On a Saturday evening at a 5-for-Rupees 500.00 beauty salon, Lina is getting her eyebrows threaded. Her eyes water and her fingers hold the skin taut while the beautician unspools and twists the thread expertly, and rakes the skin between Lina’s eyebrows. In the next chair, Baby lowers a worn copy of a magazine, turns to Lina and says, “Did I tell you, Joji’s stalker might have killed herself.”
Lina shoots Baby a look from the corner of her eye, but the beautician doesn’t bat an eyelid. She carries on threading Lina’s left eyebrow at a blistering pace, pressing Lina back into the chair. Beauticians must hear all kinds of gossip, but also, the beautician doesn’t know that Joji is Baby’s boyfriend. Baby is reading her magazine again, but her forehead is in folds and her mouth is in a pout.
After the beautician moves to another client, unspooling more thread, Lina looks over at Baby. “Joji has a stalker?” she asks.
Baby closes the magazine, drops it on her lap and flips and flops her right hand. “Well,” she says. “There’s this girl who likes him, and she threatens suicide if he doesn’t call her constantly and text her and things like that.”
“Things like that,” Lina repeats, unsettled at this revelation.
Baby is beautiful. Like a slab of soft butter, a jar of clear ghee. Her complexion is neither fair nor dusky; her features are full and fresh, she has lovely, thick eyebrows and her hair is black silk. She’s the sort of beauty no one would associate with competition in love or heartbreak, regular-people disappointments.
“And how did you find out that she might have, you know, killed herself?” Lina asks, her voice low.
Baby sighs. “Don’t you listen to anything I say? Joji talks to her every week and this week he didn’t call because he and I had a fight about her, and she texted and threatened to do something, and now she won’t answer his calls and she always answers his calls!”
Lina is reluctant to probe further but can’t help but ask why Joji is close with this girl who’s clearly vulnerable, and why this doesn’t bother Baby. Why has it gone so far? Lina thinks Baby and Joji’s romance is careless and erratic, but she worries her own ideas about love are too conventional. Even as a teenager her notions about infatuation was more serious. Like in real, grown-up relationships, with rough patches and ups and downs, and at the end, it would all be fine because of an absolute commitment to keep going, because there was no way out. This was before Rohan, when Lina was young and naïve and now she’s glad for solitude and friends, the apartment she shares with Baby, even her nerve-wracking job as a Junior Account Manager at ILICI bank. She values all of this believing contentment is temporary; the natural state of adulthood is duty bound and joyless.
Baby seems to notice Lina’s discomfort. She puts a hand on Lina’s arm. “Oh, it’s not like that, Lina,” she says, her voice sweet and soothing.
“You know Joji loves me. This girl, she’s an only child and she has no friends. Joji loves me and she knows that, but she’s a little too attached and she’s very lonely,” Baby says.
Lina tries to smile. Baby is so certain of herself, even in situations that could break her.
The girl sitting on the other side of Baby doesn’t try to hide that she was listening to their conversation. The girl smiles at Lina and Baby. “Hi,” she says and waves at them. The girl is having her hair colored and her legs waxed at the same time. Salon workers crowd around her, two work on her hair and two on her legs. She must be a regular at the salon and a generous tipper. When she arrived, the salon workers greeted her like they would a friend. They discussed husbands and boyfriends, and ribbed each other about their sex lives. The girl is dressed in the same beauty parlor sarong as Lina and Baby – clingy, synthetic fabric, tied at their chests and ending at their calves, and Lina notices the love bites on the girls neck, down to her shoulders, one underneath her bottom lip. In a couple of days it will lighten then disappear, but for now it is what it is. The girl touches her face and neck. “My boyfriend likes to make these marks.” She giggles. “He’s such a child, he doesn’t like to share.” Lina and Baby smile at the girl.
“Her boyfriend is an idiot,” Baby whispers in Lina’s ear. They made eyes at the girl and chuckle into cupped palms, but Lina is thinking about Rohan, how he had often marked her neck the same way.
