The Last Guest (Part 1)
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.
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.
To be continued… (Part 2 coming soon)
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Vikram Shah, Himanshu Bora, Amrita Singh, Anselmo Martyres, and Clarinda Cerejo for reading early drafts and helping shape the story.