Every so often, I passed by that narrow busy street, by the house, by the kitchen window overlooking the street. I took it that when the window was shut, Meenu was not at home and when it was open, she was somewhere in there, working at her desk or feeding the cat, or smoking in her living room, out of sight. Today, there she was, behind the greasy cream grills of the kitchen window. I stood soaked to my skin in the pounding rain and watched her from across the street, the little traffic momentarily hiding her from view. She wore a black t-shirt, had her long hair tied in a towel on her head, and a cigarette in hand. She was stirring a pot with her other hand while the kettle went off beside her, white steam springing from it. I thought, if she saw me, she would be instantly worried. Why was I standing there in the rain? Why no prior notice? Did I want to come in? But when she absent mindedly looked up and caught sight of me, she laughed. A curious laugh, scrunching her eyebrows as if what the hell?
I did want to go in. I thought of the one other time that I stood there, flowers in hand and an apology in mind. I had not quite got through the words I had rehearsed, Meenu had burst into laughter seeing the flowers. Truly dramatic, she had said, squinting her eyes, and had never let me finish. Or that is how I remember it.
Today she said quite cinematic as she opened the front door. She had put on a knitted shrug on her way there. I waited for her to search my eyes for an explanation but she turned around and walked briskly to the kitchen, the shrug trailing behind her. I staggered into the living room, leaving my flip-flops at the door. She breezed back from the kitchen, walked into her room, came back with a towel, a t-shirt and a pair of shorts in her hand, and asked if I wanted coffee. I nodded.
I could hear Meenu humming an old filmy tune (that I could just not place), while I changed into the dry clothes. I came back into the living room and sat on the rocking chair. She had already placed a coffee mug for me on the centre table. She walked around still humming, looking under the furniture like she usually did to find her cat Kaanti. Outside, the rain had turned light, barely audible. I walked, I said, to which she said, clearly. And then silence. She did not care why I was there. This was as per usual—Meenu was always content with need-to-know basis relationships. She had somehow grown, over the years after college, to tolerate my intrusiveness.
I leaned back and rocked myself on the chair. The chair—a second-hand buy—was a housewarming gift from me. I had thought it would be a great joke to have an old heavy rocking chair in the already dimly lit house. I remembered how the seller on OLX seemed to jump at my first offer, and insisted I pick it up immediately. We travelled to a part of the city I had never set foot in. The whole time I wondered when the city had grown that much and who lived in those massive apartments. On reaching, we discovered two things. The first was that the seller was flying out of the country that very night and was clearing out everything she possibly could. Second, to my alarm more than to hers, Meenu remembered she had matched with the woman a year before on Bumble. She quickly whispered to me that it had not lasted more than a couple of dates and “the sex was pleasant from what I remember.”
That day, with the carton boxes towering around us, I sat looking at the house, at the balcony with the French windows, at the curtains still swaying ghost-like, at the extra little space between the living room and kitchen to set a dining table. There, while feeling second-hand panic for the seller for how much work seemed pending, I had asked Meenu if I could be her flatmate. I just can’t with my parents anymore, I had said. Shameless fellow, I thought the chair was a gift, she had laughed but her eyes looked keener than she was letting on with her words.
A few days later, I had lugged my big blue suitcase up from the basement to her ground floor apartment. It was the first of many times that I would lug it up and down that staircase, the first of many times that I damaged the neighbours’ terracotta planters. A week later, I managed to get an offer from a small media house in the national capital and had instantly taken it up. I told her in a text message that I was moving cities. Her reply was simply backstabber, you! Congratulations. Maybe she thought if she said it right away, it would be ironic and there would be no need to address it later. When she got back home, I had sulked at her until she was forced to ask why I did not seem happy about the good news. “Me? Are you? Are you happy for me or not?” I had demanded then. Today, I prayed that she would demand an explanation from me any minute now but she did not.
The new job I moved cities for was shit. The new city, hellish. I spent all week struggling to give myself pep talks, working in a nearly empty office, trying to make their social media pages popular without much success. The man I was reporting to said I lacked sincerity and his assessment could not have been more accurate. The housing situation gave no joy either—my two flatmates used air conditioners in their rooms while we split the electricity bill equally by three, but they snapped if I used their milk carton and not mine by accident. I had no friends and was revolted by men’s profiles on dating apps.
All in all, it was tragic and in three months’ time, before my probation period ended, my suitcase and I were back at Meenu’s. This return was among the firsts. The third time around, I returned after a failed documentary project, where I could not, to save my life, assist the god forsaken editor. Climbing up the stairs, we stopped at the notice board on the landing between the basement and her floor. She placed her middle finger on point 3 of the minutes of the housing society meeting. It was about bringing to the attention of the owner of Flat A2 that unauthorised guests were staying in the house. And so, from now on, the ID proof of all visitors must be sent in advance to the owner and the housing society which would have the right to permit them or not, as well as take “required measures” against the tenant and trespassers.
“What the fuck is going on? No, wait… I’ll get you into more trouble now,” I had said, and nervously reached for a hug.
“People come and go, it’s not your fault. Or mine,” she had said, settling deep into the hug.
