23. Danish Roy

I had no idea what I was doing there.

  One moment I was sleeping in my pyjamas and the next moment I was apparently on a date with my underage student. It was welcome in a way. My parents were home with my uncle's family, complete with their annoying twin sons, and it was only a matter of time when I would have had to leave my bedroom fortress and sit with them.

  I ate my salad and gulped my vodka. And then ordered some more. It made life a little better and I felt less guilty about finding Aisha absolutely stunning.

  'Eat,' I said. 'That's also what people do on dates.'

  This girl was bat-shit crazy. She had just told me a real story about a sad incident and had intended to act sad but had instead starting bawling in the middle of the restaurant, shouting, I would have died had my mother died that day. It was embarrassing and cute at the same time.

  And post that, she kept looking at me like things were going to happen, like dates were supposed to be these magic times where every few seconds a bunny appears and amuses the participants. Dates for me had always been boring. I never knew what to say or what to do and the girls always seemed to be in physical pain while being with me.

  'That's your fourth vodka,' she said. 'Are you drunk?'

  'Me? No.'

  'So what do we do after we eat?' she asked.

  'I don't know yet.'

  'Is that also a part of being on dates? Doing things spontaneously? Then why wasn't it in any of the manuals? I knew they were a sham.'

  She rubbed her hands and pushed away the plate in front of her. She had hardly eaten. The salad was quite a disappointment. I felt like having biryani now.

  I waved for the bill and studied it intently when it came. 'No happy hours,' the waiter said as he waited for me to clear the bill. I nodded and slipped in my debit card. She protested that we should go dutch on the bill and even fumbled with her handbag but I turned her down. I couldn't have let a kid pay for my alcohol.

  'So, what now?' she asked once we left TGIF.

  'There,' I said and pointed to the games arcade. The fourth vodka had worn off my inhibitions, making me more inclined towards taking stupid decisions.

  Now a games arcade might not feature among top-rated things to do while on a date, but they are certainly top-rated things to do in life. Xboxes and PlayStations would never replace the feeling of standing in a crowd of screaming rowdy boys under the flickering tubelight of a shady video game parlour—your sweaty fingers wrapped around little red controllers—egging you on to beat the shit out of your opponent. It was the closest you could get to being in a fight to death.

  'What?'

  'Tekken 3 and Street Fighter,' I said. 'You vs me. Okay, let me tell you something. If you beat me, I will grant you permission to skip the counselling sessions!'

  'Done!' she said.

  We bought eleven coins. I picked the blonde-haired Paul and she picked Katarina.

  'You're so dead,' I said as I snapped my fingers, took hold of the controllers and gave them a nice spin. She inserted the coins. 'I should warn you that I was an arcade game samurai in my times. My name was feared.'

  She rolled her eyes in a mocking attitude. 'We shall see.'

  The first fight started. She started pressing all the buttons at once and howled at the top of her voice as if it would help. I was shaky at first but slowly it came back to me and I knocked her out quite easily. The second and the third fights were even easier. I was the king of this world.

  'I'm new at this,' she said. I laughed. 'What? Give me a little room. Let's make it best out of three?'

  'Fine,' I said. We had extra coins and there was no way she was beating me. I decimated her again.

  'Can we make it a best out of five?' she asked. And then it became a best of seven, and then best of nine, and best out of eleven.

  'Give up, already,' I said.

  She scrunched up her face and turned away from me in mock disappointment. 'It's a stupid game for boys.'

  'You think so? I shouldn't probably tell you that you are one of the fastest learners I had ever seen.'

  We resumed the game. By the eleventh game, she had stopped banging on the buttons and learnt the three punch-flying kick combos, which she used cleverly.

  'Really?' she screamed and lunged at me. I lost my footing and she landed awkwardly on me, her elbow jammed in my groin.

  'Ow.'

  'I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry,' she said as she rolled away and got up. I doubled up in pain on the ground, clutching my insufficient tools of reproduction. 'Are you okay?'

  'Yes,' I mumbled. 'I just need to lie down here for a little while.'

  And she laughed. Not like a little snicker. She laughed with her mouth open, and she mumbled little apologies, but she kept laughing till her eyes teared up.

  And then, I laughed too.

  When I felt slightly better, we shifted to ice hockey and a shooting game, both of which ended in draws because neither of us wanted to lose so we started cheating. We were thrown out of the arcade when Aisha took the ice hockey puck and flung it outside the window after a self-goal.

  Later, we watched three movies for the price of one. We had first row (really uncomfortable) tickets for Avengers: Age of Ultron where she shrieked every time Hulk landed a punch. During a crucial scene between Iron Man in a Hulk Buster suit smashing up Hulk in a crowded street, she stood up on her chair and hurled expletives and popcorn on the screen.

  'Sit down!' a little boy in the row behind ours shouted. She threw a fistful of popcorn at him.

  The boy's mother looked at me. I shrugged. 'She's not with me,' I said.

  She kept jumping on the seat till the usher held her by her hand and asked her to step down. During the interval, she begged me to walk into another hall which was playing Margarita with a Straw, a film about a girl with cerebral palsy exploring her sexuality. She cried like a little child and flung herself in my arms. She stormed out of the movie hall, cursing and accusing the director of emotional manipulation. Finally, we sneaked into the theatre playing Rio 3, a happy animated movie and she and I giggled like our life depended on it.

  Later, I drove her home and she slept with her mouth open 

in the backseat of my mother's car.

  'We are here,' I said.

  'Huh?' She woke up with a start and wiped the drool off her face. 'Thanks.' She stepped out of the car and stretched like a little poodle and rubbed her eyes. 'It was a great date.'

  'Yeah, it was.'

  'I'm going to knock my date with Vibhor out of the park!' she squealed.

  'Best of luck.'

  I drove back home. I missed her already.