Trigger warning: drugs. Mild drugs, but still.
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vi. columbusing
Omar texted me to tell me that the thingy at his house would start at seven-ish, so Jürgen and I decided that the appropriate time to show up would be eight. We were doing this not to be fashionably late but just to avoid the start-up awkwardness at any get-together, especially a small one. Apparently it was only going to be Omar, two of his friends, me, and Jürgen. So at seven, by when we should’ve technically been there already, I was flinging open my wardrobe and declaring loudly, ‘I have nothing to wear.’
‘Leena, pretend-we’re-in-a-movie hour ended at six,’ Jurgen mumbled, coming over to stand behind me.
‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘I really have nothing to wear.’
‘You have everything to wear,’ he said, gesturing at the jumble of mostly useless apparel that constituted my wardrobe. Then he randomly plucked out a hanger, from which was hung a slinky peach chiffon top I hadn’t the faintest memory of ever purchasing. ‘Here, wear this and wear jeans. You’re done. And you’re welcome.’
‘It’s sleeveless,’ I said, spouting a trope common in our land of oily male oglers and inefficient depilatory devices.
‘So?’
‘My pits are like the Black Forest right now, Jurgen.’
He made a faintly grossed-out expression and I held back a retort and a few seventies-era sociopolitical references. I grabbed the top and hung it back up, where it promptly slunk back into its previous hiding place, where it would remain forever. We stood looking at my clothes for a few seconds.
‘Um,’ Jurgen said. ‘So nothing sleeveless.’
I shook my head.
‘Why are you even dressing up for this?’ he asked, turning to me. ‘Like, it’s not a party or anything. You look fine as you are.’
I was wearing a boring, grey Marvel t-shirt with this overwashed crinkly Hawkeye print on it and skinny jeans and flip-flops. I didn’t look as ‘fine’ as I looked ‘I really don’t give a shit’. Which, actually, wasn’t so bad.
I shrugged and closed my wardrobe. ‘Guess you’re right.’
So that was done. We went back to what we’d been doing pre-seven ‘o’ clock: lying on opposite ends of my bed and reading our respective books, playing bicycle with our feet and testing Newton’s third law of motion. At seven-thirty, we departed, not before I carefully swiped on eyeliner so it wouldn’t look like I didn’t put in any effort at all. So ultimately my grunge was as soft as a baby’s butt, and Jurgen was just…Jurgen, in his ubiquitous sweatpants and t-shirt, on which there was an illustration from Go Fly a Kite, which was the cheesiest of cheesy Bing Crosby songs, but described Jurgen very well. If the world went my way, I’d have Jurgen wearing that t-shirt like all the time.
But the world didn’t go my way, in fact, it went aggressively un-my-way, which was why he sometimes wore muscle tees and glossy basketball shorts.
The security guards at Omar’s gate buzzed us in without too many questions, probably because they saw me in the morning. As we walked up the short easement to the house, leaves crunching under our flip-flops, Jurgen mumbled, ‘Not just an STO, but a rich STO. Well picked, darling, well picked.’
‘Hush,’ I mumbled, stepping onto the porch and ringing the doorbell. ‘Reserve judgement, o impulsive one.’
It took Omar a minute to get to the door, understandably, considering the sheer size of the place. He opened it wearing, thankfully, a t-shirt and jeans, and surrounded by a blessed aura redolent of pot.
Praise the omnipotent god I don’t believe in; the evening just got a lot easier to deal with.
‘I distinctly remember telling you seven o clock,’ he said, opening the door wide for me.
‘It’s not very punk-rock to show up early to stuff,’ I said, walking in.
‘It’s not very punk-rock to use your punk-rock as an excuse for stuff,’ Omar rightly said, and I ignored him, stepping over the threshold.
‘Omar, this is Jurgen, Jurgen, Omar.’
‘Hey,’ Jurgen said, sticking out a hand. Omar grinned and shook it enthusiastically. I wondered when they had started smoking.
