The Best Possible Experience by Nishanth Injam

Author:Nishanth Injam [Injam, Nishanth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

The telephone rang once and stopped. I find myself standing near it, breathless. Was it a wrong number or a one-ring call? I sit by the phone; it doesn’t ring again.

When Chaya asks me why I haven’t showered yet, I grudgingly leave. In the bathroom, I strip and look at myself. Blackheads all over my squab nose and pores open like the gates of a temple. I set about squeezing my nose, digging the blackheads out with my fingernails. Hold, squeeze, scrape. My nose turns so red I can’t breathe. I release my grip and inhale and wrestle again. Hold, squeeze, scrape. It’s been only a few days since I’ve done this, and I’m convinced my face was made to attract dirt. If I stand next to Radha in the street, pollutants freed from the exhaust of a speeding motorcycle will levitate in the air for a second, lost and exhilarated, and shoot toward me, completely ignoring her, as if I were the only one present, as if I spoke to them personally, as if I whispered in their cells, “Come to mama.”

I roll my hair into a bun. Water pours from the tap into a bucket; we don’t have a showerhead. Radha had told me in passing the day before about shower fittings that haven’t made it to our town yet—how they shoot water at your face, how if you aren’t careful, you can get your hair wet when you don’t want to. As I retrieve water from the bucket in a plastic mug and empty it over my body, I think about what being in love with someone (Rahul?) would mean. Would my body lose track of individual senses? Would I stop seeing water on my skin, stop smelling the chlorine in it, stop hearing it pat down my body, stop tasting it in my mouth, stop feeling it soap my body—and just sense it breathing in every molecule of my being?

Chaya knocks on the bathroom door. “Are you sleeping inside?”

“I’m done,” I yell. I rinse and clean up.

“Open the door.” Chaya bangs again. “Can you hear me?”

I get dressed and open the door as slowly as possible.

“What were you doing in there?” Chaya shoves me out, saree in one hand, and locks the bathroom door. I understand: Father is bringing home guests. She can’t serve them tea in a nightie. She has to abandon Mansfield Park or whichever big fat Jane Austen novel she is rereading at the moment and shower and change into something presentable.

The phone rings and stops. Goose bumps flare on my arm.

It rings for the second time not long after, and I pick up right away. There’s no one on the other end; the person (Rahul?) has already hung up. My heart pumps rapidly. I stand by the phone waiting for the third call. A whole minute. Nothing. But just as I step away, it comes. The third and final ring. He’s no longer a question mark; he’s definitely interested. Butterflies take wing in my stomach, each flutter strumming in me a song of inexplicable joy.

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