Chapter One #2
‘Wait until after I’ve left, okay,’ Timira instructs her as she blows over the napkin for the ink from her felt-tip pen to dry before folding it enough times for it to resemble a square in a bar of chocolate.
Settling the bill as swiftly as she can, she rushes out and starts walking away in quick steps before breaking into a jog, as though she were trying to escape from something or someone.
For the next few minutes, she runs. Along the Carter Road promenade, unbothered by the clammy, heavy air typical of Bombay and the stench from the drying fish and salty waters that she never fails to wrinkle her nose at, even after nearly fifteen years of living in Bandra.
Even the curious looks she garners from the little urchins looking for unsuspecting pockets to pick, the young couples sipping water from the same coconut, and the waif-thin models looking like Baywatch lifeguards as they run in their tiny sports bras go unnoticed.
Tripping over her shoelaces that have come undone, she finally stops and lets the tears roll.
* * *
A FEW HOURS AGO
It has been just over a couple of weeks since Timira broke up with Rodrigo and only two people in Timira’s circle are aware of it.
Unfortunately for her, these aren’t the two that she shares a roof with—her sexagenarian, retired parents.
Naturally, through this time, while a storm has raged inside her heart, though Timira has tried to appear calm and eaten (a lot of) cake, like the bold pink letters on the mug she is currently holding suggest, she isn’t sure if she has managed to convince her intuitive and hawk-eyed mother.
It’s a clammy, overcast, moody morning, and Timira is pottering about the house looking a little lost and trying to steer clear of Mummy Marak’s line of sight.
‘Is that an empty mug you’re holding like a trophy, TimTim?’ her mother, a retired schoolteacher, teases.
Startled, Timira mumbles incoherently while also marvelling at her mother’s single-minded focus on her every move.
Should send her to ISRO. They’ll thank me for sending a human satellite!
She presses when she doesn’t get a response from Timira, who’s now lost in thought, imagining herself being felicitated by the scientific community.
‘Are you looking for something? Why aren’t you getting ready?
Won’t you get late for work? Let Apa look for it; he has nothing to do anyway.
Look at him, staring into the phone all day long and typing away.
Ask him what he’s doing and he always has the same answer, “deleting stuff and making space”.
What is all this stuff that he needs to delete anyway? I should check his phone …’
‘No, Ma! You shouldn’t! What is wrong with you?’
‘Oh, good. Now I have your attention, daddy’s darling!’
Timira’s father, unperturbed, remains engrossed in his phone.
‘Must you always be so dramatic, Ma? Argh. I’m looking for earphones. Do you know where I might have kept the old pair?’
‘But you’ve been wearing those wireless ones … what do you call them, pots?’
‘Pods, Ma. AirPods.’
‘T, D, pot, pod, same thing. What happened to those?’ ‘I’ve misplaced them,’ Timira lies. She has thrown them away. They were one of her first gifts from Rodrigo.
Her mother tries hard but is unable to entirely hide a slight smile.
She had suspiciously observed Timira come home laden with more gifts in the past year than in all the rest of her life put together.
But in the past couple of weeks, she has found most of those items in the recycling or garbage bin—discoveries that have pleased her no end.
What had been a nagging suspicion for two weeks had finally just been confirmed by Alice, her hare-brained only child’s friend.
Timira had not notified her parents about her relationship with Rodrigo because she knew they, especially her mother, would never approve of her dating a world-famous playboy footballer who is also a single father.
She thought she had done well at hiding her relationship—both at work and at home.
But she was now beginning to suspect that her mother knew all along.
And that she was now taking a lot of pleasure in the relationship’s demise.
Timira notices the corners of her mother’s small mouth upturn a little.
Ah, she knows. Must be Alice’s doing. Got to be!
‘You get ready for work; I’ll look for them. Or just take Apa’s!’
‘Can you leave him alone, please? Look at the poor guy. Doesn’t make a damn sound even! Those earpods are his only escape from your jibes and nagging. Must you take those away from him?’
She feels a sudden pang of sympathy for the mousey, sorry-looking figure slumped against the couch.
Poor Apa!
‘Who’s asked him to not make a sound? Me? When? Why are you always telling me off?’
‘You can be a little nice to him, you know.’
