A Short Affair

by Simon Oldfield

  Anyway, all of this is undone those first few moments in Didi’s.

  There are a couple of people eating, dressed in black suits with black shirts. They eat separately but both look up at Priyanka and smile at her. She waves back at them.

  ‘They drive cabs too,’ she says.

  ‘What’s the worst thing about driving cabs?’ I ask.

  ‘People spoiling movies for you,’ she says, smiling. ‘Or television. Or basketball. Or your seats, with vomit, cum, oily foods. People thinking they know better than satnav. Traffic. DVT. Having to buy things so you can use the bathroom. There’s a lot of things.’

  ‘Wow,’ I say. ‘Is there anything good?’

  ‘I get to listen to a lot of podcasts.’

  I laugh as Priyanka leads me towards the counter. Didi is checking her phone, leaning against a wall. I recognise her as one of the people who gave me the nod the other night. I realise now, this is the building I walked past with Spider-Man. I look around – the rest of the nodders are all here, serving food. She has a permanently open mouth, seemingly mostly smiling, and thick-ass glasses. Her hair is pulled tight into a bun. She wears one of those black tees that lists a bunch of names: Hers says Didi & Masi & Faiba & Ba & Mota Ba & Bhen-a-ji. I love it. I take a sneaky picture of it, for the Gram. Didi looks up at me as I hit snap.

  ‘Kem cho didi,’ Priyanka asks.

  ‘All right, che,’ Didi replies, without looking up from her phone. ‘Who is your friend?’

  ‘A customer,’ Priyanka says. ‘She is missing home.’

  ‘Gujarati?’ Didi asks me, looking up. I nod. ‘You want some khichdi?’

  I haven’t eaten khichdi since Dada’s cremation. I sat in the kitchen with Mom and washed great bowls of brown lentils by hand as everyone sat next door singing prathna. Pops kept popping his head in the door asking if we needed help. He looked so lost. Dada had been such an integral part of our lives. When he had his mind, he dictated our social engagements. When he didn’t, we did everything for him. It was all-encompassing. Jesus fuck, the amount of times I had to help Pops lever him out of a bath and Dada got all weird cos his penis was out, like there was anything either vaguely sexual or humiliating about the nudity, and not the fact that this man no longer possessed a mind that could control his own damn body. It was depressing.

  At Dada’s cremation, relatives turned up with food – samosas, bateta nu shaak, paneer, rotlis, but it was Mom’s khichdi that kept us all going. When I asked her how to make it, she said it was her favourite too and she would teach me one day – either peasant food or grief food, she said. I laughed, wolfing down my second bowl of the stuff.

  ‘Yes please,’ I say to Didi, as she spoons a mound of khichdi into a white plastic bowl, handing me a white plastic spoon.

  Priyanka asks for some bakri and gajar nu pickle. Didi unwraps some foil and lifts a hard disc onto a plate.

  ‘Together?’ Didi asks and Priyanka looks at me.

  I’m about to say sure why not, when Priyanka laughs.

  ‘Separate,’ she says. ‘This is not part of her fare.’

  I’m about to bite into my khichdi as I walk towards a table, choosing to sit on my own while Priyanka heads over to catch up with one of the other drivers. The other one disconnects his phone from a phone charger and stands up, ready to leave. He looks familiar, like I’ve used his cab on Lyft or something. He has a thin, pencil-like beard and moustache and his hair sticks up like he is Guile in Street Fighter II. He catches me staring at him. He rubs at his chest, two fingers slip between the buttons under his shirt, and he nods at me as he leaves.

  My cheeks burn. I’m embarrassed.

  I nod back at the shadow of his departure. He is long gone and part of me feels bereft.

  I bite at a huge mound of khichdi, and, too much clove aside, it tastes just like how Mom used to make. I feel like I’m at home.

  SIX

  I eat leftover khichdi at work the next day. I’m sitting in front of the coffee shop. Maggie told me to eat my smelly food outside.

  I joked that it did overpower the smell of avocado on fucking sourdough toast somewhat. She smirked as if to say, I functionally understand this to be a joke but refuse to understand it or honour it with a laugh.

