The First Time (Love in No Time #1)

by Bitsi Shar

  “I doubt very much that nothing is going on. Why is he calling this early and sounding kind of desperate to speak with you?” she counters.

  “I don’t know” even as I think to myself “desperate”—why would he be desperate to speak to me—oh! Yes—yesterday—the fiasco it was and how I had run from the situation without getting him a chance to explain or apologize. Yes, an apology was in the offing. But Dipta doesn’t need all these details or any other detail for that matter. She is just goading me to spill and I am not spilling anything.

  “He is not desperate. You are desperate to hear what you think might be dirty, juicy details of my semi-existent love life, right?” I am being a little harsh now.

  And she sounds indignant when she says, “No, I am not desperate but as your friend I would like to know where all is your pussy dragging you these days!” Oh, she didn’t just voice that! OMG. I have never heard her talk this way.

  “And yes, I would say he is desperate too because he asked me to tell you to call him back ASAP and he must have said this at least three times. And if he didn’t hear back from you before the evening is over, he was going to pay you a visit.” Her eyes are now bright with anticipation of what she might hear from me now.

  “What, he said what?” She smiles but says nothing. She knows I heard her and that my question is purely rhetorical. No, absolutely no. He cannot come here. I am not ready for this. I am really irritated now. All this early morning inquisition is making me feel on the edge and I haven’t even finished my tea!

  “Dipta, thanks for taking the call. I will call him when I have a chance and he is certainly not coming over this evening or any other evening. So if you get a chance to talk with him again do convey my sentiments to him.” I leave the kitchen. The conversation was over as far as I was concerned.

  “No, its not. And you know its not.” Dipta is not one to give up so easily on mushy details of her friends’ lives. She is not bothered by my irateness or my reticence. She is patient like a hungry alligator—who waits and baits and then bites when no one is looking. Well, I will just have to be more patient than her and not take the bait. Maybe I should be answering all the phones from now on. This way I will prevent cross-connections. Right now I am just too damn angry with him to bother with Dipta’s agenda. Let him sweat. He deserves to after what he pulled on me yesterday.

  Chapter Eleven

  It turns out to be a very hectic day at work. I have three separate reports to file and two lessons to write. So its almost 2:30 p.m. before I come to and realize that I am a little hungry and a little brain-fuzzed. So I take a break, eat a sandwich I brought from home, drink half bottle of water, and take deep breaths. The air is heavy with dry heat making it difficult to not sweat or breathe heavy in the confines of a claustrophobic office space. “Sharma!” Some one is calling me by my surname again.

  What happened to first name references?

  Too formal for some?

  Or is some one really fucking with me again?

  I turn around, irritation writ large on my face when I see Dipta at the doorway, a smile writ large on hers. And there is a huge bouquet of pink roses in her hands. Wow! The flowers are really beautiful. Someone must really, really like her.

  “Ms. Sharma, these just arrived for you.”

  For me?!!!!!!!

  There must be something wrong with this order. I don’t know of anyone who likes me that much. Do I? And then it hits me. Its him!

  “There is a note here. Don’t worry I didn’t read it. Here take these and happy smelling!”

  She hands me the bouquet, gives me another one of her signature smiles and walks away to continue harassing someone else.

  I open the note and it says:

  “Ms. Sharma. I don’t know how else to apologize for yesterday. I am hoping these flowers will do so in some measure if not entirely. I really am very, very sorry. Please call me. I do want to hear your voice and I do want to make it right for you, us. Just tell me how and I will do your bidding.

  In bated anticipation, AD.”

  “Do my bidding?” Who writes like that? Which Shakespeare play did he swipe this from, I wonder? But even I have to admit it is kind of novel and kind of sweet. Reluctantly, I smile and bend down to smell the flowers. They smell as sweet as his apology. There, I said it. I can do Shakespeare too. But then I hark back to yesterday and I cannot forget the moment or what it made me feel. Anger incinerates happy. I want him to squirm some more. The flowers have helped his cause but not entirely. I take the flowers to my desk and for a moment just admire them. I take his note and read it again and again. Yes, I am quite a sucker for romance and all the make-up stuff that makes romance delicious. I am starting to feel better, even gooey inside and cannot decide whether this is a good or bad thing. What I do know is that he is forgiven. Just like that.

