Distaste
When people asked Miriam if she was lonely, she used to say No, because she had friends. It was something to have friends, said Miriam. In truth, she only had one friend.
As to family, there were none worth speaking of. Most of her family were dead: the rest lived in the Gulf where they drove respectable mid-size sedans and worked in hospitals as surgeons. (Miriam was a chartered accountant: a job they found distasteful because she earned so little.) When her relatives remembered her, they sent a Christmas card. Although she didn’t celebrate Christmas, Miriam always put these cards on her mantelpiece. Although she was thirty-seven, there were only four cards on the mantelpiece.
Miriam’s friend was a woman named Sarala, who lived next door to her at №5 Royal Gardens. Royal Gardens was a block of apartments in the unfashionable part of the city, full of retired colonels and frowsy mothers who never seemed to be able to keep track of their children. The children themselves were knock-kneed, with eyes like bug bites in their faces. She wondered how anyone could love them. In Miriam’s mind, the enormous amount of care that children required — comforting, feeding, wiping the bubbling snot from their noses — could only be justified by beauty.
If there were any other single women in the building, Miriam never saw them. Sarala was the one person she could talk to.
She was a few years younger than Miriam and thinner, with pockmarked skin. (Once, Miriam noted that it looked as though worms had been burrowing just under the surface, before berating herself for the cruelty of the thought.) Sarala had no knock-kneed children of her own to love, and no job to speak of besides cooking and cleaning. Miriam wouldn’t have known what to say to a glamorous woman, a busy woman: Sarala’s life was just as narrow as hers. Her dreams as circumscribed.
And yet it had been Sarala’s idea from the beginning.
- Listen, (said Sarala, blowing on her tea to cool it), have you heard of this site? A site you use to meet men? It’s called True Match
- O Sarala! Not for me …that’s for the young people
- It isn’t, said Sarala. It’s for everybody. It’s not an arranged marriage website, either
- I’m too old
- No such thing, said Sarala, snapping a chocolate biscuit in half. Not for the first time, Miriam noticed the particular zest with which her friend ate. Those biscuits were stale, she thought suddenly, she hadn’t sealed the tin properly when she’d put them away, they’d gotten soggy…but Sarala ate as if she were starving hungry, even cupping her hand to push the remaining crumbs into her mouth.
- It’s very simple, said her friend. It takes two minutes to make a profile. Only two minutes. You don’t have two minutes?
- Nobody will want to meet me, said Miriam. But even as she said it, she wondered.
It began there, and it may have ended there, if not for two things. The first was Miriam’s boredom. If Miriam had been less competent, it is very likely she would have forgotten about True Match altogether. But she was able to finish her work every day with hours to spare. Plenty of time to think about Sarala’s suggestion.
The second reason was pity, which Miriam had seen plenty of over the last decade. A thirty-seven year old Malayali woman who was unmarried! Aiyyo kashtam. It showed — according to everybody — the criminal neglect of her family.
At first, there had been offers to come see this boy or that marriage broker. Eventually those offers dried up, and everyone was content to let Miriam alone. Nobody so much as shared her fruit salad in the canteen, or flirted with her over the tax audit. Not even her junior, Raghu, who was rumoured to flirt with nuns from Holy Angels’ when he saw them on the street.
She laughed over it with Sarala, and said she was fortunate to be free from unwanted attentions. Most people were deceived by her nonchalance. They had no idea that she was offended by her undesirability, or that she was insulted by their pity.
But Sarala had known, she thought.
She didn’t know how to do it at first, but the form was easy enough. All you had to do was fill out a profile with your name, age, sex, and hobbies. You could provide as much or as little detail as you liked. At first Miriam was wary, but she found a certain joy in filling the text boxes as fully as she could. She had never before been questioned so thoroughly about her likes and dislikes. Here, it seemed to matter that she preferred fish to chicken; that she had a favourite side of the bed; that she watched Mohanlal movies on Friday nights. Miriam imagined a man reading these details — a man with a sensitive turn of the mouth — and perhaps recognising himself.
