A Short Affair

The way he looks at me, I know he’s going to send a drink over and then follow it up three minutes after that with his ass on the seat next to me. Luckily, Teddy knows me and so, when he sits the beer down on the counter next to me, he asks if I want an exit strategy. I look up from my book and shake my head at him.

He laughs and shimmies his shoulders to the Frank Ocean song playing. It’s hit the bit with the strained falsetto at the end. Before I look back down at the page, I see Teddy bite his bottom lip and spin around to face the rest of the bar. I cackle. Rohan once said my laugh was the noise a passer-by would least expect me to make. It was, he said, how shy people really sound when no one is paying any attention.

Teddy, trying to hold my attention, does that cock-hitting lip-biting head shimmy that made Bad-era Michael Jackson impossible to look away from.

I found Teddy’s Instagram page recently. He’s in an all-boy dance troupe called Gravity Bites. They all look ten years too late to be a boyband. Like they’ve formed a tribute band to N-SYNC now, approaching forty, rather than N-SYNC in their prime. He’s their Joey Fat One.

Four minutes after the beer goes untouched, I feel the guy slide onto the seat next to me.

I flap up the cover so he can see it, while keeping my eyes on the page, cursing this guy for making me re-read the same sentence four times.

I hold my finger up to indicate I’m still reading, let me finish. I carry on staring at the page, long enough to turn it, and stare more. I wait until it becomes awkward.

‘Excuse me,’ I say, looking up finally. He turns around expectantly. ‘You forgot your beer,’ I say louder.

I want to laugh. I look up at Teddy and he rolls his eyes around, clockwise. I let out a giggle.

The apartment is dark. It doesn’t feel like home yet. Everything is placed in an unfamiliar location.

I can hear the dog’s tail wagging as I enter. It’s come to the door. I haven’t taken it out all day.

I switch the light on and there he is, Spider-Man the dog, staring at me. He nods over to where his leash hangs off my bookshelf. I look at the doormat where I stand to pick up the dog-walker’s note.

Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a doggie can.

Except a number two. He may be constipated. Or superheroes never need the toilet.

Mike

Sighing, drunk from the free beer I accepted, I grab the lead off the shelf and open the bag with the empanada in it. So much for eating it in front of Twitter in my bed, I think.

Outside, Spider-Man has his nose to the ground. Searching for rivals. Jackson Heights is blissfully still at this time, part of the reason I moved here. I don’t know the area too well yet. The empanada is warm in my stomach. I’m thirsty. Spying an open bodega, I walk towards it to buy a bottle of water. Inside, the lights are bright and there is a bustle. I keep looking back at the front door, nervous to leave Spider-Man by himself. I buy a bottle of water, silently, from a guy who barely looks up from the Hindi melodrama he’s watching on his phone.

We walk a couple more blocks. I want to go home but the way Spider-Man tugs at the lead, excited to be out at 4 a.m., makes me feel bad about cutting short his street time. We near a corner and there is a familiar noise.

Someone’s listening to the Dhoom 3 soundtrack. It makes me smile. I remember the song well, Katrina Kaif simulates a chaste lap dance for 50-year-old Aamir Khan, who is wearing a bowler hat and suit vest like a creep. I may have misremembered this. There are voices talking over the soundtrack. The familiar familial sound of shrill, fast Gujarati peppers the night air and for a second I’m transported home.

I haven’t been back in months. Not since Papa told me he voted Trump and I yelled that he was a sell-out before hiding in my room and getting not-stoned from a 7-year-old joint I remembered I hid in an old copy of a Jhumpa book. I can barely speak to the man on the phone. I’m sure to send Mom photos of me on every single damn protest, my placards and slogans clear, because I know she’s definitely showing them to him. But no way I’m spending time with that apologist for the racist hashtag notmypresident.

Hearing the Dhoom 3 soundtrack reminds me of a few Christmases ago, being home, with Preeti, listening to it on repeat as we drove around, doing the Greatest Hits of our stupid upstate small town. It reminds me of my mom, standing over the kitchen counter, cutting up okra wheels so small they dissolved in your mouth, while a desi cable channel pumped out the hits.

Ni main kamli, kamli,

Mere yaar di

I almost bound around the corner, feeling instantly at home as I hum the chorus, my arrival announced by Spider-Man’s relentless enthusiasm.