‘You must be the boyfriend,’ Omar said, still pumping his hand up and down.
Now they both had mirroring grins on their faces, only Omar was high off some probably-expensive weed and Jurgen was high off getting called my boyfriend.
‘I am, yes.’
After they were done shaking hands, Omar led us down the corridor to his room. Before opening the door, he turned to us abruptly, as if he’d just remembered something super-important.
‘Wait, you guys aren’t straightedge or anything, right? Shit, I should’ve asked you before.’
Jurgen chuckled.
‘We are hardcore bent-edge,’ he assured Omar, who looked very relieved, as we couldn’t already smell the people hotboxing in his room.
‘Good. Like, I have this friend who’s into the whole Krishnacore stuff and it just gets really annoying – anyway, come in.’
I had never seen that much pot in my life. A mound about a foot in length was heaped on a mat on the floor; I was simultaneously amazed at how much combined wealth must have been present in the room to make that bounty possible, and apprehensive of how fucked up everyone was going to get if they intended to smoke all of that. Next to me, Jurgen said, ‘Hoo boy.’
He’d smoked pot only twice or thrice before that night, and had gone through an unfortunate period of abstinence in the middle when he had been convinced that the smoke was ruining his skin. He would just sit with us with a scarf around his face, the only sober one in the room, before he went to the lengths of calling his dermatologist and clarifying the ‘hypothetical’ side-effects of marijuana on his skin, after which he was delighted to learn that it was, in fact, more good than harmful (and his dermatologist, realizing belatedly her glorious misstep, told him ‘but good is a relative term, it’s relative. Say no to drugs.’).
‘Guys!’ Omar slurred, wading through the smoke. ‘This is Leena, and her boyfriend Jurgen. Leena and Jurgen, this is Amelie, and this is Hannah. Hello hello, nice to meet you. Pass me the thingamajig, please.’
The one who was Amelie said, in a pretty French accent, ‘Thanks for the gender-neutral term of endearment, Omar,’ which made me like her already. She was rail-thin and was wearing the kind of outfit I thought would never be possible in the kind of socio-political climate our country was plagued with: a Brady Melville crop top and shorts and a golden anklet. For a brief moment I admired how wonderfully satirical her outfit was. Gold anklets were a prostitute’s identifier in 1960’s Britain, and she was making an extremely powerful statement by combining one with an outfit that would be deemed ‘slutty’ by this liberated society we live in. Her impudence impressed me.
Or maybe she just saw the anklet in Claire’s and bought it because it looked pretty. I made a mental note to ask her but considering the cluttered state of my mental pin-up board it seemed unlikely that I would remember.
The one who was Hannah was lounging on her stomach on Omar’s bed, and looked like a postmodern Botticelli woman, if there ever was one. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, like me, and gave me a friendly smile when we were introduced.
‘You came at the right time,’ Hannah said, as I sat down on the floor next to Amelie, and Jurgen took a beanbag. ‘We needed a joint roller.’
‘No worries,’ I said, making a big show of rolling up my sleeves. ‘I’ll have you know that I am the best joint roller in Chennai.’
‘She’s kidding,’ Omar told me. He was sitting opposite me on the floor. ‘We wouldn’t designate you roller, that’s mean.’
‘No but really,’ Jurgen said. ‘She’s actually really good at it.’
I smiled bashfully at the praise. Amelie, who had been taking a pull from the existing joint, finished it.
‘Oops,’ she coughed, thumping herself on the chest. ‘Okay new girl, prove your worth.’
‘Now I feel pressured,’ I joked. The weed was all laid out in front of me, all the rolling papers scattered messily on the side. We formed an assembly line of sorts, de-seeding and de-stemming like a collective machine of dexterous brilliance, much like the sari-clad ladies at the vegetable mandis, sorting out the good coriander leaves from the bad. Soon there was a puddle of seeds and stems ready to be discarded.
As I got to the process of rolling the joint, Jurgen struck up a conversation with Amelie and Hannah.
‘So where are you girls from?’