Lina identifies Elmon Joseph as soon as she enters the Coffee Break Café. He’s wearing the blue and black-checkered shirt he said he would be wearing, and she is dressed in a pastel pink salwar kameez to help him identify her. He’s at a table by a large window that overlooks Brigade Road, and she knows Elmon has seen her because he’s looking at her. He pushes back the wicker chair, stands up and leans over the granite table, his hands grasping the edge of the table. Hi, hello, they say and he gestures to the chair across from him and she sits down carefully, conscious of her every movement. Lina quickly notes the pressed, formal pants, the gold watch on his wrist, and his thick, well-groomed mustache, all of which reminds her of her father. She wipes the sweat that collects above her upper lip, fans herself and looks around the room as if she’s wondering if the air-conditioner is broken.
“It’s very hot,” he says, leaning forward and she smiles and nods affirmatively, and she thinks she’d like to leave.
Elmon Joseph is twenty-eight years old and works as a Project Manager with ConviSYS. These are the only details Lina knows about Elmon, and even as she arrived at the café, she was certain she didn’t want to marry a man named Elmon, that Lina Elmon doesn’t sound right, that anyone whose parents thought it was a good idea to name their son Elmon might expect their future grandchildren to have ridiculous names.
The waiter brings coffee and a plate of cookies that’s delicious, but the conversation is bumpy and unsatisfactory. How are you? What do you do? How long have you worked there? Do you like Bangalore? Do you prefer coffee or tea? Cats or dogs?
As soon as her parents found out that she and Rohan were broken up, they wanted to find Lina a match. It was not just her parents, even Baby tried to set her up. Because – why are you alone? Suddenly, at twenty-four, being single is an anomaly and no one understands her fatigue; love is too big an investment of time, potential and energy, only to lose everything in a flash or burn down with it.
Lina distracts herself with the busy traffic outside, the assortment of stalls that line the street and the crowd of pedestrians walking by. She doesn’t want to compare Elmon to Rohan who she now remembers as lively and young, in every way the opposite of Elmon. An hour goes by and they leave the Café, Lina politely agreeing to meet Elmon again but wanting to never return, to just keep walking and maybe she’ll end up in someone else’s life. Later, when Baby asks about Elmon, Lina can remember only one thing they spoke about. Elmon’s fathers name begins with an L and his mother’s name is Elsa, and so the El attached to Mon, that in Malayalam means son was how Elmon got his name. Baby shakes her head, her eyebrows raised. “Lina, this is not good. How can you not remember anything else?” she says.
Then she asks, “You didn’t find him attractive at all?”
“He looks older,” Lina says. “I’m not trying to be cruel, he’s evaluating me too and maybe if we met in different circumstances, I would have noticed qualities to admire.”
“Then why are you meeting him again?” Baby asks.
“Because I found him unattractive is not a good enough reason to say no.”
“It’s good enough for men to turn down women,” says Baby.
“We’re not men,” Lina replies.
Lina is sitting with Baby on the balcony of their Cooke Town apartment, drinking tea and watching the busy intersection. Baby shakes her head. “I just don’t understand Joji,” she says. “Why is this even happening, why must I worry about strange women obsessed with my boyfriend?”
It turns out that Joji’s stalker is alive and well. She spent the weekend with her mother. They went shopping and she simply didn’t bother to answer Joji’s calls. Lina is relieved the girl is safe but the whole situation seems twisted. Baby refuses to tell Joji to stop, she will not admit this bothers her. “Why should I ask him to stop talking to people, I have my dignity and pride. I’m better than that,” she says with a hand to her chest.
Baby’s restraint surprises Lina. She would have handled things differently. She and Rohan had been possessive of one other and their endless fights about this girl and that boy had made her feel petty and small. To act with such self-control feels impossible to Lina.
In the evening, Joji comes over holding red roses, a box of pastries from Sugar and mutton biryani from Rahman’s, and he promises that he’s done talking to the girl, it’s not like they know each other anyway and he’s told the girl to talk to her parents, or a friend, or a person she can trust and find the right kind of support, because he cant help her anymore, it’s beyond his capabilities, he’s done. Baby is pacified, for now.
