Chapter 2"You should have forgotten it weeks ago. You should have dumped him before your mother started hoping it was Getting Serious."
Exactly.
So why hadn't I?
Because it had been easier not to, that's why. I'd have been back to square one.
Square one had started like this. About eight months back I'd split up with Abhi.Abhi and I had been an item for ages, until he'd told me he was terribly sorry, he was still very fond of me, but to be honest, he thought we'd turned into a comfortable habit.
Unlike me, who could almost have qualified for a Ph.D. in fibbing lately, Abhi would barely have scraped a GCSE. He'd said it in the awkward, stumbling tones of a hopeless liar and I'd known at once what was behind it.
Or rather, who. I'd met her, at a do thrown by a colleague of his a couple of weeks previously. She'd given me that poisoned-honey smile such women always give you when they fancy your man like mad and are hoping you'll conveniently get run over on the way home. I'd poison-honeyed back (as you do) and hoped she'd come out in nipple warts for her pains.
On the way home he'd said reproachfully, "I thought you were just a bit off with Jocasta."
Jocasta. I ask you. "Of course I was!" I'd retorted. "She fancies the pants off you! She was giving you the eye half the night, only you're too thick to see it!"
"She was doing nothing of the sort," he'd said irritably. "God, women can be so unbelievably bitchy. She's a really nice girl."
Bloke-speak for, ("I wouldn't kick her out of bed, either.")
I don't know how he could have imagined I was too thick to put two and two together. Too devastated to be dignified, I'd screamed it through a throatful of tears. The word "cow" had figured prominently, I'm not ashamed to say, and faced with that, he'd admitted it. He was terribly sorry, but you didn't choose these things, they just happened.
And of course, they happened a lot more easily when you were working together. One massive disadvantage in my relationship with Abhi had been the fact that in every sense our workplaces had been miles apart. Like him, she was a medic, working in the same hospital.
In the immediate aftermath I'd actually wished to be seized with a life-threatening case of Fat Cow Disease so they'd have to rush me to St. Thingy's. This was not so that Abhi could behold my near-lifeless form and be seized with remorse: dear me, no. I saw myself in intensive care, where Jocasta would be in charge of the drips and I'd die on purpose, just to get her into trouble.
If Preeti hadn't been occupying our cupboard at the time, my loving mother would never have known the extent of my misery. As it was, she was doing a sort of foreign correspondent of the love-war zone, reporting back with messages like, "Emergency supplies of vodka and tissues are being rushed in, but the situation is frankly desperate."
Which naturally resulted in worried maternal phone calls every other day, to check that any overdoses were only of the Nutella variety. "Are you sure you're all right, dear?" etc. Eventually these had progressed to anxious variations on, "You really must get out more, dear, and find somebody else."
This theme had resurfaced in various unsubtle forms practically every time she'd phoned, e.g., "Anything nice happened lately, dear?" At which I'd said brightly, "Well, I won ten pounds on the lottery and got a really nice cashmere jumper half price in the sales."
"Lovely, dear," she'd said, trying desperately not to sound disappointed. "You can hand-wash it, you know, as long as you're careful."
To someone like my mother, an unattached daughter who's just hit thirty is a Serious Worry. I knew she was saying fretfully to Dad, "Yes, I know she's happy as she is, dear, but if she doesn't get a move on..."
So one night, just to keep her happy (all right, to shut her up) I'd lied. He'd just slipped out, perfectly formed, as if I'd been cooking him up for weeks.
As I said before, he wasn't entirely plucked out of thin air"my imagination's not that great. Four nights before this phone call, I'd gone to a party. I hadn't wanted to go at all, only the hostess was Jess from my department, who was thirty-six and even more blokeless than me (not so much as a damp squib in eighteen months). She'd been terrified that nobody would turn up and she'd be left among her M&S nibbles like a female version of Mrs. Merton's Malcolm.
So I'd taken along a duty-free bottle of Stolichnaya and prepared to be a party animal. I'd put on a little black dress with a tiny bit of fluff just above my left nipple, as I'd read somewhere that it's a foolproof way of pulling; blokes are irresistibly drawn to said fluff and itching to brush it off. Nobody had told Jess this, however, as two minutes after I'd got there she'd said, "Oh, look, there's a bit of fluff on your dress," and flicked it off herself. Well, that's the last time I donate my duty-free booze to her.
