‘I offered help. He said no.’
‘He won’t say no now. I could help him but I am travelling most of the time.
And if you help him, it may work.’
‘May, the key word is may. Can be replaced just as easily with may not,’ I said.
‘Try,’ Ananya said and placed her hands on mine. It was probably the only
restaurant in Chennai she would try such a stunt. Here, it looked sort of OK.
‘First your brother, then your father. If nothing else, I’ll be your family tutor,’ I
said as I sipped the last few drops of my tea.
‘And my lover,’ Ananya winked.
‘Thanks. And what about your mother? How can I make her cry in happiness
like the purity-seeking Harish?’
Ananya threw up her hands. ‘Don’t ask me about mom,’ she said. ‘One, she
gives me a guilt trip about Harish everyday. And two, Chennai has put her in her
place about her Carnatic music abilities. She has stopped singing altogether. And
that makes her even more miserable, which creates her own self-guilt trip, which
is then transferred to me and the cycle continues. Even I can’t help her with this.
Work on dad for now.’
I nodded as Ananya paused to catch her breath.
‘Thanks for bearing this,’ she said and fed me a scone dipped in cream. I
licked cream off her fingers. Little things like these kept me going.
‘Easy, this is a public place,’ she said.
She pulled her hand back as the waiter arrived with the bill. I paid and left him
a tip bigger than my daily lunch budget.
‘Hey, you want to go dancing?’ she asked.
‘Dancing? You have an eight o’clock curfew. How can we go dancing?’
‘Because in Chennai we go dancing in the afternoon. Let’s go, Sheraton has a
nice DJ.’
‘At three in the afternoon?’
‘Yes, everybody goes. They banned nightclubs, so we have afternoon clubs.’
nora
(Nora)
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