Even when I swung my giddy way up the stairs—have you ever swung up a staircase, my darling? You hold the banister and you twirl as you ascend and it gives you the feeling of being in an old musical, while you’re singing spunky songs about being a spunky lady in the city and sometimes your next-door neighbours will pop their heads out of their doors and join in the chorus. My house has no next-door neighbours, it has an upstairs and a downstairs, and the downstairs is abandoned. No one lives there, but the owners can’t do anything about it because of the woman I live with, upstairs, who will never move or sell. Aunty Bidisha is not really my aunty, she’s an old family acquaintance, and she used to be a semi-famous, C-list Bollywood starlet in the 1970s. She never became a proper star though. ‘My looks went out of fashion,’ she’ll tell you if you offer a listening ear. But my guess is that she’s one of the many many people in this city who almost made it. She has a whole bunch of the movies she was in on video cassettes, okay, there were only three movies, and two ads, but on Sundays, she’ll oil her hair and sit in front of the TV all day, rewinding and watching herself gyrate around a tree. She’s played an orphan girl rescued, a nun and, once, the role of roles—the heroine’s best friend who is killed in front of her.
She’s also very large, in a somewhat shapeless way, like a mattress which has lost its bounce. Is this cruel? I don’t mean to be cruel to poor old Aunty B. She took me in (for a hefty sum, it’s true, but took me in all the same), she offers me outdated and irrelevant tips on how to make it in Bollywood, and she has an old admirer, from her movie star days, a short man with a breathless voice who keeps her in whisky and good humour. Plus, she has a very fine cook in Fazia, who once wanted to be in the movies too, through her employer, and has been working with Aunty B since they were both in their twenties. The house smells of withered dreams though, it’s a particular sort of smell, musty and disappointed. But it’s clean. Fazia and the cleaning girl see to that. Over the smell of hurt is the incense that Aunty B lights every day and wafts around the house, pretending to be pious. Sometimes, before her admirer arrives, she sprays the perfume that he brings every three months. It is strong and harsh. And now I just imagined them having sex. Yuck. That’s unkind of me though, fat, old people too need sex.
God knows I do, it’s been too long, too long, and the only likely person I’ve met in this city, by which I mean someone who shares my, let’s call them tendencies, has been someone I wasn’t even slightly attracted to. It’s a pity, she was nice, tall and broad-shouldered, and kind. I could tell she was kind by the way she smiled, kind people have a particular smile that makes you trust them immediately, but even though she wanted to (I know she did, and I let her touch my arm, caress my shoulder) I just wasn’t into it. I only want you, with the same single-minded focus with which I wanted Aditi, my first, my last, my only girlfriend. I’m new to this lesbian thing. I haven’t even called myself a lesbian yet, although I suppose I am, right? I think it’s the word itself that I object to, it sounds so heavy, so … so … ponderous, somehow, when all I think about when I think about the things that make me a lesbian are light and fluttery feelings. It’s actually my whole new-ish lesbian thing that makes me so hopeful about you. If I, someone who thought she’d die if the cutest boy in school ever talked to her, could find herself, a mere seven and a half months later, up against a cupboard in her best friend’s room, with the aforementioned best friend right there up against her, then, I don’t see why you couldn’t be similarly persuaded too.
It’s a hard life though, being gay in India, or anywhere else really. ‘It’s the politics of the thing,’ Aditi used to say. She didn’t know she was lesbian either, until she developed very non-platonic feelings for me and thought she’d give it a shot. We were both so brand new, I had barely been kissed by boys at this point, and in the hetero world, I guess you could say I’m a virgin. We were together for about eleven years, she was my best friend and my girlfriend, so it was a relationship quite like a marriage. We both moved out of our houses at the same time when we got jobs and lived together. We had a double bed, and a single wardrobe, and up until the very end, our sex life continued to be fantastic.