Seven people, three women and four men, all dressed in jubo lenghas and sarees, wearing NY Yankees puffa jackets, stand around the open trunk of a car, smoking, listening to music and laughing. There are deep silver trays of food, potatoes and onions and okra and gajar pickle and white rice and yello kadhi and my favourite, mounds of khichdi, all stacked next to the trunk.

In unison, they all nod, and I walk on, waving an embarrassed hi to the sky, as they resume their conversation.

It’s only when I’ve passed them that I turn around and nod back. None of them is paying any attention.

That communal nod of theirs, it stays with me all the way home. For a second, I don’t feel homesick.

I’m thinking about those people the next morning when Rohan stops by the coffee shop to grab my keys and collect Spider-Man.

He nods at me as he enters and I smile and offer a small wave. The shop is empty. I’m leaning on the counter, reading articles on my phone.

If you have time to lean, you have time to clean, the old barista mantra goes. Not me.

‘Nah,’ I say. ‘He definitely shed hair on everything I own. He smells like butt. All my throw pillows look like mohair monstrosities now.’

‘At least you’re no longer referring to Spider-Man as it any more. That tells me you bonded at least.’

‘Oh, you know,’ Rohan says. ‘Shaadis are always four days too long, twenty masis too social and one racist kaka. I brought you a box of samosas though. Shall I leave them in your apartment?’

‘Leave me one,’ I say. ‘I need my fix. God, I can’t wait to go to a wedding this year. I need my masi fix.’

‘All right, bet,’ Rohan says, handing me a baggy with a deliciously brown samosa in it.

An online commentator wrote under my last essay, about the unbearable whiteness of publishing, that I should shut the fuck up because no one cares what a chubby samosa thinks. I thought, my guy, the last thing you want is a thin goddamn samosa.

Rohan leaves as another brown guy enters, wearing a snapback that says Haram on it. They nod at each other.

I don’t mind answering. Her name is Priyanka. She laughs after everything she says, and in silences flatly says doo-be-doo. No tune associated with it. Just doo-be-doo. Normally I would find it so irritating but tonight, it sounds utterly charming.

She laughs. ‘It’s what you say when you’re in strange cities, you try to find the links. It helps you feel connected.’

‘At first,’ she says. ‘But then, before you know it, you’re nodding at every person with brown skin you walk past, and you start to feel like you’re near the people who look like you. It helps you put down roots.’

‘Five years ago. I was not even there. My sister sent this to me in the mail. My mother. Through the mail.’

We’re nearing home. It’s late. The amber swell of the streetlights as we approach my street are a comforting welcome-home for my drunk ass. Drunk enough to Uber. At some point tonight, I was sober enough to say yes to one more drink. I got even more excited when that one more drink was at my favourite bar in my old neighbourhood.

‘So glad I took this job,’ she says, banging the steering wheel. ‘I can go and get some aapna food.’

‘Where?’ I ask. ‘It’s 4.20 a.m. Where you gonna get dhal bhatt shaak rotli?’

Priyanka slows the car and looks back at me, leaning with my cheek against the cool window.

‘You live here and you don’t know about Didi’s?’ I shake my head. ‘Didi’s Gujarati food?’ I shake my head again. I close my eyes and smile. I want to lie down. I want to drink something fizzy. I want to not be in this car. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let’s get some dhal bhatt shaak rotli at 4.23 a.m.’

I’ve not heard of Didi’s. My mom’s rotlis were the best. We all say that of our mom’s way of making them. Each mom has their special way. Every chapatti is different. Every family serves their chapattis differently. I know that now. I know that Sheila mami likes them small and thick, that Nisha kaki likes them with lots of ghee. I know that Ba made flying saucers, with the middle all puffy. Mom makes them flat. Like our family is used to. Every family learns to make them their favourite way. The difference is subtle. It can be down to the diameter, thickness, amount of heat. My mom’s chapattis were thin and very round, covering the circumference of her circular rolling board. She would cook them on a naked flame, using her asbestos fingers to turn them as needed. They were sometimes burnt and always as they should be. I haven’t been home in months. I want rotli.

I open the car door, and wrench myself from the backseat. I’ve been in this car so long I feel less drunk and more heavy.

Meena sends me out from the hotel to get these infamous kebabs. I’m walking down some random street behind the Taj. Every red-flag word of warning Mom gave me about this country is banging through my brain.

The two men, hunching over four oil drums, each one blazing, illuminating their faces golden in the night sky, work dough for the naans, keep the kebabs turning, have the right change for you before you’ve even paid. I order two lamb and two chicken.

