The Trouble with Rose
Amita Murray

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Amita Murray 2019

Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com

Amita Murray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008291242

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008291259

Version: 2019-01-31

Dedication

anisha

first reader, best sister

s.l.a

because everything is about you

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1: Wedding Day

Chapter 2: Spot the Difference

Chapter 3: The Morning After

Chapter 4: Luncheoning

Chapter 5: Family Melodrama

Chapter 6: Back to Normal

Chapter 7: Not Romance

Chapter 8: Living a Lie. oh, Sorry, I Mean Living a Life

Chapter 9: An Incoherent Narrative

Chapter 10: Romancing the Chickpea

Chapter 11: The Birth of the Theatre

Chapter 12: The Beating of the Heart

Chapter 13: Dinner for Sixty, Please

Chapter 14: A Cat With Nine Lives

Chapter 15: High and Dry

Chapter 16: Walking in Straight Parabolas

Chapter 17: Running but Staying in the Same Place

Chapter 18: Punched

Chapter 19: Running but Paralysed

Chapter 20: Wining and Dining

Chapter 21: Oh, But I Bet You Didn’t Know That

Chapter 22: Model Villages

Chapter 23: A Sticky Kind of Glue

Chapter 24: Lost

Chapter 25: The Rest of the World

Chapter 26: You Jest Not

Chapter 27: No More Teenagers

Chapter 28: But How Can I Not?

Chapter 29: But Then, How Can I?

Chapter 30: Clutching at Straws

Chapter 31: My Nani’s House

Chapter 32: On the Last Day of Christmas

Chapter 33: Dialling in My Sleep

Chapter 34: Lonely Wanderings

Chapter 35: Digging Into the Past

Chapter 36: Sometimes It Fails

Chapter 37: Maybe I Don’t Want to Know

Chapter 38: Not the One I Want

Chapter 39: Isn’t It Ironic

Chapter 40: A Million Reasons to Die

Chapter 41: One Reason to Live

Chapter 42: I Cry

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

1
Wedding Day

In the natural course of things, by the afternoon of her wedding, a bride is thinking ahead to all the things life will have in store for her. Love, joy, romance, silly little spats with her soul-mate that will be sorted out – hopefully in bed, nibbling on toes – and the endless harmony, the never-ending fun and the countless hours she will spend doing nothing much at all in the arms of the love of her life. She imagines that from now on things will be perfect, she will be happy, and gone forever will be anxiety, irritability, chin hair and a generalized tendency towards narkiness. In short, she will become a better, more grown-up version of herself.

She knows that all of this wonderfulness will start with an enormous slice of cake followed by a steamy night in bed, hopefully in a remote tropical island where none of her extended family will be able to call her, text her, tweet her, or otherwise be able to find her. In the normal course of things, on the afternoon of her wedding, a bride is not behind the bars of the local prison waiting for her lawyer to bail her out or for her extended family to tell her all the things that have gone wrong in her life. I’m not saying that this has never happened in the history of weddings. I’m just saying that it is rare.

Before I tell you about my wedding day, I should make a note here – actually it’s more of a disclaimer – about my enormous extended family (mentioned above). Is this story about them, you ask? Well, no. Are they always there, do they have an opinion about everything, and can’t you just ignore them?

Well. Yes, yes, and no.

I have so many cousins, aunties and uncles that live in London that I have to look at every Indian man or woman passing by just to make sure they aren’t one of them. The thing with my relatives is that they tend to feel insulted pretty easily. You should know this before I go on with my story. They keep score of who gives them regular updates about their life and grovels for advice, who invites them to what, and who sends them a box of champagne truffles for Diwali and not just a regular Indian sweet box with plain laddu in it. They also like to write notes.

Dear Rilla,

I hope you enjoy the hundred-and-fifty-piece NutriBullet I sent you. It is a superior brand to the plain three-piece blender sent by Auntie Parul. Thank you for the champagne truffles. I don’t drink (as you know), so I have given them to my cleaner. I know you are too busy to visit us (have you got a job yet?) but I thought that I would remind you that our home is your home. Don’t forget your family.

Best wishes.

Yours truly, etc.

All in all, it is better to turn and stare at every Indian person walking by, just to make sure it isn’t one of the GIF (Great Indian Family) in case you accidentally ignore them. Or, in my case, so you can make a quick getaway. Of course, since every other person you see in London looks more or less Indian, this can make you see monsters lurking around every corner, and turn you into a neurotic mess.

My GIF forms the backdrop of just about everything. They are the wallpaper and the furniture, the muzak, the Thames, London traffic, pollution and global warming rolled into one. They are always there and generally in the way. And no matter how much you think you can deal with them, the truth is you can’t.

Let’s go back now to the matter at hand, the story of the bride who got arrested on her wedding day. I’ll tell you the story the way it happened. Or at least, I’ll tell it to you almost the way it happened. Which is nearly as good.

The setting for the wedding is Bloomington House, a country estate near Cambridge, its rambling red-brick walls charmingly cocooned in a wood of crab-apple and ash. Today, cloud shadows play hide-and-seek on the lawns, and the trees that are waking up in the half-light of spring shiver naked in the breeze, their reflections playing leapfrog with the koi in the pond. Next to the pond is a Japanese meditation garden, where someone has clearly been thinking about alien invasions because there are crop circles ranging all the way from one side to the other in order of size.

In this romantic scene, a large number of cars have recently pulled up and evacuated my numerous relatives in all their colourful glory, tucking in sari trains, sprucing maroon lipstick, jingling bracelets, chattering non-stop. I watch this from a window in the back room in which I am waiting. How long before all of them head into the barn for the wedding ceremony? I scan the grounds. There are too many of them, this is the problem. They keep stopping, gesturing and exclaiming at the view, the manor, the gardens, the weather, each other’s clothes, jewellery, complexion, hair, manicures, the works. Just looking at them is exhausting. I turn and pace the room, my hands on my waist. Why is this dress so tight? I fidget with the buttons at the back but the snug bodice won’t let me stretch my arms far enough.

This will be over soon. This will be over soon. What is the matter with this place? Why is it so hot in here? I fan myself with my hands but it makes no difference.

I look around me. Unlike the garden that is lit up with lanterns, and the hall for the wedding breakfast that is covered at my request in all sorts of roses – red, pink, Cabbage, yellow, white, Hot Cocoa, the lot – the back room in which I’m waiting is white-washed and uninspiring. There are rolled-up yoga mats at one end, chairs piled one on top of the other, a hatch in the wall with a view into the newly painted kitchen, a headless Spiderman on the counter, no doubt forgotten by a child. On the cork board, there are notices for yoga classes, an advert for the local florist, a dog walker whose ‘best friend has always been a dog’ since she was three, a request for clothes for the Salvation Army, a phone number to call if someone spots a missing person and another for people with gonorrhoea.

I stare at them and my breathing gets short and heavy. I look out of the window again. The flock of relatives is thinning but a few linger outside the barn. Come on, come on, come on, I whisper. I stare at them, willing them to go faster, and give me some space in which to think. And maybe to breathe.

My reflection stares back at me, the little bronze hoops in my ears and the band of dark pink and orange flowers pinned all around my head suddenly looking out of place, like they belong to someone else. My silver dress is fuzzy in the window. What made me choose silver? It is washing out my complexion, making me look pasty. My black hair is bundled up on top of my head but already coiled strands are making a getaway. There is a look in my eyes, a maniacal look. Do I always frown like this? I try to relax my forehead, but almost at once the brows knit back together. I rub hard at my forehead.

There is so little air in this room that I am finding it hard to breathe. I take gasping breaths. Finally, every last one of my relatives disappears into the barn, through the wisteria that hangs over the barn door like the tail of a bejewelled pony getting ready for dressage. It’s now or never. I struggle with the window latch. It is jammed shut, having recently been painted over with thick white paint. I push against the window, try to budge the latch. I take off my shoe and pound it, I claw at it with my fingers, rubbing my knuckles raw, but the window doesn’t budge. Not a smidge. I need a wedge, something that will slide under the window, splinter the new paint that has glued it shut. I look all around me. There’s nothing. Nothing! There is a knock at the door. A relative? My fiancé? A summons? I stare at the door then, heart pounding, I walk slowly to open it. Standing outside is a policeman.

‘You need to step this way, miss,’ he says.

I look frantically behind him towards the inner door of the barn. I am supposed to walk through it any moment now. I look at the police officer. His ginger hair has been hastily brushed and there are two croissant crumbs clinging to his enormous moustache. The man was clearly in the middle of his breakfast when he was sent out on this mission.

I take a deep breath and hold out my hands, keeping a wary eye on the barn door.

‘That’s okay, miss,’ the man says. ‘If you cooperate, there’s no need for handcuffs.’

The man is so relaxed his hands are lolling in his pockets. What is the matter with this man? He is smiling and bored at the same time. I am now starting to feel a little faint. Or maybe like I’m going to explode. I am going to burst out of this dress. The tiny buttons at the back are going to ping-ping-ping off me like bullets. I flap my hands to cool myself. I look desperately at the man.

‘Please, please, I—’

‘Now, miss, steady now—’

‘You don’t understand—’

‘Calm down, you need to calm down—’

This is when I scream. My scream rents the air and the man looks startled.

I’m good at screaming. When I was seven, a drama teacher spent a month with my sister and me, basically teaching us how to scream. There’s not a lot I remember about my education – through most of it I was busy trying to show everyone that I was unteachable, bunking lessons, running away from school, sitting morosely with my hands in my pockets and not saying a word when asked a question, getting into endless debates with teachers about the conformist nature of the school system – but I have learnt how to scream.

The man holds out his hands to me. ‘Now, now, miss, there’s no need to be like that about it.’ He still sees no need for restraints, not really. This is all in a day’s work for him. I feel a little affronted that I rank so low on his list of important criminals to track down.

I tear the gerberas off from my head, and the rest of my hair comes bundling down. I stamp on the flowers a few times and scream again. The inner door to the barn bangs open and a small horde of people come crashing through it. Behind them, I can hear a buzzing, like the busy hum of a beehive that can turn into thunder at any moment.

My parents, my fiancé and his parents all try to push into the back room, all at the same time, with my Auntie PK and Auntie Dharma.

My mother, Renu Kumar, first through the door, makes straight for me and grabs my shoulders. Her forehead is deeply furrowed, her pink lipstick indifferently applied and now a little smudged, her purple silk sari with its green border tucked in a little too high at her waist so that you can see her ankles.

‘What’s happening? Who is this man? What’s happening?’ She sounds a little frantic. She stares into my eyes.

Then Simon crashes into the room. His grey suit and tailored burgundy waistcoat with the blue paisley tie tucked in looks good on him but he has already managed to undo the top button of his shirt.

‘I saw a policeman walking up the driveway! What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing! Nothing at all. I—’

‘What are you doing here?’ Simon is staring at the policeman, looking completely confused.

‘Now, sir, there’s no need to panic. I just need to speak to Miss Kumar here, that’s all. At the police station, that is.’

‘You know you’re not supposed to see her!’ My fiancé’s mother waves a hand about, tries in vain to get Simon out of the room. She is wearing a steel-blue skirt, with a long coat and hat to match. She looks as neatly put together as always, but her cheeks are a little red and her pearl necklace slightly askew, giving her a jaunty Camilla Parker Bowles look. Marie Langton has obviously been hitting the gin a little early today.

‘What is all this about, Officer?’ my father Manoj Kumar intones, smoothing back his salt-and-pepper hair that has been styled to such perfection that parallel comb-streaks can still be seen in it. He pats the collar of his Indian sherwani coat – long, gold and white, and too tight for him – that the GIF has made him wear today. ‘Surely, there’s been a mistake. We can get it cleared up in a jiff.’

There’s something about uniforms and official people that makes my father use his posh English, the one from which all trace of an Indian accent has been wiped. His disinfected accent does have its uses in some situations. Not in this one though.

‘Miss,’ the officer says, totally ignoring him, ‘if you come with me quietly, there’s no need for a display.’ He’s looking significantly at me. The man actually wants me to go quietly, he doesn’t want to make a fuss and that’s not out of laziness, I can see that. He is trying to protect my feelings. If he doesn’t have to say what he’s arresting me for in front of my family and in-laws, he won’t.

Everyone is staring at me. There is a sea of unblinking eyes, all waiting for me to speak.

‘The thing is,’ I look from face to face, ‘here’s the thing. See? I’m being arrested for shoplifting. You see what I’m saying?’ I say it with the air of someone about to choreograph a song to the theme. If this were a musical, I would be singing it. The thing is, the thing is, folks, be-ware! I am being arrested because I am wild as a hare! A hare, you say? A hare, I say! A hare? A hare! A hare? Be-ware! I think I’m going to pass out. I stare frantically from face to face. Get me out of here, get me out of here, I want to say, but nothing comes out.

‘That’s piffle,’ my father says to the police officer. ‘Rilla is a good girl. She would never do such a thing.’ He looks genuinely confused. It’s like my teenage years have left no impression on his memory.

