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Apples and Lozenges

Posted on May 21, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

He wasn’t quite what she expected.

It was a fact of life she had learnt to live with. Like the time she switched from the PC to the Mac.

It was a sexy machine. All silvery and slim with little pieces of attractive minutiae like the keyboard that lit up and the magnetic power cord plug. It had looked sexy enough in all those ads she watched online that exhorted her to switch simply by extolling the disadvantages of the PC. She knew she would look cool puttering about in a café or restaurant with that glowing Apple on the lid letting everyone know they had a cool person in their midst. She had planned to go into public places and leave her Bluetooth on to see what happened. Maybe a cute guy would send her his picture. Maybe she would get propositioned by Nokia 6260. She liked the idea of flirting by Bluetooth.

That was the promise. The reality had been a little different. The computer was easy to use but also a bit frustrating for a girl who had spent a fair bit of time memorizing PC keyboard shortcuts and arranging her desktop just so. The whole Command+whatever style of function took some getting used to. And she absolutely hated the absence of a right-click button on the mouse. Like with everything else in life, she felt somehow, not quite completely satisfied with the experience.

She might have been several times bitten but was still not shy of going online to find dates. Though sight-unseen shouldn’t have been better than a living breathing person in a nightclub or at the fruit market, she preferred technology to the old-fashioned meet and greet.

In the nether world she inhabited with millions of others, meeting was the very last thing anyone did.

So it was a big step that she was sitting across the table in the restaurant that looked out at a crossroad in Bandra. It was one of the painfully hip suburbs in Mumbai. The hip nightclubs and the good eating was all clustered within a ten-kilometre radius more north than south of the city. The kids there had the painfully cool haircuts and the painfully cool clothes and (she suspected) the painfully cool sex.

Herself, not so much.

Finding a guy who wasn’t a complete retard was so difficult she was considering switching sides (or playing fields or sports or whatever the metaphor was). The first time she hinted that she might try dating girls, one of her girlfriends had inched away from her, as if the condition might somehow be contagious. Of course she didn’t but she developed a healthy curiosity about those who might.

So when she found a message from r0yrog3r69 in her in-box she was immediately intrigued by the fact that he had left his sexuality undefined but his about me tags claimed him as mildly angry, empathetic, environmentally-conscious, bi, loves graphic art, hates Bhansali/Johar/Barjatya/Chopra.

She didn’t have a view about the environment, was definitely dissatisfied with the way life was turning out despite her best efforts, knew she could feel empathy in the right situation, wasn’t sure if he meant graphic as in ‘hardcore’ or graphic as in containing them and agreed with his taste in (or distaste for) cinema. Which left the bi bit for her to obsess over. She had considered asking him several times during their online chats and cybering sessions but she decided that it might be best for her to ask him in person.

He worked as an apprentice editor at a facility down the road and it was possible that he hadn’t left work completely behind him as he chatted with her. He possessed a distracted air that (she thought) added to his charm. He looked comfortable with the image she presented so her initial concerns about the meeting subsided. They exchanged pleasantries and then they ate from each other’s plates. It was going very well so over dessert she decided to ask him about the two-letter word that had got her interested in him in the first place.

“So in your tags, are all those things true?”

He nodded, “Oh yeah. Did you know that we have less than eight years to do something about the global warming problem?”

“No. Really?”

“Yup, yup!”

“What happens after that?”

“Chaos man, total chaos. Might as well call in the Four Horsemen. If nothing is done about it now you don’t need to save up for more than eight years because we’re all going to be in hell by then.”

“So best to get laid now hunh?”

The joke was a bit off colour but he grinned and she felt relieved.

“And the other stuff?”

“Hmmm?”

“In your tags.”

“Some of it was to fill space y’know…make it look like I had…something. What do you say about yourself in those things anyway?”

She wasn’t able to hide her disappointment in time, “Oh so it’s not true?”

“Oh no, it is but I don’t know, it feels a little fake, or needy, to be saying I have empathy…Everybody should have empathy! That’s why the planet is so fucked because everybody is so busy being selfish.”

“Yeah I know what you mean. So it’s all true then?”

Something in her voice made him look up from his slice of pie, “Was there something in particular you wanted to ask me about?”

She blushed. He was definitely interested now, “Go ahead. We’re buddies already, you can ask me.”

He was smiling. She steeled herself and set free the question that had been on the tip of her tongue since before she’d left home, dressed in snug blue jeans and a brown tank top that gave her generous cleavage without looking too slutty.

“I was wondering whether you were really bi…”

“Oh,” his face seemed to close up. He took his elbows off the table, sat back and refused to meet her eyes, “I knew I shouldn’t have put that in there.”

“No, no, I don’t think it’s bad. I was just curious that’s all. Are you really bi?”

He met her eyes and understanding dawned upon him, “Polar, not sexual.”

“Oh.”

There was really no recovering from that.

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