That’s the thing about India though, even if it is tough being gay, it’s really easy to live with a woman and without anyone getting any ideas. We were just two friends who were exceptionally close. Our parents would never have consented to us travelling with our boyfriends, for example, but anything I was doing with Aditi got a stamp of approval. That was nice. We travelled a lot. We never kissed in public. Once in a while, one of our friends or our family would ask about our love lives. We never ‘came out’ per se, which is why I guess I never thought of myself as a lesbian. I loved Aditi, her mind and her body, and her gender seemed incidental. We didn’t really feel the need to have a whole huge, ‘Oh by the way, I’m gay’ conversation, because I guess we never thought of it as a ‘relationship’. That might have been the problem. I loved her, and so I wanted to claim her. She didn’t have the same desire. After that first time, when she took me completely by surprise, I was the initiator. I wanted her so hungrily, I thought I would explode, and she’d lie back and take it. Encouraging me, yes, with words and fingers, but she was passive and I was the aggressor. Even when she initiated it, much later, she would simply kiss me, tentatively cupping my breasts. I would lean forward, grab her face, and get my clothes off as fast as I could.
While I thought we were ‘almost married’, she encouraged me to date nice boys. ‘It’ll be so much easier for you,’ she said and I had no idea what exactly she was doing with me.
6
After the Sex, Before You Leave
‘Look at that.’
‘Look at what?’ asked Akshara.
‘That.’ Mo held up his hand, palm facing them, fingers slightly splayed. ‘See how the light comes through them. It’s so beautiful, I never noticed.’
She laughed. ‘You’re high.’
‘I’m not high! I’m just … appreciating the finer things of life.’
‘Like, light filtering through your fingers.’
‘See?’ He turned to her, his eyes sleepy but happy. ‘This is why I like you. You have just the right phrase for things. “Filtering through”. I wouldn’t have put it that way myself, but it fits.’
She lay there hugging this is why I like you to herself like a treasure. She was in his T-shirt, he was in his boxers and around them lay the paraphernalia of the joint he had just rolled.
‘Filtering.’ He said it again, like a statement, and shifted his head on the pillow so his nose was by her cheek. ‘Are you hungry?’ he whispered into her ear.
‘Are you?’ she whispered back.
‘Starving. Man, I feel like I ate nothing last night, but all the food is over anyway.’ He was sitting up, moving away from her, and she wanted to hold him to her, to let him never leave and to suspend the moment they’d been having in some kind of frozen time. But it was over, and what Shayna had said stayed to haunt her. He’s not going to be madly in love with you. But he was acting like he was. He was tender and kind, and attentive, and it was now three in the afternoon and neither had left the bed since she had come back the night before. He had been a little surprised to see her reappear at his door last night, but had taken it well enough, the Mo she knew wouldn’t push. And she had spent the night there once before, on his bed, only they hadn’t touched that night. Last night though, he had gone to the bathroom and, filled with sudden daring, she had taken off her clothes and stood there, feeling awkward and slightly foolish even as she was doing it. He had taken an abnormally long time in the bathroom and she had had to sit down on the edge of the bed, regretting doing anything, but as soon as she heard the door click, she stood up again in front of him. He had looked at her a long while, his mouth quirking up at one corner and just when she thought he wasn’t going to say anything at all, he said, ‘Oh.’
And she giggled, oh God, she hated her own nervous giggle and said, ‘Yeah.’
And then the details had gotten kind of hazy, sort of like blurry flashbacks, a tangle of legs on the bed, Mo sitting up to take off his T-shirt, finding one, two, three fingers inside her, and then they were having sex and she finally knew what his face looked like when he came. It wasn’t unattractive and for that she was thankful. It didn’t have to be attractive, the face you made during orgasm, but it couldn’t be hideous and it couldn’t be funny. Once, with another boy, she had giggled—it had looked like he wanted to sneeze. And that had kind of ruined the moment. Mostly though, you saw a boy’s shoulder when he was on top, seeing as how most boys she slept with were taller than she was. But Mo and she were about the same height—and so she had seen his face, looked into his eyes as he moved on top of her, and seen him bite his lip and throw back his head and it had been glorious. Better than glorious—transcending! She almost expected a swell of music to break out from around them, but instead, he had rolled off and kissed her again and again and again, till they fell asleep. And once again this morning, and now they were at that comfortable couple stage where they could be naked around each other all day. At least, she had thought so, but when he reached for his boxers and put them on, she had felt obliged to wear a T-shirt too. She would have been quite happy not being in touch with anyone that day, at all, but he was checking his phone, so she scrabbled for hers and tried to look busy as well.
