by Single Desi

I reminisce for a fleeting moment about breezy Saturday nights, black couches and a brawny shoulder...

It was a foggy Friday night in the midst of a bone chilling winter. I rushed from work to get ready for an important interview. I showered, slipped into some hip huggers and cabbed it over to Club M, the new desi hangout. I was greeted at the door by Alan, a computer guy who was expanding his horizons by DJing. We were carded and banded by a couple of menacing, ghetto looking bouncers. The music was techno, the walls a gaudy fresco of Moghul glory and the crowd mostly 18+ halter clad girly girls and chain toting homeboys.
I was trying out for my first gig as a bartender, an unrealized passion I needed to fulfill. The vision of the perky bartender, a shapely woman deftly throwing liquors together, her lithe persona exuding complete control over her coterie of needy clientele was astonishingly appealing. Alan introduced me to the boyish owner, a nerdy man in his early thirties. He looked at me skeptically and asked rather superciliously me if I had ever bartended. I looked around, suffocating in the drone of beats mingling with the stench of cigarettes and post pubescent pheromones. “I’ve never bartended before,’ I said rather stoically to my bemused prospective employer.
“She has a bar at home,” ventured Alan in a valiant attempt to save the moment, but an unenthused potential hire and an aggravated employer seldom make a gainful connection. “Call me,” he said and walked away.
Alan was surprised by my reticence to impress someone for a job I really wanted. I admit I was craving an opportunity to bartend, I was willing to put my best foot forward to impress the head honcho, but I knew the moment I set foot into the club that this was not my scene. The passion, the focus and drive had rapidly vanished and were replaced by a feeling of entrapment. Do we ever really know what we want till we test the waters? Do we ever get mature enough to plan out the path of our lives and not let the minuscule annoyances of everyday life deter us from that future phantasm?
I remember a conversation I had with my mother last year. She was perturbed by my independent streak, my take it or leave it attitude and my utter inability to find suitable companionship. I knew I could never make her understand the joy I felt coming home to an apartment that overlooked the city, sipping a glass of Pouilly Fuisse and inhaling the sweet scent of emotional independence. Rohan strolled into my life on a hot summer day and swept me off my feet. We called it la-la land, a Shangri-La of dreams and reality. Yes, we both talked incessantly of a suburban home with three opinionated kids, a pricey mortgage and the total loss of personal space. We were going to be super achievers, the kind that worked hard and played hard. There was our Sunday dim sum ritual, my well-orchestrated culinary evenings and long walks by the East river. The months of punctilious planning soon began to feel like we were entering bondage. Maybe we rushed too fast towards the dream we had secretly nurtured or maybe it just was just a chimera.
For the first time I felt like life was passing me by. I was stuck in a maze with no sense of direction and a gnawing need to know where I would be five years from now. Is introspection the aftermath of my chance encounter with the labile dream of stability or a crisis I’m supposed to finally confront in my thirties?
Varun was the biggest commitmen tphobe I knew till he took control of his erratic dating preferences. A few months later he was in the throes of matrimonial bliss, more content than I had ever seen him during his bar hopping days. Javed is a cute, confident and career driven financial guy I had lost touch with for over a year. I gave him a buzz to check in and was amazed at the parallel paths our lives had taken.
“We tried,” he averred nonchalantly, “don’t beat yourself up!”
He had persevered to make things work with his ex, the only woman who had made his heart fibrillate. Even a proposal couldn’t make his relationship work and he quit dissolutely in the erudition that there was too much love and too much hate.
I bumped into Vikram this weekend, a handsome dentist with a thriving practice. It was his vacillating personal needs he couldn’t figure out. He wished he could buy five years of his life back and not feel the noose of nagging expectations compete with the choke of compromise as those ominous birthdays crept by.
I am sitting in front of my computer sipping a blood orange Cosmo. I am ruminating about a past well lived and a future I am clueless about.
The months ahead seem rife with arduous ER shifts, lavish vacations with bosom friends and endless opportunities to glam up for nocturnal lounging.
I reminisce for a fleeting moment about breezy Saturday nights, meaningful movies, black cozy couches and the comfort of a brawny shoulder to rest on.
I am intrepid in the knowledge that I know exactly what I want, I think!

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