Chapter 8: Nikhil

The man at the juice bar is staring at me.

Not the creepy staring that Mumbai produces in abundance — the staring that men do on trains, in markets, at traffic signals, the staring that women learn to ignore the way they learn to ignore autorickshaw exhaust: unpleasant but unavoidable. This is different. This is: curious staring. The staring of someone who is trying to place you, trying to figure out whether he knows you from somewhere, the somewhere being: uncertain.

I'm at Seaside Fitness, post-yoga, drinking the juice bar's one acceptable offering: fresh mosambi juice, no sugar, no salt, just the fruit and a prayer. I'm sweaty and red-faced and wearing my standard gym outfit — black leggings, grey t-shirt, the uniform that I've now owned for three months and that needs: replacing, but that I keep wearing because the replacing would require shopping, and shopping alone is: one of the things I haven't learned to do in Mumbai without feeling like a tourist in my own life.

"Excuse me — are you Madhuri? Madhuri Srivastava?"

The name. My maiden name. The name I'd carried for twenty-three years before it became Madhuri Khanna, and that I'd recently reclaimed — not legally yet, the legal reclaiming requiring paperwork that I haven't completed, but socially, because at Seaside Fitness I am: Mar, which could be short for either Madhuri Srivastava or Madhuri Khanna, the ambiguity being: useful.

"I'm Madhuri, yes. But I go by Mar."

"Nikhil. Nikhil Desai. We were at —" He pauses. The pause of someone reconstructing a memory from decades ago. "Lintas. 1997. You were in the creative department. I was in accounts."

Lintas. The advertising agency where I'd worked for three years before Harsh's transfer to Lucknow had ended my career and begun my wifehood. Lintas, where I'd been a junior copywriter with opinions about taglines and a collection of advertising awards that were currently in a cardboard box in my Bandra apartment because I didn't know where to hang them and hanging them felt like: mourning a career I'd chosen to abandon (or had the choice been made for me? This question I'd asked Dr. Mehra, and Dr. Mehra had said: "What do you think?" which is what therapists say when the answer is: obvious and painful).

"Nikhil! My God." I stare at him. I don't remember him — or rather, I remember a shape, a presence, a twenty-something man in the accounts department who wore formal shirts to casual Fridays and who may or may not have been the person who accidentally printed the entire month's media plan on the creative department's printer and caused: a minor interdepartmental war.

"The printer incident," I say. "Was that you?"

He laughs. "Guilty. Twenty-eight years and that's what people remember."

"Seventeen pages of media spreadsheets on our colour printer. We couldn't print layouts for two days."

"In my defence, the accounts printer was broken, and I didn't know colour printers were: territorial."

He's: fifty-two, divorced (this comes out within the first five minutes, because divorced people recognise divorced people the way dog owners recognise dog owners — through small, specific signals that the non-divorced don't notice). He's been at Seaside for four years. He works in — no longer advertising but consulting, the vague kind of consulting that involves PowerPoint slides and airport lounges and phrases like "value proposition" and "stakeholder alignment." He has a daughter, thirteen, who lives with his ex-wife in Andheri and whom he sees on weekends when the weekends aren't consumed by: work, which they often are, the consumption being: the reason for the divorce, or one of the reasons, the reasons being: plural, because divorce reasons always are.

"What happened with you?" he asks. "You were brilliant at Lintas. The Surf tagline — that was yours, right?"

"It was a team effort."

"That's what brilliant people say when they don't want credit. I remember the presentation. You were electric."

Electric. The word enters my body through my ears and travels to a place I'd forgotten existed — the place where professional identity lives, the place where "I am good at something" is stored, the place that twenty-seven years of wifehood had bricked over like a fireplace nobody uses. Electric. I was electric. At twenty-three, standing in a conference room, pitching a tagline to a client, I was: electric.

"I left advertising when I got married," I say. "Moved to Lucknow."

"Lucknow? From Mumbai advertising to Lucknow?" His expression is the expression of someone who has just been told that a Formula One driver retired to become a bullock-cart operator. Shock tempered by politeness.

"My husband was transferred. And then — you know. Life happens. Children happen. Twenty-seven years happen."

"And now?"

"And now I'm here. Divorced. Drinking mosambi juice. Trying to remember who I was before I became someone's wife."

He looks at me. Not the staring of earlier — the looking that happens when someone sees past the gym clothes and the sweat and the fifty-year-old face to something underneath. "You were electric," he says. "That doesn't go away. It just gets: covered."

We exchange numbers. Not in the way that single people exchange numbers — with expectation, with possibility — but in the way that old colleagues exchange numbers: as a bridge back to a self that existed before the self was: overwritten. His number in my phone is filed under "Nikhil (Lintas)" because I need the reminder that I knew him in a context where I was: not a wife, not a mother, not a divorcee, but a copywriter. A professional. A person with a skill that people paid for.

The next week, Nikhil invites me to a wine tasting.

"It's at this shop in Bandra West," he says. We're at the juice bar again — this has become a pattern, the pattern that gym acquaintances develop: same time, same place, the reliability of people who have nowhere better to be, which sounds sad but is: not. It's the reliability of choice. We choose to be here. We choose this conversation over other possible conversations (or over no conversation, which is: always an option, and the awareness of that option makes the choosing: meaningful).

"Wine tasting? In Bandra?"

