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It took her five meetings – almost – to strike up a conversation.
Sweety saw Guddu first. She was volunteering at a home for HIV-positive children, for a project that counted for ten whole marks on her finals. They were marks she needed very badly. It was one of his three part-time jobs while he studied for his counselling degree, but he didn't tell her that. In fact, he didn't talk to her at all.
Hello, chikna, Sweety breathed softly to herself, that first day, but said no more and no louder. Shyness was not exactly a Sweety characteristic, but things had been a bit awkward between her and the predatory instinct for a while now, mostly thanks to the impending matrimonial storm at home. There was nothing quite like impending doom to dampen girlish ardour. She found out about the part-time jobs and the degree from her guide, who wasn't much older than she was and clearly had an eye for the same sort of men. She found out that he was very quiet and singularly uninterested in talking to anyone, even the kids. "Stammers," Althea said. "You know how the older boys get about that sort of thing."
She had seen him in the early evening across a room full of squalling boys (they put her to work on the boys because they listened when she talked), lean and neat and yes, beautiful. Men like this were greatly appreciated by Sweety. On that first day, she crept up to him sideways, chattering at her charges loudly over the sudden hammering of her heart. She cocked her hips and flipped her hair and made the kids laugh. He had been sitting at the far end of the room with a little boy who had scrambled into his lap and refused to leave. They did not speak. They sat there for the whole hour that Sweety made a mess of the Science lesson she was supposed to be teaching, gazing quietly out of the window at the far end of the large classroom. They had been sitting there when Sweety left. He hadn't looked at her even once.
"So what's he doing here, then?" Sweety asked, without thinking very much about the question. A stammer; the dreamy ones were never perfect.
"He keeps the books, and he teaches music," said Althea. "It's mostly Hindi stuff." Her toes twitched in her gladiator sandals, just starting to go out of fashion that season. "He doesn't stammer when he sings."
"Fully romantic," Sweety said. She saw him again, crossing the courtyard with a guitar in his hand. "Where does he live?"
Althea said. "I have absolutely no idea," Althea said. "Why would you want to know that?"
"It tells you a lot about a person," Sweety said. She looked up and saw Althea glaring at her.
"Go do your work," Althea said. Sweety brooded a little over the lovely and remote apparition going over the accounts in the office next door, but she went.
*
It was crunch time for Sweety, and not just because of the exams. Everything coming down on her suddenly; Sargam getting married and moving away to Abu Dhabi, leaving her degree unfinished, and Maitreyi eloping with a Christian boy, whose parents were still foaming at the mouth, and the next thing Sweety knew was that her own family was getting serious about marrying her off. They had started talking about it all the way back when she had turned eighteen, and was still sneaking around with Hussain. Dada had laughed good-naturedly when she rejected the first two proposals flat out for being ugly and uninteresting, and told Kaki that it was alright, a girl with a college education and a face like hers had every right to choose someone handsome and interesting. They were in no hurry to marry her off. Sweety had heard the easy lie behind the words, but it hadn't mattered very much until now. The college education was about to end; the face had stayed the same; and Hussain was old history (the last Sweety had heard he was still telling people that he was relocating to Hong Kong the minute his fledgling shipping business took off, and his hairline was already beginning to recede). Sweety had no more defences against the onset of the inevitable. She had nothing left to fight for.
She could get a job, she thought, walking through the bylanes leading up to the chawl. She'd never been very interested in one before, but she didn't see why she wouldn't do well. She was quite good at running things. She had told Dada that maybe she would get an MBA, but then Dada had lowered the newspaper and looked at her shrewdly, glasses slipping down his nose, and said, "You're having trouble enough finishing one degree," and she'd had to acknowledge the truth of that. It was all fine and very well to have it down on a piece of paper that you were qualified to tell people what to do, but what was the use of spending all that effort to earn a chance to sit in an airtight office all day? At least an arranged marriage wouldn't involve having to fix spreadsheets.
