MH-03

On Arshil’s scooty it feels like we can go anywhere. If tomorrow he asked me to go with him to Europe on it I would say yes without thinking. I’ve known Arshil’s scooty for almost as long as I’ve known him—I don’t remember my first ride on it but I remember it always being there, an option on the few night-outs when we wanted to club-hop. The vehicle felt like an extension of him; sometimes when I see him drive past me I cannot tell where he ends and the scooter begins. He sits on it hunched over like a question mark, his back so curved I worry it might snap. One night as I watch him fade into the distance after dropping me home, I text him: terrible posture. He says that everyone who owns a scooter has bad posture. 

Last night as I climbed onto the scooty after gulping down pineapple juice from a stall in Dadar, he said: I do wonder if I’m getting too old to be riding a scooty. I was indignant. What do you mean, I cried, a scooter has nothing to do with age! What would you ride instead? When I was younger I wanted to learn to ride a motorcycle. It was only a vague idea; I thought it would be unexpected, cool, change the way people looked at me. Then I thought about actually doing it: legs spread over a roaring machine, speeding past colourless cars, exposed, crushed under the weight of the motorcycle if it fell. When I saw Gauri in Bhopal, I suddenly found scooters equally cool. How effortlessly she fit into the city as she rode, as its grimy air entered her pores, as she tied a dupatta around her face before getting on. She made owning a scooty look like belonging. In a new place she had chosen the simplest form of convenience and it was really an admission: she was here to stay. 

When Arshil was teaching me how to ride his scooty, he’d make me go round and round in circles, ten times towards my right, ten towards my left. He was a good teacher, a patient teacher. On our driving lessons I was introduced to Dadar’s lanes for the first time, awed by the planned neighbourhood that existed beyond a frighteningly crowded train station. Two years later, Arshil and I would spend hours weaving through these roads, searching for golas or frankies or neera, whatever I was craving on that particular day. I would be able to distinguish one lane from another, recall specific buildings, even name some landmarks after reading Shanta Gokhale’s Shivaji Park: Dadar 28. But back then, I was new. Every road in the suburb looked identical: welcoming, wide and smooth, sheltered by rain trees on both sides. The rain trees had trunks so thick I would imagine how spacious the squirrel homes inside them must be. Bird nests were comfortably tucked into their fat branches. Most of all I loved looking up at the canopy these trees formed, a map of green veins from which bits of blue sky peeked out. This is something Arshil can never do because he has to focus on driving. I point and exclaim at pretty bungalows, sugarcane juice stalls, a toddler tripping and falling, a dog panting in the heat, the colour of the sky, birds flying past us. He misses all of this. Sometimes he asks, will I ever get to ride in the back?

While learning I drove the scooty at the speed of a brisk walk but it made me feel like the wind. Afterwards my thighs would hurt for days. When I announced I was a prodigy, Arshil indulged me. When I video called him from Goa to ask how to turn a scooter on, he instructed me. Now he says maybe he should ride a motorcycle instead. I’m about to tell him my parents also ride scooters when he says: Either young people or old people ride scooters. You never see anyone my age riding one. I wonder if my parents count as old and shut up just in case. I try to think of a suave scooter-riding Bollywood hero but cannot. 

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I don’t know if I will offend Arshil by saying that I cannot imagine him without his navy blue scooty with the crack on its taillight; that it is so much of him, that he seems out of place behind the wheel of a car; that seeing him seated on his Activa 125 waiting for me by every road, dropping me home some metres ahead of my building gate so we can kiss without anyone seeing feels like breathing out, like I have come home. Every road I turn onto, there is Arshil waiting, and I am home. 

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When we first started dating I did not know how to sit on the scooty anymore. Before, I had maintained a polite distance, clung onto the back railing; now, one evening, I awkwardly fidgeted. I don’t know what to do with my arms, I confessed. I want to put them around you but I don’t know how to do that, it feels strange. In the months before I had spent so much time on Arshil’s scooter that I’d become used to my voice growing hoarse from shouting so he could hear me against the wind. Only yesterday I learnt a new trick to hear him better when he’s in front of me: tilt my face away from his so my ear is nearer to his mouth. Move your hands a little, see what feels comfortable, he had said as I fumbled around in the backseat. Now my arms encircle his waist when we ride. Sometimes I feel the urge to squeeze him like a toothpaste tube, touch his exposed neck, cover his mouth with my hand like a kidnapper in a movie. When I do he opens his mouth as if to bite me, a puppy-dog snap that makes me want to press him to me even more. Once when we’d just started dating, he’d slammed the scooty brakes on a sloped road. Inadvertently, without realising, I slid closer to him, my frontside flush against his back. Yippee, he’d said under his breath, you’re closer. It made me blush, the fact that he had noticed. I wonder if he still notices. 

