Yes, maybe relationships are not, after all, just consolations for those who can’t have greatness. Maybe she isn’t asexual. What, if not love, is this hot prickling that begins, as she imagines Dheer’s reply, just where her breastbone ends?
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction
Odd Couples: Mr. Polyamorous and Dr. Asexual
Workdays, Dheer rises between 10am and noon. The maid has come, and cooked and swept, and gone. It’s up to the four Persian cats, left behind by a schoolfriend gone to San Fransisco, to decide enough’s enough and treat Dheer to a spot of quasi-sexual face-sitting. His throat saturated with fine graywhite cathairs, Dheer rises with a hacking cough and mines himself out of his quicksand mattress, which rests on the floor, for Dheer hasn’t got around to buying a bed, for he might be changing jobs soon and then he’ll move out of this flat, which was left behind by a workfriend gone to Sydney.
Sunday’s a workday for Dheer. He always gets handed the night and weekend shifts. Which is kinda okay, ’coz the work’s kinda chill.
Dheer’s phone buzzes. Texts from Pragya, says his lockscreen. Indecisively his thumb brushes the dust collected in his screen’s many fine cracks. Pragya’s gone to Nandi Hills. She didn’t ask to meet him his weekend, made plans with a colleague instead – to Dheer’s relief.
For Dheer has told Pragya he’s polyamorous, can’t commit to anyone just yet. One evening, as they lounged on his mattress, Pragya said suddenly, ‘You should look up what ‘polyamorous’ actually means. More commitment, not less.’ His head snapped to her. Pragya’s eyes were flashing but her lips were smiling. He laughed his gentle laugh. She’s six years his senior: he feels well taken care of.
Pragya’s got nice humour, nice body, nice portfolio of stories, and an impressive PhD. Dheer’s last dry spell, Hinge and Tinder and Bumble and OKCupid notwithstanding, lasted nineteen months. Then, twelve weeks ago, he matched with Pragya on Bumble. It probably won’t last. The longest he’s ever been with anyone is five months. This time he’ll hold out for his dream girl. A face like Gracy Singh – a young Gracy Singh, like in Lagaan; clever enough; always looking up at him ready to laugh. Meanwhile there’s Pragya. Pragya’s gone out with another guy today – just friends – and Dheer is relieved. But his thumb keeps cleaning his phonescreen, jiggling his lockscreen up and down, and the snow of his relief becomes flecked sudden yellow with a stranger’s piss. Accidentally his thumb unlocks his phone. Ha! It’s just photos Pragya’s sent him, from her early-morning outing: flamboyant bushes and bird’s-eye-views of Bangalore’s smoggy outskirts.
He saunters from his room with a flatfooted waddle usually observed in heavier, older men. Dheer’s not yet 31 and he prides himself on his leanness: though it’s the leanness less of a beefcake and more of a hayrick. He catsteps over his cats. The drawingroom is empty. His flatmate’s still asleep.
Dheer yawns at the clock. Almost noon: too late to go run. Not that it’s hot out – it’s June, Bangalore, pleasant. But running so late would throw off his whole routine. And if he can’t run today, then he can’t start learning guitar today, ’coz he’s got to run to get psyched for anything else. And then he can’t start learning the drums six months from today, after he’s mastered the guitar, ’coz, even though drums are what he wants to play, onstage at Enchanted Valley someday, he’s got to start with guitar, ’coz everyone starts with guitar.
Dheer’s disappointment is a house-sparrow flitting a sunny lawn. He revives himself with half a cigarette, which proves too much, waves before him flashing his notebook with its shabby cover and yellowed pages brown-spotted at the bottom of his drawer, makes his disappointment throb like a heart attack. Quickly he calibrates back down with the stub of last night’s joint. There we go! He’s got loads of time to do everything he’s ever wanted to.
Thumbing through his emails, Dheer sits up. A collegefriend has announced that he’s arriving tonight from Bombay and staying with him for three weeks. Not since Dheer dropped out of his undergraduate engineering degree has he heard from this dude: doesn’t even have his number. How did he track Dheer down? Panicking, he rushes into the kitchen.
On the counter, from tiny plastic bowls of congealed sauce, cigarettebutts protrude, twerking gently in the breeze. Someone’s gagged the halfdrained Budweiser bottles with the token sprigs of parsley that came crowning the buckets of fried chicken. Dheer lifts the lid on yesterday’s breakfast, untouched, and yesterday’s lunch, untouched, and yesterday’s dinner, untouched. He rarely eats breakfast, and yesterday his flatmate didn’t either; lunchtime he doesn’t remember; then they had schoolfriends over for Halo and takeaway.
