After the Storm

by Lakshmy Ramanathan

  ‘Meenakshi! I didn’t see you come in,’ boomed her mama.

  ‘I keep telling you that room divider is unnecessary. Can’t see who is coming in or going out,’ her mami grumbled.

  ‘What do you suggest we do Vidya? Without the divider, this flat will look like a train with compartments.’

  More grumbling.

  Meenu looked across to Rakesh who was towering over all three of them and grinning down broadly.

  ‘Where are my manners?’ said Mama, slapping his forehead. ‘Rakesh this is our niece, Meenakshi. Meenu, Rakesh’s grandmother and my mother are far from the same village.’

  ‘Hi, Rakesh,’ said Meenu extending her hand formally.

  Rakesh’s lips twitched at the corners but he returned the courtesy.

  ‘Pity, you’ve just come in’, continued her mama. ‘He was just leaving.’

  And now Rakesh thought he might just break the man’s neck. He choked back on the thought instead and told Meenu,

  ‘I didn’t know you came home so early!’

  ‘She never does’ chimed both her mama and mami.

  ‘I never do,’ Meenu replied, grinning for the first time in two days and meeting his eyes fully.

  Her mama–mami looked from her towards Rakesh who had not taken his eyes off her. They quietly exited the room mumbling about newspapers and cooking dinner.

  Rakesh closed the gap between him and Meenu in three long strides but she hurriedly turned to look down certain that her sore lips would be a dead give away of what had happened last night. Mama–Mami might be long sighted but Rakesh would spot the damage in a jiffy. Okay not in a jiffy but definitely after one of his long, lingering stareathons.

  Feeling his breath so near, Meenu felt her own shorten. Her lips began to tremble and she yearned to just lean on him and bawl her lungs out. Why else were his shoulders built so broad if not to lean on?

  ‘Everything alright?’ he asked, his voice quiet and concerned.

  Meenu nodded.

  ‘I am sorry I didn’t reply to your messages’.

  ‘That’s alright,’ he said placatorily.

  ‘Is that why you came?’, she asked looking up. ‘To check on me?’ surprised by his concern.

  ‘Well, you didn’t answer my messages. So I thought I would find out from your mama,’ and then he tilted his head and squinched his eyes as if to catch her face in the full glow of the setting sun streaming in from the hall window.

  ‘Why are you smiling now,’ asked Meenu her hand automatically going to the sore corner of her lip, worried it had turned a pus-yellow.

  ‘Just enjoying the view,’ he said quietly.

  Meenu smiled back at him.

  ‘Alright I should be going now,’ he said, tapping on her upturned nose lightly with his finger and walking past her. Before getting past the entrance door, he turned around and faced her again. ‘Meenu, if you need anything, just call me.’

  And suddenly she found her eyes welling up. She didn’t want him to see her crying and nodded vigorously without looking up. Rakesh stared down at her, waiting for her to meet his gaze. When she didn’t, he shrugged his shoulders and left.

  Meenu whose whole body was shaking from wanting to cry shut the door back a little too quickly. It banged against the wind and to Rakesh, it felt like the door had been slammed against his offer.

  It had never been clearer. The girl had never been keen on him. Still it was she who had sought him out at his restaurant and at the office party.

  What was she scared of now? The creep? He could just kill that bastard.

  After a night of tossing and turning to check if there were any messages from Rakesh, Meenu left for work in the morning, still not sure how to face Rathore. Just before lunch, she heard footsteps coming to a halt behind her. Rathore gripped her shoulders tightly and asked if they could head out for chai. Once they had grabbed a kulhad each and gone to the back of the building, he pulled her closer to him, planting a kiss on her cheek. Meenu felt her mouth open and then close. The last two days had been so overwhelming that just thinking about it brought out the waterworks and rolled back her tongue.

  They sat in silence finishing their chai and then he took her hands in his, squeezing them tight.

  ‘Listen, I am very sorry, Minaakshi’, he said, his voice deep and earnest.

