Vinod, of course, had his faults as well. He had a temper which he rarely displayed in front of me, but was apparently always willing to pick a fight if he deemed another to be driving badly. He had a lot of self-confidence – misplaced, in my belief – in his ability to beat up anyone if necessary. ‘Hum mein bahut taakat hain, madam,’ he said to me once, and I nodded while casting a doubtful eye over his skinny frame, estimating him to weigh about ten kilos less than me.
Vinod also tended to drive faster than necessary and sometimes had to be chastised by Vijay for this. I never noticed, as I was usually gazing dreamily out of the window at nothing, and in any case, he seemed to be a bit protective of me because he once confided to a colleague of mine, ‘Jab madam hoti hain gaadi mein, toh main hamesha araam se chalaata hoon.’
One evening, about a month after joining us, he admitted to having been in a scrap with the law, and we were very interested in knowing the details.
He said, ‘Sir, aaj hamara license chala gaya. Kal court se collect karna hain.’
‘Kyon, kya hua?’
Vinod explained, ‘Ek police-waala aaya aur hum sab driver pe chillaane laga … bola ki humne wrong parking ki hui hain. Par humne nahin ki thi, sir. Uss ke saath sab driver log ladne lage … aur … aur hume bhi gussa aa gaya, sir! Humne bhi police-waale ko keh diya!’
Vijay really wanted to know where this would go. ‘Toh kya kaha tumne?’
Vinod seemed too ashamed to continue. ‘Poochiye mat, sir … bas keh diya.’
Vijay coaxed him, getting ready to hear the choicest of Allahabadi abuses, ‘Bolo, na … kya kahaan … gaali de di kya?’
Vinod said with the air of someone getting something heavy off his chest, ‘Sir … humne police waale ko poochha, “Tumhe hawaldar banaya kisne?”’
And that was Vinod.
So there was no denying that we now had good help. Also indisputable was the beautiful sea view. But still, I missed our own home in Bangalore and the city itself. I found myself resenting Vijay’s insistence on moving to Mumbai due to some mad, completely inexplicable urge to experience sales in rural India. I tried to adjust to the situation and not complain, given that it had only been a short while since our move. Besides, at least he seemed to be enjoying his new job a lot more than the previous one, even though it was the opposite for me. But after all, sacrifice was what marriage was all about, right? It sucked.
2
The Social Circle
‘I really think we need to be more social,’ I announced to Vijay one evening as we sat alone in our sea-facing apartment.
It had been on my mind of late that despite our many similarities to Monica and Chandler, one thing that was strikingly different was that we had no friends to have coffee and laugh with on a daily basis. I was already beginning to visualize us in later years and wondered – when he and I turned eighty and seventy-three respectively, would we be the sort of antisocial, doddering old couple who would have no one to share their park bench with? Or more possibly, I thought, we might not even live to such an age since, according to some research report I had read on the internet, the higher rate of longevity was observed amongst people who maintained close relationships with friends throughout their lives.
The fact was that Vijay and I had been so wrapped up in each other in the last year or so that we didn’t hang out regularly with anyone else. I was still shuddering at the thought of imminent death by lack of bosom buddies, when Vijay agreed with me readily about our need to socialize.
‘Sure,’ he said, and added after a pause, ‘but with whom?’
I thought about it for a while and then admitted defeat. There was absolutely no one to socialize with. The problem was that while we were intermittently in touch with our older friends, Vijay and I still hadn’t found anyone we could both hang out with.
Vijay had once attributed this to the fact that I didn’t like any of his friends’ wives.
‘But they don’t like me,’ I protested.
Vijay raised an eyebrow and I admitted, ‘Oh, all right – it’s just that they are boring aunty-types.’
Since Vijay was so much older than me, so were his friends and their wives. They were all slightly balding, slightly potbellied, and had moustaches – the husbands that is, at least mostly – and of course, they also had their precious children whom they were always going on and on about.
I decided to go on the offensive. ‘You don’t like any of my friends either.’
‘That’s because they are all immature brats, just like y–’ Vijay saw the look in my eye in the nick of time, checked himself, and pretended to have a coughing fit.
