They left, finally. I didn’t. Vidur tossed me an inquiring look and I caught it and tossed it right back at him. He shrugged okay, and steered the other girl out of the door by her shoulders. I hadn’t stopped to consider if Yusuf even wanted me there, but why wouldn’t he, right? For a long time, I just sat at the dining table, watching him as he cleared away the glasses and turned off the music. I began to wonder if he even noticed that I was still there, but he shot me a glance every now and then, and I sat with my knees under my chin, all curled up and he smiled and said, ‘You look like a little girl.’ Strangely, this didn’t turn me off as I suppose it should have. ‘Look,’ he said then, and gestured out of the window, ‘the sun’s rising.’
‘Uh-huh,’ I said. I wondered if this meant he wanted me to leave.
‘You must be tired,’ he said and did a big yawn. ‘I’m tired. Come on, let’s go to bed.’ A strange squiggly feeling of excitement began to build up in my stomach as I followed him, but all he did was show me to the guest bedroom.
I must have looked as confused as I felt, because he laughed, reluctantly, and leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. On the goddamn forehead. ‘Want something to sleep in?’ he asked, pushing past me to enter the room, and pulled out a T-shirt and shorts from the cupboard. I couldn’t speak, I was so angry, but I took them from him and he smiled and said, ‘Good night!’ and walked out, closing the door behind him.
I stood there in the middle of the room, feeling foolish, but then, as I shrugged out of my dress and let it fall to the floor, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I looked nice. Hotter than anybody he had recently slept with, that’s for sure. So, I opened the door and walked through the house in my underwear which, that day, was lacy boy shorts and a push-up bra and opened his bedroom door and slipped into bed next to him. This was not something I’d usually do, men didn’t normally require that much persuasion, but it was kind of hot, me being the aggressor. He wasn’t asleep, of course he wasn’t asleep and he was rigid as I pressed my body into him. It’s weird being the big spoon. I let my hands wander from his back to his front and he stopped me before I could go below his chest. Just caught my hands, and we lay there in uncomfortable silence.
‘Wha-haat?’ I asked, and I could hear the whine in my voice.
‘Go back to bed,’ he said, still facing away from me. ‘And tomorrow, well, today, since it is morning, I will take you out to dinner.’
‘I don’t want dinner,’ I said, coldly, and moved my hands away from him.
‘You might feel differently tonight,’ he said, and there was a smile in his voice that made me want to throw something at him. Something heavy and glass, preferably.
‘I’m going home,’ I said, and walked out, going back to the guest room and dressing deliberately, not rushing, so he could come back in whenever he wanted. He didn’t, though, so I slammed the door quite hard behind me and felt a bit better. Nothing like a good old-fashioned door slam when you feel like you’re having a tantrum.
Luckily, I had the day off. Normally, we rotated our days off, so that everyone had a chance of a free weekend every now and then, but it had been a long time since I had had a full Sunday to myself, and I was also grateful that I wouldn’t have to deal with Vidur’s questions at work that day. He’s not, I suppose, as super annoying as most people about it, but he has this, ‘If you’re not going to tell me, then I’m not even going to ask’ policy going on, which means he’ll never come out and ask you, but he’ll sort of drop pointed hints and digs for information throughout a conversation. After a while, getting weary, you can’t even say ‘Shut up, Vidur’ because then he gets this wide-eyed hurt face and says, ‘Why? What did I do?’ Sometimes he descends into a deep sulk, and all these things combined, are more irritating than him actually wanting the story in the first place, so you just tell him, out of self-defence and watch him judge you in three seconds flat. Now there’s a guy who would never, ever, not even if his life depended upon it, walk in another person’s shoes.
