Cold Feet

by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

  In her head, this had gone differently. In her head, Mo had first done that movie thing, you know, when you enter a room in a new dress and the guy you like stops still for a moment, unable to say anything, as you rotate in front of him, smiling shyly and then he just whispers, ‘Wow’. Wow-whisper. All she wanted. Instead, Mo hadn’t even been the one to open the door, someone else had, and when she had finally spotted him, he had smiled and nodded at her, and kept talking to the group of people he was with. Not to be deterred, she had gone up to him, maybe he hadn’t noticed the way she looked, but he hadn’t even looked up until she, tired of lingering at the corner of the group had said, ‘Hi’ softly, and he had introduced her.

  Looking around at the group of people he was with, all very good-looking, especially this one girl with a pixie hairdo and a way of looking at Akshara from the corners of her eyes like she knew what was going on in her head. She should’ve known then. There wasn’t going to be a wow-whisper. There wasn’t even going to be a slow clap or a passionate doorway speech.

  ‘In the movie of my life,’ she said out loud, in the silence of the kitchen, because she had just thought of it and it sounded like the time to say something dramatic, ‘I am the sidekick.’ This made her smile, drama always did, and still smiling, still pretending like someone was holding up a camera for her slow reaction shot, she poured the vodka into a plastic glass and did it like a shot.

  ‘What’s that, Aksh?’ Mo was in the kitchen, he looked quite drunk and amused by her. ‘Hey, vodka! Clever girl.’ He was now taking the vodka from her and pouring it into the same glass. ‘I probably shouldn’t be drinking any more, no?’ Akshara felt her body uncurling like it always did around him. She thought of her soul, at that moment her soul was like a sunflower, and it was turned towards him. He made her so happy, even when she was unhappy. ‘I would give up anything,’ she thought, fiercely, ‘if I could be in this kitchen with him forever.’

  ‘Whatcha thinking about there, serious face?’ Mo’s voice was teasing and Akshara, filled with love, said, ‘Oh, just taking a break, kicking back, you know.’

  It wouldn’t do to be too eager around him. How many times had Mo complained that girls were too eager? Actually, not that many times. She loved him, but she knew that his charm was only apparent once you got to know him. He was an ordinary-looking man, slightly balding, a bit on the short side, kind of skinny and not even a snazzy dresser. He usually wore a T-shirt and jeans, and tonight, he was in a blue one, just plain blue, no writing on it, and khaki shorts. She wanted to put her hand inside his T-shirt, inside his shorts. She wanted to ball up the fabric as he pressed her against the kitchen counter, his stubble brushing her neck, sending sweet shoots of ticklish pleasure down to her core.

  Something about this must have flashed for a second in her eyes, because he said, ‘What?’ and she shook her head rapidly to get rid of the thought and said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘You got a really weird look on your face there for a second’ and she said, ‘Probably just the vodka’ and he said, ‘Aksh?’ and she said, ‘Yeah?’ and just like she imagined, he fit himself into the space between her legs and raised her face and she went on her toes again, even though she didn’t really need to, arched her back, and he had his fingers in her hair and was smiling at her and just barely brushed his lips to hers and she, wanting this so much, grabbed the back of his neck and pulled his mouth to hers. Through her dress, she could feel a heart beating. She didn’t know whether it was hers or his.

  It was slightly awkward kissing, the only thought in her head was ‘Oh my God, I am kissing Mo. I am kissing Mo!’ She didn’t know whether the liquid filling her up, making her panties damp, coursing through her veins was because he was actually kissing her, actually right now, in real life, or because she had imagined it so often. In any of her favourite movies, this would be where the scene would end, with them in the kitchen, mouth against mouth, her hands on his back, his hands in her hair, pulling her closer, but ow! Her hair got caught in his watch strap, and really, the way he moved his tongue wasn’t ideal: he kept shifting his mouth position, just as she got used to one! But she was kissing Mo, and she wanted more, she wanted to be naked, moving against him. She wanted him to undo her dress and watch her step out of it. She wanted to tug at his T-shirt, pull it off over his head and feel his skin against hers.