In Bangalore too, it had only been towards the last few months that we had discovered that one of my friends called Manav actually met with Vijay’s approval.
‘Yeah, he’s one decent guy – can’t think of anything wrong with him,’ Vijay had admitted, a trifle reluctantly.
After this, we had insisted that poor Manav spend all of his free time with us, telling him that he was ‘our social circle’. Evening after evening, he would find himself sitting on our sofa while we chastized him for spending too much time at work and told him that he really should make more time for us.
Since Vijay and I had started hanging around with him so often, Manav was an unwilling witness to many of our arguments. He would find himself sitting around and twiddling his thumbs nervously while Vijay and I glared at each other in stony silence. He would eventually say, ‘Chalo, main nikalta hoon,’ and make as if to get up, but we would both turn towards him quickly and I would bark, ‘Sit, Manav. You are our social circle. You keep us sane.’ Vijay would nod along sullenly in agreement while Manav would sink back gloomily into his chair. And Vijay and I would go back to glaring stonily at each other while Manav recommenced twiddling his thumbs.
When we were leaving Bangalore, Manav seemed really eager to aid the process – he insisted on coming over to help us pack. He lifted heavy boxes with an unusual degree of enthusiasm and even drove us to the airport for our flight to Mumbai. I thought I saw tears in his eyes when it was time to say goodbye – possibly, tears of joy.
Now that we were starting afresh in Bombay, I was determined that the two of us would have a social life. After a great deal of reflection, I finally realized the problem.
‘You know what?’ I said brightly to Vijay. ‘The issue is that we don’t have even one solid, good set of couple-friends. Couple-friends are very important. Then we can do all sorts of couple-things together … like … like …’
‘Tennis doubles?’ Vijay suggested helpfully.
‘… trips and stuff,’ I finished a trifle lamely, distracted by his interference.
‘Sounds like a good idea,’ he said. ‘Got anyone in mind?’
I thought about it. ‘Well, almost all my batchmates are here – Atul is newly married …’
‘No way,’ he interjected. ‘No newly married couples. They are always all kootchy-kooey and annoying to be around.’
‘You mean like we were back in our younger days, when we were actually romantic with each other?’
‘Exactly,’ he shuddered. ‘Awful.’
‘Okayyy then,’ I said. ‘Should we go with your friends? Who do you know here?’
Vijay frowned and said, ‘Hmmm. There is this guy I knew at IIT, Mohit – he’s quite cool … I’ve met his wife also … Sheila or something …’
‘They got kids?’
‘Yes, two …’
‘Next!’ I said firmly.
‘Listen, Y,’ Vijay said earnestly. ‘This way we’ll never find anyone to hang out with together. You know what I think? Let’s just go with the flow and see what happens, right? Go about our lives as usual, and strike up new friendships in a natural way. It has to be spontaneous.’
‘Fine, fine.’ I agreed, but then a thought struck me and I continued, ‘Or, we could look at someone from our office. That way, we’ll all have something in common …’
‘Yes, that sounds spontaneous,�
� agreed Vijay, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘Why don’t you put up a sign on the noticeboard? I can see it now … “Wanted. Office Couple for Friendship with Like Minded Twosome. Acceptable Age Range Thirty-two to Thirty-four Only. Should Have No Issues. Must Live Near Bandstand. Female Half Should Ideally Be Hot Stuff ” … Wait, wait, honey! Come back … help me craft the job description … ha ha ha ha …’
As it turned out, our eventual couple-friends did indeed turn out to be someone from our office – at least one of them was.
Vivita, ubiquitously known as Vivi, worked on the same shampoo brand that I did, and I had been warned about her by my colleagues: ‘Watch out for her – she’s really weird.’ I was usually undaunted by weirdness. But once I met Vivi, I could see the point.
