West of No East by Bobby Nayyar

Author:Bobby Nayyar
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781907536311
Publisher: Limehouse Books
Published: 2011-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

Christmas has never been the easiest time for myself or my parents. In my youth they would spend most of the time visiting relatives with boxes of chocolate for their children. Years later they were doing the same, only handing over the chocolates to the children of the children they had watched grow up, marry and move on in their lives.

Feeling vulnerable and childlike, I had been left alone in the house in Hornchurch on Christmas Eve. My parents were only a few streets away. I didn’t want to go with them and be reminded of the things I didn’t have. And I didn’t want to see the pained expression on their faces as they played with someone else’s grandchildren. It was bad enough when I was single and then, when I got married, watching their expectations implode when Anita had her first miscarriage. The past is the past, my father told me, but home always seemed to be the place where bad memories and misadventures would collect like the dispossessed at a shelter, not sure where else they could go.

I sat on the floor in my bedroom going through boxes of old photographs from my university days. I told myself I was looking to collect a few of the best ones, so I could take them to Wapping and scan them, really I was just looking for photos of Rubina. It had been a strange night at the Frontline Club. Not enough of a date to be adulterous, but more than enough awkwardness and unease to make it clear that we were both thinking about the same thing. I searched through the box and found only one photograph of her. It was deliberate, both of us careful not to be caught in any photographs that would lead to questions and inquisitions, especially in the early days.

I remember taking the photograph. It was near the end of our first year. We had finished our finals, a group of us sitting on the Backs near the river Cam, a ratio of 3:1 of beer cans to people, some of us upright, some lying on the grass staring up, seeing no distinction between the sky and their future. I had my now antique Nikon SLR, originally with hopes to become a photographer, or at least get a few snaps in Varsity. I waited until her boyfriend, a white guy named Steve, moved away to take a phone call, then I took my snap, Rubina made a self-conscious yelp. I think she was just worried that she’d been photographed with cans of beer, but more so she was annoyed I hadn’t given her a second to prepare for the shot.

I actually only saw the photograph a few months later, when I finally developed the film, another thing completely lost in the digital age. Rubina was wearing a beautiful cotton dress, the fabric bearing red and yellow flowers like a landscape painted by Georges Seurat. She sat on the grass with her thin, smooth legs outstretched, her arms propping her up, the deep cut of her dress revealing an ample cleavage.

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