  ‘Ahem.’ The voice actually said, ‘ahem’, like it was a word and not just a throat clearing. Akshara felt herself being pushed backwards, almost like Mo was ridding himself of her, and there was the pixie haircut girl, standing in the doorway, smiling that odd lopsided smile she had, at both of them.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, Mo, I was just leaving.’

  She didn’t look sorry, Akshara thought sourly, wiping off her mouth with the back of her hand. Mo did kiss sloppily, but maybe that was just his drunkenness.

  ‘You weren’t interrupting.’ Mo’s smile was unhurried, and casually, but carefully, he stepped away from Akshara and the kitchen counter, and walked to the door. ‘Shayna, you’ve met Akshara, right?’ he said, putting his hand on the small of Pixie Girl’s back.

  ‘Yes, we met earlier … at Amisha’s bachelorette party I think?’ Oh yes, that’s how she knew her, even though she had forgotten her name. Akshara watched as the two of them exited. She felt her chin tremble, always her giveaway for tears. Mo was drunk. That’s all it had been. Drunk Mo hitting on her because she had looked desperate. And because she loved him and she wanted him and he knew that.

  ‘No! Mo, go to bed!’ Shayna’s voice travelled to where Akshara was in the kitchen and she heard angry footsteps. She quickly brushed away the tears. My face is moist with his kisses and my tears, she thought, and then, equally blankly, I must remember to write that down. Shayna was standing at the kitchen door, shoving Mo in front of her. She was a tall girl, even without heels, and in them, she towered over Mo.

  ‘Go. To. Bed.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Mo held up his hands, like he was completely sober and Shayna was insane. He caught Akshara’s eye and did a slow shake of his head, like can you believe this girl? But Akshara looked away. She didn’t much feel like being his co-conspirator that night. Sam, the young American who had been in the living room talking to Shayna last time Akshara had checked, came out as well.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he called out in the corridor, and when no one answered, he asked again.

  ‘Nothing man, Shayna’s a little drunk, that’s all.’ Mo spoke sulkily, Akshara realized something, and then the same realization led to the other that this was because he had been denied what he had really been wanting the whole evening—Shayna. I am such an idiot. Her chin began to tremble again and she carefully screwed the cap back on to the vodka, began to collect paper cups, anything so that the next sentence she spoke wouldn’t be all blurry with weeping.

  ‘You’re an idiot, Mo,’ Shayna said, with contempt, ‘I’m going home. Hey!’ This to Akshara, who was still gathering paper cups, putting them carefully one inside another, ‘Your dude just tried to kiss me by the door. After he was just kissing you. I thought you’d like to know. I would.’

  Mo groaned, said, ‘Aksh, don’t listen to her.’ But Akshara placed her paper cup tower by the sink and walked to the door. ‘He is not my dude,’ she said, swishing past Mo and Sam and Shayna, just swishing past, like a perfect movie heroine, bag swinging. There was a moment where she had to stop by the door and put on her shoes, but everyone was still watching her, and she tried to do it as cinematically as possible, resting her hand on the wall for support in an artistic fashion. Finally, shoes on, she turned to face them all. ‘I bid you a good night.’ What was that! She asked herself and in a complete panic, opened the door, rushed outside and slammed it shut behind her.

  The night air was surprisingly cool and friendly, and she pressed hard on the lift button, trying to make it come up to the fifth floor as fast as it could. Finally, creakily, it came, with a sleepy lift operator inside it, who opened the metal gate for her, wi
thout looking up, and she slammed shut the doors with great satisfaction.

  ‘Wait, I’m coming down too.’ Oh great, it was Shayna. Witness to her humiliation. Akshara crossed her arms across her chest and stared mutinously at the walls. The lift capacity, she discovered, was 450 kilograms. So, she mused, if everyone weighed 45 kilos and there were ten of us, and a puppy, we’d all go hurtling to our deaths.

  Shayna was in the lift now, waving. ‘Goodnight!’ she called out and then turned to Akshara, ‘I bid you a good night? What was that all about? Were you trying to be Shakespeare?’

  She doesn’t know me, why is she talking to me like she knows me? ‘I don’t know,’ said Akshara. ‘It just came out before I could think of anything else.’

