Shayan

People often asked me what I did on my weekends, by people I mean my colleagues, my fellow wannabe actor friends, and my roommates. I would make excuses around work, which they assumed was acting, but in reality, I was a counter attendant in a café bar. It's not like I hated going to parties, but the amount of debt you carry after you were thinking out of your butt and decided to move to a city way out of your league, leaves you no time and money to let loose. I worked every day of the week, from early morning auditions to full-day job at Coffilia's; a café by day and a bar by night, my days were as trite as an ace student's calendar. The nights were no different. I would change from my yellow work uniform to my casuals and travel two hours from the cafe in a public bus to get to my accommodation. Then before I could have a moment to myself, I would doze off in my only good pair of jeans on a bed that was long meant to be burned for mites.

It was one of those why-am-I-even-alive days, when my repulsive boss called me in his office. If there was one person I avoided with utmost devotion was this guy, Justin Matthers- a young millionaire by his father's grace who was taught no lessons of humility in his thirty years of living. The man had no principles, if they didn't involve money. He treated his staff like piss. He fired someone every week with a big dramatic scene of therapy needing humiliation. In the seven months of my employment, I had seen more than thirty co-workers being let off in a fashion that would have been illegal in a perfect world. It surprised me how no one had come back for his life. That reckless piece of meat didn't deserve daylight.

So when someone like him wanted to see me, my mind went into guessing a whirl of possibilities that this man could throw at me. 'Your face belongs into the vagina of a whore your dad fucked in front of your mom' was an actual quote I had heard him shout at a college dropout who had joined us in an urgency to support his family, the boy had been taking a long time figuring out our frost machines, and before he could spend a week in training, Justin had had enough of him.

The door to his office always remained open. Justin's computer's butt faced us, the main stall in the café, as he sat behind the monitor. As opposed to the baffling emotions of the staff, there were no instances in my experiences where a customer confronted our manager. They seemed to enjoy the place. I was too close to the devil to see the niceness of this place, I guess, but I sure waited to see how our boss would handle a complaint.

I paced my steps when I caught him looking in my direction. He had a tranquil expression on his evil face, a refreshing sight. 'Can I come in?' I asked with sincerity that you could only see if I was trying to kiss ass.

'Yes, you may.' He replied with a soft tone.

I chose to stand beside the chairs on the closest end of the glass table. I didn't want to assume a seat and flip him off. Justin's gaze trotted back to the screen, and with his right hand he picked up an orange envelope and tossed it hard to my side of the table. My salary… he threw my salary at me.

'Open it if you want. It has 9k for last month.' He said, from behind the thirty inch monitor.

'Why am I losing 3k from my pay?' I had to ask. Losing a fourth of your income meant I had to choose between my rent or dinner for an entire month.

'I checked your tips. It was more than three thousand, while others had roughly about half of it. I don't know what it is that you are using to brain wash our customers, but if it's working for you, you should do that, while I can use that money on something better, like my shoes.' The arch in his right eyebrow as he said those words had my chest clench from inside. But, I flashed a smile and got out of there. My charm, if it was even there, was being held against me. There were no rules, or a union to help me in a time like this. Although, Coffilia's was a big hit among the youth, it was too new to have a regulatory commission. And Justin, a law graduate, knew how to exploit the loop holes.

I didn't need that crap today. I knew I was slowly going to make my peace with it, or find a way to conn that money back from him, or perhaps was going to have my little revenge someday, but these days, my mind was on something much more enthralling.

Rayee.

My Girlfriend... If she ever let me call her that. But it didn't fit, I knew that. And if it did, Rayee was the worst kind of girlfriend one could have, she hated talking, refused to go out on dates, never texted unless been asked to, and never accepted gifts. If I thought harder, she sounded like the girl most guys would dream of, given her inability to cling, and her runway looks. But I wanted more. I wanted to know her, and I wished she had also shown some interest in knowing me. I quite enjoyed the twenty minute window of conversations after our coitus, that's how her bio clock worked she had said. She couldn't keep up with my chattering. Since high-school, I was the quietest in the group, but Rayee made me feel like I must have been the most annoying person she had met. Though she never expressed it herself, she left unrefined clues: 'I like to sleep before 11.' 'Talking after sex hurts my head.' I hated that she didn't connect with me emotionally to speak out her heart or even about her day. Maybe she wasn't that type. I was supposed to appreciate her quirks. I was living the dream, wasn't I? She did ask me if I wanted to share my stories. I would itemize my daily routine, what happened at work, my boss, but after the sixth time of me narrating the same stories, I am going to stop on my own.