Until about ten-thirty it had looked as if her nightmare was coming true. Guests were thin, conversation strained, and people were starting to give their watches furtive glances, wondering when they could decently get away. Knowing I could hardly desert a sinking do, I just carried on hitting the vodka, grinning fatuously and trying to break awkward silences with stupid jokes.
But lo, suddenly there arrived a raucous horde, some of whom Jess knew not at all, but who cared? Instantly we had a real party, and I was oiled enough to enjoy it.
And there he was, across a crowded room. Dressed from some previous do in a dinner jacket and dress shirt, open at the neck, his bow tie wrenched undone.
In short, the type to make your worst female enemy hate you even more if you had him on your arm. So I charged off to Jess's loo to look for another bit of fluff, but since she's one of those irritating houseworky types, I couldn't find any. Not that it would have made any difference if I had.
For the next three hours Varun Raichand (for it was he) had assorted size-ten women hanging on to him. After an initial, perfunctory introduction I only managed to catch his eye twice and my alluring smile (perfected in the bathroom mirror at age sixteen) had sod-all effect. So I carried on hitting the vodka and let some bloke called Clive chat me up. I phoned a taxi about one-fifteen, and would you believe, just as I was about to leave, Varun came up, eyed my cleavage, and said, "Not off already?"
Story of my life.
If I'd been sensible and switched to Evian an hour previously, I might have said, "Well, maybe not," metaphorically punched the air and yelled, "Yes1. Yes1. Yes1." However, since I was Ananya Kashyap, with incipient hiccups and a horrible feeling I might actually throw up within the next twenty minutes, I gave an enigmatic (drunken) smile, said, "Afraid so," and thought, Shit.
But then (I've only ever done this when really far gone) I grabbed a pen from Jess's side table and took his arm in what I imagined was a seductively inviting manner. In a huskily inviting tone (thank God no hiccups came out) I said, "But feel free to give me a call," and wrote my number on his wrist. And then I smiled again, floated out without falling over, and threw up the minute I got home.
The bas***d never phoned, not that I was too heartbroken, as Jess subsequently found out he not only had a girlfriend called Caroline, but also worked for one of those estate agents where anything under eight hundred thousand's a bit down-market.
Still, he served the purpose. I embroidered him nicely and he went down so well I didn't have the heart to dump him. Preeti had gone home by then. I'd intended to fill her in, but she'd seemed so pleased for me, I hadn't liked to disillusion her. Besides which, she'd have been bound to tell somebody, in perfect confidence, of course, but in small villages like ours, perfect confidences have a habit of getting onto the jungle telegraph all by themselves.
Through a massive yawn Alix said, "My mother was going on just as much as yours, and I didn't invent anybody."
Since she was hardly ever given to smugly stating the obvious, I refrained from comment. Alix rarely irritated me, in spite of weighing only eight and a half stone and being one of those irritating people who are disgustingly slim because they don't eat much. However, Alix hated bits of her as much as I hated bits of me; she constantly bemoaned her lack of cleavage and envied mine bitterly, so I had to love her. She also hated her hair, which I would describe as fluffy, Renaissance-painting stuff, somewhere between Flopsy Bunny brown and copper. She called it an effing mousy mess.
"And I was in just as bad a state as you were," she went on. "Worse, if anything. I mean, Simon just told me straight out that there was somebody else."
Shortly after Abhi had given me the elbow, Alix had suffered exactly the same. "You always knew he was basically a reptile," I pointed out. "You always used to fall for reptiles."
"So did you. Abhi was too 'nice,' if you ask me. You'd only have got bored with him in the end."
"I was nowhere near bored with him! He was the first decent bloke I'd had in ages!" However, I have to say she'd uttered a crumb of truth. Just occasionally his "niceness" had made me guiltily irritated; for example, he'd always refused to bitch about anybody, no matter how bitchy or bas***dy they were. I'd almost wished he'd show a normal, human, bloke-ish crack.
And of course, I'd got my wish.
There had been some comfort in being dumped in company. Alix and I had spent wallowy evenings bitching about men in general, and our own in particular. We'd described in minute detail their more revolting habits (e.g., wafting their 20cc of foul gases up from under the duvet and asking whether you thought they savored of free-range egg or balti) and their utter inability to see through the kind of two-faced bitch who does her damnedest to pinch them off you while pretending to be "sweet." (See Jocasta, above.)