  She waited for Shayna to laugh, but Shayna just looked thoughtful. ‘You were too nice to him,’ she said. ‘Running around telling people to take their shoes off, turning off the AC, you were doing all the shit jobs for him.’

  ‘I love him,’ said Akshara, simply. ‘You do nice things for people you love.’ They reached the bottom floor and rattled the doors open.

  ‘What do I know?’ said Shayna, grinning. ‘I’m of the school of thought that advocates making them want you by not being nice to them.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why Mo likes you,’ said Akshara. She wasn’t looking for sympathy, just stating a fact. Mo liked Shayna. That was it. Whatever had happened between her and Mo was already becoming surreal in her mind. It was just one of those things that you do sometimes and never speak about again.

  ‘Listen,’ said Shayna, as they reached the gate. ‘You really want to sleep with him? Go upstairs right now and I guarantee you will. The thing is, tomorrow morning, he isn’t going to be madly in love with you. No matter how nice you are, or how many times you fuck him. If you want to take that chance, and get it out of your system anyway, go ahead.’ She had glitter on her eyelids, Akshara realized, purple and gold mixed, swooping out like wings on to her browbone, a little stick-on silver star in the corner of each eye. Just like a fairy godmother would look. ‘Well?’ Shayna stood with her hip cocked out, one hand on her waist.

  ‘I want to get it out of my system,’ Akshara said, miserably. Shayna regarded her for a couple of seconds, and then reached into her tiny gold bag.

  ‘Wait, give me your number,’ Shayna said, and when Akshara did, she dialled it and hung up. ‘That’s my number. Call me in the morning when you regret it.’

  Akshara smiled for the first time. ‘I probably shouldn’t be doing this,’ she said.

  ‘Probably-schmobably. You’ll do it anyway, if not tonight, another night. May as well get it over with. Plus, you have me to hang with in the morning.’ Shayna wrinkled her nose in goodbye, smiled her lopsided smile and swished off.

  Akshara didn’t blame Mo for wanting her. She kind of wanted her herself.

  Wiping her sweaty palms off on her dress, she made her way back to the lift and back up five flights to get what she wanted. She felt more powerful than she had in weeks. If he is going to kiss me and dump me anyway, we may as well go a little bit further.

  3

  Getting Away from It All

  I was standing in the middle of my room surveying the mess of clothes on the floor and my almost-empty suitcase. Some people might have thought of this as a lack of organizational skills on my part, but I saw it as a system. Pile One was for tops and it lay by the bookshelf I had made myself. It had just needed some bricks and planks. It had all kinds of tops, from something you might need to travel in, to something to wear to a slightly fancy nightclub, to filmy beach tops, my personal favourite, that looked like they had no function except to look pretty, which is the way you want to look on a beach.

  Pile Two, by the cupboard they were meant to be in, if you believe in conventions, was dresses. Again, an assortment of things, lycra, cotton, wool—how had wool gotten in here?—and short, long, knee-length. Pile Three was underwear; you don’t need a description of that, do you? But, I had divided those into things that are comfortable—boy shorts, cotton briefs, and things that aren’t—thongs and lace mostly, but look good and porn star like once you put them on.

  Most of these things were meant to be in my suitcase, not around it, if I wanted to catch the train in less than half an hour, but then, I was still being cautious, still pretending almost, like I didn’t have to go. Which was kind of true … technically. I didn’t have to go. I hadn’t made the booking. I didn’t even have a ticket. But today was the day I had circled with a purple glitter pen, okay, okay, I had drawn a heart. It was three weeks since I made my decision, and back then, I had just picked a random date, somewhere close enough that I could look forward to it, and far enough away that I didn’t have to deal with it immediately. But immediately was right now, today was the day, and in order to keep the promise I had made to myself, it was high time I put everything on my floor into my suitcase and lugged it to the station. No flights for me. I was already severely broke from a holiday I had taken earlier that year, broke and broken, if you want to know the entire truth. In fact, I had been less in my flat and more out of it over the past three months. But the last vacation, the big vacation, had been the one that was forcing me to take this one, and before that I had been travelling on work, which I had since taken a leave of absence from. Or, been made to take a leave of absence from.