Finally, she added a picture of herself taken on a beach in Kovalam some years before. She had gone on holiday by herself because she couldn’t find anyone to go with her. That particular day, the gulls had stolen her egg sandwich, and she was hungry and wanted to go home. But she’d asked a fisher boy to take her picture on the cold beach, and somehow, due to some trick of that light, she looked just as she had always wanted to look in pictures. That is to say, not beautiful, but not offensive. Pleasant enough that if a movie were being shot on the beach, the director would keep her in the shot.
In the morning, she had four new messages.
She forced herself not to read them. Instead, she went to work and sat in her cubicle, and doodled several more eyes, and congratulated a colleague on his promotion. The whole time, she felt a warm fist inside her, clenching and unclenching itself in joy; worry and joy.
It wasn’t until the evening that she switched on her computer. Even then, she forced her expectations to stay small. Contained. In a 4x4 cardboard box. Even when she read his message.
It was the only message that she liked, but as she told Sarala the next day, one was quite enough.
- He seems all right, she said, trying to sound unconcerned, as if she hadn’t committed the words of the message to memory. He sent a very nice, decent message. He liked me; he thought I was pretty…I went to his profile, and he’s attractive…Short, I think he said, only five foot seven, but of course that does not matter when I’m short myself…he reads poetry! Quite a fine mind, it seems…
Sarala pinched her in excitement. She had a bad habit of pinching, but just then Miriam didn’t mind.
- What have you written back? she demanded.
- O, said Miriam, faintly surprised. Nothing…
She wanted to tell Sarala that she didn’t have to write back. It was enough to receive a message like that. In fact, the thought that their correspondence might continue had never entered her head until that moment. Instead she said, ‘I’m thinking of the right thing to say.’
It took her two days. She wrote in the careful, stiff English style that they’d taught her at school:
Hello,
Thank you so much for your kind message. Pardon the late reply as I only read it today.
You said you wanted to know more about me, and asked to hear some things that are not in my profile. I don’t know what exactly to tell you, but I can start with my real name. It is Miriam.
To tell you the truth, I still find the idea of this strange. I would have liked to have met you in some other place, perhaps a library or a coffee shop, or a place where we were buying the same music CD (I have the restricted imagination of a person raised on romance movies). But then you would not have talked to me, and I would not have replied even if you did. I would not even have met your gaze.
When I was growing up, boys used to tell me that they could tell a prostitute from an ordinary woman by the way she looked at you. If you stared at an ordinary decent woman, she would drop her eyes, whereas a prostitute would stare back.
Where are you from? How do you come to be here?
Yrs. sincerely,
Miriam.
Dear Miriam,
Had I met you in real life, I would certainly have talked to you. I am a very informal person. When I was in school, I got into trouble for it all the time…Do you remember parent-teacher conferences? I used to be lectured for talking to girls in the corridor. I tried to tell them that I was asking the girls for their notes, since girls took better notes in class, but somehow they never liked it…
My name is Keshavan. I come from Trivandrum. Why am I here? To talk to more people. I don’t know anyone in this city, and it’s not easy to make friends at my age. Others tell me to join a class, but I feel too old for that. I tried to attend a filmmaking class, but everybody there was so young that they had dreams of actually making films…I didn’t want to say that I was past all that.
I can imagine that you feel nervous being on a site like this. No doubt, when men tell you they are looking for friends, you doubt their intentions. Which is why I would like to say now that my intentions are strictly non-platonic…
Please write back soon. You have not yet told me anything about yourself.
Keshavan.
Dear Keshavan,
What to tell you?
The other day I was in the market buying plantains. Suddenly, I noticed that the vendor had given me a bad banana. It was sitting there in the basket, brown and faintly bruised. It was certainly overripe.
I didn’t know what to do. It would have been very simple to tell the vendor to replace the banana with a sound one. Indeed, all around me, there were women arguing with the vegetable sellers.
- I’m not paying that much for vendakka
- Reduce it to twenty, then I will buy two dozen
- Cheta, nobody will pay that much for grapes, not even a king…
The sounds went on and on around me, the mundane sounds of bargaining. But I felt unable to express the slightest dissatisfaction. I watched him twist the bananas up in brown paper. I paid him the money, and left. I threw away the banana when I reached home.
