by Durjoy Datta
‘Sure,’ he mumbles from under the relentless, almost vicious, munching.
‘How do you look?’ I ask. ‘Not that it matters, but you know, just like that. I’m curious.’
‘Didn’t your dad tell you?’
‘As a person who goes by what people tell her, I have noticed that guys don’t describe other guys very well. Dad only describes other men as he’s okay or he isn’t nice. You’re okay.’
‘Thank God!’ he responds. ‘If you go by what the current standards for being hot or nice or good-looking are, I’m at the dimmest end of the spectrum. I’m almost embarrassing . . .’
‘I’m sure you’re not,’ she says. ‘And even if you are, I don’t think it matters. The first thing everyone says about Dad is that he’s attractive, which is strange because he’s a really nice person and no one talks about that.’
‘Your blind wisdom. Just the best.’
‘Eyes complicate stuff,’ I say.
‘Stupid eyes, always ruining everything,’ he agrees.
We finish our lunch, walk around the amusement park, and he keeps clicking pictures of me, which no one else has ever done. Except Dad.
‘Oh, damn,’ he exclaims suddenly. ‘Wait here. Don’t go anywhere. And if someone grabs you, tell them that you’re not a Disney character, although you might be as cute.’
‘But—’
He’s gone.
And then I feel something soft against my face. Like a snout. With fur.
‘What’s it?’ I ask.
‘I found your exact replica. The first time I saw you, I remember thinking to myself that you’re like a stuffed toy, but out of production. But I found you here. You’re the inspiration behind . . . LOLA! This yellow-coloured bundle of joy. Look at her, I mean touch her, she’s exactly like you,’ he says excitedly.
‘You have lost it, Deep! Have you been drinking?’ I ask, steeling myself, to hide that inside I’m mush, I’m melting.
‘I’m sorry. But she really does look like you,’ he insists.
‘You’re such a kid,’ I say, still not ready to give into his sweet talk, because if I do, I’m going to grope him and eat him up.
‘I just love Disney characters!’ he defends himself and it’s so cute that I throw myself at him and hug him and mumble ‘That’s so cute!’
‘Who’s Lola, by the way?’ I ask, caressing the stuffed toy, which has big eyes and a round bottom, in my hand.
‘Bugs Bunny’s girlfriend,’ he says. ‘I used to be an authority on Disney characters till the time Dragon Z came and spoiled it all.’
He leads me to other rides, some of which involve getting on a boat and finding ourselves in the middle of a fake tropical rainforest which sounds very real. He makes me pose for pictures wearing headgear inspired from all things Disney.
‘Are you Bugs Bunny?’ I wanted to ask him.
21
I literally had to drag Deep out of Disneyland. By the end of it, I was sure he wanted to get himself an Aladdin costume and dress me up like Minnie Mouse.
‘I have no intention of going back to watching television again,’ he says. He’s had too much cotton candy.
‘We are not going back to the hotel. We are just going some place quieter,’ I say. ‘Find the bus terminal on the map and look for the bus that goes to Tai O.’
‘Tai O?’ he repeats after me and I hear him shuffling to check his map. He’s good at this stuff. Also at holding hands, and making me feel like a cute Disney character. That also makes me wonder how good he is at kissing, which I ask him when I get on the bus.
‘When was the last time you kissed anybody?’ I ask. He falls over me as the bus turns, probably negotiating a sharp turn.
‘That would be never,’ he says. ‘This looks exactly like the road to Shimla or Nainital. Oh, look. This is an entire different island. We were here, on the Hong Kong Island, and now we are on Lantau Island. We will take the ferry back to the hotel.’
He conveniently ignores that I asked him a question and becomes a Lonely Planet guide, telling me about the cluster of islands that are collectively called Hong Kong, expressing shock over how we traversed over water in a Metro and we didn’t even notice, and how excited he is to go back to the island where our hotel is on a ferry. I tell him that we can also choose to go back to the Hong Kong Island using a cable car which is the longest cable car in Asia and separates one from the water and forests below by just a glass floor, but he’s scared and tells me that the ferry’s a more romantic option. I try to convince him, since Dad told me the views from the cable car are terrific and terrifying, beautiful and overwhelming, but he says he doesn’t take heights very well. As if I didn’t remember that from the day we went on the observatory deck.
