chapter 14

14 Back in my office I called Aanya and we went over the details of the New York trip. JWT had suggested we stay at the Soho Grand at the end of Greenwich Village. The photographs on the website looked fab but as a photographer I was cynical about commissioned shoots. What did sound special though was that it was a pet-friendly hotel and despite my cynicism looked plush. The trip was going to be a short one: a day in the office with JWT and dinner that evening with Matt and his team; Nat had an aunt and uncle she wanted to visit the next day; I would use that morning to go back and see folks over at the ICP; and then one full day when I would show Nat around. ‘I am entirely in your hands,’ she had said when I asked her if there was anything particular she wanted to do.There was a surprise waiting for me that afternoon. When I called the pantry and asked someone to bring me the takeaway menu cards for lunch, there was silence at theother end. I thought the pantry boy hadn’t heard me so I repeated the request.‘Natasha has brought lunch for you and said we should warm it when you asked for it,’ he blurted.Covering my tracks, I quickly added, ‘Oh, yes, I forgot.Could you bring it over, please? Thanks!’He came in ten minutes later carrying a large tray with a bowl of spaghetti and pepperoni in tomato sauce, some garlic bread and a glass of orange juice on it. As soon as he left the room, I called Nat.‘Thank you.’‘For lunch? My pleasure, I hope you liked it.’ ‘No, really, Nat, thank you! You shouldn’t have.’ ‘Did you like it?’‘I just sat down to eat.’‘What is wrong with you? It’s almost four!’‘Nat. Mommy. You fed me a large sandwich this morning.’‘Right. Sorry, eat up. I am going to bring you lunch from now on.’I thought about it and then decided not to complain. ‘Have you read all your emails?’ she asked.‘Not yet. Is there something urgent?’‘You know that insurance company shoot where Cara suggested you keep the girl and go colour?’‘Yes?’‘The client loved it, couldn’t stop talking about it, in fact. We’ve got ourselves a very bright girl there. And thismorning’s video. She’s capable of a lot more than we think she is.’I couldn’t agree more, but said, ‘Yeah. Your find!’‘No, yours. I told you, she came here because she saw your work in New York. I thought it was strange then but it’s all worked out in our favour. So we have you to thank. Again.’‘Should we make her permanent?’‘It’s up to her. When I spoke with her before she joined she’d said she’d like to go back to New York at some point but it depended on how much she likes it here and if she has a reason to stay.’‘What do you mean?’‘I don’t know. She said she’d let me know when she is ready to accept a permanent offer.’‘Okay. Let’s keep her busy until then. I hope she decides she likes it here,’ I said, wondering what Cara had meant.‘Exactly. You eat. We’ll talk later.’ ‘Thanks for lunch, Nat.’‘Stop it. Bye!’I went back to work and it took me a couple hours more before I decided I had done enough for the day and got up to leave. I bumped into Aanya and Roy by the lift and was about to enter with them when I remembered that I had said I’d go home with Cara. I waved them off and turned around and walked back to her desk, only to find it empty. I texted her.Girl, what’s POAAren’t you coming home?I want to. Need to finish some shopping tho Shopping???!!! You?I need a summer suit. You want me to come? And we’ll grab a bite?Hmm. No. You go. I’ll finish some work on the video.Come by later and show me the suit?Yep.See you.It took me a while to get to the mall. The guys at the Hugo Boss store were very helpful and I found the ice- blue linen suit I was looking for. The trousers needed some alteration so they told me to come back in half an hour. While at it I spoke with their tailor and asked for the jacket to be tucked in a bit too to fit my shoulder. Trying to keep my arm straight while he measured me I realized I was still sore from the accident, and the word sore reminded me of Cara and I smiled. They said they might need an hour to get everything done, so instead of wandering about aimlessly, I decided to go to Cavalino’s, a sports bar in the same mall that I loved particularly for the bitter beer they brewed in- house. They also made delicious chicken wings.I ordered my first beer and texted Cara to tell her where I was. She responded immediately, saying ‘Have one on me’. The chicken wings when they came were just as great as I remembered them. I sat there thinking about things to do in New York with Nat, and it surprised me just how much I was looking forward to the trip. I hoped spending timewith her would give me an opportunity to get to know her better and, I must admit, I had developed a little crush on her. I hadn’t been taken care of or loved like that in a long time, a very long time actually.Through most of my childhood I was in boarding school and then when my parents were yanked away I had to deal with the fact that A, they weren’t around any more, and B, to be brutally honest, having lived away from them for several years already I didn’t really miss them all that much. There were days when I would suddenly remember that they were dead, almost as if I had forgotten that fact. It was something I could never admit to anyone. My teen years were tougher, especially the years immediately after their deaths. The housemistress, a forty-year-old woman, was especially kind and loving. I spent many weekends at her place because she thought I shouldn’t while away time alone in my dorm. She had a son, a year my