  Fuck her, fresh air.

  I’m leaning against a bench when a guy approaches wearing a bomber jacket made out of sherwani material and fucking Bata chappals. I smirk at him, except this smirk says ‘I am digging the fashion, my friend, and I get it, I get its heritage, but this is not necessarily an invitation to stop and chat, so keep walking’. He nods at me.

  ‘What’s up, ma?’ he asks in a hoarse voice, like he’s been on too many villain auditions in one day. ‘You good?’

  He talks with such clear familiarity and friendliness that, for a second, I worry that we know each other, even though I can count the number of brown people I know in this city on a thumb, called Rohan.

  ‘Do I know you?’ I ask.

  ‘Aren’t we all related?’ he says, laughing.

  ‘Sorry, we’re in an awkward exchange now. I love your chappal-and-sherwani look and you said hey and for a second, I thought I knew you. But I don’t. Do I?’

  ‘Naw, but it’s good. Always good to see another desi out here. It’s like a mayonnaise factory.’ I laugh and he laughs too. ‘What you eating?’

  ‘Khichdi?’ I say, unsure why I’m embarrassed, suddenly, claiming food-authenticity with another brown person, like he might correct me on my pronunciation, or say, actually, that is Gujarati brown-lentil khichdi, it’s important to be specific, lest I think it’s a Nepalese red-lentil khichdi, mixed with lamb mince and parsley.

  ‘You sure?’ he says.

  ‘Yeah, it’s delicious. From Didi’s,’ I say, like a goddamn pro. I coulda lived here my entire life.

  ‘Oh word,’ he says. ‘I love that place. Gotta get me some oondhwo. Anyways, stay blessed.’ He starts to walk away, stops then turns to me again. ‘Jay Shree Krishna,’ he says, and leaves.

  SEVEN

  ‘I cannot believe Didi’s is still there,’ Mom says.

  I’m surprised she has heard of it. It has become an obsession of mine. I’ve been there three out of five nights, tried pretty much the entire menu, each dish tasting like home. I’ve eaten alone with a book, I FaceTimed a buddy in London, and I brought Rohan. Who tagged us on Instagram. Which is how Mom knew about it. Since she joined Instagram to share Sanskrit memes and follow Priyanka and Deepika and the hungama of all the other Bollywood stars, she is obsessed with the app. Of course she comments under every one of my Grams. Of course she follows Rohan. Of course it means he tags me into everything every time we see each other. It’s his way of ensuring we keep in touch. His mom died four years ago. Since then, he’s been ending every episode of his podcast with ‘Call your mom. She misses you’.

  Every time I hear him say it, I well up.

  ‘How do you know about Didi’s?’ I say, shoving a pizza slice in my face so Mom can’t tell how sad I feel, interacting with her through a screen.

  ‘Darling, we did not always live here. You know you were born in Queens. A few blocks away from Didi’s.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But it was open then?’

  ‘Of course, Didi’s is as old as desis in the city themselves. It was a place for all of us to go and be amongst our people. I know my colleagues at the college here call this self-segregation, but they are goras, Rakhee, darling. They do not understand that this was self-preservation. Going to Didi’s every Thursday and listening to people read out their letters from home, or on Saturdays when we would move all the tables to one side and listen to mehfils, or the friends Papa made with other taxi drivers. We had a community in the city and that was our central clubhouse.’

  ‘Wow,’ I say. ‘Well, I love their khichdi.’

  ‘You used to come with us,’ Mom tells me.

  ‘Really?’ I say, and for the first time in ages, I feel like I’m truly all ears to Mom. Like whenever we t
alk, I tell her the bits about my week that are palatable to her: the micro-progressions of my career, the micro-aggressions of hipsters, what I’ve eaten, have I been on any dates. We don’t really share stories that count. Everything is a list: a list of meals, a list of names of people I’ve dated, a list of hipster racist incidents, a list of commissions. There is nothing that makes this conversation easy.

  But now, all I want to hear about is the good ol’ days of Didi’s.

