summer, electric, by Gemma Singh
Did we ever cook together?
No.
You would have procured the produce with your quick, efficient movements, exchanging a smile and a few words with the local grocer at the checkout counter. And she would remember you, her broad-shouldered, sharp-jawed regular.
Your kitchen would be missing nearly all cooking tools.
“Do you have a cheese grater?”
“Nah, just throw in the entire brick.”
“Do you have a lime squeezer?”
“Come on, what are hands for?”
“Umm, how about a chopping board?”
“Oi I’m 24 not 17, of course I have a chopping board,” you would say as you rummaged around in the cabinet under the sink looking for one.
I would ask you to chop two red onions for the egg bhurji. You would chop them coarsely, but I’d be too distracted by the sight of your fingers to notice, imagining them in an entirely different context.
I don’t remember blushing before meeting you, face heating up, even though you could not see it on my brown skin. But you would see it in my eyes and tease me endlessly.
Did we ever dance together?
Yes, maybe not quite together, but close to each other, so many bodies swaying and sweating to a Bollywood beat in that place near the hills that I can no longer name. I was aware of your every move, hoping to feel your eyes on me, and never finding them there. I would later discover that you were aware of me, too, but more subtle in the art of the chase than I was accustomed to.
Who chased who?
Despite repeatedly scrolling through the history of our messages, I would never quite find an answer, eventually deleting the proof of our fleeting co-existence out of self-preservation.
Did we ever share a taxi?
Yes, before the start of everything, in a ride to the good side of town. I rolled down the window because the inside smelled like Bombay in a bottle: dried fish, monsoon damp, and something electric that I could never identify.
We sat at the exact distance of two people who hadn’t quite gotten close but knew it was only a matter of time. I looked at everything but you, at the dark emptiness that I knew was the Arabian sea, and the streetlights that blurred at 60 kms/hour like a Monet canvas in an oil spill. I thought you looked handsome in an old-fashioned way, Clark Gable smirking at the bottom of a staircase.
Are we there yet?
You looked outside and recognized a landmark that must have meant we were close, closer than you realized. And then you looked right at me, making some internal decision, and kissed me like it was now or never, like those last few seconds in the taxi ride to the good side of town would be the only chance we would ever have. Your palms holding my face, my hands in your hair, I opened my eyes to look at the driver in the rearview mirror. He looked indifferent, and had likely seen this scene too many times to count or care.
Did we ever leave bruises?
Not out of violence, but perhaps out of desire, because there was so much of it, and we searched for places to hide it:
In the last glass of whisky we shared on your bed at midnight;
Or the tray of chai your cleaning bai brought into the bedroom the next morning, disturbingly at ease with a disheveled stranger under your Jaipuri quilt;
Or the strawberry shake we shared in the cafe by the water.
Let’s hang again? you texted.
I can’t, I have to help my friend move in.
I was not playing hard to get, I had promised my friend, who was real, and the chicks over dicks code had been inculcated in me through pop culture and life from an early age. But you pursued in earnest.
Okay, how about today?
Uh, I am hungover and feel like shit.
Cool, let’s get some strawberry shakes and sit by the sea, you’ll feel better.
If I were honest with myself (which I didn’t have the time or the inclination to be), I would have admitted that I needed to get some distance from you, assess the state of my heart, and cool the liquid glass it had transformed into over the course of a week in the monsoon of 2011.
I’m also on my period.
Ah, such a one track mind? We can just chill, you can help me write this report for work I’ve been struggling with.
Smart of you, paying attention during those endless conversations, and realizing that I liked to write, even boring stuff. I should have understood then the dangerous appeal of emotionally intelligent boys who want to hang out even without the possibility of sex.
Did we ever do recreational drugs together?
Hash, which you procured from the old amma in the fading rust sari, handing her multiple five hundred rupee notes through the dusty kirana shop window.
Cocaine, a couple hits with your friends, after which you picked me up in your black Honda City. I was nervous, wondering if the drug would alter you in some darkly appealing way, making it impossible for me to enjoy you without wanting more.
But you were still you, just lighter, happier, and with more words coming out of your mouth than I had ever heard before. You told me about the girls from your past, the ones who really got under your skin, the way you were starting to get under mine. You smiled softly, as though even in their absence you shared an inside joke, which was lovely to see, and I wondered if I would smile about you the same way someday.
The stories you shared, like puzzle pieces adrift, I collected and stored in my pocket. I liked your fears the best even if I didn't tell you mine. One of them was me falling for you. Another one was you falling for me.
And I remember in that moment, car windows down, how you looked at me. Your eyes chaotic but with a veneer of self-control that never snapped. And in your apartment I watched you figure out how all the whirring pieces in my body came together and apart.
Did we ever tell each other that we were in love, if only for the duration of a heartbeat, a breakfast, a season?
I know I did not.
I don’t think you did either.
We were young and hungry and believed that this feeling would strike again and again with all the mysterious strangers from our future we hadn’t met yet.
The DM I sent you on Facebook Messenger was seven months too late. Too many glasses of wine down, I still hedged my bets, going confessional but not completely. I wrote that I still thought about you, but fleetingly, like a quiet question mark at the back of my mind. I threw in a cavalier mention of the boys I had been with in Barcelona but maintained that you kissed better. I wrote that I had loved our time together, leaving un-asked if we would ever have more.
Your response came the next day: kind, affectionate, and brutal. You were taken.
Did we ever break each others’ hearts?
Mine bruised but did not break. So this is it, I thought to myself during all the afters. The aching emptiness of wanting someone you cannot have. I wrote down everything I felt and everything I didn’t, in diaries, textbooks, google docs, napkins, and emails to my girlfriends.
Was this drive through a summer with you more than I needed, desired or paid for with all the change I had? Are your pockets empty too, and were you the thief or I? Shall we be civilized when we meet, feign a friendly nonchalance, real as the time passes?
Did we ever forget that summer?
I thought back to the taxi ride when everything felt full of promise and beginnings. If I could rewind, I’d ask you what that question was that lurked in your eyes, and when the desire to know the answer began to fade. Half wondering if the seeds of an ending lay in something between us, the wind, or maybe that strawberry shake we shared.
Gemma Singh lives in transit between New York and New Delhi. She studied International Conflict from Georgetown University. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Boston Accent Lit. She pretends to read Das Kapital while actually devouring A Rogue of One’s Own, and would like to write a novel that is made into a Bollywood film.