‘Delhi,’ Hannah said. ‘I mean, I’m originally from New York but my dad works for the embassy and I’ve been here pretty much all my life.’
‘I met Hannah and Amelie at THIMUN,’ Omar supplied, ‘In Sri Lanka.’
Jurgen nodded. Amelie said, ‘Français, if you couldn’t guess by my accent.’
‘Best not to assume anything,’ Jurgen said, shrugging.
‘Et tu?’ Amelie asked.
‘Uh…I’m about fifty-five percent German, forty-five Indian, and hundred percent Chennaiite,’ Jurgen said proudly. I rolled my eyes.
‘You’re hardly a Chennaiite.’
Cutting off Jurgen’s indignant response, Hannah asked me where I was from. I tried to concentrate on the joint, which was starting to assume a weird ovoidal shape.
‘Um…born and brought up in Chennai,’ I told her. ‘Nothing exotic about me. Hey, can someone make me a filter?’
For the next five minutes they were all engrossed in trying to make the perfect filter. Soon I received the M-shaped cardboard from Jurgen. I stuck it in and licked the edge of the rolling paper. He watched me, leaning back on his palms.
‘I dunno, but I find that weirdly hot.’
I rolled my eyes, wiping the spit off the side of my mouth.
‘I’m licking a paper stuffed with leaves, Jurgen.’
He mumbled something and looked away. I stuck the joint firmly and then held it out.
‘Voila.’
‘Ah, c’est magnifique,’ Amelie cooed. ‘Omar, ze lighter?’
Omar handed her the lighter.
‘May I?’ I asked everyone and they nodded. I put the joint between my lips and Amelie lit it.
I took a good pull and pressed my lips together, handing it to Amelie. The stuff actually smelled good, unlike the cheap shit Arjun normally bought from that Top Gear rip-off corner shop. Jurgen grinned at me.
‘You look cute with smoke coming out of your nose.’
I exhaled, his face temporarily obscured by a grey cloud.
‘I am dragon. Mwahaha.’
He shuffled closer to me, sitting so that our sides were pressed up against each other. When it was his turn, he held the joint awkwardly and observed it for a few seconds.
‘Okay, we’re here to smoke the damn thing, not for a darshan,’ I said impatiently.
He laughed nervously.
‘Uh, I think I’ve forgotten how to do this. Wait.’
He took a drag and held it in, tendrils of smoke weeping from his flared, reddened nostrils. I laughed, taking the joint from him.
‘Okay?’
He let it all out, coughing a bit.
‘Fuck, that burns.’
‘Swallow first,’ Hannah told him. He nodded.
‘Seriously, you okay?’ I asked him.
‘Yeah, yeah.’
I had forgotten about Jurgen’s love-hate relationship with drugs. The first time we’d done it, holed up on Ben’s terrace and feeling terribly rebellious and in the throes of adolescence, he had gone into angst for days, questioning everything we live for, and how the lessons we’d been taught growing up were all turning out to be horrendously wrong, or perhaps they were earth-shakingly correct and we were just too stupid to realize. He was also concerned about his lungs, which I understood. And then after a while he took his trip to the dermatologist and he was off and on. But recently he had adopted a more fuck-it attitude, which was more in tune to mine, so there he was.
‘We should make a cross joint out of all that,’ Hannah mumbled after a while, gesturing at the weed we had left.
‘I dunno how to roll a cross joint,’ I said.
‘Thanks to Seth Rogen, I do,’ Amelie said, who was holding our current, half-finished joint.
‘He is the true educator of our generation,’ I said, nodding.
As it happened, unfortunately or fortunately, Omar’s parents called when we were almost done with the joint that they would be home earlier than anticipated, dashing our cross-joint dreams. From what I gathered, they were flying back to Chennai from Singapore. Two regular joints later, five teenagers who were stoned as fuck were trying to clean up the room and remove evidence of their daringly illegal shenanigans. Jurgen and I barely had the will to move, and, if I remember correctly, were squished onto the beanbag in an enthusiastic cuddle. Omar was blaring Electric Wizard on his expensive Sony stereo and was singing along to the impromptu jazzy solos. Amelie was slow dancing by herself on the carpet. Hannah was easily the most rational amongst all of us, and wasn’t showing any particular signs of insanity. When it was approaching eleven, we started to realize that we needed to move, and fast.
