Hold my Hand (Penguin Metro Reads)

by Durjoy Datta

  I look around but I can only see different shades of denims. It takes me two 360-degree scans to spot the only mid-forties guy around. He’s chatting up the bouncer, and he’s handsome, like movie-star handsome. His arms are bulging out of his T-shirt, the nerves of his biceps are visible under his skin.

  ‘Is your dad a fitness model?’

  ‘Oh, you see him? He’s here, right?’ She breathes and smiles to herself. ‘He used to be a pilot in the Indian Air Force. Now, he’s a consultant.’

  ‘Consultant to swimwear models? I don’t think men in their mid-forties are allowed to be that muscular. It’s against the law or something.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be mean! He’s a consultant for a company that makes lightweight aircraft.’

  ‘Fancy!’ I say. ‘Oh shit! I think your dad is looking at me.’

  ‘He wouldn’t mind. He forced me to come to this club.’

  ‘Forced? Why?’

  ‘He wants me to be a teenager and do all teenager type things and not miss out on anything. I don’t think he likes me as I am. He expects me to struggle with adolescent issues too,’ she laughs.

  ‘And you have no adolescent issues?’

  ‘Blindness takes up a lot of my time,’ she says with a defeated smile.

  ‘Your dad is still looking. He’s really muscular,’ I say, a bit unnerved.

  She doesn’t give me a direct response, ‘People tell me he has a disarming smile. Is he smiling?’

  She finishes her coffee and the bartender notices immediately and asks if she needs a refill. She shakes her head and the bartender smiles; I think it’s the first time I have seen him do so. She takes out a ten-dollar bill from her pocket but the bartender refuses it. He says, ‘It’s on the house! For the beautiful birthday girl!’

  ‘Birthday? It’s your birthday?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ she blushes.

  ‘Happy Birthday!’ I say and she thanks me.

  ‘It’s actually tomorrow. But thank you. I think I should go now,’ she says. ‘Dad must be really bored.’

  I nod, and then realize she can’t see. So I say ‘okay’ and she steps down from the stool. Her dad’s still watching.

  ‘Can you walk me to my dad?’

  ‘You think that’s a great idea?’ I ask, nervous at walking towards a girl’s dad who’s 99 per cent hard muscles, 1 per cent eyes.

  ‘Okay. I will go on my own then.’

  I feel bad when I see her start to walk for she’s petite as a bunny and the crowd is doing a stampede of stallions and I say, ‘I will come.’

  She reaches out to my outstretched arm and holds it and we walk towards her dad, who’s still chatting with a bouncer, with one eye on us.

  As soon as we get to him, he reaches out to her and hugs her, ‘Did you have fun?’

  ‘As much as I could!’ she says and laughs.

  ‘Who’s your friend?’ he asks and extends his hand. We shake hands.

  ‘Deep,’ I say before she, whose name I do not know yet, tells him that she doesn’t know my name and he punches me into oblivion.

  ‘He’s staying in the same hotel as ours,’ she adds.

  ‘I’m her dad,’ he says and then looks at her. ‘But, Ahana, it’s not yet twelve! On my eighteenth birthday I emptied bottles of Chivas Regal like it was water and danced till it was noon of the next day. Why don’t you buy your friend a drink?’

  ‘I don’t drink, sir,’ I say, silently adding, ‘usually.’ I hope he can’t smell the alcohol on me; not the best first impression.

  ‘What’s wrong with kids these days?’ he shakes his head.

  ‘Fine, Dad, I will dance,’ she says. ‘But only if you don’t look. Deep says your muscularity makes him nervous.’

  The man laughs. It’s a very masculine laugh, affected and practised, yet somehow very natural. I hate his perfectness.

  ‘Fine. I will go hide myself some place.’

  ‘Aren’t you the best dad, leaving your daughter to dance with a stranger, oh, not before asking her to get drunk and dance till midnight?’ she chuckles.

  Her dad reaches for her hand and kisses it. ‘I really have no choice. I have the best daughter in the world and that’s a lot to live up to!’

  He goes back to the bouncer and they walk away from us.

  ‘Your dad is friends with the bouncer.’

