Mango Chutney: An Anthology of Tasteful Short Fiction.

by Gabbar Singh

  “Hello everyone, my name is Ananya,” she spoke in a soft, nervous tone and sat down on her seat before she could finish, probably to avoid more questions from the teacher. As soon as the first period ended, I exchanged seats with a classmate seated right behind her. The next teacher arrived and started taking attendance.

  “Hi!” I whispered. She didn’t reply, did not even turn her head. “Ananya, right? Hi!” I said again, louder this time. “Hi,” she replied, pivoting her head ever so slightly to the right.

  She was wearing shiny yellow earrings, which actually looked gawdy and a tad too grown-up. I hadn’t seen any girl wear such earrings in school before. For a moment, I thought of asking her if they were made of real gold, but I thought showing more interest in her earrings than her was not the prudent thing to do. She didn’t participate as much as I’d expected, which made me want to prod her more. I began to think of something, something crazy that would grab her attention.

  I made a fist of my right hand and started blowing air in it. The boy sit - ting next to me asked me to stop shaking my legs. I wasn’t aware that my movements were making the entire desk tremble, making it difficult for him to copy whatever nonsense the teacher was scribbling on the black- board. I gestured to punch him in his face. Scared, he pulled his head out of the direction of my punch, dropping his pencil on the ground. I smiled at him and spared his face. For he had shown the way forward for me. I took out a five-rupee note, my allowance to buy lunch, and dropped it near her school bag.

  “Hey, look there is a five rupee note near your bag. Is it yours?” I asked her. She looked down, picked up the note and said, “No, it isn’t mine but we should give it to the teacher. Shouldn’t we?” The next moment, before I could respond, she was at the teacher’s table, telling her that she had found a five-rupee note near her bag. I wondered if she really was that dumb or was trying hard to be one. It was going to be a long and hungry day for me at school.

  “Were you in a girl’s school or what? You don’t talk to boys at all?” I asked her abruptly, while poking her back with the tip of my sharpened pencil. “Ouch!” she exclaimed. “What’s happening over there?” the teacher asked.

  “I broke my pencil’s tip ma’am,” she said. Everyone laughed. Thankfully, the teacher went back to her chores. “Thanks!” I said. “Why are you bothering me?” “Because I want to get to know you.” “Idiot.” “Thanks.” “Stupid.” “Thanks, again.” I heard her giggling, before she said, “Mental case.”

  I imitated her giggles and thanked her again. I enjoyed every morsel of at - tention that I got from her, troubling her all day long by the end of which she got used to my constant need to get noticed. I looked at her during lunch break from a distance, while scavenging food from my friends. She was sitting amongst a bunch of girls, gabbing over their open lunch boxes, gobbling food from each other’s. She didn’t look at me even once during the break. Lost in thought and scheming to get her attention, I did not register any of Rajan’s supremely dull tales that he felt I was obligated to listen to since I was foraging for food from his lunchbox.

  The canteen was searing hot. She broke into a sweat as soon as she en - tered, beads of sweat on her forehead resembling carefully set pearls in a necklace. Every now and then, one would break free and travel down her face before being mopped into a starched handkerchief that never seemed to leave her left hand. She raised her eyebrows and breathed heavily be- fore and after every mouthful, as if she were climbing stairs. She was quite the talkative one, just not with boys. She would use both her hands to make all the girls around her understand her point. She looked more mature. And beautiful, too, unlike the rest of my female classmates. Like Aishwarya Rai. I, on the other hand, behaved like the creep who stalks her from a distance. I did not dare tell her that she resembled Aishwarya Rai. I wanted to. I decided to wait for the right moment.

  *** Over the next few weeks, we became close friends, thanks to all my taunt - ing, done with careful deliberation and an astute knowledge of the con- sequences. Eventually, I told her that it was I who had put the five-rupee note near her bag on the first day of the school to seek her attention. She was surprised; I didn’t think she would be.

