Cold Feet

by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

  I will never sleep with another man again. The voice in her head had changed a little bit, substituting ‘sleep’ for ‘sex’ and ‘I’ for ‘you’ll’ which meant it had entered her conscious mind. After three days of having in-laws there, Amisha sat with bleary eyes, eating breakfast. Sleeping in the living room was hugely uncomfortable. To avoid the ‘I told you so’ fight, she had opted to sleep on the couch and given Derek the mattress on the floor. The couch was a hidden demon. Comfortable enough for short afternoon naps, sure, but it did nothing as a bed substitute.

  She watched the Masters get ready to go out for the day and wondered if she could sneak into the bedroom when they were gone, turn up the air-conditioning so that it purred loudly, curl up with equally purry cats and go to sleep for a long time with the curtains drawn. Maybe that’s why her brain had said ‘sleep’, it was the only thing on her mind, but now, come to think of it, how wonderful it would be to nap with Derek! It had been so long since they had done that, not since their early days. A nap could be even more intimate than sex, an afternoon nap, when the world was busy and just the two of them lay cocooned with the perfect temperature, maybe peeling off their clothes and she would face him and his hands would cup her back, like she was fragile and precious.

  Derek was working from home that week, so that he could entertain his family, but which meant he mostly locked himself up in the study to work for several hours at a stretch, and she had no excuse. It would have been too rude for her to also vanish. So, with as bright a smile as she could manage, she had been on tour guide duty, taking them around, making reservations for lunch and dinner, making sure they were happy and comfortable. This, she didn’t mind so much, they were her guests after all. No, what pissed her off was that Derek had completely accepted this. Apart from a vague shoulder caress every now and then, she couldn’t be sure whether he thought that she hadn’t noticed that he wasn’t doing anything at all, or whether he actually thought she preferred it this way.

  She had showered in preparation for taking them to the Elephanta Caves, but just then, over her muesli, she decided not to. She was going to stay at home, and take a nap. And after her nap, she’d have a really long shower, the kind that scalded her skin, and she would read a magazine and surf the Internet, aimlessly. ‘You know what?’ she said, looking up, ‘you guys carry on. I’m feeling rather tired.’

  ‘You okay, Meesh?’ asked Derek. She could tell he was slightly annoyed at this change of plan. ‘Oh, I’m okay,’ she said, smiling, and waving her spoon at him, ‘I just really need a nap.’

  ‘Poor dear must be tired,’ said Mrs Masters, who had never said, ‘Call me Ellie’.

  ‘Oh, I am tired,’ said Amisha brightly, and heaved a huge sigh to prove her point.

  ‘I don’t know if they’ll be able to manage on their own,’ said Derek, his voice trailing off in what would normally be an effective manner. This was where she was supposed to step in and be accommodating, just like her mother had taught her.

  Instead, she stood up and took her bowl to the sink.

  ‘You go,’ she told Derek, ‘spend some time with your family.’

  He was upset, but he couldn’t say anything in front of them, and so they finally left, Derek with very bad grace, not even pausing to kiss her on the temple, like he normally did. As soon as they were gone, Amisha raced into the bedroom, yanked off her clothes, leaving them lying in a pile on the floor, jumped over the two messy suitcases that lay there and threw herself on the bed, startling the cats considerably.

  ‘This is marriage, pussy cats,’ she told them, as she moved the remotes for the air conditioner and the television side by side, turning them both on simultaneously.

  You’ll never have sex with another man again.

  Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t.

  20

  The Small Confessions of Akshara

  The things Akshara Seth wanted to say, at random inopportune moments, but didn’t, were usually the same recurring things. She wanted to grab people on local trains, while she was on the way to work. She wanted to tell her girlfriends when they were trying to have a girls’ night out, and be flighty and giggly and talk about boys and sex like they were so casual about it, but really, they really, really wanted answers, and the first thing Akshara always thought was that the problems they were having with boys was probably because they thought of them as ‘boys’. She wanted to whisper her list of secret things to Mo.

  Mo whom she was no longer speaking to, or was he no longer speaking to her?

  She missed him, not just the sleeping with him, even though that had been wonderful, she missed being his friend and him being hers, and having someone to go places with and giggle to, and having someone who had the power to make her breathlessly giddy just by taking her hand and winding his fingers through hers as they walked down the street.

  One of her things: a middle-of-the-night ambush phone call. He’d pick up, groggy and dry-throated with sleep. ‘I love you,’ she would whisper and bang the phone down.

  She had never done this, but spent a lot of time imagining that she had. She never thought about what would happen after she said the words. That didn’t seem relevant to her. What mattered was getting it out of herself, so that the confession would no longer be branded across her guts, she could even see the letters, raw and red and oozing; by blurting them out, she’d be bequeathing them to him and then they would no longer matter.