Sweety stopped at the gate of the chawl, away from where the boys were playing cricket on a makeshift patch of concrete, and looked up at the tenements. They were piling high on top of the other, always growing. The stairways and alleys were clogged with washing lines on every floor, jumbling together on the rooftops with bits of jutting asbestos sheets under which the smaller children hung, watching the streets zipped up and down with automobile lights below them. Her eight-year-old cousin was looking through the railings, catapult in hand, taking in potential targets slice by slice. Chains of electric wires and telecom cables twined around each other over his head.
"Ganesh!" she stood at the gate and yelled. He ignored her. "Come down. Do—right now! You do not want me to climb up there, chirkut."
Even the evening sky showed in installments here; a fierce pink over her head, a streak of grey there, an orange further away, a purple behind. Where you came from did tell people a lot about you. Hers was an old chawl, built in an old part of Bombay, dating back to the years when the mill chimneys in the middle distance had use to smoke night and day, and families pouring in from all over the state had huddled around them for sustenance. The rooms were small and the air was choked, but at least there was food, water, schools, stadiums – better than the rest of the country. The mills had gone silent not long after Sweety was born, but the families stayed on. Sweety had dim memories of it being a different place, with more light, maybe less people. They kept crowding in, now, especially after Dada started making promises of jobs and housing for Marathi families. The jobs materialised sometimes, but more often it didn't matter; if the boys had Dada's faith he kept them on and provided for them to do his own work. It was not a place that brooked any illusions, nonetheless. It had resembled a slum for some time now, but no one ever moved out unless they had somehow displeased Dada. So people recognised that you belonged when you told them you were from here. They knew that your family had come here generations ago, and that you were a Marathi, and that there was something untouchable about you, because you lived in the shadow of Sunil Bhope; you would not be messed around with.
Sweety herself had both the address and the surname. She wasn't just from here; she was its here-ness. All her life it had made things easier for her. Even the teachers at school had treated her differently because of it, in spite of the years in between that Dada had spent in jail. He had been remanded the year mobile phones first came to the country, and they had smuggled one inside for him to conduct his business. There had always been one or other of her teachers with problems to solve. Rent, water, property disputes, housing loans; the sort of stuff for which you could only pray, unless the local don had a baby sister studying in your class.
The kids at the shelter liked her. Maybe she could be a teacher.
*
"So be one," Dada said over dinner, leaning over to spoon more dal on her plate. "No one's going to lock you up in a kitchen, here or anywhere else. Women should teach." He drained his glass of buttermilk.
"You won't have time for it once you have children," Kaki interjected through a bite of her poli.
"You want to teach these AIDS children, is it? Alright, fine, HIV-positive, don't shout; I don't see the difference," Dada said. "It's not good to get caught up with these things. They die, don't they?"
"Chee baba," Sweety sighed. "How to explain all this to you?"
"Save your breath," Dada said, and chuckled in that diabolical way he had. "Explain it to Manish."
"Who's Manish?" Sweety asked.
"He's Shelar's son," Dada said. "The builder. Surely you've heard of him."
Of course you couldn't move out, Sweety thought glumly, sitting out on the verandah later in the night. There was nowhere else to go.
*
Back at the shelter, she saw Guddu again, and heard him sing for the first time. The song was old and his voice was soft and strong. Hai apna dil to awara, he sang, with a real hold on the notes, like someone who was actually good at this, na jaane kis pe aayega. The kids jumped around, and some of them puffed up their forelocks and tilted to the side while they danced, like Dev Anand. Sweety didn't know all the words, so she watched through the window, and laughed. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Guddu looking at her, and then looking away when she turned towards him.
He really was dreadfully good-looking. It was predictable, but she sang Aaj phir jeene ki tamanna all the way home.
The builder's son was very rich. It was the primary attribute of his candidacy as Sweety's future husband. Not for a minute did Sweety discount richness. Rich was good. Rich meant more space, everywhere: in a house, in a car, in a job, in a life. They could have children who would be able to waste their lives doing photography or mountain climbing or something where they didn't have to worry about rent and bills and the next meal. Maybe they would send them abroad to study. Manish had studied business development in Australia for about three months, he told her. He didn't tell Sweety why he'd come back.
