Fortified
Anya had hoped her words would stimulate something in her friends but she didn’t see it as an indignity if that didn’t happen. What she was unprepared for was her own emotional state.
📣Recently, I published a serialized short story (part 1, part 2, part 3). This story is a variation on that with the third and concluding part reimagined. It is complete in itself.
For those who have read all three parts of the previous story, a big thank you :) I suggest skipping straight to Section III below. For those who are yet to start, please do so at the beginning.
If this story appears truncated in your inbox, please click on "View entire message" and you’ll be able to view the entire post in your email app. Enjoy your read!
I
It had been an unusually warm day for early November, so close to winter. After sundown, the streets had cooled off quicker than anyone was ready for, and now an evening breeze, swirling up little eddies of dust, blew the dupattas off the callow women strolling on the waterfront walkway with their lovers who made valiant attempts to retrieve the lost items from the snap and curl of the sea, only to return tittering to their inamorata. Parents wagged fingers and called their children close, who responded by darting away from their clutches and making a mockery of the warnings. Pensioners on their daily constitutional knocked on the sticks of their walking partners and gazed up with wonder at the shifting skies.
Anya was with her husband and six other friends, a trio of couples, whom they had known long enough to call them their gang. Kabir and her were hosting the gang at their sea-facing Mumbai apartment overlooking Bandstand for their customary annual Diwali party, sixth year running. The evening had consumed Anya for a full fortnight, no less. She wasn’t one to downplay her efforts and those who did, she surmised, did so as some sort of self-preservation against irreparable damage to their self-esteem should the hosted event turn out worse than their expectations. But that wasn’t her, she knew. She didn’t want to be coy about her blood and sweat. She wanted to put all of it out there.
The evening had gone off well—the appetisers were polished off, the teen patti games had drawn devil-may-care bets, the dinner spread was scrumptious, and the mulled wine was a revelation. “As usual, Anya has outdone herself” was the unanimous verdict. Despite this, looking around her had the effect of pulling together Anya’s eyebrows and turning down the corners of her mouth.
She had seen it coming. When she had imagined the evening, she had foreseen this inevitable lull when they would be done with gifts, with cards, with dinner, with gossip. Kabir had seen it coming too, but he didn’t care for it. He was laissez-faire about parties and people. “Babes, they’re all adults, they’ll know what to do,” he had said to his wife when she had run by him her ideas for post-dinner entertainment.
Her phone chimed. The cloud kitchen run by a celebrity cookbook author that had promised her a mouthwatering slow-cooked dessert was cooly texting her about a delay in delivery. She toyed with an appropriate response to the news of the delay, but gave it up after she couldn’t make it not sound passive-aggressive. Her eyes narrowed on Kabir, sprawled against a bolster with his arms flung wide in what he liked to call his vegetative state. If only he hadn’t stopped her from making dessert (“you’re biting off more than you can chew, babes”), she thought. Her friends too seemed to have given in to torpor. The women had folded their legs under their anarkali suits and presently wondered aloud if waxing ladies got paid to make you feel ugly, while the men who had unbuttoned their silk kurtas and taken off their juttis had gotten started with Trump and the Middle East like they had answers.
Her husband’s aloofness, her friends’ insouciance, and the sight of those giggling lovers and impish children on the promenade merged into a single weight that pressed down on her. She felt so smothered under it that she stood up at once from the chesterfield.
“Looks like dessert is delayed, guys,” Anya announced. “This lady I’ve ordered from is saying it’ll take something like ninety minutes in this weather.”
“Oh God! I can’t think of food anymore. I’m in a food coma anyway,” said Karthik, patting his stomach from the other end of the sofa.
“That’s ages away. It would be nice to do something…anything,” said Sam, Karthik’s longtime partner. To Anya, this was a variation on “It would be nice to make a weekend trip together” or “Let’s do brunch this Sunday”—things Sam said without ever acting on them. Normally, Anya would not take Sam’s bait but at the moment she felt stirred to break the monotony.
“There’s this new game my cousin got from the States. Fancy that?” said Anya.
“Anya, you have a global list of suppliers or what?” marvelled Dhruv.
Anya put up a pre-emptive defense. “It is not competitive, not heavy on the brain either…trust me, it’s loads of fun.”
“Remember the last time you asked us to trust us?” said Binati, throwing a quick wink at the host.
Binati’s accusation made Anya want to prove a point. “This game is by Esther Perel. You guys heard of her?” she said.
“Of course! You think our marriage has survived on love alone? It’s Esther’s podcast, baby,” Apurva said, winking at his wife Yamini.
