Cover Story
We were hungry that evening.
It was close to midnight. She had come to stay with me after much deliberation and heart ache. There had been fights with her dad, sly footwork with mine, deception and lies. She had flown down from Delhi or somewhere far off. It was a long time ago.
We were meeting after some months. Our stories together, together in the same points of time and place, were few any ways. We had kissed once on a brightly lit, lonely staircase in a public library. We had exchanged undying promises of love a few times through hasty telephone calls and sweaty, immature letters written on blue green paper soaked in fountain pen ink. Most of the sentimental talk was, as would be expected, instigated, dwelled upon, lingered on and flogged to boring predictability by your humble narrator. She never spoke too much about love. She found my fascination for that topic strange and absurd. She could talk about several other things though in some twenty voices, all at once, interspersed with glints and glimmers of the eye, curl around the ears and smiles, all imagined vividly but strained out faint through the invisible pores of crackling telephone lines.
It was a love affair of distances, with promised encounters being so far and few. Every day efforts at reaching out to the other stealthily drained the infinite magic from all the love. She promised to come down once, just once, to meet me in that dump I called home. She made it out to be an adventure of startling magnitude. The secrecy and the conniving added to the thrill of misplaced guilt. Again, it was I who ended up with the romance in the head. She descended on Bangalore with a steely view of what was to happen, and what will and what the limits would be. She acted like she had rehearsed it all in her head and whatever it was that unfolded was taken in, with large strident steps: all, but that untimely hunger.
We had spent about three hours together till that point in time. The first was spent cuddling together, with exploratory kisses but a firm rejection of any bold behavior. The firm rejection led to a second hour of rambling whines on the state of our relationship (me), work life (her) and sulking (me). The third hour was spent by her in the bath, while I tried out a few Sade songs on the desktop stereo, hoping it would set the tone for the rest of the night.
She stepped out of the bathroom with beads of water in her forehead and a whiff of hibiscus and jasmine. She looked beautiful enough to get me into love proclamation mode any moment, if I got such a moment again. And that's when she looked at me with that look that conveyed annoyance, grief and helplessness with a certain difficult to define tone. She said "I am hungry". So was I.
I had a small kitchen filled with empty beer bottles and mice. The refrigerator smelled of a week old tomato and semi rancid butter. I had forgotten about the food. There was disappointment in her tone- an emasculating annoyance that could have made me go on my knees to please her at once. I wished love would conquer all. She would forgive this transgression, forget that hunger and spend a blissful evening slumbering peacefully wrapped in my arms. That of course was not to be.
“I am tired", she said with resignation, like the limits of patience pulled hard at the fragile fiber of her love for me. "I have had a long day, sweetheart and I need food".
She had called me sweetheart. That was love wasn't it?
"We could eat out", I said helpfully. I was lying, hoping for the impossibility. The city shut its restaurants at midnight- government regulations -and it was already ten minutes past.
We went out in my green old beaten car. The brakes wouldn't work too well. She wasn't talking to me any more. She stared out of her side of the car, into the dying lights and amber street glow of the city. We drove around silent construction sites and dark sinister parks out into the main deserted roads of my city. The silent facades of long closed restaurants passed us by. Wait staff cycled out of one South Indian restaurant. A drunken bunch of college kids took turns to puke out of a Beetle.
I took the smaller by lanes hoping for bird feed from some late operating cigarette vendor. A police van stood instead in such habitual places. I asked her for the time. "One" she said in the same tired soft voice and continued to look out.
It was all going wrong of course. I pushed in the Dylan mix tape in my car stereo to break the sad uncomfortable silence. It refused to play once, twice and after receiving some button pushing and left fisted banging, it burst out into Jokerman. She was unmoved. I loved that song. I still do. I hummed along with it and joined in every time with the bird flying high in the light of the moon chorus. I thought I could spot a smile on her face.
We drove for twenty minutes with little success. She gave out a sharp little frustrated groan and looking almost fierce said “I will kill for food now”
That was cute; I tried to give a broad indulgent smile. I turned to see a set stony face, all the prettiness frozen into a threatening emotionless mask.
The fear of loss that it inspired set my brain into flash alert. It responded with a wave.
“We can try the airport”, I said. They have a coffee shop right outside which ought to be open twenty four hours. She said nothing, so I speeded up towards the main highway. The airport was some twenty kilometers away. I decided to reach it before the end of the next song.
She got out of the car, before I could turn off the engine and walked with still purpose towards the coffee shop. An uninteresting girl in a black cap and red t shirt looked at us sleepily.
“Two sandwiches please,” I said.
“No sandwich. We are closed”
“No you aren’t. You have a sign saying 24 hours right over your head”
“No Sir. Cash Machine is problem. No billing”
“We drove forty kilometers to get here. Give us something” I was trying out my charming face and persuasive tone here.
“No Sir” The girl turned away from us and fiddled with some coffee machine at the back of the shop. She was ignoring us.
That was when the love of my life gone by, smashed the glass of the temperature controlled food display counter with her bare fist. She was running towards the car before I could understand what had happened. The counter girl was screaming for help. I ran in panic towards the car. She was already in the driver seat when I reached it.
“Get in” she said flinging open the door on my side. By the time I was in and closing the door, the car was already moving at some 1oo km per hour.
The stereo was turned up to full blast and she choked Dylan out with her left fist.
She was driving badly. The car jumped several speed breakers. She switched to second gear for no reason and jerked us clean towards the windshield, made it up by accelerating further and got the fifth gear on just in time.
“There’s no one following us”, I shouted, my heart still pounding. “Let me drive”
She slammed the brakes on the fifth gear and the car skidded noisily.
“Here”, she said as she walked out of the driver’s seat and claimed for herself the seat behind me in the rear. I turned to look at her. She was surrounded by six shrink wrapped sandwiches and two small Crystal Magick water cans. How she managed to steal so much in the blink of an eye I would never know.
“Are you ok?” I asked
She showed me her right hand, moving it around in some front-back-front dance routine. It had a small cut under the thumb. It looked small, white and pretty. She was smiling, her eyes gleaming in pride. She stripped the plastic off a sandwich and passed it over to me.
“Here” she said in that soft cuddling tone, that was a caring caress. She loved me again I told myself. I took a bite into the cold bland brown bread sandwich that smelled of some pungent spice and tried to look happy.
She wasn’t bothered too much though about my feeble demonstration of perfect love. I could hear her munch through the sandwiches and click open the can as I drove back to my place distracted by the sharp blinding head lights of the trucks that crossed us. She started talking only when we were almost home. She talked about the weather in Bangalore. Before she could complete her monologue on the rains in the city, we were there. I stepped out and opened the rear door for her. She clutched a ball of plastic wraps and a crushed water can, which she flung into the dustbin near by.
She handed me a can and walked up the stairs to my house. There weren’t any sandwiches left, of course.
The moment we entered my home, she headed straight to the bedroom and flopped over on my bed, kicking her shoes out. As I walked out of the room with my pillow to the couch outside, she turned her head towards me sleepily and said, “That was fun…”
I had to agree that it was.