There is a long queue of girls behind us, who need to make space for more alcohol in their system. So we step aside. The music is really loud and peppy here and I want to dance, but Di wants to go talk to Radhika, so we go back to the table. She was the one who invited Radhika to join us for today’s dinner. I agreed because she is Samir’s friend and it will be good for the reality show to see us as a couple.
Radhika gives Di a warm, glowing smile and they both excitedly start chatting about the project Di is doing for her. Apparently, Radhika handles the marketing for Deepak’s family business. They manufacture and supply kitchen equipment to all major hotels in India and London. Didi is thrilled to build their web presence. I notice that Radhika is not being mean to Di. There is almost a look of respect for Di in her eyes as she listens to Di talk about project ideas. Strangely, I feel even more hurt as if Radhika considers Di good enough to be her friend but not me.
The waiter refills everyone’s glass and brings oven-fresh pizzas. We all eat and there is light banter floating around. Anusha seems to have fun ignoring Varun. He deserves it. Didi has had a drink and is laughing a lot now. She also keeps giving Samir and me these cute-puppy looks. And she has made us pose at least half a dozen times so she can whatsapp the pics to Ma-Papa. Tired of posing and smiling, we both turn our backs to Didi and she clicks a picture of our backs too. We look at each other, sigh, and utter ‘Sisters!’ in a sort-of exasperated manner. And in that moment of shared misery, something clicks between Samir and me. It is beautiful. It is heavenly. It is almost like love. In that instant, I decide to drop my mask and be myself. I decide to stop analysing if he is faking his love and if I am not. I decide to just enjoy the present moment with him. Like a butterfly who counts not months but moments and has time enough. I decide that a few moments of love are better than a lifetime of missed opportunities.
The evening is spectacular especially after I start being myself. Samir and I are both a little tipsy, crooning ‘Saari night besharmi ki height’, which was playing on the dance floor as we left. We are all walking out to the parking lot, when Varun takes me aside, and says, ‘Looks like I will need to bribe you again.’
‘I don’t take bribes from irresponsible fathers,’ I snub him as politely as I can. Well, if Anusha really is still his dil ki deal, he has to accept the buy-one-get-little-one combo she comes with. He gives me a look that says that he has no idea what I am talking about, but I promptly walk away. And then Samir comes back for me, takes my hand, and pulls me away with him to his car. We drive home together, screaming the same song on top of our voices. We stop at a red light and I open a bottle to drink some water.
‘Why do I get this feeling sometimes that you actually love me?’ He asks sweetly.
‘Maybe, because I do love you at those times,’ I reply logically, with full confidence. Am I the only one who feels that alcohol makes the logical side of the brain work faster?
‘I love you too,’ he mumbles cutely.
‘I think you are just saying this because you are drunk,’ I counter. See, again I am being so rational.
‘So are you,’ he counter counters.
‘I am perfectly in my hosh,’ I claim. ‘You can ask me any question to test.’
‘Why did you leave me in Goa?’
‘Because I thought you were using me to get inspiration for your book,’ I am amazed at how well I have summed it up, given that I myself hadn’t figured it out before now.
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘I guess I don’t like to be used by people I love.’ That makes so much sense! God! I am ingenious.
‘And now you are using me?’
‘Yeah,’ I beam with an inebriated smile.
‘So does that mean you don’t love me?’
I know he is sounding emotional, but I think he may not be drunk at all. He is asking way too many inferential questions. I take a deep breath and straighten my slumping back.
‘I love you and that is the reason why I am using you, silly!’ I reason. Okay, I agree I am getting a little incoherent now.
‘Same difference.’
I shake my head rejecting his explanation. ‘It’s not same because you can never be happy with loving only me forever.’
‘And you can?’
‘What loving me? Of course!’ I laugh amused by my own joke.
‘No, loving me,’ he says, all needy and looking sticky-toffee-cake delectable.
‘I can never be happy loving anyone else,’ There. I have bared my heart. I just hope I don’t regret it in the morning.
‘What about Vir?’
‘What about him?’
‘Aren’t you guys like serious?’
I sense some jealousy. It makes me feel wanted. I debate whether to let him on the truth about Vir’s virtuality.
