Another Country. Anjali Joseph

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      The building Nina lived in was bourgeois in a quieter way than Leela’s; smaller, more subdued. There was no elevator. They walked through a dark hall, up a wooden staircase and to the third floor. Doisneau, said the name plate. Nina brought out a key.

      The flat was unexpected – why? It had all the traces of another life, an established life not like Leela’s or her friends’: a hall table, letters, bills, an umbrella stand, pictures; in the living room, two tall, shuttered windows that opened onto a balcony. There was a table in one corner, a divan bed, a kilim, and a succulent plant that looked insolently comfortable. Leela was surprised to feel a pang of longing.

      ‘This is my room.’

      She followed the other girl, who moved quickly, like a small nervous animal, pulling a curtain, opening a door.

      The room was narrow and long; Nina’s bed lay against a wall, and there was a desk, with her laptop, a plant, a bookshelf, a hanging wardrobe.

      ‘It’s lovely,’ Leela said.

      ‘Do you want to see my family?’ Nina pointed at pictures in a collage on the wall: a balding, tall, outdoorsy man, and a plump woman with fine eyes stood outside a Scandinavian looking house on a hillside.

      ‘I like your house,’ Leela said.

      ‘It’s very typical of houses in New Zealand. There’s a lot of modern architecture, and trying to bring the outside in. That’s my brother.’ This was a tall, blond young man, handsome but pained.

      ‘He’s gorgeous. Is he coming to visit?’

      Nina laughed. ‘No plans. He’s a poet, did I tell you? Or he wants to be one.’ She sighed. ‘He’s working in a petrol station, he’s got no money. It’s not easy.’

      They passed again through the narrow room, into the small hallway, then back into the living room. Nina went to the kitchen, a neat, 1970s cupboard-lined area with colourful glass here and there, to make tea and take out the cheese. Her face crinkled. ‘Do you feel like a little glass of wine? I have a bottle open.’

      Leela laughed. ‘Okay.’

      They sat on either side of the table, their folders out and their faces growing warmer, their expressions more indistinct as they drank and laughed and ate cheese and bread and salad. A spear of sun slanted in through the window behind Nina, lighting part of her hair. Leela watched dust fall. She felt dazed, not by the wine, or the overtures of friendship as Nina told her more about Thomas, the guy from the concert. They’d gone out once or twice. ‘It’s not serious,’ she said, but her face was eager. ‘I’m not sure how much we have in common.’ It was instead the unspoken sense of their homes, in other countries: Leela’s a strange place familiar only from early childhood and emotion, the India to which her parents had unexpectedly returned, a place of silence, bird calls, a balcony next to her room, trees outside, and the life of the facing building; and Nina’s, the modern house in an open landscape, near a beach where Christmas Day was celebrated with a barbeque, and a student world of working in a Mexican restaurant in Auckland, and not getting New Year’s Eve off. For each girl, the other’s home was non-concrete, but superstitiously to be believed, in the way of a story heard in infancy; it held a reality that had nothing to do with experience. Both knew it, and it made them feel tender, as though for their own lives, which might have been continuing elsewhere.

      ‘I was wondering whether to bring him to Kate’s party, eh?’ Nina said.

      ‘Party?’

      ‘They’re having a party on Friday, remember? Kate said we could bring people.’

      Leela thought she would ring Patrick; she could legitimately invite him to a party, with real French people. Surely he’d be glad. She turned self-consciously to the page in front of her and looked for mistakes.

       Chapter 6

      In the métro, Leela scrubbed surreptitiously at her cheeks. They flamed. It was possible she’d overdone the highlighting gel, which she’d found in the beauty department of the Monoprix while making last-minute preparations for the party.

      She tried to catch her reflection in the window of the train; she was sitting on one of the fold-down seats near the door. Against the darkness of the tunnel, the glass was smeared with swiftly passing yellow lights and their comet-like tails. She glimpsed herself: hair up, brown skin, and large, comically anticipatory eyes. The person in the reflection was someone she recognised, but who it was hard to believe represented her. The cheeks, yes, they were sparkling away. She sat back. She would reassess, at Kate’s.

      In the last few years, she and Amy had made a ritual of getting ready. Wine, cheap and horrible, was procured; Amy blasted out her favourite music on the stereo; they would dissect the feelings and motivations of their friends and current love interests, long circling discussions that adduced, with all the precision of the legal mind, pieces of evidence and conversations and inferences from them, amounting, often, to an extenuating and essentially uncertain summation of psychological ontology: ‘Maybe he’s just insecure.’ A phrase that became a joke between them.

      Those moments of preparation contained aspiration, but also nervousness and self-obliteration – Amy, taking a palmful of foundation, would rub it all over her face, till her features were all but erased, then draw them back with eye- and lipliner, eyeshadow and mascara. In both girls, there had been a primitive uncertainty about cause and effect that still subsisted in Leela. It was what had led her to put a minimal dab of highlighter on her cheekbones then, unsure this would work, daub the stuff on her browbones, her temples, her collarbones, even her shoulders. The world was one thing, and it was colossal. One, next to it, was perpetually in danger of being forgotten. Tactics would have to be employed; but anxiety persisted about whether they would bear fruit.