To be fair, he didn't have a chance to tell Sweety much of anything at the meeting with their families ranged on either side of them, gold gleaming heavily at the necks and wrists of the Shelars, and off the rims of the special teacups. And alright, so the fellow was unexceptionable. He had nice teeth – those did not run in the Bhope family – and an honest, hearty laugh, and a hairline that didn't look set to recede any time soon. He'd left Australia without a fancy degree, but Sweety knew that she'd written utter rubbish in her own BA finals. Maybe the children would study, if Sweety told them to. She thought of all the things she could tell Manish that might get him to withdraw the proposal, but the options were limited: there was nothing she could say that wouldn't get back to Dada. Sweety knew there were boys, sometimes, who sympathised with you when you told them that you had a boyfriend already and weren't ready to tell your parents about it, and who helped you cover for it by removing themselves from consideration quietly and decently. She tried to guess at what Dada would say if word got back to him that Sweety had told Manish that she had a boyfriend, and then what he would say if he found out that that she didn't actually have one; her imagination failed her at this point.
In a brainwave after they had been allowed out for coffee – Kaka and one of the boys trailing indiscreetly behind, in a way that seemed not to bother Manish in the least – Sweety declared to him that she was in a difficult position.
"Sick children?" Manish said. "Like, dying children?"
"They deserve love too," Sweety said. "It's my life's mission to help them. I don't know if you've ever felt that way – that there are some things that you just have to do. Some things that go beyond a duty."
Manish looked blank.
"Dada is a politician," Sweety said apologetically. "Maybe that's why. Social justice. You know how it is. I can't let anything get in the way of my life's work. It will come first for me, all my life."
She looked up at him through her bangs apologetically as she said it, putting all her heart into it. Dada would have laughed at this point, or waved it off.
"Wow," Manish said. He looked deeply impressed. "That's amazing."
"Oh," said Sweety.
"Do you think you'll have a couple of hours next weekend to spare?" he asked. "We could go to the cinema."
She didn't even have any grounds for refusal.
Dispirited, she wound her way back to the shelter, a month after finals had ended, for reasons mostly to do with Manish's steadfast resistance against shock, hurt or any disappointment at whatever she could say or do to him (The children would definitely have to have her brains). She had to make some demonstration of her commitment to her life's work, now that she'd told him. She could never be a teacher either, she realised, unless she developed unforeseen reserves of patience with the little devils and their tricks, which stopped being amusing when you were facing up to them every day instead of three hours a week. They didn't let teachers spank children any more in most schools that she knew of. Maybe the good thing about being a mother was that you could smack them up their heads now and then without being fired for it.
*
It was almost another month gone by before she ran into Guddu the beautiful again. He had left in the intervening months, finished his own degree and begun full-time at one of the bigger AIDS awareness NGOs in the city. He had promised to come by once in a while to take a look at the accounts in an unofficial capacity, Althea said, and sure enough, there he was, drinking tea and reading the Hindustan Times standing by the kettle in the staff kitchen. He looked up when Sweety entered, and looked away again immediately, on reflex. Sweety laughed silently. Even beleaguered and almost at the end of her independent existence, it was delightful to be able to do that to handsome men.
He looked up again, almost invisibly squaring his shoulders. They were very nice shoulders, straining a little against the faded green cotton of his kurta. His eyes met hers; he nodded and then – shyly – smiled. The corners of his mouth quirked up, and a deep, completely endearing dimple peeked through. It completely distracted Sweety.
"H—hi," she stammered.
And just like that, the dimple disappeared, the smile slid off, and then disappeared, replaced with something hard and cold. Sweety blinked.
*
It was his own fault, Sweety argued to herself. She had made a genuine mistake, a slip of the tongue, and he had chosen to interpret it in the unkindest way possible. So what if he stammered, and people made fun of it? If a girl had stumbled over her words talking to you – Sweety chewed the end of her braid in a fit of nervy anger – wouldn't you take it as a compliment, anyway?
