Published in Muse India, Jan 2011 : fiction)
The face was a flicker. Silky neck, untidy shrubs for brows, familiar dimple, angular nose. Added lumps and grooves now; the curliest hair – a mass of multiple question marks clamped on the head – jet black – as before.
Or perhaps not. Impossible to tell from the distance.
He hadn’t seen her, but her eyes stayed pinned to his face.
A sound defying eardrums – perfect rhythm, perfect harmony – Click-Clack-Click!
A flutter of saffron. A flutter of green. Music.
She stepped back – restless, and allowed her rose-pink eyelids to make the world vanish in an instant.
***
‘Are you from India?’ Ashita said tentatively, wading her way through the blonde and red heads, to the only face that seemed to have registered her presence and smiled. She was relieved to see at least one body bearing familiar black and brown features amongst the throng of whites, most of whom had looked through her as if she were a piece of clear glass.
‘Your friendly neighbourhood,’ he answered with another smile – charmingly dimpled, she noticed. ‘Pakistan.’
She noticed too that he spoke with a British accent. He would probably never make it to the ramp with his mad scientist looks, but he was affable enough.
‘Hi, I’m Ashita.’
‘Imran.’
‘Khan?’ she chuckled, raising her brow.
‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘Imran Khan.’
He wasn’t kidding.
‘Yes, he’s my favourite cricketer,’ he answered her unasked question. ‘And no, I don’t play cricket myself.’
They smiled at each other again. He was instantly likeable – a trait she rarely found in men.
‘I guess everybody asks you that,’ she said. ‘Rewind – stop – play – stop – rewind?’
‘One becomes good at it after thirty-two years.’ He picked up a beer. ‘Like some?’
‘No, thanks. I don’t care much for beer.’ She picked up a soft drink instead.
‘We’ll see how long that lasts,’ he winked.
‘So,’ she changed the subject, ‘thirty-two? I thought you were an MA student like me.’
He shook his head, and his dark curls waggled on his forehead. ‘Actually,’ he said, handing her a plate of sandwiches, ‘I teach here.’
‘Really? What do you teach?’
‘English – the language course, part-time. I’m a PhD student, to tell you the truth. Genetics.’ He answered her unasked question a second time.
‘I see.’
‘And you?’
‘English. Literature, that is.’ She carelessly ran an eye over more russet, black, and blonde heads flooding the hall.
‘Oh, those Arty-farty subjects!’ he grinned.
‘You teach language yourself, don’t forget!’ she grinned back.
‘Shall we sit down somewhere?’ Imran looked around him, trying to balance his plate on his thigh. ‘I can’t see any chairs though. It’s a good turn-out for the new batch today. Strange you haven’t ganged up with a bunch of Indians already.’
She looked at him. His eyes were twinkling like a pair of gems.
‘Too clannish,’ she replied. ‘Not my type.’
He nodded, understanding. ‘They are like that, aren’t they? Asians?’
It is rather strange,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘What’s the point of coming all the way to a foreign country, if all you want to do is gang up with other Indians and start running after Indian food and Indian restaurants, Indian this and Indian that, right from Day One?’
‘True, true.’
‘So why are we doing this?’ she said, appraising his prominent jaw line.
‘Doing what?’ he turned to her, confused.
‘Bitching about Asians?’
Her cherry-coloured lips broke into a monkey smile, and he laughed with her.
‘Oh, just adding some chicken-tikka-masala to life.’
It sounded funny the way he said that in his British accent: teekha ma-sa-la. She repeated the words to herself, giggling within. He was quite a comic, she realised, during the uninterrupted twenty minutes of their wandering conversation. She granted he was attractive in a non-sexy kind of way. Well, he could pass off as ‘all right’ if not exactly ‘dishy’.
‘Hey, I gotta go,’ he excused himself suddenly. ‘I forgot I was supposed to play host to five hundred others today.’
Ashita stuck out her tongue at him, suddenly piqued. ‘Asians?’
‘All of them from everywhere. Oxford is a cosmopolitan city.’
She paused, annoyed at his nonchalance. ‘Do you have to go?’
He shrugged with a benevolent can’t-help-it smile again. ‘Much in demand, you see. Do I see you around?’
‘Sure,’ she replied, turning away abruptly.
‘Take the 10A if you wish to get to the city centre for your shopping tomorrow morning,’ he called after her. His eyes shone like the polestar, bright with laughter. ‘The stop’s bang opposite the residence hall. Might bump into you.’
***
‘So, is that what they think?’ Ashita rolled over, pulling the blue duvet away from his torso as she did so. She left his well-toned body exposed – to her eyes, and the clamminess in the bedroom.
Imran did not answer. What could he say after two generations of his family had already spent their lives performing a post-mortem on the subject? It was a bad idea to dissect Partition during sex. Who started it? He couldn’t remember. He recalled there was something she had mentioned about Punjabi culture, and the conversation had meandered from Chandigarh and Ludhiana to Lahore and Rawalpindi; from 2001 to 1947.
‘Come on, answer me,’ she pinched his stubbly cheek. ‘They really think we are the villains? They think that we have been infiltrating into your country, that we explode those wretched bombs?’