“She has a podcast? I didn’t know,” said Sam. “But anyway I’m not playing any game made by a shrink. You guys have already taken enough of my dignity at teen patti. I need a little to go home tonight.”
Apurva had come over to Anya, as she pulled a box out of the board game cabinet. “It’s a game that—” he read off the box — “lets people share their stories and make surprising discoveries about each other.”
A collective groan went around.
“Well, Cards Against Humanity also helps make surprising discoveries…until last year I didn’t know that my wife was into sugar daddies,” said Apurva, turning to look at Yamini. “Why do we need to learn one more game?”
“The problem is that you artist folks,” said Dhruv, wagging a finger playfully at Anya, “have a way with words. And you think that’s normal.”
“True that,” agreed Yamini. “I’m the PowerPoint crowd, baby. Bring me a deck of slides and I’ll come up with a story.”
Watching her friends reminded Anya of a colleague who had devoted two years to studying the works of R K Narayan, only to conclude grimly that the experience of reading yet another story set in Malgudi was like getting served her favorite dish over and over—wonderful the first few times but after the hundredth occasion, she was ready for something else.
But this was a canon, she thought, looking around at the gang, of her own making. These were the characters she had chosen and now she was haunted by their soul-crushing predictability. She wanted her friends to come to her party to make a connection, have many-sided debates, and discover each other anew but their boisterous resistance revealed to her how far out she was. Just as she wished her friends were more stimulating, the doorbell rang.
“Oh my goodness!” Anya’s voice boomed along the passage moments later, the words spaced out.
A stranger’s voice floated into the hall, muffled by the kitchen and the two bedrooms in between. “I’m sorry! I don’t want to flood your floor.”
“Are you serious? No—come, please!”
“Oh, please don’t mind me,” the guest said with surprising composure, as her dress shoes squeaked with each step on the linoleum passage. She had a North Indian accent, the way she straightened the vowel in mind. “Actually, I had an umbrella—that was my master plan. It is now floating somewhere over the Arabian Sea.”
Even with her shoes off, she towered. Her slim arms poured out of a sleeveless silk blouse which clung to her shapely figure. Her chanderi saree, drenched in the rain, had turned sheer. Just below the nape of her neck, between her shoulder blades, was a yin-and-yang tattoo. Her skin had the warm glow of dusk, like it could trap the light that fell on it. Her wrists were bare save for a slim silver bracelet. A thick choker hugged her neck, it went with her matching drops. You could see her collarbones right up to where her shoulders dropped. Her hair was soaked wet and evidently she had tried to get the water off, for now it dripped down her arms like from a channel in the roof.
To the gang, she appeared in the passage in a burst of incomparable exquisiteness.
Anya offered the guest a towel, a hair dryer, a change of clothes, and the privacy of a room. She came out in a few minutes in a gray New York Fifth Avenue sweatshirt and shorts and her hair voluminous but smoothed, except at the ends where it turned frizzy. She retained in her features a curious anomaly, a bulging Adam’s apple that went up and down when she swallowed.
“Arunima,” she went around introducing herself with handshakes. Everyone responded to her gesture by getting on their feet, everyone except Kabir, who claimed he was too comfortable in his corner. She then took the only empty seat in the room, next to the coffee table, facing the chesterfield, the window sill, and some chairs in between.
“None of my friends would make the mistake of calling me punctual but even by my standards—” Arunima shook her head ruefully. “I was supposed to be here much earlier…that was before I got stuck in traffic, then my Uber broke down. Anyway,” she said with a sigh, “I’m really sorry.”
Her voice was low and slow, finished off with a velvety, almost sultry, touch. Despite her forthcomingness and her ready apologies, a hush swept up the room. She looked like someone who was used to her effect in a roomful of people, for she sat smiling and nibbling on snacks nonchalantly for a couple of minutes until Anya remembered to offer her dinner.
The new guest continued chatting through her meal. It turned out that she was new to the city. She had grown up in Nabha in Punjab, and had worked for an IT company in Gurgaon for a decade before she discovered her love for writing and came to Mumbai to work in the movies. Her first break was as an uncredited dialog writer for a short film that had recently dropped on streaming. She was currently working on her first feature-length screenplay, commissioned by a big-banner production house.
“Finally…someone from Anya’s world,” cried Apurva. “We corporate slaves are an alien species to her.”
“Oh, please! Don’t put me alongside her. I just write soaps. Arunima’s being modest. She is more famous than she’s led you to believe,” Anya clarified. None of them knew Arunima except Anya who had met her at a play and afterward struck up a friendship.
“You’ve been featured in shows and stuff…in Humans of Bombay and something else too, no?” Anya said, throwing a glance at Arunima, as if to ask “Do you want to?”