  Just hearing the apology made Meenu want to cry. She had never been manhandled. Ever.

  ‘Look, I really like you and…’ he said, running his hand through his crew cut, ‘and what happened at the office party was just not right. I was way out of control.’

  She felt like asking whether he was apologising for roughing her up for grinding into another woman but she found that her voice was lost.

  ‘I think I had a little too much to drink,’ continued Rathore analysing his behaviour with an air of magnanimity absent in unearthing its repercussions.

  Meenu just nodded absently.

  ‘All well?’ he asked and just as she prepared to say no, his phone rang. Mistry, he mouthed to her. He gave her his hand and they walked back to the office. When she returned to her desk, she felt more confused than ever. Well the fact was, he had apologized, maybe for one or both. She should either accept it or tell him right now that it was all over and move on.

  But what were her options? Sure, Rakesh made her feel warm and weak kneed but so had Rathore! What if the Rakesh in Mumbai was a charade to snare a girl like Meenu into marriage? And Meenu knew she wasn’t ready for it.

  By now Rathore had returned to her desk, smiling ear to ear. He was mumbling something about a brilliant opportunity. God, was the cad so thrilled about being given a second chance by Meenu?

  ‘Are you listening,’ he asked, a look of slight annoyance washing his face.

  ‘What?’ she asked snapping out of her reverie.

  ‘The Daily Times is opening a new edition in Jaipur and they want me to help with the launch edition for a whole month. You know … ease the process for the new team, help them settle down,’ he said looking a bit flushed.

  Meenu nodded silently.

  ‘Imagine,’ he said, his eyes lighting up, ‘I am going to be overlooking all the teams. Not just sports!’

  Meenu couldn’t share the excitement.

  Looking at her dead pan face, Rathore realised that she wasn’t receiving the news well. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said his fingers touching her lips lightly. ‘I’ll fly down weekends.’

  11

  Like that happened. Two Sundays had gone by and there had been no word or call from Rathore. Meenakshi realised that being in touch with him was something of a literal thing- of being touched. There was little else they had done when they had seen each other. It made her realise how little she knew of him. She didn’t know where he lived, with whom, whether he had a landline or a dog and if he cooked breakfast or skipped it. Alarmingly, she knew the answers to each of these questions in Rakesh’s case. The chef extraordinaire lived with his mother in Chembur above his own restaurant; had a landline but no pets and started work early (real early) with a mug of coffee from his own restaurant.

  For the first time since she had hit puberty and turned boy crazy, she began to wonder if she had got it all wrong. It had taken a decade of chasing boys off school walls, college buses and office canteens but in the end Meenakshi Iyer had come to realise that it was not about getting the boy but getting to know the boy.

  She had also found out that the Jaipur edition had been a closely guarded secret that had been sprung upon the employees’ throats at the last minute. She should have seen it coming when she and her batch of trainee friends had been inducted prematurely. There had also been the out of turn promotions of certain subs. But she hadn’t foreseen it and now the Jaipur edition, a long, chased dream of the owners had parachuted with some not-so-pleasant consequences.

  For starters, experienced hands from the Mumbai office had been airlifted to get the production cycle up and running since the team at Jaipur could not be trusted to b
ring out the pages themselves. Not at least for another month. This meant the baton had been passed on to less experienced hands in Mumbai, who ended up issuing daily corrigenda whose brevity and clarity were wholly missing from the stories they edited.

  The owners who had never reported a story in their lives had also concluded that it would be easier for the new to have all pages (except the city ones) imported from Mumbai. This forced all desks in Mumbai to file, edit, typeset and release their pages one hour earlier than usual so that Jaipur could add their own sparkle (garbage and sanitation woes in the city) before firing it off to the Press. All this meant one thing – work and mounds of it for the team in Mumbai.

  As if this was not enough, web targets had been scaled to twelve per month. This meant that in addition to the stories a reporter submitted, he/she also had to file twelve full stories to the web desk. For some of them, this was a welcome relief since their stories that had been put on hold to make way for an ad/better story could now be diverted to the not so fussy web desk. For others, this exercise was pure torture.

