Falling Objects

30 Days 30 Stories: Day 4

She didn't know how he found these places. They were secret discoveries none of her friends knew about. She thought he was joking when he told her about this place called Mäki Patisserie.

"Maki, as in abe teri ma ki?" she asked.¹
"Exactly, but it's spelled with an umlaut."
"A what?"
"An umlaut. You know, the two dots they put in European-sounding words."
"So the European Mäki means something different than yo mamma?"
"There is no European Maki. They just made up the word. It's a prank."
"How do you even find these places?"

He shrugged.

It was a cozy spot like an eagle's nest at the top of a narrow staircase in a white building, with mottled sunlight spraying through the glass windows onto white tables and the smell of fresh bread wafting in the air. From their table by the window, she could see yellow auto-rickshaws and sleek motorbikes zoom by on the 100 feet road. Pickled peaches and herbs in oil floated in glass bottles on the shelves by the windows. The day's specials were written in chalk on a blackboard.

He started fidgeting within five minutes. It wasn't anything about the place, she knew. He just fidgeted. With his feet planted in one spot, his knees would oscillate left and right. His fingers would thrum on the table. He would scratch his chin and stroke the back of his neck. Initially she had found these tics annoying, but in a particular lighting, he reminded her of a helpless puppy squirming in a corner and there was something endearing about it.

The burnt Basque cheesecake was delicious. She gestured with her spoon to ask him if he wanted a bite. He was staring into space. He went away at times, vanishing somewhere she could not see, and she feared that if she shook him, he would return rattled, like a toddler woken up from his afternoon nap by the clattering of vessels in the kitchen. She touched his hand and signalled again. He took a bite of the cake, nodded approvingly, and then looked around, impatient for his own pistachio tart.

She didn't feel like talking here. There were no people in the cafe, but she felt like the chubby girl with glasses kneading dough in the open kitchen was family already, and she didn't like to talk to Kanan around family. She could be silent with him anywhere, though. It wasn't a problem if they couldn't talk. He was going away, and coming back, and then he noticed that he had been absent, and blushed a little, nervous, and asked her small irrelevant questions about the food. Something was on his mind.

When they walked down the road and through the bylanes and streets through the dappled shadows cast by the Mayflower trees, he had his hands in his pockets. He was looking upward all the time.

"What's up there?" she asked.
"Branches. Bricks. Meteors. You never know what could hit you," he said.
"Huh?"
"Did I tell you about the time a brick almost killed me?" he asked. He was looking at her now, and his hands were in his pockets.
"A brick?"
"A falling brick, in my second year of college." He continued:

"Usually they put second year students' hostels next to the lecture complex, distributing us like chickens among several coops, but that year they were building this huge-ass building called the Mega Hostel. It was this colossus where all the second year students lived. Kind of like Hogwarts castle. And it wasn't in the center of the campus, like the other buildings; it was off to the side, next to the jungle. We could hear crickets chirping in the evenings, and when I looked outside my window, I could see bats hanging upside down in the trees. The air felt sticky. And we would hear construction noises all the time because the hostel wasn't yet done. The hostel was a work in progress. The topmost floor was still being built.

So one day me and my friend Shravan were coming back from class. I remember I was wearing my tattered jeans and Navy Blue Shirt with a red scorpion on it. And I was wearing Canvas sneakers."

"Canvas? Like sports shoes in school?" she asked.

"Not like sports shoes. They were my sports shoes from class 12," Kanan replied.

"Cheapskate."

"Yeah, right. If you think that's cheap, then what'll you say about that scorpion shirt I was wearing? I wore that one so much that it tore around the collar. I'm still begging my mom to sew it up, but she's refusing out of spite," he muttered. "And I had only one pair of jeans, which I wore all the time."

"Is it the same pair you're wearing now?"

"No, at some point I replaced them with these. But I still have only one pair of jeans," he grinned.

"Ugh. Nothing to be proud of."

"Yeah yeah, anyway back to the story, I was wearing the scorpion shirt and jeans and walking with my friend Shravan and we were just about to enter the hostel, when I saw my friend Kevin walk past us. So we said hi to him, and I just turned for a second and asked him whether we had Solid State Devices class after lunch... And then. BOOM." He swung his hand, as if throwing a dart. "Something fell and shattered, right next to us."

"What?!" asked Sasha.

"Yeah. Shravan jumped back but I was just standing there, dumb. Then we both moved back a little and looked up. We didn't see anything else coming our way. We moved a little to the right, and then a little to the left. I was holding my hands over my eyes, like I was trying to glimpse the sun. Shravan was just swearing in an incoherent babble, over and over. Kevin was the only one looking at the fallen object. 'Hey, that looks like a brick, he said'. It did look like a brick. Fragments of what had once been a brick.

