I met Nathan the morning I lost control of Joey. We were walking at Regent’s Canal, and I had been on the phone with Ana, when Joey shot forward like a stone in a slingshot, straight towards a group of floating gadwalls. I pocketed my phone and ran. It was Nathan who leapt forward and caught Joey’s leash, while I shouted fuck, fuck, fuck, behind him, fuck, fuck. Nathan had looked confused for a frozen moment, as though unsure how he’d got there, clutching at the leash of a straining, barking German Shepherd, with a woman now yelling stupid fucking ducks, at him. When I reached them, Nathan had given me Joey’s leash and watched me wrap it around my wrist – thrice, for safety, I’d said – and mumbled, ‘Well, that’s that, I suppose,’ and left. He didn’t like dogs, he told me later, and his leaping was certainly out of character, but I only smiled, and said airily, really? I’d never have guessed. I knew I might not have noticed him otherwise – the way his shoulders folded into themselves to make him smaller, and his permanently reddened ears – I appreciate it, Nathan had replied, watching Joey settle down between my legs at the end of our morning walk, yes, I do appreciate it. I wasn’t sure what he meant.
Nathan said he was an artist. He was a photographer occasionally, but really an artist, and he lived and worked in a little studio in Camden, behind the stables market. Every Sunday he sat down on a bench by Amy’s statue and watched people walking through the stalls at lunchtime, sipping their beers and listening to Julie busking near Franklin Tarot Palmistry Clairvoyant. She always sang La Vie en Rose ten minutes before two, and rolled a cigarette soon after. Nathan said he liked to paint giant people in miniature settings – an oversized man watching a matchbox television, a large woman eating a coin-sized apple, a huge boy getting into a Hot Wheels car – it gave him perspective, like an elephant’s view of an ant. I was not sure how much to believe him – he could’ve been lying and I’d never know – but I said I was studying, though I was really trying to be a writer. Elephants might choose not to see ants, Nathan had then replied, but it was really a matter of looking – and here I wondered if we only sat next to each other every Friday because we wanted to talked to (and about) ourselves; not that this bothered me.
It wasn’t long before Ana was planning our wedding every time I called her. Ana liked to do this, and she’d done it often, first with Imtiaz, then Nikhil, and Leila, but Nathan was by far her favourite. Our parents were not going to be in the picture. I was to wear a blue cotton sari with a thin gold Mangalgiri zari border. I’d wear a red cotton blouse, plain, with a sexy plunging back, and a sweetheart neckline. Nathan was going to wear a white linen shirt and black linen pants, with a pen clipped to his chest pocket. We’d have a registered wedding. We’d use Nathan’s pen to sign the papers, and he’d produce it blushingly, like wilted flowers from a backpack. Ana was going to be one of our witnesses – obviously – and since Nathan had never talked about his friends, she was waiting to decide who the others would be. Then there’d be a late afternoon lunch party on the terrace of our new apartment (Ana was still trying to decide where we’d live; she was leaning towards Bangalore), and the party would go on until breakfast the next morning. We would eat fish curry and rice, and have a self-replenishing icebox with cold, throat-clearing beer. We’d begin by dancing to Prateek Kuhad and steadily progress to DJ Snake and Dhanush, whose songs Ana would play from her phone. First, Nathan would ask me to dance. Then he’d dance with Ana while I danced with his friend, the one who was our witness – until Ana and I slipped out of their hands like flying fish, and found each other for the rest of the evening. And then, Aida, Ana would say laughing, you two will spend the next day locked up in your little room, loudly doing unspeakable things with open windows, at which point I rolled my eyes and told Ana to stop smoking and go back to work, because unlike her, I was not vela, and had an essay to write.