They eat dinner and watch Dance Stars and Lina tries to focus on the television show while Baby and Joji canoodle on the divan. They are clingier and more emotional than usual. In one week Joji will move to London for a work assignment, and he’s excitedly making plans for a final trip that weekend, to Nandi Hills. Lina, as all their friends, is always included in every plan, and she thinks how she and Rohan had been the opposite, always alone at the movies and ice cream shops and on long walks. At first it had been exciting, just them, they needed no one else, but it turned out to be a sort of deprivation. They ran out of things to talk about because they were always together, just the two of them. They quickly found out how little they had in common and one day, like ice melting to water, they stopped talking altogether.
Lina is uncomfortable with Baby and Joji’s PDA and simultaneously left in wonderment. They’ve been together a decade and Joji’s always showering Baby with gifts and attention. Baby’s real name is Annie and Joji’s real name is George, but everyone who knows them as a couple knows them by their nicknames. When she sees them together Lina’s certain that any number of women couldn’t distract Joji’s affection for Baby, and maybe her heartbreak with Rohan was a single round of bad luck and the next time she meets Elmon, or another man her parents want her to meet, she should let something happen. Baby once confided in Lina that she and Joji haven’t yet had sex. “We do everything but not that,” she said, though Lina didn’t think that was such a big deal. She and Rohan had done it, but she did not tell this to Baby.
Lina works at ILICI Bank’s corporate office on M.G Road, managing credit accounts for mid-size corporates. She works six days a week and spends the seventh day worrying about the next workweek. The pay is not worth the stress of managing large numbers, the constant terror of a misplaced decimal point, an amount recorded and transacted in error. Baby is the Assistant Manager at the adjoining ILICI branch office. She tends to clients all day, getting wrung out by her Manager and clients in turn, but she’s a seasoned employee and has learnt how to handle the turbulence. What really eases Baby’s workdays is Ram, processor of checks and demand drafts, Baby’s “work husband” Joji likes to tease.
At breakfast, in the office cafeteria, Lina orders Pongal, and Baby and Ram get the Idli-Vada combo plate. This is Ram’s favorite food and Baby likes to think they have this in common. Ram is fairly good-looking and always well dressed but lacks personality, and Lina cannot understand why Baby is so taken with Ram. As usual, they are bickering. Baby wants Ram to join them on the Nandi Hills trip. “What’ll I do on a hill,” Ram says. He spoons up the last of his sambhar and won’t look at Baby.
“You do nothing. It’s beautiful and peaceful and that’s why we’re going,” she says.
“I’m busy this weekend,” he says, though just a minute ago he said he had no plans. Ram stands up, gathers his plate, glass and spoon, and Baby has her head down and she stares at her plate.
“I don’t care,” Baby insists after Ram leaves.
Unlike Joji, Ram is aloof and moody. He’s one of those people you cannot really depend on – he forgets to meet Baby after they make plans, cancels on her when he feels like it, and places his convenience ahead of everything and everyone else.
This – Baby and Ram – is not unusual. All around the cafeteria, and downstairs in the lobby and in conference rooms, Lina observes employees in pairs.
The drive to Nandi Hills through the morning fog and the winding road on the hillside is magical and dangerous. Baby and Joji are arguing again, about him moving to London. “Baby, Baby,” Joji pleads and Baby is unmoved. Her face is stone, and from the backseat Lina notices that even when the car drops into potholes, Baby’s the only one who isn’t thrown around. When they get to the top of the hill, Lina detaches from the couple and makes small talk with the others in their troop, and as she walks back from Suicide Point where people linger to discuss the jilted, heartbroken lovers who leapt off the cliff, Lina’s cellphone begins to buzz with a string of text messages from Rohan who wants to know how she’s doing.
During inventory week, Lina accompanies the Senior Account Manager, Sita, on tours of client factory units located beyond city limits where the fields are endless, as are the roads, and the mountains are green, and the landscape is marked with clusters of dusty villages and industrial buildings, flocks of goats and pairs of cows grazing on green grass. The bank pays for A.C taxis, the clients cover the meals, and it almost feels like an annual school picnic. Almost. Lina is unnerved at Sita’s haphazard method of verifying collateral. Sita picks items at random and verifies only those. The Senior Account Manager is focused and adept in her conversations with the unit personnel. They discuss operations and forecasts for the coming quarters. They walk through warehouses and stores with inventory lists that are endless.