Arunima flung her arms into the empty space behind her, made a face, and sighed. She reached down into her handbag, fished out a small bottle, and placed it on the coffee table.
“Is that an eau de toilette?” asked Kabir. He was the farthest from her, half in shadow, under the pendant lights by the window.
“What’s that?” Arunima mimicked an airplane flying over her head.
“It is a vape pen, bro,” Apurva said to Kabir. “And,” he continued, leaning in for a closer look, “it’s called Chillax…so on brand for you Kabir that you should ask them for affiliate money.”
“How would I know, dude? My wife has ordained dhumrapaan nishedh hai,” said Kabir, evoking authority in chaste Hindi.
“Ordained meaning?” asked Arunima. “Sorry, I’m from a small town.”
“Don’t mind him,” said Anya. “He’s being dramatic. You can vape if you want to. It’s not smoking anyway.”
Kabir cried out foul play but his remonstrations died once Arunima pressed a button on the cartridge, put the vape to her puckered lips, and pulled long and hard.
“I was born a boy,” she said, leisurely exhaling a wisp of smoke that caught the draft of the air-conditioner and spiralled upward. “Now I am, as I hope is clear, not a boy. That’s my claim to fame.” She laughed softly as she said it.
Breaking the pause that followed, Yamini asked, “Just so that we don’t mess up, do you put yourself in the T of LGBTQ?”
“I see myself as a woman,” she said. “The trans bit helps people get my past, I guess, so I’m okay with it being used on me…although I feel the labels are starting to confuse the average person.”
Sam piped up in agreement. “Ya! All the pronouns and the whole non-binary stuff. Our HR is having a nightmare.”
“Would you call yours an Adam’s apple or an Eve’s apple?” wisecracked Kabir.
“Good one!” chuckled Arunima. “I’ve had surgery for my transition but I haven’t touched my vocal cords. My surgeon has been telling me about it but I’m in love with this.” She held up the vape pen. “Surgery means giving it up.”
“You shouldn’t touch them if there’s a chance in hell it may affect your voice,” said Sam. “What do they say about singers and movie stars with a unique voice? Instrument, yes—what an instrument you have!”
“To me she sounds like a late-night RJ who fixes the broken-hearted, runs call centers, and puts the insomniacs to bed—all with her instrument,” said Apurva. He finished off with his own impersonation of such a voice.
“Oh!” Karthik said.
“What’s that?” Dhruv asked.
“No,” Karthik said, suddenly conscious. “I just—it’s her Insta.”
Dhruv leaned over to peer at Karthik’s phone. A quiet curse slipped out under his breath. On the screen was Arunima, younger by a few years, in a pink rayon dress with a v-neck and a hemline that showed off a pair of rangy legs.
“Why are you surprised?” asked Binati.
“Boss, I’m a millennial. I’m a fossil at all this.” Karthik protested feebly, as Dhruv snatched the phone from his hands and held it up for all.
“A horny millenial…Sam, you agree?” said Apurva.
“What would you like to know?” asked Arunima, pulling together the digressions of the group.
“This is our celebrity trans guest AMA. Anya, you couldn’t have planned it better,” said Kabir, sipping his gin and tonic.
The questions came one after another. They asked her about gender dysphoria (when the physical and mental gender is not the same), how the Indian legal system supports gender transition (turns out that changing official identification is surprisingly easy), and how she identifies herself on forms (she uses Female, and much less prefers Others though that is available too).
She had transitioned eleven years ago. In that time, her desire to educate the world had jostled with her desire to not be treated as an exhibit, to have space for herself, to not have all interest reduced to what she was born with between her legs. But she could see. No matter what her audience’s considered position was on the subject of gender and identity, they had responded viscerally to her presence. Their curiosity helped keep the weight of their gaze light.
Anya found herself smiling. She looked around her and she saw the others transformed too. Their eyes twinkled, their bodies leaned forward as if pulled by an invisible thread. What a splendid evening, she thought. The party had come alive in a way it hadn’t before in a hundred previous iterations.
“We were just about to start this game when you came in,” said Anya, pushing forward a box of cards toward Arunima. “It’s just telling stories from prompts. I’m sure you’ve got a bagful of them.”
The guest sifted through the cards. “You guys are brave!” After a moment’s pause, she added, “Sure…if that’s what it takes to get this party started.”
This time, no one protested.
II
“Something I hate about myself?” Binati wondered aloud as she fiddled with the prompt card.
Every round had a storyteller who collected a card each from the others before picking one as a prompt to recall a true story. When that round ended, everyone picked a fresh card from the draw pile to restore their stock of cards and the storyteller moved clockwise.
