The Best of Our Days

 

 

I turned around in my seat to face the noisy kids. “Could you please shut up?”

It was a lousy movie. It was worse after that.

When lights came on during interval, I thought of apologizing to them. I stood up. They had also stood up. They scowled at me. I noticed they had come with an old couple.

I followed the kids to the snack counter. The brother must be twenty or so, his sister at least half a dozen years younger. He kept an arm around her shoulder as they approached the unruly crowd at the snack counter.

I whispered in the boy’s ear, “Follow me, keep your sister in between, protect her from behind.”

I made way through the crowd. My grumpy nature helped. The kids followed. I heard her ask him, “What did the creep say to you?”

After the movie, I had more reason to have a foul mood. A car was parked in such a way that I could not get mine out. I shouted at the parking attendant. Not that that helped. After fifteen minutes, a lady my age or so came to the car, along with those two kids and the old couple.

“I should have known,” I muttered.

The girl told the lady, “That’s him.”

The lady looked at me. I could see where the kids got their scowl from. I returned my best.

“Shake,” the lady said, the scowl turning into a familiar smile.

That took me by surprise. Some call me Shakes, the fashionably abbreviated form of Shekhar, but only one had ever called me Shake.

“Indu,” I said.

“How are you?” she said.

“Staying alive. You?”

“Same.”

The parking attendant interrupted. “Now, you don’t want to go.”

We ignored him. She introduced her parents.

“You used to drop her off after tuition,” her mother said. I nodded.

Her father asked me what I did. I replied, “Nothing.” He frowned.

The parking attendant muttered something we didn’t hear.

“Better go before I bash him up,” I said.

She smiled.

“Can I have your number?” I asked.

She hesitated. Then, she took out her smartphone and said, “Tell me.”

I told her my number. She dialled. I took out my mobile and looked at her number.

The girl gave a loud hoot. “Look at his phone. What’s that?”

The girl’s mother smothered a laugh, “Shake, really? You still have one of those Nokia thingies?”

I turned to the girl. “Young lady, this has an alarm clock. And, Pinarayi and Shah can’t track me like they track you all.”

That got a loud snort.

They went to their car. I heard the girl ask her mother, “Why did he call you Indu?”

A few days later, I got a SMS from Indu. “Lost my number?”

I called her back.

“You could have replied with a message,” she said.

“My fingers don’t poke where fingers aren’t supposed to poke,” I said.

There was silence from her end.

“I don’t message,” I clarified.

“Definitely not on that thingy,” she said.

We did not talk for long. I told her that I do not do phone calls either. I asked her if she could e-mail. She asked for my email id and immediately sent a Hello. I told her to wait till I logged into my account on the laptop.

“Is your laptop running XP?” she asked.

“Very funny,” I said.

I replied to her email with a Hi.

Before ending the call, I laid down some ground rules. Do not twist anything I write into double entendre or something like that. Any confusion, clarify. She too made her rules clear. Do not think I am hitting on you. Ever. Replies will not be prompt or regular, she added.

Our email exchange turned out to be a regular affair. At least two or three from each side every day.

“We should have kept in touch via letters back then,” I wrote in one.

“We should have at least remained on talking terms,” she replied.

In our final year, we went to the same Physics tuition teacher thrice a week after school. The teacher’s house was close to our school. We took the 15:45 city bus; tuition class was for an hour from four; we walked to a main bus stop two kilometres from there, after having a snack at a small shop; I got off at her stop and walked with her to her house; and, I used to be back home around six.

Her family was conservative and orthodox, so was mine and every other family I knew in my city-town. One mate told me she was Pentecost and did not take medicine even when she was sick. Another told me she was evangelical and sang prayers instead of eating. At home, my folks thought I was turning out to be a fanatic. Later I learned that my school mates thought that too. It did not help that I gave a semi-religious speech for a competition in the final school year. I do not remember the details. It had a lot to do with Hindu pride and nationalistic fervour. I like to think now that I did not really know what I was saying then. I do remember that the speech was met with an uneasy silence from the audience. Younger kids who used to hero worship me maintained a distance from then on.

We used to talk, I am not sure about what, during that walk from the tuition teacher’s house to the bus stop. After that speech, that stopped. After I/she poked at her/my faith.

That is her name, Faith. But I called her Indu. She called me Shake. In the best of our days, we wanted something for ourselves.

Our email exchange revolved around our lives. We did not ask too many questions. We spoke, or rather wrote, our mind. We knew most of the details, life in small places tend to be so. We were divorced. I knew she had had an affair, after her divorce, with one of our old school mates. That idiot bragged about it in a social media group. She exited all social media groups then. I was not on any social media, and hardly in contact with anyone, but got to know all the lurid details. She knew about how my marriage went to the rocks. Those details were well-circulated. She did not know that my affair was with a married woman. I gave her details in an email.