Sometimes, I thought of telling Nathan about these conversations. I supposed he might listen to them with the lightness they deserved, like icing powder, sprinkled and swallowed to no real effect – or that he would laugh noisily, with his head flung back, as though he was clearing his throat. Then Nathan would have told me about the woman he loved – his brother’s wife, who lived in a large white house with cream lace curtains, two daughters with a hamster each, and a lonely dog – and I would have thought of Ana’s lipstick flecked teeth, the mint and cucumber smell of her hair.
I walked Joey for Miss K. I had met them on the Tube one morning on my way to Eastcote, when Joey sniffed at my calves (for which Miss K sharply tugged his leash twice), and then fell asleep on my feet. Miss K apologised repeatedly (as people tended to do in this city, for simply holding, filling space, their sorrys permanently carved onto the tips of their tongues), and I had been forced to smile, shake my head, and insist, also repeatedly, no, really, it’s no problem at all, I love dogs, no, really – when I simply wanted to sit in silence with the heaviness of Joey’s head, and his gentle, steady breathing on my feet. Later, it was Ana who convinced me to take the job: Here’s a sweet dog, Ai, she said, and you love dogs; now you have an opportunity to walk said sweet dog who lives up the road from your house, and for money too, Ai, you’ll get paid, p-a-i-d. It’s also an early morning walk, which means you’ll actually reach the library at nine-thirty, fresh as a washed sweater, ready to work on your readings. And then, after a moment of silence, You know you write slowly; you really can’t afford to wake up at eleven and reach the library at lunchtime, not so close to your deadlines; plus, it would really help if our calls matched my smoke breaks.
And so, I learnt that Miss K worked in a bank. She lived in a large apartment that overlooked Regent’s Canal in a house with sprawling glass windows – without curtains, I told Ana, nobody here seems to care about strolling, curious strangers peering into their houses – and lights that could be dimmed or brightened to reach through furniture and between bookshelves full of Mills and Boons, and photographs of her parents. There were wooden partitions decorated with flowers and crystal vases on crocheted mats; in one corner, a bar cabinet with deep wine glasses and a marble ashtray that Miss K said was from India – couldn’t I guess? On the rare days that Miss K was awake before I came to pick up Joey, we would have an early, quick breakfast. She would bring out her French press, two rose-patterned bone china cups, and a plate of cinnamon rolls (or toast and strawberry jam), and we would sit down on the wooden chairs by her windows, Miss K in a maroon silk robe with her feet up on her glass table, and me, stilted, in my running shorts, with my earphones hanging out of my pocket. Joey’s going to chew them one day, Miss K had warned me – and eventually, when nobody was looking and I had forgotten to tuck them into my pocket, he did.
During the first of these breakfasts, Miss K had a lot of questions. Ana later called them barbed, myopic, and circular, and when I assured her that I’d answered them with blunt disinterest, she insisted that I should have lied, making up lightly wound cotton candy stories that dissolved on the tip of my tongue. Miss K had wanted to know, was I from India? Must be Delhi? What did my parents do – had I got a scholarship? Did I have a student loan? Then obviously I must have another job; what did the bar pay me? And I must want to work in London after my course – Why ever not? Was I used to speaking in English? What did I like about London – what did I mean, nothing, really? Did I have a boyfriend – oh, then, a girlfriend? Why not? Was it because of my parents; were they strict, did they hit me? What did I think of Brexit? Had I voted for Modi? Why not? Did I also like Shah Rukh Khan? Why didn’t I know how to use the Tandoori masala powder she had found at Waitrose? Did my parents want me to get married soon; were they looking for boys? And then, suddenly, softly, speaking into the drowning silence of the rest of her apartment, and the soaking cold of her wooden floor: Here’s some advice, Aida, don’t ever get married.
