12. Aarti
AARTI
It’s been, oh, ten hours and thirty-seven minutes since Noa ran out of our meeting faster than Sha’Carri Richardson, and I haven’t heard a peep from her since. Neither has Madge, even after contacting her boss, Stella.
I can’t entirely blame Noa for ghosting. Is professional ghosting a thing? I wish I’d known sooner. There have been plenty of times in the buildup to this show where I, too, wanted to run for the hills.
I knew being the face of Up Late would be a fresh challenge, but being unable to find my schtick, even with a team of the most brilliant comedy writers in the business, is embarrassing.
What’s even more embarrassing is the fact that the success of this career-defining moment I’ve worked toward my whole life is being held hostage in the sweaty palms of a neurotic ice cream scientist who has zero interest in saving my ass, let alone appearing on national television with me.
Why would she? She met me at rock bottom, and ever since, I’ve dragged her through one nightmare scenario after another.
The common denominator in all this chaos? Me.
Welcome to my brain at midnight: the time where, if I’m not asleep, bad things begin to happen.
My mind splits open and becomes a dark, never-ending vortex of stress and (sometimes good, but mostly bad) ideas.
A haunting remnant of Midnight Live, you’d think, but no.
My subconscious has been primed for all things late-night since my days of falling asleep to audiobooks on cassette tapes as a child.
“Do not flip the tape, beta, you will be up late and too tired for school,” my mom would tell me.
Some nights, I’d listen. But other nights, like tonight, I’d flip the tape.
And grab the next. And flip it. And grab the next and flip and flip and flip until I made it to the end of whichever fantasy novel I was listening to for the thirtieth time.
I’d lay there under the Kantha quilt my grandmother made me, hands folded across my stomach, listening, thinking.
One of those nights, it was as if my dad could hear my thoughts spiraling from the other room. He crept in and placed something on my nightstand.
“Here, Aarti,” he said, giving me my first ever night notebook. “To rid yourself of the Chinta.”
My dad had always been somewhat of a lowkey yogi, meditating in his chair after dinner or hitting a downward dog between his classes as a professor. I thought he must be doing it all to deal with the stresses of Maa. And then I grew up and realized it was probably to deal with me, too.
I scribble “professional ghosting” into the current notebook on my bedside table. I’ve lost count of how many I’ve been through at this point. At least a hundred during Midnight Live alone.
I roll onto my back. Turn on my right side. Then my left. I wriggle onto my stomach, so much more restless than I even was as a kid. That’s me–always regressing!
I scream into my pillow so that Diti doesn’t wake up. If she’s even home. Who’s to say? She’s probably out enjoying her life, performing emergency CPR at a college rave, doing what our parents told us to do. Be a doctor, a lawyer, anything but a comedian.
I reach for my pen and haphazardly scrawl “rave CPR” in my notebook.
I should have listened to my parents.
Nope. No. I would have been miserable as anything but a comedian.
Although… I am currently miserable… as a comedian.
Fuck.
I trudge into the office after a nearly sleepless night and am greeted by Madge and a god-tier-sized matcha.
“I spoke with Stella at the crack of dawn,” she says as we walk down the hallway. My tired ears perk up. “She and Gretch the Wretch exist in the same maniacal time zone, apparently.”
My half-functioning brain interprets the rest of the words coming out of her mouth: Something something five thirty a.m. Really crazy. Noa will come around. Don’t worry.
“Wait,” I laugh, “Don’t worry? Noa’s been MIA for nearly twenty-four hours. And that Stella woman also made it sound like Noa had a heads-up about the meeting yesterday. Breaking news: she did not.”
Madge pats me on the back a little too hard. Droplets of my precious matcha spill through the spout.
“I can tell you’re not at peak Aarti functions this morning, so follow me on this. We have to pretend like everything is okay, because, my dear, we have no other option.”
She charges ahead into the writers’ room, leaving me in the wake of her truth bomb.
“Hello everyone, everything is fine,” I begin our pitch meeting. Madge tries to hide her facepalm. “Let’s talk about ice cream, unfortunately.”