  As if retaliating, she took me to task ever since I revealed my primal act of desperation. She deemed it her responsibility to improve my illegible handwriting. One could never tell the difference between the way I wrote ‘l’, ‘p’ and ‘f’; they all looked the same,: fate could be pate or late, nobody knew but myself. Sometimes even I didn’t.

  She surprised me when, asked to sing her favorite song in Music class, she chose to sing “O Mere Sona Re Sona Re Sona Re”. Nadeem-Shravan used to rule the music charts back then – you either sang Yaara O Yaara Milna Hamaara or Tu Shaayar Hai, yet she picked a thirty-year-old song. I wondered who made her listen to such music.

  She surprised me when she gifted me a set of six differently-coloured pens before the semester exams so that I could write my answers neatly, and differentiate between the questions and the answers. She cared for minute details that I never would care about, like underlining a definition or marking the heading in all-capitals. She told me that I should put a colon after every ‘Q’ and ‘A’. She wanted me to be perfect, like she was.

  She surprised me when after the winter vacations she told me that she had missed me. The year was about to end. We had known each other for nine months. I still hadn’t told her that she looked like Aishwarya Rai. We were inseparable those days, and I figured that I’d tell her when the right time came.

  Three years passed and we continued to remain inseparable. ***

  Time is a master craftsman of a completely different league. It had been only thirty-six months since we first met, and a lot had changed. She had had her nose pierced and wore a black nose ring in sharp contrast to her complexion. The length of the skirts of my other female classmates was getting shorter every year, whereas Ananya had started to wear full-length salwar-kameez. She wore her dupatta, properly pinned at the shoulders, hanging down on her uniform like a drape. The way she walked had changed as well. She had begun to walk slowly, as if she weren’t walking, but floating an inch above the ground with a womanly elegance, an aura that one could perceive. Her presence turned a lot of heads and I became progressively protective of her. I walked her home every day after school, even though it was a rather long detour for me. She would hold my arm with both her hands while walking. I assured her many times, “I am not going to disappear and leave you alone. You can let go of my arm for a change!” to which she always had an innovative reply, some funny, some endearing and the rest, downright ridiculous. “Are you planning an escape mister?”, “The princess doesn’t want to let go!”, “I would let go if you let me hold on to the other one!”, “Why don’t you simply tell me that my nails are hurting you?”, “What, now you want me to hold your legs?”, “I thought we had a contract that I am allowed to hold your arm as long you are allowed to walk me home every day!”, “The day I don’t feel like, I won’t! But today, I want to”, “Why do you have a problem when your arm doesn’t?” and “It’s the best feeling to have you by my side, annoyed!” Little did she know I enjoyed it too, that I was just putting on a show, as if I was the macho guy who didn’t like being touched. In reality, I was far, far from what I pretended to be. Perhaps she knew that.

  I begged my female cousins to hold my arm just the way Ananya did but no one was better at it than her. She would hold my arm just above the elbow, and as we walked, she would let her hand slowly give in to the gravity and let it travel downwards towards my wrist. She would hold it there, at my wrist, neither grasping it nor letting go, like the atmosphere around earth, helping it brim with life and at the same time, protecting it from the debris of outer space. It was during one such walk that we made a pact to always stay in touch after school, even if we ended up in different colleges. I liked the thought of it, the thought of her constant presence, real or virtual.

  *** It was the last sessio
n of school. Valentine’s Day of the year 2000 was about a month away. The millennium was about to end. Everybody seemed desperate to spend the last Valentine’s Day of the millennium with ‘someone special’. Ananya wasn’t. One day, I asked her about it.

  “I have already found mine!” she said. I had no idea how to react. How could someone just say something like that without any regard for the other person’s feelings? Why couldn’t she have told me already that she liked somebody?