  Another one of her things: ‘I like strawberry ice cream, and I know no one over the age of five really does, but I do.’ Her things didn’t all have to be revelations. Some were just things she wanted to share. Not with the whole world, mind you, not over the Internet, but to someone unexpected. Someone who didn’t know that about her already, and who now would have an image of Akshara, which included the fact that she loved strawberry ice cream. And then she would correct you, ‘I don’t love it, mind you. I’m not a big fan of ice cream in general. But given a choice, I’d take the strawberry. I like it. I have a working relationship with strawberry.’

  Now here she was, at a party where she knew no one, the host was an old school friend who had just moved to Bombay and had insisted she come. Well, Akshara was quite sure that if she had made up an excuse at the last minute, the old school friend wouldn’t have pressed it. But the fact of the matter was that Akshara hadn’t left her house for a while, except to go to work. Her flatmate was still swanning about Goa, and even though she hated to admit it, a lot of her social life had been tied up with Mo. They had common friends, and went to the same bars, and while she had some individual friends of her own, she hadn’t called them since Mo and she had ended. If they had even ‘begun’. He had been so keen to keep it on the down low that no one knew, people might have suspected, but no one knew for sure.

  Another thing: ‘I slept with Mo. And it was wonderful and it redefined what sex could be, for me. And I thought we were happy. Actually, we were happy. And then he was an idiot and ruined everything.’ This confession would have to be made to people who knew both of them so that someone else too would be aware of this momentous thing. It wouldn’t be just her secret. Once it was out there, it would belong to a lot of people and then she wouldn’t feel like she had invented the entire affair. Mo would never, ever, never, ever tell. And suppose she didn’t? She’d live to be eighty and then she’d die and no one would know and the thought of this made her despair slightly.

  There was a couple next to her on the sofa who were having such a complete conversation, such a perfect conversation, to eavesdrop upon that she wondered for a moment whether they were doing it for her benefit. Maybe, she thought, maybe they were actors, maybe she was part of their play, or maybe, even more likely, they were sexual deviants who got off by having other people witness their fights. In her free time—another confession!—she read advice columns online. Not the stuff that came with the morning newspaper, those were either too tame or too blatantly made up (an example: I like to masturbate. Does this mean I’m n
ot a virgin?). No, the ones Akshara frequented were all written by someone in the US, someone who had been there and done that, who had readers who obviously had also been there and done that. In this manner, Akshara found out that people had all sorts of kinks even if they looked perfectly normal. They could be zoophiles, people with a passion for four-legged creatures; they could be fond of soiling, taking their own or their partner’s faeces and rubbing it all over themselves. The most common were the ones who liked to be tied up, told what to do. This struck her as not unusual, she herself quite liked to be told what to do, and not just in bed. People just want someone else in charge of their lives, that’s why God was invented. The most heartbreaking was the man who wrote confessing to his love of children, and that wasn’t fatherly love either. He knew it was bad, and he had never acted on it, but he didn’t know what to do.

  Suppose, thought Akshara musingly, suppose she had an uncontrollable passion for something that wasn’t usually invested with sexuality, like old lifts, for instance. Suppose, every time she got into an old lift, she wanted to do dirty things to it, to rub herself to orgasm against its shuttery gates, to lick the buttons, to peel off the ‘Capacity’ sticker and stick it inside herself. This wouldn’t be very nice, and no one would understand. So, she’d settle for sex with a person, a consenting adult, but every time she rode in a lift, she’d think how unfair it was that everyone in the whole world, well, not pedos, obviously, or bestiality people, but most people got to indulge their kinks, even the faeces-rubbers, and she didn’t. And that would make her angry.

  She had become a lot more open and accepting of people after Mo. The truth was, he had pushed her sexual boundaries a little bit. He had held her down once, given her a ‘safe word’ and told her he wouldn’t stop, even if she begged and pleaded, until she said the word. They had picked Tabasco as their word. It was also the word they used when they wanted to have a private conversation while other people were around. ‘Tabasco,’ she’d say, when someone said something that triggered a flood of dirty thoughts within her and he’d smile secretly to himself and it was like foreplay. She didn’t use her safe word though, even though he had scared her with his force, she had sort of liked being scared. Later, there had been a finger circle of bruises around her wrists and she had rubbed them, but he hadn’t apologized, just the opposite, he had looked triumphant and she had felt full and filled.

  ‘I know where your brown shoes went,’ said the woman of the couple. The man had taken a drag of his cigarette. ‘I put them next to the trash can and the garbage man must have taken them away.’

  He looked irritated, stubbed out the smoke and, looking away from her, said, ‘Why would you do that?’ They seemed unconcerned that Akshara was blatantly listening, and out of politeness, she turned her face away.

  ‘It’s not my fault, your red shoes were lying outside.’ They looked Indian, but they spoke with American accents.

  ‘Why would you put my shoes next to the trash?’ asked the man again. The woman shrugged. ‘Those were expensive shoes,’ said the man, and she yawned and looked away.

  ‘I have to go, I need to pick up Joey,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel well at all.’ They both stood up and glanced at Akshara, who looked up, but they barely registered her.