“My many neuroses,” she said after some thought. “Even though you’ve to understand, I’m helpless. I wish I had chosen them though.”
“Just on the evidence of Dhruv’s drinking,” said Apurva, “I have to agree.” Everyone turned in the direction of Dhruv, who overtly pretended to hide his drink behind his back.
“Something I would like to change about the way I deal with conflict,” said Sam next, “is to actually deal with it and not bottle it up. I’m Miss Conflict-Avoidant.”
“My wife’s goal in life is to be liked,” commented Karthik. “What would you say if the person next to you at work comes in smelling like a sewer?”
Sam grimaced at the prospect. “Absolutely nothing?”
One by one they spoke. No one clamped up but no one broke the dam either. Each adjusted how much and what they shared, calibrating to the level of openness in the room. They were all feeling around, sussing the mood. The game continued, the conversation flowed, intimacy mixed with social polish.
“Something that was painful when it happened but makes me laugh now…well, I’ve a full playlist for this. How much time do we have?” asked Arunima, twirling a card between her fingers. She put the card down, swept up the crusts from the coffee table, popped them into her mouth, and began.
“Some years ago, when I had transitioned but was still figuring things out, I met this wonderful Gujarati lady as part of this Art of Living thing I did. We were both in the program and our group had gone on a weekend retreat. Over those three-four days, this lady and I kind of hit it off because we were both shy and then on the last day, she told me that she couldn’t help but think of me as her daughter-in-law, and would I meet her son? She would be delighted if I said—”
“How arrogant!” someone said.
Arunima smiled. “When she said that—and I remember this so clearly—it felt like I was out there in the cold and this woman, this total stranger, had gathered a heap of logs and made a fire for me. I hugged her…I knew that I was not going to consider her proposal, but I also felt like I owed her the truth. So I told her.
“She went quiet for a minute and then said, ‘That doesn’t change what I asked for.’ I was like ‘wow, what a lady! I hope her son takes after her’ because, come on, normally, who would say that? I was in love with her. I was so desperate at that point that it was a pity the lady herself wasn’t available. So the retreat ended the next day but I decided to stay back for a couple more days—it was a lovely property in Bhandardara. The morning after, once we had gone our separate ways, I wake up to a dozen missed calls from her. I call her back and she’s all flustered. She says, I shared your birth details with our panditji and he’s worried. At this point she starts crying on the phone. Even as I’m putting together the words in my head, she asks me point blank, ‘Can you confirm your caste with your family?’
“It was a beautiful morning. I was standing outside my cottage, staring out across Arthur Lake and the mountains behind it. I remember thinking: Of all the things that stood in her way of accepting me, caste was a dealbreaker for her! Caste? And here I was worried the world would think less of me because I had changed my anatomy. Her question was a slap across my face. At that moment, I felt I had no chance in this world.”
“That’s so sick! How on earth is it funny?” said Yamini.
“Of course it is,” claimed Kabir. “That time at an Art of Living program when Arunima tried a Gujarati senior citizen for size. How can you beat that?”
“It feels absurd now, doesn’t it?” said Arunima. “But…you got to be able to laugh about some things to save something inside you to cope with the truly dark stuff.”
Yamini shook her head.
“Okay! My turn?” asked Kabir, slipping a wedge of lime into his newly filled glass.
“This is getting heavy, man. I need more punch in my spirit,” said Dhruv, reaching for the bottle of cointreau in the bar cabinet. “Can you go easy with your story, please?” Dhruv asked Kabir.
“What are you saying? She has raised the bar,” Kabir said, pointing at Arunima. “I gotta keep up.” He scratched the fuzz on his chin as he looked through the cards in his hand. “I’ll go with…one funny incident from your past that may be socially questionable now…this was back when I was twelve—no, thirteen,” he began. “Twenty-five years ago, the summer of my thirteenth year, the year of my blossoming manhood—”
“Come on! Cut the crap, Kabir,” grumbled Binati.
“Over the top?” asked Kabir. “Alright, let me start again.” He took a big swig of his drink.
“As a kid I always wanted to be in boarding school. I had been pestering my parents for a while. Finally that summer, they said, we’ve had enough…pack your bags…we’re going to Mount Carmel’s in Mussoorie. The school was doing a two-week trial…I mean you guys must’ve heard of Mount Carmel’s…they always have more kids wanting to be there than there are seats for them. But I was an only child so my dad wanted to make sure that the school environment would build my character…or some nonsense like that. I couldn’t care less where they sent me and for what reason, as long as I was out of the house.