‘Vir really loves me…but…hicc…you know what’s his problem? He is too good to be true,’ I say, sort of sliming through the question. So I don’t make myself totally available, but I leave the door open for possibilities.
I am pleased to see the effect of my half-truth on Samir. His sultry eyes glitter with desire to win me over. We all want what we can’t have. It’s human nature. He parks the car in the basement slot and leans over the steering wheel to kiss me.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ I say and open the door to get out.
‘Why?’ He locks the car and quickly comes around to my side. He holds my hand to keep me steady.
I refuse his support and walk a few steps in a straight line. Then I stop and puke all over his car.
‘I am sorry. Can we kiss another time?’ I apologize and then I pass out. So much for playing hard to get!
Jab We Met
Have you ever walked on a road just because it is beautiful, even though it takes you nowhere in particular? These last two weeks, living with Samir has been a journey like that for me. Sometimes smooth like his flirting, sometimes messy like his futon, but all the while evocative like his photography!
To be honest this road trip does have a purpose and is a rather materialistic one. I would be stupid to believe that Samir and I are really a couple in love. And even if I want to be stupid, the weekly mailer from my credit card company doesn’t fail to remind me of my predicament. But I have never been the one to walk around with an umbrella in anticipation of problems that are yet to rain. Since my business is back on track with NRI weddings, I am enjoying my time with Samir.
Sitting at the coffee table in my teddy-bear night suit, with a pencil in my mouth, I am engrossed in my favourite Sunday crossword puzzle.
‘1 Down: Asks for one’s hand in marriage (8).’ Hey, this is related to my profession—‘proposes’, although ‘suicides’ fits too.
‘10 Across: French fries ingredient (8).’ Starting with ‘p’. This has to be ‘potatoes’. Yummy!
‘3 Down: Not a —— of doubt (6).’ What is it? Can’t be trace or flicker.
I look out over the balcony and ponder over the clue. It’s a beautiful, early September morning. I can smell a lively mixture of burning wood from the nearby slum, incense from the balcony below and the soon to be arriving festive season in the air. I see Sharma uncle watering the Tulsi plant in his balcony. He looks rather like an alien, having suddenly lost all his hair in the last few weeks. I had no clue that he recently got diagnosed with cancer until Samir told me. And he has been here, what? Ten days! Oh! He gels with people like blue jeans, which go with everything.
I look around for Samir, but he is nowhere to be seen. His nightclothes and worn underwear are thrown in an untidy heap on the floor, with last night’s pizza box and empty beer cans, beside his futon. Seriously, living-in is so important to see how a person you are sleeping with sleeps at his home. Not that I am sleeping around with Samir, but I would love to. After he has cleaned his messy futon, that is.
I bring my wandering, sex-deficient mind back to the crossword, but I still can’t solve the clue. I really need tea. While growing up, a warm cup o
f tea, mummy’s soft aloo parathas and mentally stimulating crossword clues made my Sunday mornings perfect. But I am too lazy to get up and make it perfect myself. Besides, on Sundays I work in energy saving mode. So I decide to wait for the cook instead. I am holding the newspaper down on the table with my left hand and stopping my hair from flying around with my other, when the doorbell rings. Thank god, the cook has come. I open the door in eager anticipation. A strong cross breeze gushes in through the open door and blows the newspaper all over the living room.
‘Why don’t you take your keys?’ I say, annoyed to find a sweat-dripping Samir instead of the prospect of a hot, yummy breakfast.
‘Bad mood huh, early in the morning? Here why don’t I give you a hug?’ Samir chuckles, coming close to me.
‘Ughh. Please no.’ I duck under his outstretched hands and start picking the paper. He laughs, takes out a yoga mat and starts stretching on the floor. There are puddles of sweat all over the living room where he has walked.
I watch him do sit ups, the lean muscles of his thighs curving towards his flat belly in a rhythmic motion. With his sweaty t-shirt peeled off, he looks deliciously hot. Something to feast on, if not the food, I tell myself. The buzz of my phone interrupts my unchaste reverie. Didi has SMSed the answer for the puzzle for 21-across. I reply with 17-down. It’s always a race between us, finishing this crossword, but sometimes we exchange answers to outrun our Dad.