So Shravan and I ran into the building and peered at the foreign object on the ground with the safety of a roof above us. It was a brick. There was nothing special about it. If I hadn't said hi to Kevin, I would have continued to walk, right under it and it would have cracked my head open. That would have been something, no?"

"Holy shit."

"Yeah." He was silent.

"Did you find out where it came from?"

"Yeah." Kanan said squinting his eyes. "Our arch rivals, the Death Eaters had tried to kill us by --"

"Oh shut up."

"Alright, alright. It was nothing. Just a bunch of construction workers on the fifth floor who had accidentally knocked off a brick. Even the lift didn't go up that far. I had to climb the fire escape to go yell at those people who didn't even understand what I was saying because my Hindi was terrible, and their every-other-language was terrible. My anger was lost in translation. I just felt very disappointed that I could have died in a complete accident, you know."

"Yeah, crazy."

"No, it was more than that." He sounded different. He sighed and his shoulders dropped, and his hands dug into his pockets as if his jeans were imploding and sucking him in. "It was more than that. Till that point in life, I was all about 'work now, enjoy later.' You know, we didn't have that much growing up, and my father used to always tell me these banal little platitudes like 'If you suffer for the first 20 years of your life, you can live royally for the rest of your life. And if you relax for the first 20 years of your life, then you have to suffer for the rest of your life.' Typical sigma male stuff, except my dad was in on it before it was cool.

And then this brick drops out of nowhere, and I could have died at the age of 19 never having known what that promised land was supposed to be. It wasn't like I was torturing myself into studying, but I was definitely putting off stuff for later. When that brick dropped that day, I plonked into my bed and passed out for 14 hours straight. My roommate thought I had died in my sleep. I apparently didn't even move. I woke up with a cold sweat, and my bedsheet smelled like a dead rat. Something changed in me that day.”

“I didn't want to put off anything --" He suddenly looked at her in panic, "Sorry, I'm just going on and on."

"No, no, what happened after that?" she asked.

He stroked his chin. "There was a concert that week. There's this band called Agam, I don't know if you’ve heard of them. They were coming to play at a polytechnic college next to our college, maybe 15 minutes by the local bus. Shravan had tickets and he'd been pestering me to go with him, and I’d been refusing because there was an exam the next day. And then after the brick fell, I was like fuck it, I might die at any moment, why not at least dance to some music with my friends among a bunch of sweaty dudes? That concert felt amazing. I was screaming myself hoarse." He chuckled, "And then you know what happened?"

"What?"

"The lead singer vanished all of a sudden and then we're all standing in the dark for forty minutes till the organizers told us that the show's over. We had no clue what happened. Turns out, the lead singer got a massive heart attack," he said.

"You're kidding me."

"What are the odds, right? The day I decide to live my life, a disaster strikes him. I didn't even know. That singer later did a TED talk about that night when he was 'reborn' due to a cardiac arrest, and I sent him an email and we became friends. Nice guy. I wonder if I infected him with the bad luck that sent the brick my way. What if I’m some sort of second-hand prophet who goes around transmitting wake-up calls to people?"

"My God, you have so much lore," she said.
He smiled, and the corners of his eyes crinkled. "You must have lore too."
She shrugged. "Not really."
"Can I ask you something?" he asked, after walking a few steps.
"Something's been on your mind, hasn't it? Since we were in the cafe."
He rolled his tongue around in his closed mouth and grimaced, and sighed. "Yeah."
"Shoot."

"When we were climbing up the stairs to the cafe, somewhere around the second floor," he said, "you looked like you just wanted to leave. Like you wanted to run away. And like right until the moment we reached the fourth floor, I kept turning around, expecting to find you gone." He paused. "What was that about? Didn't you like the place? I realized I never asked you if you like cakes and dessert and cookies. Like maybe you didn't eat sugar and --"

"Aw shut up, it’s not like I’m eighty. Who doesn't love dessert," she said.
"But something was up, right?" he asked.
"Yeah." She hesitated. "It wasn't the cafe –."
"It was me, then," he said, his shoulders falling.
"My god, let me talk!" she rolled her eyes.
"Okay, okay."
"I was afraid I would fall."
"Fall?" he frowned. "From a staircase? On the second floor? Are you afraid of heights or something?"

"Not heights exactly, more like... I'm afraid that I'll feel the impulse to jump and I'll take it." She bit her lip and rubbed her own arms, as if she was shivering in the cold. She had walked on for a few seconds before she saw him jogging a little to catch up.
"I don't understand," he said.