  They liked me at my job, in a small graphics design company. The boss and I had gone drinking together many times. He was my friend, but that’s why they didn’t out and out fire me. ‘We’re looking to hire more people anyway,’ said the boss’s partner and his girlfriend, ‘so, your job will still be around when you get back. It’s just, you don’t seem quite committed to it at the moment.’

  It’s true. I wasn’t.

  I hadn’t been committed to it for some time. Even though I liked what I did, it wasn’t what I’d studied art for. I always thought I’d be a famous painter or an animator or something, but I liked making logos and websites and seeing things come together. It was a nice job, and they were nice people. Having been pretty much commanded to leave, however, I had come marching home, taken up my calendar and made my ‘purple heart’ date. ‘There are no handouts in life,’ I had proclaimed to my (very nice, very patient) flatmate, Akshara. ‘I have to make my own destiny, change my own life.’

  I heard the front door click and slam, and Akshara calling out a hello. ‘Are you still here, Ladli?’ She stood at my bedroom door, surveying the mess. ‘I thought you were leaving tonight.’

  ‘I am leaving tonight,’ I said, beginning to stuff things into my suitcase. Having a witness there suddenly made me want to do it. It made it more real. I was really leaving. I waited for her to ask me a million questions about whether I was sure this was what I wanted to do, how I had to give her all my details as soon as I found a hotel and so on, but she just stood there, by the door, staring into space. Weird. I just packed around her, and I was done quite quickly. I’ve never been a lazy packer. I’m of the attitude that whatever I don’t pack can just as easily be bought wherever I go. ‘Well,’ I said, standing up, pulling the suitcase into an upright position, ‘I’m off.’

  She shook her head, as if to clear it and looked at me with the loving worry I had been expecting earlier. ‘When will you be back?’ she asked. I had been longing for someone to ask me this. I shrugged, like I had practised mentally, for ages, and said, ‘Dunno.’

  I had expected her to make a bigger deal about this, to tell you the truth, I’d thought she’d be all like, ‘You don’t know? How can you not know?’ But she was cool, she just smiled at me and said, ‘Be safe, and have a good time.’ Did we hug now? I wasn’t sure. We didn’t hug a lot, or at all. I sort of leaned forward, and she seemed as unsure as I was, and patted me on the back, and I gave her a little squeeze. Akshara wasn’t someone I would pick for my grand send-off, but all my friends were, well, not there at the moment.

  I had been planning to be very awesome and economical and backpacker-y
about the whole thing and take a local train to the station, but at the last minute, I thought, ‘What’s one last extravagance?’ and hailed a taxi instead. My last Bombay taxi for ages, I thought, getting quite sentimental about the whole thing, stroking the velvet seats and gazing out of the peeling tinted windows that only rolled down halfway. Once we got to the station, I even tipped the guy, which made him think I was both an idiot and a foreigner, so he pocketed my extra cash, helped me with my suitcase and saw me off with a scornful look.

  My plan was to hop into one of the unreserved compartments, this was the way I was doing this trip, all very spur-of-the-moment! With the wind whipping through my hair, and not a clue to where I was headed, I was going to do a whole ‘Song Of The Open Road’ thing. I had a journal, which I planned to fill with my ‘cool, travelling by the seat of my pants insights’, but all I kept thinking of as I made my way down the platform, wheeling my suitcase behind me, was how this was going to sound in a story that I would tell at a cocktail party upon my return. My second thought, though, as I pushed my way into the very crowded compartment, was that no true-blue seat-of-their-pants traveller would ever travel with a strolley bag.

  I managed to get a seat by the window after some haggling with an old woman and her very large extended family who had filled up the compartment. I threw myself upon their mercy, played my I’m-A-Single-Woman-Travelling-Alone card and injected just the right amount of pathetic into my expression. Pretty soon, I was being beta-ed and told to sit wherever I liked, which happened to be the window. I pulled out my fully charged iPod, ignored the two goggle-eyed toddlers sitting across me, and prepared to have a melancholic journey (like someone in a music video) as I gazed at Bombay drifting away. There wasn’t enough space for us all to sleep, so the old lady, spooning a toddler, slept on the lower berth on which I was sitting and everyone else farmed themselves out. I stayed upright, squeezed into my corner, with soft music in my ears, watching the shapes in the dark as they moved past me.