  ‘Will you be able to walk him?’ asked the man, sounding bored and the woman nodded and walked away. It was all like some surreal drama text, thought Akshara; if she were reading this in a book, the moment would be fraught with symbolism, the woman’s illness, the man’s barely concealed anger. I am not a part of this play, she thought, I am just the audience, and the fact that she had brushed up against these people’s lives and they didn’t even know her filled her with so much vertigo that she closed her eyes for a moment and inhaled deeply, thrice.

  This happened to her frequently. Once, at the British Council Library, she had been walking up the stairs and a woman had been calling to her child, and Akshara passed them and thought, they will go on with their lives and I will go on with mine and they exist simultaneously with me. How could she be both the centre of her life and not even a factor in other peoples’? Had everyone on the planet, except she, come to terms with this? Did everyone get that weird, giddy feeling you get when you first think about infinity and what it actually means?

  When next she went to the bar for a drink, she decided the only way to liven up the party for herself was to pick the next person who spoke to her and tell him or her exactly three of her things. She wouldn’t decide in advance what those things would be, she’d just pick the first three that came to her mind. She would tell without giving room for the other person to interpret them back to her, and then, she would leave. She went back to the red, sagging couch, went back to her space in the corner and waited. She wanted to giggle.

  She didn’t have to wait very long. A tall man came up to her, asked her if the seat was taken and when she shook her head, he plopped down next to her.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said. His voice was hoarse.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Akshara back, and now that there was actually a person sitting next to her, she began to chicken out of her game. Besides, how would she begin? She couldn’t just launch into it. She’d have to do the whole dance of what do you do and whom do you know and where do you come from. She was already getting annoyed and it was this annoyance that made her cross her legs, turn to him and say, ‘I watch reality shows all Sunday. I don’t have a TV so I download them on my laptop. I tell people I watch movies when, in fact, I’m watching America’s Next Top Model or something about rich housewives in suburban America and I watch them from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, about seven hours of it, and by the end, I feel like I almost am these women. I feel my accent changing, I feel myself getting meaner, why are people on reality shows so mean? I feel like nothing matters except money, and like I could easily backstab someone I consider my best friend. I can also feel my brain rotting, like literally rotting, when I do this, but I can’t stop.’ You’re a weirdo, said her inner voice and she tried to drown it out by taking a large chug of her drink.

  The man next to her seemed unmoved. She was unsure if he had even heard her. On to thing two: ‘I like to walk around the house touching my stomach. I don’t know why, but if I’m on the phone or just going to get water or something, I’ll just like walk around touching it. Once, I did it at work, that I noticed, I mean, I might have done it subconsciously at other times, and I thought what if my colleagues think I’m really weird or something, and I’ve got to stop, but while I was having this thought, I noticed I was touching my stomach the whole time.’ She glanced at the man again.

  His mouth twitched.

  She took a deep breath to launch into her third thing, and he said, ‘Unconsciously.’

  ‘Pardon?’ asked Akshara.

  ‘You mean unconsciously. Not sub. You were doing it but you didn’t realize you were doing it.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, feeling suddenly a bit chastened. The man looked at her for the first time, really looked, and Akshara couldn’t tell if he was attractive or not, just that he held her gaze a couple of seconds longer than was comfortable.

  ‘I don’t like parties,’ he said, ‘I never have. I go to them because I feel they check something off in my life: works hard, goes to parties, is social. I wonder sometimes if the fact that I’m using them as a point system for my life means I’m doing something wrong.’

  She opened her mouth, he held up his hand. ‘I’m not even checking it off correctly. In my inner point system—I have points for everything—“being social” means I talk to three varied people. I listen to their one-line descriptions of their lives and I tell them about mine. Then, I collect a phone number. I never call it. But when I wake up the next day, I have a phone number, which I add to my point system, for me, it’s not being social unless I do these things. I have all these phone numbers on my cell, all with the person’s name and where I met them, and I have never, not once, called them.’

  �
�You could have mine,’ said Akshara, ‘and then that’s one thing you can check off.’

  ‘That won’t work,’ said the man.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I actually want to dial your number.’

  Akshara felt herself blushing furiously. She didn’t know whether this was the drink or the fact that she had spilled some of her things on this man and he wanted to hear from her again. The plan had been to reveal and leave. The plan was obviously not working. Besides, it was bothering her that she couldn’t figure out whether or not he was attractive. Whether or not she was attracted to him. Oh, Mo, she thought, if things had worked out between you and me I wouldn’t be having this conversation with someone else. I wouldn’t be in this position. Suddenly, she felt very tired of Mo, of the entire situation.

  ‘Okay,’ she said to the man, ‘you can have my number, but I’m leaving now.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said, and she couldn’t think of a good enough reason to disagree. She didn’t want to disagree anyway. They were standing up, and they were saying goodbye to her old school friend and they were out of the door into the lift, and going down in silence, and she thought of her Being Attracted To Old Lifts fetish, and almost didn’t bring it up, but then she did. ‘Or planes,’ he said, when she was done. ‘Imagine if you were attracted to aeroplanes. If nothing else, imagine the cost of you travelling back and forth just so you could fulfil your fantasy.’