Her flatmate Ladli was leaving for Goa that evening. Ladli had been threatening to leave for a while now, and at each new departure date, Akshara would find her in exactly the same place, sitting in the middle of a clothes tornado in her room, gazing blankly at the wall. She was lovely, but a little flaky. She wondered what Ladli would make of this. She was the only one who had guessed Akshara was in love with Mo, without Akshara having to say anything. Mo had been over for drinks, and Akshara had been normal, she thought, the way she would’ve been anyway, and Mo had gone to the bathroom and Ladli had said from the corner where she was picking at her nails, ‘If he hasn’t done anything about the fact that you’re in love with him, then you should forget about him.’ She hadn’t been able to question her, because Mo had come back then, but that statement had also stayed in her head yesterday. For someone who was intrinsically so self-absorbed, Ladli did astound you with her insight every now and then.
But she didn’t really give Ladli much thought when Mo sat back down on the bed, pulled her T-shirt up and kissed her stomach. She closed her eyes and when she opened them, he was hovering above her, smiling.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘I’m going to make you toast,’ he said, and went away again, leaving the room this time. She snoozed for a bit, until he came back with what appeared to be an entire loaf toasted, lots of butter and cheese, and two glasses of orange juice—on what she recognized as his laptop bed desk.
‘You do realize it’s past lunchtime, right?’ she asked, even though her stomach was too twisted and fluttery at that moment to eat anything at all.
‘Time,’ he said, sitting down next to her and buttering a piece of toast, ‘is a state of mind.’
The afternoon sun reached into the bedroom through the closed windows and danced across the sheets. Akshara tried not to get crumbs everywhere, but Mo was crumbing, all over his beard too, so she let herself go a little bit, placing a saucer on her lap to catch as many as she could. When she had eaten three pieces of bread, and not skimped on the butter either, she sat back, satiated. Mo was still going, he really seemed to intend to finish the entire loaf.
This would be better if it were a photograph, thought Akshara. Something about the scene seemed too much like a film, something soft focus, or maybe not even as animated as a movie, maybe a black-and-white photo shoot, where they lay across the bed, not talking and the audience had to figure out what was going on. If she were the audience, she’d think this was a scene of a couple in love, probably dating for years, comfortable in each other’s silences. In reality, however, the fact that the hours were galloping along was making her stomach twist. Sooner or later, she’d have to have a conversation with Mo, no, not just a conversation, ‘The Conversation’.
Would they be able to stay friends even though this new knowledge of each other at the most intimate would always lie between them? If she wanted to, she could assume Mo liked her as much as she liked him, but Akshara was a practical girl. If Mo had liked her, he wouldn’t have made a move on Shayna almost immediately after kissing her, and he definitely would’ve made the first move with her last night. But, if Mo didn’t like her, surely he wouldn’t be finding excuses to linger here with her in bed? He wouldn’t, for example, be finishing his last piece of toast and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and then reaching out for her. And he wouldn’t lie like that, his face buried in her neck if he had no feelings for her at all. Right? Right.
‘I’ve always liked you,’ she said, softly, as they lay back against the pillows. He didn’t say anything, maybe he had fallen asleep, but she felt the need to keep talking. ‘Always. Like, the first time we met, at that launch, and then we went out afterwards because you really needed another beer. I liked you then. And when you started dating that random chick in the middle—what was her name?’
‘Ramona,’ said Mo, by her side.
