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‘Why won’t I be able to?’
‘Just like that, with a girl in your home at two-thirty in the morning!’
‘I’ll sleep, yaar. I wouldn’t have slept too well in the room though.’
‘When do you leave for work?’
‘I have to be at work by nine.’
‘Wake me up in the morning, I’ll cook breakfast.’
‘Oh madam, you don’t have to go through so much trouble. The maid will be here in the morning. Tell me what you would like to eat and I’ll tell her to cook that.’
‘What’s her forte?’
‘She cooks everything equally badly.’
‘No issues. I’ll talk to her in the morning.’
‘Shall we sleep now? It’s 3 a.m. When do you have to wake up?’
‘Wake me up when the maid comes.’
‘Okay, goodnight!’
‘I don’t like hearing goodnight at all.’
‘I don’t like it either.’
‘Then why did you say it?’
‘I was just being formal.’
‘All right, you finish with your formalities; I’ll move in with another friend of mine.’
‘I’m sorry, yaar. Won’t happen again. Please don’t move.’
‘All right I won’t go, but I hate sorry and please as well.’
‘Okay, give me back all my sorries, goodnights and pleases.’
‘Here! You’re totally going to remember this. Now go to bed.’
Sudha—drained after that fight with her flatmate—slept soundly, as if she was in her own bed. Chandar couldn’t drift off for quite a while; he felt as if he was sleeping at someone else’s place.
P for Poha
When Chandar woke up in the morning, he found out for the first time how a home felt when two people lived in it. Sudha had taken the Bollywood page out of the newspaper and left the rest of the newspaper scattered. She had an opinion on everything. She even had an issue with the fact that Chandar didn’t read the Bollywood page.
‘Why don’t you read Bollywood news?’
‘I find people in the film line extremely shallow, and their news even more than that. We have put them on a pedestal for no reason.’
‘You don’t know anything about life. As if the rest of the newspaper has useful news.’
‘Of course it does. You get to know what’s going on in the world.’
‘You’re so innocent, yaar. Newspapers hide more than they reveal. They tell us only those things that hide the important things.’