‘Well…’
‘Why, for god’s sake?’ she sounded genuinely stumped. ‘Why would we do that?’
He gave her a Buddha smile. ‘Maybe for the same reasons you guys think Pakistanis do that in your country.’
‘It’s not the same thing!’
‘Sure it is,’ he said. ‘We are people just like you – brown – with two eyes, two hands, two legs; the same fixation with food and weddings.’ Then, seeing her gorgeous eyes fuming, he winked. ‘It’s a six and nine thing.’
‘Six and nine thing?’
‘A matter of perspective – like the figure six. Sitting across from each other I’ll see it as a six, but it’ll appear a nine to you. Right?’
‘Smart.’ She tugged at the question-mark curls on his head crossly.
‘Ouch. That hurt!’
‘And what if it’s an eight?’
‘What?’
‘An eight is an eight is an eight is an eight.’ She uttered it like a tongue-twister.
‘Ah well!’
‘We have more serious problems to deal with, you know; we’re not like you. We’re not obsessed with Pakistan.’
‘You mean to say we’re obsessed with India?’ He smacked her hand playfully.
She looked up at him, wondering if he was rankled. Had she succeeded in stepping on his toe – something she’d been trying so hard to avoid all these months?
No, he was grinning his clownish grin. She exhaled. That was the thing she liked best about Imran. She had never seen a crease over his brow, though she had lost her own cool several times. His face always seemed – well ironed.
‘It’s useless to argue with you,’ she said, plonking her head on his generous chest again.
‘Well, can you think of any new arguments? What can we say that our governments haven’t been saying to each other for over half a century? I would have thought they had exhausted all word combinations in Hinglishurdu by now.’
‘Talks! Blah blah blah!’ she jumped up again. ‘Crazy, isn’t it? They’ve been talking for over five decades – about the same thing. Gawd, how much one can talk!’
‘Well … people need something to keep them occupied, don’t they? Political Sisyphuses. Imagine if it ended today. They wouldn’t know what to do with themselves.’
She turned serious again, changing the topic.
‘So, what does Ammi say?’
He was quiet for a while, solemn himself. Sometimes, speech was as impossible as silence. He felt like the turtle holding on to the twig in mid-air for his dear life. He couldn’t decide which would be the lesser evil. He invariably opted for silence on most occasions; afraid that anything he said might hurt her. But he knew she was hurt anyway. He sighed.
She buried her head in the pillow, and then rose again.
‘Imran! You can’t go back home and marry some woman you don’t even know, even if she’s Muslim! You’ve lived here forever. You’re practically a Brit!’
‘Maybe.’
‘There’s no maybe about it. It won’t work. You know it won’t.’
He offered no comment.
‘Don’t use your parents as an excuse! You refuse to make a choice, and that’s different.’
There was thick silence in the room, the colour of clouds at the horizon. There were subjects in the world that defied dialogue. Or perhaps he was simply unqualified to discourse upon them, regardless of how he felt.
Ashita would fume and fret most vociferously, beg him to utter something comforting, and then exit from his room steaming like a heated engine, only to return once the fury had evaporated, which, given her nature, usually happened within the day.
‘You don’t love me,’ she said, facing him again.
Her words flew into the air like soap bubbles, and dissolved into nothingness. They were not accusing; merely stated a fact. He didn’t reply. He wanted to. He looked at her Cola-coloured eyes seeking reassurance in his. There were few occasions in his life when he felt the familiar knot in his stomach creeping up – tightening, tautening, until it became unbearable. He had felt it once somewhere in the by lanes near their home when he was twelve years old – the first time his mother had caught him gazing at a young neighbour like a mesmerised Mowgli. He remembered how he had waited near the same Neem tree to catch a glimpse of her for three days, evading his mother’s surveillance. The smell of mutton koftas from Ammi’s kitchen wafted to his nostrils from thousands of miles away. He felt depressed.
‘Do you?’ she enquired again, thumping her fist against his bare chest, forcing him to look at her.
He lay motionless on the bed, silent as the night outside. He wanted to tell her he loved her.
‘Do you?’ she repeated.
Silence.
‘Bloody Paki!’
The draught from the balcony brusquely drowned Kylie Minogue’s voice floating from a CD in the room, leaving only the groaning sound of the thick night outside faintly audible.
***
The door flung open, startling Imran. She stood pokerfaced looking like a stuffed crow, still dressed in her lemony night suit he found irresistible. Her eyes seemed swollen from too little sleep and too many tears.
‘Why are you here?’ Ashita demanded sans any prelude.
‘May I come in?’
No, you may not! She glared at him.
He smiled in return – a cuddly bear smile. ‘Will you make way and let me enter, or should I elbow you aside like a good Asian and enter anyway?’
She felt ashamed and indignant at the same time. Reluctantly, she stepped aside.
‘I thought you said you weren’t coming,’ she rasped with feigned lassitude. ‘Weren’t you supposed to leave for Brighton today?’
‘I was. I postponed it to tomorrow.’ His eyes travelled to the corner of her desk Smokie Robinson was usually found crooning from at this time of the day. He was missing in action today though.
