Cold Feet

Reddy Madhavan Meenakshi

Description

Sometimes, you have to run away to find yourself. Sometimes, you find yourself where you aren t looking. Sometimes, you find yourself only after you lose yourself. Amisha has found her perfect man and is going to marry him, but suddenly feels the need to push the boundaries of their relationship. Akshara is in love with her best friend, but while he will give her benefits, he won t give her his love. Ladli has had her heart broken, so she runs away, only to find it waiting for her at the other side. Shayna knows what she wants in a man, but the man she wants is nothing like that. And finally, the girl who wants Shayna, actually just needs a friend. Cold Feet is the story of the strangely entwined lives of five women who live in Mumbai and deal differently with the same thing love.

Sujets

• Romance

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 14 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184758689
• Langue: English

Extrait

MEENAKSHI REDDY MADHAVAN
Cold Feet

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
The Bachelorette Party
1. You are Young and the World is Your Oyster
2. Fool Me Once
3. Getting Away from It All
4. The Flat with the Frog Bidet
5. Instant Karma
6. After the Sex, Before You Leave
7. Like a Mermaid, Minus the Fish
8. A Siren Sparkling
9. How Not to Be Needy
10. Our People
11. Daddy s Girl
12. The Antibiotic Pink Bungalow
13. All the Old Practised Positions
14. A Dialogue in One Tone
15. With a Little Help from History
16. The Next Song on the Playlist
17. Friends in Strange Places
18. Becoming Who You Want to Know
19. Other People s Opinions
20. The Small Confessions of Akshara
21. Wisdom is as Wisdom Does
22. Distinctions, Not Differences
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
COLD FEET
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of You Are Here and The Life and Times of Layla the Ordinary . She shuttles between New Delhi and Mumbai, two of her favourite cities, and finds things to write about in both.
This book is for two men I could not do without: Kian Ganz and Samit Basu
Her mind lives tidily, apart From cold and noise and pain, And bolts the door against her heart, Out wailing in the rain.
- Interior by Dorothy Parker
The Bachelorette Party
Before every wedding, there is a set of rituals that must be followed, prayers to be said, fires to be walked around, clothes to be bought, jewellery to be held up to your face, and the best bit, the only reason people actually care about whether you get married or not-parties to be thrown. It used to be quite a simple thing to do in the past-just one party for the ring ceremony when you announced your desire to tie the knot. It s actually called the roka in Punjabi wedding rituals, which translates to stop , as in, you have stopped the bride and now she can t marry anyone else.
Some people have engagement ceremonies, which is like a fancy version of the ring ceremony, and is more of a modern thing, signalling a longer engagement before you get married. Once your wedding dates are upon you, there are at least three different kinds of pre-parties you could have-the YPP (Young People s Party, for the Young People to get together and make merry without the dulling presence of adults); the sangeet (a song-and-dance affair, where the aforementioned Young People from each side get together and do a little dance performance, and it s all rather intimate and casual and getting to know you); and the mehendi (which is usually a non-alcoholic afternoon affair where the women get henna on their hands and eat a lot and find it hard to go to the bathroom because they re wearing really fancy clothes and have henna all over their palms). Then finally there is the wedding.
This is a basic template for an average Punjabi wedding, but seeing that most Indians usually end up having a lot of fun with these things, these rituals seem to have become universally adopted.
Amisha, sitting at her dressing table, gazed anxiously at what was threatening to become the world s largest pimple on her chin. She was less concerned with the traditional Hindu marriage stuff and more about a little Western tradition she had taken to heart-the bachelorette party!
Because she was marrying an Australian, she figured she was entitled to her hen night , but she had decided to go for the far sexier sounding bachelorette party . It didn t seem fair that guys got to call it a stag do, she thought, blotting the concealer under her eyes. In her mind, a stag do immediately conjured up images of wild animals running and rutting and fighting, while hen night was just so sitting-on-eggs-y. If they had to name it after an animal, then how about lioness night? The lioness did all the work, hunted and provided and looked after the kids that would be a good animal to have on her last single outing. And, of course, mermaid night, if you weren t picky. A hen isn t an animal either, not in the way a stag is, so why couldn t they be mermaids? They d braid each other s hair with pearls and swim through the pounding surf and ride sea horses, and yes, a mermaid night would be far more exciting than a hen night. But no one would have understood that if she had put it on the invitation, so she went with bachelorette. It was a much nicer word than spinster even, throwing images of a woman wearing red shiny heels and a glittery cocktail dress as opposed to the woman who lived in her nightie and only had slippers on.