junior, who naturally hated me and a daughter, his twin, whom I got along with quite well.Well, a little more than well. It was she who gave me my first lesson about a woman’s body. It began when I walked into her bedroom one day, unannounced, while she was changing. She taught me that patience pays in the bedroom as she sat on my lap, then lay down beside me, and let me touch her. I can still remember her vividly, naked except for white cotton panties. In the course of the year we fooled around in, I developed quite a fetish for them. I can tell you now that she had ten fingers like a mouth and a mouth that felt like ten fingers. Every time I had to manage my erection,she lent a helping hand or mouth, sometimes both!I gulped down the remaining beer in the mug and ordered another. The girl at the bar, who was wearing a tight, cleavage-baring T-shirt that said HAVE ANOTHER JUG, walked over to a tap near me and began to fill draught beer into a tall mug. Handling the lever with her left hand and holding the glass in her right, she lovingly turned the mug this way and that, letting the beer rise while smiling at me intermittently. When she let out a small oops as the froth in the mug brimmed over, I learnt that to a susceptible dirty mind a beautiful woman could make anything look erotic. I felt so tingly that I had to get up and go pee. As I walked to the loo I turned to check out the DJ who was pumping out pretty great music. That’s when I saw them.Aanya and Roy were sitting at a table, in a corner. She was looking straight into his eyes and he was holding her hand over the table. He wasn’t drinking; she was. I quickly rushed into the loo. I had known that Roy was having a tough time in his marriage – on the rocks is a term best used when talking about alcohol – and that his wife of many years was mercurial and often went away with their child to her mother’s. Roy wasn’t exactly a model husband either; he used every opportunity to stay away from home, be it at a party or drinking in a bar with friends or clients. Swiftly my brain started to connect the little dots.I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. I adored both of them and they were adults who were free to see whomever they wanted, even each other, but how was one supposed to feelwhen someone you worked with closely was cheating on his marriage, and a friend you were terribly fond of was in a relationship bound to break her heart? He wasn’t going to leave his wife and she, Aanya, wasn’t going to be happy considering she was sharing him with someone else (or was she?). Stolen moments and secret sex were great when you were a teenager, but as an adult it was probably like warm beer – tasted bad and left you with a hangover.Zipping up, I stepped out of the loo and peeked around; they were still there. The time for answers was later. For now, I had to leave the bar without being seen. I walked over as calmly as I could and asked the nearest waiter for the bill and then, rather than wait, just gave him a couple of five-hundred-rupee notes and left. I was praying as I walked out that they hadn’t seen me. Getting out of the mall, after a quick stop at Hugo Boss, I junked the idea of driving over to Cara’s and went home instead.I texted her to say I was too tired and that I was going home directly. She replied instantly.Poor baby. You want me to come home?I said no, and told her that I wanted to go home and sleep. She sent me an emoticon kiss.When I got home I poured myself a drink, switched on an Ella Fitzgerald LP and sat down with a book. It got me thinking about Aanya and Roy again.Half an hour later the phone rang. It was Roy. Had he seen me in the mall? My first instinct was to ignore the call but then I realized that if he had seen me it would probablyconfirm to him that I knew. Or maybe it wasn’t about that at all, maybe he hadn’t seen me, in which case I could definitely let the phone ring and meet him at work tomorrow. But what if they had simply gone out for a drink and I was reading too much into it? The phone kept ringing. Eventually I gave up and answered.‘Hey, Roy! Sorry, I was in the shower.’ ‘Hey, man.’‘What’s up?’‘Nothing. Did you see, the insurance clients loved your work apparently?’‘Yeah. Nat told me and then I saw the email chain.’ ‘Cara is good.’‘She is.’‘Erm . . . when are you guys going to the US? You and Nat, I mean.’Roy never made small talk, especially over the phone. It was obvious he was struggling.‘Roy, you didn’t call me to ask that.’‘I didn’t. I saw you at the bar but you walked away before we could call you.’‘We?’‘Aanya saw you too.’‘Oh, I didn’t notice, I would have stayed otherwise,’ I lied.‘Right. We were just having a drink.’We all want to be adults about our life and yet can never face the truth. I was hardly one to make judgementsconsidering my relationship with Cara continued to be a secret, though it would have been perfectly normal if I was dating her.‘Nice. I like the beer there,’ I said. ‘Sid, now you are being polite.’‘Yes, fuck it. Are you and Aanya seeing each other?’ ‘Yes, it’s been about six months now.’‘Okay.’‘Okay? Are you fine with this?’ ‘Is Aanya fine with this?’‘I knew you would ask that. In fact she wanted me to find out precisely for this reason; she knows you are very fond of her.’‘You haven’t answered my question, Roy.’ I was getting angry now. He had touched a nerve.‘No. She knows I won’t leave Rachel and she is not happy about that. Yet it’s been six months.’‘And where are you going with it?’ ‘I don’t know, Sid.’