A Short Affair

by Simon Oldfield

  Stevie winced. He knew he should want to comfort and hold her. And, for a moment, he thought of touching her arm the way she had his, and sighing in that sympathetic manner. But he stayed where he was, paralysed on her sofa, his eyes constantly flicking towards the taut strings of Barney’s tennis racket.

  ‘Look, could you just go?’ she said. ‘I’m not really . . . I can’t have this conversation with a pupil just now.’

  He took that in for a second, that word. Pupil. Then he rose and bolted for the door, hating himself for the great relief that welled in his chest as he realised that what she’d said was true. This was nothing to do with him.

  Out in the street, he was filled with violent thoughts. He pictured himself surprising Barney from behind, plunging a large knife straight through the fluff of his dressing gown and puncturing his lung. He imagined kicking Barney into the mud with an army-issue boot, raising a rifle and waiting whilst the beast begged for mercy before shooting him between the eyes.

  That evening, Mike called home from Helston. The training was going well, he said, but it would be a while before he’d be ready to go into combat. Probably the war would be over before he got to the Falklands. He sounded disappointed.

  From behind his newspaper, Stevie’s father read out the latest news. The Belgrano, which survived the Pearl Harbor attack when it belonged to the US navy, had been asking for trouble all day . . .

  Stevie and his mother left the room. When they were alone in the kitchen together, she told Stevie that Mike’s call reminded her of one he’d made, years ago, whilst on his first school holiday on the Isle of Wight. It was so long-awaited, that call, and yet, when it happened, neither of them knew what to say, so they’d talked about the food, and the weather, and afterwards she’d cried, because she’d forgotten to tell her son that she missed him. Stevie listened, and nodded, and then he handed her a tissue.

  ‘Don’t you go away, too, will you?’ she said. ‘Don’t go and fight any stupid wars. I know it’s what men do, but . . . you’re different, aren’t you?’

  She traced the outline of his face with a fingertip and looked at him for a long time, and he nodded.

  Then she flicked the switch on the cassette player, and a song came into the room. He recognised the voice as Smokey Robinson’s. She had to pull him to his feet, but once Stevie was in his mother’s arms and could smell the familiar scent of chip fat and perfume on her collar, he rested his head on her warm shoulder and held her as tightly as he could.

  His father came in. ‘The girls love a man with a woman’s voice,’ he said. ‘Don’t they, June?’

  But Stevie’s mother said nothing, and Stevie didn’t let go. Instead he clung to her, letting her dance him around the room, her skirt whirling and whirling like a crazed bird.

  DIDI’S

  Nikesh Shukla

  Artwork by Jonathan Trayte

  DIDI’S

  Nikesh Shukla

  For Chimene Suleyman

  ONE

  The way he looks at me, I know he’s going to send a drink over and then follow it up three minutes after that with his ass on the seat next to me. Luckily, Teddy knows me and so, when he sits the beer down on the counter next to me, he asks if I want an exit strategy. I look up from my book and shake my head at him.

  ‘I was hoping reading a book would be my exit strategy,’ I say.

  He laughs and shimmies his shoulders to the Frank Ocean song playing. It’s hit the bit with the strained falsetto at the end. Before I look back down at the page, I see Teddy bite his bottom lip and spin around to face the rest of the bar. I cackle. Rohan once said my laugh was the noise a passer-by would least expect me to make. It was, he said, how shy people really sound when no one is paying any attention.

  I need new friends.

  Teddy, trying to hold my attention, does that cock-hitting lip-biting head shimmy that made Bad-era Michael Jackson impossible to look away from.

  I found Teddy’s Instagram page recently. He’s in an all-boy dance troupe called Gravity Bites. They all look ten years too late to be a boyband. Like they’ve formed a tribute band to N-SYNC now, approaching forty, rather than N-SYNC in their prime. He’s their Joey Fat One.

  Four minutes after the beer goes untouched, I feel the guy slide onto the seat next to me.

  ‘What are you reading?’ he asks, like the book is a major imposition.

  I flap up the cover so he can see it, while keeping my eyes on the page, cursing this guy for making me re-read the same sentence four times.

  ‘Any good?’ he asks.

  I hold my finger up to indicate I’m still reading, let me finish. I carry on staring at the page, long enough to turn it, and stare more. I wait until it becomes awkward.

