summer, electric
i rolled down the window because the inside smelled like Bombay in a bottle: dried fish, monsoon damp, and something electric.
Did we ever cook together?
No.
But you would have procured the produce with your quick, efficient movements, exchanging a smile and a few words with the local grocer at the check-out counter. And she would remember you, her broad shouldered, sharp-jawed regular.
Your kitchen would be missing nearly all basic appliances.
Do you have a cheese grater?
Nah, just throw in the entire brick.
Do you have a lime squeezer?
Hey, what are hands for?
Um, how about a chopping board?
Oi, I’m 24 not 17, of course I have a chopping board.
I would ask you to dice one red onion and two green chilis for the egg bhurji. You’d chop them coarsely, but I’d be too distracted by the sight of your fingers to notice, imagining them in an entirely different context.
I do not remember blushing before meeting you, neck heating up, even though you could not see it on my brown skin. You would see it in my eyes and tease me endlessly.
Did we ever dance together?
Yes. Maybe not quite together, but close to each other, so many bodies swaying and sweating to a Bollywood beat in that dive bar in the hills where we both happened to be. I was aware of your every move, hoping to feel your eyes on me, and never finding them there. I would later discover that you were aware of me too, but more subtle in the art of the chase than I was accustomed to.
Who chased whom?
Despite repeatedly scrolling through the history of our messages, I would never quite find an answer, eventually deleting the proof of our fleeting co-existence out of self-preservation.
Did we ever share a taxi?
Yes. Before the beginning of it all, in a ride to the good side of town. I rolled down the window because the inside smelled like Bombay in a bottle, dried fish, monsoon damp, and something electric.
We sat at the exact distance of two people who had not quite gotten close but knew it was only a matter of time. I looked at everything but you, at the dark emptiness that I knew was the Arabian Sea, and the streetlights that blurred at 60 kms/hour like a Monet caught in an oil spill. I thought you looked handsome in an old-fashioned way, Clark Gable smirking at the bottom of a staircase.
Are we there yet?
You looked outside and recognized a landmark that meant we were close, closer than you realized. And then you looked right at me, making some internal decision, and kissed me like it was now or never, like those last few seconds in the taxi ride to the good side of town would be your only chance. Palms on my face, hands in your hair, I opened my eyes to look at the driver in the rearview mirror. He seemed indifferent, having seen this scene too many times to count or care.
Did we ever leave bruises?
Not out of violence, but perhaps out of desire, because there was so much of it, and we searched for places to hide it:
In the last glass of whisky we shared on your bed at 3.00 am?
On the tray of chai your cleaning bai brought into the bedroom the next morning, disturbingly at ease with a disheveled stranger under your jaipuri quilt?
Or the strawberry shake we shared in the cafe by the water?
let’s hang again? You texted.
I can’t, I have to help my friend move in.
I was not playing hard to get, I had promised my friend, and the girl code had been ingrained in me through pop culture from an early age. But you pursued in earnest.
okay, how about today
Uh, I am hungover and feel like shit.
so lets get some strawberry shakes and sit by the sea, you’ll feel better
If I were honest with myself, I would admit that I needed to get some distance from you, assess the state of my heart, and cool the liquid glass it had transformed into over the course of a week in the monsoon of 2011.
Also, I’m on my period.
always such a one track mind ;) we can chill, you can help me write this report for work I’ve been struggling with
Smart of you, paying attention during those endless conversations, and realizing that I liked to write. I should have understood then the dangerous appeal of emotionally intelligent boys who want to hang even without the possibility of sex.
Did we ever do recreational drugs?
Hash, which you procured from the old amma in the fading rust sari, handing her multiple five hundred rupee notes through the dusty kirana shop window.
Cocaine, apparently you did a couple hits with your friends and came to pick me up in that black Honda City. I was nervous, wondering if the drug would alter you in some darkly appealing way, making it impossible for me to enjoy you without wanting more.
But you were still you: just lighter, happier, and with more words coming out of your mouth than I had ever heard before. You told me about the girls from your past, the ones that really got under your skin, the way you were starting to get under mine. The stories you shared, like puzzle pieces adrift, I collected and stored in my pocket. I liked your fears the best even if I did not tell you mine.
One of them was me falling for you. Another was you falling for me.
Car windows down, ocean breeze drifting in, the way you looked at me, your eyes chaotic but with a veneer of self-control that never snapped. In your apartment, how you calculated all the ways that the whirring pieces in my body came together and apart.
Did we ever confess to falling in love, if only for the duration of a heartbeat, a breakfast, a season?
I know I did not. You alluded to something once, on the phone, a few drinks down.
what is it about us do you think
What do you mean?
can’t explain just that it feels effortless this thing with you
I had no experience being vulnerable enough to ask why your messages became infrequent over time, and I had every intention of leaving home and country behind without excess baggage. We were young and hungry and believed that this feeling between us would strike again and again with all the mysterious strangers from our future we hadn’t met yet.
The DM I sent you on Facebook Messenger was seven months too late. Many glasses of wine down, I still hedged my bets, getting confessional but not entirely. I wrote that I still thought about you, but fleetingly, like a quiet question mark at the back of my mind. I threw in a cavalier mention of the boys I had been with in Barcelona but maintained that you kissed better. I wrote that I had loved our time together, leaving un-asked if we would ever have more.
Your response came the next day: kind, affectionate, and brutal. You were taken.
Did we ever break each other’s hearts?
Mine bruised but did not break. So this is it, I thought to myself during all the afters. The aching emptiness of wanting someone you cannot have. I wrote down everything I felt and everything I didn’t; in diaries, textbooks, word docs, napkins, and emails to my girlfriends.
Did we ever forget that summer?
I think about that taxi ride when everything felt full of promise and new beginnings. If I could rewind, I’d ask you what that question was that lurked in your eyes, and when the desire to know the answer began to fade. Half wondering if the seeds of an ending lay in something between us, the rain, or maybe that strawberry shake we shared.
That winter, soaked in an endless loop of memories, I was glad. Glad for how through you I found pieces of myself, sharp edges and raw silk, I didn’t know I had inside me.
Glad for all the things we were to each other, and all the things we would never be.1
