptly to the nursery.

  'I know,' he said lightly.

  I looked up quickly. His lips were smiling, but his eyes weren't. They were oddly vulnerable.

  'You look really nice in that sari,' he said abruptly.

  I felt my cheeks go hot. 'Thanks,' I said, matter-of-factly. 'You look...'

  Awesome. Superheroic. Biteable. Incredible.

  '... nice too.'

  'Hey, thanks!' He grinned. 'But don't come too close or you'll smell the mothballs.'

  'I wasn't planning to,' I said defensively.

  'How's Ma?' he asked, ignoring this weird reply.

  He used to be really fond of my mother. And he couldn't stand Amma, but that's another story.

  'How's your horrible dad?' I countered, then immediately wanted to kick myself.

  The sparkle in his eyes died instantly. His face shuttered over. I looked away, wishing I'd kept my extra-wide mouth shut. The erstwhile royal family of Bittoragarh was, frankly, seriously weird. Zain's dad lived entirely in the past. Luckily for her, Zain's mom had died young. Not so lucky for Zain, though. We'd become friends because our bereavements had been so inversely symmetrical. Me with no dad, Zain with no mom. He used to love our house. And I didn't blame him because, really, those dudes in the crumbling palace had had absolutely no sense of interior decor. There were huge heads of animals mounted on walls all over the place. Lion. Tiger. Moose. Boar. Deer. Elephant. All glaring at you with glassy, accusing, you-killed-me-sicko-burn-in-hell eyes. I couldn't eat a thing with them watching me. God knows how Zain did. There were intricately carved ivory tusks all along the dining room wall, forming a sort of a tunnel that led to the table. There were tiger-skin carpets. All the dustbins and umbrella stands were elephant legs, chopped at the knee and hollowed out. They had toes and everything. And then there were these tall lamps scattered around the place, with heavy wooden bases, upon which stood erect elephant trunks with a wire threaded through them, topped off with lacy beaded lampshades.

  'He died,' said Zain shortly. 'Four years ago. Didn't you know?'

  Oh good! I thought.

  'How awful,' I said.

  He looked at me, his expression sardonic, and then suddenly said, in a louder, more formal voice, 'Hey, Mr S!'

  I blinked, confused.

  'Hello, young man! Barbequeing, hain?'

  I looked around and realized with a start that Zain and I were not all alone on a desert island, after all. We were at a wedding, and Tawny uncle, with his son the Rapist in tow, had just joined us. The Rapist was blatantly ogling me.

  (He isn't really a rapist. At least, we don't have any proof of it. Ma said, the last time she came to India, that he as good as raped you with his eyes every time he looked at you, and the name had stuck.)

  'Titu dear, remember Jinni?' said Tawny to the Rapist.

  'Of course!' said the Rapist, addressing my breasts with the welcoming air of someone greeting old friends. 'I remember...'

  Both of you? I thought irately, as I yanked my pallu higher.

  And Zain toh you know...' Tawny uncle trailed off.

  The Rapist held out his hand, but Zain, whose hands were messy from threading kebabs onto skewers, shrugged and smiled hello.

  The Rapist laughed foolishly, picked up a kebab and chewed on it jauntily.

  A little silence followed.

  Finally, Tawny uncle broke it with an awkward, 'So! I will leave you youngsters to enjoy!' and rolled away. The music on the dance floor changed abruptly, from a fast song to a slow, romantic one. The Rapist, sensing an opportunity to grope, brightened instantly and turned to me. 'Would you like to dance?'

  At which point, Zain, who had just been asked to whip up some kebabs by a very pretty girl in a spangled silver sharara, said smoothly, 'These galoutis will take some time to cook, Sherry. Whyn't you dance with my friend here till then?'

  Sherry smiled in a friendly manner.

  'I love this song!' she announced.

  The Rapist smiled beatifically at her gorgeous delletage.

  'Titu, meet Shahana,' Zain told the Rapist. 'Great dancer.'

  'Hi, Titu.' She smiled.

  'Call me Tits!' the Rapist beseeched her instantly. 'Would you like to dance?'

