CALL ME DAN

Anish Trivedi

Description

GAUTAM is awkward and shy; DAN oozes confidence.DAN deftly juggles his coffee and cookies; GAUTAM drops drinks.GAUTAM is afraid to talk to girls; DAN finds himself in bed with girls he’s only just met . . .Gautam Joshi is thirty years old; with a job in a call centre that his parents think is just one step up from unemployment and in a relationship that his girlfriend Michelle thinks is going nowhere. But Gautam loves his world. He makes more money than his father; and women actually want to go out with him: Blonde bombshells; friends of friends; strangers in bars; all seem attracted to Gautam. Well; not quite. That only happens when they call him Dan.Anish Trivedi’s Call Me Dan is a hilarious look at the new India; where arranged marriages and one-night stands are all part of a young man’s search for love. Even true love.Visit www.anishtrivedi.com for more...

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
• Date de parution: 17 juillet 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9788184752755
• Langue: English

Extrait

Gautam is awkward and shy; Dan oozes confidence. Dan deftly juggles his coffee and cookies; Gautam drops drinks. Gautam is afraid to talk to girls; Dan finds himself in bed with girls he's only just met…
Gautam Joshi is thirty years old, with a job in a call centre that his parents think is just one step up from unemployment and in a relationship that his girlfriend Michelle thinks is going nowhere. But Gautam loves his world. He makes more money than his father, and women actually want to go out with him: Blonde bombshells, friends of friends, strangers in bars, all seem attracted to Gautam. Well, not quite. That only happens when they call him Dan.
Anish Trivedi's Call Me Dan is a hilarious look at the new India, where arranged marriages and one-night stands are all part of a young man's search for love. Even true love.

Cover design by Divya Thakur, Design Temple
PENGUIN BOOKS CALL ME DAN
Anish Trivedi is a former investment banker who gave up Wall Street to host radio, anchor television and run a media company. He is the writer of two plays, Still Single and One Small Day, and a regular contributor to magazines that include GQ and Elle. His acting credits include the stage, Hollywood and Bollywood. He lives in Mumbai, but writes all over the world. This is his first novel.
C ALL M E D AN
ANISH TRIVEDI
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Group (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Penguin Books India 2010
Copyright © Anish Trivedi 2010
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-01-4306-330-8
This digital edition published in 2011.
e-ISBN : 978-81-8475-275-5
This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this e-book.
To my parents, Siddhida and Arun, who taught me early in life that nothing beats a good book
Contents
Copyright
Chapter 1
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
He’s having trouble with Dan. Gautam is. With Dan. Not real trouble. Not having to think too much about it trouble. Just the nagging, niggling feeling that something, soon, will go wrong. This is a small town. People notice. They talk. There was that whole business with Michelle for instance. Well, not so much Michelle, really, as her friend. But Michelle was there, listening to every other word over the thump of the bass and the crash of glasses and the shouted greetings as people discovered friends they hadn’t met in twenty-four hours. It could have all gone horribly wrong if she’d twigged to what Dan was trying to do. But then she only heard every other word so it was okay.
And then the next night. With the same girl. Only this time Michelle was in the back by the pool table, adding another scratch in the worn out felt and leaving one more beer ring in the polish, just happy that it was a Friday which meant two days without having to wear a uniform and smile at people who couldn’t be bothered to be polite. They should have been together, Michelle and he, but the girl, what was her damned name, decided to talk to the DJ and then they ended up at the bar while Dan was getting another couple of pints. Two pints. One for Michelle. One for him. Only the girl, it sounded something like Preeti but wasn’t, took one from his fist while he was telling Ravi behind the bar to put it on his tab and took one long, slow gulp.
‘I think I’ll keep this.’
Fingers wrapped loosely around the neck of the bottle.
‘I should get back. To Michelle. She might want that beer.’ Not that she knows it’s missing. Yet.
‘She might.’
‘You look like you need it more.’ Not that there’s much left in the bottle after that last long pull.
‘I was just thinking that about you.’
‘The beer?’ Of course she means the beer.
‘The beer.’
And that tongue, just the tip, glistening with the last drop she licked off the bottle.
They stayed at the bar then, right under the blowers that used to suck the cigarette smoke out, but now that there’s no smoking there, just the conversation away from the crowd, right where he shouldn’t have been, there was Dan, saying all the things he shouldn’t have, the things he’d said the night before. Only this time the girl, it might have been Priya, had her hand on his arm, the one that wasn’t holding Michelle’s half drunk beer, and was leaning in so a curtain of hair, recently washed but already smelling of cigarettes sneaked on the street and the hint of sweat, fell between them, brushing his cheek and once, when he raised his own bottle, his lips.
He should have left then. Or stepped back, or even moved away from the bar where everyone could hear, even over the loud rock that never changed. He should have. Instead he let her hair stay right there, stroking his lip. And then leaned over even closer, like that was really possible, and said her hair smelt like something he’d like to wake up to every morning. Which is when she leaned in just that little bit more and let her lips follow where her hair had been.
‘Why don’t you?’
And then she left him standing there with her breath and her lips and her voice, soft as a sunbeam, even though she’d had to shout to be heard over the blower and the Beatles, inviting him to follow her.
Which is when Michelle came over, looking for her beer. And found him standing there, under the blowers where he never stood, ever, because he depended on his ears for a living, he said. Without an explanation for why he was standing there or for the grin he couldn’t get rid of or where Sandhya, that was her name, had gotten to because it was time they were all heading home.
He got lucky that night. Dan. Gautam knows he did.