“Anyway, this is Mussoorie we’re talking about, so everything was picturesque. Kids had trooped from all over the country. Within a couple of days, I had found myself a crew of boys. A loud, spoiled bunch at a fancy boarding school—straight out of the Karan Johar playbook.”
“Bro has standards,” said Dhruv, sipping on his cointreau.
“Karan Johar? Please tell me this is not some unrequited love story,” begged Binati. “I can’t take it from Kabir of all people.” A guffaw, followed by shushes.
“So,” continued Kabir, “we had something called free play where we kids were left on our own. This one afternoon, about a week into the trial, we wandered into the forest. It was a huge campus and you could spend hours wandering. Tailing us was this kid, this boy…he wasn’t in our group. By now we had become wise to each other and everyone saw—it wasn’t just me, I swear—this kid was weird. He had this walk, you know, he would sway his hips, his voice hadn’t broken, and he was not good with words. All of this would’ve been fine on its own but…but the kid wanted to be a part of everything…a full enthu cutlet. Because of how clearly out of place this kid was, everybody let him hang around because they thought it would be easy enough to put him in his place and I took the lead with that. If he said a word wrong or his trousers were too short, I would let him have it. And for me, really, it was a fresh start. Getting out of home was like I could be anyone. I mean there are things I did in Mussoorie that I wouldn’t think of doing back at home. I would harass this kid day and night. But it didn’t seem to have any effect on him. He would just be the same, cling to us like…like he was one of us. That got to me.
“Anyway, that afternoon, we are out in the woods, shooting the breeze, when someone finds this forked piece of wood. Before you know it, we’ve stripped the wood of its bark and filed it and someone has pulled out a pair of rubber insoles—and we’ve made a slingshot. Now we’ve put so much work into it, we better put them to use. Right? So we climb up this big boulder to see what we could shoot at from that height. The taller kids go up first and lend a hand to the ones below and hoist them up, one by one. Now all of us have been pulled up and just this kid is waiting down for someone to pull him up. And I offer him a hand, of course. I wait for him to hang off me. Once he’s off the ground, I let him go. He slips off the face of the rock and falls. He has this gash on his elbow. Nothing that would put him in a hospital but it’s funny. Everyone watching from up is in splits. This boy turns to look up and, by God, he had some spine about him…he looks up at me and shows me the middle finger. That’s it, that does it for me. I jump down the rock and I’m on to him in a flash. I throw him on the ground but he…he fights tooth and nail…the more he resists the harder I go at him. By now my friends are egging me on and our shirts have torn and our mouths have dirt. This kid is putting up a real fight and it is beginning to turn embarrassing for me so I—”
Kabir interrupted himself with a sigh. He got up, sat back down. He looked at the glass in his hand, ran a fingertip on its rim, then looking back up at everyone, asked, “Are you guys ready for this?”
“What? Are you kidding us?” said Karthik. “Come on, man.”
“Are the ladies okay with this?”
“Yeah yeah…the women will survive,” said Binati, rolling her eyes.
Kabir lifted his shoulders in a grand shrug, his palms splayed wide, his eyebrows climbing high in a gesture that said, “Well, you asked for it.”
“I pull his pants down, down with his chaddi…all the way to his knees. I press down on him, and while his legs are locked because I’ve wrapped myself around his knees, I jam a foot under his chin. So his underwear is gone, he can’t use his legs, and he can’t look down because my foot’s pressing on his throat. By now, all the boys up top cheering and egging on our scuffle in the dirt have stopped. Everyone has gone real quiet. You can only hear the treetops. We both lay there like that until a couple of guys pull me apart. The boy continues to just lay there, his shirt sleeve bloody, his mouth thick with dirt and spit, his nose running. I don’t know if it’s the shock or what but he doesn’t stir for a long time. A few of the boys check on him and he’s fine, he’s breathing, so we leave him and walk off.”
Kabir knocked back the last of his drink and put down his empty glass on the marble. He looked around the room and all the faces bar one were gawking at him.
“Typical engineering student behavior. Our boy Kabir showed all the signs in advance,” said Apurva, after a long pause.
“How did you ever end up with Anya, man?” quipped Karthik.
To which Kabir pointed a thumb at Anya, like a hitchhiker, and mouthed the words “Ask her.”
“God, Kabir! You were such a devil.” said Yamini.
“Hai na? I don’t get half the things boys do,” said Anya, as she checked the status of the dessert on her phone.
“So then? What happened next?” Sam asked, unsure if the narration had seen its finish.
“Then what…the whole thing blew up. My parents were called, I was asked to leave. My dad was furious. He grounded me for a week. Goodbye, boarding school.”
“What happened to the boy?” asked Sam.