In one email, she wrote, “For the first time, I feel that there’s someone ready to accept my version.”

“Same here,” I replied.

Given our worldviews, experiences and cynicism, we did not add that we might actually be taking in a different version. After all, we had stressed that it was all about feeling that way.

She irritated me when she wrote, “Did you hit her and use all her money?”

I replied with silence.

“Did I irritate you? I am in that kind of mood,” she wrote with a zany look emoji.

I did not tell her what I had typed and then deleted. “Did you sleep with him to ensnare him?” I guess she would not have taken it as a rhetorical question.

Slowly, gingerly, we wrote about all the other stuff people were saying about us.

“Catharsis sucks!” she concluded.

“I’ve got only her to do that,” I wrote.

“Convince me how that isn’t a double entendre.”

“That was the truth.”

In another email, she asked me if I liked kids. I replied with a very quick negative. We did not talk about her kids. Or about our family.

She read my stories. I read her poetry. We did not offer feedback. We gave encouragement. Just two amateurs wanting to be amateurs.

We became comfortable enough with each other to talk about sex.

“He turned out to be only as good, or as bad, as my husband,” she wrote.

“It is usually so,” I replied, trying to sound confident.

“Are you impotent as your wife claimed?” she asked.

“Only with the wrong woman at the wrong place at the wrong time,” I replied.

“So, always?” she wrote.

“Grrr…”

Faith was touched upon a lot later. We jointly came to the conclusion that the biggest plus point about being a social discard is to lose faith in the collective stuff. She did ask if I still gave horrid speeches. To four walls, all the time, I told her.

We probed about the individual. That seemed benign, definitely not malignant. We pushed boundaries. We kept them intact, though.

“Let’s have coffee,” she wrote.

“Outside,” I insisted.

“Definitely. But you might meet my kids.”

“That’s ok. Just make sure they don’t poison my coffee.”

“My son won’t.”

She came in an auto. She told me her kids would pick her up.

Quite formally, we congratulated and thanked each other for what we had shared so far.

“If we were in your story, how would it end?” she asked between sips.

“Probably, in love.” I thought for a while. “But how?”

“Medical emergency and we are there for each other and find deep love,” she suggested.

“Your daughter needs my help and I prove to be an able guardian. God forbid,” I said. She laughed.

She and I listed out the cliché scenes, from the tragicomic to even murder.

I wrote down all the points in my pocketbook.

Her kids turned up.

The boy gave a small smile. The girl had perfected an ugly scowl. When I went to get the kids ice-cream, the girl took the pocketbook I had left on the table and read the points. I did not object about her intrusion when I returned with their ice-cream.

“Why haven’t you mentioned the situation in ‘The Lady with the Dog’?” the girl asked.

“Aren’t you too young to read that Chekhov story?” I asked.

She gave her famous snort.

And, as explanation, she said, “I read.”

“But…” I was interrupted.

“She writes too,” her brother said.

“Oh…”

“Her second novel will be out next month,” he said.

“Her novel…?”

“She has more than thirty thousand followers,” he continued.

“You are joking…no?” I spluttered. “Indu, you could have told me that your kid could help me sell my stories.”

“Do you think she will?” Indu said.

I smiled sweetly at her daughter. No scowl on that poker face.

“I have read some of your stories,” the girl said.

“You have?”

“Too much of you.”

“Too much, indeed.”

“You don’t have to repeat.”

“I don’t.”

“Brrr…have you published any?” the expert asked.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Not good enough…”

The round eyes compressed to slits.

“Not my philosophy,” I said.

“Philosophy isn’t philosophy if kept to oneself,” the girl said.

“She should be locked up,” I complained to her mother.

When we were about to leave, I took out a birthday card from my backpack and gave it to the girl.

“My birthday is not anytime now,” she objected.

“Kids your age should have a birthday every month,” I said.

Indu looked at me. I had said those words to her long back along with the monthly gift of a birthday card.

“Let’s have a party soon,” I said.

“It’s Ma’s birthday next week,” the boy said.

“I will make the cake,” the girl said.

“You cook too?” I asked. Without waiting for the snort, I continued, “Ok, I will bring the enji-mittayi.”

“What’s that?” the kids asked.

“Local delicacy, ginger sweet, what all kids miss nowadays,” I said. “Your mother used to finish off all my money on that.”

“Yeah, right, 50 paisa for ten,” Indu said. “Where are you going to get that these days?”

“I have learned to make that, everything is on the Net,” I said.

It was time to leave. The ladies went to their car. The boy held me back.

“Promise you won’t hurt my mother,” he said.

“I can’t promise that,” I replied without hesitation.