‘You have never kissed anyone?’ I ask again.
‘I’m saving it for my wife.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Of course not, but you made it sound like it’s so odd that I haven’t kissed anyone. On a scale of 1 to 10 on how kiss-worthy a person is, I am a minus hundred.’
‘I don’t buy that,’ I say and put my head on his shoulder, partly because I’m tired, partly because he’s never been kissed, and mostly because he’s not holding my hand, I miss his touch.
‘How have you been doing in the kissing business?’ he asks shyly.
‘I have kissed three, and though the quality has been questionable, I think I’m doing okay in terms of quantity,’ I declare, wondering if he will think of me as promiscuous and try kissing me, which I totally wouldn’t mind.
‘When it comes to kissing, quality trumps quantity. That’s like the only rule to kissing,’ he responds.
‘For someone who has not kissed, you sure do know a lot of rules,’ I smirk.
‘That’s how I roll.’
It takes us about an hour to reach Tai O, home to a small fishing community. This is where I first came a year back with Dad and fell in love with the quietness of the place—a far cry from the relentless buzzing activity of the Hong Kong Island.
‘Where is the village?’ I ask him and he says he’ll check the map. We walk around like headless chickens, asking people for directions to the village and when we finally get there, it’s familiar once again. The narrow winding lanes with the small houses that Deep describes to me, the sound of wind unhindered by the high-rises, the creaking of small doors, the barking pet dogs, it all comes back to me in a rush of memories.
‘Be careful,’ Deep says, as he holds my hand tighter and asks me to walk closer to him.
‘Where are we?’ I ask, a little alarmed. The wind has picked up and it’s hitting my face and I can smell the sea.
‘Umm, we are literally over the sea, and I’m not misusing the word literally. The village is built over water, and the passageways . . . hey, careful! are leading us from one house to another. I think we just entered someone’s house—and there are fishing nets and rusted air-conditioners lying about, also there are like these motor boats tied to the wooden pillars these houses stand on. I’m sure this is someone’s home, hey, there’s a dog there! It’s so quiet and so beautiful. I think the bus just dropped us to the 1800s. It’s like Venice made out of wood. Truly, it is the Venice of the Orient,’ he says, ‘let’s just sit here.’
He makes me sit with my legs dangling over the edge and tells me that we could be sitting on someone’s veranda, but as he notes from the guide book that he has been reading, people in the Tai O village community don’t mind mingling, and often passageways pass through living rooms.
‘The sun’s setting,’ he says. ‘The sea is about to swallow the sun only so it can spit it out somewhere else.’ Then he puts his hand around my shoulder and I snuggle into his armpit, and it’s not weird, just really romantic. Of the few moments that I do feel like seeing, this is one of them. I want to see the sun set, I want to see the small waves Deep describes. I want to watch the village folks immerse themselves in their daily work, fish, sell their produce in the local market, which is flocked
by tourists, come back home and live in their tiny huts suspended over the sea. I really want to see.
‘Have you been in love?’ Deep asks softly, which is really weird because he never says things like this.
‘I don’t know what love is,’ I respond. It’s true.
‘Ditto. The closest I have ever been in love is with Holly Smale,’ he says.
‘I thought I was your biggest conquest ever overseas,’ I smirk.
‘She’s a geek turned failed supermodel turned geek author,’ he clarifies. ‘And you will never be a conquest. I’m like Alexander the Great and you’re India. I end with you,’ he mumbles.
I’m mush.
We are back on the bus, and while he has dozed off, I’m still thinking of his Alexander the Great analogy. I hate boys for this very reason. They say things in the heat of the moment, oblivious to the fact that they have just created a bunch of cocoons inside our stomachs, which would transform into butterflies every time they talk to us from then onwards.
I end with you.
I mean seriously, did he just have to say that? He could have just said, I’m Alexander the Great and you’re India. You give me cholera and I go back to Persia and die a slow death while my soldiers mutiny against me. That would have been so much better. I would have been sleeping as well.
He’s still asleep when the bus stops and I can hear people walking off the bus.
‘Hey, Deep?’ I shake him up. ‘I think people have got off the bus.’