‘Why?’
‘You looked so miserable!’ he smiled sheepishly.
In spite of herself, she giggled. A little wet pearl still clinging on to her thick eyelashes, dropped onto her night shirt.
‘So where’s the party?’ he asked, looking around at the bareness in the room.
‘I cancelled it.’
‘No!’
‘I did.’
‘You could have carried on anyway.’
She stuck out her tongue at him. ‘No food, no wine, no Imran, no party!’
‘So there’s nothing at all in your room?’
She shook her head, melancholic.
‘Oh, never mind. I’ve got something in my car, I think. You noshed yet?’
‘Nope.’
He leapt up. ‘Hey, that’s a special party for us then! I like it better this way, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ she beamed unexpectedly.
He reappeared with the most amazing plum cake, and a Smokie CD he knew she didn’t possess. ‘Happy Birthday, my love.’
She blushed. ‘My love my foot! Thank you! I thought you didn’t like plum cake.’
‘I don’t care for it much, true, but … I don’t mind it – not much anyhow. I’d rather go to an Indian restaurant and hog. Biryani would be great. I’m not too dotty about cakes. You like it though?’
‘Absolutely love it.’
‘There. It’s all yours. It’s only the beer I care for.’
‘Sorry, I’ve only got red wine,’ she shot back.
‘Will do nicely. Wine, eh?’
She got up, chuckling, and switched the radio on. Kylie’s Can’t Get You out of My Head played for the eleventh time that day.
‘Oh wow. I thought you hated Kylie,’ he winked.
‘I don’t mind her, really – not much anyhow,’ she winked back, disappearing inside for the bottle opener.
***
The October sun had disappeared at three in the afternoon. Dark clouds had begun to cast shadows below, painting everything grey, even before the afternoon had melted into dusk, making it seem a longer day than usual. Buckingham Palace seemed morose in the weather, an eerie quiet having settled upon it after the animated change-of-guard ceremony. Standing at the gates, Ashita hugged her leather jacket tight.
‘Let’s walk down to a restaurant,’ Imran ventured.
She shook her head.
‘Let’s go … please. You’re freezing.’
‘No, I’m fine.’ Ashita was resolute.
His mother’s dreams and father’s hopes rested inside the pocket of his coat, enclosed in a sloppily torn envelope. Abbu and Ammi were not Internet-savvy people. They still laboured at their alphabet in their neat handwriting. He had grown to recognise the smell of the ink from his father’s ancient – and much treasured – Parker, gifted to him by his grandfather.
She held out her hand.
A glossy piece of paper emerged from his other pocket: a photograph. Ashita and Imran, Imran and Ashita, at Doreen’s birthday bash the year before. A picture-perfect-made-for-each-other couple garlanded by each other’s arm, blowing soap bubbles into the camera. Her gaiety had created that halo around him everybody, who looked at the photograph, couldn’t help commenting upon.
He was tempted to seize her then and there, to ask her to be his wife that instant.
She looked up after a brief pause.
‘So …?’
The dreaded question.
He hung his head, trying to plow through the gossamers within. It would be an act of heresy to look upon her vulnerable face and not respond. He knew this was the moment. He gently placed the photograph upon her palm, as if handling a breakable item.
‘Do you have to go?’ she asked.
The past broke into shards and fell around him like marbles. He rummaged through the pieces – a memory here, a memory there, a moment here, a moment there. He wanted to hold them all together; lock them away safely.
He was quiet.
‘Will you be coming back?’ she ventured again. Her voice was matter-of-fact, untainted by emotion. Her Cola-coloured eyes refused to match her voice.
‘I guess so,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m sure I will.’
‘Come and see me when you do,’ she said. After a pause she added, ‘Bring her with you. I’d like to meet her.’
‘Ashita –’
‘Yes?’
‘A six can be a nine.’
The denouement of a love story….
He melted away like many of her other Oxford dreams.
***
An officer’s thunderous command. Obedient boots stomping in answer. One sound.
The Click-Clack-Click of rifles again.
Music: slow, sad.
The saffron descending, past the green, waving farewell.
Hussainiwala ended the day’s ceremony.
‘Mamma!’ Aakriti was tugging at her shirt. ‘Wake up! Daddy says he’ll race us all the way to the Sutlej. Come!’
‘Ah, er … okay. Where’s Pranav?’
‘He’s already with Daddy. Come!’
Ashita searched for that face again in the Pakistan segment, on the other side. There he was, right at the back, leaning against the iron grilles. He had apparently missed her in the multitude.
She observed there was a dab of grey near his temples now. Upon an impulse, she yelled. Only, the yell was a gurgle that emerged from her throat and sank instantaneously.
‘Mamma, chalo na!’
Ashita picked up her daughter in her arms.
She threw a last glance at the silhouette across the divide. He had stepped back now, and was allowing the crowd to brush past him into the greenery beyond, as he stared vacuously in her direction. She wondered for a moment if she had caught his glance at last, and her heart thumped with greater vigour for a few confused moments. But, he turned away, and she watched his lean figure slowly vanish into the mist – unaccompanied, alone.
***
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