My mother’s chin is trembling though. She’s pulling out a hanky that she has tucked into the sleeve of her sari blouse. My mother has the tendency to burst into tears. In family pictures she can be seen in the background with a hanky covering her eyes. Of course, since every family picture is crammed with the GIF, you would have to really be searching – a Where’s-Wally-scale search – to find her.

Now my father is patting her on her back and making shush-shush noises. It’s my wedding day, I’m getting arrested, and it’s just been revealed to everyone that I am a kleptomaniac. But no, my father is comforting my mother. Everything is upside down.

‘Darling, what’s going on?’ Simon asks. He has tucked a Hot Cocoa rose in the lapel of his new grey suit just for me, and his eyes, his eyes are even now looking lovingly at me. I swallow painfully. I don’t want to hurt him, but I know I’m going to. He places a hand on my shoulder. He is medium height, though this still makes him a good few inches taller than me. His dark hair falls over his forehead just the way I like it. ‘This is just a mistake, isn’t it? We should really get on with it. There’s a crowd of people waiting.’

The thing with Simon is he always thinks the best of me (and he hates to keep people waiting). He’s loyal, doesn’t worry a lot about little things and he rarely has any problems with other people. Which basically makes him the opposite of me.

‘I did something stupid. I’m so sorry.’ Suddenly my shoulders are slumped and there is a crack in my voice. I hate this kind of thing in myself. You think you are dealing with a situation in one way and then your body betrays you and it turns out you are not dealing with it at all. I realize that right about now I could do with a hug, but no one is offering me one.

‘This won’t take long, sir,’ the police officer says to Simon. ‘Now if you just—’

‘We’re about to get married though.’ Simon frowns. ‘You can’t just take her away. What’s your proof anyway?’

‘I am not at liberty to discuss the details, sir.’ The officer smoothens his moustache.

‘Can’t you wait till they’re married?’ My mother’s hands are clasped, beseeching. ‘At least wait till they’re married. Please, you have to!’

My mother – the only one in this room who really knows me, besides my sister Rose – has always said that no one will want to marry me. I’m just too rude, clumsy, stupid, standoffish, unfeminine and ungroomed. At the moment she just wants to make sure that I get married quickly, before Simon finds out what I’m really like. The one thing she is sure would never happen is now actually starting to look like it never will. There is an ominous twitch in her cheek.

One of the aunties, Auntie Dharma, is counting her beads. ‘I told you not to fix a date when Mercury was retrograde. Shani is in the house of marriage.’ She is wearing a salwar-suit, her chunni placidly on her head, and a long thin white plait lying mousily on her back. She is skinny, her face as wrinkled as a prune, and her large eyes goggle from behind thick black spectacles. She calls herself a spiritual healer and works in a local meditation centre. She believes luck in marriage comes from your karma in a past life.

The other auntie, Auntie PK – the journalist who only ever wears khadi cotton, only ever in shades of beige, and doesn’t pluck her eyebrows or wax her upper lip or armpits – is looking cross and saying that someone will pay for this. She means some man somewhere in an air-conditioned office drinking a macchiato before changing for his tennis game. Her short spiky hair is standing up all around her head.

I breathe deeply. I can get through this, I’ve been through worse. And this isn’t the first time I’ve been arrested. But the walls of the white room are closing in on me. There are too many people between me and the door. I look hopelessly at the window. This is when Rose steps in.

Rose. My beautiful sister Rose, in her long silver dress – silver is really her colour, not mine, her beautiful hair blacker than black, her eyes dark as coal, her rosebud mouth, a glow all around her body, walks up to me and gives me a hug. I swallow painfully. A tear escapes but it disappears in Rose’s hair – or she brushes it away for me, knowing I hate people seeing me cry. It is just like Rose, she knew I needed a hug. No one else did. But she did.

She pulls back now and looks into my eyes. ‘It’ll be all right. Okay? Okay?’

I swallow and nod. I try to take deep breaths.

She cups my cheek in her hand. ‘This is not a big deal. You’re bigger than this.’

‘We’ll get a lawyer,’ Simon’s father John Langton cuts in. He is short and broad-boned, his hair cut neatly so that all the strands are exactly the same length. His eyes are a pale grey, so that they seem to look through you, not like Simon and his mother’s dark blue.

‘You are a lawyer,’ Simon reminds him.

‘We’ll get a lawyer,’ his father says.

At the police station, things happen quickly. Since what I have stolen costs less than two hundred pounds, I am told that I will be turned away with a police caution. Though, if I accept these terms, this will still count as a conviction and I will have a criminal record. (It’s true I’ve been arrested before but, since I was underage at the time, I didn’t get a criminal record.) When the officer interrogating me suggests the caution, I say, ‘I will take this under advisement.’ I have been waiting all my life to say these words. I confer with my lawyer, and I take the caution and the criminal record that comes with it. When we come out, my lawyer (organized by my nearly-father-in-law), a middle-aged woman called Gudrun, who is built like a Rottweiler, tells me to get a grip on my life.

‘Grow up. Get therapy. Next time, you’ll get fined or do time. And it’ll get really difficult to get a job. Kosher?’

Various members of my family are standing about outside the police station, waiting to pick me up. Simon is pacing up and down, ignoring everyone. The moment he sees me, he rushes up to me and engulfs me in a hug. He holds me tight and I stand rigid, not feeling like I can touch him right now, though I can feel the thudding of his heart.

He pulls back finally and searches my eyes. ‘Rilla, we can still do this. They didn’t want to give us another slot, but they did in the end. Let’s do it now. Okay?’ He’s still looking at me like I’m the most important person in the world. He has taken his jacket and tie off and he probably has no idea where they are. I love this about him. I love that he doesn’t care where half his clothes are.

‘Simon,’ I whisper, ‘I shoplifted. Don’t you see? That’s not normal.’

‘You’re under a lot of stress. The wedding, and the warning about not completing your MA. It happened. It happens to a lot of people.’ He looks firm. ‘If you just put one foot in front of another, it’ll be over soon. Then we can deal with the rest of it.’

‘Don’t you see?’ my voice cracks. ‘I can’t do this. I’m – not ready.’

‘You want to postpone the wedding? Okay, okay, look, we can do that. We’ll do whatever you want. Whatever you need.’ He is scanning my face, trying to sound re-assuring, though I can see none of this is making sense to him, none of it is really sinking in.

I look at him wordlessly. How can I explain it to him? How can I find words for something that I can’t fully understand myself?

I mutely shake my head. ‘The thing is, Simon,’ I blurt out finally, ‘I can’t go through with it. None of this is working.’

‘I told you,’ says my mother, tears pouring down her cheeks.

Somehow I escape everyone. I think it is because I scream, ‘Leave me alone!’ and disappear down into the underground before anyone can stop me. I enter a train at random, staring down anyone who dares to look at me, standing there holding on for dear life, still in my silver wedding dress. After a few random stations have whizzed by, I get off. I run out of the tube station and I end up on a park bench, bent double, face in hands, taking gasping breaths.

I say I escaped everyone, but I didn’t, because Rose is here with me.

I sit up. ‘I made such a mess of it. I always make a mess of it. Rose, why can’t I get one thing right?’ The tears that have been threatening all morning now start to pour down my face.

She takes my hand. She sits quietly, just holding my hand. Sometimes I think it’s uncanny how she knows just what I need her to do. When you’ve grown up with someone, maybe you get so used to each other that you know what every movement means. Every gesture comes with its code, every mood, each slump of the shoulders, every turning away. My sister knows the code. She can sense it before I can.

The fit of crying passes after a while and I sit there, my nose red, sniffles catching in my throat.

‘I guess you knew I was going to break up with him?’ I say now. I don’t look at her. I don’t need to, I know the look on her face. She doesn’t respond.

I stare blankly around me, where life seems to be carrying on as normal. A swan sits regally on the edge of a duck pond, its mate doing laps in the water. A chunky peanut-butter Kit-Kat wrapper sits next to an overfull bin that is starting to smell of dead rat in the sunshine. The bench I am sitting on has been dedicated to Lady Cornelia North, who donated it to the council in 1986. Red buses line the park, parents with dark circles under their eyes determinedly push buggies, a jogger talks to herself as she fast-walks past. I shut my eyes tight.

‘I guess I knew,’ Rose says.

‘I’m hopeless.’ I place my face in my hands again. ‘I wreck everything.’

‘Why this though, Rilla? I thought Simon was the one.’

I jerk my head. ‘He barely knows me. He thinks I’m perfect. I’m the opposite of perfect. You know! It wouldn’t have worked. How could it ever have worked?’

‘What if I make you the most beautiful garland in the world, Princess Multan, my phool, my Queen of Roses, Princess of Hearts?’ Rose’s voice becomes rounder, louder. Like she’s talking in a theatre, her voice ricocheting off moonbeams.

I speak through my tears. ‘Then perhaps I will marry you, Rup. Is that really your name?’

Rose gently blots away my tears, then she bows ironically. ‘Of course, my princess. It is I, Rup Singh. I was a prince once. A sorceress turned me into a commoner. I wait for the love of a true princess to change me back into the real me.’ Rose switches back to her normal voice. She speaks as if seeing this scene in her mind’s eye, from a long time ago. ‘And now you sit on the balcony waiting for the garland. You comb your beautiful black hair. Roses bloom in your cheeks. Your delicate hands cradle your heart. Your voice, like a nightingale’s, sings to your lover. To me.’

‘My lover with swarthy brown cheeks and coarse hands,’ I say. ‘But I love you anyway. And you come back with the most beautiful garland in the world, made of roses and marigolds, jasmine and hot-house zinnias. And in the centre, forming the heart pendant, a moth orchid. The most precious flower in the world for the most beautiful princess. You scurry up the trellis outside my window like a monkey. You give me the garland. I give you a kiss and promise to marry you.’

‘And I turn into a girl,’ Rose says.

We both laugh. My laugh has a catch in it, but it’s a laugh nonetheless.

‘I turn into a little brown nut of a girl,’ my sister says. ‘Ugly and scrawny, shifty and sly. Because the witch that transformed me did so not from a prince, but a princess. Now I am back. I am not Rup, but Rupa Singh.’

‘Oh well,’ I say softly, looking at her face now, shimmering in front of my eyes, ‘I promised to marry you, so I will.’

‘You will take me for your partner?’ Rose says. ‘Even though I am a woman?’

‘No one is perfect,’ I say.

We laugh. Laugh at this script that we know better than anything we’ve ever said. Because we’ve rehearsed it a thousand times, performed it a hundred. When I was seven, and Rose was nine.

‘Rose,’ I whisper. ‘Rose.’

We sit together, neither saying a word. I am scared to break the silence, scared that this moment will disappear.

‘I don’t think I know how,’ I finally say. The words well up. ‘Don’t you see? I don’t know how to make it work. I don’t know how to be with someone. I have never known.’ I look desperately in front of me, searching for something that isn’t there. Rose doesn’t say anything.

‘That is where I have to go back, isn’t it?’ I say it softly. ‘I have to go back to that. To Princess Multan and Rup Singh. To those living rooms in Tooting and Wembley and Harrow and Hampstead. That’s where I have to go.’

Rose doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to. She knows as well as I that to make love work, you have to go back to where you learnt how to love.

2
Spot the Difference

Hold up two illustrations and spot the differences between them.

So I told you a story, the story of my wedding day. As I told you, it was almost the story of my wedding day. Actually, in all important details, it was the story.

But if you hold up the two pictures, one real, one almost-real, you’ll spot ten differences. Let’s go through the list.

One. I told you that the back room in which I was waiting, the one with the yoga mats and chairs, the back room of the main building of Bloomington House, an estate in Cambridgeshire, was white-washed. In actual fact, I think it was eggshell blue.

Two. I said that the name of the estate was Bloomington House, but in fact it is Bloomington Manor.

Three. Auntie PK, the feminist, was not wearing unrelieved beige. Thinking back, I can see in my mind’s eye that she had actually taken the trouble to wear an oxblood scarf. Auntie PK was either trying to make an effort – a bit of colour for a wedding – or making a statement.

‘You are Indian,’ I can imagine her saying, ‘yet getting married in a silver dress. Shouldn’t you be wearing red? What are you, white?’

Or, who knows, she could have been wearing it under threat from whichever auntie had knitted it for her.

Four. My mother’s hanky was not tucked into her sleeve today. She had pinned it to the green train or pallu of her sari for the occasion. She had made an effort, even if she had been certain the wedding would come to nothing, she would tell me later.

Five. There wasn’t a slump in my shoulders when I was facing Simon and my family. If I look carefully at the actual picture, the real one, not the almost-real one, my shoulders are riding up. It’s my defensive look, the one my mother is always quick to point out. ‘It isn’t attractive, Rilla, and no one will want to marry you.’

Six. I told you that Auntie Dharma said that Mercury was in my fifth house. But for all I know about this, she could have said that the Savannah Bird Girl was making sweet love to a humpback whale in the garden. I have no idea what she said, but it was definitely something about a planet in our solar system messing up whichever one of my houses deals with marriage.