I wasn’t very tired when I got home. Model Roommate was in, which was a miracle, considering I hadn’t seen her in two weeks. ‘I thought you were dead,’ I said to her, on the way to the fridge. She snarled at me, and went back to painting her nails glittery blue. It wasn’t a good colour for her. TV shows and movies have made our expectations of roommates ridiculous. Everyone wants a new best friend. As for me, I just wanted someone to split the rent with. The less I liked her, the better, because that meant I wouldn’t have to be involved in her life. It’s one of the things my father taught me, actually, how, when there was money involved, you never, ever got personal. I knew so many people who wanted to live on their own, and couldn’t, because they were scared of telling their roommates they were moving out. In terms of that, Model was the ideal roommate. I relished a chance to hurt her feelings, and I knew she felt the same way about me.
She had been drinking my expensive juice again, something I hated about her. It’s not even like she cared. She’d drink anything sugary that was in the fridge, the sugarier, the better. In revenge, I used her expensive samples of perfume which she was very careful to keep in a zipped-up bag at the bottom of the cardboard carton that served as her cupboard.
‘Tit for tat,’ I had told Vidur and he had laughed and said neither of us had much tits or tats. I kind of wanted to speak to him, but I didn’t as well. The humiliation was still zinging in my ears.
I spent the rest of the day sulking. I smoked a couple of cigarettes, read an eight-month-old issue of Elle UK, and talked to my brother, who had called wanting to know if everything was okay. He sounded more hassled and grown up each time I spoke to him. ‘You’re eating well?’ he asked, and I told him he may as well be our mother. Then we bitched about our extended family a little bit, whose latest crime was having this huge party on a Tuesday, the day my mother fasts for my father, and not even checking with her to see if that was okay. It reminded me I hadn’t spoken to my mother in a long time.
‘We want to come visit,’ said my brother, out of the blue, and I said, ‘What? No, I work too hard!’
‘We’re going to come anyway,’ he said, in an It’s-Decided Tone, ‘I’ll let you know the dates.’
Not that I didn’t love them, I did, I mean, I do, but my family belongs in Delhi. Where I can drop in occasionally, make sure everything and everyone is okay and then return to my life, my real life in Bombay, unencumbered by history and family. Having them here would be disorienting, like in the middle of a 3D movie, when you take off your glasses out of curiosity to see what the screen looks like without. Blurry. Weird. What’s-wrong-with-this-picture-esque.
By 4 p.m., it was very obvious to me that Yusuf wasn’t, in fact, going to call. This was an entirely new feeling. I don’t mean to brag or anything—actually, I suppose I do, who begins a sentence with ‘I don’t mean to brag’ unless they’re quite aware that what they’re about to say counts as bragging?—but in all my years of dating, let’s see, I’m twenty-four now, and my first-ever ‘Will you go around with me?’ happened when I was twelve, so I guess it’s been, wow, twelve years since I started dating. And in those twelve years, I’ve never once been unsure of a man’s affections. I’m not saying I’m this big beauty queen or something, but when a guy likes me, it’s quite obvious and I normally don’t have to do anything different to keep him from going on with that feeling. I suppose I was well overdue for a heartbreak, life lessons and what not.
But Yusuf!
I was so much younger and hotter, with so much more to offer than he had, and yet, he was the one keeping me dangling. It was ridiculous. Ridonkulous as Vidur would say. Sometimes he likes to pretend he’s from the USA, specifically the part where people pay to be tan and turn out orange, and he keeps peppering his conversation with ‘ridonk’ or ‘whatevs’; the most annoying is ‘totes’ for ‘totally’. The worst part is, I’ve picked it up too and so, while Vidur and I use it in an ironic fashion—or so I would like to think—sometimes,
it slips out in real-life conversation and people look at me like I’m crazy. ‘Kray-kray’ is Vidur’s word for that.
At 6 p.m., I decided to take a nap. My eyes were burning with tiredness and I had that funny, surreal feeling you sometimes get from jetlag. Not that I remember much about jetlag, the last foreign trip I took was as a family, when my father was still alive. I was twelve. We went to Italy. I ate a lot of pizza and watched my parents interact in a new environment, away from their family, and almost fall in love with each other. And after my dad died, we haven’t had the means, or really, the motivation. My brother works super hard, sure, but he saves more than he spends, so he can invest in that real estate he’s always talking about, and so he can support me and my mother, who regularly get cash from him, just slipped into our bank accounts when he feels we’re falling a bit short.