“What about the rest? Shouldn’t we check everything?” Lina asks. She worries, how can they be certain the items listed are actually stacked in the stores, and the machinery with the given specifications are as numbered, how can they know these assets are as valued on paper and aren’t promised as collateral to another bank, how can a proper verification be accomplished in under five hours?
“Don’t be silly,” Sita scolds, a stern mentor. “They don’t actually expect us to count every item, then we’ll need a week at each facility. This is routine and we have a mutual understanding with our clients. Trust, faith, you know, and there are ways to retrieve a loss. Insurance for one.”
Despite these assurances, Lina is nervous and wrung out by the end of the week. She wants to be done with the bank.
“Oh, Lina,” Baby sighs when Lina tells her. “Just ask yourself, do you want your boss’s job in five years? Or your boss’s boss’s job in, like, ten? If not, you have your answer.”
It’s good advice. Think about the future. Whatever it is today, compound it and ask yourself if you still want it.
“Nothing is worth being this miserable,” Baby says. She’s sprawled out on the divan, leaning on Ram while he reads the newspaper and Lina does not want to discuss the matter further with Ram around, and now that Joji’s gone, he’s always around. She wants to tell Baby that Ram is bad news, but people only hear what they want to hear. Often, Lina finds Baby just staring into space, a vacant look in her eyes, and she worries that Baby is depressed.
At first, after Joji left, Baby cried every day. She cried herself to sleep and cried when she woke up, she cried over Joji’s favorite foods and even over blue nail polish, Joji’s favorite color. When she ran out of tears, she became angry with him for going away. “I cannot believe him,” she said. “He says he’s doing it for us, but he didn’t bother to ask me what I want!”
“Baby, why didn’t you just tell him not to go?” Lina asked.
“We’ve been together eleven years, Lina. Eleven years! Do I have to tell him?” Baby snapped. She had a point, but Lina also understood Joji’s intentions. They’re getting older and Joji wants to settle down. He wants to marry Baby and he’s thinking ahead. He’s thinking that a job in the U.K is promising and better money, and you don’t stay because you’re content where you are and you’re scared to do the next thing.
That night Lina updates her resume. She calls and emails friends and puts out the word that she’s seeking other job opportunities. “Not a bank, anything else,” she tells them.
On the weekend, Lina boards the last sleeper bus at K.R Market and arrives at her parents’ home in time for breakfast. She avoids visits as her parents have become intensely focused on her marriage prospects. Her parents have been married twenty-six years, unhappy for as long as she can remember. They barely talk, which is an improvement, before which, their many fights, on the streets of their town, in the car, and once at a wedding with over a thousand guests as witnesses provided enough material for small-town gossip. Lina attempted to sidestep all of this by finding love on her own, disqualifying herself from the rigors of an arranged match, which would only reignite gossip about her parents. Though her parents loathe each other, they maintain a strong attachment to Lina. “Your visits liven up the house,” her mother says. “Your father smiles.”
Lina’s mother talks about Elmon like he’s already her son-in-law. She insists that Lina must speak with Elmon’s mother on the phone. “It’ll make a good impression that you’re home for the weekend. They’ll know you’ll make a good daughter-in-law,” she says.
Lina tells her parents she’s meeting an old schoolmate and goes to Rohan’s house. They’ve been texting, but this time it’s different. This time there are no promises, no obligations, at least this is what Rohan wants and Lina has decided she will not ask for more.
His parents are away for the weekend and she’s been in his house a hundred times before, on the couch in the living room and on the bed in his room. Lina’s sitting on a chair at his study desk, and comforted by the familiarity of the space and his company, she mentions Elmon, in a casual manner, because there’s still a compulsion to share every truth. Rohan is quiet. His eyes latch on to hers and when they kiss, he bites her lips raw and his hands feel strong, forceful. Before, she couldn’t respect his hesitation to commit, that he kept her hidden from his parents and his brother, and now, when they can be in the moment and move on he seems to want something else. As he puts his hands on her waist, his face in her neck Lina thinks they’re a puzzle she cannot decipher, opaque like muddy water.