Seven. When Simon’s father said we should get a lawyer and Simon reminded him that he is a lawyer, Simon’s father stage-whispered, ‘I’m not going to be dragged into one of your messes. If you had any sense, you wouldn’t be either.’ Simon’s father doesn’t hate me. But for him, someone who has been arrested doesn’t belong in the Langton family; they besmirch the family name. Well no, I don’t think he cares about the family name. It’s more that carelessness – the kind that gets you arrested, the kind that shows a disregard for morality or at least decorum – makes him feel physically ill. It’s the way mortgage brokers feel about people with poor Experian scores. That is how Simon’s father feels about my record. Simon shouldn’t have told him that I had been arrested in the past, you say? Well, he didn’t. I did. The first time I met him, which was two months ago. Which was four months after I met Simon. Your eyebrows are rising now. A bit hasty to be calling the banns, you say? Well, you could just be right, and we will come back to this, I promise.

Eight. Simon is too nice to remind me that my MA committee has warned that if I don’t make any progress in my thesis, then I am out. Out, out, out. Forever. He is too nice, and also I haven’t told him about that yet. I would have gotten round to it, but I hadn’t yet. So he couldn’t have reminded me even if he had wanted to.

Nine. You’ve probably already noticed this one, it’s quite glaring. I’m sure you spotted it right away. I’m the small brown nut. My sister Rose is the princess, tall, beautiful, fair, her skin bathing in permanent blossoms. So, in that little sketch we re-enacted on the park bench, of course Rose is Princess Multan, who weighs as much as a flower, whose every word pours out of her like birdsong, whose beauty is shielded by groves so dense that no one but the most daring prince could get through. Beautiful and kind, soulful and lyrical, that’s my sister. I am Rup Singh, her suitor, a walnut, hoping that my skill in making garlands will help her overlook the fact that I am ugly and that I am a girl. In the play we enacted as children, Rose was the princess, I was the suitor. I changed this around in that scene on the park bench.

Ten. Rose of course wasn’t at the wedding at all or on the park bench. The last time I saw her was seventeen years ago. Still, that doesn’t mean that she isn’t the one person in the world who knows me best. And that she wouldn’t have said and done exactly those things if she had been there.

3
The Morning After

The next morning, I wake up from a dream that I can’t remember. I panic because I don’t know where I am. I stare all around me blindly, then things in my room slowly start to come into focus. The thick wooden beams that divide the attic room into bedroom and bathroom solidify, and the fairy lights, strung up on the wall above my bed, draw into focus. A blue Massive Attack poster that reads ‘Unfinished Symphony’ stares down at the bed, and next to it a dog finds a ladder to the moon in a Miro print. Through the large window on the opposite wall, I see the park lined with trees, two children playing hopscotch in the playground, a man blowing leaves around and a Joker sitting on a bench, beer bottle in hand, his exaggerated red lips smudged and his purple coat a little the worse for wear. He is leering into the distance, seemingly straight at me.

I spring out of bed and pull the blackout curtains shut, not letting a single file of light into the room. My head pressed hard on my fisted hands, I keep a firm hold on the curtains, just in case they spring open again. I turn around, keeping my eyes half closed.

What else is waiting to attack me? On the slouchy sofa-chair with red stripes that I dragged home from a car boot some weeks ago and that Simon and I pushed and pulled up three flights of stairs lies my discarded wedding dress. It looks like it’s never been worn, like it has quickly got rid of any memory of me. Not a billow or a crease, not a broken button to remind me of how it might have been if Simon had slipped it off me last night.

I shove it under the bed, but now the sofa-chair is staring at me accusingly. It seems to murmur, Why did you do it, Rilla, why did you do it? I run to my bed, drag my duvet off it and fling it on the sofa-chair, but I can still see its shape. I fling myself face down on the bed. I am safer now, now that I can’t see the things in my room, but the dream starts to come back in threads and there’s that choking feeling in my throat again. There is Simon in my dream wearing an orange t-shirt that says ‘Go Bahamas’. I’m wearing pretty much what I’m wearing now, a tank top and floral pyjama bottoms. I don’t know what I have said to the dream-Simon, or what I have done, but he looks stubborn. He has that look on his face that he gets when we argue, the jaw clenched, the ocean-blue eyes remote and unreachable. He will never forgive me. He should never forgive me. My mother is standing behind him, her arms crossed over her chest. You always do this, she says, you always push people away. I told you. I told you! And then it comes back to me. There had been someone else in my dream, standing behind my mother, looking at me with sad eyes. A dog. Mine and Rose’s dog, Gus-Gus. I gasp for breath as the memory of the dream hits me. Gus-Gus, when was the last time I dreamed of Gus-Gus?

The dream-memory threatens to choke me so I jump off the bed, push my hair to the top of my head, stick a hairclip into it and start cleaning. I have to clean. I have to do something with my hands or I’ll go mad. There is stuff everywhere. There should be boxes, ready to go to the flat Simon and I are – were – moving into, in Crystal Palace. But there aren’t because I hadn’t got that far yet. I had only got to the point of pulling things out of closets and drawers and staring at them. I start folding. Picking up, folding, placing in drawers. This is a good task to do, I can do it for hours. I can do it for the rest of my life.

I’m halfway through the first drawer when my phone rings. It is my mother. I close my eyes, willing her to go away. My parents are possibly the last people I want to talk to right now, but she keeps ringing. After the seventh missed call, I tap the green button.

‘Rilla,’ my mother says without so much as a hello, ‘what are you doing?’ She doesn’t mean right now, in my room at this particular moment, but generally, with my life. ‘Why do you have to ruin everything?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I mutter. I stab viciously at strands of my hair that are trying to escape the hairclip.

‘What are you trying to do, show Simon that you’re thoughtless, selfish? Rilla, he’ll find out what you’re really like, don’t you see, and then what will happen?’ Her voice has a panicky note in it, a twang of desperation. ‘You’re twenty-five. When are you going to grow up? Are you there? Are you listening? You can’t treat people like they’re nothing, you just can’t!’

‘Really?’ I grind my teeth. ‘You’ve always said I’m really good at it.’ I whack at a t-shirt to get it into shape and fling it into a drawer, holding the phone between my ear and shoulder.

‘Do you think Simon will take you back after what you did? How will we face him again?’

We?

‘Did I say I want him to take me back?’ I mime thwacking the phone on the floor a few times. ‘Did I say that?’

‘We just want you to be happy. What is wrong with that? Tell me, what is wrong with that?’

‘You want me to be happy?’ I say slowly. ‘Now that’s too much, Mum. I would have said that’s the one thing you’ve never wanted me to be.’

My mother is breathing hard now, I can hear her. I squeeze my eyes tightly shut but the familiar guilt is starting to creep up. My father takes the phone, and in the background I hear my mother say, ‘I don’t know what he sees in her, Manoj, I really don’t!’

‘Rilla, why have you upset your mother? Can you have one conversation that doesn’t end like that?’ Dad says. He doesn’t sound annoyed, he just sounds like my dad – tired and resigned. I picture him sticking a finger and thumb in his eyes and rubbing wearily.

‘Well, Dad, why don’t you tell me?’

‘Rilla, beta—’

‘Sorry,’ I mutter. ‘I’m going now. Sorry, okay? Just – don’t call me, please, okay?’ When I put down the phone, I notice missed calls from Simon, some from last night, others from this morning when my phone was on silent. There is also a text message: Please call me. Just let me know you’re okay.

Tears threaten to rise but I push them down. Not now, Rilla. This is not the time. I stab at my face with the back of my hand and carry on tidying.

I clean obsessively. I can’t think about Simon. I can’t think about Simon and I can’t think about my mother. And I definitely can’t think about Gus-Gus.

After an hour, I give up trying to sort my room out and walk slowly downstairs to the living room. My flatmate Federico is sitting in the middle of the floor in child’s pose, looking in through the window of a miniature Victorian house.

The flat Federico and I share is part of a three-flat house in Lewisham. When I started my MA three years ago, I came across a pamphlet on a notice board at university, advertising for a flatmate. It gave details of the flat, and then ended with the words, ‘Even if you hate everyone else, you’ll love me!’ We met on campus and had a long chat about American politics, Simon Cowell and Lucozade (and how much we couldn’t stand any of those things). I told him about my favourite Mexican restaurant – La Choza in Brighton – and he told me he would make me nachos (all made from scratch) once a fortnight if I lived with him. I moved in the following week.

As I step into the living room, a floorboard creaks under my weight, and the four walls of Federico’s model house collapse. Down comes the sloping roof.

‘Oof,’ Federico says, sitting up. His springy curls are standing up all around his head, his hands are now on his small-boy hips. He is wearing his red tracky bottoms that say ‘Ho Ho Hoe’. A joint sits next to him in an ashtray and there’s some Tibetan chanting emerging in wafts out of his phone. ‘Do you have to come crashing in here like a water buffalo?’

Federico has discovered a passion for model villages and he is trying to build the San Francisco of the 1900s. So far he has built two Victorian houses, one pink, one lilac, a few lamp posts, a post box, and a road – at the moment they look like a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, craggy angles, buildings falling everywhere, everything grey and smudged, all rather steampunk.

‘If you can figure out how to build them so they actually look like something real, that would make a difference,’ I say irritably.

‘Regretting it now?’ he asks, bending down again, trying to get the structure back up, one wall at a time, holding his pinky fingers out for balance. His stare is so dark and intense that his eyes look like they are lined with eyeliner.

I flop down on the window sill. ‘No,’ I say. ‘No, I am not.’

‘Okay, then,’ Federico says. ‘I’m glad you’re happy with your decision. It must be a good feeling.’

Federico is from Mexico. He is short and wiry, and has a mass of curly hair that comes out of his head like an explosion. He is on a post-graduate scholarship to study music at Trinity. He had been accepted by Columbia, but he decided to move to London instead as a protest against the divisionary politics of the American government. (Also he didn’t get a visa.) When he is being sarcastic he talks in exactly the same tone as when he’s not, so sometimes it’s difficult to know if he’s being serious. At the moment, though, his meaning is crystal clear. I glare at him. After a few minutes, I finally think of a good comeback.

‘And anyway, you think you’re better at relationships?’ Ha, take that, Federico.

He rolls his eyes. ‘Is that the best you can do? I never said I am good at relationships. But chucking someone at the altar, that would be a first, even for me. Still, as long as you are happy …’ He peers at one of the walls of the model house. He holds it straight up, then upside down, then sideways. He abstractedly scratches the C and D tattoo on his right shoulder, then grunts and rummages in his petite toolbox.

‘Happiness is overrated.’ I examine my hands, my customary clipped nails buffed and polished with transparent nail polish by an auntie for the wedding. ‘Can you think of times in your life when you’ve been truly happy?’

‘Are you saying you can’t?’ Federico says, shovelling through the toolbox, picking up and discarding tools. ‘That is truly tragic, chica.’

A vision arises in my mind. A vision of being chased up and down the house by my sister Rose. Giggling helplessly, hiding in cupboards, behind curtains, under chairs and tables, getting tickled till I was upside down and inside out. The helpless giggles, the cries of ‘Rose, stop! Rose, stop!’ ringing in my ears. Rose’s face, leaning in, checking to see if I was okay, if I really wanted her to stop. I never did, not really. And she would go at it again, and I would run shrieking through the house. Yes, I want to say, yes, I can remember a time in my life when I was truly happy. I can still feel it in my body so it must have been real. It’s just that it was a long time ago and I was a different person then. I pick up a cushion and try to push it into my eyes. These are unnecessary memories. I don’t need them and I don’t want them. I can’t have them.

‘Everyone has the capacity for happiness,’ Federico says. ‘Now take what you did to Simon—’

‘Can we talk about something else?’ I say through the cushion.

Why can’t people talk about something, anything, else? I close my eyes but Simon’s face seems to be imprinted on the insides of my eyelids because I can see him even when I shut them tight. And he doesn’t look stubborn like he did in my dream. He looks something else, something I’d never seen until yesterday, until the afternoon of our wedding when I told him I couldn’t be with him any more. He had looked like he couldn’t understand what I was saying. He had looked lost.

‘Bad karma to leave someone at the altar. And if you’ve done it, at least tell him why.’

‘Seriously, Federico, drop it.’

‘Avoidance helps no one, chica.’

I emerge from my cushion and snap. ‘I know you like playing the therapist. But how come we never talk about you? Why don’t you look at why your relationships don’t work? What are you afraid of?’

Federico has gone through four boyfriends in the last year. He is with someone he cares about now, but they always seem to be at odds. If I can change the subject, throw it back in his face, maybe he’ll leave me alone. Maybe I’ll feel like I’m not the only broken one.

He shrugs, picks a buff he likes and starts shaving the wall to even it out. ‘I don’t push people away. I’m not intentionally cruel.’

I grind my teeth. ‘I am not – maybe your boyfriends don’t like that you act like you’re straight,’ I snap.