  I hear him let out a slow, deliberate sigh of air.

  ‘Okay, I hear ya,’ he says, sliding off his stool and standing.

  He walks back to his buddy.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, looking up finally. He turns around expectantly. ‘You forgot your beer,’ I say louder.

  He cuts eyes at me. ‘It’s on me,’ he says.

  I want to laugh. I look up at Teddy and he rolls his eyes around, clockwise. I let out a giggle.

  The apartment is dark. It doesn’t feel like home yet. Everything is placed in an unfamiliar location.

  I can hear the dog’s tail wagging as I enter. It’s come to the door. I haven’t taken it out all day.

  I refuse to call him Spider-Man. It’s a stupid name. Rohan’s an idiot.

  I switch the light on and there he is, Spider-Man the dog, staring at me. He nods over to where his leash hangs off my bookshelf. I look at the doormat where I stand to pick up the dog-walker’s note.

  It’s written by some guy called Mike. He always leaves something cute.

  Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a doggie can.

  Except a number two. He may be constipated. Or superheroes never need the toilet.

  Mike

  Sighing, drunk from the free beer I accepted, I grab the lead off the shelf and open the bag with the empanada in it. So much for eating it in front of Twitter in my bed, I think.

  Outside, Spider-Man has his nose to the ground. Searching for rivals. Jackson Heights is blissfully still at this time, part of the reason I moved here. I don’t know the area too well yet. The empanada is warm in my stomach. I’m thirsty. Spying an open bodega, I walk towards it to buy a bottle of water. Inside, the lights are bright and there is a bustle. I keep looking back at the front door, nervous to leave Spider-Man by himself. I buy a bottle of water, silently, from a guy who barely looks up from the Hindi melodrama he’s watching on his phone.

  I’ve downed half the bottle before I’ve untied Spider-Man.

  We walk a couple more blocks. I want to go home but the way Spider-Man tugs at the lead, excited to be out at 4 a.m., makes me feel bad about cutting short his street time. We near a corner and there is a familiar noise.

  Someone’s listening to the Dhoom 3 soundtrack. It makes me smile. I remember the song well, Katrina Kaif simulates a chaste lap dance for 50-year-old Aamir Khan, who is wearing a bowler hat and suit vest like a creep. I may have misremembered this. There are voices talking over the soundtrack. The familiar familial sound of shrill, fast Gujarati peppers the night air and for a second I’m transported home.

  I haven’t been back in months. Not since Papa told me he voted Trump and I yelled that he was a sell-out before hiding in my room and getting not-stoned from a 7-year-old joint I remembered I hid in an old copy of a Jhumpa book. I can barely speak to the man on the phone. I’m sure to send Mom photos of me on every single damn protest, my placards and slogans clear, because I know she’s definitely showing them to him. But no way I’m spending time with that apologist for the racist hashtag notmypresident.

  Hearing the Dhoom 3 soundtrack reminds me of a few Christmases ago, being home, with Preeti, listening to it on repeat as we drove around, doing the Greatest Hits of our stupid upstate small town. It reminds me
of my mom, standing over the kitchen counter, cutting up okra wheels so small they dissolved in your mouth, while a desi cable channel pumped out the hits.

  That song.

  Ni main kamli, kamli,

  Mere yaar di

  With no one to speak to in Gujarati in the city, I’ve been feeling homesick.

  I almost bound around the corner, feeling instantly at home as I hum the chorus, my arrival announced by Spider-Man’s relentless enthusiasm.

  Seven people, three women and four men, all dressed in jubo lenghas and sarees, wearing NY Yankees puffa jackets, stand around the open trunk of a car, smoking, listening to music and laughing. There are deep silver trays of food, potatoes and onions and okra and gajar pickle and white rice and yello kadhi and my favourite, mounds of khichdi, all stacked next to the trunk.

  They all stop talking as I arrive, and look at me.

  In unison, they all nod, and I walk on, waving an embarrassed hi to the sky, as they resume their conversation.

  It’s only when I’ve passed them that I turn around and nod back. None of them is paying any attention.

  That communal nod of theirs, it stays with me all the way home. For a second, I don’t feel homesick.

  TWO

  I’m thinking about those people the next morning when Rohan stops by the coffee shop to grab my keys and collect Spider-Man.