It’s four-thirty in the morning and Gautam is just getting up, out of habit, without an alarm that would wake his parents in the next room, or his sister, in the next bed with just a small stool separating it from his. He heads for the bathroom just a few feet down the passage, glad that at this hour there’s always water in the taps and he doesn’t have to use the bucket of cold water that’s been sitting there since his mother filled it last night.
The geyser is instant, sputtering hot water in bursts that scald his fingers while he shaves, wishing again Michelle would let him grow a moustache. He’d look good in a moustache, the kind Tom Selleck used to have in that TV show where he drove a Ferrari and picked up trouble and women in the first ten minutes. But Michelle doesn’t like facial hair, so he doesn’t grow one.
As he does most mornings, Gautam stops to examine himself critically in the mirror, wondering, hoping something has changed. The image that looks back solemnly is the same as the one he saw the day before and all the times before that, a face he knows is not handsome, but can be charitably described as pleasant. Hair that curls when it gets too long, plastered down in patches where his head has rested on a hard pillow. A nose that goes unnoticed most times. A mouth that twists into a crooked smile which ends at a small hollow, not quite a dimple, one that women find attractive, although no woman has ever told him that. The mirror stops mid-chest, but if he stands close enough and on his toes, he can see beyond the bones of his ribs to the slightly skinny legs, just past the narrow waist and hips, see enough to promise himself that he will begin working out, this evening he will go sign up at the gym just down the road.
Ten minutes later he’s stepped out, drying himself and reaching for the hair gel. A glob of goo rubbed between his palms and streaked back in one smooth gesture that he’s also learned from television. Pants pulled on, and then, still buttoning his shirt, Gautam leaves home, walking down the dim stairs, dodging bicycles and sleeping servants, to come out on the street. The dog that huddles under the milk booth sticks its head out, just as it does every morning, and ignores Gautam, each of them comfortable in their dislike of the other. Three, maybe four, years ago, when the dog was new, it barked and chased him, and because he is just a little scared of dogs, Gautam ran, only to be chased louder and faster. Then one day, tired of being breathless as he reached the station, he turned around and ran at the dog instead, shrieking, drowning out its yelps. Two beggars and a taxi driver, asleep on the st