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In childhood my family and I had Scooty Pep: red tomato pulpy, babyishly drawn flowers on her front. When Mamma learnt to ride, neighbourhood residents would shout in surprise: Dekho, ladki scooter chala rahi hai! On hot sunny afternoons she would whizz past them to pick us up from school. We’d sit on Scooty Pep packed together, Mamma, Deeti, me. Once on the way back my Sophie the Sapphire Fairy got soaked in the rain because I hadn’t put a plastic bag inside my school bag even though Mamma had told me to. I had to lay all its pages out on the table so it would dry up and afterwards they were weirdly crispy. In the mornings Papa would drop us to school. Once Deeti’s classmate Sarah asked if he was our grandfather. Deeti complained to Papa. He replied, is her grandfather so young? I’d never thought of Papa as old before that: his nose and skin were always shiny smooth, he still had all his hair, he was constantly smiling and on Sundays he wore t-shirts. Sometimes I would close my eyes to try and see the resemblance between Sunday Papa and weekday Papa but I never could. To go to office he would put on his rimless glasses and tuck his shirt into his pants. My favourite shirt had brown-and-white checks. In glasses Papa’s face and body became broader. He seemed bigger and more serious but never scary. 

Sometimes the four of us would go out together on Scooty Pep. This was when Deeti and I were still small. Deeti would stand in front holding the handles with whoever was driving. I sat sandwiched between Mamma and Papa which is why when we once skidded down the slope near Prime Academy and fell, I was the least hurt, only some scrapes on my elbows. Deeti had a cut on her eyebrow. If it had been a little lower she could’ve hurt her eye. Papa almost fainted. When he stood up he fell again but the people gathered around us caught him. Mamma can’t remember where she was hurt but when we got back home that afternoon, the three of them napped for hours. They said not to tell anyone we’d had an accident so naturally I called Likhith on the intercom and broke the news to him in urgent whispers. That evening, we went to Nani-Nanu’s house in the palm-green Xeta that would always break down everywhere. On the way Mamma asked us if we could not mention to Nani and Nanu that she had been the one driving. If Papa made us fall they would easily forgive it. If she did, they would hold it against her forever. I didn’t understand this until years later. Some parts I don’t understand even now. 

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Deeti and I spent enough time with Scooty Pep for her to have a personality. Back then we didn’t even have to spend time with anything to give it a personality but giving isn’t really the right word: everything just was alive and we were the only ones who could see it. We spoke gently to flowers and rooms. Our black-and-white exercise cycle was a cow whose pedals we spun for milking. Deeti slept surrounded by all her toys because she didn’t want to leave any out. I cried when we sold our boxy TV for 500 rupees to buy a brand new LCD. I imagined one day these inanimate objects would become our friends, reward us for our kindness–for being the only ones who saw them for who they really were. In reward I would ask for a puppy. 

I was much older when Scooty Pep left. For years she stood parked in our new building. No one went anywhere on her. When I took Berry on walks I would keep newspapers inside the scooter to clean up with in case she pooped. In school we had learnt the term non living things quite early on but still it took years to sink in. After college our lives became too big to accommodate the feelings of objects. When Berry came–a real, live puppy–her feelings became the centre of life: does she seem sad today, when she sleeps do her paws move because she’s having a nightmare, we can give her our old toys to chew on. New life tore old life apart with its teeth. Jasmine in graveyard soil. For some time then, Papa had been meaning to get rid of Scooty Pep. He said we wouldn’t even get any money because we didn’t have her papers. I don’t remember saying goodbye. She must have been lonely that first night in some garage by herself. 

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Once on the phone after I’d given up on learning to drive the car and scooter I told Arshil I didn’t feel the need to in a city like Mumbai. I could take an auto anywhere. I could take a train or the new metro. I never felt restricted by my incompetence. A scooty was unnecessary. I don’t know, he said after a pause, The freedom the scooty gave me. I can just get up and go wherever I want whenever I want. 