There is silence. Not much changes in Federico’s face. There’s a slight shift, a clicking of his jaw, but not much else.

I want to claw my tongue out. I want to sit up and slap my face a few times. What is the matter with me? It’s like words spring out of my mouth and I have no control over them.

‘Sorry. Okay? Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’ I have the stupid impulse to ask, Do you still like me? Please say you still like me. But I never say things like that, and I don’t say it now. Even though I could do with some people liking me right about now.

Finally, after many suspended moments, Federico moves, he reaches out a hand. The four walls of Federico’s model house are standing up together. He takes one down and starts cutting out a square shape to make a window. He can’t quite get the four sides to be the same length, so the window is getting bigger and bigger. I watch him at this task for a while. He is no longer talking to me. In fact, he’s acting like I’m not here. I sigh and leave him to it.

Outside our house there is a lonely patio on which people rarely sit. Sitting there bears the risk of being sociable, so everyone avoids it, and this works perfectly for me. Sometimes I leave a pair of smelly socks there to drive the point home. I go down to it now and sit down heavily on the swing, hugging my knees to myself. I can’t tell if I never want to see Simon’s face again or if all I want is for him to come walking up to the house right now. A tinny twang-twang-twang is coming from the ground-floor flat. Our downstairs neighbour Phil (who is a teacher in training) wants to join a mariachi band and Federico is teaching him the vihuela. I clamp my hands over my ears. There are workmen digging outside the park across the road. They’ve been there for weeks, and the local residents are complaining to the council about how the noise is bad for their children. This has to be the noisiest street in the world. I stare into the distance.

My neighbour Earl rides past on his mobility scooter. Earl’s mobility scooter is the Cecil Turtle of vehicles. It is so slow that I can say hello, pop inside, put the kettle on, make my vanilla Rooibos chai, pop back out, drink the entire mugful and say goodbye to him as he rides out of sight. When he sees me this morning he does a double-take. Yup, I’m still here. I’m not on my way to my blissful new life with Simon.

‘To get somewhere, you have to leave the house, Rilla!’ Earl calls as he slo-mos past.

I curl my mouth. ‘I’ve always been better at staying put, Earl. That’s the problem.’

His snowy shock of hair blows gently in the breeze as he glides past.

That’s when I notice that I have a text message. 20 mins, it says.

For a moment, I’m paralysed. I stare at it like I can’t understand the words.

It is from my cousin Jharna. It was sent eighteen minutes ago. This means I have two minutes before the GIF arrives. I run inside and fling myself up the stairs and all the way up to my room in the attic. I barricade myself, I wedge the dresser inside the closed door, I place a dozen or so books on top of the dresser. I sit down on the stripy sofa-chair, cover myself with the duvet and squeeze my eyes shut. The GIF is on its way.

4
Luncheoning

Two minutes after I disappear inside my room, my parents, an auntie and an uncle, and Jharna turn up. Federico lets them in. I can hear them downstairs in the living room. Well, that’s just fine. They can sit and chat with Federico for as long as they like. There’s absolutely no reason I need to leave my room. I will read a book. I pick one up from on top of my dresser and stare at the words. It is one of my books for my MA thesis: Roland Barthes saying something about love, something about how we meet millions of people in our life, but out of these we only truly love one. I snap the book shut. One out of millions! His arithmetic is clearly all wrong, that’s the problem with Barthes. How can anyone find love if faced with such odds? The man is a kook!

I look at the clock on the wall. I spring up off the chair, crouch on the floor and put my ear down to it. The odd thing is that the GIF has been there for a quarter of an hour but no one has bothered to even come up and knock at my door. Well, that suits me perfectly. What I need is exercise, I’m so restless I feel like I’m going to break things. I pace up and down, do some push-ups against the wall, and jog around the room. The buzzer rings. At once, I’m on the floor again, my ear pressed to it. I can’t hear anything for a few minutes. Someone, probably Federico, has walked all the way down to the front door, and then walked up again, slower this time. There are some exclamations, followed by silence. Then there it is. The sure waft of cheesy dough. The wily bastards have ordered pizza! I jump up and look out of my window. In the distance I see the delivery man. He’s from our local and they do really good pizzas. There’s the usual pepperoni and chicken sausage and farmhouse, but they also do goats cheese and caramelized onion, butternut squash and spicy bacon. My tummy moans, long and slowly. All of a sudden, I desperately want pizza. I’ve eaten nothing but Federico’s kale chips and tonic water since yesterday, my stomach turning at the thought of food after what I did to Simon, but now I can smell it. I can smell the pizza. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can hear them chewing. I pace around the room for another five minutes. Argh! I hate them so much!

I give in to the inevitable and walk slowly downstairs where a small army seems to be crammed into my living room.

‘Talk some sense into her, men don’t like it if you take them for granted,’ my Auntie Pinky says as soon as she sees me. She is munching pepperoni pizza.

I leap at a random pizza box and inhale half a slice in two bites. I close my eyes. It’s the tastiest thing I’ve ever eaten. Spicy sausage. I shudder it’s so good.

I turn around to look at the assembled company. ‘Hey Auntie Pinky, Uncle Jat,’ I give them a wave. I munch up the rest of my slice and grab another one.

Of course my Uncle Jatinder – my mother’s brother – and Auntie Pinky are here. They are always here. They are self-appointed custodians of everything. Everything that anyone in the GIF does or wants to do has to go through them. If you’re getting a job, a haircut, a mortgage, a pet, a manicure, a degree, a marriage license, a wax, it has to be discussed with Uncle Jat and Auntie Pinky so that they can tell you the best way to go about it.

Auntie Pinky is short and plump, her hair is uncoloured with two white wings (we call them the East Wing and the West Wing) that make her look like a zebra crossing. Uncle Jat has soft curves, he wears glasses with a gold chain attached and his hands gesture softly when he talks. He wears kohlapuri slippers even in the dead of winter and sneezes soundlessly by squeezing his nose. He doesn’t look it, but he is very good at all things finance. They own a catering business, an empire really, that supplies Indian restaurants with dessert.

‘Let’s not heckle the girl, Pinky,’ he says.

‘Thanks, Uncle Jat.’ I munch on the crust. Even the crust is good. Crunchy and skinny and cheesy, just the way I like it. ‘I ate frogs’ legs on pizza once,’ I say to no one in particular.

My parents, Uncle Jat and Auntie Pinky are all jammed into the one sofa in the room. It isn’t a large living room and the GIF is making it leak at the seams. Federico is sitting on the cane rocking chair. I have nowhere to sit, so I stand leaning against a wall.

Suddenly Auntie Pinky slaps her head with a hand. She gets up, walks to a large shopping bag that is sitting in the corner of the room, brings out an enormous plastic box and starts laying homemade cupcakes onto a tray, since apparently several boxes of pizza are not enough to feed our small GIF army.

‘I came prepared,’ Auntie Pinky says, holding up the tray, ‘with Rilla not having a tray.’ She turns to look at me. ‘What do you do when you have guests anyway, Rilla, please tell me?’

‘I don’t,’ I say.

‘Well, you have Simon. I expect he comes around all the time,’ Auntie Pinky says. ‘What?’ she says, turning around and looking at everyone – even though no one has said anything. ‘I’m a liberal. They were nearly married. You think I don’t know that he comes around all the time? Anyway, you should own a tray, Rilla. A man likes to know he’s appreciated.’

‘And I need a tray for that?’ I goggle at her.

‘How do you bring him a cup of tea?’ Auntie Pinky says, raising her eyebrows. She forgets the cupcakes for a second to fixate on this fresh disaster. ‘Seriously?’

‘He brings me – used to bring me – a beer out of the fridge,’ I respond.

‘Oye, what are we living in? An episode of Friends?’ Auntie Pinky says.

‘Anyway,’ Uncle Jat says, opening his eyes wide and looking at us significantly, ‘let us not make a mountain out of a tray.’ He chuckles at his own joke. ‘Look, Rilla, we will take care of everything.’ He wipes his fingers on a tissue. ‘We’ll get the criminal record dropped first, then we’ll talk to Simon. People make mistakes all the time. I spoke to his father on the phone this morning …’

‘You did what?’ I shriek. I unpeel from the wall like someone whipping off a plaster – in one quick definite motion.

Uncle Jat is unperturbed. ‘We are in a precarious position, after what you did. But I called him and I said let us not cry over spilt milk. I said, in my humble opinion, the girl is afraid of – you know – the hanky-panky business. Indian girls are shy like that.’

I groan. ‘I want to die.’ I slump against the wall again and close my eyes.

‘I said maybe we can settle the matter over a drink.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He was most amenable. Very reasonable man. He said he wouldn’t dream of inconveniencing me like that. And of course the wedding would be back on, there was no negotiation necessary. White people know how to be rational, I have always said that.’

‘It is all right, Rilla. We have your back,’ Auntie Pinky says. ‘I will make chicken tikka masala if necessary. And we will serve the finest scotch. Nothing is too good for you.’ She smooths her sari. ‘And also the situation is desperate.’

My mother’s family were well-off when she was growing up, but Uncle Jat has taken ‘well-off’ to a new level. His dessert empire keeps going from strength to strength, providing desserts not only for Indian weddings and parties, but increasingly for big events like Wimbledon and Royal Ascot. Instead of distancing him from the rest of the family, this wealth has made him feel like he owns everyone. No, that is a mean thing to think. It’s more that he feels he has to take care of everyone, make sure that they are living their life correctly. He is of the mind that there is no problem that can’t be solved if you have money to throw at it. Uncle Jat and Auntie Pinky like to tell you where you are going wrong, and then be the ones to fix it.

My mother Renu is crammed into a corner of the sofa, perched in about two inches of space. She is accusing me with her eyes. As far as she is concerned, if things have gone wrong in my life, it is no one’s fault but my own. She is wearing a plain navy sari today, probably to express that this is a sad, sombre day. An African Bee-Eater brooch holds her sari in place, given to her by one of her Ugandan students. She teaches Life in the UK classes, telling her students that people in this country eat with a knife and fork, that they don’t squat on toilet seats, that mince pies have no meat in them, and that Henry VIII beheaded his wives because divorce was not allowed back then. She tells them that the first fish and chip shop was opened in 1860 by a Jewish immigrant.

Her chin is trembling and she’s doing her hand-flapping thing. ‘If you only thought of other people for once. What will happen now, what will become of you? What will Simon’s family think of us?’

I incline my head to look at her. ‘That hand-flapping makes you look like a geisha.’

She stops abruptly. Dad gives me a really, why? kind of look. He is back in his customary check shirt today, tucked neatly into his jeans, his brown belt tied a little too tight. His hair has been ruthlessly combed so that no stray strands can spring up. He is looking apprehensively at Mum. For someone who has written a book on Indian street theatre called Nautanki and Other North Indian Curiosities, who loves melodrama on the stage and on the page, he shies away from all forms of it in real life. My father, the great pacifier, the one who steps in as soon as he smells a storm brewing. The one who will do anything to keep at bay a painful truth.

My mum has no such hang-ups. ‘Why did you do it? Why, Rilla, why? After everything we do for you, this is how you repay us. It is like a slap in the face.’

‘Yes,’ I start, ‘yes, it is definitely all about you—’

Dad gives me a warning shake of the head. I roll my eyes, and slide down to the floor. Dad pats my mother’s arm.

‘The thing is, it doesn’t matter why she did it.’ Uncle Jat folds his hands together. ‘Let sleeping waters lie, I say. What we want to think about is how to fix it.’

‘We can invite them to dinner.’ Auntie Pinky has her plotting face on. ‘Rilla can cook for them, say sorry to them—’

‘I can offer Simon’s father shares in my company,’ Uncle Jat says.

‘All she needs to do is call Simon.’ My father looks from person to person, nodding his head. ‘He is a sensible boy, it can all be sorted out. If she calls Simon—’

‘If she says it is all her fault, that she is a stupid girl who has no more sense than a newborn sparrow, he will listen.’ Auntie Pinky slowly nods her head.

‘I am here, you know,’ I say mildly.

‘And while we’re at it,’ she looks sternly at me, ‘I’d like to know why you didn’t wear the earrings, bangles and two necklaces I gave you for the wedding. Not one bit of gold – what kind of bride wears bronze hoops? They will think we are paupers. With no respect.’

I close my eyes for a second. The GIF seems to be here to make me feel bad. Well, most of the party is here for that reason. I look over at where my cousin Jharna is sitting. She is definitely only here to be on social media. And when I say here, I don’t mean in my flat, but on this earth. She is eighteen years old. She only ever looks at me with one eye. The other is reading her tweets, darting left and right, gobbling up news bites, 140-character morsels that tell her important items of news, like which one of her favourite celeb-crushes is just chillin’ in their PJs y’all and which is taking their hipster poodle out for a doggie manicure. Still, I can’t forget her text message warning me that the GIF was on its way, cavalry and all, and that I could run if I wanted to; I didn’t even know she cared. She is now stabbing at her phone, sitting on the floor with her knees tucked up under her chin. The position startles me. It reminds me of me, and then it reminds me suddenly and forcefully of my sister Rose. It catches me unawares, and a sharp pain hits me in the chest. Don’t you see, I want to say to everyone, my life has gone completely wrong, doesn’t anyone see? I look around for help, but no one is looking at me. They’re all tucking in to the cupcakes. I slump back against the wall.

