Cold Feet

by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

  – Dating! It’s not like you and I are dating!

  – Oh my God!

  – Forget it, okay? I’ll cancel the date.

  – Oh my fucking lord!

  – Aksh …

  – I do not believe you. I. Do. Not. Believe. You. You are the most …

  – I told you I wasn’t ready for a relationship!

  – By ‘relationship’, and yes, I will totally do the air quotes even if they piss you off, by ‘relationship’, do you mean there has to be a bit where you say, ‘Will you be my girlfriend?’ and we hold hands and skip off to our home room together?

  – Look, I’m just not looking to settle down right now. Jesus, calm down.

  – Nor am I! Am I saying let’s get married and have babies? No! But we’ve spent every single night together since we started fucking, and we talk about our days and have dinner together and this feels pretty much like a relationship to me.

  – Will you stop saying fucking like that?

  – It wasn’t ‘making love’, obviously, stupid me, so what else do I call it?

  – I care for you a lot, you’re my friend, but I’m just not the kind of guy who can be with only one woman at a time.

  – That’s soooo typical. It’s like your get-out-of-jail free card, isn’t it? Blame the concept of monogamy.

  – You’re not even making sense right now.

  – I don’t have to make sense. You’re an asshole. I’m leaving. Enjoy your date.

  15

  With a Little Help from History

  At half past nine on a Tuesday night, Amisha put the finishing touches on the salad she was preparing for dinner and surveyed her kitchen. It looked quite clean, considering she had spent the last two hours cooking. Derek had taught her to clean as she cooked, and everything was rinsed and put away and the soup steamed cheerfully and the chicken parmesan looked delicious. She carefully laid the table with the blue-and-red plates she loved, folding down cloth napkins under the knife and fork and spoon. He had been working very hard recently, and Amisha thought a pick-me-up three-course dinner might make him feel a little more cherished.

  More and more, she was relishing her role as a housewife, the perfect homemaker. She still had a job, but that played only in the back of her mind, the minute she had got engaged, she had thrown herself into domesticity with a fervour that scared her sometimes. This was not feminist behaviour, but the joys of a perfectly dusted house, everything in its place, planning and cooking a meal, these were things she loved. And they were so easy! Cooking had never been one of her skills, in fact, back in the day when she had been still single, she had flaunted her non-cooking as a badge of honour. Not for her the boring dull domestic duties that couples had to do. She was free to eat home delivery and sit in front of her TV all night, vegging out whenever she pleased. Occasionally, when she was feeling broody, she would made a simple pasta, but that was just stuff from her fridge thrown together. Macaroni and Chinese chilli garlic paste. It was about as disgusting as it sounded, and yet, she had liked being able to feed herself, it made her feel self-sufficient and powerful.

  Once Derek and she had gotten together, however, she began to buy cookbooks. It began with a simple browse one Thursday, on her way back from work, she had spotted an unobtrusive sign advertising a book sale in one of the nearby buildings. It was obviously a homemade sign, the sale, too, was of a very amateur variety, a family trying to spring-clean who had gotten the entire building society involved and were having a sale on rented plastic tables on their lawn. They seemed surprised that anyone who didn’t live there would actually come. The books too were not great, a whole pile of pirated bestsellers, someone’s old magazines and a couple of kids’ colouring books, already half filled in.

  She had desultorily walked around, picking up a grubby pink teddy bear at one point, or examining an old chair which had some potential if she were to repaint it and add new upholstery, when she saw a pile of books, not arranged, but just dumped on a table. Piles were her undoing. Even when shopping for clothes in one of the export fashion stalls all over the city, she never could resist a good rummage, even though the shopkeepers had grown wise and now went through the piles themselves placing anything that was attractive on hangers and marking up the prices. The rummages usually never yielded anything good, and yet, she began to sift through this pile of books, her fingers growing dusty and she almost gave up and went away till she stumbled upon a box set of cookbooks. Pasta, Meat and Vegetables, The Best of Italian Cuisine Made Easy! She was usually suspicious of anything marked ‘made easy’, for, in her experience, they rarely were, but thumbing through, they did look quite doable, and best of all, most didn’t involve any preheating of the oven or using a blender, two kitchen appliances she was wary of.