  Looking a little stunned, she nodded and the two of them floated away.

  'I've always wondered,' Zain mused, as he flipped the galoutis expertly, 'what it must feel like to have three moustaches...'

  'Like who?' I asked, a little irritated at the way he'd just assumed I wanted to stay with him and not, you know, burn the dance floor with the Rapist.

  He looked up, his dark eyes dancing.

  'Like your grandmother's buddy,' he said, waving the flat steel ladle about dramatically. 'Tawnyyy Suleimannnn!'

  I gave an involuntary snort of laughter.

  'One above his mouth and two above his eyes?'

  'Exactly.' He grinned. Then he added, his eyes disturbingly warm, 'You always know what I mean, Jinni.'

  'Yeah...' I muttered, looking away uncomfortably. 'Don't be mean about Tawny uncle, okay? I like him.'

  'Okay, dear, okay,' he replied peacably.

  I giggled again.

  'You still do that weird snorting thing when you laugh,' he said, shaking his head. 'Like a koala with a cold. It's disgusting.'

  Then he smiled and tilted his head in the direction of the beautifully lit sprawling white house behind us.

  'Shall we go inside and talk?'

  ***

  He led me through the cobbled courtyard into a carelessly expensive country kitchen, which opened into a cozy study, stocked with overstuffed armchairs and lined with old bookcases.

  'Why don't you sit, I'll just wash up and come,' he said, heading for the massive silver and chrome sink.

  'Okay,' I said somewhat dazedly as I sank into the cushy sofa, kicked off my absurdly high-heeled golden sandals and crossed my legs under me, my ears buzzing strangely. I was experiencing the weirdest sensation of sliding back in time.

  Zain and I had been unwilling friends at first, thrown together during every summer vacation since we were five or six, because our grandfathers were thick buddies. I spent most of that early time together making fun of Zain's crumbling, termite-infested palace and his weird dad. He reciprocated by being snide about my goody-goodiness and oily plaits. But since all the local kids in Bittora thought the two of us out-of-towners were a pair of zoo exhibits, we had no choice but to quit squabbling and become friends.

  The first thing we would do when we met was stand butt-to-butt to see who had gotten taller, then race out to the mango grove to climb our favourite tree and, inhaling the cool, intoxicating aam-ki-bor, tell tall tales about what we'd done all year. Zain had large dark eyes, spoke very fast, ran like the wind, and was wickedly inventive in the games he made up. His skin seemed golden in the Bittora sunshine, almost transparent, a thin blue vein lightly visible along one cheek. He made me laugh a lot, up in the branches, as we swung our legs and the bees buzzed around us, but he was also oddly intense and could be very moody at times.

  As the sun climbed higher into the sky, we would slide down the tree trunks, trample through the gay, black-eyed sunflower beds an
d strut into the house to feast on slices of tiny, slightly sour King's Bakery bread, slathered with thick, fresh cream and sprinkled with crunchy sugar. We would pore over the stash of superhero comics in my room, play grimly competitive games of carom in the verandah, or swarm up the raat-ki-rani growing along the pillars and whack the lazy lizards dozing on the walls with rolled-up newspapers. The idea was to build a collection of their tails which dropped off if you whacked hard enough and wriggled about on the floor for hours.

  Sometimes, fired by the tales of independence Bauji used to tell us, we would write out long, freedom-fighter type speeches and declaim them to each other in the garage, using the bonnet of Amma's old Ambassador as a podium. Bauji would patiently hear us out, pointing out flaws in our rebuttals, raising points we had missed, and awarding a crisp five-rupee note to the better speaker. Or we would recite poetry - Zain loved Ramdhari Singh Dinkar's Singhasan khali karo ki janta aati hai, because it was all about abdicating the throne for the people, and he was rather hung up on the grand gesture his dadajaan and all his 'royal' cronies had made back in the fifties. Of course, I was always quick to point out to him that they hardly had a choice in the matter. They were a bunch of indolent, decrepit dudes with no armies, disgruntled populaces and landlocked states. Zain retaliated by sniggering at my favourite poem, the gutsy Khoob ladi mardaani woh toh Jhansi wali Rani thi, pointing out smugly that it hailed Laxmi Bai as 'mardaani', which meant as-good-as-a-man. So obviously, being a woman wasn't good enough, smirk smirk. We also created our own comic book series called Enforcer 49, with Zain providing the text and me doing the drawings. That's what got me hooked to superheroes in the first place.