Hannah delegated work quickly, but almost nothing made sense to me.
‘Clean, must clean,’ Jurgen was mumbling as he got on his knees and began crawling on the carpet.
‘Hannaaahh,’ I sang. ‘Montannaaaaaa….’
‘Leenaaa,’ she sang back. ‘I told you to hide the stash and pick up the seeds on the floor.’
I saluted.
‘Aye, aye captain.’
Jurgen and I got to work, squinting through the haze to pick up seeds. We weren’t in much of a hurry, and everything seemed peaceful and wonderful, until Omar said, ‘Guys, guys, how are you two getting home?’
And I checked the time and it was ten-fifty.
In hindsight, the situation seems a lot more horrific than it did to me then. Jurgen and I were in no state to take public transport and face our parents at home. But then, in that moment, I was very calm and collected – I just straightened up and said, ‘Bus’, not realizing that the last bus ran only till eleven-thirty.
‘Lemme get you something to eat,’ Omar said, his American twang more pronounced. ‘Y’all need to sober up.’
‘Nooo,’ Jurgen whined. ‘But we just got here. Oof.’
‘Careful,’ I mumbled, as he fell over onto the carpet. Then I screamed because he grabbed my ankle and pulled me down and I fell on top of him in an ungainly heap and banged my head on his shoulder. He had me in a firm embrace, oblivious to my pain.
‘Hey,’ he said.
‘Hey,’ I mumbled.
He smiled a bit, his eyes as glazed as a chocolate éclair. ‘Hey you…out there on your own, sitting naked by the phone, would you touch me…’
‘Ba da dum dum, dum, da dum, dum.’
‘HEY YOU, DON’T HELP THEM TO BURY THE LAAIIIIIIVVVEEE.’
I kissed him on the nose. He kissed me on the mouth.
‘Leena Mathew.’
‘Yes.’
He looked at me very seriously and deeply, holding my face in his hands and almost squashing my cheeks.
‘I think you are the bestest person in the world.’
‘Faintly unromantic,’ I commented through a mouthful of cheek and tongue and tooth. ‘That’s what kids say to their favourite aunts.’
Jurgen gave a deep throaty chuckle, which I suspected was not attractively chocolaty because of his inherent baritone but because of the smoke lodged in his throat. His hands moved into my hair.
‘Then you are the favourite aunt to my kid.’
‘You are the Lennon to my McCartney.’
‘The jam to my cheese.’
‘What?’
His eyes were closed. Hannah was giggling.
‘You guys are the cutest things I’ve ever seen.’
Omar then re-entered with two huge bags of tortilla chips and chucked them at me.
‘Eat up.’
For the first five minutes I practically had to force-feed Jurgen, but when he sobered up a little bit and started to realize the gravity of the situation he began stuffing his face, muttering ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ over and over again. Fifteen minutes later, my head was still light and everyone’s jokes were still funny, but it was late and we had to begin the journey home. Omar saw us off on a bus and stumbled back home, and Jurgen and I took the shady seats in the back and the conductor gave us suspicious looks as we bought our tickets, wobbling unnecessarily on an already shaky bus.
‘Oh god,’ Jurgen groaned, leaning his head on the seat in front. ‘The floor is swimming.’
‘Dude. We didn’t even smoke that much.’
He shook his head. ‘No like – I haven’t taken a hit in a while, right? I think everything just…I dunno, hit me harder.’