And then there were other times, when Miss K would look at me and ask, her voice glinting as though dipped in varnish: Are you quite sure you have enough friends? I could never tell where this question came from. But Miss K usually followed it with an invitation to drinks – on her, of course – somewhere at Strand, maybe The Savoy, where she could perhaps introduce me to some of her friends from the bank. They’d like me, she said, and one of them had even been to India. If only I could straighten my hair and wear a dress, smile, look more approachable, it would work out – it’ll do you good, Miss K would say, going out, making an effort, and maybe then someone will ask for your number. By then, my feet would be melting into the floor in a heat of irritation, so I would sip loudly at my coffee and say, that’s kind of you, but I’d rather not visit The Savoy – and every time, Miss K, whose head was caught in what Ana described as a dense grey cloud of ignorant misunderstanding, would reply, oh, but we can make you just the kind of person who does.
Nathan often found this amusing. Miss K thinks you’re a bit of a soft pear, he’d say, and smile kindly, you know, the pear that people forget to pick, and so it falls to the floor in a mush. I wasn’t sure what to make of this either. Soft pears could become pear jam. And so, I’d simply begin to talk about Ana, who liked to say that I was swallowed whole when I moved to London – not even chewed, with my bones spat out; I was swallowed, like the elephant in the boa constrictor in The Little Prince, soda glasses and two left feet and all. Nathan, whose voice dropped to his ankles when he was serious, wanted to know if this was true. I told him I couldn’t argue. Instead, I called London the Cold Place and began to read advice columns about moving to new countries – Baba Yaga might’ve written that some cities consume us all, Nathan interjected, nodding – holding the word loneliness between my teeth, uncertain of how hard to bite it. What if it cracked like a nut, I’d once asked Ana, and spilled into my mouth – I told you not to go, Ai, Ana had said, I don’t want to say this, but I told you not to go.
I always met Nathan once a week. He only jogged along Regent’s Canal on Fridays, and every Friday morning at seven-fifteen, he sat down by Word on the Water in a crisp white shirt tucked into his running shorts, with his hair standing to attention and his shoulders drooping. I would sit down next to him at seven-thirty with Joey at my feet, his legs unfurled behind him like a tadpole’s. It’s been a long week, Nathan would begin to say – it hasn’t been long enough, I sometimes replied – then, too, too long, Nathan would mumble again, warming his ears and stretching his words like a rubber band. On some days, he brought us a packet of hummus lentil chips. He’d watch me feed the last chip to Joey – the way I said, shh, don’t tell Miss K about this and kissed his forehead – and then Nathan would declare that I was going to lose my job, no doubt; hadn’t I heard of stranger-food danger, and what if Joey fell sick with hummus chips while Miss K was at work? I ignored him. On one such week, Nathan asked if I ever wondered why he ate chips for breakfast – sometimes I eat cookies for dinner, I’d replied – and again, Nathan had laughed, opening his throat to the sky, and declared, well, that’s a good answer.
Otherwise, we had two kinds of conversations. The first kind was reserved for when we talked about the people in our lives – here, we would listen to each other quietly and reply thoughtlessly, with jagged words we soon learnt to forget. I realised that Nathan often made judgements and decisions with coarse scorn and ease, with a bitterness that clung to his tongue that he didn’t notice. I don’t know how you can stand to be around Ana, he’d once said; you must hate your mother; have you and Ana always whined so much; you must be so sorely difficult to live with. I suppose it came from his family.
There were a few things I knew about Nathan’s parents: that his mother lived in Manchester, and his father had died when he was twenty. He had left Nathan out of his will; Nathan had refused to be a lawyer; Nathan met his brother for dinner once a month, and they would eat in near-silence. He might enquire after his nieces, and his brother might ask him about a new painting, but that was all they said – when they were finished, his brother would give him enough money to pay his rent, and they would be on their way. His brother was a doctor – a neurosurgeon, Nathan said, tapping his forehead – and a man who exuded the air of tough success, of someone who had closely followed, and learnt, from a severe father’s advice. And then: that’s just the problem; I wasn’t that child, and that was that, Nathan announced, as though he was giving me a heavy, gift-wrapped present. I, not knowing what to do with it, had looked down at Joey watching the ducks, and said carelessly, you seem to be just like your father, and meant it. I never told Ana about this reckless harshness. I suspect that neither of us understood it – instead, I listened to Ana talk about Nathan, the way her voice became softer, gently teasing, asking about us so often that I could begin to imagine this too – the weightlessness with which Nathan apparently spoke, his gentle frown, the quiver of his upper lip before he smiled, our cocooned-in-a-sleeping-bag warmth.