  Chapter Twelve

  It is my favorite time of the day. I am sipping some lukewarm Darjeeling green tea and watching TV rather mindlessly. In other words I am idling or in Dipta’s words rejuvenating. Dipta and Jaya are on a date. They need to catch up with each other after all the crazy traveling they have been doing. So they are in CP, heart of Delhi’s business district, eating and drinking at their favorite hole in the wall. They planned to spend the night at Jaya’s parents’ home in the heart of CP. So I have the apartment to myself. Goody!

  I am flipping channels when the phone rings. For a moment I think it is the TV. I lower the volume. It is my phone. I pick it up after its tenth ring. “Hello,” I say in my very bored voice. “Hi,” a voice replies. Its him! Shit! I should have expected this and yet I didn’t prepare myself well for the unplanned attack. Silly, silly.

  “Ms. Sharma are you there?” I don’t respond.

  He sighs audibly and then says, “I know you are and I know you are still angry with me. Sorry. I can keep saying it till you accept my apology. I have no problem with that.”

  He pauses. “Did you get the flowers?”

  I croak a feeble, “Yes.”

  But do not add a “thank you” and he is aware I know that I don’t and says rather sarcastically, “Why, you are very welcome, Ms. Sharma.” Hmm! Whatever.

  “Look, I want to see you again, if you’ll let me. I want to apologize in person, is what I am saying. Can I see you again, please?” A question and a request all rolled into one joint for me to smoke or not. The choice was mine. But I remain silent, giving him no clue to what I am feeling or thinking as he is speaking. My silence is not by design. I really don’t know what to say to him in the face of all this remorse he is expressing.

  “God, you are really frustrating!” He finally admits as more silence greets him from my end.

  “Ok, have it your way. I am leaving for Jaipur tomorrow morning for a meeting. I will be back Friday afternoon. Can I invite you to lunch near my office in CP then? Please say you will come.”

  It is my chance to sigh audibly. “I’ll think about it.” I manage to spit out eventually. “Ok,” he says too quickly as if he is afraid that I will say no and right now he will take the maybe any which way and run to Jaipur with and back.

  “Ok” he repeats. “I’ll call you Friday then to confirm?”

  “Yes,” I confirm. I really need this one-sided conversation to end so I can go back to my idling. But I also know that after this call there will be no idling.

  “Okay then. I think my work is done here. I hope you had a good day and will have another one tomorrow. And, Ms. Sharma I will be thinking of you and I look forward to our date. Have a good night, Ms. Sharma.”

  And I don’t know why I blurt, “I am alone at home tonight.”

  Did I just say that?! I slap my palm to my forehead. Of all the things to finally say after all that heavy silence on my end. Absolute silence except maybe for a small static. Maybe he hung up before I hung myself from a virtual ceiling with that inappropriate sentence. I begin to sag with relief. I am safe. My confession has no takers. But then I hear him. He is breathing in l
ong and slow.

  And then he says, “Are you?” “Why Ms. Sharma how would you like me to process that?”

  He continues, “I could ask—is that an invite? But then you just shut me down so I doubt it was one.”

  He stops as if still considering my statement and then with a touch of concern in his voice, he asks, “Are you scared to be alone in that apartment? Are you? You will tell me if you are, right?”

  Oh dear! How did we get to this conversation from that one!

  “No, I am not scared. Sorry, I don’t know why that shot out of my mouth. It was a mere statement of fact. There is no need for interpretation of sorts here. Let it be.”

  I plod on.

  “So I hope you have a good trip.” My good manners show up now that I have committed a boo-boo.

  “Ok, Ms. Sharma. If you say so, if you say so. Though I might have to torture the truth out of you on Friday. Till then, sweet dreams, baby.” With that he hangs up.