  “What? You like someone?” “Yes! I am going to tell him on this Valentine’s Day that I like him,” she said with a smile. I had known her for so long; she hadn’t talked about any boy with me. What if it was me? She hadn’t kept a secret from me ever. If there was someone else she was attracted to, she would have definitely told me. But she hadn’t, so, that just confirmed that it must have been me! I realized that I couldn’t be more desperate and self-centered.

  I grabbed her hand and asked, “Who is he?” “Patience,” she replied, looking right into my eyes. There was a rare glint in her eyes. She didn’t attempt to release her hand from my grip. I could hear my heart pound. The power of that moment was so strong that I could hear blood rushing through my veins as water runs through a pipeline, the fluttering of my eyelids as a bird takes its first flight of the morning. At that moment, I had three trillion ears.

  The next day onwards, I pestered her about the mystery guy that I now hated. Except of course, if it was me in which case I had a lot of respect for him. She said she didn’t want to tell me yet, that she was waiting for the right moment.

  “But why wouldn’t you just tell me?” I asked. “But why wouldn’t you just wait?” she replied.

  For the first time in three years, I was not completely sure about what she was doing or thinking. She was different every day. She would ask me questions irrelevant to the situation we were in, like “What do you like to eat in winters?” “What places would you like to travel if you had money?” “Which books would you like to read other than course books?” She seemed to want to know all about me. Her eyes sparkled whenever she looked at me. Her gaze didn’t stop at my eyes, but went further upwards and downwards. My eyebrows, my eyelids, my nose, my lips, my forehead, my unshaved beard, my ears, my hair, everything, I could feel it photo- copying my face. Somehow, I controlled the urge to hold her face in my hands, tell her eyes to stop traveling all across my face and kiss her right there.

  Two weeks before Valentine’s Day, she disappeared. Whoosh! No intima- tion, no information, no news. Ananya was gone. Some friends said her father had gotten transferred to a new city. Some said she was avoiding Valentine’s Day on purpose, as if to make a point. Teachers said she must be preparing for the finals that were due in an- other two weeks after Valentine’s Day. According to me, these were the stupidest reasons one could ever give. They didn’t know her. I did. They weren’t in love with her. I was. They weren’t waiting for the right mo- ment. I was.

  I waited for a couple of days for her to show up. I had thought of every possible reason for her absence. I could stick to none. When my curiosity almost killed me, I decided to go all the way to her house. I had prepared a list of questions in my quiver that I was going to shoot at her. After school, I rushed towards her house, only to find a big lock hanging at the entrance, mocking me.

  Even to this day, I don’t know where she disappeared. I refuse to cel - ebrate Valentine’s Day, even with the girl I am presently in a relationship with. Call me stupid or a hopeless romantic. Not that they are very differ- ent from each other. I have honestly tried to get over Ananya, to get over the relationship that never even started. But whenever I have tried to do so, I have ended up feeling sadder than the last time. Those who say they know it all, say there is an age when people fall in love; they say it was just infatuation, that love cannot happen at such a tender age. But, I don’t believe them. The fact that we are born out of love means that we, at all times, have had all the love that two people shared at a certain moment. We love our family, friends, even gadgets and toys since childhood. Why, then, do we have to be mature enough to love a person for a lifetime?

  It doesn’t matter where she disappeared, neither does it matter if she felt the same way about me as I did about her. What matters is that she could have told me that she did, but she didn’t. What matters is that I could have told her too, and I didn’t. Both of us waited for the right mo- ment, and that moment passed right through us. Now it is too late to find her, tell her that she looked like Aishwarya Rai. I wish someone told her, though. Or she might have discovered the resemblance herself. But that is unlikely; she was never a slave to reflective surfaces.

  I hope she is in love with that someone. And I just pray they haven’t named their daughter Aaradhya; that would be way too filmy, even for her.

