‘Don’t shame our kids,’ she cuts me with a laugh.
She feels exactly the same as I do about our kids’ ineptitude with numbers.
Both of us are extremely impatient teachers of math. It’s unbelievable how bad Rabbani, nine, and Amruta’s sons, Naman and Nishant, eight, are at mathematics. We like to tell ourselves that by the time they grow up, technology will make mathematics-related jobs obsolete and it’s not going to matter. Every couple of months during the parents-teachers’ meeting, Amruta and I spend twenty humiliating minutes in front of the worried class teacher of 3B, Bal Bharati School, listening to her tell us how badly Rabbani, Naman and Nishant are doing in math. The same worried class teacher gossips in her staffroom about whether something is going on between Amruta and me.
The class teacher’s right.
There’s something between Amruta and me. We just don’t know what it is. Our lives fit in like a complex jigsaw puzzle, a tall Jenga tower. Rabbani and her sons are in the same class, we both live in Gurgaon, we both have flexible day jobs, this tiny podcast and a mid-twenties life that’s not shared by a lot.
And we are both scared.
If we fit in the last piece of the puzzle and get our lives intertwined, we would be taking a decision for too many people. Her parents, my father and the kids. And that scares the living daylights out of us.
My phone rings.
‘Hello . . . what . . . nonsense . . . you serious? . . . no way . . . I will see what I can do . . .’
I cut the call. Instinctively, I open up MakeMyTrip and check the next flight to Dubai. It leaves in two hours.
‘Is everything okay?’ asks Amruta.
‘The airlines forgot to load Gaurav’s luggage,’ I answer. ‘The next flight is in the night. If the clothes need to get there then—’
She cuts me before I can finish. ‘I’m not teaching the kids, absolutely not!’ she protests. ‘I will let the kids fail rather than teach them subtraction,’ she says.
‘I would rather have an aircraft run over me than teach them.’
‘I would rather walk into a turbine than teach them.’
‘I would rather sit in a cargo hold and freeze to death than teach them.’
She laughs. ‘We should say all of this in the podcast. Go now, leave. I will see you tomorrow.’
The immigration officer at Dubai Airport looks at me, then at my passport and then back at me. ‘Used to be a resident, habibi?’ he asks me in his thick Arabic accent when he spots my old residence visa.
‘It took everything away from me,’ I respond to him with a smile.
‘Hope it’s better this time. Welcome to Dubai!’ he tells me and stamps my passport.
The dry air of Dubai at once feels familiar. I load Gaurav’s suitcases in the boot of the taxi. ‘Atlantis,’ I tell the driver. ‘I will come back to the airport so don’t stop the trip once I get there.’
The roads of Dubai come into view. The city that chased us away.
My phone beeps.
Amruta
Are you okay?