  Zain was sent off to some fancy public school in England when we were both twelve and returned in the holidays all snooty and proper. He winced whenever I spoke, and kept correcting me: 'Don't say roits, Jin, it's riots. And my shoes are not Naaik, they're Naaikee. And it's not veemin, you idiot, it's women.' I had to break a few badminton racquets over his head just to cut him down to size.

  After that, I saw a little less of him, as our holiday terms no longer synchronized completely and also because he got totally obsessed with cricket and spent a lot of time playing with a gang of husky local boys. But he would still come over in the afternoon, when it was too hot to play outside, and lie around, eating entire trayfuls of ice cubes and crushing me at carom. That year, he wrote to me from England, sprawling untidy letters full of four-letter-word-peppered limericks.

  The next summer, we didn't quite know what to say to each other, and started having the most idiotic fights. Also, my sharp-eyed grandmother cottoned onto the fact that my teenage 'haarmoans', as she called them, had started to play the harmonium every time Zain showed up. She pretty much forbade him to enter the house, even telling Ma I should spend my holidays in Delhi so I could concentrate on my studies far away from that 'always-coming' fellow. Thankfully, Ma, convinced the yearly visits to our hometown gave me 'roots', vetoed this.

  Finally, one afternoon, just a few weeks before my tenth class board exams, when the music from the harmoniums had waxed into a full-scale symphony, Amma said a whole lot of typical uncalled-for things and Zain dropped out of my life forever.

  Okay, so he's hot, I admitted to myself, as I sat on the overstuffed sofa in the cozy study. So what? Don't forget he walked out on you and never got in touch. He may not have valued the romance - but we were friends, right? Surely that counted for something? Unless... hey, unless he spent all these years working out and becoming Taller, Stronger and Sharper, striving to reach the epitome of suave, masculine hotness, so he could totally wow me when we met again... and now that he had hit his exquisite, incredible peak, he had contrived to casually bump into me at a wedding. It could be!

  Even as I was thinking this, the new, taller, hotter Zain walked in, dropped down at the other end of the sofa, and in one fluid movement, swung his long legs over the arm of the sofa and deposited his dark head into my lap.

  'Hey,' I protested, my heart banging hard inside my little velvet blouse. 'Back off, okay? I barely know you.'

  'That's okay,' he said, his eyes dancing. 'I know you really well. I know you hate logarithms and love rock music and...' His voice grew huskier and one lean hand rose up to brush my cheek caressingly. 'I know you have a little, cream-coloured, South America-shaped birthmark way up on your... um... left... right, no, definitely left thigh - wanna hear more?'

  'No, thanks,' I said hastily, and tried to haul his head off my lap.

  But quick as a flash, he caught my hand and pressed a soft kiss on the inside of my wrist.

  Fireworks.

  And his lips had barely brushed my skin.

  I gave a shaky laugh. 'Zain, if you're going to be like this, I'm going outside,' I warned him.

  'Get me off your lap first,' he countered with a grin, clutching my fingers tightly.

  I glared at him.

  'Okay, okay,' he said and swung himself up easily, his tousled dark hair falling into his eyes. He threw himself along the other end of the sofa, stretched his long legs out in front of him, tapped one foot impatiently, and said, 'You want to talk, right? So, talk!' He threw one arm up into the air. 'Taqlia!'

  'That means "Leave us",' I told him sweetly. 'Should I?'

  'Really? God, my Urdu sucks.'

  'What-of-yours doesn't?' I said, trying for sarcasm but ending up giggling.

  Encouraged, he caught the edge of my pallu and started weaving the pliant fabric in and out between his fingers.

  I glared at him.

  He gave the pallu a light tug.

  I yanked it back from him and stood up. 'I'm going outside,' I said.