  I am left stupidly looking at the phone. “Baby?” Wow! My whole body is starting to sing. Every muscle, every sinew is alive. God! This man is making my body betray the hell out of me. It is reacting to everything he says, does, sends, insinuates, calls out to, demands—oh! The list is getting longer. I groan and cover my eyes to shift my frames of reference and return to an existential state. But that state doesn’t exist anymore. It has been shot into oblivion. I agitatedly pace the room. Ok! Time to shower and maybe go to bed. Sleep is what I need, desire—really? My inner devil mocks me. I ignore the she-devil. I grab a clean towel from the clothesline on the verandah and head to my final destination for the day. A cold shower on this balmy evening made hot by a certain someone is not what I want but it is what I need.

  Chapter Thirteen

  And Friday is here, again. But this Friday feels different than any other. My entire day at work is torqueing around the anticipation this Friday is carrying on its delicious back. And on this day, I realize how jumpy I can get. It is frankly beyond irritating to anyone, especially me! Every time some one speaks or asks me something I jump half an inch on the chair if I am sitting or from the floor if I am standing. My heart too is jumping out of my body and I literally have to clutch it back in before it can decide to leave my body for good. At this rate, I am going to be dead before I even hear his voice again. Calm down, Ms. Sharma! I instruct myself but I know it is futile. But I realize that I am using his way of reference to me as my way of reference to me! Even though I prefer his way. My last name sounds sexier when he says it. He makes my last name sound special, like its something to cherish. Wow! I am really into this shit, aren’t I? I know the man doesn’t do any kind of cherishing and he certain doesn’t like possessing anything that is not Boss or Armani and comes in a glossy shopping bag.

  I have seen him with his family—his mother, his sister, and his younger brother. He is very brisk with them, even rude. He seems exasperated, maybe even embarrassed by them. His dad passed away when he was twenty so he became a patriarch as a matter of fate than conscious choice. And maybe it is this lack of choice in matters of family accompanied by a sense of obligation to them as the eldest male child that has resulted in so much angst against them. Not that he didn’t work hard to provide for them. He did but beyond bringing home the bacon he wasn’t anything else to them. Empathy was a foreign word in that family.

  I guess I am different. I am not family. With me there is possibility of intimacy that every guy at his age, or any age for that matter, desperately seeks. Do not get me wrong. I am not talking of love as in “I’d like to spend the rest of my life with you.” I am talking of love as in coming—inside someone for the first time. I am talking about the reality (not just the possibility) of having sex with a girl who is willing, familiar, and not an obligation. Willing is the operative word here.

  For a girl in this culture to be willing and available without a certificate of marriage is a rarity. It couldn’t happen which doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen at all. One didn’t hear about it often enough which is the important marker of the permissible and the non-permissible in a culture. I was willing and available. The fact that I didn’t live with my family instead sharing an apartment with my friends in Delhi formalized my willingness as a sexual partner.

  To be willing and then have no space to enact that willingness kind of negates the very idea of “willing” and also of “available.” But the fact remains that I am an Indian girl but like a girl anywhere else in the world I have cultural access to stories and fables of love and sacrifice. I am brought up to believe in the notion of love but at the same time have no cultural freedom to enact this notion with someone, somewhere. So in a way I have to believe there is love but at the same time to believe love doesn’t exist.

  So in a way I can like boys but have no access to them in order to express that liking, even in the most innocent of ways.

  Boys were fabled to be bad. They wanted only one thing, I was warned. And there was only one thing that can happen from the bad things that boys wanted to do to girls—pregnancy. So to avoid becoming pregnant outside of marriage, avoid boys.

  Parents told their girls to stay away from boys as if this manner of cultural abstinence was enough to prevent a gigantic cultural shame from happening. They never thought to tell their daughters about protection as prevention. They just wanted to avoid the sex question exactly like the way they avoided having sex beyond their procreating years.

  I doubt most parents were doing it after their kids were born. Rather the one time they did it was on their marriage night and then the pussy and the penis were forgotten relics. But here we were—him and I working against cultural edicts. He was a boy I liked and I was the girl he liked. His hormonal reactions to me he had managed to couch in a language of romance that enticed me against my better judgment.

