The Association of Small Bombs(34)

The woman passed. He felt a touch on his shoulder. “Are you OK?”

It was another woman, a thin, slight, dark girl, who was a secretary.

“Yes,” he said, smiling. He tapped his head. “Just thinking.”

The woman burst into a bright smile, revealing an endearing set of crooked teeth. “Sorry, you just looked like an Egyptian mummy. I wanted to make sure you weren’t having a seizure.”

“A seizure?” said Vikas. “Do people stand like this when they’re having seizures?”

“I saw it in a movie.” She grinned.

“In a movie! So of course it must be true!” He meant it to be wry, but it came out sounding cruel, and he was relieved when she played along and smiled.

“An American movie, no less!” she said, shaking her head.

“Ah, the Americans and their seizures,” he said vaguely, feeling bad that he was such a bad flirt and so easily embarrassed by women. “What movie was it, actually?”

“This new movie; you probably haven’t heard of it. It’s called Mean Streets.”

He paused. “Of course. Mean Streets. By Martin Scorsese. From 1973.”

“I wasn’t sure how to pronounce it,” she said, looking surprised.

“I haven’t seen it, actually—I’ve read about it. I heard it was very good. Did you see it at the Rivoli film festival last month? I wanted to see it.”

“Yes,” she said. “Rivoli.”

Vikas looked at the girl more carefully. The first thing about her was that she was a little darker than the sort of girl that Vikas would have wanted to date or marry. The second thing was that she was pretty. She had a small strawberry-shaped face with high cheekbones, big, liquid eyes, and a crooked goofy smile—in some ways it was a cartoonish face. He had never noticed before how small and delicate this girl’s face was, because, when he had spotted her occasionally across the office, what stood out was her cascading curly hair, so uncommon in North India, and the fact that, unlike the Punjabi secretaries, she wore skirts and loose shirts with big starched collars. “What’s your name, remind me?”

“Deepa. Deepa Thomas.”

So she was a Christian; that explained it. Vikas, who was a serious man, decided to cut off his flirtation. He crossed his arms again. “Very nice to meet you, Deepa.”



When Vikas, standing outside the office in CP, thought back on this memory, with its innocence, its inarticulate posturing, its sudden movement toward the common love of cinema, it made him cry.

Maybe it was my destiny to suffer.

But I could have ignored her. Instead I sought her out.

A week after meeting Deepa, Vikas had become silently infatuated with her. It was not an uncommon development for him. He spoke to girls so infrequently and was generally such a shy character that a pretty face and a few flirtatious words were enough to make him tipsy with love. Often he would begin fantasizing deep into the future about women—courtship, sex, marriage, the works—and with Deepa it was the same: he must have written several imaginary novels’ worth of conversation with her in his head in that first week of infatuation. He also rebuked himself for his silliness.

She might have a boyfriend, he told himself.

She might be married.

She’s a Christian, for God’s sake—you can’t go steady with her!

What will Mummy and Daddy say when you tell them you’re going to marry a South Indian?

And your friends, won’t they judge you also?

He began to rail against his friends. What a judgmental, bigoted bunch I’ve been blessed with. Not one intellectual or broad-minded fellow in the whole lot of them. They all watch movies and read pondy mags and fantasize about all sorts of women but when it comes to marriage they’ll be marrying the usual fat Punjabi kuddis. . . . He suddenly felt very brave, like he was an activist hired by the government to promote national integration in a stubbornly segregationist Indian subcontinent.

Then a week passed. She made no effort to talk to him and was busy walking around the office twirling her hair with a finger, her crisp skirts making a sound like grains being raked, and Vikas began to feel nervous. What if she was about to quit? What if one of these British-looking fellows had designs on her? In the office Vikas had calculated that about fifteen men were better-looking and more articulate than he, while the other seventy were not; of course, he believed himself to be the most brilliant, with the best taste. Your taste won’t matter if you do nothing with it. If you just sit. He thought of his playboy friend Prabhat, who was just finishing his specialization in pediatrics, and from whom he had stolen so many gestures. Prabhat flirts with everyone: girls, aunties, babies, men, children. He has no shame at all. Prabhat’s lack of shame was amusing and endearing. He was in a sense an ecumenical playboy. In college in Delhi he had dated a couple of fantastically ugly coconut–hair oil types from Haryana—fellow medical students who, Vikas had said unkindly, should consider specializing in the medicine of self–plastic surgery. But then Prabhat had also snagged an air hostess and a TV newscaster, and in fact was now engaged to the latter. Bloody lucky fellow, with his good looks, his height, his hair which stands up on end . . .

Vikas went one day to Deepa’s desk doing a full medley of Prabhat gestures: tousling his hair into thick black twisting flames; stooping a little, as if he were a tall man; and looking off to the side as he spoke, as if deeply distracted by the galloping machinery of his intellect. “Deepa, hi. Oh—I saw Mean Streets, by the way. It’s bloody brilliant, man.”