  Call it bad timing or the result of turning up at work every day for two weeks but the owners had also begun to experience work related epiphanies. Their most recent one was combatting social media’s rise as a parallel source of news by assigning twitter handles to their reporters and encouraging them to tweet about their stories nonstop, 24x7. Suffice to say, in the days after the Jaipur launch, employees at The Daily Times had begun to acquire raccoon-like dark circles.

  It came as a relief when Meenu got her day off two days early.

  Ever since she had been made a reporter, she had had her Sundays off even though the desk and most of the reporters took off on Saturday. This was because there was no business page on Sundays. Much of the team came in on Sundays however for bringing out the Monday edition. Meenaksi’s stories didn’t really affect the cycle of production. Not yet. And she along with a few others were the lucky ones who got their Sundays off. Last Sunday though, Meenu had been called to come in and double up at the desk owing to the never ending chaos generated by the Jaipur edition. Her desk head had given her a Friday off.

  When the sun spread its warmth and glare past the jamuni curtains into the tiny balcony where Meenakshi lay on her diwan, she woke up and wondered how to spend the day.

  Out of the blue, she remembered Rakesh’s offer to show her around the kitchen and decided to look up on the offer. She squinted at his contact on her phone and dialled his number but just as the ring sounded, she cut the call, rattled out of her sleepiness. Just because it was her day off didn’t mean he was free! Besides, he might have been in one of his early morning meetings. What an ass she had almost made of herself, she thought picturing Rakesh in a huddle with his chefs.

  But it was her day off. So she spent the first half of the day stretched out like a python digesting her pongal vada from breakfast and engaging in small talk with her mama and mami. Post noon when a long, hot shower threatened to put her back to sleep, she decided she had had enough of staying indoors and out she would step for some shopping. After a small lunch, she donned a tee and jeans and headed to Bandra’s Hill Road to seek a bargain or two.

  It was nearly an hour and so far she had held on pretty well, buying just one stole and a pair of flip flops. But then she came to this store that had on display crochet tops, hats, shrugs and skirts and all resistance came crashing down. Meenu went in and picked out a shell white off-shoulder top. As she held it against herself looking into the mirror opposite her, she thought it looked a size smaller. A store help who had been stuffing his face with biryani looked up and pointed one yellow finger towards the mirror.

  ‘Uske peeche hai trial room,’ he said.

  Meenu nodded and pushed at it. The mirror panel rolled back to reveal a tiny trial room complete with wooden stool, fan and light. She inched through gingerly and hung her bag on the sole hook. Next she stripped out of her tee, placed it on the stool and tried on the crochet top. She was right. The top was a size smaller and didn’t go below her bust. She was just about to pull it over her head when her phone rang. She reached for it in the pocket but jabbed her elbow into the wall instead. Cursing loudly, she tried to yank the top over her head with a forceful tug but the top got stuck in the back hook of her bra. The bloody phone hadn’t stopped ringing either. So she twisted and shrunk at an odd angle till her fingers forced their way into her pocket and wrung the phone out. Placing it on the stool, she put it on speaker.

  ‘Hey … did you call?’ a man’s voice asked not bothering to identify himself.

  And just like that, she felt naked. It probably had to do with her torso being fully exposed at the moment, but…

  ‘Gnnf…’ she replied, cloth getting inside her mouth as she opened it to speak.

  ‘What?’ Rakesh said, bursting with laughter.

  Having finally prised the top over her head, Meenu took the phone to her ear and said, ‘Sorry, Rakesh, my dress got caught in my bra’.

  Uh oh … Too many details. Rakesh had gone quiet.

  ‘Hellooo,’ she said.

  ‘You are killing me now,’ he said in a low growl.

  Meenu giggled, saying ‘I told you … I can be mean.’

  ’Where are you now?’ he asked and Meenu could swear she could feel him smiling.

  ‘Out shopping’.

  ‘With girlfriends?’

