RAABTA

Pratap found himself in the same pub where he was two weeks ago. His friends were not in town, and Saturday evenings needed some distraction. He believed he liked the pub and its food, perhaps. He ordered a drink at the bar and scanned the crowd of strangers. He sighed inwardly in disappointment. He had tried his usual hangout the last weekend and oddly found the woman he took home to her place for the night uninteresting. She kept investigating his status through a series of questions. It felt like an interrogation, and he soon realised she was not ready for something casual. Then he was amused at himself. Even if he did find a familiar face here, there was no way he could approach her now with the complexity of work between them. In the past week, he had been supervising the project, and it did not escape his notice how Kiran took credit for all of Ajabdeh’s hard work. He did not intervene because it was not his place to. The air of formality that hung between them, with Kiran and Sh...

One sip of the cocktail and she could feel the weight of the world slowly melt away in the music and laughter of the crowd. The deadlines and fresh start with new clients from Monday morning were a tedious job for her. Having a supervisor whom she detested did not make it any better to motivate her to work hard. But she needed the money she made to run the house. She initially refused to come to the pub with her friends because it was a Sunday. She could not afford a hangover. But they were not to listen to her excuses. She was glad they kept in touch to remind her of the good old days. Although they never judged her financial position, their offer to pay for her, the expensive places she could not afford anymore, and their success often rubbed the wrong way on her once she was home in the small two-bedroom rented apartment.  For the longest time in her life, she had believed that her father would turn things around. She believed it when he made poor business choices; she believed ...

Ajabdeh looked up at the sky as the grey clouds poured incessantly over the cityscape. She pulled her raincoat out of the rear end of her scooter and cursed the day. She was already wet when she could finally put the raincoat on and start the vehicle. As the stop timer in the first crossroad counted down from ninety, she finally had some time to think about what had just happened. Thankfully, she had not lost her job. The HR left the incident as a stray one with a warning for her conduct. But what disturbed her to the core was how he and the others around her saw the incident.  She remembered getting down from her Uber ride home on Sunday morning, and the moment she tiptoed up to the decent flat and unlocked the door, she could hear her father in the kitchen.  She removed her heels at the doorway and shut the door noiselessly.  “So, you are home finally?” Her father’s voice was gruff. Their usual Sunday mornings were when he made breakfast experiments, and they would shar...

“I swear I don’t understand those uncles who wear pants, suits and shirts to weddings,” Ajabdeh spoke as she sorted the marigolds eyeing some of the uncles in the banquet while one of the other bridesmaids was breaking down the petals and another was making designs for a flower rangoli they wanted to surprise the bride with for her Mehendi ceremony. “Why?” one of the younger girls asked as Ajabdeh shrugged. “Well, you wear those every day, why not make some effort on another person’s special day and look good? Wear traditional?” “But if they wear suits and watches, maybe our dupatta will get stuck to one of their watches or buttons.” Another one made all of them giggle as Ajabdeh shook her head, amused.  “Well, Sherwanis also have buttons.” The one making the rangoli shrugged. Ajabdeh nodded in agreement, getting up from her spot and wiping some of the petals off her kameez. “The bottom line is, unlike women, men don’t think they need to put in effort for things like these. Wearing...