Tonight was the ninth time we were going to be together in her apartment. Rayee had texted me an hour before I was done with my job. She said she was in the neighborhood and would stop by to pick me up. It was a Friday. I still had to leave early the next day, but I didn't say No to her, I couldn't say no to her. Rayee liked being with me at nights that she chose, which would mostly be on Saturdays. It worked for me because on Sundays I didn't have to show up at the café. A few auditions that my agent arranged for me could be taken care of during the day. And in the evenings, I tutored two twelfth grade students on Mathematics.

So far, we had only met in her high-end home that she had taken me to on our first date. On our third encounter, I had blurted out the question I had long been saving in: 'What do you do for a living?' Her answer: 'Nothing. This place isn't mine.' And that was all. Rayee never bothered to explain further. I wanted to pry so hard. I wanted to ask her everything that had come to me ever since that night: Whose place is this? What's your full name? Where are your parents? And most importantly, Why do you CRY during sex?' The sobbing hadn't been as loud as on the first night, but it presented itself every time I fucked her, still in the one position she allowed. The togetherness that began with a typical love making between a couple (minus the part where if you kiss her, she won't kiss back), would ALWAYS traverse to something alarmingly reprehensive. Those last few minutes, if I wanted to finish, I needed to shut off my overthinking brain and convince myself that's how sex was in reality, we had to do things for the other person even if it made US look like freaks.

***

Twenty minutes before our shifts ended and the liquor racks were brought in, all seven of us who waited on tables got together in the back office and tallied our tips as a rule. Justin had no way of corroborating the exact tips, we knew the blind spots of the cameras. Half the tips went into our pockets and half were deposited in the jars at the back. But if a generous customer tipped us a hundred bucks, we kept sixty to ourselves and forty into our separate mason jars. We had to play safe. Justin was awful. All of us knew we had nowhere better to go at that moment, we were broke and exploitation wasn't that bad as long as we had a few bucks coming our way. Living in Mumbai toughens you up. You take shit, you give shit, and you get used to it. It's training for life you don't even realize, until later.

Once our little math fun was over, I changed into the same grey jeans and a black T-shirt that I dearly loved and headed out to the seating area with two hundred rupees in my pocket. It was a good day.

I collected my tiny duffle bag from behind the counter, and as I turned to the main door, I noticed all but one table empty. While the cleaning ladies rearranged the tables and chairs in the front, Rayee was sitting in the farther one to where I was standing, right beside the main entrance.

When you looked at Rayee, you didn't want to look at anything else. To say Rayee was beautiful was an understatement. Once you saw her face, you instantly knew you weren't going to see something that perfect for a long time, and you wanted to take it all in because it would suck when you had to look away in virtue. There was a hint of foreign in her sharply symmetrical features. The whitish taint on her complexion hinted she was from somewhere extreme north of India. Her full, pink lips hadn't yet been ruined under the scorching sun of Mumbai. But it was the sadness in the hazel-brown eyes really drew you in. You had to be in proximity to see it, and when you did, you would be enchanted by it so smoothly that it would take you a few seconds to realize you were being creepy.

From what I had learned in those three times when I had met her in public before I was taken back to her bedroom, Rayee was well aware of her mesmerizing persona. Whenever she saw somebody staring at her, Rayee stared back, hard, until that person looked away. Cab drivers, security guards, teenage boys in her campus, the old lady who lived next door to hers, they all had had similar responses to her cold, ominous stares, like they suddenly wanted to be away from her, except for the men. No. Men my age behaved like a serpent enthralled by the melodies of the charmer. And as for me, I was damned the second I had seen her in the pub.