‘Roy, I know what you and Aanya do is your business but I am very fond of her and I just hate it that she is going to come out of this unhappy.’‘Or maybe not, Sid,’ he retorted, sounding defensive. ‘What do you mean?’‘I think she is very happy.’‘You just told me that she isn’t happy!’ I snapped.‘She isn’t happy that there is no bigger future for us together. It is true that I have no intention of leaving Racheland my son, and she knows that. But for the moment, while this is happening, I know she is very happy. We enjoy each other’s company and we have fun every time we hang out, or are . . . you know . . . together.’I stayed silent, because I knew what he meant.‘Okay, listen all I am saying is that she, and I, wanted to be sure you knew about this and that you were okay with this, which I think you are, but also aren’t. I will let Aanya know.’ ‘Whatever! The two of you have put me in a very difficult spot, Roy. Don’t get me wrong. It is your life and I’d be the first one to say do whatever makes you happy, but I still wish you hadn’t called and that we hadn’t had this conversation . . . Fuck it! I am too close to this to be rational.Let’s talk about something else.’ ‘Thanks, Sid.’‘Don’t thank me.’‘Sorry . . .’ he paused, ‘and by the way both of us think you should be dating Cara.’‘I am going to hang up now, Roy,’ I said and disconnected the call. I hated that they were trying to match-make.I was surprisingly angry. So Roy and Aanya were seeing each other. I didn’t know what it was about that fact that nagged me, and made me so upset. Was it because Roy was married and was having an affair? Maybe. Was it because it was Aanya he was seeing? Definitely. I guess if I were to be honest I was also upset because what he had indicated in that brief conversation was that their relationship too was about the sex, which was exactly the case with Cara.If we were to write a description of our relationship, it would probably go Hey, Hi, Now?, Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, OH GOD, OH GOD, O-H-G-O-D!So who was I to judge Roy and Aanya? I still didn’t know much about Cara, or she about me, even though we shared our bodies so openly with each other. I often woke up alone in either home, hers more often than mine. I didn’t call her in the morning, unless I was in her place and had to find something, and she didn’t call unnecessarily either. She did love it when I called her though, even if it was only about work. Every time I did there was a breathless, childlike joy in her voice that was palpable. At work things were extremely normal between us; although images from the previous evening or weekend flashed through my mind, she didn’t show any familiarity at all. I struggled at times with her aloofness; whenever she was part of the same meeting or when we were physically next to each other life would move into instagram-in-macro-setting mode. Her eyelashes, her lips, the way they felt when we kissed, or when they were wrapped around my cock, the curve of her neck and the heady fragrance of her perfume, the goosebumps on her cleavage from the air conditioning in the office, her breasts, the delectable rubberiness (is that even a word?) of her nipples, her fingers and the way they glistened when she wet them in her mouth before inserting them into her as she masturbated for me sometimes, her luscious bottom and the way she rhythmically moved her hips up and down my shaft when shewas above me and facing away, her long legs which wrapped around my hips, drawing me deeper into her, and her toes as they curled when she had an orgasm. It was tough being around her and not imagining these things and objectifying her because she indeed was an incredible sex object and loved being objectified in this manner. She was the one person I knew who was absolutely capable of inducing an orgasm that could split your DNA strand into two.Thinking about Cara always made me think about sex but there was a lot more to her than that (and he makes it sound like an afterthought, the pig!).She had converted one of her bedrooms into a studio, smartly breaking down an entire wall and installing bay windows so the room was filled with natural light. This was where she practised two forms of art: drawing nudes in charcoal and pottery. Her nudes, all of which her best friend Rhea had sat for, were astonishingly real and beautiful, and her delicately thin, intricate works in clay, which she spent hours painting laboriously in various hues of black, were scattered throughout the house.If one knew her one would know that her works were a reflection of her personality and it’s because I know so little of her, in a manner of speaking, that I will have to resort to an analogy (the first one that comes to my mind as I type) that one might call cheesy: she was like polyfloral honey, delicately multilayered, sweet with a strong aftertaste and blessed with a sensuous viscosity.Now go ahead, dip your finger in her sun-soaked valleyand lick (and there you have it, we’re back to sex again. With Cara you can’t escape it).I had finished my drink and read a couple more chapters of the book before I decided to call it a night. Just when I had put my head down on the pillow, almost as if she knew the precise second, Nat messaged to remind me to take my pills. Standing in the kitchen, drinking water afterwards, I counted my blessings. Constantly thinking of someone while being constantly thought of by someone else was a pleasantly warm place to be.But things were about to change. This chapter is sort of a midpoint, think of it as an intermission.