Maybe you would if you realised that the girl was still having fits over it weeks after you'd returned her (one hundred percent innocent and friendly) greeting with abject and merciless coldness, and left her to gawp after you like a fish. It had taken Sweety a full day to work out why that had happened. She would have kicked herself if she hadn't been so annoyed with him. She was still annoyed with him. It was, of course, the only reason she was still even thinking about it.
The summer passed. The marriage situation continued to deteriorate. Manish was still intent on marrying her, and every early notion of a sabotage operation was receding as the weeks sweated on. Sweety kept starting herself on the business of reconciliation with the whole affair, but she never got very far. She hoarded her money instead, and planned irrational escape routes. Dada didn't have much of a network on the ground outside Mumbai, but he still had more than she did. Escape would entail leaving the country. She could get as far as Kuala Lumpur if she went east, London if she went the other way – not that any country west of Dubai would give a runaway Bhope an entry visa.
"We can go to London if you like," Manish offered, during a conversation over dinnertime – they were now unchaperoned at the stuffy, posh old Gallops, at the racecourse – about honeymoon destinations. "Fantastic Indian restaurants. They're really Bangladeshi."
There was a possibly-coincidental lull in the voluble and exclusively Bengali conversation floating over from the bookies at the next table.
"I've heard," Sweety said sadly.
She was in the parking lot, waiting for Manish's chauffeur – Manish was staying back for a late appointment with some business associates, he said, as if he expected Sweety to believe that he was even interested in, much less capable of, doing business without adult supervision – when she saw Guddu again, under the dim light of the lanterns hanging from the gulmohars. She stared: his hair was long, and the t-shirt he was wearing didn't stretch across his shoulders so much as mould itself to them like paint. It couldn't be – he wasn't – but the face –
– and almost as if he felt her eyes on her, he turned to look at her, frowning. Sweety realised that she had been quite wrong. It was a hard, challenging, closed face, staring at her the way she had stared at him openly. It was a face ready for a fight. It wasn't Guddu.
"Charlie," called someone behind him, rolling up in an improbably red sports car. "Oi."
"Here," he replied, finally taking his eyes off her. He spoke strongly and clearly. It was an uncanny resemblance, but he wasn't Guddu.
*
She was still thinking about it as she went home in the blue darkness, the moon shining clearly on the puddles of water left behind by the evening tankers. Over ahead, the chawl was buzzing with the sounds of the night: late dinners, the odd quarrel, the night-time soaps. Little Ganesh, long past his bedtime, was racing his car over the wooden railings of the verandah as she went in.
"What took you so long?" he said.
"Why aren't you asleep?" she demanded.
"You went out for dinner," Ganesh said. "What did you bring me?"
Sweety hefted him bodily and marched up to his kholi. His grandmother was fast asleep. Sweety looked at Ganesh, shook her head, and turned around to put him to bed in her own room, where he would be less likely to disturb aged people who needed their sleep. She climbed up one floor, and then there was a soft thump as he wriggled out of her hold and picked himself up off the ground, getting a running start on her.
"Ganesh," Sweety called. "I'll play cricket with you tomorrow if you sleep now."
"Sshh," he said over his shoulder. He was climbing up to the window of Dada's office now, dimly lit, murmuring with the sound of the 10 o'clock news. He turned and beckoned to her as he crouched down below the sill on the narrow balcony.
"It's been far too long since someone beat you with a rolling-pin," Sweety hissed at him, but she climbed up to put a hand over the railing at his wriggling neck. She looked into the office over his head, and saw Dada sitting there, talking to someone hidden from view. She craned her neck, and caught the dull flash of gold reflecting off the tubelight.
"...no question of redevelopment being residential," the other man was saying. It was Manish's father, the builder Shelar. "The sooner it goes over, the better it is."
