“Why not?” Ritu eyed the bowl in her hand as Maya’s chef was plating up their thalis. Maya had gone all out, with marigold table arrangements and incense sticks and the works. Her mother would be proud of her for this arrangement.
“I’ll have some,” Nilay called out.
Ritu gave Maya a triumphant look as she walked around to him and began to serve it up.
“Don’t fill his entire plate with salad! There is puri, samosa, basundi… and the chef has fried papad and fryums too…”
Ritu filled half his thali with salad — “You can make space for the rest, I’m sure,” she informed tartly. He glanced at his plate, then back up at her, a smirk in his eyes — “Love the hospitality.”
“I am so sorry, NiP…” Maya began to push to her feet.
“No, no,” he waved her off. “I love salad. Not a big fan of the rest…”
Ritu noted him eyeing the spread around him.Yeah, right.He was salivating inside.
“Try the samosa,” Gautam passed him the platter steaming with mini samosas. They smelled divine. Ritu glared down at him, hoping none of the other two occupants noticed.
“Uhh… I’ll take the dal and some rice.”
“It’s a festival, and you aren’t even eating the good stuff?” Maya butt in.
“I am on a diet.”
“It doesn’t matter on new year.”
“I have a ramp to walk soon.”
Maya gave a whoop so loud, Ritu’s bowl clattered.
Her eyes widened in amused horror at the man quietly eating his salad as Maya launched into an in-depth interrogation on which show and which venue and ‘how did she not know’ about it. Ritu knew nothing about fashion or his world, but she was sure this man was making it up as he went.
She sat down on her chair and served up the salad in her plate, then added a dash of salt because the original version did not have any. She eyed Nilay Patel, eating it all without reaching for the salt and pepper shakers, or complaining. In that moment, his need to become ok, his obsession to recover without a procedure, settled in for her.
As he finished his salad and let her push more onto his plate without protest, Ritu decided she would try her best to make sure that he became ok without an invasive procedure.
5. Khamoshiyan Gungunane Lagi
— RITU —
Mumbai traffic. The one thing that she had not missed. The one thing that made everything worse, especially when she was running late with procedures, had to cross over from suburbs to town at 10 in the morning, and the Uber driver was a dangerous Midtown Madness killer. She had to plead with him to slow down and not cut lanes like a prisoner broken free from jail when all she wanted to do was get down and run to Dr. Shravan’s clinic, however far it was.
“Only emergency cases,” she muttered to herself, shaking her head. In the last week, she had seen upwards of 50 emergency cases of her good senior, and performed a dozen procedures. Even Sunday had been spent inside the confines of the Cath Lab.
Ritu grabbed her bags — tote, gym bag with change of clothes that she had not had the time to change into after her procedures, a bag of lunch packed from Maya’s house and… she was forgetting something.
“Shit! Fuck…” She thumped on the Uber’s body and stopped it, opening the door and reaching inside for her bag of sanitized Crocs. She ran inside the heritage gate of the clinic, stopping to sign the register. The watchman looked at her, knew that she visited this place thrice a week, and gave a chin nod, filling in the register for her. Ritu grinned, running to catch the lift that was making that ding-dong-ding-ding-ding symphony. The old woman going up held the grille for her.
“Thank you.”
Mumbai people never ceased to amaze her.
Ritu finally found a moment to look at herself in the hazy mirror of the lift. Her OT bandana cap was still on, hiding her bun. Her wintergreen scrubs looked tired after just 4 hours of procedures, but they smelled clean, thank god. She hoped patients weren’t waiting for her. She would get a minute to change.
They reached her floor, and the old lady held the grille open for her.
“Thank you, again.”
Ritu ran, speed walking down the alley and pushing the door of the clinic open with her back, hands full. And the silence that greeted her was heaven.