“He left. He was having a rough time even before all this, he wouldn’t have made it past the trial. I mean, imagine this kid among a hundred rowdy boys. Honestly, I think it did him some good.”
Arunima had not stirred awhile. Now, without so much as a murmur, she got up and went to the bathroom. When she emerged a full two minutes later, her eyes were puffy and she was shivering even though the temperature on the air-conditioner read the same as before. For the first time that evening no one noticed her.
“Do you remember the boy’s name?” she asked. The words sounded heavy, like they had escaped a gasping throat.
Kabir shook his head. “There was this moment,” he said, his gaze floating somewhere beyond the room, “when I was on top of him and we were going at each other and I caught his eyes. They had this color I had not seen before…like a green…Aishwarya Rai types…very exoti—”
Kabir stopped short and straightened himself up. Unbeknown to him, Arunima had walked across the coffee table to the window sill where he had been all this while.
“What else did you do to that boy when you had him under you? Remember?” As she spoke, she leaned in. The overhanging pendant lamp caught her eyes. They blazed green. Kabir recoiled.
“Did you do this?” As she said it, she grabbed Kabir’s crotch.
“What the fuck!” he said.
With hard, unblinking eyes, she scanned Kabir’s face. Kabir stepped off his window perch. She followed him. There was a terseness to her movement, the way she pursued him across the room.
“The funny thing,” she said, suddenly stopping in her tracks when she reached the dining table, “in all this was that you were looking for his balls but she never wanted any in the first place.” Her voice no longer had any edge. She sounded tired.
With these words, she dropped to the floor. As she fell, her elbow caught the edge of the dining table, making a dull thud that was followed by a ringing of the glasstop on the wooden frame. She didn’t flinch. Big, fat drops rained from her eyes. Away from the light, the green of her eyes was darker, a deep hazel. The teardrops tumbled down the gray sweatshirt she had on and reappeared as dark splotches around the hollow of her belly. She just sat there, making no attempt to stop the cascade.
Kabir, whose lips had shifted from slightly parted to curling downward, turned on a dime and headed into one of the bedrooms. Anya hotfooted after.
The clock on the wall chimed once. Twice. Thrice.
It rang into the silence a full eleven times before murmurs could be heard from the bedroom, which rose to loud accusations before turning into sharp hisses, which slipped through gritted teeth, slid under the closed door, and lingered in the space like a poisonous gas.
Arunima had hauled herself to the French window. She sat motionless, pulling on her vape and staring at the rickshaws that screeched to a halt, swerving at the last second to avoid scampering strays; the merrymakers who left their garland crackers unlit and scuttled away from the pouring rain; and the bikers who screamed abuses at speeding cars that splashed water from potholes on them.
Binati arranged and re-arranged the coasters on the coffee table in different geometries; Sam and Karthik cleared out the cheese platter, then wondered if they should’ve let it be in case someone built up, against all odds, an appetite; Dhruv scooped up his glass and finished off his cointreau in two big gulps. Apurva, for the first time in a million visits, browsed through the hosts’ bookshelf. And when Yamini blew out the scented candles, the room turned icy.
III
“Is this..?” asked Yamini.
“Mm-hmm.” Sam, whose phone they were huddled over, affirmed.
Dhruv and Apurva put an arm around Karthik on either side of him and leaned over. Binati too joined in. The gang was staring at a picture of a young boy sitting on a swing on the patio of a squat house. Two plaits, woven from his lustrous hair, fell over his shoulders.
Arunima Ahluwalia came out to her parents when she was thirteen. What her parents thought to be a phase, read the caption on the Instagram post, turned out to be much more than that.
“I refused to cut my hair after Mussoorie. My parents gave up. This was from that year…just before I came out,” said Arunima. The splotches on her sweatshirt had faded.
Sam threw an arm around Arunima and squeezed her shoulder lightly.
“You guys could hardly wait, I guess.” No one had noticed Anya emerge from the bedroom until they heard her say the words.
The huddle broke. Something in Anya’s tone wasn’t quite right. Not a lament; not a joke either.
“Don’t take this otherwise, Anya,” said Sam.
Anya met her eyes. “I’m trying not to. But I’m not used to seeing you pick a side.”
Karthik was about to say something when Sam raised a palm and stopped him.
“So what, Anya?” Binati intervened. “Your husband is a dick. We always suspected, right? Tonight only proves it.”
“I’m with Binati on this. This,” Yamini said, showing Anya around the room with a sweep of her hands, “works as long as you don’t see the real Kabir. We come here, we tolerate him because of you…because you don’t see the bully he can be. But the minute that changes, the minute it gets awkward for you—I mean, after tonight—I would not feel offended if you asked us to leave.”