‘Can’t you get your ass out of that phone?’ Auntie Pinky complains to her daughter after a while. She stands up, tugs at Jharna’s crop top for a second in a vain effort to make it longer, then starts tidying the flat. She picks up old tissue off the floor, wine glasses from a few days ago from behind the sofa. She tidies cushions (after she gives them a wary sniff), gets the dustpan and brush from the kitchen and starts clearing away wood dust. She drags the model village carefully under the rustic coffee table in the corner. Federico and I look sideways at each other but neither of us tries to stop her. It’s the first clean the living room has had in weeks. He makes a face, I shrug. Does this mean he has forgiven me for what I said to him earlier about his relationships?

‘How will you get a job, beta, if you’re always on your phone?’ Uncle Jat says to Jharna.

‘You didn’t have such a problem with it last week,’ Jharna responds.

‘I was looking for an old school friend from Delhi,’ Auntie Pinky expands, panting a little with the strain of bending and straightening, bending and straightening. ‘Jharna tracked her down. The girl can find a needle in a haystack as long as the haystack is on the WWW.’

‘Whatevs Muvs,’ Jharna says.

Since her vocabulary is better than most people I know, I’m guessing she’s doing the teen lingo just to annoy her parents. She goes back to her phone, works furiously with her thumbs, and blows an enormous bubblegum bubble that nearly smothers her nose ring. She is wearing a crop top that says ‘Everybody Should Be a Feminist’, a pair of loose boyfriend jeans and a military-print hairband knotted in her hair.

‘How can you live like this?’ Auntie Pinky complains. ‘If you take these posters off the wall, Federico, I could give it a proper spring clean. Look at the cobwebs.’

Federico looks like he wants to go and stand in front of his precious posters. Greenpeace, Janis Joplin, yin-and-yang, an X-Files ‘I Want to Believe’, an embossed Om. But he also doesn’t want Auntie Pinky to stop cleaning. I throw a cushion at him.

‘Oye, why are you hitting the poor boy?’ Auntie Pinky demands.

‘Spider,’ I mumble.

‘Where?’ Auntie Pinky shrieks.

‘It’s—’ I clear my throat, ‘disappeared under the sofa.’

Auntie Pinky marches over to the sofa, stares for a second, then goes into a crouching position, armed with a patent leather pump. But she doesn’t stop there. She keeps sliding until she is lying flat on the floor and peering under the sofa, holding her phone in the gap between the sofa and floor for light.

‘Hold your horses,’ Auntie Pinky says. ‘I see it, I see it!’

Federico and I are staring at her. I glance at him. On a normal day, he would be enjoying this pantomime, and also basking in the sight of someone actually cleaning our flat for once. But he is avoiding my eyes. Has he forgiven me?

‘Anyway, why did you dump him?’ Jharna says.

It takes me a few seconds to realize that she is talking to me. I wince. I didn’t dump Simon, that is an ugly word. Dump. Definition: a) Drop heavily or suddenly, b) Knock down in a prize fight, c) Another word for tip – an area for dropping your rubbish, and d) Slang for doing a shit. Clearly none of these apply here.

‘Dump? Is that what Hannah Montana would say?’ I say wickedly.

‘What are you, twelve?’ She gives me a look of disgust before going back to whatever she is doing – probably unfriending me on Facebook.

‘Why did you do it?’ my father asks.

I blow air out of my mouth like a kettle on the boil. ‘We shouldn’t have got engaged in the first place. It was a mistake.’

‘And it took you till the wedding day to figure this out?’ my mother says.

‘I thought I could go through with it. Okay?’ I spread my hands out to emphasize that this should be obvious to everyone. I take a deep breath. ‘I thought – I thought if I could just get through it, it would be okay afterwards—’

‘Look, Rilla,’ my father says, carefully wiping his hands on the toilet paper thoughtfully provided by Federico, ‘let’s think rationally about this.’

‘I’m done thinking rationally.’

‘When do you ever think rationally?’ my mother says.

‘Why are you all here?’ I snap.

The doorbell rings. Federico runs down the stairs and brings up my Auntie Menaka. No way. No way. I groan.

‘Oye hoye,’ she says, ‘look at these young people, so cool, so cute.’ She gives me and Jharna a wave. She is wearing a strapless long kurta today, black, embroidered in red, with aqua blue trousers. Her hair has obviously been done this morning, and her make-up is flawless. She stands next to Federico. Now she is running her fingers through his hair. Auntie Menaka knows that Federico is gay but she is the most non-judgemental person I know. She will flirt with anyone. Well, any man at any rate. ‘What’s up? How’s studies?’

Federico shrugs. ‘Boring.’

‘Oh, so sad,’ she says, and puts his head on her large breasts and strokes his hair with her fingers. ‘So, what are we going to do about Simon?’ she says to the room at large. ‘Such a lovely boy. Have you seen those dreamy eyes?’

‘We were just talking to her about that,’ Auntie Pinky says. ‘Trying to talk some sense into the girl. You know what happens to spinsters? Even ones with careers?’

Auntie Pinky doesn’t have time to elaborate because Federico helpfully chips in. ‘Career, what career? She’s been thrown out of her MA programme.’

I choke on my pizza crust. The man has not forgiven me at all! There are tears in my eyes. I’m still choking but no one is even thumping me on my back.

When I stop there is complete silence in the room. There is a moment when everything is suspended. Nothing moves. But then the nagara-drum is boiling, Mum’s tears are flowing and the air is crackling. Not only have I broken up with my fiancé but I am also being thrown out of my MA. No one in the history of the Kumar family has ever failed in their studies before. The word failure does not occur in the Kumar family dictionary. The Kumars and the Kapoors, my mum’s family, complete things. We conquer, we cruise through our studies, we appear at the other end complacent in our excellence.

‘They did what?!’ Uncle Jat sits forward on the sofa. ‘It’s atrocious. Do they know who we are? I will talk to your supervisor. What is his phone number? Just a name will do.’

Auntie Pinky is patting my mother with one hand, holding the dustpan with the other. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she is saying. ‘It’s all right. There is no saying why these things happen to us. But it will pass. It will pass. God, oh God, why are you doing this to us!’

5
Family Melodrama

The doorbell rings again, and Federico runs down to answer. For heaven’s sake, who is it this time? Up he comes, bringing with him the Unmarried Ones. Auntie PK, Auntie Dharma and my father’s sister Auntie Promilla enter the living room. My parents and relatives give each other sombre hugs, not unsuited to a funeral.

The three aunties hold me until I’m ready to scream. I glare at my father. Since he is the least likely to have had anything to do with this ambush, he is the one I’m most irritated at. Why didn’t you do something to stop this onslaught? my eyes ask. Why didn’t you stop it?

As if anyone ever listens to me, his shoulders answer.

The Unmarried Ones are the bogie man of the GIF. When young girls of the GIF behave badly – shriek, yell, fight, drop and break things, eat in such a messy way that they get covered head to toe in melting chocolate, point out everything their parents are doing wrong with their lives, that kind of thing – a helpful GIF member reminds them that if they carry on behaving this way, no one will marry them, and they will turn out like one of the Unmarried Ones.

It is unfair to club them together, really. Auntie Dharma, the spiritual healer, was married briefly, a long time ago, until her husband died. She doesn’t say out loud that it was the best thing that ever happened to her, but the implication is that her loss was the spiritual realm’s gain.

Auntie PK, the feminist journalist, has a ‘friend’ she lives with, who is a lawyer named Zeze. Now and again when one of the GIF invites people over for dinner, they’ll say to Auntie PK, ‘Why don’t you bring your special friend along, Parminder?’ But apparently Zeze is always busy and rarely able to attend GIF social occasions. This could be true, Zeze is a very important human rights lawyer. But it could also be that the only time she encountered the GIF some years ago, Uncle Jat tried to get her to work for him, and Auntie Pinky suggested she meet some nice Indian men who were great ‘marriage material’ and who would like that Zeze was half-white and half-black.

Auntie Promilla is single because – well, because Auntie Promilla is an animal charity. That’s right. She doesn’t work at an animal charity, she is an animal charity. She collects animals like burs. She rarely speaks to humans, she has nothing to say to us and she looks over our shoulder when compelled to say something. But with animals – the more disabled and abused the better – she is a fairy godmother.

The Unmarried Ones are all crammed into the tiny living room. And now they are all talking about me again.

‘Wait till shani has moved on,’ Auntie Dharma says. ‘Then let me set a date.’

‘Living without a man isn’t the end of the world,’ Auntie PK chips in, but no one pays any attention.

‘Her chart says she might have problems in the romance department,’ Auntie Dharma says thoughtfully.

‘I say, get a haircut.’ Auntie Menaka takes a tiny nibble of a pizza slice that she has been eyeing for a while, then places the rest down on a plate. ‘Any man problem can be solved if you get a haircut.’

‘Look, we can kill two birds with one stone—’ Uncle Jat starts.

His wife takes up the thread. ‘Yes, yes, throw a party, call everyone, her friends and supervisor and Simon and his parents!’ Her eyes are dancing at the idea.

They volley ideas back and forth. People are nodding their heads, starting to look excited. Federico actually has the grace to look a little sheepish at this fresh attack. He glances at me, but I avoid his gaze.

‘Plain talking is the best way, I find,’ Auntie PK says. ‘No games.’

‘What’s the point?’ Mum interjects. She has been sitting silently for a while, but now this question bursts from her. ‘What’s the point? Nothing can change what has happened!’

‘Mum—’

‘I knew this would happen! Didn’t I tell you, Manoj? I knew!’

‘How could you possibly know, Mum—’

‘You ruin everything! That’s how I knew!’

‘Now, Renu—’

I stand up abruptly. ‘What? What do I ruin? Go on, tell me!’

Mum’s tears are flowing now. ‘You alienate everyone. You’re selfish!’

‘And – and what else! Don’t stop there, Mum!’

‘You don’t call us, you don’t visit, you never even say thank you for anything anyone does. You – you killed that budgie Auntie Promilla gave you!’

Everyone turns to stare at me. I clench my fists at this list that my mum has come up with, the list of all the things I do wrong. I am so mad I can’t even see her properly. Mad at my mum, at my dad for letting her say these things, at all of them, sitting here in my flat, passing judgement. Even Auntie Promilla, who rarely says anything, is looking at me with sad eyes.

‘You said the budgie flew away,’ she says, a tremor in her voice.

My mouth tightens. My dream from this morning hits me square in my chest, and suddenly I can’t breathe. I look at all of them, not daring to say what is on the tip of my tongue, yet knowing I’m going to blurt it out. I stare at Auntie Promilla, who has given the GIF various family pets over the years, some beloved and others hated. But the first pet that she ever gave us, gave me and Rose, was Gus-Gus.

‘Talking of Auntie Promilla’s pets,’ I say breathlessly, talking quickly so I can’t change my mind, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you for years. Whatever happened to Gus-Gus?’

The silence in the room can be cut with a knife. For many moments, nothing happens. No one speaks and nothing moves. People look blankly into space, at their shoes, at the wall, at anything but each other. Jharna is the only one who has no idea something cataclysmic has been said. Jharna, and Federico, whose hair is standing on end in the face of all these arrows aimed straight at my heart by my family.

My mother looks down at her trainers, my father at the shiny laminate floor. Auntie Pinky and Uncle Jat finally look at each other, then away, then each other, then away. Auntie Menaka is looking absorbedly at her long manicured yellow fingernails.

Auntie Promilla doesn’t say anything, not one word, but she flinches. Yes, Auntie Promilla remembers the Irish wolfhound.

In the silence that follows my question about Gus-Gus, I can hear the thumping of my heart and it sounds suspiciously like a time bomb.

Uncle Jat clears his throat, finally breaking the silence. He turns to Auntie Promilla.

‘So are you doing anything important at the moment?’ Uncle Jat disapproves of Auntie Promilla’s obsession with animals. ‘I can get you a job, you know. All these animals-shanimals, they are okay as a hobby, but they are hardly a profession. We could send them to a charity—’

Auntie Promilla shakes her head, shrugs, nods her head. This covers every possible answer. She is looking nervously at me.

‘I’m so lucky I don’t have to work,’ Auntie Menaka cuts in, sitting on the arm of a sofa. ‘Or look after animals.’

‘Do you remember the hamster?’ my father asks.

Everyone laughs nervously. They avoid my eyes. They discuss various other pets that the GIF has had over the years. There’s nervous fidgeting all around.

‘I once saw a spider monkey in our back garden,’ Federico says. ‘Its long arms and legs were crossed. I tell you, it was meditating! I swear it even had its eyes closed.’ Federico thinks we are talking about pets. Jharna is looking at me, though, with a slight frown on her brow.