  ‘That place, we called it the other house,’ she tells me.

  ‘I like that a lot, Mom.’

  ‘Your papa has some good stories, want me to get him on the phone?’

  I try to say it as tempered and as plainly as I can. ‘I don’t want to speak to him,’ I say.

  ‘He misses you, beta,’ Mom says. ‘It was just a vote. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does,’ I say. ‘Anyway, tell me how to make khichdi,’ I say, taking the laptop over to my kitchen counter.

  ‘Have you soaked the dhal?’ she asks.

  I love my mom in this moment. She is firm and clear with instructions, but you can tell, from the smirk on her face, that there is nothing she would rather be doing than telling her only child how to cook her favourite dish over the internet.

  She’s even put on an apron, even though she’s not cooking anything herself.

  I want to cry, and tell her I miss her and use any excuse to go home. But she has that determined look on her face, like I will teach this child how to cook like me. I choke back a tear and listen.

  EIGHT

  Didi’s becomes my comfort-food spot.

  I eat away bad dates, rejection emails from editors, my silent spat with my pops, Mom’s well-intentioned sharing of news of more successful cousins, Spider-Man’s death, Rohan’s upset, my upset, loneliness, the empty apartment, bad sex, the season finale of a show I would never admit I watch publicly, trolls who seek out women of colour with political opinions on the internet so they can describe to us all the ways they would like us to be raped, a guy I used to hang out with who’s now on a pretty successful AMC show ignoring me when I say hello to him at a random bar . . .

  Didi’s becomes where I bask in good news. I only take Rohan if I take anyone. I won’t let white people ruin this place for me.

  I eat to celebrate a new commission, a published work, a successful reading, a day at work when I didn’t want to spray boiling milk into a customer’s eyeball, friends’ successes, a guy I used to hang out with getting cast in a pretty successful AMC show, a good conversation with Mom, a care package she sends containing theplas in tin foil and a Hanuman Chalisa book.

  I get to know what it’s like to know where everybody knows your name.

  NINE

  It’s 4 a.m. and I’m back in the bar cos I know Teddy’s working. I’m trying to finish a terrible book I need to review and the only way I can finish it is if I wash it down with two or three beers. I’m at the corner of the bar, leaning against the wall and against the bar, almost squatting over my stool just to stay awake because this book is terrible.

  I can feel the man next to me try to get my attention. He flicks a beer mat repeatedly against a knuckle to distract my peripheral vision, he sighs a lot so I’ll ask what’s wrong, when my mac ’n’ cheese arrives he asks the bartender what I ordered, to establish a connection, even though it’s just fucking mac ’n’ cheese, he makes a phone call to a buddy and says he’s doing nothing, just propping up a bar next to the most beautiful tanned lady in Queens.

  At which point I put my book down and turn to him. His phone call mysteriously wraps up quickly and he turns to face his entire body at me.

  ‘Brad,’ he says, extending his hand.

  ‘Did you just call me tanned?’ I ask, curtly.

  ‘Yeah, best tan in Queens. Especially for this time of year.’

  ‘It’s my skin colour, buddy.’

  I shake my head in disbelief. I hate this, when it’s this casual, this normal; it causes my stomach to burn, for me to be that weird kid who never fit in once more.

  ‘So . . . ?’ he says, not getting it.

  ‘This is not a tan,’ I tell him, slowly, seeing Teddy hover near us, just in case this escalates and he can use his bartender privileges to chuck someone out. ‘I’m always this colour.’

  ‘Well, lucky you,’ he says. ‘Imagine being tanned all year round.’

  ‘Fuck you, asshole.’

  ‘What the fuck did I do?’ he says, picking up his phone from the wet bar and then dropping it in beer-spill again. ‘It’s not like I’m a racist or anything.’

  ‘No,’ I say, gathering my things, flaring my nostrils. ‘But you said something racist.’

  ‘I’m not a racist,’ he says.

  I’m out the door.