‘Oh, please. Whatever. Stay married for forty years and then talk to me about being nice. And why should I be nice to him when he’s nice to only his colleagues? He should go live with them!’
‘Ma, please! A little respect, perhaps?’
‘Why? Why? So what if he was in the IAS? I was a teacher, too. Equals, we are equals!’
Her mother’s cheeks are now flushed and her nostrils flared.
Her former bureaucrat father puts his phone away, clears his throat and speaks in a pronounced eastern accent. An accent she adores, and one that her father, even after over forty years of living and working across India, is proud of and refuses to let fade.
Timira’s father was one of the first in the Garo community to crack the civil services exams. Possibly among the first in Meghalaya—his home state—as well.
As one of the toppers, he had the option to choose the more glamorous Indian Foreign Service, but he chose the Indian Administrative Service because he wished to remain close to his parents.
‘And to meet Ma,’ Timira would often tease her shy Apa.
Her parents had met, accidentally and quite serendipitously, in Delhi.
Her maternal grandfather, then chairman of a leading PSU, had been visiting North Block to meet the finance minister, and her father was in the premises to meet with a senior in his cadre who was at the time on deputation in the same ministry.
They had been introduced over a cup of tea and her grandfather had been won over by her father’s ‘brilliance and humour’, he claims. ‘His ability to bullshit and my father’s inability to see through it,’ her mother has always maintained.
Her grandfather had wasted no time in inviting the ‘very fine, very sharp, very family-oriented young man’ over to dinner without a care about the fact that he was hoping to set up his very Brahmin, very Bengali, very cosmopolitan daughter with a very tribal, very Christian boy who had grown up in the relatively obscure town of Tura in the foothills of the Garo Hills.
A little later on the same afternoon, her father was loitering around Bengali Market in Central Delhi mulling over the suddenness and randomness of her grandfather’s invitation and trying to decide between sweets and a fruit basket to take with him, when a group of girls in their early twenties breezed past him, chatting loudly and animatedly.
The most sprightly and loudest of the lot, also the tiniest with a head full of hair that reached until her waist, almost had a spring to her every step and seemed entirely unbothered about the pallu of her saree forming a trail and sweeping across the dirty pavement.
The group smelled of talc and jasmine that, he surmised, they must have just bought from the hawker he had left only a few steps behind.
As the pallu kept getting dragged away by its owner, her father’s feet dragged him on, too.
Catching up in quick steps, he had bent down and lifted the pallu and in a soft voice whispered near the pallu-owner’s ear.
‘Excuse me, miss. Your saree …’
The pallu-owner had spun around to lay her eyes on a man of average height and build but with eyes that twinkled and skin that sparkled in the winter sun.
‘Thank you,’ she had nervously replied before getting dragged away by her friends.
Timira’s father’s heart sank as the pallu-owner walked away. Then, just before she went completely out of sight, she turned around one last time and smiled.
‘That made my heart do somersaults!’ her father had later admitted.
Without doing any thinking, least of all about the repercussions, he had followed her as the afternoon turned to evening.
The girls took a bus; he hopped on to the same.
He watched her friends getting off one after the other until she was all by herself.
Seated by the window, twirling her hair around her index finger and looking out of the window with a smile.
The seat next to her was vacant but her father did not have the courage to approach her.
‘What if she thought me to be a creepy stalker? After all, I did follow her. It was quite creepy, now that I think of it. I’d be livid and overcome with worry if it happened to you, Tims!’
Her father followed her as she alighted from the bus at Asiad and walked through lanes and passed by kothis that looked alike before stopping at one with a small garden and a blue Premier Padmini parked beside it.
He watched her ring the bell and beam sunnily as the door to the house opened.
He watched her enter the house and shut the door as he attempted to hide behind shehtoot trees.
After waiting for a good thirty minutes and beginning to feel rather foolish, he decided that he lacked the courage to see his daring approach through.
Crestfallen, shoulders drooping, he had only just started to trace his steps back towards the bus stop when an Ambassador car pulled up next to him and honked loudly.
‘Marak! Is that you? Must say you are most punctual! Impressive.’
Her father could only stare.
Mr Ganguly lives here?
‘C’mon, hop in!’