We had despaired at the smelly/useless/puerile nature of the entire species, and the fact that the 0.2 percent of them that did not belong to the above category were invariably a) married, b) gay, or c) involved with one of the aforementioned bitches who'd pinched them from somebody nice (like us). We had bemoaned all this from the comfort of the sofa, accompanied by half a ton of popcorn and any old-film hunk from Cinderella's prince to Lizzie Bennet's Mr. Darcy.
"Pity you can't ask somebody from work to do the honors." She sighed.
For obvious reasons, this was O of the Q. "Even if I had conjured him out of thin air, I'd never ask. Can you imagine the sniggers?"
"I suppose."
"And Preeti's probably met all the old nonwork friends, so none of them'd do, even if any of them looked remotely like a Varun."
"No." She sighed. "Scruffy buggers, one and all." Dropping the paper on the floor, she picked up the color mag. "Want to hear your stars?"
"I've already read them. They weren't remotely relevant." In the past couple of weeks I'd also read my stars in every single mag on the Pop-In shelves. Not one had said, Don't worry, Pisces, an absolutely perfect Varun is about to turn up when you least expect him. One of them had even said something like, An adverse aspect to Uranus in Mars means that a sticky situation of your own making may possibly get stickier.
"You never know your luck"maybe Belinda'll call it off," she said.
"Don't!" Even to get me off the hook; I'd never pray for this; my poor mother would never hold her head up again. Shreya would come round, full of pseudo-sympathetic gloating, and this time the arsenic would be all ready beside the tea bags, and probably a plate of ground-glass-and-sultana flapjacks, too. How many Swee-tex was it, Shreya? Like a little nibble with it?
"Preeti's never met Calum," Alix mused. "I suppose you could ask him."
Calum was the slumbering "slave." She'd met him one freezing afternoon a couple of months back, after inadvertently spraying him with foam at the car wash. At least, that was what she'd said; if you ask me, she did it on purpose. At first she'd said grudging things like, "Well, I suppose he's not bad"not quite as primeval-slime-ish as the average." Lately it had progressed to things like, "He looks quite sweet when he's asleep."
Much as I appreciated the offer, I wouldn't have dreamed of inflicting my entire family on Calum for the day. I wasn't sure their relationship was on a firm enough footing to stand it. Besides which, Calum wasn't exactly how I pictured Varun. He reminded me of a big, shaggy dog"very lovable, but not quite groomed enough. And very slightly portly about the tummy, if you want the truth. "I couldn't possibly ask, if only because he's far too nice to say no."
She didn't persist. "I still think this agency business is mad. I can't believe you're even considering it."
"Why not? I'm supposed to be a human-resources manager. It follows that I should manage to resource myself a reasonably human bloke."
"You'll be lucky. They'll all be slimeballs, you mark my words."
"There's no harm in giving them a ring. I would like to keep Mum's end up, if only for a day."
"You mean she'll be 'off' with you for six months if you don't." She glanced over her shoulder toward the kitchen, whence came merry banging and crashing. "God, he can't even make a cup of tea without making a racket"if he wakes Calum up, I'll kill him. He looks really sweet when he's asleep."
You see?
Ace's return, with sustenance, restored her humor. "Thanks, monange. There should be a fiver in my bag, if you can find it."
"Nah," he said. "You can iron me a couple of T-shirts."
This was intended as a windup. Alix was supposed to echo, "Iron? What the hell do you think I am?" whereupon Ace would grin and say, "A woman."
Scorning this laddish bait, she made a face at her toast. "You've put far too much Marmite on"how many times do I have to tell you to scrape it?"
"God, I can't do anything right." Ace shot me a hurt look that was rather spoiled by the wicked little wink he added. "Bitch, bitch, bitch"moan, moan, moan"she's getting just like dear old Mum."
"I'll tell her you said that!" Alix threw a cushion at him, Ace threw it back, and a mock fight ensued. I didn't care whether it ended with Alix's tea going all over the carpet, but I retrieved the paper before it got torn or tea-soaked, or both.
'We know the feeling, the blurb said.' We are Sally and Julia and we started Just for Tonight because we know exactly what it's like to be missing that one vital accessory for important occasions. If you've got the perfect dress, the perfect jewelry, the perfect shoes, why not choose the perfect man to complement them?'
Just too easy for words.
Edited by sanee - 9 years ago
Bade Achhe Lagte Hain
Anupamaa
Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon
