Chapter 15: A Brief History of Anuj and Seher
Anuj and Seher had first met at a party. They exchanged glances for the first half of the evening, each gauging what the other laughed at, or said to the group they were standing with. Neither tried to one-up the other’s last word. Seher even checked for Anuj on Facebook but before they started living together, Anuj was not on Facebook. They didn’t say a word to each other for the first half of the party, or at least till they found each other alone (or after 26 songs as both of them had counted, when Florence Welch sang Kiss with a Fist in a version without drums). They spoke about movies when they finally did, and websites to waste one’s time on when staring at the computer at work or at home when there was nothing to do. That night they ended up at Seher’s. The next day, they ran into each other again at another party. Initially, both of them tried to avoid each other but when they ran into each other at the bar (after 17 songs this time), Seher said, “This party is boring.” And they landed at Seher’s again.
Seher asked Anuj to find a TV show to watch as she changed into her night t-shirt³⁸. It was yellow, with a stretched neck and a print parodying Mr Men. It said Mr Hump and it had a rotund teapot-like character with biceps, a wink and a marijuana leaf where a fig leaf would have been. They watched a few episodes of Black Books before they started making out while waiting for an episode to load because the Internet speeds decided to drop. When Anuj crashed, Seher texted Veena frantically.
Seher and Anuj communicated over email through the next week, during which they met twice. They would have met two more times except Seher had to be with Veena on one day and the other was production day at work.
The next time they spent a night together, when Seher woke up, she saw Anuj watching her. The side of his head was resting on his palm. This was also the first time the two saw eye-to-eye after coitus. Anuj’s eye wandered a bit before he blinked and it was back to looking at Seher’s morning face with his other eye. She grinned, exchanged some morning breath in a kiss and then let him make her coffee before she took a couple of drags off his morning joint. And then she jumped out of bed and escaped. Numbers were not exchanged till Veena interfered. The ruse was that whatever it was may just be casual. When Seher finally started talking after sex, she had called Anuj’s wandering eye a singularity. “It wanders and devours parts of the universe before it returns to look only at me.”
³⁸ She had bought the t-shirt at Sarojini Nagar for a hundred bucks when she was in college. By the time she met Anuj, the neck of the t-shirt had stretched so much that all she had to do was bring her shoulder to her cheek and the neckline would drop down her arm. This particular feature of the t-shirt was responsible for the sobering up of many-a-drunk-men who would’ve been waiting for the euphemistic last drink or the euphemistic post-date coffee. Anuj had dubbed it, The T-shirt of Uncontrollable Prettiness, like it was a treasure item won after slaying a boss-level monster.