I suppose this is the sort of woman I am. I often feel struck into silence. I would like to speak, but I find that passivity is, so often, the best option.
I don’t know why I’m telling you all this! Perhaps since you have been so forthcoming with me, I feel free to be the same way with you.
Do you think people can change?
Miriam.
Dear Miriam,
I understand what you’re trying to say.
I think people can change. I always have thought so. My nephew (who often discusses these philosophical matters with me) would disagree. His seventeen-year-old brain is convinced that people do not change. I think he bases this opinion on the fact that his favourite dessert at seven was gulab jamun, and it still is gulab jamun…
But I must not be facetious, especially as you have written to me with so much sincerity.
I hope you won’t mind if I say that you are a very extraordinary woman.
Best,
K.
If Miriam had been a less reserved woman, her friends — her friend, to be accurate — and her co-workers might have noticed a change. But Miriam had spent thirty-seven years with the belief that she had nothing of interest to say, and in consequence she had developed an unbreakable reserve.
But there were changes to notice. For instance:
- She no longer walked straight past shops. Now, she lingered before sari displays in showrooms, and hovered over makeup counters for so long that shop attendants tried to sell her charred-looking lipsticks.
- She walked a little faster than before, too. As if she was eager to reach her destination instead of being indifferent to it.
The only person she mentioned Keshavan to was Sarala, because it had been Sarala’s idea. But when Sarala pressed for details, she refused.
We have interesting conversations, was all she said, and she left it at that. She didn’t add that it was a correspondence that moved her, that gave her immense delight, so much so that sometimes she could hardly fall asleep for joy. There was no way of saying it without sounding foolish.
They wrote to each other every day now. She wrote in the morning; he replied late at night. Slowly they discovered parallels in each other’s lives of the kind she had dreamed. They both liked mangoes, but detested mango pickle. Their star charts were strikingly similar. He had been born at the same hospital she had visited when her aunt developed lymphoma. She told Keshavan how she had felt when it happened and how guilty she had felt when she whispered to herself: Dying is boring. (Even though it had been, and she’d brought Sudoku puzzles to do at the hospital those long nights.)
Miriam had never been in love before, and nobody had ever been in love with her.
(No, that wasn’t quite accurate. There had been a boy in school who wrote her a love letter once, in a bold black hand. Dear MIRIAM, it said. I love U. I want to propose U as my girlfriend. Don’t reply please. JOHN.)
John had seen, he thought, in the not-really-seeing way of young boys. John had seen the way she filled out her school uniform, perhaps, or how her tightly braided hair swung down her back. But they had never spoken. Not a word had passed between them.
Now there was Keshavan, who had never seen her.
One dreary Wednesday, she told Sarala she was going to meet him.
- It’s been two months. I think it’s time
Sarala wiped the edges of her mouth before replying.
- It might be dangerous, she said slowly. What if he turns out to be a madman? Or married? Or a crook? I’m not sure…
- I doubt it. I’ve been speaking with him for so long now. I would be very surprised if he were…Sarala! You were the one who told me to do this
She would have been hurt by the doubt in her friend’s eyes, if not for one thing.
The first time Sarala met Miriam, she had been crying. Miriam had knocked on her door to ask if she might be interested in a Ladies’ Society and Sarala’s kajal had run down to her cheeks. Her eyes were red, too, making her look like an illustration of the goddess Kali. Miriam had seen the illustration as a child — it was a lurid one, pasted on a city bus — and it had terrified her so much she had nightmares for weeks.
- We could read books, Miriam had said in a rush. Or exchange recipes, or do other things that Ladies’ Societies do. I’m not sure, but we can look it up. I must warn you though, that nobody else in this building seems very interested in being part of a Society.
The woman with red eyes smiled. It was only the dust and ashes of a smile, but it emboldened Miriam.
- Come in, she’d said, and they had spent the afternoon eating Bourbon biscuits and discussing their neighbours. The Ladies’ Society.
