‘Ah, ah…’ I didn’t know; I couldn’t be sure. Did I think he was a snob? I had the hots for him.
I don’t remember much of Andrew in school, outside of the poster pinned in my head. Maybe it was a time I had unconsciously blocked out after we started seeing each other in college. I wanted to remember only our time together. It might have something to do with Meena andhis affection for her or the fact that I didn’t really know him back then. It was more an image I had of him.
‘Snob?’ I asked. The moment the question was out of my mouth, I realized that I wasn’t in with the talk in Bangalore Scottish. I wasn’t one of the StyleStahs. Maybe they had thought of Andrew that way.
‘Yeah, yeah, that was the general opinion,’ Chhaya said, filling me in on what I didn’t know.
He referred to me as ‘she’ and ‘her’, not by my name, like an old couple who didn’t need an address.
Was it that easy for him to give me up?I wondered even as I returned the sunny disposition to both of them.
What we shared was tossed aside for what? Hot sex and an iPhone. I didn’t realize – but I don’t think anyone else at the table had either – I was shaking my head. Maybe they hadn’t discussed me, Meena and Andrew. She wouldn’t have wanted to bring me up for whatever reason, and Andrew was adroit at controlling his emotions.
‘Finished writing?’ Chhaya turned to me and asked about my ‘Crime 3.0’ piece.
I nodded.
‘And she’s done a darn good job of it,’ Andrew said.
Our eyes met, and I nodded before a smile took over my countenance.
Andrew and I walked back to drop Chhaya, and just before we enteredMorning Herald’s premises, I patted Andrew’s arm. He was walking ahead of me.
‘Meena and you were a thing, I know.’
‘Myraahh!’
I turned on my heel and waded into MG Road, but before I walked away, I asked Andrew not to follow. The air was heavy, and the footpath was busy. The peanut vendor was working up an aroma. My tears were salty.
Chapter 23
I had spent most of the first half of Monday running around bookshops in the CBD.
I don’t know if any city in the world (not that I had the stamps on my passport that would qualify me to make that comment) had a collection of bookstores like two parallel streets in the heart of Bengaluru did. The city’s intellectual compass.
There were the old names – Premier (Mummy’s favourite; she loved it so much, she took it with her perhaps. It shut shop the year she passed away.), Gangarams, Sapna, Higginbothams. And then there were those that sprouted at the turn of the millennium – Blossom, Bookworm, and more recently, Bookhive. Therapy on rickety shelves.
I was looking for a rom-com to lift my mood, and I was at Blossom, not for the first time in the morning. I had settled on the floor and had a pile of pre-owned books on my lap when I knew Andrew was in the room. I felt him in the air.
I was between two racks of books that touched the ceiling; if the timber trembled, I’d be buried in this pile of romantic dialogue. The lighting was dull, and when Ilooked up, I was looking at the CCTV camera beside which Andrew was standing. He was wearing an uncertain smile, jeans that looked like they needed a washing machine cycle and an olive-green tee that had been perfectly ironed. I always envied the way he ironed his tees… when he ironed them.
Andrew got down on his haunches. His back was slightly bent, and his shoulders had collapsed around him.
I inhaled his scent. His eyes were a storm. Had he followed me?
‘Hi,’ I said, with a dull wave that was an ache.
I’m not sure if he mentioned her name first or if he just started talking. ‘…was working in an art gallery in Boston; that’s where she went to college,’ Andrew said.
He was talking to my head now; I was looking at a book.
‘I went to the gallery a couple of times. I sought her out but as a friend.’
I felt a weight fall on my shoulders. Was it a book? Were the shelves collapsing?
The gallery was a 15-minute drive from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Andrew was stationed.
‘That’s why I went to see her,’ he said as my eyes met his. ‘All I wanted at the time was friendship.’ His eyes pleaded.
