‘No, Dada, you’re a cutu button.’
‘That’s also true,’ I say.
Rabbani’s class teacher, Archana Kotak, is waiting for her outside. She smiles at me.
Archana Kotak and I went on a date a few months ago. At the end of the date, a drunk Archana wrapped her arms around my neck. Then she rejected me by saying, ‘I am not ready to be with someone who has a lot of baggage.’
‘As far as baggage goes, I have been a hoarder over the past few years,’ I answered. ‘I have a conveyor belt of different sizes and weights.’
She ran her fingers over my face and slurred, ‘But just because we can’t date doesn’t mean you can’t take me home, because you totally can.’
‘I live in a one-room kitchen,’ I answered. ‘Rabbani would be there, and so would my father. Might get awkward if they wake up and find the nursery teacher in a reverse cowgirl.’
‘I will have to go back home and google “reverse cowgirl”,’ she chuckled. And then, with lips upturned in mock sadness, she added, ‘I would have taken you home but I live with my parents. They will self-immolate.’
Neither of us wanted to spend on renting a room for the night. Our desire wasn’t worth that much. That was the end of the date.
Archana takes Rabbani by her hand.
‘How have you been?’ she asks me with a smile.
‘Hanging in there,’ I respond.
On her right hand, a gold band glistens. This is her last month at the school. She’s getting married and moving to Chandigarh next month. It’s ironic that she’s getting married to a farmer who might or might not know what a reverse cowgirl is.
3.
Aanchal Madan
The aircraft lurches. I spot the dark, endless ocean from my window seat. We touch down. The network comes back on. There are missed call notifications from Vanita Pen.
Vanita Pen is Vanita Iyer, my best friend. Four years ago, Vanita Iyer asked me for a pen during registration day at SRCC and then promptly lost it. She insisted I save her number and remind her to return a pen. I never changed the name. She never returned the pen.
Vanita walked into SRCC as if she had always been there. Despite being too tall at 6’1”, too lanky and shaped like a stick figure made by a child, she walked with the grace and surety of a dancer, the pace of an athlete.
On the first day, when a professor told her her skirt should be longer, she cried and then reported him. On the second day, she wore a shorter skirt. On the third day, she got through dramatics, dance, music and debate societies, and didn’t join any. On the fourth day, two guys asked her out. While I was taking my first, small steps at SRCC, keeping my voice down, existing, she had been gliding through the corridors, laughing, announcing her arrival. I liked Vanita. Everyone liked Vanita. She would talk to you as if you had known each other for years. ‘She’s an army kid,’ people would whisper. ‘Army kids can talk to anyone.’ There were many army kids in our college. None like her. Throughout that first week, I would go back home and daydream about talking to Vanita, of being friends with her, walking the corridors like her, being exactly like her.
‘Do you have my pen?’ I asked her on the seventh day.
‘No,’ she replied with a crinkled nose.
‘I want to be friends with you,’ I told her.
She laughed with her face, her body and her eyes. ‘Aren’t we already?’ she said and put her arm around me. ‘Do I still have to give you the pen back?’
And that was that. By the end of the first month, we were thicker than sisters.
Since then, we have lied to each other’s parents. We have got caught marking proxies for each other. I have cursed all her boyfriends, nursed her through the break-ups. We have pushed each other out of the way of rampaging DTC buses.
She told me about her struggles with her body, her hate for her own dark skin, her rage against her tiny breasts, the depth of her sadness, the intensity of her grudges, the sharpness of the blades she had once considered as a child.
I told her about my anger with the world, the water in my milk, being touched by an uncle, the extent of my ambition, the shame of being poor, the loneliness of not fitting in.
I told her she was the hottest girl in the college. She told me I was the prettiest girl in the college. Sometimes, she would just look at me and say, ‘Why the fuck are you so beautiful, Aanchal? It’s not fair.’ I might have loved Vicky, but Vanita was my favourite person in the world. I could have died for Vicky, but I wanted to live with Vanita.
* * *
Vicky Garg hated Vanita Iyer at first sight.