Bachelorette! said the invite in sparkly pink letters. It was only an online invitation, but that meant Amisha could make the letters flash and have little balloons moving around, which she did. And when you clicked on the letters they faded away to give you the information about the party. There was a box you could check immediately underneath to show whether you were attending or not, and out of the twelve invites she had sent, eight people were definitely coming. These were good odds for a Friday evening party in Bombay, where everyone s calendars were fully booked weeks in advance. There was always something happening more important than you, and most people just swung by for a drink and then just as capably swung out , leaving no trace of their presence except sometimes a cloud of perfume and an empty glass where they had been sitting.
Amisha had been in Bombay for about two years now. For her, it was a city that inspired terrifically close friendships in a we re-all-in-this-together sort of way and it came with the caveat that once you were done with the city, you were kind of done with the friendship, too. Sometimes, the friendships lasted, but it was rare for a Bombay friendship to flourish outside of Bombay. But Amisha nurtured a rather traditional school of thought where a friendship grew from a stem to a flower to a tree eventually, and these instant overnight relationships where you came back from a party with two new best friends were beyond her. Still, she was trying. She made an effort. She wouldn t have called the people coming to her party close friends, but they were the nearest she had. If close friends meant the people you confided in, then they were that, but only by default.
Sometimes Amisha felt like a fraud, especially when the other girls, drunk, draped their arms around her and made declarations of undying friendship and love and she reciprocated because it would be rude not to. At that moment she would think, Am I the only one who isn t feeling this? Over the years, she had managed to whittle down her circle to people whose company she actually enjoyed. It didn t matter if they were close friends or not; they were intelligent, fun-loving women, and they would be a good choice to have around at a party.
About twenty minutes away by rickshaw, Ladli and Akshara were doing their usual passive aggressive dance around their flat s only full-length mirror. Akshara was taller, she could see clearly over Ladli s head and so Ladli thought it was only fair that she stand in front and let Akshara stand behind her. Akshara complained that it was hard to put on eyeliner when you weren t close to the mirror. The tiffs continued as the two of them tried to fit their faces in at the same time, but this also led to subtle space-occupying as one scattered her make-up all over the table instead of putting it back on the shelf and the other blocked the mirror while checking out her outfit.
Ladli, being softer and easier to bully, finally picked up her make-up and went to the bathroom to put it on in front of the cracked mirror there and Akshara, the one who was the quickest to feel guilty, began to make up for it by showering Ladli with compliments the minute she emerged.
Nice dress, she said, nervously, twisting her fingers round and round.
Thanks, replied Ladli, looking down at herself and smoothing out her skirt.
This one-word answer sent Akshara into a tailspin of remorse, convincing her that Ladli was really, really mad and she began to drop more compliments. Nice shoes. I like your hair like that. I like your bag. Your lipstick is pretty, is it new? Ladli, whose mind was on an entirely different matter-her boyfriend, who had been avoiding her calls recently-just nodded absently at Akshara.
She was an absent nod kind of person; it was something you learned not to take personally after a while. Akshara knew this and yet descended into despair. We re going to be late, she said, mournfully.
Are we? asked Ladli in surprise. Let s go then.
After a quick glance at the mirror, Ladli picked up her bag, drew out her keys and checked her cell phone for messages. Everything was okay everywhere but in her love life. Which meant that nothing was okay. I will not obsess, she told herself, thumbing her phone like a worry stone. She tried to be cool, firm and impassive. I. Will. Not. Obsess.
I wonder if she s still mad at me thought Akshara. I ll let her have the whole mirror next time.
Shayna hated to be the first to arrive. Usually, she timed it so that she was comfortably in the middle of arrivals when people were already there, conversations had already started, and she d ring the bell, standing in the doorway for an extra second, both to gauge the party inside and to make an entrance. This wasn t something she did on purpose, nothing that she had consciously decided, it just came from the fact that she loved to be the centre of attention. If you told her this, she would narrow her eyes at you, but there was something pure and innocent in her need to be the focus of a room. She was like a little girl, a precocious little girl, who comes into the room at her parents dinner party in her pyjamas, and proceeds to charm all the guests. Look, here I am, notice me! But for Amisha s party, she had made the mistake of assuming, since Amisha was old and boring and about to get married, that everyone else would be old and boring and arr