Nose crinkling, Dheer glances from the overflowing counter to the empty dustbin, and to the fridge – always empty, a mysterious device operable only by mothers and maids, and girlfriends, if you’re lucky. Deep inside Dheer’s skull, as he gazes at the ice-blue fridge-door, a lightbulb comes on. It flickers. It goes off. The maid will take care of it tomorrow. He nibbles at an idli from this morning’s breakfast, turns away from the counter, stumbles over a heap of half-full home-delivery grocerybags, slops Whiskas into the cats’ bowl, and sinks into the rumstained navyblue sofa to log into work on his beaten-up dustfurred laptop.
Dheer does customer service for an ex-girlfriend’s schoolfriend’s crypto bank. Same job, same salary since 2019. It’s kinda dull. One of these days, when he rises early enough to run and then to begin guitar lessons, he’ll update his resume and find a new job, a new flat. Then his real life will begin. Maybe he’ll even get a proper girlfriend.
He rolls a joint, stretches his legs out on the ottoman, resumes exploring Zelda’s open world on the television, and puts on his playlist. Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and The Doors. He’s got the best taste. Nobody can deny that he’s destined for greatness. One eye on his workscreen, he screams softly along: The soul of a woman was created below.
Another text from Pragya. Dheer drops his head back, ready for more towering trees and particoloured treebark that look like zoomed-in patches of an Impressionist painting. It’ll be kinda nice seeing Pragya again next weekend after this breather. A tingle runs through him as he anticipates holding on with one hand to the desk in his bedroom, with the other to his windowledge, to stop the wheels of his dusty workchair from banging too loudly against the wall as she rides him. Dheer’s flatmate is single – he’d hate to rub sex in his face.
For an asexual person, Pragya sure does want a lot of sex. ‘I don’t get pleasure from sex,’ she told him last weekend, cat-stretching her toned body, ‘but I still like it. Good exercise. And it’s like a reset for the brain, even if I don’t orgasm, which… yeah,’ she cut herself off, with an awkward little laugh, but sharp.
Dheer opens a new tab and Googles ‘How to make a woman come.’ Scrolling down, he new-tabs the first ten results. He browses the first article and PageDowns through the second.
It’s not like he’s lazy. He loves reading. But, even back in school, when he had an exam for which he had to read, say, chapters 1-6 of the Communication Systems textbook, he’d read everything else instead: a Murakami, a Paulo Coelho, even chapters 7-12 of the Communication Systems textbook. Reading what you’re supposed to read is – I mean, he’s done with school and all that. And he hasn’t even decided if he’s staying with Pragya. And it was mean of her to tell him like that, after insisting all along that it was no big deal.
His phone pings. Desperate to read anything but how to make a woman come, he unlocks it immediately this time.
“We’re on our way back, on the bus,” reads Pragya’s text. “I’m in trouble.” Dheer sits up, ready to grab his helmet and motorbike and go. “I just saw a motorbiker out the window. I don’t know if the bike’s the same model as yours, or if the helmet is, or if it’s the shape of his back in his jacket – but he made me think of you. I’m in trouble!”
But she doesn’t really think she’s in trouble. She’s concluded her text with a smileyface.
Dheer’s ankles drop off the ottoman. Dheer’s back hunches off the sofaback. The sun blazing between the curtains scorches Dheer’s Sunday-afternoon chill.
***
Pragya’s in the windowseat, nodding along to her colleague’s rants about workplace politics. Pragya’s smiling, eyes halfclosed. She doesn’t check her phone. This suspense is more enjoyable than any reply Dheer could make. Limerence is like cloudwalking over a twilit world: the perfect state for a writer. From here you can only fall down into singlehood or partnership: workaday worlds, both, traffic-stuck under a blazing sun.
“…I could not believe it,” Nakal rants, “We are friends since postgraduate days…”
How cute Nakal is, how young, still astonished by the facts of life: old friends, now colleagues, who mine, with simpering smiles, your personal life, then deliver whispered reports to your department head; undergraduates who continue their Twitch sessions uninterrupted through your Critical Theory class; a dean who, getting wind of your applications to other universities, reads you a rambling lecture on ‘lack of culture fit’ between you and this university.