  ‘He makes friends easily. I don’t.’

  I beg to differ.

  We are sitting on the pavement. The dancing, the music, the drunken theatrics, the excessive hugging is on like it just started; the party also looks like it has just started. There appears to be a carnival on the streets.

  She tells me she’s not much of dancer and I tell her I know exactly what that feels like.

  She’s doodling with her fingers on the pavement, her head still bobbing to the distant beats of dub step; she is smiling. For a girl who can’t see herself in the mirror, she’s dressed up nicely, a loose, long-sleeved pink shirt and shiny black pants; reminds me of the vampires with no reflections but impeccable hair and stuff.

  ‘Deep, right?’ she asks. ‘What are you doing in Hong Kong? I’m sure my dad will ask.’

  I tell her about my project of developing cataloguing software for libraries and then she asks me if I love books, and I say I can’t imagine a world without them, and then she tells me she misses reading. She tells me it’s been more than a year that she’s been in Hong Kong, and I ask her if she loves it here, and she nods.

  ‘It’s a great place for a blind person,’ she murmurs. ‘How’s it for someone who can see?’

  ‘It is nothing like what I have seen before,’ I answer honestly.

  ‘It’s not even funny how many questions Dad will ask me about you.’

  ‘What will you say?’

  ‘That you’re not my type.’

  I’m a little offended, even though it’s a joke, but I say, ‘You’re not my type either. You’re majorly exquisite.’

  ‘Exquisite?’ She laughs. ‘You know a lot of strange words. Do you see him?’

  ‘I’m sure he’s on the top of some building aiming his sniper-type rifle at me.’ I look around and he’s not there. ‘I can’t see him.’

  ‘Do you want to . . . maybe dance?’ she asks, biting her nails.

  ‘I think the people I came with left me alone because they saw me dancing,’ I say, laughing.

  She tell me it’s okay, but I can see it in her blue-green eyes that she’s sad and then I warn her that I’m a bad dancer and she says she wouldn’t know because she’s blind and she says it like she has acne or bad hair. She bets me that she’s even worse, and I don’t believe her.

  I lead us towards the crowd that is dancing on the street, and I am shouting, ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ and I feel kind of important. We are bang in the middle of a scene from Grease. It’s the centre of the street and everyone’s dancing and everyone’s cool and has great hair, none better than hers though!

  We start shifting our weight awkwardly from one foot to another, I am consciously trying not to touch her, and she’s looking straight, approximately at my abdominal area.

  ‘Can you hold me? I feel like you’re not there,’ she asks like it’s nothing, like I go about holding beautiful girls all the time. And just like that, my hands are on her waist. She’s moving rather exquisitely like a snake to a charm, unhindered and graceful and just, just, incredibly hot! Her eyes are closed, her hands are playing with her hair, falling on her face, and I’m like half-dead and half in love, and her head sways like it’s floating in the music, and she’s some place else, somewhere far away. I want to tell her that she’s a liar and a part-time belly dancer but I keep shut. I’m sure her dad’s looking.

  Seconds pass, then minutes, and she’s still dancing, and I am still holding her, all my nerves seem to have accumulated in my palm for it feels so real, so immediate, like she’s a cliff and I’m hanging on to her for life.

  And just then the clock strikes twelve.

  ‘Happy
birthday, Ahana!’

  ‘Thank you so much!’ she says and adds shyly. ‘You’re an exquisite boy. Is the word gender-specific?’

  ‘No!’

  Her father soon comes and he’s happier, also slightly drunk. He thanks me, and whisks her away. She walks with a cane that she sweeps around in front of her, people part like she’s plagued.

  I catch a cab and go back to my hotel, ride the lift alone and go to bed. She’s in the next room, just a few walls away and the knowledge is unsettling.

  13

  I wake up to Ritik’s call. He apologizes for having left me alone and then metaphorically nudges me, saying I had game yesterday, and that the girl I ‘picked’ was pretty. He asks me who the ‘old guy’ was, and I ignore the question. I ask him if I have to come to office again, and he says no one cares, and then laughs and disconnects the call. I promptly go back to sleep as if I never picked up the call and soon I’m dreaming the same dream I was before the phone rang.