Dada chuckled slowly. "Shelar saheb, even I can't advance the date of an election. It's a democracy," he said. "We owe it to the public to be efficient. So you start your contract work now. Let's get Manish and Sweety married just before the election – that should be a free meal for many of our voters – and once the poll results are in, you squeeze your bulldozers into the bylanes."
"Not to speak ill, Bhau," Shelar was saying. "But what if the elections – that is to say, we don't. You don't –?"
"I don't?" Dada said amiably. "What don't I?"
"Forget I said it," Shelar said, and joined his hands. The bracelets glinted. "Will five crores be enough? The Cullinan Mills tenants made a big fuss when their land was redeveloped. You heard? The payouts were almost three percent of the land value. Ridiculous."
"Five crores won't be enough," Dada said. He smiled. There was a gold cap on one of his own teeth. "But that's what families are all about, no? Making do."
Pressed flat against the wall, Sweety bit her lip. Dada was ceding power to Shelar in return for election funding. It was something you did when you wanted to get into power: you sold off land that wasn't yours to sell. It meant that the chawl was going to go; residents would be paid off and told to look for rooms elsewhere, like people all over the mill districts had been for years now. Dada had stood between the builders and this chawl ever since he had come back from jail, which was why people would vote for him when elections came around a year and a half later.
Ganesh tugged on her hand silently. She put a finger to her lips automatically. They jumped down to the steps and tiptoed away, careful not to creak the boards.
"Ganesh," she began.
"I get to bat first tomorrow," he said to her, and darted out of sight to his room.
*
Sweety's results came at the end of the summer, as bad as she'd expected, but not worse.
"Baba re, you have at least another twelve months before the wedding," Dada said to her. "I can't do anything about it. It's the Shelars and their astrologer. Something about Saturn in the fifth house. We can't disrespect these things." He saw something in her face, then, and chuckled and added, "I'm only the brother of the bride."
He looked for a moment like he wanted to say more, but Sweety nodded and slipped away to her room. He had looked at her often over the last few months, almost wanting to say something, almost asking where they had gone or what they talked about, or whether she liked him.
"In a hurry to get it over with?" Kaki asked her, inside. Sweety rolled her eyes, since she was the only person who was in anything but a state of anticipatory excitement. "Don't be. Weddings are short. Marriages are long."
Life went on. It wasn't like Dada had stunned Sweety when she overheard his talk with Manish's father. The knowledge that a leader was betraying you was never a surprise. It was just a matter of the lengths to which you would go to ignore it. While he had been making his bargains, people across the tenements had been watching watching TV, drinking, sleeping, having sex, ironing their clothes for the next day. Through it all, they had known that it was coming. They would never find houses in this part of the city again; they would be uprooted and flung far out, to the suburbs and outlying districts on the mainland. They would commute for hours to come to work, put their children in unfamiliar schools, live a life poorer and stranger than the ones their own parents had had. It was inevitable, but Dada had bought them some time, and they would play along when he said he was standing for elections to buy them some more. It would be over, soon. He would tell them that the rich people had won in spite of his best efforts, and he would start the fight to reclaim the dignity and identity of the poor. He would start riots against the Hindi speakers. Everyone would play along again.
She enrolled for her Masters' degree at the university, which went on a three-month strike to protest administration pay grades, just in time to throw admission processes across the city into a state of chaos. She made excuses not to meet Manish, but played along gamely when he showed up anyway. She did manage to slap him when he tried to kiss her in a movie theatre, but that was the only satisfaction of the entire affair. The whole marriage thing was playing out, too. Playing along.
It was a democracy. She kept meaning to stop going to the shelter, but somehow the opportunity never arose. There was always something to get away from.
"Well, don't show up if you can't commit to the children," Althea told her peevishly. "It's about them, not you."
"Says you," Sweety said coldly to her. "Have the directors written your recommendation for NYU yet?"
*
Three weeks later, it was the last day of summer, and Sweety had a list of potential escape locations and a stash of money, salted away under her mother's saris, that would last her at least three months anywhere on the subcontinent.