I ask where I can buy some beers. It’s almost a novelty, being able to drink at nineteen. One of the kebab-wallahs points down a street.

It’s dark and eerie and exactly the type of street Mom told me to never walk down alone. The buoyancy in my feet comes from stepping out of my American shoes into something more ethereal. I get this place. I don’t need Mom to patronise me.

Fucking come on. White people come to India to find themselves all the fucking time. A desi girl can’t walk down a dark Bombay street and masquerade for a local at all?

I’ve been instructed to knock on a window. I look around for the window in the side of the warehouse that occupies the majority of the dead-end street I’ve been sent down. I feel like I’m on the set of Don’t Look Now.

To be honest, there’s only one thing on the side of the building that could be a window. I tap on it, confidently. I need beer goddamnit, my kebabs are going soft, so quick, please.

The window opens, decisively. A man sits at a desk in the window. He nods at me.

‘Two Kingfisher,’ I ask, peering inside, watching men crate up bottles of beer and eat kebabs from the same place I just stopped at.

‘White,’ I say, not entirely convinced I’m enough of a connoisseur of any alcohol to know the difference.

Back at the hotel, Meena is nearly ready for our trip to Inferno. I tell her about the warehouse of beer.

Didi’s is quiet and small and exactly like the inside of that warehouse behind the Taj in Bombay. Plastic white Formica chairs, plastic white Formica tables, plastic spoons, plastic thalis. A television in the corner pumps out a Bollywood playlist off of YouTube. I bare my teeth at Priyanka and nod my head in time to the beat. She smiles at me.

My cousin over in England sent me a link to an article recently, about some landlord who refuses to rent to desis because our food smells too much. Lord, I wrote back to him. Curry smells so much better than egg mayo, my god.

Pops, watching that television, as the girl dances the item number. Mom sitting, one foot up on the chair, her elbow draped over it, smearing gajar pickle into her thepla and eating it in two bites, the smell lingering for hours, me gulping down a salt lime soda as a treat.

Further back, to school, Mom making me get changed out of my school things, into home clothes – a plain kurti, trackies – so that my clothes didn’t smell of the food. Us keeping our coats and our outdoor clothes out of the kitchen. The worst thing, she was intimating, would be being told that our clothes stink of curry. The first dish I learned to make myself was pasta with tomato sauce. The care packages she sent to me at college, theplas and parathas wrapped in tin foil, the empty jelly jars now filled with gajar pickle, keree ni chutney, I’d eat ’em on benches in the quad, by myself, knowing that Lindsey, my roommate, would complain if I ate them in our room, because she complained about everything. It made me feel so far away. Like when they served some sort of miscellaneous generic chicken curry in the cafeteria and she put her scarf over her nose, baulking about the smell and looking at me.

There are a couple of people eating, dressed in black suits with black shirts. They eat separately but both look up at Priyanka and smile at her. She waves back at them.

‘People spoiling movies for you,’ she says, smiling. ‘Or television. Or basketball. Or your seats, with vomit, cum, oily foods. People thinking they know better than satnav. Traffic. DVT. Having to buy things so you can use the bathroom. There’s a lot of things.’

I laugh as Priyanka leads me towards the counter. Didi is checking her phone, leaning against a wall. I recognise her as one of the people who gave me the nod the other night. I realise now, this is the building I walked past with Spider-Man. I look around – the rest of the nodders are all here, serving food. She has a permanently open mouth, seemingly mostly smiling, and thick-ass glasses. Her hair is pulled tight into a bun. She wears one of those black tees that lists a bunch of names: Hers says Didi & Masi & Faiba & Ba & Mota Ba & Bhen-a-ji. I love it. I take a sneaky picture of it, for the Gram. Didi looks up at me as I hit snap.

‘All right, che,’ Didi replies, without looking up from her phone. ‘Who is your friend?’

I haven’t eaten khichdi since Dada’s cremation. I sat in the kitchen with Mom and washed great bowls of brown lentils by hand as everyone sat next door singing prathna. Pops kept popping his head in the door asking if we needed help. He looked so lost. Dada had been such an integral part of our lives. When he had his mind, he dictated our social engagements. When he didn’t, we did everything for him. It was all-encompassing. Jesus fuck, the amount of times I had to help Pops lever him out of a bath and Dada got all weird cos his penis was out, like there was anything either vaguely sexual or humiliating about the nudity, and not the fact that this man no longer possessed a mind that could control his own damn body. It was depressing.