Everyone else is smiling and nodding now. We can move on from the awkwardness brought on by my unfortunate mention of Gus-Gus, who disappeared at the same time as my sister.

‘There was a time I thought I would take up silent meditation. For the rest of my life.’ Auntie Pinky laughs nervously.

‘You, silent!’ Uncle Jat makes a sound like upph.

‘Hard to imagine,’ Dad agrees. Apparently we can move on.

But then he glances sideways at me. Just for a fraction of a second, so that it’s hardly there at all. But I know they all remember what I’ve said. I know they can hardly breathe in case they blurt out the wrong thing. In case words are spoken that can’t be taken back.

‘This is how we’re going to play it, is it?’ I say softly.

Jharna looks up from her phone, her eyebrows raised. Everyone else is quiet.

My father rubs his face. He looks suddenly old. His face is pinched and there is so much grey in his hair. He looks shrunken. ‘This is all my fault.’

I roll my eyes. ‘Enough, okay? Enough with the drama.’

‘No, beta,’ Dad says. ‘That’s for us to say. Enough. You need to come and live at home if you can’t cope with day-to-day life like a normal adult. We’ve tried and tried with you—’

‘Damn you,’ I whisper. ‘Damn you all.’ They’ve tried and tried? When have they ever tried?

Then I find I can’t speak. There are words I want to say that I have never been allowed to say, words that even now are stuck in my throat. Words that hurt too much to say out loud.

‘Please just go,’ I say finally. I want it to come out angry but instead there is a crack in my voice and I can’t meet anyone’s eyes. I suddenly have no fight left. I can’t even look at them any more. I shake my head, holding back tears, and leave the room. I walk up the stairs to my room, close the door behind me. I slide down to the floor, squeeze my eyes shut with my hands and try not to think about anything at all. Not my family, not the mess I seem to be making of my life, not Gus-Gus. And certainly not my sister Rose.

6
Back to Normal

The next day, a Monday, I resolve to go back to my normal life. I’ve found that in times of stress over the years, having a regular and predictable routine is the one thing that I’ve been able to depend on. In the last six months with Simon, I let my routine slide a little, let it get scruffy around the edges, but now it’s time to put my life back on track.

As I walk out of my house, I take a deep breath to brace myself for the day. But I needn’t have worried, because the city looks like it is determined to help me in my resolve. On the train to New Cross Gate, to get to campus, I easily get a seat. On my walk to Goldsmiths, a little girl with a cheerful pigtail on top of her head waves shyly at me. As I make my way across campus to get to my department, the March sun plays peek-a-boo on the common, and candyfloss pollen floats on the breeze. I turn my face up to the warmth.

Maybe, just maybe, I can go back to who I was before I met Simon. If I can do that, if I can let go of the image Simon created of me – a tempting picture of someone who knows who they are, for whom something vital didn’t get left behind a long time ago – then maybe things will be okay.

I walk into my department building, humming along to someone who is listening to ‘Cake by the Ocean’ on their phone, determined to make this the first day of the rest of my life.

My optimism is severely tested as I walk through the double-doors.

‘Ohhhhh,’ says an undergrad who I tutor, making a sad face when she sees me. ‘What happened?’

‘Oh,’ I say, staring at her. She is wearing dark red lipstick and thick black eyeliner, a pair of harem trousers and a sports bra. ‘Yes. It’s all fine.’ I smile brightly and give her a thumbs-up.

I keep my eyes focused ahead of me as I walk quickly past the student towards the stairs that lead up to my office. I can do this. This still makes sense. Of course people are going to want to know what happened, and why I’m not on my honeymoon. But as news stories go, I’m sure I’m not the most important of the day. And, in any case, I am not going to let an eighteen-year-old who thinks underwear is suitable to wear around campus ruin my day.

‘Rilla!’ another voice says, as I place one foot on the stairs. I slowly turn around. It is one of my professors. Professor Maxine is French, she teaches phenomenology, and she tells her students: Talk with your body, yes? Your heart, she is the same as your crotch, yes? ‘What happened? Why are you here?’ she says to me now, her face a picture of deep distress. ‘Come here!’ She embraces me. ‘Cry, ma petite! Cry!’

I shake myself like a dog when she lets go of me. ‘Professor Maxine,’ I say, though there is a breathlessness to my voice now, ‘really, it’s all fine.’

I run up the stairs before she can say anything else. I look left and right, and pass by a meeting room in which a few of the admin staff are having a meeting. It is glass-fronted, and I resist the urge to hide my face behind a book as I pass by. The department administrator pauses in the act of giving a PowerPoint presentation whose title reads, What does your work allocation say about you? and does a double-take. No way! she mouths, her face aghast.

Now I’m running. I can’t get to my office fast enough. Why on earth did I think it was a good idea to come to university today? Of course I’m the scandal of the week, and I should have known I would be! I run inside my office, slam the door shut and press my back against it. I look frantically around at the broom cupboard that is my office: the grey cabinet, the posters of philosophy conferences that other grad students have left on the walls, my work desk and chair, my old department-issue desktop, the thick leaves of the aloe plant that a student gave to me as a present.

And then I realize it. I’m alone here, I’m alone in my office. No flatmate, no GIF, no students or professors. Yes, I am alone here and that’s a good thing. I am still feeling the weight of the onslaught, but perspective slowly starts to return. I can stay in here and I can work. I put my bag down, take off my jacket and scan my workspace. I move things around. I place my water bottle and a chocolate-and-orange cereal bar next to my computer, fiddle with the height of my chair, place my spring jacket on the back of it. There, the room looks familiar now. I feel safer, I can breathe.

I automatically reach out to the desk calendar to change the date. And there it is. Monday, March 13th.

I have neatly crossed out the words ‘Office Hours’ and instead written ‘First Day of Honeymoon’. My hand snaps back like I’ve been stung. I stand staring at the words, feeling trickles of something crawling up my spine.

Why, why not even one exclamation point, I think irrelevantly. Why not more excitement at the thought of spending ten days with Simon in Hawaii? Tears prick my eyes and I turn blindly around.

Why am I here? I had woken up with the idea that if I could just carry on as normal, then maybe all this would go away. But what is normal now? What is normal for me? In the time I’ve been with Simon, my ‘normal’ seems to have morphed into something I no longer recognize. I stand with my back to my desk, a hand on my mouth, eyes tightly shut. I’m unable to move, unable even to think clearly.

After many minutes, I slowly open my eyes. And there is a thought in my head, a clear one. Focus, I need to focus. I turn slowly around, refusing to look at my calendar. I turn on the computer, I slowly sit on my chair, tentatively now, not daring to move too fast. I open a file I’ve been ignoring for too long – the file in which I have made notes for my MA thesis.

Just as I click on the file, there is a knock at my door that nearly makes me jump out of my skin. I creep to the door, open it a notch and sneak a peek. What looks like the entire undergraduate population of the philosophy department is standing outside my office. I slam my door shut. Another invasion. First the GIF, now this.

I have something of a reputation for saying it like it is, for not being nice, but getting straight to the heart of the problem. And not just about undergraduate papers, but also undergraduate lives, so my office hours (held twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays) are usually full with back-to-back tutorials. I’m employed as my supervisor Professor Grundy’s teaching assistant, so I assist in classes, mark essays and give feedback to students on their coursework. But today, two days after my non-wedding, there is already a line snaking its way out of my office and down the corridor to the common room. Popular or not, my office hours have never been this well attended.

There is a knock behind me again. I close my eyes, willing the student to go away, but the knock is repeated. I open the door an inch, heave a shuddering sigh, then reluctantly gesture in the first student.

‘Oh no, what happened?’ It is Sara, a redhead with Britney Spears pigtails.

I purse my lips. ‘I thought I’d cancelled my office hours.’

Her green eyes are wide. ‘Yes, but then we saw you were in. You look so sad!’ She reaches out a hand.

I stop myself from springing back. ‘I’m fine,’ I mutter. ‘Now, what did you want to talk about?’

I gesture her to the ‘student chair’. Sara settles into it like she’s here for a picnic. She seems to have no questions about her essay or about my feedback, but it still takes me fifteen minutes to get rid of her.

The next student comes in. ‘Oh no, what happened?’ Mimi gasps, as soon as she walks in. ‘I am so sorry for you! Did you literally leave him at the altar? In front of all the guests? At the very last minute?’

My heart is pounding, and I can hear a busy hum from outside the door, the swarm of locusts is expanding further. I decide that my best strategy is to attack.

‘You need to think about whether this is what you want to do with your life, Mimi,’ I tell her, finding her paper on my desktop and clicking on the file. ‘Look at this paper – it’s so awful I don’t even want to use it as a coaster!’

She peers closely at the computer. ‘Well, you can’t,’ she points out. ‘It isn’t printed out.’

‘Totally not my point,’ I say sternly. ‘How much time did you spend writing it? Half an hour?’

This strategy works. I use this form of address with each student as they filter in.

‘Tell your girlfriend how you really feel,’ I say to Jacob. ‘Don’t be a douche-bag.’ He looks mildly hurt at my words, but his natural laziness kicks in and the hurt vanishes. He lounges back in the chair, the front legs of the chair come off the ground and now he is almost horizontal. ‘She’s, like, you don’t talk, and I’m like, whaaaa?’

Several more students come in. Each one asks me what happened, and why I look so awful (one actually uses the word decaying) but I am like an Olympic ping-pong champion, I thrust the ball right back at them.

I have been at it for almost two hours, and am starting to feel more like myself, when Wu Li comes in. She gives me the standard sad face and question. I prepare myself for attack. It is harder to do with Wu Li, though, because she is one of the top undergraduates in the department, and her personal life seems spotless as well, not riddled with broken relationships, binge-drinking, flatmate crises or chlamydia scares like everyone else’s. I search her paper frantically for any of my comments that don’t read, Excellent! Great point! Wow, never thought of it that way! Have you thought of doing a PhD (talk to me about this!).

She’s looking at me seriously for what feels like minutes on end, her eyes unblinking beneath curly eyelashes. ‘Maybe you’re like Nietzsche,’ she says at last. ‘You can only talk about love, but not practise it.’

My stomach clenches. I stare at my computer.

‘But it’s okay,’ she adds sympathetically. ‘Some people are just not cut out for love.’

I stumble blindly up from my chair. ‘I need to make a phone call,’ I say to her, holding the door open, my voice sounding strangled and choked. She gives me a sympathetic, knowing glance on her way out. I slam the door shut for the third time this morning. I need to get out of here!

But my options are limited. I can either leave through the door and face the fifteen or so shiny young faces that are still waiting on the other side of it, or I can climb down through the tiny twelve-inch-square window in my office, adopt my father’s way of dealing with confrontation – i.e., avoiding it like the plague.

My friend Tyra walks in as I stand there, hands tangled in my hair. She stares at me aghast. Tyra was invited to my wedding, so she doesn’t need to ask, Oh no, what happened? She quickly closes the door shut behind her.

‘Rilla—’ she says. ‘You look terrible. Your hair, your skin, your shirt is buttoned all wrong and’ – she looks down at my feet – ‘you’re wearing mismatched socks!’

I look at her, panic clear on my face. ‘I shouldn’t have come today—’

She walks over to me and places her hands on my shoulders. ‘Rilla. For crying out loud, get yourself together! Who cares what anyone thinks?’ She quickly buttons my shirt right, pats my hair, and squeezes my cheeks to get some colour back into them.

I collapse on my chair and lift my head to stare up at the ceiling. ‘I never want to see anyone again.’

Tyra perches herself on my desk and swings her legs, stylish in her orange jumpsuit and platform sandals. She is watching me, her caramel skin beautifully offset by an emerald scarf and enormous silver hoops.

‘Rilla, what’s going on?’

‘With what?’

‘You know what. All of it!’

I shrug defensively. ‘I couldn’t go through with it, okay? Why is everyone staring at me like I’ve lost a limb? I made a mistake getting engaged in the first place.’

She nods slowly. ‘Well, I could have told you that.’

I look at her sharply. This is the first time since I left Simon at the altar that anyone has expressed this opinion. Everyone else in my life is convinced that I’m a terrible person, that I hurt Simon and I ruined my life. I narrow my eyes at her. I want to ask her what the hell she’s talking about but, characteristically, her rapid-fire brain is already moving on to the next thing. She’s looking at my computer screen where she can see the notes I’ve made for my MA thesis.

‘Any progress?’ she asks, trying to read what I’ve written.

Federico was wrong about what he said to my family. I have not been thrown out of my MA, I’ve only been given a warning. I need to produce more work, have more to show for the last three years. I’m doing an MA in philosophy, writing a thesis on multicultural perspectives on love. I want to know, I genuinely want to understand how some people are so good at love and others aren’t. Yet the more I study it, the less I seem to know.

I shake my head. ‘Nope, no progress.’