  It’s ten when I wake up, find that my toothbrush has been replaced by a brand new one, so I brush enthusiastically, and then more vigorously because I might bump into the girl from yesterday. It strikes me then that she’s blind, but I still brush harder, just in case.

  I have just one shirt left. Blind. Blind. Blind. I tell myself. It puts me at ease knowing that she doesn’t know I’m a gangly idiot who stares awkwardly at her. She just knows I smell old, so I shower like a POW coming back home after a decade.

  In the shower, where all great ideas emerge, I’m thinking of H.G. Wells’s The Country of the Blind where everyone’s blind and the concepts of beauty and ugliness are obsolete. But people do smell. I empty another bottle of bathing gel.

  Then I find out that the breakfast is complimentary. I didn’t know that before. I have wasted two days’ worth of food and this knowledge would make my mom angry.

  It’s a buffet and it smells nothing like Mom’s cooking, but it still smells great; like the sea has descended into the restaurant. The smell is raw and fresh, yet the open flames are blazing. I want to eat everything to make up for the two days that I missed, the stir fried noodles, the ramen bowls, the pasta, EVERYTHING!

  It doesn’t take me long to spot her, sitting in the corner seat, slurping noodles into her mouth from the bowl. She’s good with chopsticks. She’s still in her pyjamas, and they are white and pink, her golden brown hair is all over her face, and it’s unfairly adorable.

  I fill up a bowl with shrimps, ramen and chicken, and it smells delicious.

  ‘Can I join you?’

  ‘Huh?’ She pulls out the earphones from her ears. ‘Oh! It’s you. You smell of seafood today!’

  ‘I bathed extra-hard today.’

  She is giggling and then she asks, ‘Are you sitting?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘I expected to meet you today,’ she says. A piece of chicken slips from the chopsticks and falls into the bowl, and splatters. ‘I always have breakfast in my room. Today Dad insisted we eat here. He must have known that you eat here.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because he’s now my enthusiastic girlfriend trying to set me up with you.’

  ‘Your dad is a mixed martial arts fighter, a cold-blooded killer, not a girlfriend.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s around, keeping an eye on me. But I think he likes you. Last night, he kept talking about you as if you’re his newest crush,’ she says. Then she suddenly changes the topic, ‘Chopsticks suck! So blind-person-insensitive. I’m done!’ She slides her bowl away from her; in silent protest against blind-insensitive chopsticks. I drop my chopsticks too and use the fork instead. I see her Dad sitting a few tables away, talking animatedly to two men—all of them are dressed in dark suits and shiny shoes.

  ‘I can see your dad. He’s sitting with two other men. Looks like a Secret Service meeting to me.’

  ‘You can stop worrying about him! He’s not bad. And I told you he likes you.’

  ‘But can he kill a boy sitting twenty feet away?’ I ask, only half-joking.

  ‘I’m sure he has done that from longer distances.’

  ‘With chopsticks?’

  ‘I doubt he’s that good.’

  I eat quickly, trying to forget my kung-fu mastery over chopsticks from yesterday, and I almost choke on my food.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I think a shrimp just jumped back to life in my throat. I’m done too.’

  I push my bowl to the centre of the table as well and our bowls touch, and it makes me uneasy, the butterflies-in–the-stomach uneasy, the roller-coaster-that-has-no-bottom uneasy, the best type of uneasy.

  ‘Oh shit! Your dad is coming over,’ I utter in panic as I puff up my chest. I don’t know why but probably to look like I’m not all bones.

  ‘Are you kids having fun?’ he asks and looks mostly at her. He scoops her up in his large hands, and she looks like a stuffed toy, the kind that’s too precious to be sent into mass production.

  ‘He was wondering if you could kill men with chopsticks.’

  ‘I have killed with less,’ he laughs and then adds, ‘I just test pilot small planes and sometimes cargo planes. It’s boring. Its been years since I have had the imponderable joy of seeing a man die.’ I’m not sure if he’s joking but they laugh so I guess it’s a joke. He says, ‘I have a meeting to go to, Ahana. Are you sure you will be okay? Deep, do you have somewhere to be today?’ he asks, his movie-star eyes are compelling and I say, ‘No!’