I am still struggling with 3-down when Mansi wakes up and sleepily walks out of her room.
‘Yikes, it stinks like a dead rat. Meg honey, please call pest control,’ she says, taking a seat next to me. ‘I thought you said he was wild-rose-fragrance Samir,’ she mumbles when I point out the source.
I giggle at her remark.
An hour later, I am digging into scrumptious aloo parathas, sipping hot ginger tea and down to the last three clues. I smile gratefully as Samir loads another aloo paratha on my plate straight from the gas. Freshly showered and fragrant, he looks smoking hot in my favourite Flamenco apron and has taken over the cook’s role for today. Mansi is sprawled on the floor, eating cut fruits and pouring over the article on fall fashion trends.
‘King’s downfall—4 letter.’
‘MATE?’ Samir offers from the kitchen, his face flushed with the heat from the gas.
‘What?’ I can’t hear him clearly because of the noise of the chimney.
‘He wants to do you in the kitchen, hon,’ Mansi suggests, looking up from the magazine.
I kick Mansi lightly with my leg. She knows all too well that Samir and I have decided to not have sex while we live-in. I swear by Starbucks, it wasn’t my idea.
‘MATE as in CHECK-MATE. The answer to your clue, Senorita,’ he smiles at me from the kitchen.
I blow him a flying kiss and he pretends to catch it.
‘C’mon. Take a break guys. No one is watching your lovey-dovey acting here,’ Mansi says jokingly, rolling her eyes.
She is right. We do have to get everyone to believe that we are a couple as the reality show folks can ask our friends and family about us. Everyone, except Mansi, knows our truth and Anusha who managed to extract the secret out of me. I don’t think Anusha gets the picture though, because she thinks that Samir really loves me. I can’t blame her. She hasn’t had much success in love; although funnily enough her life got screwed by a mobile phone too, like mine did when I read those notes on Samir’s phone. It seems that Varun’s phone was broken when she had tried to reach him with her pregnancy news. He never got her missed calls or messages. Poor guy, he was as befuddled by the mystery of her disappearing act as I was.
‘Gorgeous, here I am trying hard to get your attention and you think I am acting for Meha,’ Samir quips, flirting with Mansi, as he plonks himself on the bean bag next to her with his breakfast.
‘It’s too late, sonny boy. You missed the opportunity to dance on the chance. I have found myself a serious, long-term visionary now,’ Mansi banters.
They both share a laugh at some private joke that I have no idea about at that time. But with Mansi, I don’t feel any threats. Oh! FYI, Mansi is currently dating an awful-looking divorcee potato, who went with her on the EBC trek and is a CXO of some dotcom start-up. I think she is into rebound therapy. And I am all for rebound relationships. After all a girl needs a guy to be able to blame for anything that goes wrong in life. It can’t always be the Boss or the PMS. I just hope she bounces back fine.
Right now, I watch Samir and her fooling around. Mansi throws a cushion lightly at him. I laugh watching them fight like kids. He ducks and the cushion hits my cup of tea, breaking it.
‘My favourite cup,’ I grumble and aim the cushion back at Samir. He ducks again and it hits Mansi instead.
‘Hello girls. I am Samir—the Wind. You can’t knock out wind. You can only get wind knocked out of yourself.’ He smiles conceitedly, assuming a confident victory pose.
We both go ROFL. With the light-hearted chef’s special banter and cushions flowing around, it’s a perfect Sunday now. Well almost! I still have one clue left to solve.
Surya has moved his position from my bedroom and is now filtering into our living room. Seeing Samir’s and my shadows embrace on the floor, my mind jockey starts humming a variation of the song, ‘Sooraj ki baahon mein, ab hai yeh zindagi…’ As I hum along, replacing Sooraj with Samir, the last clue dawns on me. 3-DOWN is SHADOW. ‘Not a SHADOW of doubt (6). Hooray! I finished the crossword. I click a picture to send to Papa and Didi, except Didi has already WhatsApped her solved crossword picture to us. She again beat me to it.