In the second kind of conversation, Nathan and I would listen and listen to each other, and stay quiet about what we had just heard. This was saved for when he talked about his paintings, and I talked about writing – the writing I wasn’t doing, the writing I should be doing, the writing Ana was doing, the writing that wouldn’t happen in this city that had wrung my wet stomach and left it to dry in a Tesco plastic bag, instead of on a spacious terrace in the sun. We talked aloud to ourselves while ducks floated by. Joey growled in his sleep; a shirtless teenager fished in the canal; an old woman slowly cycled past, a sunflower in her hair. A boy photographed a struggling fish in his hands and threw it back into the water. The gallery should email me, Nathan said, any day now – he was working on a painting of a larger-than-life Julie busking with a miniature guitar (no, not a ukulele) – and I would say, I can’t break into a new form if I don’t write; I’m soon going to have to say I used to write, because I’ve never had the ability or the strength to see it through.
On most days, these conversations came easily. Nathan would say that his first painting had been of his father, retired, in a plaid shirt, looking out of a small window at a woman who was (certainly) not his wife. It was perverse and recognisably him – the mole on his chin, his dark chocolate hair, his unexpectedly long eyelashes that looked made-up, sometimes false – and it hurt Nathan’s mother. His father had torn it, first into half, and then into neat quarters, and when Nathan had stuck it back together with tape, he had looked straight at his father and said, quietly, steadily, I must thank you, it adds to the effect. A gallery loved it; he called it The Model Family – it was fractured, violent, and radiated pain, one curator said – and here Nathan smiled, because that pompous review had changed everything. And then I’d reply with a story about the way I fought with my mother who called me a liar every time I wrote, her voice brittle, like a thin sheet of ice, and mine, loud, like a pressure cooker, Mama, it’s fiction – to which she’d ask, then why does this man sound like your uncle, and isn’t this paragraph about the time he hit you; it was the only time he hit you. It’s a story, I’d say once more – who do you think you are, Mama always wanted to know, because nobody will talk to you again if you keep writing about them. None of my paintings have been as good as that first one, Nathan might have said next – might, because it’s difficult to remember the sequence of such conversations when there have been so many – I haven’t written in eight months; perhaps I’ve lost it, I may have replied, you know, even my stupid tattoo has to do with my writing.
And to all this, Ana would say: Nathan’s an artist, Aida, you two seem to understand each other; what if you never find someone who likes art, and I’d laugh. Sometimes I would think of Ana, who once wrote about a lonely woman in Bombay, standing on the edge of a seven-eighteen Andheri local, watching an old woman cutting tomatoes – and the mint and cucumber smell of her hair.
I never told my friends in university about Nathan. Ana said this was strange, but I thought it seemed too complicated, even unnecessary, this business of explaining that once a week I met a man whom I talked to about writing because he said he was an artist, even though he could’ve been lying, and I’d never know for sure. It’s easier this way, I told Ana, to have you imagining my wedding on the phone, without everybody here also smiling knowingly every Friday, asking me if Nathan and I had exchanged numbers yet, made a date – especially when it was impossible to articulate why neither of us seemed to have any inclination to see each other for more than half an hour every week, even if Ana wished otherwise. I knew how these conversations would go. Chhavi would smile, the same wide smile she reserved for when she saw me with James, quickly raising her left eyebrow twice, and then biting her lip; Farhan would simply roll his eyes and declare that it was not possible, not at all, there was definitely something I didn’t know, nobody wanted to just talk like that. David would agree, and we would all go out to smoke our cigarettes in the rain; then, while Farhan told us about a painfully narrow-minded session at the university Marxist reading group, David would turn to me and whisper, but the important question is, Aida, is your artist dude rich?