  ‘Nope. Just alone.’

  He seemed to take a while digesting this fact.

  ‘And what did you shop?’ he asked in a slow, leisurely tone as if he had all the time to stop and chat and not get busy with the demands of running a busy, upscale restaurant kitchen.

  Meenu quickly told him what she had bought including the off-shoulder top she was going to get in a bigger size.

  ‘So, how do you look in them?’ he asked, curious.

  ‘Well, you’ll never know until you see me isn’t it?’ replied Meenu archly.

  There was a moment’s pause and then Rakesh spoke, his voice low and strained.

  ‘Meet me … at my restaurant,’ he said in a tone which felt like he wasn’t asking. ‘Eight-ish,’ he added and cut the call.

  Meenu raced back home to get ready. All the way in the rickshaw, she couldn’t stop smiling. Her unexpected day off was turning out to be cute. Rather cute.

  ‘Meenu! Back so early!’ exclaimed her mami who by now was used to her day long shopping trips.

  ‘Yes, Mami, I have to go meet Rakesh.’

  ‘Rakesh who?’

  ‘Rakesh Ramakrishnan.’

  ‘Who, that cook?’ asked her mami frowning.

  Meenu winced. ‘He is not a cook, Mami. He is the head chef and owner at Chutneyed.’ And when she saw her mami draw a blank, she added, ‘It’s a restaurant in Chembur. Just opposite the Sringeri Mutt. Mami, you should get out more.’

  Ignoring her remark, her mami asked, ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘He told me himself!’

  ‘When?’ she demanded, curiosity washing her face.

  ‘When he was here the other day’, she said surprised by this sudden ambush from her otherwise non-interfering aunt.

  Her mami seemed to take in the information and process it.

  ‘Where are you meeting him?’ she asked a little cautiously now.

  ‘At his house,’ Meenu replied truthfully. Well she was meeting him at the restaurant below his house but did a staircase make a difference?

  Not surprisingly, the reply seemed to put an end to the interrogation. Actually, Meenakshi’s aunt – a former math professor had just run the odds of Rakesh’s mother being at home on a Friday night. The results had soothed her nerves and she had returned to her Sudoku cube. Good girl or not, she was not letting Meenu meet a grown man in his house all alone. Not under her watch.

  12

  After a quick shower, Meenu blow dried her hair into soft waves and put on some make-up. It had been easy being flirty over the phone but now that she was meeting him in an hour, she h
ad become a bundle of nerves, smudging her eyeliner twice. After making sure she didn’t look like a tart, she splashed some perfume onto her shoulders and neck and rolled a vanilla butter cream lip balm over her lips. Slipping into the off-shoulder crochet top and her favourite skinny jeans, she grabbed her taupe boots from under the diwan and hurried past the door lest Mami ambushed her for another interrogation.

  It was nearing eight by the time she reached the restaurant. The long line and butt – to – butt chairs made her hesitate. It looked like a busy night and the last thing she wanted to do was to pull him out of work. She was hovering about the entrance wishing she had double checked with him about the date when she was stopped by a manager who was taking down names for reservation. When Meenu gave her name, he gave a quick nod of recognition and escorted her to a quiet corner of the restaurant where a table for two had been laid. As she took her seat, she was pleasantly surprised to note that she had a view of the open part of the kitchen – one that she hadn’t seen the other day.

  Rakesh in his chef’s whites was in the front, calling out dockets, tasting spoons thrust at him, thumping a waiter on his back, cracking a joke with another. The air smelt delicious and Meenu’s stomach began to growl. Right on cue, a waiter arrived with food.

  ‘Wheatgrass rasam served with pepper crackers and coconut milk foam,’ he said with a flourish.

  ‘But I didn’t order them,’ she said looking up in confusion.

  The waiter just nodded towards the kitchen where Rakesh stood. She should have known.

  Just as she finished her bowl of rasam, she felt someone walk towards her table. When she looked up, he was giving her one of his knock out smiles – one which teased her lips to part and smile back at him.