  At Didi’s, there’s a line; it’s Ramadhan and I’ve come just as people are having their last meal before the fast starts. Priyanka nods at me from three people in front. All the men lining up look tired, haggard. Summer-month fasting must be the toughest.

  As I wait, I stare at a collage of pictures, on the wall, near the entrance. I’ve never noticed them before.

  Faded, curled at the corners, almost over-exposed, is a photo of two people I instantly recognise. Beaming, banging dandhiyas together, facing the camera, him in an all-white juba lengha, her in one of her pink floral saree specials. It’s my mom and pops. Doing garba. The inscription reads Navratri 1989.

  I lean in close.

  There I am, almost three, sleeping on two chairs pushed together, wearing a red salwar.

  I realise something.

  This other house, it’s always been here for me, home, I just hadn’t found it yet. I look at the line of people in front of me, the most brown faces I’ve been surrounded by since Nadya’s shaadi.

  This is the other house. I snap a photo of the photo on my phone.

  I’m ready, I think. It’s early, but I’m ready.

  I finally feel at home.

  I text Pops.

  A QUIET TIDY MAN

  Claire Fuller

  Artwork by Luey Graves

  A QUIET TIDY MAN

  Claire Fuller

  Before everything changed, my siblings and I liked to canter our horses across the lawn in front of the house. Their hoofs would turn over great clods of turf and my stepfather, Charles Grubb, would follow at a safe distance to stamp the grass back into place. Phyllis, my middle sister, once led her horse into our entrance hall and encouraged it to tackle the stairs. Charles, who happened to be walking past with an un-iced Christmas cake, only raised an eyebrow and returned a few minutes later with a shovel and bucket for the manure which the horse had left along the patterned runner.

  Charles accepted us and our house, and the way we lived, because he was in love with our mother, and had been ever since he saw her at the county gymkhana when they were both seventeen. He’d been too shy to declare himself then and so had waited, whilst she married our father, produced first me and my twin sister Joyce, then another child and then two more. Charles’s patience paid off, because when our father died unexpectedly, Charles was on hand to step in.

  Our mother inhabited an unstructured world where home-schooling was often forgotten for weeks and mess and dirt went unnoticed. But there were six horses and five children to feed, electricity bills to pay, and a stable roof to re-slate, so she married Charles Grubb on the understanding that she didn’t have to take his second name, the idea of which caused a scandal amongst our neighbours. When she and I walked into the village post office I was aware of the silence that fell, but my mother was oblivious. She swept her cape around her, taking up more than her share of the available space and dislodging curling postcards of the church font and dusty packets of custard powder.

  ‘I have been Marjorie Bird since my first marriage,’ my mother said in her booming voice to the postmistress, Mrs Mardle. ‘I may have caught a Grubb, but there is no need to become one.’ And she would laugh at her own joke.

  As
well as trailing after the horses, Charles cleaned up after us in the house, which was old and broken and had a kitchen which was sometimes flooded by the Thames. We children didn’t use our own bedrooms, but slept wherever the fancy took us, or sleep overcame us, and consequently all of our clothes, books and toys were left wherever we dropped them. Yet another girl from the village who ‘did’ for my mother had resigned, this time citing ‘feral children, animal droppings trodden into rugs and ducks paddling through the kitchen’ as her reasons for leaving. And so our stepfather took to carrying a willow trug he found discarded in the orangery. He picked up single shoes, empty teacups and damp towels as he wandered through the house, placing them in his basket and amiably matching them with their partners or returning them to where they belonged.

  Charles had arrived in our house with a portmanteau, a great deal of money and a silver-topped cane engraved with the letters CCG. He allowed my youngest sibling, Clementina, to look at it, and one evening at the dinner table she asked what the C stood for.

  ‘What a ridiculous question,’ our mother said. ‘C is for Charles.’

  ‘Or cabbages,’ said Thomas, one up from Clementina.

  ‘C is for Christ,’ said Phyllis who was going through a religious phase.

  ‘Constipation,’ said Thomas, laughing and spilling potato from his mouth. ‘Cardboard cut-out,’ he shouted. ‘Curds! Custard face!’