She got into a cab and directed the driver to the shelter. It was a sweltering day, the light too bright to be able to see anything. The four young men who swaggered up to the taxi window just as the driver leaned out to turn down the meter went almost unnoticed until they were right under Sweety's nose.
"Boss," one of them said. Something about the tone of it made Sweety's neck prickle. She looked up, and squinted. "Know any paan shops around here?"
The driver's hands tightened on the steering wheel – he had heard it too, that indefinable menace, boyish but potentially endless trouble – but his voice was steady as he answered. "No," he said. "Sorry."
"No?" another boy said, in a tone of heartfelt surprise. "How is that?" The driver turned the key in his engine. "How is that?" the other one repeated.
"I'm not from this part of town, baba," the driver answered, and started the car. One of the boys leaned in casually through the open window.
"Oh," he said. "So where are you from?"
The driver sat, polite and tense, waiting for them to clear out of the way. His face in the rearview mirror was stiff with anger. They weren't any of them particularly old, but they looked strong, belligerent with their upturned collars and clenched fists as they formed a ring about the front of the taxi. Another one repeated the question again, this time in Marathi.
Sweety poked her head out from the backseat. "Why do you want to know?" she asked the boy. He looked down at her, taken aback momentarily. They hadn't paid her any attention so far.
"Why do you want to know?" she asked again.
"No one's talking to you," the first boy spoke up. "We're just looking for information."
"Why? Did someone die and make you the Census Board?" Sweety said. She pulled herself back in. "Let's go, bhaiyya."
"What on –?" one of them began. "Oye, you w—" Sweety lost her temper and stuck her head out again.
"Listen, you dick," she said coldly. "Either you count yourself extremely lucky that I'm sitting in this taxi because I have somewhere to get to, and you back off right now. Or you say that one more time, and leave it to me to shut you up in a jail cell faster than you can remember your own mother's name, and that won't be the worst thing. Do I give you the impression that I won't? Do I give you the slightest impression that I don't know how to deal with motherfuckers like you?"
No one said anything.
"Move, boss," she told the taxi driver, and whipped her head around just in time to catch one of the boys putting an uncertain hand out towards her. "I dare you," she said, dangerously, and part of her almost was spoiling for a fight, now, to jump out of the cab and slap their faces around. But they pulled back, and a couple of them were grinning sheepishly, now, as though to make it out as some sort of joke at Sweety's expense. "She's in a hurry, har har." They obviously weren't any of Dada's boys. "Go suck some cock, sister!" one of them called as the cab pulled away.
"Go fuck yourselves!" she screamed, and sat back. "If your little dicks even knew how."
She was laughing to herself by the next signal. It might have been dangerous, of course. There were roving bands of men like that everywhere. The summer brought it out in them. They would sit around in the doorways, in front of their party offices and at their run-down little restaurants with nothing to do all day. And then a mobile would ring with a word from the local corporator, or there would be an editorial in their afternoon paper, and they would be up and about, spoiling for a fight, for Marathi pride. It was unfair, objectively speaking; they caused a lot of damage to property – thank goodness the gang they'd just left behind hadn't come out with hockey sticks or cricket bats – and they roughed up the smallest ones first, the ones who were all too obviously from outside the city, no antecedents or affiliations, no way to learn Marathi, too proud to cut off the telltale tuft of hair or the beard. It wasn't right, but it was hardly the worst thing about the city. It happened when you had so many people crammed into one small space. You needed someone to lay down the law, and as far as Sweety could tell, laws were always going to be unfair to some people.
"What? Oh," she leaned forward as the driver pulled over to stop at the side of the road. "Don't tell me you've run out of petrol."
The man's hands were shaking. "Madam," he said in a low voice. "Please get out."
Sweety shook her head. "What?" she said.
"Please get out," he said again. His voice cracked as he said it.
"I heard you," she said. "I just didn't believe you. Is something wrong with the cab?"
"I cannot go further," he said. "Madam, out."