  ‘Oh, Dad. Stop it! I will be fine.’

  ‘What? I was just saying that you need to treat him on your birthday. That’s all!’ he defends himself. ‘Fine, Deep. If you have anything else to do, you can. She can celebrate her birthday on her own.’

  ‘No, sir, I am doing nothing today.’

  ‘See?’ her dad says and Ahana rolls her eyes.

  He leaves with his friends from the Secret Service and I breathe easy.

  ‘Why do you call him sir?’ Ahana asks and gets up from the table. She knocks over a bottle of Tabasco sauce.

  ‘I think I want him to like me.’

  We walk to her room, her fingers are wrapped around my arm and I don’t think I will ever get used to her touch. We ride the elevator together. She’s standing next to me, my arm in her hands.

  She is mumbling and I realize she’s counting the steps to her room. She unlocks her room and I let her hand go and stand at the entrance. She enters.

  ‘You can come in. I will not tell Dad,’ she giggles.

  ‘What makes you think I will take that chance? I’m sure he has the whole place bugged and is sitting in a black van running facial recognition and background checks on me.’

  ‘God! You do have a superhuman imagination. And it’s okay. I asked him. You’re allowed in our room.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘You’re answerable to my parents if something happens to me. There are no spare parts to replace me in my family.’

  ‘You’re impossible!’ And she adds, ‘In a good way.’

  ‘What happened here?’ I ask. Vases lie broken on the floor, there are pillows torn open, and lamps lie upturned on the floor.

  ‘My mood swing last evening.’

  ‘It swung like a cyclone.’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me. I’m a poor blind girl and no one’s allowed to be mean to me. It’s one of the perks of being blind.’

  ‘Um—’

  ‘It still sucks.’

  Gingerly, she walks to her bed and sits down, and then lies down and sighs. Her room is huge. It’s actually a corner suite with two rooms and two bathrooms and countless lights and two televisions. There’s even a black shiny piano in the corner.

  ‘Do you play the piano?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, but I kind of suck.’

  ‘Play!’ I urge.

  She refuses but I insist and walk her to the piano. She asks me to sit next to her on the piano stool and I do so. I can feel her close to me and I fin
d it difficult to breathe.

  ‘Be kind to me.’ She starts playing what she tells me is Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Sonata, 1913 edition, which I know is one of the toughest pieces to play (I read it in the memoir of a pianist who killed himself) and she’s surprised that I know.

  I’m not an expert on music, but her fingers dexterously move on the keys and it sounds perfect.

  ‘You’re such a liar!’ I say to her. She’s smiling like she knows she’s nailed it. ‘You said you can’t dance and you dance like you majored in it, and you play the piano like it’s your pet. I will never believe you now,’ I act as if I’m angry.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve never thought I’m good enough! Okay, what can I play for you?’

  ‘Play something I recognize,’ I say.

  She plays a medley of old Hindi songs, and I recognize the tunes from the tapes of my dad, who is a great fan of old Hindi instrumentals. It’s been years since Mom has been trying to get him to clear out the drawers filled with hundreds of cassettes, but Dad never listens to her and it’s one of those rare occasions when they fight.

  ‘That was great!’ I exclaim.

  She gets up, our bodies no longer touching, and I breathe easy. ‘You’re just saying that . . .’

  ‘I’m not. It was concert-level great. You’re a child prodigy, damn it!’

  ‘It’s easier for blind people to be prodigies. We are like little circus puppies. The littlest thing we do people go like, hey, did you look at that, it can stand and sit. It isn’t flattering at all!’

  ‘I didn’t—’

  She sighs and buries her face in her palms. ‘I’m so sorry. It’s just that being blind is like constantly PMSing.’

  ‘That’s a great quote!’

  She laughs and the tension evaporates. We are silent. She keeps thinking of something and smiles, throwing her hair back, which is about six million shades of brown right now.

  ‘Deep. I’m sorry for Dad, but if you have to be somewhere you can go. It’s fine by me.’

  ‘There is nowhere I would rather be than right here.’

  She smiles. I’m the freaking tsunami!