  He nods at me as he enters and I smile and offer a small wave. The shop is empty. I’m leaning on the counter, reading articles on my phone.

  If you have time to lean, you have time to clean, the old barista mantra goes. Not me.

  ‘You have a good time with the pup?’ he asks.

  ‘Nah,’ I say. ‘He definitely shed hair on everything I own. He smells like butt. All my throw pillows look like mohair monstrosities now.’

  ‘At least you’re no longer referring to Spider-Man as it any more. That tells me you bonded at least.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I say. ‘How was your trip?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ Rohan says. ‘Shaadis are always four days too long, twenty masis too social and one racist kaka. I brought you a box of samosas though. Shall I leave them in your apartment?’

  ‘Leave me one,’ I say. ‘I need my fix. God, I can’t wait to go to a wedding this year. I need my masi fix.’

  ‘All right, bet,’ Rohan says, handing me a baggy with a deliciously brown samosa in it.

  An online commentator wrote under my last essay, about the unbearable whiteness of publishing, that I should shut the fuck up because no one cares what a chubby samosa thinks. I thought, my guy, the last thing you want is a thin goddamn samosa.

  Rohan leaves as another brown guy enters, wearing a snapback that says Haram on it. They nod at each other.

  As the Haram guy approaches the counter, I smile and he nods at me.

  ‘You know Rohan?’ I ask.

  ‘Who?’ he says.

  ‘What can I get you?’ I ask. Maybe I mistook that nod.

  THREE

  ‘Where you from?’ the Uber driver asks me.

  I don’t mind answering. Her name is Priyanka. She laughs after everything she says, and in silences flatly says doo-be-doo. No tune associated with it. Just doo-be-doo. Normally I would find it so irritating but tonight, it sounds utterly charming.

  ‘I’m Gujarati but I grew up in New Jersey,’ I tell her.

  ‘Baroda?’

  ‘Rajkot.’

  ‘I have a faiba in Rajkot. You know the Mistrys?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Should I?’

  She laughs. ‘It’s what you say when you’re in strange cities, you try to find the links. It helps you feel connected.’

  ‘Does it?’ I say. ‘It makes everyone feel so far away.’

  ‘At first,’ she says. ‘But then, before you know it, you’re nodding at every person with brown skin you walk past, and you start to feel like you’re near the people who look like you. It helps you put down roots.’

  ‘I miss my mom,’ I say.

  ‘Me too,’ she says. ‘Where is yours?’

  ‘Bergen County. You?’

  She taps at her neck. Her taveez.

  ‘I’m sorry. When did she pass?’

  ‘Five years ago. I was not even there. My sister sent this to me in the mail. My mother. Through the mail.’

  ‘All the way from Gujarat?’ I say.

  ‘No,’ she says, looking in her rear-view. ‘Houston.’

  She laughs. I smile back. We fall into silence.

  Doo-be-doo, she tells me flatly.

  We’re nearing home. It’s late. The amber swell of the streetlights as we approach my street are a comforting welcome-home for my drunk ass. Drunk enough to Uber. At some point tonight, I was sober enough to say yes to one more drink. I got even more excited when that one more drink was at my favourite bar in my old neighbourhood.

  As we pass the building a few blocks from my house, Priyanka points at it.

  ‘So glad I took this job,’ she says, banging the steering wheel. ‘I can go and get some aapna food.’

  ‘Where?’ I ask. ‘It’s 4.20 a.m. Where you gonna get dhal bhatt shaak rotli?’

  Priyanka slows the car and looks back at me, leaning with my cheek against the cool window.

  ‘You live here and you don’t know about Didi’s?’ I shake my head. ‘Didi’s Gujarati food?’ I shake my head again. I close my eyes and smile. I want to lie down. I want to drink something fizzy. I want to not be in this car. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let’s get some dhal bhatt shaak rotli at 4.23 a.m.’

  Priyanka pulls the car over and parks it before I can agree.

  I’ve not heard of Didi’s. My mom’s rotlis were the best. We all say that of our mom’s way of making them. Each mom has their special way. Every chapatti is different. Every family serves their chapattis differently. I know that now. I know that Sheila mami likes them small and thick, that Nisha kaki likes them with lots of ghee. I know that Ba made flying saucers, with the middle all puffy. Mom makes them flat. Like our family is used to. Every family learns to make them their favourite way. The difference is subtle. It can be down to the diameter, thickness, amount of heat. My mom’s chapattis were thin and very round, covering the circumference of her circular rolling board. She would cook them on a naked flame, using her asbestos fingers to turn them as needed. They were sometimes burnt and always as they should be. I haven’t been home in months. I want rotli.