“…instead of directly telling me not to apply elsewhere,” says Nakal, “she wastes one hour of both our time…”
“Mmm.” The grapevines rush past: at the peak of fruiting season, they’ve withered fruitless under the blazing sun. Pragya advised Nakal months ago not to tell anybody he was applying elsewhere. She’s got an inkling which of their colleagues informed on him. It’s generally the people whose own work is subpar, whose best hope for clinging to the cliff’s edge is to kick somebody else off. “Next time be careful,” is all she says now.
“Yeah!” And Nakal rants on.
How tiresome younger people are! You’ve spent all this time labouring up the hillside, grappling with boulders, slipping in mud. Now you’ve got to halt, and turn back, and lend a hand to somebody labouring up after you. Ahead of you stretches the rest of the path uphill. Pragya clamps her lips. This teaching job, the PhD students she’s mentoring, the creative writing workshop she offers – it’s all slowing her down.
“Anyway, screw all that,” says Nakal, “Tell me about your book. Did you find a publisher?”
“No-oo, not yet… Some of the agents said they love the writing, but short story collections are hard to sell, especially as a debut.” Pragya knew all this before she embarked on her three-year stint: writing stories, revising them, publishing them individually in good magazines. She only turned to short stories after the novels she’d spent years drafting went nowhere. “I really thought, by 35, I’d have at least three books out. That was my whole life plan.” She laughs. Her laugh is like the snarl of a dog, all teeth, eyes hard.
“So, now,” says Nakal, “will you write a novel?”
“I should, but” – her brows knit and her lips purse, showing her in the windowpane herself, already aging, still miles from her dream – “now I don’t want to. There’s no guarantee, is there? I could write a novel and they’d complain that it’s not classifiable into one genre, or too long, or too something.” Nakal opens his mouth. “Anyway,” Pragya interposes, “screw all that! Tell me about your visit home. Is it raining in Kalimpong?”
Pragya hates discussing her book. It’s always on her mind. If only somebody would take, anybody, just so she could be a published author. Is an author from a tiny press whom nobody reads still an author? Ha! The tree never fell, alone in the forest, the tree is still falling forever.
Nakal talks about his motorbike rides among West Bengal’s rainy green hills, the hikes he did before he put on his holiday weight – that, he explains, is why he was struggling a bit on their hike this morning, when Pragya kept halting and turning back. Pragya half-listens. She watches Karnataka’s drier, scrubbier greenery flying by. Nature’s consolations are like Cleopatra’s charms: evergreen.
She checks her phone. Dheer’s seen her message about the doppelganger motorbiker. Hasn’t replied. Probably still abed, the lazy buttcrack! Pragya’s hard, bright face softens. He’s just where she was at his age: knocked down, still deciding whether to get up and try again. Well, sort of. At age nine Dheer wrote a few poems, and his father said you couldn’t make a living that way, and he hasn’t opened his notebook since. As for his music… her face hardens again.
Still waiting to begin! Waiting for whose permission, for what lightningbolt in blue sky? She could self-publish. Many decent writers do, now. But, well, you know, all that money, all that self-marketing… I mean, really, isn’t the writing labour enough?
“…Ramnagar is kinda like that. D’you want to go there next weekend?” says Nakal.
“Yes,” says Pragya. “I hate sitting at home at the weekend. Yes, we’ll go.”
Keep moving: this was the answer, she knew, when she’d finished the final revision of her book, query letter, synopsis. Write new stories, go places, see people. She got hiking shoes, signed up to all the dating sites. As for writing new stories – well, what’s the point of pouring yourself into a new thing when the old thing is still going a-begging around the fleamarket? Keep moving, she keeps telling Dheer. Update your resume. Start applying. The time to chase your dreams is now! Meanwhile, my dear, here’s how you brew a cup of tea, here’s how you slice a lemon in half, and, see here, darling, this thing’s called a refrigerator. You can do it!
Hollow rings the voice of the cheerleader standing in the empty stadium under flickering floodlights.
Dheer wasn’t much when she met him. Barely taller than her, greasy ponytail, panting halfway through their paddleboating session at Madiwala when she was just warming up. Avid reader, his Bumble bio read, yet all these weeks Persepolis has sat on his windowsill, bookmarked halfway through, acquiring a second jacket of cathair cemented with dust. But he’s grown on her. Might be kinda nice to really date him. He’s not really polyamorous, he’s just playing the field, and enough, already. Her textmessage, sent lightheartedly, becomes more significant the longer it stays unanswered. Yes, maybe relationships are not, after all, just consolations for those who can’t have greatness. Maybe she isn’t asexual. What, if not love, is this hot prickling that begins, as she imagines Dheer’s reply, just where her breastbone ends?