‘Huh?’ He wakes up with a start. ‘Damn. Was I drooling? Did you see?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
My Alexander the Great, the man who named twenty cities after his name, sleeps with his mouth open, salivating on himself.
‘Where are we?’ he asks, shocked, and then I feel him pull out his map again. ‘Oh no. We took the wrong bus!’
‘Where are we?’ I ask. I’m lost with a drooling boy, but it feels okay.
‘This is Po Lin Monastery and the Giant Buddha,’ he tells me. ‘Do you want to roam about here? The next bus is in twenty minutes.’
‘I would love to!’ I say.
A familiar scent engulfs us, reminds me of the incense of the Man Mo temple, and Deep tells me it’s much like that, only bigger, the gold and red more pronounced. Through Deep’s running commentary I find out that there are flowers arranged in beautiful patterns on the stairs that lead to the main praying area, where gold-coloured statues await us, enclosed in wooden and gold casing. There is a huge bell he wants to ring but says it’s written that it is forbidden to do so. He tells me there are little red-coloured cushions we can rest our knees on and pray. It’s very quiet and peaceful. Deep’s voice comes down to a whisper.
‘I don’t want to miss this,’ he says, and lets go of my hand, which scares me, and adds, ‘Let’s pray?’
I close my eyes, and start praying, but I’m thinking of him, which makes me feel guilty, but I’m still thinking of him, so I give up and open my eyes and wait for him to finish. Once done, he leads me down the steps of the monastery and tells me that I have to pose again.
‘You can’t miss clicking a picture in front of these flowers!’ he exclaims. ‘Your dad will be so happy when he sees this.’ He makes me pose on the steps, in front of the monastery, in front of what he describes as a big steel tub—he cannot tell what it is used for—and in front of the twelve fierce warriors who protect the worshippers during the twenty-four hours of the day, each taking two-hour shifts. Very practical gods indeed!
‘Do you want to go up?’ he asks. ‘It’s about two hundred stairs. We’ll probably miss the next bus, but we can take the one after that.’
‘What awaits us on top of the stairs?’
‘Precisely what it says here, a very large Buddha. The biggest I have ever seen really,’ he says and adds after a second. ‘Also, some statues that are praying.’
‘What do we have to lose?’
We start walking up the stairs and it’s harder than I imagined it would be. The first fifty stairs were a breeze, but now my breath is laboured, and I attribute it to my utter lack of exercise. I spent the first five years of my life hoisted six feet off the ground, in Dad’s arms, and the next thirteen, I have spent constantly sweeping my cane in semi-circles, and I have been told I shouldn’t ever be in any kind of hurry. I might do a lot of walking, but most of it is slow and measured, and stairs for me is a death trap.
We take five breaks before we reach there, and I’m tired and exhausted. ‘Now what?’ I ask.
‘We talk to the big guy,’ he says.
‘You just talked to him downstairs,’ I argue.
‘This one is a different flavour,’ he quips, and quite frankly, I am shocked he remembers what I said that day. But he’s right, you have to walk up, get tired, show your commitment to God, to get your wishes fulfilled. It’s a lesson for life. Meet people halfway. It’s something Dad always tells me.
We sit on the stairs in silence. And then Deep tells me that he can sit there and look at the panoramic view of the Lantau island, green and vast and quaint, for days at end. He tells me it feels like time has stopped at the prettiest moment of all of history. He slips his fingers into mine and it’s so beautiful and complete that I want to cry. I just want to cry. I don’t know why but I do want to cry.
‘What did you say to the big guy?’
‘I like his curls,’ he says.
‘Seriously.’
‘I can’t tell you what I asked for,’ he says. ‘It won’t come true otherwise.’
‘I told you mine.’
‘The ones you asked for yourself, not the one you asked for me,’ Deep argues.
‘You wished something for me?’ I ask, positively, happily shocked.
‘Who else would I wish for?’ he responds.
Deep is my favourite type of boy.
22
The ferry pushes off from the harbour, and Deep’s jumping on his seat, looking over, and constantly asking me to, ‘Look!’ and then apologizing. He tells me there is only water in front of us as far as his eyes can see, and that the million light bulbs of the Hong Kong Island are like twinkling stars in the sky, and how completely immersed in the world he feels while the ferry is cutting through water that is engulfing it completely. ‘It’s like being lost, yet not so.’