Vivi was the type of person who had no compunction with occasionally coming to office in the clothes in which she had slept the previous night. She had a flat on the office campus and reported to somebody in the regional team in Bangkok and being fond of her beauty sleep, she did not enjoy the early morning telephone conversations ‘with Bangkok’ as she put it, which were typically scheduled at 8 a.m. Therefore, on days that these were planned, she preferred to dispense with the formality of dressing, and appeared wearing brightly coloured slippers and pajamas, her short hair dishevelled, participating intermittently in the conversation with Bangkok on the speakerphone.
She confided in me once, that she had even participated in a telecon from her bathroom at home and no one had figured it out. ‘It was very early in the morning, and I can’t just go like that, you know? I need my time on the pot.’ I thought this fell in the category of ‘too much information’, but nodded along.
Apart from the sloppiness of the aforementioned early mornings, Vivi was a sharp dresser in general. She even had a range of stylish saris which she wore for important meetings, and her unique fashion sense made her stand out in the corporate environment.
She walked into the office one day, tall in her fashionably high heels, resplendent in a dark blue shimmery sari, her short hair all shiny and neatly styled with some sort of gel or spray. While we were exchanging pleasantries, I thought to myself that she looked wonderfully elegant today. Exactly at this point, she suddenly paused, ran her tongue over her teeth and declared, ‘Oh, you know what? I think I forgot to brush today!’ She then trotted over to the oral care department, to borrow from a confused brand manager a sample pack of toothpaste and a spare toothbrush, and headed to a nearby loo to correct her oversight.
Another time, all the managers in our company were to attend a speech given by an important British vice-president from the global headquarters. About half an hour into his speech, the door at the front of the auditorium, right next to the stage, creaked open and Madame Vivi poked her head through it. Undaunted by the fact that all eyes were staring at her, she boldly entered. After a couple of seconds, she seemed to lose her nerve slightly, but it was too late to turn back. So she scanned the packed room and spotted one empty seat right at the back and started heading for it. Unfortunately her attempt at subtly tiptoeing to it was rendered somewhat ineffective by the fact that she was wearing her most stylish heels that day. The bemused speaker’s speech was now punctuated by her quick ‘tick-tock-tick-tock’s. She soon realized that she was being a disruptive influence and slowed down, and began to take really long, slow strides in a manner reminiscent of the Pink Panther. All this did was to lengthen the space between each tick-tock, so it became ‘tick … tock … tick … tock’ instead. The speaker cleared his throat a couple of times but being of the foreign variety, politely continued talking and made no allusion to her, in spite of the fact that he had now lost the attention of almost everyone in the audience.
Vivi finally settled into her seat, and having regained her innate self-confidence, began looking around her and scanning the faces of all the people staring at her. She spotted me a few seats away and flashed me a friendly grin and waved excitedly. I resisted my first impulse to pretend that I didn’t know her, and after a second, smiled and nodded back at her.
‘This,’ I thought Casablanca-style, ‘could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’
Vivi and her bespectacled, lanky husband Anshul came over for dinner one evening and despite Vijay’s scepticism, which stemmed from my various confused attempts over the last few days to describe Vivi as a person, we all got along well. We sat in our living room, windows thrown open, the sound and smell of the waves outside creating just the right atmosphere for us to get to know each other. Vivi had a laugh that was penetrating and infectious, like a bell which clanged around inside your head but in a nice way. She spotted my guitar lying around and demanded that I play it – I complied and as I strummed, she sang along in a loud, clear, confident and almost completely tuneless voice.
It was revealed that Vivi had an unshakeable and possibly rather misplaced belief in her own talents. Some years back, she confided, she had seen an ad in the paper calling for singers and actors for a part in a musical being staged by a theatre group that travelled the world for their performances. Vivi called up her mother to prepare her for the fact that her daughter would shortly be quitting her corporate job and travelling the world, performing. Her mother, who appeared to have the same blind faith in her talents, assured her that she would be supporting her completely in this life-altering decision. Vivi went ahead for the audition, preparing the song ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. She performed confidently – and after only a few moments of stunned silence, the judges politely informed her that they were looking for an alto while she was clearly a soprano. Listening to her sing now, I could fully sympathize with them.
