RED.

She’d taken the night off for some clarity of thought. Changing into full length jeans and a cardigan felt comforting against the harsh winter winds of Bombay. The sea face at Marine Drive always felt liberating, in a way.

“What are you thinking, Afroz? What’s going on in that head of yours?”, asked Daniyal. “You see that tip? That part of Bombay protruding out of the main body, with all that verdure; what place is that?”, she wondered out loud whilst continuing to gaze into the ocean. “That’s the governor’s bungalow”, he said.

“Oh, is it… I’ll live there once, you know? I mean, ‘we’ will. I’m sure of that”, she declared.

“Maybe we will… in another life”, said he as he readied himself to get back to work. “I must go now. They must be waiting for me.” She looked on and finally managed to say, ”Do you have to do this? It doesn’t have to be this way”. He smiled, ‘empathetically’ and walked away.

“If only he knew what it meant to wear a low cut blouse and let the pallu drop, ‘accidentally’… every evening” she thought to herself as she called for a taxi.

“Bhaiyya, 104, Kamathipura chaloge?”.

***

Daniyal and she had been dropped off at Veena maashi’s kothi; just opposite to the 11th Lane traffic signal when she was just 12 and he, 15. As a child, Afroz once asked Daniyal how he could be certain that he was elder to her. To that, he’d reply saying that he remembers what father looked like. After all, it was he who came to see them off at this strange place… She asked no more questions.

She didn’t know where she was, perhaps he did but was too ashamed of admitting. After all, he had become an apprentice of Veena maashi, training to be the next dalaal saab while she was just another dhandewali. How she detested that word. Ten years later, she still has a vivid memory of her childhood, though it wasn’t childhood per se.

“No, no! Lower, lower than that. Aah, that’s perfect”, Sheila would say, as she taught Afroz to drape her first sari. She even remembers being made to practise the ‘inviting pose’ at the traffic signal for hours, “Baby, sway! Sway! You’re too stiff, this isn’t the army! And stop turning your sari into a shawl. The trick is to let it fall. Haan, you’re getting there”. She was an expert now, plus, she spoke English - a real catch. On Mondays she was Violet; on Thursdays, Shirley. ‘Rita sells like cupcakes, baby!’, Veena maashi told her once, so she was Rita on the weekend.

On her taxi ride back ‘home’, however, she never once looked at the traffic lights; she dreaded the red to this day. That was when it all started, she remembers - the traffic lights turning red, striking of the inviting pose, dropping of the pallu, three provocative taps on the window, the honking in affirmation… she’d revisited it all, a million times over.

“Madam ji, aa gaye. Isse aage nahi jayega.”, the taxi driver said. As she opened her purse and fished for the money, she asked him, “Bhaiyya, shaadi ho gayi hai aapki?”. “Ji. Bacchi hai 10 saal ki.” “Accha, Khayaal rakhna”, were her words as she handed him a five hundred rupee note and never looked back.

That was the night, she wrote Daniyal her first letter : “Dearest, you said, ‘maybe in another life’, didn’t you? Well, I’ve decided to take a leap of faith. Khuda hafiz”.

- Siddharth Téndulkar

Vice-President 2015-16

Rotaract Club of NM College