by Durjoy Datta
‘I’m sorry. I just meant to tell you the real story and then fake my tears so you don’t call her.’
He laughed and then so did I.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh,’ he said.
‘It’s okay.’
Once I shut up and wiped my face, he said, ‘Give me your mother’s email ID. I will mail her notifying about this. I hope she doesn’t check her mail?’
This man was brilliant. I smiled, and not the creepy psychopath smile I had been assaulting him with before. He typed out a mail and hit ‘send’. Next, he buried himself in the menu and ordered himself a salad and a vodka. Clearly, I was not paying for this date.
‘I will have the same,’ I said to the waiter.
‘Without the vodka,’ he said and waved the waiter away. ‘You’re too young for that. And this isn’t a date. Don’t call it that. You’re seventeen.’
‘So?’
‘That’s illegal.’
‘Bella was seventeen and Edward was a hundred years old!’ I protested.
‘I’m not an undead, sparkly vampire.’
‘Fine. But you still need to tell me what exactly people do on dates? Like how’s it different? Like what do they do?’ I said.
‘They talk.’
‘About what?’
‘Depends on who they are talking to,’ he said. ‘If they really like the person, they open up, otherwise they gossip, talk about pubs and movies they went to, their annoying friends, take selfies and look into their phones and text people who are not sitting in front of them.’
I was taking notes. He was rather knowledgeable about these things. This was a good idea.
23
Danish Roy
I had no idea what I was doing there.
One moment I was sleeping in my pyjamas and the next moment I was apparently on a date with my underage student. It was welcome in a way. My parents were home with my uncle’s family, complete with their annoying twin sons, and it was only a matter of time when I would have had to leave my bedroom fortress and sit with them.
I ate my salad and gulped my vodka. And then ordered some more. It made life a little better and I felt less guilty about finding Aisha absolutely stunning.
‘Eat,’ I said. ‘That’s also what people do on dates.’
This girl was bat-shit crazy. She had just told me a real story about a sad incident and had intended to act sad but had instead starting bawling in the middle of the restaurant, shouting, I would have died had my mother died that day. It was embarrassing and cute at the same time.
And post that, she kept looking at me like things were going to happen, like dates were supposed to be these magic times where every few seconds a bunny appears and amuses the participants. Dates for me had always been boring. I never knew what to say or what to do and the girls always seemed to be in physical pain while being with me.
‘That’s your fourth vodka,’ she said. ‘Are you drunk?’
‘Me? No.’
‘So what do we do after we eat?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Is that also a part of being on dates? Doing things spontaneously? Then why wasn’t it in any of the manuals? I knew they were a sham.’
She rubbed her hands and pushed away the plate in front of her. She had hardly eaten. The salad was quite a disappointment. I felt like having biryani now.
I waved for the bill and studied it intently when it came. ‘No happy hours,’ the waiter said as he waited for me to clear the bill. I nodded and slipped in my debit card. She protested that we should go dutch on the bill and even fumbled with her handbag but I turned her down. I couldn’t have let a kid pay for my alcohol.
‘So, what now?’ she asked once we left TGIF.
‘There,’ I said and pointed to the games arcade. The fourth vodka had worn off my inhibitions, making me more inclined towards taking stupid decisions.
Now a games arcade might not feature among top-rated things to do while on a date, but they are certainly top-rated things to do in life. Xboxes and PlayStations would never replace the feeling of standing in a crowd of screaming rowdy boys under the flickering tubelight of a shady video game parlour—your sweaty fingers wrapped around little red controllers—egging you on to beat the shit out of your opponent. It was the closest you could get to being in a fight to death.
‘What?’
‘Tekken 3 and Street Fighter,’ I said. ‘You vs me. Okay, let me tell you something. If you beat me, I will grant you permission to skip the counselling sessions!’
‘Done!’ she said.
We bought eleven coins. I picked the blonde-haired Paul and she picked Katarina.
‘You’re so dead,’ I said as I snapped my fingers, took hold of the controllers and gave them a nice spin. She inserted the coins. ‘I should warn you that I was an arcade game samurai in my times. My name was feared.’
She rolled her eyes in a mocking attitude. ‘We shall see.’
The first fight started. She started pressing all the buttons at once and howled at the top of her voice as if it would help. I was shaky at first but slowly it came back to me and I knocked her out quite easily. The second and the third fights were even easier. I was the king of this world.
‘I’m new at this,’ she said. I laughed. ‘What? Give me a little room. Let’s make it best out of three?’
‘Fine,’ I said. We had extra coins and there was no way she was beating me. I decimated her again.
‘Can we make it a best out of five?’ she asked. And then it became a best of seven, and then best of nine, and best out of eleven.
‘Give up, already,’ I said.
She scrunched up her face and turned away from me in mock disappointment. ‘It’s a stupid game for boys.’
‘You think so? I shouldn’t probably tell you that you are one of the fastest learners I had ever seen.’
We resumed the game. By the eleventh game, she had stopped banging on the buttons and learnt the three punch-flying kick combos, which she used cleverly.
‘Really?’ she screamed and lunged at me. I lost my footing and she landed awkwardly on me, her elbow jammed in my groin.
‘Ow.’
‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ she said as she rolled away and got up. I doubled up in pain on the ground, clutching my insufficient tools of reproduction. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes,’ I mumbled. ‘I just need to lie down here for a little while.’
And she laughed. Not like a little snicker. She laughed with her mouth open, and she mumbled little apologies, but she kept laughing till her eyes teared up.
And then, I laughed too.
When I felt slightly better, we shifted to ice hockey and a shooting game, both of which ended in draws because neither of us wanted to lose so we started cheating. We were thrown out of the arcade when Aisha took the ice hockey puck and flung it outside the window after a self-goal.
Later, we watched three movies for the price of one. We had first row (really uncomfortable) tickets for Avengers: Age of Ultron where she shrieked every time Hulk landed a punch. During a crucial scene between Iron Man in a Hulk Buster suit smashing up Hulk in a crowded street, she stood up on her chair and hurled expletives and popcorn on the screen.
‘Sit down!’ a little boy in the row behind ours shouted. She threw a fistful of popcorn at him.
The boy’s mother looked at me. I shrugged. ‘She’s not with me,’ I said.
She kept jumping on the seat till the usher held her by her hand and asked her to step down. During the interval, she begged me to walk into another hall which was playing Margarita with a Straw, a film about a girl with cerebral palsy exploring her sexuality. She cried like a little child and flung herself in my arms. She stormed out of the movie hall, cursing and accusing the director of emotional manipulation. Finally, we sneaked into the theatre playing Rio 3, a happy animated movie and she and I giggled like our life depended on it.
Later, I drove her home and she slept with her mouth open
in the backseat of my mother’s car.
‘We are here,’ I said.
‘Huh?’ She woke up with a start and wiped the drool off her face. ‘Thanks.’ She stepped out of the car and stretched like a little poodle and rubbed her eyes. ‘It was a great date.’
‘Yeah, it was.’
‘I’m going to knock my date with Vibhor out of the park!’ she squealed.
‘Best of luck.’
I drove back home. I missed her already.
24
Aisha Paul
I walked towards my house as a new woman.
My practice date was great, and if dating was this easy, I should write a book about it and fleece millions of unsuspecting girls.
I used my key to let myself in. My brother was on the couch watching Masterchef India. Without meeting my eye, he asked, ‘Where were you?’
‘Nothing. Nowhere. Why? I went nowhere.’
‘I saw that teacher dropping you home,’ he said.
‘Oh.’
‘Where were you?’
My brain never processed information and situations fast enough to come up with a believable lie. And even if it did, my face would contort and twitch and no one would believe me.
‘It was a guidance session,’ I said.
‘What guidance session?’
‘He’s not a teacher. He’s a guidance counsellor. I was appointed one after I misbehaved in class. Mom knows. And if you don’t believe me, he has mailed Mom too about today’s session. I needed to ask him a few things.’
He nodded and his eyebrows settled. I went and sat next to him.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘For?’
‘For asking where I was. And for the birthday party next week.’
‘You have thanked me before,’ he said, his tone still angry as if I had done something wrong. I sat there and watched Masterchef with him.
‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘You can tell—’
‘Why are you throwing this party for me?’ I asked, pointblank, almost like a cop.
‘It’s your eighteenth birthday, Aisha. You will be a grown up after this. You deserve it.’
It only made me angrier. All these years, I needed my brother and he was nowhere to be seen, and now he was planning to get away with it with just a party. Despite my irritation I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardise the party though. It was the best thing to have ever happened to me!
‘You don’t talk to me, bhaiya. And then you throw this party? Why?’ I asked.
‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ he said and increased the volume of the television. I took the remote from him and switched it off.
‘I’m talking to you, bhaiya.’
‘And I answered you.’
He snatched the remote from me. I snatched it back and threw it on the table. The Sellotape holding the remote ripped off and the batteries spilled out.
‘What the hell is your problem?’ growled my brother and stormed off.
*
Later that evening, Namrata came over and my brother had to open the door. We shared the room so whoever had a better reason to occupy the room would have it to himself or herself.
‘No, Aunty, we are good,’ Namrata implored, and waved to tell my mother she didn’t need another sandwich. Despite my mother’s condition, she always took it on herself to make sure everyone who entered our house was full till half-digested food bubbled up at the back of their throats.
The good thing about being friends with a nerd (I mean that in a good way) are:
They the most genuine people. They are so worried about their marks and about learning that they don’t think about playing games in relationships. Nerds rock.
They make you learn things. Once a non-nerd makes friends with a nerd, the nerd makes you learn everything they know. Well, at first they are a little shocked to see how dumb you are.
The world would be a better place if every mean, dumb person was paired up with a book-devouring, number-crunching, equation-solving nerd. They love you unconditionally. Unless you lose their notes—then they don’t.
Right now, Namrata was making me read all her favourite books. We started with Enid Blyton, then Roald Dahl and Ruskin Bond, and then we worked through John Grisham and David Baldacci, before moving on to Arundhati Roy, Manu Joseph and J.M. Coetzee. We also sprinkled quite a few young adult authors in our reading list. She made me read widely and deeply.
But that day we weren’t having a conversation about books, we were having a conversation about blowjobs. Namrata’s parents were leaving for Panipat for a day and she was sneaking Norbu in.
‘Norbu asked for one?’ I almost exclaimed.
‘No. He just mentioned it in some context a few times. So I guessed—’
‘You don’t know how to give a blowjob, do you?’
‘I think I can. Like I used to think it’s gross but right now I’m a little confused. Of all the boys you have dated, you haven’t given it anyone?’
I blushed. The old Aisha would have lied, but not the new one. The new Aisha doesn’t lie to her friend. Friendship should mean not having to lie.
‘I haven’t dated a single boy yet.’
She laughed.
She saw me not react and her laughter trailed off. ‘What? You? Aisha? Not one? None?’
No. And then I started to cry for no reason whatsoever. She didn’t know what to do so I just crawled up to her and put my head on her lap and cried. She patted my head, not knowing what to make of it.
‘Why are you crying?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know? Stop making a habit of crying. You give us girls a bad name,’ she chuckled.
‘Sorry, sorry.’
‘Stop crying!’
‘Fine.’
‘You’re beautiful, Aisha! If someone doesn’t date you, it’s their fault not yours.’
‘It’s so unfair. I don’t have a problem with not dating anyone. But it sucks when everyone thinks you are and you aren’t!’
‘Yeah, tell me about it. I didn’t strip for a boy and people thought I did. Wonder how that happened?’
‘I’m sorry again.’
‘It’s okay, I was just kidding,’ said Namrata.
‘See, you’re smart and funny and adorable and understanding, and you have this cute face I could kiss all day. No wonder Norbu loves you! Why would anyone love me? I’m just big breasts.’
‘Girls would kill for that,’ she said.
‘And a face full of pimples!’
‘Not completely full,’ said Namrata and laughed. She hugged me. ‘You will find someone truly deserving of you who will love you as much as you want, Aisha.’
I smiled and sat up. I wiped my face on her sleeve and said, ‘Vibhor is taking me out on a date.’
‘Uff! Why are you such a drama queen? Why were you crying right now then? What’s wrong with you?’ she said excitedly.
‘Hehe. I think I forgot that with all our blowjob talk.’
‘Hmmm . . . I’m thinking of not giving one now.’
‘Why?’
‘Men always have it a little too easy. Blowjobs shouldn’t be doled out just like that. Norbu will need to work for it. He won’t win so easily.’
‘Blowjobs mean the man is winning?’ I asked.
‘Ummm . . . If I don’t feel like it, then I think it’s him who’s winning.’
‘And sex too shouldn’t be about men winning, right? We should make a poster out of that,’ I said.
‘I’m not sure if I want to be counselled like you,’ Namrata winked at me.
‘You would love to be counselled by Danish.’
‘Wait? Why are you smiling? Do you have a crush on him?’
‘No. I don’t. I have a date with Vibhor,’ I said.
She didn’t believe me. We spent the rest of the night arguing who out of David Nichols and Nick Hornby is a better writer, and it was so much better
a conversation than talking about other people’s lives and clothes, and gossiping. I loved the woman I was becoming. Also, I learnt an important lesson. As she slept, I thought about how men pumped their fists after having sex for the first time, while the girls shied away, ashamed.
And so I Googled the entire night about sexuality, virginity, and learned of how sex—supposedly a spectacular thing to do with one’s body—was often an instrument of oppression for women. Like it wasn’t fun any more, it was something dirty, something to be gossiped about, some taboo, to be snatched, or stolen, or cheated for. Why would they do that to poor sex?
So I decided that sex shouldn’t be about men winning. Sex should be like chess, a sport where gender is irrelevant. Winners should be based on who performed better regardless of gender.
They should make a poster out of this. Sex is chess.
25
Sarthak Paul
It would be unfair to blame it all on Aisha.
She wasn’t the only reason why rumours about her bothered me so much, and why I wanted to hide from it all. I had always been a bright student. Students who score great marks without even trying? I was one of them—hated, envied, idolized. Maths, physics, chemistry, even Hindi and Sanskrit, give me a question and I would solve it. It was a lucky break for the entire family when I aced the entrance examination to one of the toughest boarding schools in India. The scholarship covered everything and would save us thousands of rupees a year which we could use to pay off the loans Dad had taken. My parents were beaming for weeks after the result.
‘Stupid scholarship,’ Aisha used to say as she clung to my leg, begging me not to leave.
It took us five times the duration we thought it would for us to pack my stuff into three suitcases. Every night when we used to sleep, Aisha sneaked out and unpacked the suitcases and hid my clothes and books around the house. She would have this look on her face, this cute weasel look, as if to say she didn’t know who did it, and that maybe it was a sign from God telling me not to go. I hated to have to leave her behind. But I was a young boy and I wanted to experience life in a boarding school as well. I had heard that they had great boxing coaches and an unbeaten soccer team. That’s something that really excited me.