A few hours later, Samir and I are comfortably plonked on Mansi’s bed. Mansi has gone out on a shopping consulting appointment. It’s this cool job she chanced upon when she took some CXO wives on a guided shopping tour last weekend and guess what, she made a whopping one lakh rupees just by five hours of shopping consultancy. I am so glad that Mansi is out as I wouldn’t want to impose on her, especially on a Sunday. And we desperately need to use her room. I mean, it’s the only room in the house that has curtains. Hello, we need the curtains to block the sun out, what else? I know what your one-track mind is thinking. Mine is thinking the same. But hey, it’s now Samir’s idea that this live-in relationship be one without sex. I had looked expectantly at him when he had mentioned it—didn’t sound like the lets-have-coffee Samir.
‘I don’t want either of us to try to impress the other person for the sake of sex,’ he had offered as an explanation.
Anyway, so I don’t know what triggered Samir to say that he wants to get to know me as a friend, to share and care, to cry and lean. I mean, seriously?
He also said something philosophical like you can share your body and have sex with a fuck-buddy also, but it’s the sharing of souls that matters. He expects me to believe him. And, I guess I want to.
Mansi thinks it’s good that we are not having sex. It will be simple to disassociate later, while Anusha continues to propound her Samir-loves-you theory. She thinks he is afraid of losing me again and this time he really wants to get to know me. This is what he is saying too, so it all matches up. And I so want to believe Anusha but Mansi is the sex-pert. Although none of us have managed to crack the how-to-get-a-guy-to-stay-in-love-with-you problem yet.
So Samir and I are sitting on Mansi’s bed, side by side, and previewing our video on the jab-we-met story, which is due to go live on YouTube channel of the reality show ‘LiveInLoveOut’ tomorrow. We had discussed the storyline together, but the production was done by KnotsInShotS’s team in Mumbai. I am watching the final movie for the first time and I am a little nervous. I hope I look good. And I hope that the public likes our story. Our popularity and thereby, victory, depends on the number of views the video garners and the count of tweets we get with our hash tag #MehaAndSamir.
The video starts with my shot taken by Samir at the vintage earring shop. I talk about how Samir used crossword clues to gift me the earrings and how the surprise gift blew me away. The next sh
ot shows Samir joking with Radhika’s designer friends by the beach.
As Samir talks about how I stood out among the all-that-glitters-is-not-gold crowd, I recognize Sonia, in a blue bikini, standing right next to Samir in the picture. OMG! I never realized that Sonia is the same blue-bikini for whom Samir had asked me, at the mandap set-up, if this girl wants to have sex with him. I can’t help but wonder if he had sex with Sonia, soon after I left the hotel, in the same bed. The thought leaves me unsettled.
The next scene has Samir describing how lost and devastated he was when he woke up and found my note asking him to forget everything. He says he felt like the light had gone out of his life. He was almost on the verge of depression when he finally found life back in his passion for photography and KISS.
No way! He didn’t feel that way about me. I steal a quick sideways glance to gauge his expression. He catches my eyes and smiles a small smile, like he has said nothing but the truth. I give him an appreciative look on the performance. He does come across as very credible, but I am certain he is lying, possibly even trying to promote his venture, KISS.
His confession is followed by my side of the story. I share that I found Samir to be very flirtatious. I didn’t think our relationship could mean anything more than a one-night-stand to him. So I made him believe that our affair meant nothing for me either and left. He gives me back the same smile of having faked very well, when all I am telling is only the truth.
Towards the end of the video, we talk about how I was his surprise proposal designer and how destiny brought us back together, literally with me falling into his arms. Samir’s team has woven our pictures with beautiful love songs and produced a marvellous love-story video. It makes the viewer believe in love at first sight, in love forever and in us. It wants me to believe in our love. I am dying to kiss him. To see how it tastes after five long years. I allow my gaze to linger on his lips a little before looking away. I take a sip of water, pretend to reapply my lipgloss and brush my hair one final time while he opens the video chat on his laptop and connects with the reality show channel. A live recording is about to start. We better impress our viewers and judges. This recording along with our jab-we-met video will go live tomorrow on the Internet.
Let's Have Coffee Page 14