She inclines her head to study me. ‘You’re good at this stuff. I don’t get it. What’s stopping you from writing something, anything? You can do it in your sleep.’

I cluck impatiently. ‘And act like I know about love?’

She raises a stylish shoulder. It was Tyra, my best friend during the three years of my undergraduate degree, who convinced me to apply for a scholarship to do an MA at Goldsmiths. She’s writing an MA thesis on sex in black feminist literature. Soon she’ll be moving on to a PhD. She’s nearly done and I don’t even have a clue where I’m headed.

‘Do it, finish it. What’s stopping you?’ she asks.

This is a really good question. I have pages and pages of notes, hundreds of pages. Yet, I am no closer to finding a thesis topic.

The years of my degree, a BA in English Literature, weren’t easy. I was haunted by a recurrent unease with my life, maybe even with being in my own skin. I felt restless and unsure with just about everything. But I was able to focus on one thing – the degree itself. On the books we read and the papers we wrote. Once I completed my degree, though, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I felt like I had no anchor, that even the relative grounding that my degree had given me had been stripped away from me. What were my skills? What was I good at? What did I want to do? I’d never been in love with any job I’d had over the years – teaching chocolate-making workshops, selling vintage clothes, working in a pub. So when the scholarship was offered to me, I had said yes. It felt like a lifeline.

‘I can’t write anything at all. I feel like I’m pretending I know things that … I’ve never known.’

‘Why does everything need to be perfect? This is the problem with you. Either something is perfect, or it’s total shit.’ Tyra raises an eyebrow.

I shake my head. ‘That’s not true.’

‘It so is. Take your MA, for instance. It could be about, say, Jane Austen’s perspective on love. That would do. But no, the woman has to find out everything on love that’s ever been written anywhere in the world. Compartmentalize, Rilla. Write the thesis. It doesn’t have to be perfect!’

‘Maybe.’

She’s looking at me now, not saying anything.

I frown, determined to give her the silent treatment, but then I give up. ‘Fine, just tell me. What did I do wrong with Simon?’

She widens her eyes, looks about the room, seemingly looking for an answer to my question. ‘You got engaged three months after you met. You were getting married three months after that. I mean, duh, you don’t need to look far for what went wrong! Anyway, look, what’s the big deal? We all make mistakes. Love and marriage and all that, it’s not for everyone. I mean, look at me!’

‘Love and marriage and all that,’ I repeat stupidly.

‘Come out with me Friday. We’ll pick up some blokes, go on, say yes!’

This is Tyra’s answer to any problem. I don’t say anything. She jumps off the desk, gives me a kiss and knocks on my forehead with a bony knuckle. She waves her fingers, mouths Friday and disappears out of the door, leaving me staring blankly at my computer screen.

I should appreciate everything she just said. Tyra is the one person who doesn’t believe I’m the worst person in the world after what I did to Simon. Yet, the voice in my head is saying: It’s Tyra, she’s supportive, she cares, but she also tends to wash her hands of sticky situations, to fix things and move on quickly. She likes to think she knows what people should be doing with their lives. Come to think of it, not so unlike my GIF. A minute after she leaves, she sends me a text message and I expect it will reiterate what she has already said to me. But it doesn’t. It says, Prof on prowl. She means Professor Grundy, my supervisor. If Professor Grundy finds me in university today, she will not let me go without an interrogation, an interrogation that will make my undergraduates’ sad questions seem like a birthday party. In fact, it would be safe to say that her cross-examination wouldn’t be out of place in a prison camp.

I squeeze my eyes shut for a second, then stand up, picking up my bag and my coat. I feel exhausted, weary to the bone. Some people are just not cut out for love. This seems to be the consensus today. And I’m really not sure they’re wrong.

7
Not Romance

When Simon and I first met it wasn’t at all romantic. We met at the police station, that was the scene of our first meeting. Wait, I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, Ah, another one of those times. But it wasn’t one of those times, because I wasn’t the one in handcuffs, Simon was. I was only there because my fellow philosophy students had decided to volunteer some time with underage kids in custody. I was the first one frisked and I was waiting for the others to finish their turn and join me. Into the waiting area came a constable, leading a man in handcuffs. You guessed it, it was Simon. The constable was trying to establish what to do with him, so there was a lot of waiting about. No one could figure out what to do with the man and everyone had a different point of view about it.

I was leaning against the wall, looking at the floor. There is no point looking a hardened criminal in the eye, even a dead sexy one, so I was determined not to look at him. Nicely fitted jeans, a shirt the colour of mushroom soup, those deep blue eyes and hair that fell onto his forehead. No, it would definitely be a mistake to look at him.

‘I’m completely innocent, I promise,’ he said.

I smiled politely. He gave me a charming smile, so I quickly looked away again.

‘I can see you don’t believe me. But you see, the thing is, I just happened to be at the wrong taco stall at the wrong time.’ He made a face. ‘It just goes to show.’

I looked up after ten seconds. I couldn’t help it, there was something about those eyes.

‘Goes to show what?’

He smiled again. ‘That just because a man makes the best fish tacos in London, it doesn’t mean he isn’t a crook. The man was handing me a bag of tacos, my mouth was watering, my heart was racing. I had been waiting for that bag all morning. No, wait, all my life. And then guess what happened?’

I couldn’t not ask. ‘What?’

‘A copper turns up out of nowhere. The fish taco man – Paolo – who I thought was my friend, I really did, handed me another bag. Free nachos, I thought. On the house, made in the house, this day can’t get any better. Though at the time, of course I didn’t know I was going to meet you.’

I gave him a crooked smile and, to save my life, I couldn’t stop myself from twirling my hair behind my ear and placing a foot jauntily behind me on the wall. What was the matter with me? I was going to end this day in a body bag at this rate.

‘But the bag wasn’t full of nachos. Nope. It was – you guessed it – a bag of coke.’

‘Coca cola?’ (I’m not proud of it, but I said it. So there it is.)

He stared at me. ‘Cocaine.’

‘That makes a lot more sense.’

‘That is the only reason I’m in here and Paolo isn’t. Anyway my lawyer is going to come and get me out any time. And then I can take you to dinner.’

I smiled.

‘I’m Simon, by the way.’

‘Rilla,’ I said reluctantly. He was a very charming drug dealer; he must be very good at his job. I really should be careful not to talk to him, or even look at him. Anyone whose arms look so sexy and muscly with folded-up shirtsleeves deserves to be behind bars, I thought sternly. We were standing in a bland corridor, with police officers walking to and fro and there was still no sign of my fellow students. I pretended to look at my mobile.

‘What are your three worst things in the world?’ Simon asked.

His hands in handcuffs, he was now leaning against the wall opposite to me. His hair fell all the way to his eyebrows and his eyes were deeply set.

I thought about it. ‘Vomit. Slug slime. People who smile all the time for no reason.’ I meant the last one to be pointed and cruel but he didn’t take it personally.

‘Mine are snot, religion, bigots and One Direction,’ he said.

‘That’s four things! Anyway … what’s wrong with One Direction?’

He stared at me with round eyes. ‘I knew you couldn’t be perfect. What is wrong with One Direction? Where would you like me to start? What is wrong with them is exactly the same as what is wrong with the world. For instance, have you ever looked at their—’

At that moment, the door opened and the constable basically dragged Simon through it. ‘I’ll wait for you,’ he called as he disappeared.

The next two hours are better forgotten. Three of us led a workshop in ‘Using Philosophy to Make Better Life Choices’ or some such bullshit. The youth offenders who had been bullied, coerced or bribed into being there mostly ignored us, sent an occasional paper aeroplane our way, munched endlessly on gum, and didn’t hesitate to laugh in our faces. One of them farted throughout the whole thing. Only it turned out that he hadn’t been farting, but had in fact done a crap in his pants. The smell was unbearable, especially since it had leaked through his clothes onto the chair he was sitting on. This led to our workshop coming to an early finish, but then the room had to be locked down – with all of us still in it – until the matter was cleared up. Those were two hours of my life I was never going to get back and no one could convince me that I had made a jot of difference in the lives of these damaged young people. Never again, I was telling myself, never again.

I walked out of the police station filled with rage and loathing for all young things. Someone peeled themselves off the wall outside and I screamed. It took me several moments to recognize him. Yes, beautiful as his eyes were, I had forgotten all about Simon. A body bag, for sure, I thought now. That is how this day is going to end.

How, then, we actually ended up with my legs wrapped around his hips against the toilet wall of an Ethiopian restaurant in Kentish Town later that night, I have no idea. Probably because when he saw me come out of the station, he handed me a tissue. I hadn’t realized I had tears in my eyes. Tears of rage because the young gentleman of the doing-a-shit-in-your-pants fame had, as we were about to leave the room, come up to me and written an X on my notebook. With excrement.

If Simon had been nice, given me a platitude about how though it was difficult to work with young offenders, it would change their lives, I probably would have walked away. But he said, ‘The little shits. The only thing we can hope for is that they’ll kill each other in prison.’

That really is the only way I can explain it.

There is something about Simon – there was something about Simon! Simon is no longer in my life – I have to get this straight in my head! There was something about him, something assured, something sure of its place that I have never had. For example when I walk into an unfamiliar room, with unfamiliar people in it, I scan it. Is there anyone there I know? Are there groups of people who all know each other who won’t want to talk to me? People who maybe have known each other for years, people who went to school together, who have common references? People who seem to know what to say and how to say it, people who can talk about anything or nothing and it makes sense to them. I wonder, will someone come up to me, an older woman probably, talk to me kindly and extra clearly because – given my brown skin – I’m probably a foreigner? And yet if there is a group of Indian people in the room, they will think I’m not Indian enough. These are the thoughts that go through my head when I enter a room.

But Simon, he’s probably thinking, what’s on the menu, is there anything more substantial than salmon and horseradish canapés? He could talk to people about anything really, but he didn’t seek people out either. He was comfortable in his own skin.

There are two kinds of people in the world. Room-scanners like me, and people like Simon, who never worry about things like that.

For a while, with Simon, it had started to seem like I could be more carefree too. Less troubled by my place in the world, by the rivulets in my past that refused to find a home. Less troubled, more assured, more able to navigate the world.

Yes, it had seemed like that for a short while.

8
Living a Lie. Oh, Sorry, I Mean Living a Life

As psychologist Alison Gopnik reminds us, in a child’s universe, parents are like stars – fixed and stable. But siblings are more like comets that sweep into our lives, lighting us up but sometimes scalding us.

Rilla’s notes

On Thursday, three days later, still desperate to get a sense of normality back into my life, I try going to university again. And this time, it isn’t as bad, maybe people do have short memories when it comes to scandal. I hold my normal office hours, I attend a seminar, and I even type up some notes. I am still getting missed calls from Simon every day, but I have switched off the notifications and so I only have to look at his name on my phone log briefly before I go to bed. Slowly, slowly, I can start to get my life back on track.

Late on Thursday afternoon, on the train back from university, I am hanging on for dear life. It is rush hour and the train is packed. People are standing in sweat-smelling distance, and I am trying to hold my breath. The people in my immediate vicinity must be acrobats because they all seem to perform complicated tasks while trying to stay upright on a moving train. A woman with a Chihuahua in her straw handbag is fanning herself with a receipt with one hand and feeding the miniature dog chicken wings with the other. A man with soft long curls and a borg-collar bomber jacket is reading Issue 97 of The Walking Dead. An attractive young man with red hair is teaching the woman next to him how to YOK2, which is apparently knitting jargon and not something to do with missiles. And an Indian man is having a phone conversation while also writing notes on his hand.

‘I said give me your CV,’ he says, ‘and she was like, I already told them my qualifications. I said to her what have you done in your life? How can I recommend you? I can’t put my name to this. And she started crying, man. I was like, what are you, a bloody nautanki?’

And just as quick as that, I can’t breathe. I grope blindly, I clutch at people. ‘I want to stop the train,’ I gasp. ‘I have to stop the train.’

People around me are staring. They look like they are going to arm-wrestle me to the floor if I say this again. They will do anything not to have to stop the train. Someone creates a bit of room, drags me down to a sitting position, puts my head in between my legs – I have no idea if this is so I can get breath back in my body or to make sure I can’t reach the emergency lever. I fight them, flailing, punching, kicking, but nothing works because I am surrounded by a savannah of legs. Jean-clad ones, nude pantyhose, varicose veins, and then there is a face. It’s a little girl.

‘More,’ she says in her baby voice, and hands me a wad of gummy tissue with mushy banana in it. At the next stop, someone practically throws me off the train. I run all the way down the platform, all the way up the stairs, and I stand outside in Lewisham next to a florist. I bend over double and gasp for breath.

My father disappeared into his study to write a book on Indian street theatre or nautanki when I was eight years old, soon after Rose disappeared. Before then, as far as I know, he had no ambitions of writing a book. When I was little, he taught drama in a college and he used to tell me – Rose and me – all about nautanki.

Rose and me. Yes, I suppose it’s time to talk about that now. To talk about Rose and me. Though it is also the hardest thing I can think to do right now.