TV weatherpersoning doesn’t pay that much, not yet, so I can just about cover my living costs, but he takes care of the rent. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be rich. We’re not poor, but we don’t have money for luxuries.
There’s this one chick in my office, she’s quite a bit older, the lifestyle reporter, and some weeks she just walks in and waves a Prada handbag around on her wrist. She had this gorgeous one too, just a couple of weeks ago, it was eggshell-blue and the leather looked buttery soft and I would have gladly killed someone to have it.
I want to be that girl who walks in nonchalantly with something expensive. ‘Oh this? What, no, it’s nothing, just a little pick-me-up, ha ha ha.’ And then, instead of wearing export surplus clothes, I’ll wear real brands, those skinny jeans I saw online, Versace, I think they were, and I’ll casually lean over, swishing around my very expensive haircut, so everyone can see the label on my clothes. Imagine, if I look pretty decent now, what I would look like in clothes designed for the rich and the beautiful! I don’t think about clothes and stuff so much, I mean, I do, but because it’s expected of me, because I’m a young woman and people think I’m interested and that’s what the magazines I read are all about. But first, with that cash, I’d go on holiday, to Paris or something, and then, I’d shop, and I’d be sitting in a Paris café when a French artist would discover me and ask if he could paint me. I don’t want to be discovered by Indian artists, ew, unless they’re famous, because some of them are seriously lechy. French men can also be lechy, but they’re French so it’s charming. Call me a hypocrite if you like, but I bet you think the same thing.
When I woke up, it was 9 p.m. and I didn’t see why I had woken up at all, because I had been sleeping quite deeply. Then I saw my phone lit up and vibrating like crazy right next to me. It was only Vidur and I cancelled his call, but then I noticed five new text messages, all from an unknown number. And those were from Yusuf. One said, ‘Dinner time! Hungry? I know a great place. How about 8 p.m.?’
The next one said, ‘Sorry, I forgot to tell you who this was. It’s Yusuf. I got your number from your boss, and you wouldn’t believe how casual I had to sound about you.’
Then there was, ‘It’s 7.55 and I haven’t heard from you, so I’m going to assume you’re either asleep or still angry with me (which is okay, because I have the best excuse for why I seemed like the stupidest man in the world this morning).’
The fourth just said, ‘Hello? Hello. Hello? Hello.’
And finally, the last one, ‘Look, I’m up, I’m not going to eat till you text me and say we can meet for dinner. If a hunger strike works for Gandhi, it can work for me, and you’re much more compassionate than the Brits were!’
I laughed. I had to. I was still a little mad, but the same tingly feeling I had had early that morning began to creep back. And so I texted him, ‘Okay, okay. Where do you want to meet for dinner?’ I liked that I got a reply almost instantly. He wasn’t doing the thing where you see the text but you make yourself wait half an hour. He named this new Chinese place that had just opened around the corner from me, which was meant to be very posh and lah-di-dah and I had been dying to go to. And he even offered to pick me up, but I didn’t want him to see my shitty old building, which desperately needs a coat of paint and is in the world’s worst back alley, full of trash dumpsters and stray cats, so I told him I’d meet him there.
I liked that he’d offered though, it added to the list of pro-Yusuf points I was making in my head. All men get to be on a list even if I’m not considering dating them. Sometimes they make it to my ‘I’d Never Be With You In A Million Years’ list, where crimes include not shaving, wearing sneakers to a night club and not waiting for me to enter first through a doorway.