On the eve of her 26th birthday, Baby breaks up with Joji. There’s cake and flowers and beautifully wrapped packages in the living room – gifts from Joji dropped off by delivery services that ring their doorbell through the day. Baby becomes distraught when she sees these things, so Lina gives the cake to the maid, hides the gifts and dumps the flowers in the trashcan in the street. Joji calls Lina a million times, pleading with her to reason with Baby, but there’s nothing to be done. Baby’s already grieving. She’s withdrawn to her room. She will not tell Lina why she ended things with Joji, and Lina can only ask so many times.
One evening, Baby’s crying in her room, and Lina sits on Baby’s bed, holding her hand. Baby’s lost weight. Her hair isn’t combed and her eyes are sunken. “It’ll be okay,” Lina says. “It’s not the end of the world. I’m single and I’m fine.”
“You’re not single, you’re seeking. And what about Elmon?” Baby asks and Lina shudders.
“What about him?” she says. Her second date with Elmon wasn’t any better than the first. She barely spoke and she was nauseous.
Baby sits up, looks at Lina and says, “I slept with Ram.” She’s gazing at Lina’s face, waiting for a reaction.
“Okay,” Lina says, carefully. They share an apartment and work at the same bank, but they both have secrets. Lina stopped responding to Rohan’s text messages that became sexual and intense in a way that didn’t include her, but ambushed her.
“We’re sort of together,” Baby says and bites her lip. It’s none of Lina’s business, but it looks like Baby desperately wants to tell her more and Baby wants her opinion.
“Since when?” Lina asks but Baby says she can’t tell her.
“What do you mean by sort of together?” Linda asks.
“We had sex, after Joji left,” Baby replies.
“So you and Joji are really over?” Lina asks.
Baby bites her lips and hesitates. “Yes,” she says, but as if it’s a question and Lina reads guilt and sorrow and anguish on Baby’s face.
“But Joji is good to you. Apart from that situation with the girl, which I must say worried me deeply,” says Lina.
“But my whole life is here, Lina,” Baby says. “I cannot give it up just like that and move to London and start all over again, just for him.” And Baby presses her pillow to her mouth and tears flow down her cheeks, and her eyes are swollen and red. “I’m good at my job and I love it here!” she cries.
“I understand,” Lina says to Baby, but she really wants to tell Baby that Baby doesn’t have to be with Ram just because she’s not with Joji, it will be good to be on her own for a while, at least until the clouds clear. But she doesn’t. She leans in and holds Baby.
“Don’t cry,” Lina says.
Lina’s transition to Progress Intel feels quick, like daybreak after a dark, moonless night. She finds that Progress Intel is everything ILICI Bank was not. The culture is informal. Deliverables are collaborative. Workdays are long, but manageable. The same week Lina leaves ILICI Bank and joins Progress Intel, Ram moves into their apartment. He arrives with two suitcases, walks past Lina into Baby’s bedroom and shuts the door.
“Just a few of his things,” says Baby.
“He won’t be here all the time,” Baby assures Lina, but Ram is over all the time. And when he’s around, the mood is pensive and charged. Lina feels like she’s always walking in on a fight. Baby’s nervous and silly, unreadable, secretive and fiercely protective of Ram. The whole thing feels vague and slippery.
On Lina’s third date with Elmon, after a three-course meal at a five-star restaurant that he insists on paying for, and perhaps emboldened by the two orders of scotch in his belly, Elmon asks Lina if she has been in love, and then, if she’s ever been touched. She’s eating her dessert when he says this. She carefully places the spoon on the table, studies her plate and taps the tabletop with a finger. He’s watching her, undaunted, unashamed of his encroachment, and she’s surprised at herself, that she has permitted him the liberty. She wonders about the influences that inserted such a curiosity in his mind, how he could think it was acceptable to ask her such a question.
“You know how it is over here, in the city. Life is fast and it’s possible, to get carried away,” he explains.
