Chaperon

The day after our engagement, I took my fiancée to a coffee-shop in the only five-star hotel in town. Her chaperon was an aunt named Mena (with a single e, the lady insisted), a spinster of five hundred moons. Uncle Jose (Hosappan to us) was mine. He was not necessary. ‘I am sufficient,’ he claimed.

The maître d’ took us to a bright table near the French window facing the pool. Hosappan asked for a discreet space.

‘Discreet, sir?’ the maître d’ asked.

‘Privacy, young man,’ Hosappan slipped in a wink, a nudge and a hundred rupees.

Aunt Mena cleared her throat. Hosappan ignored her.

We got a table in a dark and cosy corner, within Amazonian foliage and behind strategically placed screens. How did he know of this? My fiancée slipped into the curved booth-seat from the right. I got in next to her. Aunt Mena tried to get in before me. Hosappan blocked and guided her to the other side. My fiancée and I held hands beneath the table and practised footie. During time-outs, we listened to our chaperons.

‘Is Mena short for something?’ Hosappan asked.

‘No,’ Aunt Mena replied tersely. She blundered, ‘Short for what?’

‘Phelo-or-pheno-mena,’ he hesitated, I could guess the next, ‘Mena-pause.’

She was not amused.

‘What do you do?’ she asked.

‘Are you asking me how much I earn?’ he asked.

‘No, what do you do?’

‘That usually means the other, in a round-about polite way, of course.’

There was silence.

‘So, how much do you earn?’ he asked.

‘A gentleman is not supposed to ask that,’ she said.

‘He is not supposed to ask a lady’s age but he can ask how much she charges,’ Hosappan argued.

‘Don’t be crude,’ she objected.

‘God, you have a one-track mind, my love.’ He used the vernacular for that, ‘chakkarey’, meaning sugar or jaggery. I could feel static around the table.

‘Ok, don’t get your knickers in a twist,’ he paused, ‘what do you do?’

She mentioned some high-flying job in Europe.

Hosappan shifted to another gear.

He talked about Paris like it was his backyard; they raced through the museums, the monuments and the graveyards; they cooed about the theatre; they shifted to German and I guessed they were exchanging notes about nightlife with gruff guttural grunts. He had his second scotch. She shifted from tea to gin-n-tonic. They pretended not to notice when we switched to cocktails after the fresh juices.

They raised a toast to us at the end, both flushed and rather breathless.

We wanted to raise a toast to them too.

‘Did you get her number?’ I asked him later.

‘Never get the number of the good ones, lad.’

‘By the way, when did you go to all those places?’ I asked.

‘Lonely planet…’

‘Surely, you did not pick German from that?’

‘German…?’

‘Wasn’t it German?’

‘Ah, you lovebirds will learn about mating sounds soon,’ Hosappan refused to say more.