That’s how it was for the first seven years of my life. It was always Rose and me. Rose and me did this or that, Rose and me are going out, Rose and me got into a fight. Rose and me are hungry, thirsty, tired, back from school, too awake to go to bed.

It was difficult, maybe impossible, to talk about myself without also talking about Rose. And Rose – she hardly knew what it was to exist without me either.

Our night-time stories were not the same as other children’s. We knew about Pippi Longstocking, the Wishing-Chair and The Bobbsey Twins from school. But my father didn’t read these stories to us. He read us the notes he made about Indian street theatre, gathered from books written in the Sanskrit script that would take him weeks and months to decipher. We would sit on rugs, the two of us in our pyjamas, the kind that had a matching top and bottom, and the top had a collar. I can see us now, all I have to do is close my eyes.

Me in my purple pyjamas, with the moon and stars dotted all over them. Rose in her lemon yellow top and bottom, printed with a dancing Popeye.

We would sit holding one blanket around us, skinny beans crouching together for warmth, and we would share a cup of hot chocolate. Or at least, our mother told us it was hot chocolate, but looking back it was mostly milk with the tiniest pinch, a smidge of brown in it, hardly there.

‘That looks like me,’ Rose would say, staring into the steaming milk. ‘Make it like Rilla, Mummy, please, please, Mummy!’ And our mother would. She would add another pinch to the cup and the brown would swirl and aria till it mixed with the milk. We would sit under our blanket, drink our hot chocolate, and listen to Dad tell us about nautanki.

‘Melodrama – you have to have melodrama in a nautanki. Without it, there is nothing. When you cry, you cry like you will die of sadness. You cry so loud, aliens on another planet can hear you and their hearts melt. When you are angry, you are full of rage. So much rage that if you tried to, you could swallow the sky whole. There’s no point feeling unless you feel big, see? And the nagara – the kettledrum – heightens the drama. Only when it reaches fever pitch is there an explosion. Get it? Try it. Show me.’

I would laugh, a shrill, high-pitched, over-the-top, machine-gun kind of laugh. But Rose would cry. And when she cried, she didn’t scream or sniffle. Her face turned inwards, her eyes swam and silent tears poured down her face in two long streams.

There was something about Rose’s eyes. They searched, they were always alert. She was always looking for things to go wrong, always on the lookout for trouble, something that could hurt her, and maybe me too. Yes, that’s true. She was always alert for anything that could hurt her or me. When she cried it was as if the world was coming to an end. It wasn’t the kind of melodrama that Dad was telling us about, but there was something about Rose’s tears. They broke your heart. Even our puppy was reduced to a pitiful moaning.

Gus-Gus. Yes, it is time to talk about Gus-Gus too.

When I turned seven, the same day that my sister Rose turned nine, Auntie Promilla’s Irish wolfhound Gus-Gus came to live with us and he was enormous. All he had to do was come and stand next to you – not lean on you or jump on you – but just stand next to you for you to fall over. Rose and I were in hysterics. He was easily, hands down, the best thing that had ever happened to us. I loved Gus-Gus. There was only one problem. He loved Rose more than he loved me. I was always giving him treats and throwing things for him to fetch. Smiling at him, singing, She’ll be wearing pink pyjamas when she comes (his favourite song), generally grovelling at his feet. But if Rose came into the room, quietly with hardly a whisper, as was her way, he would instantly drop what he was doing and go to her. Given the choice of going out for a run (his other favourite thing) with me or sitting under Rose’s feet, he would always choose the latter. In fact, I was sure that when we were playing he kept one ear pricked for the sound of Rose. If Rose was out and she was on her way back, even before she had come anywhere near our house, the other ear would prick up and his hair would coil tighter. He would start doing laps – front door, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, through the bathroom, back to the front door, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, and so on, until she entered the house. Rose often had that effect on people.

‘Rose hasn’t washed her hands,’ I would complain. ‘And she’s putting her hand in the liquorice allsorts.’

‘Wash your hands, Rose,’ my mother would say. But with that indulgent voice she saved for her first daughter.

‘She’s giving the dog a sweetie!’ I would cry.

My mother would walk up to Rose and take the allsorts from her hand. Then she would turn to me.

‘Have you seen how dirty your frock is? Go and change, right now! Stop bothering Rose. If you don’t have any manners, you can stop going to school and stay at home and clean the house!’

I would glare at Rose, pinch her as I passed by her on my way to the bedroom. I knew my mother was bluffing. Of course I knew! No one would keep their child at home and get them to clean the house instead of going to school. Yet what a thing to say to your child! To someone you were supposed to automatically love!

‘Take your shoes off before you go upstairs, how many times!’ my mother would shout.

This was before my mother started teaching adult education classes. That didn’t come till much later. If you looked at my mother in those days you would think that we were always late for something. We never did things quickly enough for her.

‘Hurry up, Rose! Come on, we’re getting late. Can you drag your feet any more than you are, Rilla, for god’s sake? Wash your hands! Clean your teeth! You’re late for bed! You’re so slow, what’s the matter with you girls?’

She was tired. Two demanding young girls with itchy feet must have been exhausting work. Add to that my father who was good at telling us stories but not at helping with our homework, cleaning our school uniforms, shopping for groceries, or any of those things that fell to my mother. I guess there were other reasons as well, but kids aren’t conscious of these things. On top of everything else, an enormous dog had arrived for her to look after. All because my father had wanted a horse for his play, for our play, all because he was a failed actor. And this brings us full circle to the nautanki, our foray into street theatre, Rose’s and mine.

But I’ll have to come back to that later. To say some things, you have to work up the words.

For many minutes, after practically being thrown off the train where I had a panic attack, I sit outside the train station in Lewisham. The florist who has been watching over me says now, ‘You have to take care in these lurching trains, luv!’

I have the impulse to grab his arm and say, ‘Do I look mad to you?’ Not in accusation, but as a real question.

A week ago my life seemed like it was more or less on track. It was true I needed to work harder at my MA, I needed to show more discipline and focus, but I was getting married, moving to a new flat, becoming an adult, putting the past behind me.

Now, merely a few days later, the past seems to be chasing me. The faster I run, the harder it seems to run after me.

The thing is, I don’t want to go back to the past, I don’t even want to unravel it. I’m not pushing for answers that I don’t have the courage to face. All I’m asking for is a version of my life that makes sense, a narrative that people can agree on, or even one that I can agree with myself about. I want to find a few missing pieces of the jigsaw.

Yet, whether I resist or not, the memories are trying to claw their way back up through the canyon now, knocking at the door. And their Gollum neediness is starting to gnaw at my insides.

I thank the florist for his patience with me, I don’t ask him if he thinks I am mad. Instead, I pick up my bag and the water bottle handed to me by a stranger, and slowly through the streets of Lewisham, I start walking back towards my flat.

9
An Incoherent Narrative

The Sufi poet Rumi says it isn’t for us to run after love, but instead to look within, to see what is stopping us from loving. He says that our task in life is to find all the obstacles we place around us, the shields we build that keep us from love.

Rilla’s notes

‘A coherent narrative, Rilla,’ my supervisor said a month ago when she gave me the warning about my MA. ‘That is what you need, and that is what you don’t have yet, not after three whole years here.’ Professor Grundy sat behind her desk, looking thoughtfully at me, tapping her fingers. ‘The thing is, I do like you. You’re a good teaching assistant, the students respect you. They like your honest feedback about their work.’

She looked around her like she was searching for something more to say. We were sitting in her office, her walls covered with old invites for conferences, framed certificates, pictures of her receiving awards from important-looking people. On her desk there was a statue of Michel Foucault wearing a turtle-neck and a pair of seventies-style trousers, his head an egg, his lower lip cheeky but sensual, his hands crossed behind his back. She looked at him for many moments before she spoke again.

‘You don’t really like people, do you,’ she said finally.

I flinched. ‘That’s a little harsh.’

‘Oh, it’s not meant to be. I am the same way. To be a philosopher, you have to be a little removed.’

My breath caught in my throat. Not liking people was one thing, but being like Professor Grundy, that was too much. She once made a student wait for six months to hear if he had passed a re-sit of his dissertation. She had known all along that she would pass him; I later saw a dated confirmation of this. But she didn’t tell the student. She made him wait, she made him cry, she turned him into a shadow of his former self. And all because she didn’t like him. ‘He needs to learn respect,’ she said at the time.

And she thought I was like her. This made me die inside.

‘You are making no progress in your work.’ Professor Grundy was caressing Foucault, her thumb slowly stroking his egg-head back and forth.

‘I like this stuff,’ I muttered. ‘I want to make sense of it.’

‘Rilla. Are you going to complete your MA? Can you? Do you even want to?’ She sat back in her chair and looked at me.

I didn’t know what to say.

When I applied for an MA, with Tyra’s encouragement, I wanted to explore the connections between what a culture thinks about love and what it thinks about other things like life, work, and war. I had imagined finding a kernel that was at the heart of a culture, its most basic beliefs around which everything else was organized. I had thought at the time that it was a good, concrete idea, that it was something I could focus on and develop for three years. But recently the idea seems to have evaporated.

The more I read about what other people have said about love, all I can think about is how little I know about it myself. How there is a blankness in my brain where there should be an understanding of love.

Why do we form an attachment to another? Who attracts us? How do we form the bonds of love? And when love is lost, then what happens, how do we go on living?

After three years doing an MA, I am nowhere near answering these questions, and in fact I am further away than I was when I started writing my thesis.

Well, I say writing my thesis, but at the moment I am reading it more than I am writing it. I do a lot of reading and I make a lot of notes. But that’s what you are meant to do, isn’t it? You’re meant to read what everyone else has written on your subject before you can say what you want to say. If there’s nothing else I’ve learned from my father, surely I’ve learned the art and craft of methodical application. Having grown up in a family of artists and academics in Bombay, he should know how it’s done.

The only thing is there is a heck of a lot written on the subject of love. Every poet, philosopher, mathematician, mother, baker of treacle tarts, damaged teenager turned death-row inmate – everyone seems to have said something about love. Until I’ve read it all, how am I supposed to know what my take on it is? How do I know when I’ve learnt enough about love?

Federico says love is the same as breath, that as humans we are programmed to go after it, the same way we have to go on breathing to be alive. ‘And such a basic thing, it is not something one can analyse, is it? Why don’t you do something else?’

Do something else, says Federico-the-fixer. But what else can I do? I have no other skills.

Tyra helped me deal with the aimlessness I felt after university. She didn’t know about Rose, of course she didn’t, but that’s the thing with Tyra. She doesn’t push, she doesn’t try to draw out anything about you that you don’t want to tell. She saved me. She got me out of my room and into the world, she got me out of myself, and she pointed me in a direction. Now, three years later, I don’t know if it is the right direction or not. But it is a direction, the direction of the books that have saved me in the past.

And I need a direction right now.

‘I can do it. I know I can,’ I told Professor Grundy.

I tried to keep at bay the trickle of panic that was trying to climb up my skin. I couldn’t go back to having no direction. I couldn’t.

‘Hmm,’ Professor Grundy said. ‘The thing is, we ask you to do a report on something you’ve read, you can do that. You can do a critique. When pushed, you can deliver a summary, a decent one. But we ask you to develop your own writing on the subject, and, well, how much of that have we seen so far?’

‘Not enough?’

‘No, Rilla. We haven’t seen anything. Not a page, not a word. We can’t have you be a student here for life. You can’t just be here in this programme so you can take notes. You have to make a choice. Either write something or leave. You’re not a romantic, you know how things work. Which is it going to be, Rilla? Sink or swim?’

You’re not a romantic.

My professor says I’m not a romantic, and Tyra says I’m too much of one. So, which is it? You know, I just don’t know.

10
Romancing the Chickpea

For Slavoj Žižek, the falling in love is important. He makes love an event or an encounter. It isn’t just a being in love, but the moment of falling in love that matters, it changes the rest of your life. It is such an important event that not only is it a catalyst for everything that will follow in your life, but it feels like everything in your life has been leading up to that moment.

Rilla’s notes

The day after we met, I really thought I would never see Simon again. Maybe that was the unromantic side of me. I had had such a good evening that first night when he took me out to dinner, but I had convinced myself that it must have been a one-off, something not real. We had talked nonsense for three hours over our shared platter of injera (Simon had wanted to know if it made him a cannibal that he liked bread that felt so much like human skin), shiro, yellow split peas, red lentils and the house speciality, lamb stew. Over the enormous platter we discussed – well, everything. Victorian pocket-watches. Fondue and Simon’s complete abhorrence for liquid cheese. Rye crackers and how they were really hyped-up cardboard. Whether or not Liv Tyler looked like a Disney princess version of Steven Tyler. Whether or not the Steps reunion would reveal that members of that band had frozen their bodies back in the nineties and they had now re-emerged from the freezer. If concept art was actually art or just something produced by people who couldn’t paint. And whether Theresa May looked like Arrietty’s mum in the Studio Ghibli version of The Borrowers

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