Read Online The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer - Free Book Online Page B

interested, he would have found some way, by now, to approach, to send her word of some kind . . . ?
    She felt her earlier energy leave her; it, too, had been part of her secret hope for the evening. And, now that that was thrown into doubt, she was suddenly hot and bothered, bored of the conversation. The room felt congested, the air thick under the wheeling monotony of ceiling fans.
    ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘To have a fag.’
    ‘Have one here!’
    ‘No. I want to sit in the cool for a while.’
    ‘Should I come?’
    ‘No, no, stay. I’ll just be back.’
    In those days, most houses had a single air-conditioned bedroom. During parties, it became a smoking room, with people lying louchely on the bed, the sheets in a squalid swirl, the bedside tables cluttered with glass ashtrays. Mishi, receding into the back of the house, prayed it would not be like that today. She needed a moment alone. And, opening a door at right angles to a tube-lit kitchen, from which there came the steady exchange of food and dirty plates, she was relieved to find an empty room. The bed undisturbed; the air smoke-free and cool. She was tempted to lie down, put her feet up, and, with her head against the board, close her eyes for a moment. Her body felt so heavy, every joint hard and strained. It was so good to rest it, to feel its new waxy smoothness. To feel the ribbed contours of the Fabindia bedcover under her body. To gaze with a dreamy eye at a bookshelf lined with P.G. Wodehouse. She now stood up, went into the bathroom, and, leaving the door open a crack, began to pee in the dark.
    Who has not done something similar? Not answered the urge to have something happen to you by creating the glimmer of a situation in which it might. Oh, and the peace of the bathroom, away from the harsh sounds of the party, with nothing but a laser-slim strip of light breaking in! The torrential rush of at least one kind of release and beyond, the small risk that she might be discovered, that there might suddenly be voices in the bedroom. But of course there weren’t. It was quiet. And she had only just eased into it, let a light and defenceless swoon come over her, when the quiet was broken into by a thievish flash. The bathroom door gaped, a figure entered, and, with the firm click of a bolt, the darkness returned, pitchier and more closeting than before.
    ‘Who’s there?’ she said, feigning panic. ‘Who’s there?’
    Silence. This new and securer darkness did not respond. A tap came on. And, over the chortling sound of water, the consumptive wheeze of a drain, she heard a voice say, heard
him
say, quite softly, ‘It’s me.’
    She smiled. A smile into the darkness is like a smile on the telephone: one of those rare moments, when we make an expression of joy purely for ourselves.
    ‘But what if it had not been me?’ the voice probed, making her laugh out loud.
    ‘Then I would have raised a hue and cry.’
    ‘Oh, would you have?’ he said, and she could sense he was smiling too, but she could not gauge the distance at which he stood.
    ‘You know, I really do need to finish peeing.’
    ‘Go ahead. Please.’
    And it was so odd: the way he said it, she felt she could.
    Later, she never forgot the feeling of safety he had given her, the steadiness of his hand; the sense, very early on, that she could be naked before him. Later, she found other things, but never again that security. It was the closest thing she had known to the protections of childhood, and it stayed with her forever: the running tap, the entombing darkness, her allowing herself to pee in the presence of a stranger, who stood waiting, as if he had been waiting forever, and would go on waiting, until she was ready.
    But, of course, she was ready. For she had been waiting too.

‘But what is this waiting?’ the girl Skanda has just been introduced to asks.
    She is tiny, scrawny as a bird – her wrists scarcely two inches round – but her eyes are vast and liquid, full of the