At Dada’s cremation, relatives turned up with food – samosas, bateta nu shaak, paneer, rotlis, but it was Mom’s khichdi that kept us all going. When I asked her how to make it, she said it was her favourite too and she would teach me one day – either peasant food or grief food, she said. I laughed, wolfing down my second bowl of the stuff.

‘Yes please,’ I say to Didi, as she spoons a mound of khichdi into a white plastic bowl, handing me a white plastic spoon.

Priyanka asks for some bakri and gajar nu pickle. Didi unwraps some foil and lifts a hard disc onto a plate.

I’m about to bite into my khichdi as I walk towards a table, choosing to sit on my own while Priyanka heads over to catch up with one of the other drivers. The other one disconnects his phone from a phone charger and stands up, ready to leave. He looks familiar, like I’ve used his cab on Lyft or something. He has a thin, pencil-like beard and moustache and his hair sticks up like he is Guile in Street Fighter II. He catches me staring at him. He rubs at his chest, two fingers slip between the buttons under his shirt, and he nods at me as he leaves.

I nod back at the shadow of his departure. He is long gone and part of me feels bereft.

I bite at a huge mound of khichdi, and, too much clove aside, it tastes just like how Mom used to make. I feel like I’m at home.

I eat leftover khichdi at work the next day. I’m sitting in front of the coffee shop. Maggie told me to eat my smelly food outside.

I joked that it did overpower the smell of avocado on fucking sourdough toast somewhat. She smirked as if to say, I functionally understand this to be a joke but refuse to understand it or honour it with a laugh.

I’m leaning against a bench when a guy approaches wearing a bomber jacket made out of sherwani material and fucking Bata chappals. I smirk at him, except this smirk says ‘I am digging the fashion, my friend, and I get it, I get its heritage, but this is not necessarily an invitation to stop and chat, so keep walking’. He nods at me.

‘What’s up, ma?’ he asks in a hoarse voice, like he’s been on too many villain auditions in one day. ‘You good?’

He talks with such clear familiarity and friendliness that, for a second, I worry that we know each other, even though I can count the number of brown people I know in this city on a thumb, called Rohan.

‘Sorry, we’re in an awkward exchange now. I love your chappal-and-sherwani look and you said hey and for a second, I thought I knew you. But I don’t. Do I?’

‘Naw, but it’s good. Always good to see another desi out here. It’s like a mayonnaise factory.’ I laugh and he laughs too. ‘What you eating?’

‘Khichdi?’ I say, unsure why I’m embarrassed, suddenly, claiming food-authenticity with another brown person, like he might correct me on my pronunciation, or say, actually, that is Gujarati brown-lentil khichdi, it’s important to be specific, lest I think it’s a Nepalese red-lentil khichdi, mixed with lamb mince and parsley.

‘Yeah, it’s delicious. From Didi’s,’ I say, like a goddamn pro. I coulda lived here my entire life.

‘Oh word,’ he says. ‘I love that place. Gotta get me some oondhwo. Anyways, stay blessed.’ He starts to walk away, stops then turns to me again. ‘Jay Shree Krishna,’ he says, and leaves.

I’m surprised she has heard of it. It has become an obsession of mine. I’ve been there three out of five nights, tried pretty much the entire menu, each dish tasting like home. I’ve eaten alone with a book, I FaceTimed a buddy in London, and I brought Rohan. Who tagged us on Instagram. Which is how Mom knew about it. Since she joined Instagram to share Sanskrit memes and follow Priyanka and Deepika and the hungama of all the other Bollywood stars, she is obsessed with the app. Of course she comments under every one of my Grams. Of course she follows Rohan. Of course it means he tags me into everything every time we see each other. It’s his way of ensuring we keep in touch. His mom died four years ago. Since then, he’s been ending every episode of his podcast with ‘Call your mom. She misses you’.

‘How do you know about Didi’s?’ I say, shoving a pizza slice in my face so Mom can’t tell how sad I feel, interacting with her through a screen.

‘Darling, we did not always live here. You know you were born in Queens. A few blocks away from Didi’s.’

‘Of course, Didi’s is as old as desis in the city themselves. It was a place for all of us to go and be amongst our people. I know my colleagues at the college here call this self-segregation, but they are goras, Rakhee, darling. They do not understand that this was self-preservation. Going to Didi’s every Thursday and listening to people read out their letters from home, or on Saturdays when we would move all the tables to one side and listen to mehfils, or the friends Papa made with other taxi drivers. We had a community in the city and that was our central clubhouse.’