“But to Ramnagar,” says Nakal, “there’s no bus. So, next weekend, we’ll go by cab?”
“Yes,” says Pragya.
She unlocks her phone to invite Dheer next weekend to Ramnagar. She’s not the games-playing type, but it’ll be fun watching these two chaps together. Maybe that way he’ll finally decide. There opens before her a golden vista of weekends in Dheer’s room, the stained navyblue curtains always closed, the air spicy-stale with weed. There’s so much she can tell him about the world beyond his curtains, so many errors of her misguided youth she can stop him from repeating!
She refreshes her messages. Nothing. She turns her mobile data off and on again. Still nothing.
Ha! His cats must’ve finally devoured his tongue this morning after he hit Snooze for the 57th time. What’s that line about the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object? Some objects are immovable because they’ve got so much substance. Others, because they’re so empty that things fly right through them. Whoosh!
Have a good life, then, she wants to tell him. And I was kidding, let’s keep things Motiwala casual, she wants to tell him. And you’re polyamorous and I’m asexual, and the first rule is don’t try to change your partner. And what the hell am I doing with you?
***
Pragya prides herself on her decisiveness but all week she keeps blocking Dheer, waiting for a small press to accept her manuscript, and unblocking him again in a panic wondering whether she missed a message from him while he was blocked. She drafts message after message, deletes them all, and waits for him to reply to her message about the doppelganger, to react with a meaningless tiny red heart to her photos of Nandi Hall, with a thumbs-up, even.
Dheer spends the week huddled in bed, navyblue covers pulled over him and his laptop. He jumps on customer-service tickets before a colleague can claim them, walks customers through every possible solution. Headphones plugged in, he updates his resume, edits it morning and afternoon, waits for the right morning to upload it on LinkedIn, cracks his knuckles. Weed isn’t working anymore. Maybe he should cut back. Or maybe he liked Pragya more than he realised. But if this were about that, it would be much simpler.
Next weekend, Pragya sends Dheer photos from her Ramnagar hike with Nakal: great naked boulders hanging on to the hill who knows how. Just photos, just weekending without you again. See, puppydog, nothing to be scared of. You want regular sex, don’t you? We’ll settle for what you want, then, you spoiled little nobody. All this, of course, is subtext. Pragya’s got too much pride to speak her feelings, not enough to quite hide them.
Dheer studies the photos, throws off his covers, and sits up in his quicksand mattress. His heart races. He battles the temptation of reaching for his joint. This is it, he realises. Next week he turns 32. And now this relationship is over, this last throwaway relationship, which means playtime is over.
“I’m sorry, Pragya,” he texts. “I can’t give you what you’re looking for. So should we call it off?”
He sends the text. He studies his screen. His message immediately gets two blue ticks: Pragya’s seen it. Then – nothing. WhatsApp shows she’s still online. A minute passes. Pragya types. Dheer waits. Pragya stops typing, stays online, resumes typing, goes offline, comes back and resumes typing, still doesn’t enter any text. Dheer’s often watched her typing: fingers barely moving, reams of text flying. Is she typing her novel in here? All the words Pragya could call him fly through his mind: words she’s never called him, words Dheer’s father called him. But it’s not the voice of Dheer’s father speaking the words in his head, it’s Dheer’s own voice. Still Pragya types. Still she doesn’t enter any text. Under Dheer’s greasy hair the sweat prickles his scalp and drops onto his brow. Hunched, hugging his knees, he sweats and blinks. 28 minutes pass. Pragya’s text arrives.
“You’re right,” says Pragya. “We’re utterly mismatched. I’ve been squandering my time lately. Time to get back to real life. Bye.”
Then another message: “Best wishes.”
And, before Dheer can finish reading these two texts, Pragya’s profile photo in WhatsApp’s interface turns blank. She’s blocked him again.
Dheer buries his phone under the covers and tries to rock himself. Impossible on this mattress. He closes his resume, closes LinkedIn, and casts off his headphones. He lights his joint and lies back in the quicksand. He’s taken the first step and now surely he deserves a break.
Amita Basu is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose fiction appears in over 80 venues including The Penn Review, Bamboo Ridge, Faultline, Jelly Bucket, Phoebe, and Funicular. She’s contributing editor at Fairfield Scribes Micro, and sustainability columnist and interviews editor at Mean Pepper Vine. Her short story collection, At Play and Other Stories, is due out with Bridge House Press in 2025. She lives in Bangalore, works at a climate action thinktank, and blogs at http://amitabasu.com/