Meenu had visitors all the time. Visitors from all over the world. She had a dozen friends in every city and she made more by the day. Her grant-making job took her to Indian hinterlands as much as it did to fancy hotels in other continents. When she travelled, she would have a friend sit her cat, and come back with presents for both feline and human. Needless to say, her friends all dressed the way she did—strikingly fashionable, and walked the way she did—their head held high, shoulders thrown back. I could not see how the residents of Gurukrupa Housing Society had not woken up to this reality in the first one year of her staying there.
That night a blood-curdling scream had made its way through the wall of her room and torn me from my sleep. It was her neighbour, Susheela, Meenu had explained. This was followed by the clanking of vessels on the floor, a man yelling abuses, Susheela pleading him to stop, and a few more screams that came out in chokes.
“We won’t call the police or some helpline?” I had asked, still in shock.
“She said she doesn’t want her husband to throw her out,” Meenu had said, staring expressionless at the ceiling. After a while she added: “I just… I have to buy a house,” sounding amazed at her own words.
So that was what had happened. Meenu had intervened and the respectable housing society members had not liked it. They had begun issuing notices against her cat, her visitors, and now her. I was outraged. I wanted to pull her into my arms, tell her she can count on me, that I will protect her and her stupidly big heart. But I could not, for it was she who was always protecting me.
“I just want to try… I want us to live like a normal unit,” I had once said about my parents, as Meenu and I stood waiting for the chai to boil on the stove. “I don’t understand my mother… Why can’t she just try? I told her… I told her I want to be her partner, I want to help with the bloody house. She keeps thinking I’m intruding… it’s not my house or what? And god, she thinks I’m insulting my father and…”
She already has a partner, baba, Meenu had cut me off while shuffling the litter in the litter box. I had then flung the steel tumbler I was holding into the sink, hard. Meenu had flinched, stared at the sink, then at me, then straightened up and stood looking out her kitchen window, onto the street. I left without saying a word, something coiling up inside me, but it was the next morning that I came by with the flowers.
Meenu’s remark was a long time coming. I had gone back and forth from my parents’ house, my home as it were, for “far too long into my adulthood” as my mother put it. While my mother had stopped asking me when I would have my own family, she did not stop asking when I would have my own household.
Meenu had been silent long enough without calling out my bullshit. I could not hold onto a job long enough to even commit to a city, packing off to wherever the next seemingly exciting project took me. This made a rent deposit a silly risk. After every project, I kept going back home though it certainly had ceased to feel like one. I did not envy Meenu for having one of her own—she made it abundantly clear that whatever was hers was mine. But I craved to do something for it. I craved, like with my mother, to be able to enrich her already rich life. I would often joke “when we raise our kid” as a prefix to some critique about our parents, and she would roll her eyes and say ahuh instead of we would never agree on a single thing or worse, you would run away at the drop of a hat.
It was not that Meenu expressed less because she spoke less. She usually said a lot with few words. Today, it seemed, she had made up her mind to wait and say nothing at all. “I fucked up,” I finally said, opening my eyes. She was settled, legs folded, on the teak sofa. The sofa was one of the many permanent artefacts, as I called them, that had accumulated over the years. Still humming softly, she nodded, looking at the floor. We were suddenly bathed in white as lightning flashed outside. Then the room fell into a deeper darkness as the rain began its encore.
“I’m not trying to run away,” I continued. “Not intentionally.”
Meenu did not look at me. She kept humming, staring at the floor, her hands on her knees. It was only when the words FD, and need it when I move next month came out of my mouth that she paused, sighed a deep sigh, and looked at me. “I know,” she said.
The petty seven lakh rupees I was to put in to buy her dream house, our house, and all the help I was to offer in securing her a loan, and then the wildest of them all—gradually clearing the loan—were no longer promises I was keeping. Instead, I was moving cities and what’s more, I was moving in with my boyfriend of six months. I hoped that she would recount these facts. Loud. Tell me I had betrayed her yet again, that she was disappointed in me and that she needed me, really needed me this time. I began to say “I just feel like this one project might give me the contacts I need, you know,” to egg her on to tell me I only ever think of myself.
“Yeah. You’re right, you need it. And… we’re young? We’ll plan for the long term. Besides, Niki is still on board, we’ll manage,” she said, gathering her shrug closer around her.
“Yeah. We’ll plan for the long term,” I heard myself say, accepting defeat as there seemed no way to stop her from defusing the tension.
At that, Meenu sprang to her feet, switched on the yellow lamps in the living room, and announced that she was going to fry some fish just to annoy her neighbours even more before they decided to throw her out. Her voice drifted off as she disappeared into the kitchen but then she called out: “Are you here first week of June? Can you look after Kaanti?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” I said, knowing full well that was the week I had agreed to go house hunting in the new city.
“Perfect then,” I heard Meenu say.
Shraddha Sharma is a PhD student at the Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, TISS, Mumbai and is negotiating with higher education as an early career teacher. She has previously taught at Bangalore University and Samvada, a youth rights and livelihoods organisation. Her research work is on caste and sexuality in the city and she explores this through the cultural site of dating and matchmaking. In her non-academic writing, she explores these same ideas and her own personal-political dilemmas around them.