The woman looks at me, ‘Your kids are so lucky. Both of you are so fit.’
Clearly, she took none of Amruta’s advice about not worrying about her body seriously.
I correct her, ‘She doesn’t have kids with me. I don’t have kids. That’s the primary reason why I have maintained my fitness.’
An exasperated Amruta turns, glances my way, then shifts her focus back to the new mother and remarks, ‘Ours is a long story.’
‘It’s not that long. You can hear it on our podcast though.’
The woman has lost a little interest in us. I want to dive into her brain, pick apart her neural pathways. I want to know what her assumptions are about us.
An ambitious woman with two kids divorces her husband to date a gym trainer with a middling physique?
A woman flees an abusive marriage and finds a guy who’s not only semi-charming, but hosts a podcast that he pushes aggressively, but doesn’t mind that she has two kids?
Or a woman whose husband died young finds love in a guy who loves children and together they start a podcast about parenting?
She would be right if she picked the third one.
2.
Aanchal Madan
‘I miss this.’
Lajpat Nagar is buzzing around me. A hive of calls from vendors and the steady hum of Delhi traffic. Things I have cribbed about all my life. I didn’t know I needed them in my life, like the background music of a bad TV show, irritating but necessary. Troublesome but home.
‘The question is, do you miss it enough to come back?’ heasks.
‘I missed you and I came back,’ I tell him.
‘As much as I’d like to believe that, you didn’t just come forme.’
I roll my eyes and chuckle. ‘You were a big part.’
‘You had me when you said you missed me,’ he says with a warm smile that’s considerably better in real life than over the phone. ‘Because I missed you, too.’
We don’t say I love you to each other, so this is what we have. We miss each other. It does the job. For now. Together, we weave through the crowd of families clutching their children’s hands tightly while simultaneously reminding them that if they get lost, their arms will be cut off and they will beg all their lives, so better stay close.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ asks Saket for the tenth time this evening. ‘We could do something more. . . conventional.’
‘I have craved this.’
‘There’s a very normal way of tackling the craving.’
I shake my head. We are on our way to Rohit Pani Puriwala, the guy who went viral last month for wolfing down seventy gol gappas from his own stall in one go. Since he hit ten million, he has challenged his customers to the same feat. Back in New York, I would watch videos of participants making an absolute fool of themselves at what seemed to me such a simple task. Just watching them reject a gol gappa with a desperate wave of their hands made me furious. For two years, I had been dying to have a good one.
‘I can do the singles one if you’re not up for it,’ I tell Saket. ‘I haven’t eaten a proper gol gappa in two years. This is child’s play for me.’
He grins, the corners of his eyes crinkling in that familiar way I’ve grown to recognize even through our video chats over the last six months. Though in real life, I have to crane to get a good look at him.
Earlier this week, when I met him for the first time, I was surprised by how tall he was. He always told me he was 6’2”, but my mind automatically shaves off two inches from whatever the number is. Not that I have a height preference. Over the last year or so, I have talked to so many men on matrimony websites, and it became glaringly obvious that height recedesinto the background soon enough. Though if anyone sees me walking with Saket, they will accuse me of being shallow. Saket has lanky movie star looks, the kind of star who does offbeat indie movies because he can’t bother to buff up or learn how to dance. There’s an awkwardness in his body like there is in tall people who never get used to how endlessly their limbs are growing.
‘It seems like a test,’ he says. ‘So I’m going to do it.’
We reach Rohit Pani Puriwala and there’s a large crowd waiting their turn. His stand is a riot of colour with heaps of puris shining under the light, a few big posters announcing his newfound Instagram fame, and a few boards announcing what the rules of the game are.
They are simple: eat more than fifty, and they’re on the house. For a couple: Eat seventy, and they are free.