‘Right! Ramona. And you kept telling me about how the sex was amazing, and how you didn’t like her much as a person, but the sex was so good that you wanted to stay in the relationship. That’s when I wanted to shake you and be all like, “You idiot! The sex would be so good with the two of us, and you like me as a person, so what is there to lose?” And you just refused to see it.’
Mo sighed and shifted. ‘I saw it.’
‘Did you? Well, you never gave me any indication that you did. It was all so, so platonic all the bloody time. I had to bite my tongue like a half a dozen times just to keep from confessing to you what I felt. And you knew, didn’t you? You knew that I liked you.’
‘Yeah. I’m not completely oblivious.’
‘Did you think it was going to affect our friendship? Because really, what kind of friendship is it, when one friend just really wants to do the other one?’
Mo laughed, but also detached himself from her, sitting up, drinking some water. ‘That’s all I am to you? A sex object?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘And you know how I feel about relationships.’
It’s true, she did. Mo had made it amply clear to her. He wasn’t ‘ready’, he wasn’t ‘looking’. At this point in his life, he didn’t have the ‘space’ to offer to another human being. All random bullshit excuses, thought Akshara then, and Akshara now. In her experience, if someone was right for you, you forgot about the space and the issues and whether or not you were ‘ready’. You just were.
‘Even with me?’ she asked then.
‘I don’t know.’ He was bending back down now, kissing her nose, her forehead. ‘This was pretty awesome, wasn’t it?’
She nodded, happily. ‘I don’t know though. I really like our friendship.’
‘Who says we can’t still be friends?’
‘Not “just friends” though.’
‘“Just friends” is overrated.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Level up,’ thought Akshara.
7
Like a Mermaid, Minus the Fish
So, there I was, face to face with the bluest sea you’ve ever seen. It was so blue, that blue didn’t even begin to describe it. If I were a photographer, I’d be shaking my camera right about then, because the settings wouldn’t work, and I wouldn’t be able to capture the idyllic-ness of it all. Blue seas, golden sand. And I, on a cane chair, with a bottle of beer in front of me, and my notebook, ready to look like a Woman of Adventure. Maybe my predecessors, other Women of Adventure, wouldn’t be wearing shorts and a tank top, but this was the twenty-first century! I could wear what I liked and be adventurous all the same! I had the notebook, not because I was particularly fond of journ
aling in any way, I mean, I liked the concept of a journal, a chronicle of your life you could look back on when you were old and weary, but I didn’t really have the energy to provide memories for my old and weary self. Let her manage on whatever brain cells she had left. The journal was like a prop, so I could look busy and important, all the while drinking beer at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, with no one to account to but myself. I felt debauched, decadent, all the ‘d’ words, but still awesome. Divine, I told myself. I feel deee-vine.
But, actually I didn’t.
That’s the thing about running away from your problems. I feel like someone wise has already said this, but the thought just occurred to me, so it’s kind of original even if someone else said it first. Running away doesn’t make the problems vanish. Instead, they come with you, like some clingy annoying house guest, and they’re right there, invading your moments of privacy and divinity. You’re never alone at a table when you have your problems for company. They just sit there like hairy old beasts, with their own sounds. Bump! Your boyfriend broke up with you. Bump! Your friends aren’t talking to you any more. Bump! You probably no longer have a job. Bump! And yet, you’re sitting in Goa, acting like you haven’t a care in the world when, in fact, your world is totally full of cares. I had no fucking clue!
When I was a teenager, I assumed that by the time I was an actual official Adult, card carrying, voting, driving etc., I’d have the answers to all the questions that had bugged me my whole life. Not the major questions like, ‘Why is there poverty?’ and so on, but at least the simple shit, ‘What am I doing?’ And Adult Me, in my mind, would be wise, would probably wear glasses and would have an answer to that question. The only silver lining was that my vision continued to be 20/20, but that didn’t really help much. I’d swap being able to read a sign from fifty feet away to have that answer. What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing?
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