He stayed like that for the next ten minutes till we hit the Tidel Park junction and I rubbed his back as soothingly as I could. The streetlights were winking at us friendlily and the sea breeze was lovely and cool and I knew that the situation wouldn’t have seemed like paradise if not for the druggish remnants in our systems. Jurgen and I had a thing for public transport, especially shitty Indian public transport, although I had experienced no better, and he had experienced first-world convenience during his life in Germany many years ago. Our affinity for public transport stemmed from the larger ambit of our love for functional urban spaces, or semi-functional, as the case may be (as the case most often was, actually); we were rather starved of those in Chennai. And everything seemed cleaner and more romantic at night, so for us, public transport at 11 PM with a slight high was like orgasmic heaven.
‘Oh,’ he sighed, lifting his head when we were a few minutes away from our stop. ‘What the hell did we smoke.’
‘The effects are lasting curiously long,’ I said, nodding and feeling the weight of my head as if it was tied to an anvil.
‘Time to go,’ Jurgen said, standing up abruptly as we approached our shabby little stop which was surrounded by a majestically muddy rainwater moat and was abandoned at that time of night. We stumbled to the doors, and passed through the receiving end of yet another chary look from the conductor. When we finally alighted and the bus hissed off, Jurgen stumbled a bit and giggled.
‘The ground is moving. Oh, lord.’
I quickly grabbed onto him as he fell over, hooking my arms under his armpits.
‘Oops,’ he burped, righting himself. ‘Sorry, Leens. Let us walk.’
And so we walked. Jurgen had a protective arm around my shoulder (fat load of good his skinny ass would do if I was actually attacked, though) as we dodged potholes to get to our inner street. All our respective parents were home, and, presumably, lying in wait. To my pleasant surprise, the bedroom and living room lights in my house were off; hence everyone inside was asleep. Jurgen stationed me at my gate.
‘Stay over,’ I told him, putting my hand on the gate latch. He rocked back on his heels in a way that seemed almost unbearably cute to me at the time so I grabbed his dumb Bing Crosby t-shirt before he could lose his balance and pulled him with me.
‘Okay,’ he mumbled, making his mind up when we were halfway through my driveway.
‘Good,’ I said, taking out my key.
We attacked my mother’s Haldiram’s stash with the aggression of Viking raiders, sitting amongst the packets on my counter. Jurgen, as usual, was red in the face as he tried to stomach the bhujia sev, but the food went in and everything in our heads began to make more sense. Gradually.
We were sitting in silence, the only sound in the kitchen our crunching and Jurgen’s occasional cough.
I said, ‘I still have to tell you about that cool thing I read on NPR.’
He nodded. ‘Mmhm.’
I hopped off the counter, now beginning to fear for his health. ‘Drink some water, you’re turning red.’
He was fanning his tongue.
‘I just – my throat was sore already. How do people eat this stuff with hot tea.’
‘We’re Indians,’ I told him, taking out a Captain Morgan bottle from the fridge, which, unfortunately, was filled with water not Jamaican rum. ‘The poor state of our socio-economical climate over the years has forced people to increase the spice content in their food, because the spicier the food, the faster it fills you up – and with a population that is largely in poverty, nobody wants to be hungry.’
He was gulping from the bottle, eyes fixed on me.
‘I knew that. You of all people should be able to identify rhetoric.’
He put the bottle down and I stood in front of him, putting my hands on his knees.
‘Sorry.’
‘So the thing on NPR,’ he said, looking nervously at the position of my hands.
‘Right. There’s like, this new word, columbusing.’
‘Mmhm.’
‘And it basically means to discover something that is not new, like how Columbus discovered America.’
‘The etymology isn’t that exciting then,’ Jurgen remarked.
‘Yeah, it’s quite ordinary actually.’
He was suddenly looking at me very meaningfully.
‘But it’s a good word.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’
He didn’t say anything after that so I went on.
‘I kinda feel like…like, that’s what we’re doing, right? I mean, me and you. You and I. Columbusing. And I guess the places we’re going are as unexplored as America was in 1492, but still there, you know…hidden, lurking.’
‘You can be so poetic when you want to be,’ he murmured.
