‘The rain’s not that much.’
‘Visibility’s pretty low,’ he says, checking his weather app. ‘Although they are saying it will clear up.’
He breaks off a small piece of idli, dips it in the sambhar first, then in the coconut chutney and puts it in his mouth. As he does, I notice the discoloured front tooth.
‘Your front tooth is a cap, right? It’s gotten a bit off-colour,’ I say and immediately regret it.Why?Why would I say this tooth’s off-colour? Am I slowly becoming him?Noticing teeth is his job, not mine.
He stops eating and meets my eye. ‘You’re a dentist?’
‘Just graduated my MBA, but my internship was in a chain of clinics like Clove Dental Clinic. Anyway,’ I say, ‘How did this happen?’
‘That’s not important.’
‘We have time to kill.’
‘I was punched in the face a few times,’ he says. ‘Lost the front tooth. Got a few chipped teeth at the back as well.’
‘Ouch.’
‘It wasn’t painful.’
‘You don’t have to be macho. It has to be painful.’
‘The root canal and the dentist visits were more painful,’ he says with a smile. I start to laugh, and he says with all seriousness. ‘No, really.’
‘C’mon, dentists just get bad PR for no reason,’ I say. ‘They aren’t that bad. Some of them are really nice.’
‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Is your fiancé... a dentist?’
‘What? How did you guess?’
‘No one defends dentists. So, you met him at the internship?’
I nod, and the memory comes flooding back. I had been so excited to stay with mymaasi, mother’s sister, in Lucknow, my first time living away from home. I had made plans to visit every corner of the city, to loiter in the streets, eat all the best food, and finally be myself—or maybe find myself, like people are supposed to do when they’re on their own and travelling. Papa never believed in travel. Waste of money, he used to say. Unless it was to the Vaishnodevi shrine, which we have been to a total of six times. The Lucknow internship was my only twisted shot at solo travel.
But soon, I wasn’t alone. Within the first week of my two-month internship, Aman and I were eating lunch in the clinic together. He would pull teeth out all morning while I presented and rejected marketing ideas. Then, we would both order sandwiches from the same place. Slowly, lunch meetings bled into mid-afternoon snack breaks and then strolls after work. Soon, I was lying to my maasi, telling her I was meeting with ‘office friends’ on weekends and in the evenings.
‘And you’re getting married within one or two years of meeting him?’ Raghav breaks into my thoughts.
That question pricks me. But he doesn’t deserve my anger because he doesn’t know my story. So I say, ‘Two years is a long time. I would have married him the day I met him.’
‘Same,’ he says with a wide smile. ‘I knew it, too. But I was in the eighth standard and it was the 1850s or I would have too.’
That makes me giggle. Not every day do you meet someone who believes in the stupidity of love and not swipes. ‘What do you do?’
The question literally seems to take the wind out of him. His sigh was never-ending.
‘Data engineering for an EdTech firm,’ he says.
‘So, what exactly?’
‘I build machine learning models to predict which student gives up when. Then I help marketing sell them hope right before they do.’
‘You don’t like your job?’ I ask him.
‘I like the people I work with. I like my salary. I like what I can afford,’ he says. ‘Job’s not my life.’
And then, his eyes flit towards the arrivals board. His face falls. ‘Delayed by another thirty.’