"What, they frightened you that bad? We left them two lanes over," Sweety said, puzzled. "And anyway, the further you drive, the safer you'll be. Chee baba, you can't be so thin-skinned in this city. Just suck it up and move, everyone else does, am I right? I – look, what on earth is your problem?"
He turned to her, and the anger on his face was tinged now with disgust. It looked weary and disbelieving, and thoroughly fed up. It wasn't attached to a body with a hockey stick in its hand, but it fit right in.
"Oh," Sweety said. "So you couldn't stand up to the boys, but a woman, alone, unarmed, different story, huh?"
"You can think what you like, miss," the driver said. "Please, just leave."
Sweety opened her mouth to argue further, but then her temper really flared up, and she flounced out of the car, slamming the door hard.
"Cunt," she breathed. The driver raced off without looking behind.
Just then the wind blew up in an almighty gust, and the heavens opened up. It began to rain.
She was angry and upset when it started. It was just the way everything was going about life. You waited and waited for summer to end and all of a sudden you were out stranded in the midst of a downpour; you helped a man out and he kicked you out of his cab; you went to a shelter to teach orphans infected with a deadly disease and nothing you did was good enough, for them or for you. It kicked your ass, this life, because being good was never good enough. Apparently some people managed it, but you really couldn't, not with a pass class on your BA marksheet and impending marriage to a man you didn't love. She could have cried, walking the long distance to the shelter in the rain, but all around her the air was alive, people suddenly jaunting along with a spring in their step, faces upturned to the rain, and the sharp petrichor of the first rains hitting the earth, rising from the spattered dust and slick concrete in a silvery-blue fume you could almost see.
And that was when she rounded the corner, into the crowded little connecting lane bustling with people and cars and the smell of food and mud, and saw Guddu across the street.
He was bareheaded, dressed in jeans and a shirt that had had started the day crisp and white, and was turning grey and transparent with rainwater before her eyes. He was already soaking through to the skin, trying in vain to keep his guitar case out of the downpour under the cover of the bus stop billboards that were failing to shelter a swelling population of pedestrians trying anxiously to protect laptops and Italian leather shoes and zardozi kurtas of their own.
It was late afternoon, and all at once things were beautifully clear. The day had changed. She lifted her face up the sky like the others who were with her on that street, and the rain drizzled into her open mouth. She laughed in that moment, breathless and gleeful. It was like the weather, the way your heart just lost track of itself. Now summer, now the monsoon; Now tears, now amusement. Now despair, now purpose. Now you just knew, in a brilliant flash of inspiration, what you had to do.
She fished around in her tote for the little double-folded umbrella that she carried everywhere to shield herself from the sun, shook it open and crossed the street. He was lovelier than ever, oddly dignified with the thin cotton of the shirt clinging to his chest, silent and intent in the middle of the jostling crowd. It made her heart ache in a funny way. He turned as she held the umbrella over both their heads, and his eyebrows quirked.
"H-hi," he said gravely, after a heart-stopping pause. Sweety started to hear music in her head.
"Hi," she said back, and smiled at him, and leaped off a mental precipice. "You l...looked like y..you needed an u..uhm.. mb..."
His eyes widened, in surprise and understanding, and a sudden flash of apology. "Th-thank you," he said. The dimples, when they appeared, were as heartening as ever. "I – we haven't even been i-introduced. I'm Sanjay Sharma."
"Sweety," Sweety said, and decided to escape Dada this time. "My name is S..sweety. Can I w-warh-walk you s..somewhere?"
So they walked in the pouring rain, guitar in between them (but not for long), stumbling over their words, and Sweety sang – actually sang, out loud, where people could listen and laugh, and join in – Dev Anand songs all the way back home, where everything, even the rooftops, looked different in the new season, unsteady and precarious, just about dauntless, somehow.
Ganesh was standing on top of the wooden railings on the verandah. He waved at her. She waved back, and flashed him the 'v' sign.
And that was how the war began for Sweety Bhope.