Tea for Two and a Piece of Cake (24 page)

As soon as she hangs up, I call up Akash and convey the news to him in excitement.

‘You will get more orders, Nisha. Just you wait and watch,’ he says and he is so certain.

He wants to know if he can come over on Saturday to help me.

I tell him that he can come over and look after the kids. I also decide that I would be frying all the masalas one night before itself so that nothing goes amiss this time a round.

Chetana calls the next day and asks if I will be home as she wants to come over with Dhruv.

While I am a bit hurt that she did not come when I had called her some days ago , I am also happy that she has now made the effort to call and wants to come and see me. I tell her to come over.

When Tanya comes back from school, I tell her that Dhruv will be coming to play and she is very excited.
She keeps asking how much more time is left for them to ring our doorbell. She asks so many times that I wish I had not told her that they were coming.

Finally, they arrive.

The first thing Chetana says upon seeing me is, ‘Oh my God, Nisha, you have lost so much weight! Are you ill or something?’

I do not know if she means it as a jibe. I just take that as a left-handed compliment and decide to ignore it.

‘Come in and sit down,’ I tell her.

She comes in and looks around incredulously. ‘Oh! This is your
real
house? It’s really tiny compared to your other one, right?’ she says sweetly, still smiling.

I want to tell her to wipe that smirk off her face. I thought she was my
friend.
I thought that she had come to genuinely see me and to offer some kind of support But it is very evident that she has come simply to feel good about herself.

She has come to gloat over how much I have ‘fallen’. She has come to judge my living style and my home.

And I feel like a naive fool to have called her up in the first place. I want to tell her all this. I want to tell her to stop acting like her comments are very innocent and that she is a true friend. I want to tell her that her comments hurt like hell.

But I continue sitting there, smiling a big, stupid smile, pretending everything is okay.

Lean on Me

S
ometimes, even the so-called ‘closest’ friends say and do things that hurt a lot. But when we have been friends for so long, one just chooses to brush these aside as small things and continue. That is a mistake most of us make, and that is indeed a mistake that I made when Chetana came over that day. It was a mistake that cost me a friendship. Had I spoken up and told her how I had
really
felt, maybe my friendship with her could have been saved.

Then again, perhaps everything in life comes with an expiry date. Whatever it was, I learnt a good lesson that day about how situations that we face in our lives change us as people, and how it forever alters the way we relate to others, especially with our closest friends.

I was at a most vulnerable stage in my life. All I wanted from Chetana were a few kind words of encouragement as a good friend. After Samir left me, I was full of doubts about myself. I was struggling to manage on my own, with only Akash as a big backup. But Chetana brazenly walking in to ‘assess my
situation’ (that is what it seemed like to me) bothers me to no end.

I want to calm down a bit, and so I ask her if she will have tea. She says yes and I walk into the kitchen where she follows me in.

‘God, Nisha, it is so hot in here,’ she says, fanning herself with her dupatta. ‘How do you manage, yaar? This kitchen is really tiny,’ she says in a condescending tone.

‘It’s not like I have a choice, Chetana.’

‘You did have a choice. He did not throw you out. You walked out.’

‘Look, I couldn’t bear staying there really. And honestly, I am okay here. So let us just drop this, okay?’

‘Come on, yaar. How can I drop it? Look at you, struggling here. Squeeze his balls for child maintenance. And has he sent you a divorce notice yet?’

‘Chetana, I don’t know if this will make sense to you, but I truly do not want his money. He had offered to pay me a sum monthly, but I refused to take it.’

‘WHAT?! You
refused
? Are you out of your mind?’

‘I don’t think you will ever understand unless you have been in my shoes. I do not want to be a kept woman anymore, Chetana. I want to earn my own money.’

‘Come on! How can you talk like that? You mean to say that all women who stay at home and manage their house while their husbands go to work are ‘kept women’? She retorts angrily. I seem to have touched a raw nerve.

‘Look, I really do not want to discuss this with you. I am finally doing something which gives me joy. It is
something I am good at and I have now started to earn money from it. It is just a humble beginning, but I am getting there,’ I say.

I should have kept my big mouth shut about it, but now I had already said it. My words have poured out like a swarm of bees when the hive is disturbed. I had spoken out partly in suppressed anger, and partly because I want to kind of prove to her that I am not moaning and crying because Samir has left me, but I am trying to make my own life and move on. I guess, in a secret way I am also craving for her approval, her appreciation, and I want her to tell me that I am brave.

But she says nothing like that and immediately wants to know all the details about what I have been doing.

So I tell her about Akash coming over often and how he has helped to set up The Magic Saucepan. I tell her about our first order and what a huge success it has been. Of course, I leave out the little secret about how we executed it. That is something which is Akash’s and mine alone.

I tell her that I really like Akash and I tell her how he has confessed his love for me, and how he had kept quiet all these years. My eyes shine as I tell her how genuinely grateful I am for his presence in my life. I truly am.

She listens to it all quietly and absorbs it all.

Finally she says, ‘You ever seen that movie,
The Graduate
, where the young guy falls for an older, married woman? This sounds like that. Don’t trust him. He is just a horny, young guy. And come on, you are a mother to two children. How can you be taken in by him?’