‘Really?’ I say, and for the first time in ages, I feel like I’m truly all ears to Mom. Like whenever we talk, I tell her the bits about my week that are palatable to her: the micro-progressions of my career, the micro-aggressions of hipsters, what I’ve eaten, have I been on any dates. We don’t really share stories that count. Everything is a list: a list of meals, a list of names of people I’ve dated, a list of hipster racist incidents, a list of commissions. There is nothing that makes this conversation easy.

I try to say it as tempered and as plainly as I can. ‘I don’t want to speak to him,’ I say.

‘He misses you, beta,’ Mom says. ‘It was just a vote. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does,’ I say. ‘Anyway, tell me how to make khichdi,’ I say, taking the laptop over to my kitchen counter.

I love my mom in this moment. She is firm and clear with instructions, but you can tell, from the smirk on her face, that there is nothing she would rather be doing than telling her only child how to cook her favourite dish over the internet.

I want to cry, and tell her I miss her and use any excuse to go home. But she has that determined look on her face, like I will teach this child how to cook like me. I choke back a tear and listen.

I eat away bad dates, rejection emails from editors, my silent spat with my pops, Mom’s well-intentioned sharing of news of more successful cousins, Spider-Man’s death, Rohan’s upset, my upset, loneliness, the empty apartment, bad sex, the season finale of a show I would never admit I watch publicly, trolls who seek out women of colour with political opinions on the internet so they can describe to us all the ways they would like us to be raped, a guy I used to hang out with who’s now on a pretty successful AMC show ignoring me when I say hello to him at a random bar . . .

Didi’s becomes where I bask in good news. I only take Rohan if I take anyone. I won’t let white people ruin this place for me.

I eat to celebrate a new commission, a published work, a successful reading, a day at work when I didn’t want to spray boiling milk into a customer’s eyeball, friends’ successes, a guy I used to hang out with getting cast in a pretty successful AMC show, a good conversation with Mom, a care package she sends containing theplas in tin foil and a Hanuman Chalisa book.

It’s 4 a.m. and I’m back in the bar cos I know Teddy’s working. I’m trying to finish a terrible book I need to review and the only way I can finish it is if I wash it down with two or three beers. I’m at the corner of the bar, leaning against the wall and against the bar, almost squatting over my stool just to stay awake because this book is terrible.

I can feel the man next to me try to get my attention. He flicks a beer mat repeatedly against a knuckle to distract my peripheral vision, he sighs a lot so I’ll ask what’s wrong, when my mac ’n’ cheese arrives he asks the bartender what I ordered, to establish a connection, even though it’s just fucking mac ’n’ cheese, he makes a phone call to a buddy and says he’s doing nothing, just propping up a bar next to the most beautiful tanned lady in Queens.

At which point I put my book down and turn to him. His phone call mysteriously wraps up quickly and he turns to face his entire body at me.

I shake my head in disbelief. I hate this, when it’s this casual, this normal; it causes my stomach to burn, for me to be that weird kid who never fit in once more.

‘This is not a tan,’ I tell him, slowly, seeing Teddy hover near us, just in case this escalates and he can use his bartender privileges to chuck someone out. ‘I’m always this colour.’

‘What the fuck did I do?’ he says, picking up his phone from the wet bar and then dropping it in beer-spill again. ‘It’s not like I’m a racist or anything.’

‘No,’ I say, gathering my things, flaring my nostrils. ‘But you said something racist.’

At Didi’s, there’s a line; it’s Ramadhan and I’ve come just as people are having their last meal before the fast starts. Priyanka nods at me from three people in front. All the men lining up look tired, haggard. Summer-month fasting must be the toughest.

As I wait, I stare at a collage of pictures, on the wall, near the entrance. I’ve never noticed them before.

Faded, curled at the corners, almost over-exposed, is a photo of two people I instantly recognise. Beaming, banging dandhiyas together, facing the camera, him in an all-white juba lengha, her in one of her pink floral saree specials. It’s my mom and pops. Doing garba. The inscription reads Navratri 1989.

There I am, almost three, sleeping on two chairs pushed together, wearing a red salwar.

This other house, it’s always been here for me, home, I just hadn’t found it yet. I look at the line of people in front of me, the most brown faces I’ve been surrounded by since Nadya’s shaadi.

DIDI’S