The four of us, I’d once told Nathan, had plans. They’d fermented slowly – some of them (jokingly?) involved starting cults and communes, and liberating food and books from big chain stores; and sometimes we would smoke gourmet joints (they had lavender and camomile, courtesy David) in an alley behind the university, laughing appreciatively at the graffiti that had appeared on some classroom walls as though revealing a secret: this institution is racist, eat the rich, squat the world. Every alternate evening, we would walk to Regent’s Park with a bottle of cheap wine and a can of beer each. We’d settle down around the bandstand on striped green pay-per-hour chairs we never paid for, and while Chhavi, David, and Farhan talked – about the Turkish woman in our class who supported Erdogan (she’d called Öcalan a terrorist), building transnational solidarity (what would it look like?), and learning to hula hoop on Brighton’s streets (my girlfriends taught me) – I’d watch young couples doing the salsa, as though one day I’d be able to stand up, join them, and dance as perfectly, my arms and legs straightening and bending like puppet strings.
Then, sometimes, Chhavi and I would go for a walk, our beers in one hand, a cigarette in the other, our pockets stuffed with packets of tobacco and rolling paper. I could see her jaw tighten if her boyfriend called while we were walking, and she’d ignore him. Instead, she’d talk about her thesis – on racism and immigration laws in Italy, and a little piece of writing she’d found in an archive, by a poor, thoughtful English coloniser who just couldn’t understand why he was so hated – and I’d laugh loudly, at the way she lengthened her words, poor, thoughtful, as though they were elastic, dipped in honey, and she’d grin. By the time we returned, salsa would be over, and David would be swearing – Farhan had forgotten the speakers again – why don’t you just forget yourself, he’d say, and begin to sing Bella Ciao rowdily, to drown out the metallic sounds of EDM from the group lounging next to us. Chhavi and Farhan would join him and then I’d sing the only two words I’d learnt – bella ciao – and could pronounce. But most often, I was quiet, I told Nathan, and perhaps they could tell this was all new to me, so they let me be – and here, immediately, curiously, Nathan had wanted to know if I had any, you know, white friends. He said this quietly, seriously, as though my answer could perhaps explain some stranger parts of me. I told him to get his shit together. Ana, just so you know, I then added, had wanted to know if my friends wrote (yes, they write such good protest flyers, I’d told her; I can’t even write good flyers) – that’s a better question, I told Nathan, who then ignored me.
The last time we met, I woke up early, made myself a cup of coffee, decided not to drink it, and went to Miss K’s house instead. I’d stayed up writing an essay for a class I didn’t understand – on architectural boundaries and gendered bodies – and I was trying desperately to pass, building lofty hay sentences about how we could understand the space of bazaars as in-between, where people’s bodies became the space (and body) of the bazaar while being changed by it. I left Miss K a post-it in her kitchen – Came early, took Joey – and we walked by Regent’s Canal slowly, past docked boats, Dobby, Caesar, Lola’s Boat for Loud Girls, towards the grassed stairs where Farhan and I once sat until four in the morning gulping Desperados. We’d watched three boys jump into the canal from the bridge overhead – it’s so dirty, I’d wanted to say, why are you doing this – but Farhan thought we should just watch the fun because these kids obviously didn’t want to be advised by a brown aunty, and so I didn’t. Then, Joey and I sat down by Word on the Water and waited for Nathan to arrive – You’re early, why you so early, Nathan had wanted to know when he did, and I’d only shrugged, and said I couldn’t sleep.