If she says no, that she’s never been involved with anyone, he’ll probably say, I’m happy to marry you Lina, lets take this forward. And if she says yes, she’s been with other people, then he’ll say, I’m sorry Lina that I’m still sitting at this table with you, and no, this will not work out, and she will be released. She’s heard of such inappropriate enquiries, always to a friend of a friend, or the friend of a cousin. No one will admit it happened to them. Her heartbeat is louder and her hands tremble, and she’s tempted to say, I’ve been more than just touched and that will put an end to Elmon and her, but this is private information she will never share with this man. She’s angry that she feels compelled to respond, yet she shakes her head, and having received the answer he desires, Elmon smiles. As she watches him flag down a waiter for the check, the knot in her throat feels heavier, sharper, and she wonders how much longer she must carry on this façade.
At the salon, Lina gets a mani-pedi and Baby cuts her hair short, cropped close to her scalp, a helmet of sharp bristles. “I wanted a new look,” Baby says and runs a hand over her hair. Lina stares at Baby’s reflection in the mirror. The salon hair stylist, Usha, stands next to Lina and bites her bottom lip, holds the scissors up and away from her.
“Thank you, Usha,” Baby says. She stands up and long strands of hair drop off her shoulder. Baby removes the salon cape and drapes it on the chair. Usha puts the scissors away, fetches the broom and begins to sweep the floor, and she looks at Baby constantly.
“Baby, you always look good,” Lina says.
Baby runs her hand over her head, again and again. “Oh, my head feels so light. I feel so free!” she says.
Lina has noticed that lately Ram isn’t around much. When she asks Baby about Ram, Baby pulls out her wallet busying herself. “He’s doing great,” she says. “His mother is looking for a bride for him, he wants to get married this year.”
Lina cocks her head. “What did you say?” she asks. “What about the two of you?”
Baby turns to Lina and grins, showing all her teeth, her eyes wide and open and says, “Yeah, that’s how it is.” She shrugs.
“But what about you?” Lina asks again.
“Oh, I don’t know!” says Baby. “We’re together, we’re not together, we’re together, we’re not together.” She chuckles and her eyes tear up, and Lina notices the dark circles that frame Baby’s eyes, the acne that marks her butter-like skin, the light rash on her forehead.
“Men are so irrational,” Baby says, after a moment.
“So are women,” Lina says. “But Baby, we’re talking about Ram, specifically about Ram.”
Baby sighs and leans back on the counter packed with scissors and combs, and hairbrushes, hair dryers and hair products. “Ram hates Joji,” Baby sighs.
Lina shakes her head. “But you were with Joji and then Ram came along. And Baby, I should have said this sooner, but Ram’s awful. To you, to everyone, and now he’s looking to marry someone else?”
Baby grabs Lina’s arm. “He had a difficult childhood, Lina! He doesn’t get along with his parents, he was in a boarding school all his life, he doesn’t know how to love!” Baby says.
“He doesn’t know how to love?” Lina asks and Baby winces. Lina wants to say more things but she doesn’t want to hurt Baby. She sits back in her chair, folds her arms around her body and watches Baby, who throws her head back and stares at the ceiling, tears streaming down the sides of her face. Lina remembers an evening at Rohan’s home when his brother returned unexpectedly and Rohan hid her in a storage room at the back of his house, pressed a key to the front door into her hand and instructed her to let herself out later, when he took his brother out. She waited there for an hour, among piles of old newspapers and old cans and barrels, her heart pounding that she would be found in that room, like a thief, or worse, a woman with broken morals, and later, when the fear wore off she felt mortified that he had hidden her away, abandoned her so quickly.
Lina said no to Elmon, but already, she has another date with another possible match. There will be another, then another. They will speak about the weather, if they like dogs or cats, if they’re religious or not, and they will try and fail to gauge other, more critical things – money habits and other habits, how they value relationships, if they’ve been loved, if they know how to love and be loved. It’s possible that one of these conversations with one of these men will be better than the rest. It will be more honest and pleasant, they might even have something in common, and Lina will tell this man that she’s in no rush. They must take the time they need; it is the beginning of uncertainty.