I’m going to speed up the next bit, because you don’t need to know all the boring details of where we sat and what we ordered, and so on. He did wait for me not only to go in through the restaurant door, but also, until I sat down. When it came to drinks, he asked if I wanted to split a bottle of wine, and I knew, that being the kind of person he was, I wouldn’t have to pay for half (another thing on my list, especially on a first date). I guess I think about money quite a lot? But if you don’t have much, I suppose you do. More than most people who have loads and can just slap down their credit card without even looking at the bill. He looked casual, but smart, and was wearing the right shoes. And, the best part, he told me why he had resisted me that morning. ‘I had a complication,’ he said, and I raised an eyebrow, while drinking my wine. ‘There was another woman, but she’s gone now, it’s over. I ended it today.’ And he looked at me, and I noticed he had a dimple, and he was cute for an older guy, and that was not just because I had had three glasses of wine.
And later, I couldn’t think of an excuse why he couldn’t drop me home; and to be honest, the heels I had worn had already almost tripped me twice on the way there; so I let him come into that dirty back lane, which sounds sexually innuendo-ey now that I think about it, but that night was very chaste, and he kissed me, yes, but it was a nice polite kiss. I pressed back into him, and for a moment, his hand went up and cupped the back of my head, but all too soon it was over and he was looking at me in the dark and the yellow of the streetlight and saying, ‘I hope you’re free tomorrow. We have so much catching up to do.’ And I threw my rules out of the window (one of them is not committing to meet someone the very next day after you’ve first met them) and said I was, and so we made another dinner plan. And you know, going up the stairs, I wasn’t even thinking of the fact that I’d be having a fancy dinner the next day as well. Well, not very much anyway.
And, that’s how that began.
17
Friends in Strange Places
I guess I can see where this is going with Michael Loon. I’ve been in Goa for a week now, and I’ve seen the Loons almost every single day. Today, I tell my reflection sternly, I’m going to do something different. I’ll, oh, I’ll go out with Joshua or something. He’s become my friend, kinda, ol’ Joshua, he’d have to, because he pretty much takes me everywhere and as of two days ago, has also started refusing payment.
‘But you’ve got to let me,’ I told him and he shrugged and said, ‘No men, you’re going in my direction anyway.’ The problem is, every direction seems to be Joshua’s direction, and this is making me so consumed by guilt that I didn’t even call him yesterday. I took a bus instead. I’m fully planning to only call Joshua when I want to hang out with him, not just use him to take me places, and this makes me mad, because he’s a motorcycle taxi guy, and his job is to take me places and I can’t get someone new because they all know each other and his feelings will be hurt. I’m almost about to summon the courage to pick up the phone and call him and tell him all this myself, when I see that I don’t have to. He’s waiting by the gate, and oh no, he doesn’t look very pleased.
‘Hi!’ I try out, as cheerily as I can. He takes a long, underlining drag of his cigarette and stubs it out. ‘What’s up? I was just going to call you,’ I say, and he gives a sardonic laugh. Even though it’s clear he’s here to see me, he turns away so I’m facing his shoulder. This is getting ridi
culous. ‘Is something the matter?’ I ask in my patient voice.
‘You tell me. Were you going to call me or take the bus again?’
Ohhh. He’s hurt about that. I feel terrible. I place a placatory hand on the shoulder facing me and say, ‘I just felt guilty that you were driving me places and I wasn’t paying you. I didn’t want you to think I was taking advantage of you.’
‘I offered, didn’t I?’ He still sounds cross, but he’s letting himself turn around and face me again.
‘I know you did.’ I say. ‘And I was wondering if you’d like to hang out today.’
‘You and I?’ he looks so pleased and surprised I could shake myself for not asking before.
‘Yeah, you and I. What’s fun and happening in Goa today?’
‘Have you been to the night bazaar yet?’
It’s actually on the list of things I want to do, and I know the Loons are going tonight as well, which means I’ll see them, which means I’ll see Michael, which wasn’t my plan but what the hell. ‘That sounds fun,’ I say.
He’s all smiles now.
‘Coffee now?’ I ask, making my way to my favourite shack down the road. The Villa Castellina has coffee, technically, or something they call coffee, but it’s so terrible I need to wash my mouth out with rubbing alcohol or something equally scouring once I drink it. It’s just easier to go elsewhere.
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