  ‘It’s good,’ said the lady manning the stall (or would it be womanning the stall?) whom Amisha had not noticed till that moment.

  ‘Pardon?’ said Amisha, politely.

  ‘Those books, they’re good, they helped me when I first got married. My kids loved it too.’ The lady looked bored, idly tapping a thumb on the side of the table.

  ‘Why are you selling it then?’ asked Amisha, and then felt bad, because that sounded a bit rude. ‘I made them all, I know them by heart.’ She shrugged. ‘My kids are in college now, my husband has passed away, so for whom will I keep these cookbooks?’

  Amisha was taken aback by all this sharing, and it made her feel awkward enough to buy the set, and then she felt annoyed about feeling awkward and hurried away from the stall as soon as she could.

  Later, dusting them and putting them away, she began to think of the woman as a newly-wed. Obviously, the books were quite old; thumbing to the front she saw that they were published in the late 1970s, and had all the little illustrations and matte photography she associated with that era. On the front page of Pasta, someone had written, ‘Dear Konkona, Keep him fed and he won’t stray! With many wishes to you on the start of your married life, Eva.’ It was written in careful ink, not ball point, and she could imagine Eva, maybe a friend from college or something, going over to Konkona’s when she first got married, and spending a large chunk of her salary on a good-looking set of cookbooks.

  Amisha hoped no one would give her and Derek cookbooks. If she had to wish at all, she wanted all her wedding presents to be hugely impractical—a crystal decanter, two swans made of china, a rug too precious to be put on the floor. She couldn’t share this wish with Derek, who wanted serviceable things, a real cappuccino maker, a waffle iron, and so on, but how could she explain that she wanted heirlooms? Something to put on a high-up shelf, something she’d let her children touch, but not hold, with reverence, something she could pass on to them one day. Her family owned no heirlooms, apart from some jewellery her mother had put aside for her. There was no item of household sanctity that would one day be hers, no precious plates, no porcelain figurines.

  They hadn’t been that sort of family: when her parents got married, they were quite economical, poor wouldn’t be the right word, but they were definitely struggling, so people gave them household goods, which they were using to this day, a pressure cooker, a set of steel utensils, a toaster. Now, that toaster gave Amisha a mild shock each time she used it, but her mother refused to throw it out. The books could have been a sort of keepsake for Konkona’s children, if she had chosen to hang on to them. All their childhood favourites, in one place. Maybe Konkona only had boys though. They would probably not be interested in cooking.

  That night, after she had brushed her teeth she decided to take the cookbooks with her to bed, just to flip through. There was a weekend coming up and usually she met Derek at one of their favourite restaurants, but this weekend, she decided on impulse, she would cook for him and blow him away and he would be struck by his own good sense in proposing to her. Not that she felt he was going to change his mind or anything, it was just good to keep reinforcing his decision. The Pasta volume looked the simplest, and had some lovely photos o
f the finished product, and so, sniffling a little from all the dust between the pages, she began to read. Only to realize that Eva had put a lot more thought into this gift than she had first realized. Some recipes had stars by their names, with Eva’s clear blue ink saying things like, ‘Add some extra chilli flakes for a real kick!’ or ‘This one is so simple and easy to make, and yet you’ll look like a star’. She decided on that one, which was a Spaghetti Carbonara. Eva would be pleased.

  When she went shopping for the ingredients the next day, a piece of newspaper marking the page, she imagined Eva keeping her company. Eva seemed like a good friend to have if you were about to get married. She imagined her wise, with maybe three children, managing to juggle a job and her household. Maybe she had received Konkona’s wedding invitation in the mail, with a toddler attached to her leg and a baby in one arm. Maybe she had held it out and thought about Konkona, the girl she used to know and the girl she used to be. She was probably too busy to attend the wedding and sent a note of apology later that week, just after she had put the baby to bed. Amisha imagined Eva as a sepia-coloured girl, with a long braid down her back and probably on a swing. This image was probably from a photograph or a painting she had seen somewhere, but her brain made it Eva’s, and there she was, in all her old-fashioned glory, recommending that she use full cream milk for the carbonara sauce, and frizzle up the bacon so it was fried to a crisp and was like toast for ‘that unexpected crunch!’