We spend the next several hours throwing around ideas about how my segments with Noa could be structured, and it’s a struggle.
“Truth or Dairy?” Rohan pitches. “Aarti has to answer a personal question or eat a weird flavor Noa whipped up.”
“We’re trying to play to ice cream’s strengths, not gross out the audience about frozen desserts,” Madge points out, much to my relief.
Syd rips out a page from her journal and crumples it up. “There goes Brain Freeze Roulette.”
“Wheel of Portions!” Freya reads from her notes. “Spin a wheel, add whatever it lands on to the sundae. It can have a bunch of different ice cream flavors, toppings, syrups, yadda yadda!”
“Could still wind up eating something pretty off-putting like watermelon chocolate with caramel drizzle,” I point out. Freya wrinkles her nose, deflated.
“Okay, okay,” Rohan leans forward. “Ice cream speed dating. Noa brings out different bases, Aarti has thirty seconds with each to find ‘the one.’”
“I don’t hate it,” Madge offers, which everyone present knows means it’s not good enough.
“What if Noa teaches Aarti to make ice cream, like a cooking show?” Freya suggests.
“How does that move the needle on flavor development?” I ask. “Plus I’ll give our audience the ick with how bad I am at measuring stuff.”
Madge groans, a canary in the coal mine for the low morale in our writers’ room.
“Just waterboard me in gelato and call it a day with whatever flavor I pass out on.”
Don’t worry, no one else laughs at my joke either. I lower my head to the table face-first.
We are quickly on our way to nowhere.
I slide into my car at the end of the day, a puddle of exhausted, human-adjacent goo. We landed on the most mundane segment imaginable for tomorrow’s shoot, and it took everything in me not to spill the beans to my writers that one half of our talent wasn’t even confirmed yet.
Somehow I manage to drive all the way home even though I don’t remember a single traffic jam or stoplight.
I trudge up the stairs to my condo, missing the elevator entirely, and walk in on Diti making pakora.
Gram flour covers every surface and oil sputters out of a pan that’s on way-too-high heat.
She has unfortunately never been any good at cooking.
“Make sure to clean up after yourself,” I say tersely.
“Hello to you, too,” she replies. “Good day, I presume?”
“Just swell.”
I crash onto the couch and close my eyes. I hear Diti place the fritters in the pan with an oily pop.
“Put it on medium.”
“Whatever,” she grumbles. “Want to talk about it?”
Several more mini explosions erupt from the pan.
“You forgot to chop up–”
“The beans, I know, Aarti. Geez. I was just trying to make you feel better.”
I muster the strength to open one eye at her.
She shrugs. “You walked out of here like you were on your deathbed this morning. You didn’t even hear me say hi.” She goes to flip the pakoras.
“Leave them,” I command. She rolls her eyes and puts down the slotted spoon. “For two minutes, at least.” The last thing I wanted was to come home and give my sister a culinary lesson.
“Can’t you just let me handle it?”
“They’re going to come out all wrong. I’m just trying to–”
“Help. Sure.”
We stare at each other in a classic sister standoff.
She tucks her lips. “Has it been two minutes yet?”
I sigh and stand. “I think I’m gonna–” I point to my room and then walk into it.
“Let me know if you want–”
I close the door. I love my sister, I do, but simultaneously being the responsible one and the most disappointing one is a double whammy I cannot bear right now.
I throw myself into my bed and scroll through Gramsta.
Along with the rest of my life as of late, my algorithm loves to punish me.
The same photo of Brigitte and the starlet, Mila, appears, now with over a million likes.
I heart it. Might as well join the masses in throwing her my support. Or jealousy. Whatever it is.
Ding! My phone lights up with a text.
brIGITTE
Finally falling prey to my little thirst trap?
I nearly correct her that that is less thirst trap and more relationship announcement, when she pings me again.
brIGITTE
It’s nothing serious, my little Aart-nigma ;)
brIGITTE
So are you going to invite me over or what?
I groan.
Did I mention there’s one thing that can keep me out of my endless nighttime spirals? Unfortunately for me, it starts with O and rhymes with shmorgasm.