Miriam liked to think that she had understood Sarala from that day. She liked to think that when she had heard the sound of snoring coming from the bedroom, and seen the amber glass on the floor, she had already guessed.
Later, Sarala would tell her that at least her husband had the decency to never be at home. That she was much better off than many other wives, whose husbands never left. O no. Other women’s husbands stayed home and drank araq at home and beat them at home every day. Her husband was remiss in his wife-beating duties.
She gripped Miriam’s hand so tightly it hurt and looked at her through red eyes.
- I am lucky in my way, she said. We both are.
But now, Miriam would go away with Keshavan, and she would come back to visit, and they would drink tea and eat Bourbon biscuits, but it would never be the same again. Never. There would be children, perhaps — she wasn’t so very old — and there would be a new house, and a husband who was always at home because he wanted to be, and there would be no more Society of Ladies.
She understood Sarala’s sorrow, she did. And so, when Sarala voiced her doubts about Miriam’s lover, Miriam didn’t get angry.
- You’ll go to the police if he murders me, she said, wiping Sarala’s mouth clean. Luckily I have you.
Dear Keshavan,
Do you know the ice-cream shop in Fort Kochi? It is by the pier, under the Best Bread & Breakfast. Very famous for its “natural ice-creams”, so they say. I’ve never tried it. I suspect I prefer artificial ice-cream to natural.
But I’ve walked by it several times and wanted to go in. They have every kind of flavour: lychee, chikoo, jamun, sitaphal, kesar pista. And of course they have the regular Western flavors like grape and strawberry and mango.
Let me know if you’d be interested in meeting there sometime. I am free on the weekends.
Love,
Miriam.
PS — Would you ever have imagined I would be so forward as to suggest a meeting! After all, people can change…
Despite the coyness of the postscript (she had read that men liked coy women, but she doubted it), she was satisfied with it. She sent the message, switched off the computer, and got into bed. Tomorrow — or perhaps the day after — or next week — she kissed her hand to the darkness.
Dear Keshavan,
How are you? I’m sure you must be very busy, since it has been a while since I heard from you. I feel you work too hard.
I went to a new restaurant yesterday, which I rarely do. The sign outside said ‘The Freshest Fish in The World.’ The extravagance of this claim made me curious, so I went in…
The waiter who served me had a large, ingratiating smile. He said ‘Madam, why don’t you pick a fish?’
I said ‘First give me a menu!’ But he smiled more widely still.
‘Ma’am, please pick a fish from the tank over there.’ He pointed toward a water tank in the corner that I had somehow missed when I came in. The tank was full of lobsters, pearl-spot fish, some others I couldn’t name. They were all jumbled and crowded together in that tank, right up to the top. At first I thought they were dead, but when I looked more closely, I saw they were alive.
The lobster’s feelers were moving…
The waiter said ‘We serve only A1 freshest fish. Choose a fish and we will remove it from the tank and cook it immediately for you.’
I must have eaten fish in this way a dozen times or more. I have been served entire lobsters on my plate. You must not misunderstand. I love the feeling of cracking them open, of biting their heads and tails and feelers — they pop with a satisfying noise in one’s mouth, like banana chips. My carnivorous tendencies make it impossible for me to be vegetarian. And yet I found myself staring at that tank, unable to conceive of eating anything from it.
Isn’t that strange.
Yours,
Miriam.
Dear Keshavan,
I can only imagine I have offended you in some way. At least, that is what your continued silence leads me to believe.
I am deeply sorry for whatever I have done. Please accept my assurances that whatever I have done, it was done out of ignorance and clumsiness, as this is very new to me.
Reading the above lines, I see how formal I’m being. The truth is that this is not what I want to say.
What I want to ask is, Why are you unwilling to meet me? What did I do wrong? Please, give me another chance.
Miriam.
Miriam lay on her side in the darkness. From time to time, she raised a hand to brush away the mosquitoes that gathered lovingly on her arms. How many would it take to kill her? she wondered. She pictured a cloud of mosquitoes, black like a cartoon, swallowing her whole, and a pool of blood running down from her feet: the only visible part of her.
A knock came at the door. She didn’t move, but the knocks grew more agitated.
