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Shortlisted in the Himal Short Story Competition 2019.

Dear Swara Bhaskar - Himal Southasian

Many years later, as I was to meet the woman who would become my first serious lover, I would recall just how those women in the border towns of UP and Bihar had met my eyes with a gaze that threatened to consume me from the inside out. And, in one corner of a dimly lit bar playing an old Bruce Springsteen tune that I recalled from my high school days, we talked of India and, bizarrely, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, that poet prime minister. Never mind that I can recite Bohemian Rhapsody and Tangled Up in Blue from memory, all while quoting Kanye West and making fun of Harry Potter. All her education in India had been in English, as she’d gone to one of those premier institutions that cater to the scions of Indian high society, one of those boarding schools in one of those hill stations run by some of those habit-wearing nuns. So, as she fiddled with the cork of the wine bottle and made sounds of longing under her breath, I watched the cable car rise along the pylons and thought of an Italo Calvino story where a scene like this one had first occurred. He thought she was lascivious, never mind that he openly ogled the girls sunning themselves in bikinis in the park, or that he slept with a string of women he took home from the neighbourhood bar. My untrained ear liked Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan while she preferred Abida Parveen, long before she started appearing on television alongside Asha Bhosle. We’d become foreigners in our own lands, speaking English, patronising bars and restaurants well above our pay grade, making friends with others like us, latching on to any reference of the West as if we understood what it was like to be white even though we would always and forever be brown. Maybe you too dream of one day leaving everything behind and moving to a foreign land where you won’t have to answer phone calls anymore, only you might have to wash dishes and mop floors. I came here thinking I would escape the lure of that far-off landmass but here too, outside the busiest train station, I hear my mother tongue in the air, floating like that stench of turmeric we desis always seem to carry with us.

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