  Later, Derek ate it and looked at her with wonder. ‘This is really good,’ he said, getting up and kissing her on the forehead, ‘I didn’t know you could cook.’

  ‘Oh, I thought I’d try something new,’ said Amisha, smiling- and she imagined Konkona and Eva in the kitchen smiling too, arms crossed. Amisha cooked from the beginning to the end of Pasta and Eva’s notes helped her the whole time. She even managed to make a lasagne one day, one of those scary ‘preheat the oven’ recipes, and one of the last in the volume. ‘I tried three times to make this!’ said Eva’s handwriting. ‘Papa finally put his foot down, but then I succeeded and we had no leftovers the next day! Great for impressing your new neighbours!’ Eva’s father was probably a dour, strict man who loved her very much without ever saying so. Maybe he had raised Eva on his own, as a single dad after his beloved young wife passed away in childbirth. Watching Eva grow up would be hard, because she bore such a strong resemblance to her mother, but he loved her and the two doted upon each other. Amisha added a sepia-coloured father with a bristly walrus moustache and a walking stick to the portrait. Eva no longer had kids or a husband, she decided, only a father whom she took care of and cooked for.

  She never fully admitted to herself that she was doing this but she began to surreptitiously scan the obituary section to see if anyone named Eva had died. This was silly and morbid, maybe the real Eva had died a long time ago, but she couldn’t make herself stop. Once there was an Eva, Eva D’Costa, and Amisha’s heart stopped for a second, but Eva D’Costa was in her forties and her Eva, Cookbook Eva, would be at least in her sixties by now. Amisha had a crazy urge to go back to the building which had had the sale, find Konkona, whatever her last name was, and ask her where Eva was now. She wanted to find the real-life Eva, wanted Eva to stroke her hair and give her tips on marriage, old-fashioned 1970s tips, which would have suggestions like, ‘Wash yourself before you go to bed, no one likes to sleep next to a smelly person!’ Not all this new age ‘talk about your feelings’ stuff, which she could figure out on her own.

  Vegetables was a little harder to swallow. Primarily because this cookbook was written during the 1970s when the baked vegetable dish was the height of fashion. Amisha remembered her own cook making it for dinner parties as a vegetarian option and, having faced it at many other parties, felt bad for the vegetarians among them who seemed only to have one choice—boiled unappetizing veggies with a cheese sauce baked in an oven. Then, it was fancy and ‘conti’, now, as she dutifully cooked it and placed it in front of Derek, they both only managed two portions and the rest had to be packed up and given away to the maid, who was thrilled. But by now she was committed to seeing what Eva had to say, although it seemed she had run out of steam, only one-word comments accompanied the recipes, ‘fantastic’ and ‘so flavourful’ being two. Eva, clearly, had been no more into her vegetables than Amisha was.

  This was clear by the time they got around to Meat. Amisha had started thinking of it as ‘their’ project, she and Eva and Konkona in it together. Konkona had made this lamb, added that pasta, run her finger down the same list of ingredients as Amisha. Eva provided the moral support the two of them needed—‘not as hard as it looks!’ was one of her favourite notations—and Amisha took heart and imagined Konkona thirty years ago taking heart too. Steak was on the menu tonight; even though Eva had said lamb would do at a pinch, because beef was difficult to serve to people, Amisha decided to follow the original recipe. She brushed the steak with the marinade and placed the two pieces of meat in the fridge, for two hours. ‘Go paint your nails and look fresh for your husband while this is happening.’ Towards the end of Meat Eva had stopped using exclamation marks. They had seemed to be her favourite form of punctuation, but now she seemed a little wistful. Eva sitting under a naked bulb, the new books open in front of her and writing her little annotations late into the night. ‘Cook this for your mother-in-law to make her think she made the right choice for her son.’ Her father might hear her stirring, but he wouldn’t say anything, except maybe a gruff remark the next morning. Eva, who maybe never got asked to get married, an older woman, a spinster, sitting at home, caring for her father and cooking lovely meals for no one to appreciate. Amisha felt her eyes filling up with tears at this image and then she shook herself guiltily. I must be PMSing, she thought, and took the steak out to start cooking it.