  He raised one dark eyebrow lazily. It looked pretty cool, but I wasn't impressed. I'd seen him practise the gesture too many times when we were ten years old.

  'Longing to dance with Tits?' he enquired.

  'Dying to,' I returned.

  In one smooth movement, he reached out, grabbed my wrist and pulled me so hard I fell back on the sofa and came up close against his side with a thud. 'That's better,' he said smugly.

  Suddenly furious, I tried to break his grip but couldn't, and had to settle for twisting my face as far away from his as I could, which wasn't much.

  'You can't,' I said tightly, 'just walk into my life after nine years and try and revive some juvenile little romance. I've forgotten all about you.'

  He didn't say anything, just looked down at my averted face for a long time.

  Then, very deliberately, he bent his head and pressed a contrite, lingering kiss on the soft skin at the back of my neck. The same place where he'd once kissed me, my first kiss ever, eleven years ago.

  I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and heroically managed to stifle the stupid little sigh that threatened to escape my lips.

  He removed his hands, releasing me. Then he stepped back, shrugging his shoulders a little, and said formally, his public school accent suddenly prominent, 'You're right. My apologies. Please go outside if you wish.'

  But of course I didn't wish. I reached up, found his extra-large ears, pulled down his head and kissed him.

  ***

  Anything could have happened on that overstuffed sofa if somebody hadn't knocked on the door a few minutes later.

  I think it was the catering crew, passing though with some big utensils, but whatever it was, it brought me to my senses. I sat up quickly, ignoring Zain's groan of protest and started gathering my unspooled sari.

  Zain sat up, blinking, looking adorably confused, and demanded, 'Where are you going, idiot?'

  'Outside, of course!' I said, frantically tucking my pleats in. 'There are people out there! You'd better come too - your Sherry must be back at your stall by now, desperately seeking galouti!'

  He continued sitting there, his head tilted to one side. 'I like your hair like this,' he said.

  'Oh, I like your everything!' I returned fervently, throwing his achkan at him. 'Now come on out - but five minutes afte
r me, okay?'

  'O...kay...' I heard him mutter resignedly, and then I was out on the verandah again, picking up a glass of cool red sherbat from a passing bearer. My head was spinning.

  What was wrong with me? I'd never been much of a swinging party girl. I'd gone to university with some fairly cool guys, but I hadn't slept with a single one of them. Honest! I hadn't even wanted to. I'd hung on to the 'precious gift of my virginity' till I was twenty. Then I met a cute sensitive banker, just one measly banker, and got pretty serious with him. But it had ended badly, he claimed I didn't love him the way he wanted to be loved, and that was when I decided to get a job in Mumbai. There, I had a tepid two-month scene with a dark, sarcastic music engineer which had gone nowhere fast. That was the sum total of my sexual encounters. Some nice, callisthenic-type sex with the banker, one vastly unsatisfying session with the music engineer.

  And here I was, behaving like some feisty, get-on-the-carousel-boys chick and unbuttoning achkans like I did it every day of my life. And within sight of the Top Brass and most of the Praggus. Not to mention my grandmother. Who, I now saw, was on the podium, wishing the couple, handing over our present and posing for pictures. I smiled vaguely in her direction, sipped my drink and then sniffed the glass suspiciously. Had they laced the sherbat with some kind of aphrodisiac?

  'Jinni...?'

  Zain had emerged, looking incredible. His mouth was a little bruised. My doing, I thought, feeling appalled.

  'Can we just talk?' he asked.

  'What about?' I snapped, trying desperately not to remember how he'd looked with the achkan off.

  (Lean, taut, chiselled and honey gold.)

  Zain made a vague gesture in the air.

  'About... anything. Like, what you're doing here for instance. I thought you lived in Canada?'

  'I did,' I told him. 'I went to cartoon college there.'

  He looked a little startled.

  (Lean, taut, chiselled and honey gold.)

  'What I mean to say,' I continued, babbling moronically, 'is that I studied computer graphics and animation there. But then I got so India-sick I picked up a job at an animation studio in Mumbai.'