‘Shut up, Chetana. It is Akash we are talking about here. Not some average Joe on the street. You know him so well!’

‘Well, all men are like that. I find all this “true love” business a bit difficult to digest. Men just want sex. Everything they do is for that. You can never trust a standing penis and you never know when it will stand up,’ she says.

Her words singe my very soul. They evoke such a strong reaction in me, surprising me too.

I am both furious and at the same time speechless at her statement. I am so upset that she has taken what exists between Akash and me and twisted it into something which it completely is not, demeaning it to a very base level. Under her harsh scrutiny and the volley of words that she has hurled, the magic that I feel I have with Akash wilts like a water lily left in the sun for too long. She succeeds in making me feel very cheap and slutty.

I want to tell her that Akash had every chance to have sex with me, but he refrained. This was not about sex. There
can
and
does
exist a more powerful connection between a man and a woman. But I know her narrow mind cannot even see or understand what I am trying to say.

Besides, she has already made up her mind about the relationship between Akash and me. She has thrown something that matters such a lot to me on to the floor, and she has so casually trampled on it with her words, grinding it in with her heels. I have no idea why it affects me so much, but it does.

‘Look, Chetana, Akash has had many girlfriends, okay? It is not like he is some crazy, sex-starved maniac.’

‘I did not say that, but I think sooner or later this will go beyond control. So be careful. And you really think all this Magic Saucepan business is really going to succeed? Just take my advice and go back home and take the money from Samir. Why are you putting yourself and your children through this torture? I am being honest with you and telling you what is good for you.’

I want to tell her to shut up and mind her own business. I want to tell her to stop judging something that she knows nothing about and has never experienced for herself. But somehow I keep quiet and quickly change the topic.

I am so upset with myself for having told her about Akash in the first place. It was something that was a source of great comfort and joy to me, and I expected her to understand and be supportive. Instead, she has only thrown a shroud of negativity over it. What is to be ‘careful’ about? I do not know what she means. And I don’t even want to ask her, neither do I want to know.

Suddenly, I am tired of her visit and want her to go. She leaves about an hour later.

I feel largely relieved, the talk having drained the energy out of me.

I know then that I do not want to talk to Chetana ever again. Our paths are different now. She will never be able to see it from my perspective, because her husband has not left her. What has happened to me is my experience alone. It has changed me in ways I never
thought possible. I have faced it with courage. Hell, I am even trying to make something out of my life. She has no right to throw water on my dreams.

I know at that moment that the friendship between her and me is over, even though on the surface I have tried to pretend like everything is fine. It has lived by its expiry date. It feels like something inside me has died. I do feel bad about our ruined friendship and I mourn for it.

Silently, inside my heart.

Akash and Chetana were the
only
two people in the world I called friends. Now I have only Akash.

I am so upset by Chetana’s visit and her words that I call Akash. He is at a restaurant, having a meal with somebody from his work, and cannot talk at that moment.

I tell him that something is really bothering me and I need to talk to him.

He says he will call at the first available opportunity. When he calls, I am reading to Tanya, and tell him I will call him back after I put her to bed.

We finally get to speak around ten in the night. I sit on the balcony and gaze at the stars as I speak. I tell him everything about Chetana’s visit. I tell him how hurt I feel, repeating all that she had said to me.

He listens patiently and says, ‘You know what, Nisha? She is jealous that I have hit on you and am in love with you and not her,’ he says.

‘What nonsense, Akash! Why should she be jealous of me? She is married and settled. Her husband has not left her. Mine has.’

‘Exactly. You have the freedom now that she does not have. You are making something of your life while she is stuck in a rut being a housewife and a mother. You are progressing. She is stagnating. We will make The Magic Saucepan really successful, Nisha. I have full confidence in your talent. Together we can do it,’ he says.

His words really comfort me. So much that I kiss him over the phone.

‘Aaah, I wish I was there!’ he says.

‘Come,’ I whisper.

‘I am really coming over,’ he says, and he is at my place in fifteen minutes.

I greet him at the door and lead him to my room. I have changed into a sexy spaghetti top and pyjamas. We make love slowly and passionately. He is so tender towards me. It is very unlike the sex Samir and I used to have. Akash’s body is nothing like Samir’s. Akash is less muscular and smells so different. Masculine. Strong. I melt in his arms. The way Akash holds me is different too. The way I feel with him is not at all like the way I used to feel with Samir.

And later when we are done, I quietly slip into my own bedroom and lie in my bed, thinking. What strikes me most is that Akash has been so darn considerate that he has taken care to use a condom—something that Samir had never done. And the sex has been fantastic. It was something I never knew because Samir had always scoffed at the idea of a condom and led me to believe that if one used a condom, the sex would somehow be bad. What a crazy notion! And I knew no better, because Samir was the only person I had ever slept with in my life.

One part of me wants to call Samir and gloat to him and tell him, ‘I wasn’t good enough for you, eh? Look at me now. Ha!’

But of course I do nothing of that sort and continue lying in the dark and smiling to myself.