Sometimes we fight on the Activa or sit on it just after we’ve argued. Silence spreads around us like a disease, a black, gunky bubble that swells with time, enclosing us, leaving us in a sticky mess when it finally bursts. At such times I do not want to touch him nor do I want him to touch me. I sit again at a polite distance, holding on to the back railing, feeling each second pass me by thinking I could say this thing or that to break the suffocating silence. But my mouth is physically glued shut. I feel bare against the wind, conscious of my hands, of my body against his, the dazed, somewhat foolish expression on my face that every motorist around us can see. Can they tell we are having a fight? Do we look like a tired married couple that sleeps facing away from each other? 

Once we had an argument over the phone and I asked if I could come see him in person. We didn’t know what to do when I got there. So we rode around on his scooter for almost an hour; him waiting for me to speak, my lips stubbornly stuck to each other until we finally stopped in a parking lot. I was grateful for the pause. I can’t talk about my feelings while we’re in movement, I told him. I couldn’t talk about my feelings for the next few hours. On our way back to the metro station that night, it felt like we were already back home: alone and shrunken into ourselves recalling the events of the day even as we were on the scooty, bodies touching despite how much we didn’t want them to.

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The next day on the phone I said I’d changed my mind. At least one person in a relationship needs to know how to drive. To float through the city to the other, carry them to places that usually feel too unattainable, like too much effort. The only reason I don’t feel the need to, I confessed, is because you can. How much smaller the world would seem if Arshil wasn’t here with his Activa, showing up at my gate for a drive in the middle of the night, kissing me between parked cars. The scooty allowed us something no taxi or train did: aimlessness. The ability to leisurely meander through the city pasted against each other. We could stop at Noble Chemist for ice cream sandwiches at 2am. In the afternoon sun he could give me a tour of the parts of Dadar he’d grown up in and take me to his favourite juice stall. If on the way back from Colaba I felt like spending more time with him I could say, let’s drive around a bit longer.

One night before we were dating I had sat behind him on the Activa at 3AM gasping for breath because he had flirted with a friend. I need to go to Powai lake, I’d demanded and without complaints he took me. What I needed was to be by a water body while hyperventilating, perhaps because this was the only nature I had grown up with in Mumbai. The trees in Dadar still felt more Arshil’s than mine.

When the scooty was parked it seemed to unobtrusively fade into the background, as if it knew this moment was for Arshil and me. I glared at him when he extended his hand for me to hold while I jumped over a ditch. Next to the gleaming lake my face shone with tears. On the way back we got caught in the rain, the first of many times that endless, glowing monsoon. 

There’s something poetic about the phrase caught in the rain–as if a violent silvery sheet of water has protectively closed its fingers over a firefly. It felt just as sweet: clasping each other for body heat as friends in the back of an auto. Wearing his raincoat shivering on the back of the Activa. Sitting at a bus stop in Sher-e-Punjab waiting for the rain to go away. Arshil’s face glistened as he told me working on a ship the first time had left his hands calloused. Something about us coming together makes it rain, I would say throughout those monsoon months. I liked to think our bond had that kind of power. I hated the monsoon because it was grey and made everything spin out of control. Brown knee high water spilled out of gutters. My sandals mucky on the inside. Clothes splattered with Surf Excel stains from cars speeding past. Once a dirty droplet flew from the ground nearby and landed straight on my lower lip. Arshil and I reached every destination drenched, said goodbye by reminding each other to take a hot shower. In the shower I would agonise over whether to wet my hair, and think about if he was home. About how somewhere the cement roads were shimmering underneath his scooty. 

After I cried at Powai lake I made him stay over. It was four in the morning and the rain had been brutal. Outside the air was fresh. On a scooter cold hard lashing raindrops feel almost like penance; Arshil sometimes enjoyed this surrender and I refused to admit that I sometimes did too. He insisted he would leave at sunrise because he was bad with parents. In the hall I pulled open the sofa-cum-bed and we slept on opposite ends. For the first time on the ceiling I noticed patterns of soft green, red and blue made by the two hanging lamps. If you’re mad at me for anything, I said tentatively, tell me now. Don’t tell me tomorrow morning. It made him smile. When my eyes cracked open at seven my body turned cold at the thought that he had left without waking me but he was still on the edge of the sofa asleep. In my heart there was a squeeze, an urgent awareness that something had changed overnight. Already I wanted time to pass quicker so we could be together again.