  ***

  8. Tainted Red

  Aathira Jim

  Renuka was trained for marriage from the time she could remember. To cook. To make idlis soft and fluffy. To make sambhar, a bit on the tangy side. To roll the dough for rotis just perfect so they don’t stick. To make them the perfect geometric rounds. The perfect way to fold clothes. To iron them, so that the creases look crisp and neat. And so when her parents found Arjun, the perfect groom, soft spoken and handsome, well-educated and settled in the US, a green card holder no less, she was confident.

  The wedding was a grand affair: she was decked in jewelry and wrapped in the richest pomegranate-red kanchipuramsilk-saree that flattered her dusky skin; no one noticed the nervousness and uncertainty in her eyes that she hid so well. Or of how fidgety her slender hands were. The way they shook when she bid farewell to her old life. Or how, when she cried after the wedding, her tears were mistaken for homesickness.

  How tough can it be to do all those little things she was trained for, with - out supervision? A week into the marriage, she flew with him to start her new life in an unknown country. In a strange place, filled with strange people. The weather was unpredictable: sometimes bright and sunny, at other times rainy and gloomy. She got stares walking on the streets in a saree, with the bright red parting in her coconut oil-laden hair. The one time she attempted to blend in with the crowd in a blue jeans and tank top, she felt strangely naked.

  Her husband, Arjun, didn’t say much. He remained immersed in his re - search and that was all she knew. How on earth would she make friends if she couldn’t speak English without a strong accent! The place was filled with skyscrapers and was a sea of people, who despite their differences fascinated her with their busy lives. Like butterflies flitting from one flow- er to another, each one seemed too busy gathering their own nectar to notice the others. She spent her time taking long walks in the park nearby or browsing at the local Indian provision store. Renuka enjoyed those walks by herself. Those everyday things that people tended to, tediously, brought her joy, even if it was short-lived. A mother pushing her baby in a pram, a child laughing, lovers meeting. So many relationships – yet each one unique, delicate and sacrosanct.

  Till the day she noticed the young guy in black. He was young, probably in his early twenties. With skin like melted chocolate and messy hair that looked like he ran his fingers though it all the time. Tall and lanky, un- kempt and unruly. He was dressed all in black as if afraid of colour; his eyes stared at her with an intensity that was unsettling.

  He was probably just a couple of years younger or maybe the same age as she was. But she felt too old in the saree that was draped carelessly around her lithe figure, in the way her body was devoid of any jewelry except for the simple gold fare that adorned her ears, and the fact that she wore no makeup.

  At first, she pretended to ignore him. What did he want? A bead of sweat trailed along her back, moistening her blouse. Like a parched throat that craves water, a longing, to be held and caressed, that she had not known existed, welled up inside her. And she was acutely aware of it.

  The next time she saw him was in the park. It was the very next day; he sat by the bench, nursing a
cup of coffee, watching her and following her every move with his brooding eyes. Was he waiting for her?

  She continued to see him, daily on her walks in the park, in the pub - lic library that she frequented often. But they never spoke; they merely walked past each other as if they were strangers. As they rightly were.

  But he was there when she went home and began to chop vegetables for lunch. He was there watching her as she nursed her pinky finger when the knife had slipped. Also when she served Arjun his tea in the evenings; with her, he would watch the tea become cold. He was there in the bath- room with her while she took her evening shower. He was there when she braided her long hair that lay like a thick black snake across her back. On those nights that her husband felt like making love to her, he was there more than ever.She looked away and smiled when she was underneath him. It was anything but love. That reminded her of the Titanic and how it sunk, with its promises of love and togetherness. Maybe her life too, was like that dreary ship, without the romance in a vintage car, of course. Her ship was boring and she was weighing it further down with her ob- ligations as a wife. She tried to seal the tiny holes that appeared but the water always managed to trickle in.

  Until on a Friday evening, when he took the plunge and asked her out for coffee. She was browsing the fiction section at the bookshop when he walked up to her. Up close, he towered over her. His voice, when he spoke, reminded her of the monsoon nights back home. She wanted to get drenched in his words, in the same manner that she would in the No- vember showers that she secretly loved.