The first thing Nathan said that morning was that on Sunday, he’d been sketching Julie and a stall selling cough-syrup-pink doughnuts with blue sprinkles, when she’d noticed him watching her. She’d walked straight up to him and demanded to know what he thought he was doing, exactly – as though it was her right to know, he said – and so he’d told her that once a week he sketched the market so that he could, you know, spend the week painting it onto a five-by-seven canvas he was working on at home, with the larger-than-life Julie, and the miniature guitar. You know, I’m panicking, I said when he paused – and I don’t panic; I’m used to keeping my life under control and shit, you know, whatever that means – Ana says it’s unhealthy, but that’s not the point. And then – I’m an artist, Nathan said he told Julie – a real artist, or one of those self-appointed ones, she’d wanted to know – to which Nathan had smugly replied, you a real musician, or a so-called one?
First, I’d wanted to tell Nathan that his reply didn’t make any sense. Instead, I looked at my feet and said, I’m doing nothing here, Nathan, I’m writing ridiculous papers that take more out of me than they should, and I haven’t written anything else, something – there’s nothing, not like I used to. Julie, Nathan had then continued, had come to his studio and written down a list of things she thought he needed to fix in his painting – her hair, it wasn’t brown enough; the guitar that had only five strings; the stickers in her open guitar case that didn’t have any money; he should put in some money, maybe attach some real coins for effect. And then, before he could finish, I’d said – Now it’s hitting me, how terribly self-involved I sound, like some egotistical fake, because, how can I even say this aloud – at least at home people know I write, or knew I wrote, that this was a thing I did, that I was invested in, and I could talk to people about it when it was all spiralling, coming undone. All that’s missing here, I told Nathan, instead I’m stuck making lists, List One, of all the places I can submit my writing, List Two, for writing grants, List Three, for some other crap, but I’m only making lists, and more lists. I’m terrified I won’t be able to do this writing business again, and there’s no point opening my damn mouth to talk about it because I haven’t written, because I’m energy-less and ability-less, too busy thinking, what if I get a call from home saying Mama’s in hospital, when I don’t even have enough money to book a ticket back home? Soon, I said to Nathan, who hadn’t interjected yet – soon, so much fucking time will pass that nobody will remember that I wrote, and eventually even I’ll begin to wonder if I ever did in the first place.
If I remember correctly, this was when Nathan held my hand. After a moment of silence, in which I mumbled, I’m better now, I don’t know what that was about, Nathan told me more about his painting – the gallery had emailed him, he said, their budget was too small, so he’d have to show them a painting to decide if it fit with their theme – which is, by the way, called Whose London, Nathan said, and laughed – but that there was no guarantee, he shouldn’t get his hopes up, it was very competitive. I’d watched his eyes, the way they darted from my face to my knees, where his hand now rested, the blunt pencil point of his nose, his ears red from the cold, the gel in his hair. Maybe we should exchange numbers, I’d told Nathan just before we left – maybe we shouldn’t, Aida, he had said to me, and that was that, another shiny gift-wrapped present.
*
Yesterday, I told Ana, I saw Nathan buying himself a beer at the stables market in Camden. I was with Farhan, Chhavi, and David, and Chhavi had smiled so radiantly at a bartender that he’d given us all a round of free beers. She was in a terrific mood, she said – it was a lounging in the sun, drinking beer and watching gadwalls kind of Sunday, and after this, we were going to go up to Regent’s Park as usual. I had a book with me, Farhan had his guitar, David had a letter to write. We’d watch the salsa, play some music, eat hot and sweet Thai chilli chips with a tzatziki dip. But what was Nathan doing, Ana wanted to know, how did he look, had he seen me? He was with two other men, I said, in a striped blue shirt, his hair still standing to attention, one hand in his pocket, a cigarette in his mouth. He looked taller than I remembered him, straighter even, he didn’t crumple like an accordion – there was something cool about him, composed, arranged – as though he would know exactly what to do if at that moment, a young man collapsed with a heart attack, if there was a fire, if a woman on her phone let go of a straining, barking dog’s leash by accident.
*
Ila Ananya formerly worked as a reporter at The Ladies Finger, and recently completed an MA in Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London. She is currently based in Bangalore, and occasionally blogs at www.trialpieces.wordpress.com.