  Can boys in my culture really do romance even as a means to getting sex with a girl? I doubt it. So this begs the question—is he a player?

  If he is a player then he has cut his teeth elsewhere. He has practice. And practice makes a man perfect his art of seduction of girls seduced already by cultural notions of love. So the next question is—where is he finding surfaces to crack his teeth on?

  This is Gurgaon for god’s sake. It is a small town at the edge of Delhi. There are no receptive, willing girls here. They live a protected, ignorant life. They wouldn’t know how to be even receptive to his kind of treatment. They would instead be affronted and deem him a roadside Romeo not worth their time or attention.

  They would deny their own pleasure in his expression of his pleasure because pleasure has consequences, for it steps outside of cultural prescriptions in order to be requited. Pleasure is forbidden. Maybe that is why I was being the typical girl—reacting to his expression of pleasure in this “I am appalled you are saying all this to me.”

  I was performing a cultural location in my reactions to this siren call. But I was also unperforming that location in the way I was actually responding to his siren call. I was fascinated by it. I was heeding it in order to make my own pleasure step out in the open. I know this was not a frivolous call. It was a thoughtful one. I think he was equally surprised by his own reaction to me and even as he conveyed it with much linguistic finesse and no restraint born of hesitation, he was also testing me. He was testing whatever he was feeling, I was feeling too—that we were both trying to understand that elemental blue fire that sparked between us every time we were anywhere near each other. Even when we spoke on the phone, with just our voices we were experiencing something beyond culture and culture could no longer restrain this fire. Culture’s favorite handmaiden, guilt, found herself useless in this emergent drama.

  “Ms. Sharma, a call for you.”

  I emerge from my cerebral reverie and experience a massive thud in my heart. I just know its him again. Phone and him have become synonymous in my mind. Ok, here we go. I wipe my sweaty hands on the side of my shirt and walk to the phone room.

  “Hello” I say an
d hear a very enthusiastic, “Ms. Sharma!”

  There is that voice caressing my ubiquitous last name and making it sound sexy. “Should we meet at the 100% café in CP at 1:30 p.m. Its noon now. This should give you plenty of time to finish up work and meet me there, yes?” He seems hurried—like he has somewhere to be or he is aware that I am at work.

  “Ok. See you there.” “Ok. Ciao.” And that’s it. We have set our lunch date in the most efficient and no nonsense way possible. But I am left with a vague sense of disquiet that I fail to understand.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The 100 percent café in CP is a museum. It’s décor and layout is so expansive and gaudy that you are left confused about why exactly you are here. It is not a café in the NYC sense—small, bucolic, and intimate. It is a café in the Delhi/ Punjabi sense—loud, in your face, expansive with its red vinyl sofa and chairs and marble tables. It’s 100 percent Punjabi. Red velvet and crystal chandeliers span the ceiling in the shape of a plus sign or a cross, if you will. The lighting is not muted. The thousand watt bulbs pierce through the dark velvet/ dense weave and throw interesting animal like shapes on red walls with white square frames. The servers wear dark red uniforms, the color and texture of which looks uncannily similar to the red drapes on the massive floor to ceiling windows facing the busy CP circle. In fact, I am pretty sure that the uniforms are made of the same cloth as the drapes like Scarlett’s green dress in Gone with the Wind.

  The café is packed to the brim. There is no space to even stand. The number of bodies in this place has rendered the AC ineffective. It is hot and sticky inside like it is outside. I think to myself—why in the world did he choose the most gaudy and loud place in Delhi to make his apology?

  This place is so counter-intuitive.

  Don’t apology and intimacy go together?

  I am a little irritable now. I don’t like the setting and he isn’t even here. But then I am always early. I need to breathe. I need space. I run down the stairs of the café and out through the revolving doors to the simmering heat outside. I seek a shaded spot beside a massive white pillar where I decide to wait for Mr. apology. I take in a couple of deep breaths. And end up coughing instead the dust kernels I just breathed in from the dust cloud called Delhi.