"Indian wines. There's this shop — The Grape Escape — they do monthly tastings. Sula, Fratelli, some new ones from Nashik you've probably never heard of. It's very civilised. You drink, you spit, you pretend to know what you're talking about."

"I don't know anything about wine."

"Neither does anyone. The entire wine industry is built on: confident ignorance."

I laugh. Nikhil makes me laugh — not the way Jaya makes me laugh (with sharp observations that cut) or the way Vandana makes me laugh (with cheerful absurdities that float), but with: ease. The ease of a man who has decided that life, after fifty, is too short for pretension.

"When is it?"

"Saturday evening. Seven o'clock."

"Is this a —" I don't finish the sentence. The sentence I don't finish is: "Is this a date?" And I don't finish it because finishing it would require: acknowledging that dating is something I might do, and I'm not ready for that acknowledgement. I'm three months into my new life. I'm still learning to cook for one, sleep alone, occupy space without apology. Dating is: a bridge I can see but can't cross yet.

"It's a wine tasting," Nikhil says. "With a former colleague. Who likes wine and who thinks you might like wine too. That's all it is."

"That's all it is," I repeat. And the repetition is: a contract. A contract that says: we will drink wine and not complicate things, we will be acquaintances who share an employer from 1997 and a gym from 2025 and nothing in between.

"Okay," I say. "Saturday."

"Saturday."

He smiles. It's a nice smile — the smile of a man who is: kind, attractive-enough (the "-enough" doing work again), and entirely non-threatening. The smile that says: I am not your ex-husband. I am not trying to control you. I am offering: wine.

I take the offer.

Saturday evening. I stand in front of my wardrobe for forty-five minutes, which is thirty-five minutes longer than I've spent choosing clothes since the divorce. The standing-in-front-of-the-wardrobe is: a problem. Because the wardrobe contains two categories of clothing: gym clothes (functional, unsexy, designed for survival) and Lucknow clothes (salwar kameez, appropriate, designed for: disappearing into the role of wife). Neither category is appropriate for a wine tasting in Bandra with a man who is not-a-date.

I call Vandana.

"Emergency. I need clothes."

"What kind of emergency?"

"Wine tasting. With a man. Who is not a date."

"Is he attractive?"

"He's — he's Nikhil."

"Is Nikhil attractive?"

"He's a former colleague."

"That's not an answer. Is Nikhil attractive?"

"Vandana."

"Okay, okay. What time is this not-a-date?"

"Seven."

"I'll be there at five-thirty. With options."

Vandana arrives at five-thirty with a garment bag that suggests she's been waiting for this moment since we met. She produces: a navy blue cotton dress (simple, flattering, the kind of dress that says "I made an effort but not too much effort"), silver jhumkas (statement earrings that Indian women deploy when Indian women want to be: noticed without appearing to want to be noticed), and a pair of kolhapuri chappals that are somehow both casual and elegant.

"This is too much," I say.

"This is exactly right," Vandana says. "You look beautiful."

"I look fifty."

"You look fifty and beautiful. Those are not contradictory statements."

I look in the mirror — the mirror that I've been learning to face since Seaside Fitness taught me that mirrors are: not enemies but witnesses. The woman in the mirror is: fifty, yes. Dark hair with grey at the temples. Lines around the eyes that Jaya calls "character" and Vandana calls "fixable with the right serum" and I call: evidence. Evidence of twenty-seven years of theek hai. But also: the navy dress fits. The jhumkas catch the light. The kolhapuris make my feet look: deliberate, as if I've chosen to walk somewhere specific, as if I'm going somewhere that matters.

The wine tasting is: exactly what Nikhil promised. Civilised. Sixteen people in a Bandra shop tasting Nashik wines and pretending to identify: tannins, minerality, finish. Nikhil introduces me to the shop owner, a cheerful woman named Deepa who pours with the generosity of someone who understands that the purpose of a wine tasting is not: education but: connection.

I taste a Sula rosé. It's: pink, light, with something fruity that I can't name because my wine vocabulary is: non-existent. "Berry," I say, because "berry" seems safe.

"Which berry?" Deepa asks.

"The... good kind?"

Nikhil laughs. Deepa laughs. I laugh. And the laughter is: the best thing I've tasted all evening.

We walk home. Not together-together — Nikhil walks me to my building and stops at the gate. The gate being: a boundary that he respects without being asked to respect it, the respecting being: what I need right now, which is: someone who understands that gates exist for reasons and that reasons don't need to be: explained.

"Thank you," I say. "For the wine. And the not-date."

"Thank you for coming. And for the berry commentary. Very sophisticated."

"I'm a woman of culture."

"You're a woman of mosambi juice and now, occasionally, rosé. That's progress."

I go inside. I take off the jhumkas. I take off the dress. I put on my pyjamas and stand in the kitchen and drink a glass of water and think: I went out. On a Saturday night. With a man. And it was: fine. More than fine. It was: possible.

The possible. That's what matters. Not the wine, not the man, not the dress. The possible. The discovery that Saturday nights are not: empty spaces to be endured but: spaces to be filled. With wine, with laughter, with the company of a kind man who remembers you as: electric.

I go to bed. The double bed. But tonight, the double bed feels: less empty. Not because anyone is in it with me. Because I am in it with me. And tonight, that's: enough.