  The chicken parmesan was one of Eva’s favourite recipes. She had finished the box set about eight months ago, and had actively begun to search out new recipes, mostly on the Internet. Chicken parmesan had been a great hit. They had invited another couple over, and everyone had finished eating and praised her and she had stood there, cheeks flushing, clutching a fresh bottle of white wine, and in that moment, she felt a profound sense of gratitude. ‘My little nephews love this!’ Eva had said about chicken parmesan. ‘Cheese and chicken are their favourites, and when the little ones come, you should try this recipe too.’

  Amisha no longer thought of Eva as a person to be pitied. Instead she imagined her, bustling about a kitchen, catering to nephews and nieces, father and sisters, always with an apron on and always urging you to ‘taste this!’ She probably gave cookbooks to everyone she loved, and Konkona had gotten years of happiness out of hers. This, this old box set was what she would pass on to her children, Amisha decided, along with Eva’s notes. The 1970s recipes would live on for at least another generation. And she began to make notes in her books too.

  16

  The Next Song on the Playlist

  Here’s the thing, yeah? People judge people. I mean, even the holiest of people who are all, ‘Walk a mile in a man’s shoes …’ and so on, and by the way, that makes absolutely no sense to me, because I have feet of a specific size and if I were to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, all I’d ever have to show for it would be blisters, anyway, even they’re not immune to judging. They may call it something else, an opinion, maybe or a ‘vibe’, oh God, the word ‘vibe’ makes me feel that tingly feeling you get when someone drags their nails down a blackboard, and ew, even just saying that out loud gave me that same feeling. Anyway, so when stuff with Yusuf started heating up, I could feel the judginess all around me, but it was like we were in bubble wrap and you’d have to pop all the little blisters before you got through to us. There’s this song, by this young guy called Mika, who normally isn’t my kind of singer, his voice is too high, and I like my male singers to be all gravelly and deep-voiced, anyway, so this song goes We are not what you think we are, we are golden. And that pretty much summed up
our relationship. Mine and Yusuf’s, that is, not mine and Mika’s. I don’t even know the whole song, just that one line, which kept repeating in my head each time we went out.

  It’s not like things magically happened that night I spent at his apartment. Oh, did I not say that? Yes, so after we went to that ridiculous club which Vidur dragged me to, we, I, Vidur and this other chick, all went back to Yusuf’s, and I was sitting there, looking around. He really did have a very nice house, and a dog. I’ve always been fond of dogs, and he played some music on a record player which I thought was so cool and so retro, and I just couldn’t believe I was In. His. House. After yearning for him for so long, I expected the reality to be a bit of a come-down, if you know what I mean. Like, New Year’s Eve normally is. But actually, he took my hand and asked me to dance something complicated, and I was a bit taken aback, because first of all, I don’t know how to do dances which require steps. Second of all, my heart was thumping so loudly, I was pretty sure he could hear it. But he pulled me close, not in a sleazy way, I mean, my breasts barely touched his chest, but his mouth was level with my ear and he whispered, ‘Follow my lead’ and oh my God, it was the most incredibly sexy thing.

  He’s not the most attractive man in the world, not even the most attractive man I have ever been with, but he is so confident. Most of the guys I had dated until then would be shy around me, it would be up to me to take the lead and once they were sure they had me, they’d get all complacent and lazy. With Yusuf’s palm firmly on the small of my back, I didn’t feel like he would ever get complacent. He knew his way around my body, and I still had my clothes on. I was so sure of him, of the pressure on my back, of the way his eyes never left mine even as we swooped and whirled across the room that I didn’t even hold back when he dipped me. I just let myself go into the moment, feeling my hair touch the floor, that’s how low I got, and breathless, this is where I’d normally laugh and straighten myself up, but his eyes still held mine, and he wasn’t smiling, just looking at me, like we had just finished making love and he was suspended above me, and it was the three minutes after where neither of us said a thing, just gathered our thoughts and calmed our heart rates. I was genuinely startled by the applause that Vidur and the other girl broke into, like we had an audience for our sexy times, and I gasped, and he let me up and finally I looked away, pushed the stray bits of hair away from my eyes and behind my ears and then I managed to smile and bow for the other two and pretend like it was nothing.