When she opened the door, she realized there must have been a power cut. All the lights were off, and the air in the building was like a swamp. The fans were silent.
- Miriam? Can I come in?
She stood aside for Sarala to come in.
- Did you know there was going to be a power cut? she said, feeling for a candle. The only ones she had were pink birthday candles, which would be incongruously cheerful. She couldn’t even remember whose birthday she’d bought them for.
- It says so on the notice board, said Sarala. I forgot.
Without being asked, Miriam poured them both glasses of ice water.
- I knocked on your door, said Sarala. Many times. If you’re not feeling well, you could have told me…I was worried.
For the first time, it struck Miriam that she might have been selfish. She remembered a line from a book she read once. To turn one’s back on the world when one has suffered a disappointment — is that not a selfish act? She couldn’t remember the name of the book.
- I have suffered a disappointment, she said.
- I’m sorry to hear that
- A hard one, she said.
- I -
Miriam talked. She talked and talked while the wax ran down to the top of the table. And still she could not stop talking. She told Sarala everything. In the middle, she ran to her desk and came back with a sheaf of paper.
- Here it is, she said, thrusting it at Sarala. It’s real. Feel it. So many papers. So thick. This is every message we sent to each other. Every morning and night, for months. Who would do that without loving somebody a little? At least, that’s what I thought. But you were right. He must have been a conman of some kind, because he stopped speaking to me. You want to know a romantic story I imagined? I imagined that he wanted to rob me, to take something from me, but couldn’t bring himself to do it because he fell in love with me…Isn’t that possible?
She glanced over at Sarala finally, and saw that Sarala’s skin was grey in the candlelight. She looked terrible: slumped over in her chair as though she had been hit.
- O Sarala, are you ill? Let me get you something — water or something…
- No, said Sarala. She waited a minute before picking the sheaf of letters up gently.
- I wrote them all.
Somebody sighed into that darkness. It was a long sigh, like the whistle of a rice cooker. It took Miriam a few moments to realise it was her own sigh.
- I don’t know why I did it, Sarala said, speaking more quickly now, as if she were a Christian in a rush to confess. You were so lonely…I, I wanted to help you, and you were so convinced that nobody would contact you, and I thought that if I sent you a message it would have given you confidence. That’s all I’d intended to do, to send one message.
Miriam said nothing.
- And then I thought, how can I stop? I had planned to, I swear it, but I thought one more wouldn’t matter, it seemed rude to ignore your reply, and then I found myself unable to stop…
And still Miriam said nothing.
Sarala’s voice was raw.
- It was so easy to do. I found you easily. I used a fake picture, yes, a fake profile, a fake name, but I never lied to you about anything. Everything I told you about Keshavan was real…that is how you must think of it…I wanted to keep talking to you
- I had never dreamed this could be possible, never imagined that I had more than sisterly affection for you. It was only when I wrote to you that I realised I had been knocked over by it, the force of it. I had known nothing of it then, this longing…All these years…
She went down on her knees before the sitting woman, so close their skin was touching. On her face was an expression of absolute devotion.
Unquestioning, thought Miriam. That was the word. It was as though the real Sarala — her equal; the woman who ate tea biscuits with her and discussed Mrs. Pillai’s laundry — had vanished, and left this strange, worshipping woman in her place.
She felt the shape of their friendship shift. Slide away into something she couldn’t name.
- I love you, Sarala said, gripping Miriam’s thighs with her fingers. She kissed Miriam’s knees. -I love you, I love you, I love you.
When Miriam was alone again, she remembered that expression on Sarala’s face. An urgency so fierce it was almost ugly. The longing, as Sarala had described it. She had never been the object of such a longing, so strong it existed independent of both lover and object. Not even Keshavan, she thought detachedly — not even that impudent ghost — had longed for her as surely as Sarala did. All these years…
What was it that had paralysed her? Was it disappointment at the form of her lover? Or was it that, confronted with the love she wanted, she merely found it to be distasteful?
The lights had come on a while ago: there was no longer any need for the birthday candle. Before she went to bed, she blew it out.