Saying this, Yamini slung her bag over her shoulder. Apurva stood up. The rest, similarly provoked, began to gather their paraphernalia.
“No, please, please, please. Don’t leave.” There was a desperation in Anya’s voice that she had never heard before. It shocked her so much that she couldn’t bear to look at anyone. She turned aside and picked up a matchbox. One by one, she lit the candles in the room. As eucalyptus and cedarwood wafted in, Kabir’s uneven snores could be heard from the bedroom.
But seeing her friends huddled together, hearing them not mince their words, had birthed a thought so preposterous it felt profound to her. They were, finally, shedding their invulnerability. They were peeling off those masks. Now only if they could see that what lay ahead was not a dead end but a bend in the road, the evening was not over. They could make something of it. And she had to lead them.
She sat on the chesterfield and motioned for them to do the same. Then she started talking.
“This one time I was terribly sick a day before one of our parties, so I put Kabir to the task. He had to cut into these tender coconuts and scrape out the malai. He was struggling with it, and grumbling nonstop: Why do I have to do this? Why can’t you call it off? So, I said, What do you mean call it off? He said, Look at you. You’re so sick and yet you’re worrying about what? A freaking party?
“But the gang will be coming tomorrow, I said.
“So what? he said. You don’t even like hosting them. They don’t open up; it’s all so frivolous, you complain. So what’s with this loyalty toward them? Tell them no.
“He was right. I was sick but I was acting out of some sense of duty, loyalty, whatever. It was twisted. But Kabir thought I could separate my loyalty toward him, my husband, from the loyalty toward you all, my friends. Like my loyalty for him existed on a separate plane, a higher plane. It did not. The loyalty I had for him, what I felt for you guys—I couldn’t pour one out without emptying the other. All of it came from the same place. But if you weren’t someone for whom this was true, you just wouldn’t get it. And Kabir didn’t get it. So I told him, just do the damn coconuts, and I won’t ask you for anything more.
“I’ve wanted more before…from you all. I’ve second-guessed myself before. But then the more evenings I’ve had with you guys the more I have felt…like, is it all in my head? Are you guys all too cool for me? It has always been like this for me, you know. You say I’m blind to Kabir. Maybe I am. I’m not ready to talk about my husband, not yet, but I want to say this: I know that I pour myself into people in ways that test my commitment to them. It is what makes me me…it is also my curse,” said Anya, as she brought a finger to the flame. Again and again, like a child discovering fire, she slid her fingers across.
A silence ensued. Anya thought it to be suggestive of the heft of the moment. She was already glad to not have given up on the party.
“Oh, I feel so much better having gotten this off my chest,” she said and let out a deep exhale.
“And why haven’t you ever mentioned this before?” asked Sam. Her question was met with an agreeable interest around the room.
“I hadn’t but now I just did. And I said it because it meant something to me to share it with you all.” Anya shrugged.
“Well, yes. But now we gotta go.” Binati got up to leave again but the sight of Anya gave her pause.
Anya had hoped her words would stimulate something in her friends but she didn’t see it as an indignity if that didn’t happen. What she was unprepared for was her own emotional state. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Oh hell! This is turning out into one of those fireside chats gone wrong,” Apurva said.
Sam gave Anya a side hug. “It’s my turn. I’ll go,” she said.
“I’m addicted to reading erotica. What you would call soft porn novels. Most nights I’m up at two in the morning, reading my Fifty Shades and making mental lists of things from the next day that I can put off for later. The other day I missed paying the school fees for the quarter. At first I thought it was unimportant…just a phase. But it just kept growing, like it was filling a hole in my life I didn’t know existed. Things got worse when he,” she said, glancing at Karthik, “gifted me a Kindle. He didn’t know—poor fellow. Now if I have a bad day, if I have a good one, in between chores, after meals—I’ve round-the-clock access to a personal library of soft porn. That’s it. I guess I just needed to say this. And no—I don’t feel like I’m a horrible person or I’m contaminated or something.”
Sam said most of this without meeting anyone’s eyes but Arunima’s. It was like she was breaking it to her first, although everyone could hear her just as well. She didn’t want to look at a familiar face; she couldn’t bring herself to. It was much easier to give herself up to a stranger and Arunima was virtually that.
Anya herself thought it was nice of Sam to acknowledge Arunima.
Seeing Sam step up, Apurva found himself nudged. As Sam settled herself on the couch, he laced his fingers and began.