‘It all comes together now,’ he says, ‘the yachts, the smaller vessels, the big tankers, not colliding into each other, but how do you think they managed this in the olden times? It must have been crazy back then!’
I want him to keep talking. He’s gone from holding my hand, to caressing it and I just want that to keep going. The ferry feels faster than I thought it would be. I can feel I’m on water, floating, in a transition, going towards land, and hope, and Dad on the other side. Suddenly, it’s breezy and I’m cold, and before I can tell him, he wraps an arm around my shoulder. I feel calmed, and a sense of relief flows over me.
‘The sun has almost set. The water looks as if embellished with tiny diamonds. The buildings are still very far away,’ he says.
Any other boy would have just said, ‘It’s dark, let’s go home,’ I think to myself.
I close my eyes and pretend I’m asleep because I want to soak in this moment and not talk. He, too, doesn’t say a word for the rest of the ferry ride, except once when he tells me that it’s darker now and he can see the lights faraway, that it feels like he and I are the only ones left behind after an apocalypse, and that it feels so right. He says it in the air and I’m not sure if he is speaking to me, but I have goosebumps all over my body.
‘We are here,’ he says, ‘And I think your phone’s ringing.’
It’s indeed ringing. Even with my supposedly superhuman ears, I couldn’t hear it ring. ‘Hi, Dad . . . I’m with Deep . . . A little . . . with him? . . . Okay . . . we will take a cab . . . okay.’
‘What did he say?’ he asks.
‘What do you think about having dinner with Dad and a friend of his?’<
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‘That it’s scary and I would rather jump into this freezing water and die?’
‘He’s not that bad! Why do you say that?’
‘Because he’s perfect and I’m not, because he’s handsome and I’m not, and mostly because I want him to think of me as a good boy, and the more I meet him, the more I will be at risk of spoiling my image,’ he explains.
‘Why do care so much?’
‘Because he’s your dad,’ he answers and shuts me up. We catch a cab and he waits for me to say something.
‘We are still going, right?’ I ask.
‘I would never say no to you.’
I smile. Seriously, this boy has to stop being a male protagonist from a cheesy Nicholas Sparks book.
‘Take us to Jordan, Temple Street Night Market.’
When we meet Dad and Sadhika, they are shopping. Deep tells me that both their hands are full of gigantic shopping bags, and they tell us that they are still not done.
‘Your Dad is quite the shopper,’ Deep says. ‘He and his lady friend are devouring every shop. And strangely, your dad is better at the bargaining bit. He’s a pro.’
‘He took oestrogen shots when Mom died to cope up with my Mom needs.’
‘I’m glad he took those. Because right now he’s just an old Taylor Lautner, but without those, who knows, he might have been Conan the Barbarian.’
‘I need to tell Dad this!’
‘If you don’t like me, you can just tell me. Why this elaborate ruse to get rid of me?’ he asks and we laugh.
He tells me all the stuff Dad’s buying, which is embarrassing, and he’s scared that the bags Dad’s carrying might explode, at which point Dad and Sadhika each buy a suitcase and dump all their items in them and calmly roll on. Deep is appalled at Dad’s stamina to shop in a street market, a trait attributed predominantly to young women, but he blames it on the street shops, which are lit up like Christmas tress, much like the rest of Hong Kong, and are selling everything from shoes, umbrellas shaped like guns (which Dad bought), role play costumes that Deep refuses to describe, tiny tea sets, huge tea sets, headphones in a bazillion colours, gambling sets, and Hong Kong T-shirts that say, ‘The Wonders Never Cease’. He tells me about the little trinkets, pieces of jewellery, and souvenirs and paintings that the shopkeepers are selling, driving bargains that are quite hard to resist. Deep buys a handbag for his mom at a throwaway price and can’t stop telling me about how pretty it is. The street, which is enveloped by these little shops is never-ending and seductive, Deep says, and a sharp contrast to the luxury brands whose showrooms glitter in gold and silver and are lined almost all throughout the landscape of Hong Kong. It’s addictive, he adds.