As the evening progressed, I noticed that Vijay seemed to be taking a shine to the earnest and slightly geeky Anshul, and was talking to him in a fairly animated way. Vivi and I were discussing movies, and for a moment, the men paused to listen to our conversation.
‘Have you seen this movie, French Kiss? It’s quite sweet.’
‘I’ve seen it and thought it was rather silly,’ was Vivi’s response.
‘It is silly of course, but it’s also rather funny. Meg Ryan is cute in it, and I even liked Kevin Kline’s role.’
At this, Anshul turned to Vijay and asked in a low voice, ‘Kevin Kline? Yeh kaun hain?’
Vijay explained confidently, ‘Wo chaddi hoti hain na …’
I was aghast. ‘No, that’s Calvin Klein. And is that all you have to say about a brand like that? Chaddi? ’
Anshul rushed to Vijay’s defense. ‘Arrey, nahin, yaar, achhi chaddi hoti hain …’
It looked like Vijay and I had found our couple-friends.
As the evening drew to a close, I sighed with satisfaction. Now that we had our social circle in place, we were finally all set to enjoy Mumbai – and the carefree, fun days ahead.
3
I’m WHAT?
I stood there in the cubicle of the toilet in our Churchgate office, staring at the little white strip with two pink lines on it. A range of emotions passed in a dizzying wave over me.
Shock. We were using protection. How could this be? We were just not ready for it.
Anger. This was all Vijay’s fault. Obviously. Everything was always his fault – but this time, it really was.
Suspicion. Could he have tampered with the protection? He had been going on about wanting a kid ‘someday soon’ since our wedding night.
Resentment. I was still only in my twenties, it was my time for self-exploration. What would happen to those various thrilling adventures that had yet to show up? What about my plans of climbing Mt Kilimanjaro? Okay, I hadn’t actually had any such plans, but now, I couldn’t very well have them, could I?
And then there was the fear. I was clearly going to be a horrible mother. Could you be too sarcastic to be a mother? Was there some sort of a threshold limit?
I leaned weakly against the door of the toilet and sighed. The truth of the matter was that I still hadn’t experienced any sort of maternal
pangs. I continued to be firm in my belief that children were pests who should be neither seen nor heard. They were too short, you couldn’t ever hope to have an adult conversation with one, and in general, in my closely guarded and privately held opinion, they were best described in the simple phrase ‘slightly icky’.
Except that this one was going be my icky child. Correction – our icky child.
Still in a daze, I slipped the pregnancy test into my purse – perhaps not the most hygienic move to make. I stepped out of the toilet and went to the third floor of the office, where I knew Vijay would be. We generally didn’t have much time for conversation while at the office, but in my judgement, this recent discovery fell in the category of those terribly serious conversations between married couples that begin with ‘We need to talk.’
He was sitting at his desk and as I came up silently behind him, I saw that he was busy working at his laptop, on some fancy excel file with sales numbers on it. I leaned over and said in a low, serious voice, ‘We need to talk.’
Without looking up, he said, ‘We-need-to-talk toh theek hain, par yeh kya numbers diye hain, saale?’ He was pointing to a row in the excel file. I stayed silent until he looked up at me. ‘Oh, hi. It’s you? I thought it was Satyendu. Why are you talking like a man?’
I bristled at being mistaken for his male team member. Wordlessly, I snapped open my purse to show him the ultimate proof of my femininity, if ever there was one.
He looked down and winced. ‘No, thanks. How old is that Kit-kat anyway? Do you ever clean this out?’
Irritated, I shoved my hand deeper into the purse, brushing the half-eaten bar of Kitkat and a few colorful rubberbands and pens aside, and dug out the pregnancy test. Looking around to see that no one was watching us, I held it up for him to see and hissed, ‘No, dummy. I’m pregnant.’
His brown eyes did their familiar shifty, fast-as-lightning flicker all around the room to confirm that no one was eavesdropping. A slow smile spread itself over his face. He whispered, ‘You’re pregnant? Really? Wow!’ And then his Florence Nightingale instincts kicked in and he jumped up to get me a chair. ‘You better sit down.’
JUST MARRIED, PLEASE EXCUSE Page 11