He revealed that ever since losing his job earlier in the year, he had been increasingly uneasy in social situations. He had begun dropping names and casually throwing little embellishments into conversations. His shame grew from the very things he said to expunge the shame of being jobless. There was little to be gained from his half-truths, but over time it had become easier to go on than it had been to stop. He looked around the room as he spoke but he let his gaze rest a tad longer on Arunima.
Dhruv went further. He started by addressing Arunima, then remembered the others and looked at them as well. He said he had been questioning the point of keeping his job ever since his wife had had a promotion. She earned enough for both of them and their child. His salary was surplus to their needs. He had never so dearly cherished the manly pleasure of providing for his family until he didn’t have it. Maybe he was behind the times, he said, but that didn’t gall him as much as the fact he was dispensable.
Each started slowly, measuredly, with the most recent and the most visible malaise in their lives and, growing bolder with each attempt, worked their way deeper into the soil of the past until they were unearthing old artifacts and dusting them off. With each excavation, what each pulled out became more and more intimate and grisly. They came and went as they pleased. They had long foregone cards and prompts.
Through the degustation of sharing, one thing remained constant: they all sought Arunima out. This was no attempt at laundering Arunima’s discomfort, Anya believed. It was an open admission that each of them, in their own way, were crying out for redemption. It was an admission that stirred their core for Anya saw her friends transformed. She saw how, uncompressed, their lives gained dimensions. They were no longer placeholders to each other. Where before she believed she wholly knew them, now they seemed to re-emerge in her eyes as more of a mystery, singular in the questions they posed. In that moment, she truly envied her life and wondered about the Anya who harbored misgivings about her friends.
When dessert finally arrived, well past midnight, a ravenous collective appetite surfaced. Instantly, the party seemed to have reached a kind of doneness. They traded pouring their hearts out for demolishing the newly arrived jars of the motichoor ladoo cheesecake.
“I feel like we’re at Kabir’s wake,” said Apurva, gobbling a spoonful, “and we’re celebrating his life by eating the food he dearly loved.”
“Apu, please buy yourself a filter for your mouth,” chided Yamini.
Anya was not troubled at all. This is what friends are for, isn’t it? To hold a mirror to each other and, anyway, what Kabir had done, though unintentional, called for a serious conversation among the gang. It wouldn’t do him any good, she concluded, if the matter stayed under wraps. How wonderful our future conversations will be, she imagined, with the doors we have opened for each other.
When the cheesecake had been polished off and the rainstorm had passed, they all agreed that it was time to leave. They said their goodbyes, gave each other hugs.
“Aru!” called Anya at the door, throwing an arm around the guest’s neck. “I’m so sorry.”
“Forget about it,” said Arunima.
“Aru, we’re meeting again in a couple of weeks for my birthday. You have to come, okay?” said Anya, walking the last of her guests to the elevator.
Arunima smiled.
“I know what that smile means,” Sam said.
“What? Is it because of Kabir?” asked Anya.
Arunima shook her head.
The elevator doors parted. In a split second, Anya decided to step in and continue the conversation.
“Listen, babe, again, I’m very sorry for what happened to you. But I know Kabir. He’ll come around. He just got flustered back there.” Anya locked her eyes on Arunima.
Sam looked down at her feet and nodded along.
“Oh God, Anya,” said Sam.
“What?” Anya’s stomach churned. For a second, she felt herself pulled back to that sickening moment when Arunima had confronted her husband.
“Look down,” said Sam.
Anya did as told. “Oh fish!” She was barefoot.
“This is not the first time, by the way,” Sam informed Arunima. “She’s so eager to see the back of us that—”
Anya slapped Sam’s arm playfully as the doors opened on the lobby level.
Karthik was already there, waiting. “You coming with us?” Sam asked, as she and Karthik climbed into the backseat of their SUV. Arunima declined.
Anya waved them goodbye from inside the elevator as she held out one hand to keep the doors from closing in. Back home, she washed her feet with warm water with a dash of Dettol, poured herself a shot of Frangelico, and sat herself by the window.
Below her, the palm fronds on the promenade battled gusts of wind. An empty plastic packet swirled. A ragamuffin held out a stick to catch it. On his back, he carried a bag swollen with water bottles, paper cups, and other refuse that kept spilling out. Two revellers arranged a row of anars (flowerpot crackers) and lit them up in a sequence. As showers of sparks shot upward, strays meekly emerged from under rickshaws parked by the side of the road.
Sipping on her liqueur, Anya felt every bit as sorry for the strays, the ragamuffin, even for the empty packet of plastic as she had ever been for anyone or anything in her life. How lonely life can be and how lucky she was, she thought, sighing with relief, to have the company and care of friends in her life.
That night, she went to bed struggling to remember a time she had felt as warm-hearted.