‘But then eventually the places become decadent cesspools of capitalism and stagnancy,’ I whispered, as our faces were suddenly a lot closer.
‘Stagnancy is all in the mind.’
‘Entropy is inevitable.’
‘Nothing is inevitable.’
‘Except death.’
‘Which doesn’t have to be defined as an end.’
The romantic almost-kiss turned into a frowning, forehead-to-forehead stalemate.
‘You really know how to kill a movie moment,’ Jurgen said, scowling.
‘I just wanted to tell you about columbusing,’ I mumbled.
‘It’s very interesting,’ he said politely.
I pushed myself away from the counter.
‘Fuck you. Just, fuck you.’
‘Ugh, I’m sorry, it’s just that you’re so goddamn cynical.’
‘I am a romantic and a Romantic, capital R.’
‘No you’re not.’
I put my palms up in surrender.
‘Look, I don’t know what you want me to be, okay? Just let it go.’
He pressed his lips together, his palms flat on the granite countertop.
‘The cold never bothered me anyway.’
The problem with guys like Jurgen is that they will just casually slip Disney references into arguments, which makes it hard to sustain the argument. In our case, it didn’t work so well because I am not the greatest Disney fan out there, for multifold reasons that mostly pertain to feminism, but Frozen was still one of the better ones. Like, at least it passed the Bechdel test. But God forbid it win the 2014 Oscar.
I rolled my eyes and fell back against the counter between his knees.
‘For tonight we can just continue our columbusing,’ he murmured, putting his arms around my waist.
‘Yes, we can,’ I said, nodding.
Then we shared our long-overdue kiss.
‘Tomorrow, beach, 7 AM,’ he reminded me as we went up to my room later.
‘Seven?’ I complained. ‘Can’t we do eight?’
‘It gets too hot at eight. It’s either seven or six-thirty, take your pick. You know they start flying kites at like five am on Makar Sankranti.’
‘Only the fanatics,’ I said, flipping my light switches. ‘And why do you know more about Indian culture than I do?’
‘I know more about Indian kite culture than you do,’ he corrected.
Kite flying at Makar Sankranti was Jurgen’s pipe dream, like UChicago was mine, only it was a lot more achievable. Of course, travelling to Ahmedabad mid-January would always be a bit of a task, and Jurgen was not one for tasks, small or big, so naturally, throughout all his seven years in India he had never made the effort to fly out and see the biggest annual kite festival, and simply contented himself with YouTube videos and trivia books and dumb Bing Crosby songs.
‘And yet you never put your knowledge to use,’ I said, half hoping he wouldn’t hear me. He followed me into the bathroom and was silent for a minute as I took out my toothbrush and gave him his spare one.
‘Knowledge is not procured to use,’ he finally said, squeezing MaxFresh onto his brush. He then offered the tube to me.
‘We had this argument when we read Franny and Zooey,’ I reminded him, taking it. ‘Let’s not go there again.’
We brushed our teeth in silence, glaring at each other in the mirror (glaring: half-smiling and half-frowning and fully feeling strong affection).
He spat and rinsed his mouth and I doggedly cleaned out all remnants of pot smell from my teeth. Then I received a minty fresh kiss on the side of my head.
‘You’re very cute when you have impassioned debates.’
‘Don’ call me cute,’ I mumbled, toothpaste dripping from the corner of my mouth.
‘Endearing,’ he corrected.
I spat out my mouthful of flourides.
‘That’s better.’
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A/N: Wrote this cruising along the river Seine ehehe. I have four more days on the boat and then I'm flying back to India on Monday. Some nice old lady in a town gave us her wifi password so I'm exploiting it but I'm mostly disconnected, also because I lost my iPhone in a freak accident and it is now embedded in the floor of the river. I know I sound blase but I'm pretty fucking ripped apart lol but whatever I'm practising an almost Buddhist detachment from material possessions. Plus, I'm on vacation. I gotta chill. ANYWAY. Hope you guys liked this, please please comment with your feedback :)