  ‘Sure thing, Priyanka,’ I say.

  I open the car door, and wrench myself from the backseat. I’ve been in this car so long I feel less drunk and more heavy.

  ‘Didi’s,’ I say to her, as she leads me to the door.

  ‘Aapna,’ she says, smiling.

  Ours.

  FOUR

  Meena sends me out from the hotel to get these infamous kebabs. I’m walking down some random street behind the Taj. Every red-flag word of warning Mom gave me about this country is banging through my brain.

  But at the same time I can’t help but feel like I’m at home.

  The two men, hunching over four oil drums, each one blazing, illuminating their faces golden in the night sky, work dough for the naans, keep the kebabs turning, have the right change for you before you’ve even paid. I order two lamb and two chicken.

  Mom said don’t eat street food, your poor American stomach won’t like it.

  I ask where I can buy some beers. It’s almost a novelty, being able to drink at nineteen. One of the kebab-wallahs points down a street.

  It’s dark and eerie and exactly the type of street Mom told me to never walk down alone. The buoyancy in my feet comes from stepping out of my American shoes into something more ethereal. I get this place. I don’t need Mom to patronise me.

  Fucking come on. White people come to India to find themselves all the fucking time. A desi girl can’t walk down a dark Bombay street and masquerade for a local at all?

  I’ve been instructed to knock on a window. I look around for the window in the side of the w
arehouse that occupies the majority of the dead-end street I’ve been sent down. I feel like I’m on the set of Don’t Look Now.

  To be honest, there’s only one thing on the side of the building that could be a window. I tap on it, confidently. I need beer goddamnit, my kebabs are going soft, so quick, please.

  The window opens, decisively. A man sits at a desk in the window. He nods at me.

  ‘Two Kingfisher,’ I ask, peering inside, watching men crate up bottles of beer and eat kebabs from the same place I just stopped at.

  ‘White label or black label?’

  ‘White,’ I say, not entirely convinced I’m enough of a connoisseur of any alcohol to know the difference.

  Back at the hotel, Meena is nearly ready for our trip to Inferno. I tell her about the warehouse of beer.

  ‘Look at you, badass, with your local knowledge,’ she says, laughing.

  I’ve always wanted to call this place home, I think. It feels right.

  FIVE

  Didi’s is quiet and small and exactly like the inside of that warehouse behind the Taj in Bombay. Plastic white Formica chairs, plastic white Formica tables, plastic spoons, plastic thalis. A television in the corner pumps out a Bollywood playlist off of YouTube. I bare my teeth at Priyanka and nod my head in time to the beat. She smiles at me.

  The smell of the food is fantastic.

  My cousin over in England sent me a link to an article recently, about some landlord who refuses to rent to desis because our food smells too much. Lord, I wrote back to him. Curry smells so much better than egg mayo, my god.

  Curry smells better than boiling ham, he wrote back.

  I laughed for hours about that.

  Smelling this food, I’m immediately taken home.

  Pops, watching that television, as the girl dances the item number. Mom sitting, one foot up on the chair, her elbow draped over it, smearing gajar pickle into her thepla and eating it in two bites, the smell lingering for hours, me gulping down a salt lime soda as a treat.

  Further back, to school, Mom making me get changed out of my school things, into home clothes – a plain kurti, trackies – so that my clothes didn’t smell of the food. Us keeping our coats and our outdoor clothes out of the kitchen. The worst thing, she was intimating, would be being told that our clothes stink of curry. The first dish I learned to make myself was pasta with tomato sauce. The care packages she sent to me at college, theplas and parathas wrapped in tin foil, the empty jelly jars now filled with gajar pickle, keree ni chutney, I’d eat ’em on benches in the quad, by myself, knowing that Lindsey, my roommate, would complain if I ate them in our room, because she complained about everything. It made me feel so far away. Like when they served some sort of miscellaneous generic chicken curry in the cafeteria and she put her scarf over her nose, baulking about the smell and looking at me.