"Well, it's really stupid, but I've never told anyone," she said.

"It's okay, tell me. I'm stupid anyway." Unprompted, he took her hand, and started playing with her fingers, even as they were walking. She began to talk.

"Well... When I was a baby, we had gone to my mom's ancestral home in Kerala. You know, those tharavaadus, big mansion-type places with traditional architecture and everything... Wait, you studied in Kerala, right, so you know. Yeah, so one day, my grandfather and I were on the roof of the house, and he was chewing betel leaf and spitting it into this little pot that he kept at the corner of the terrace. And I was playing somewhere near him. I couldn't even walk at that point, I was just crawling.

There wasn't any risk of me falling down because there was like a raised parapet wall around the terrace. But then, there was no barrier between the terrace and the roof, and the roof is a sloping tiled roof…. What are you doing?" she asked. He had locked palms with her and was fiddling with her thumb, going left and right, left and right.

"Thumb wrestling," he said. "You've never played?"

"Do you want to listen to the story, or not?" she asked, and he stopped fiddling, without letting go.

"So where was I, yeah, my grandfather walks to the corner of the terrace and spits into his spitting bowl and turns around, and I'm not where I was. He walks around the terrace, calling out my name, and he can’t find me. So he's puzzled, and he's looking here and there and everywhere, and he sees that I'm crawling on the sloping tiled roof. I'm not just crawling, I'm sprinting. I'm almost halfway up the roof. If I get to the top and tip over, I'll just roll down over the other side like Humpty Dumpty.

My grandfather is 80 years old and he can't climb up the roof. He starts calling for help, terrified, yelling my mom's name over and over, "Saraswati! Saraswati!" My mom's drying clothes in the courtyard and she hears his screams and comes running up the stairs. I'm almost there, near the top of the roof. A few more steps and I'm done for. But I see my mother scrambling up the roof, dislodging tiles, and I'm transfixed by her movement. I think this is a game. She gets to me and grabs me just in time." She paused, and breathed for the first time.

"One more step that day, and I would have rolled down and fallen on the floor and gone PBBBBT. No more Sasha." She felt his hand crush hers as he inhaled in a hiss. He didn't say anything.

They walked in silence for some time.

“Of course, I don’t remember any of this. It’s all what I heard after I grew up. But I feel queasy around heights all the time. Even the second floor staircase lol,” she said.

“Where was Steve at the time?” asked Kanan. Steve was her elder brother.

“He was on the terrace, watching all the drama. He was too small to do anything though. I think he was, what, five years old at the time?” she said. "So that's why I'm afraid of falling.” He nodded. He looked serious. She didn't like seeing him this way.

"And I'm afraid of falling objects,” he said. “Unless... the falling object is you. Then I can catch you," he said, bumping her shoulder and slipping his hand around the crook of her waist. There was nobody around on the streets, even though it was 1.30 in the afternoon. For all its faults, Bangalore was great at leaving them the hell alone when they wanted it.

"Say, speaking of falling, did it hurt?" he asked.
"Hurt?"
"When you fell from hea-,"
”Staaaahp. My god.”
He gave a sheepish smile and shrugged. "Couldn't help it."

"You should have stopped at the falling object line. That was good," she said. He was still looking up while walking. "So your eyes are always turned up, looking for falling bricks and branches. What if you miss something on the road?"

"Yeah, it'll be hilarious if I avoid all the falling bricks and fall into an open manhole. Zup."

"Say... I want to ask you something."

He looked at her, waiting for her to speak.

"You met me like what two, three times, before you asked me out?" she asked. "Did you ask me out because you liked me or because you didn't know what tomorrow would bring? You know, like 'what if a brick falls on my head tomorrow'?"

He moved closer to her and said, "You ask very hard questions, you know?"

He wasn't looking upward any longer. He looked at her, then he looked at road, and he seemed to be with her for that little pocket of time. And she often felt the warmth of his arm on that lazy Bangalore afternoon under the shade of the mayflower trees, even on the days he wasn't around.

---

Story notes:

This story gave me a very warm feeling when I wrote it. An image that’s stuck in my mind is a visual from Norwegian Wood, of Toru Watanabe and Naoko walking all around Tokyo, mostly in silence. It’s been a while since I read the book, but I tried infusing my memory of that visual into this story.

I introduced Kanan, Sasha, and Steve in an earlier story, Gravity on the terrace. I’m fascinated by these characters and want to know more about them. I might write about them on and off.

Harish Sivaramakrishnan, the lead singer of Agam, did give that Ted Talk. You can watch him talk about that moment here.

If you’re a reader from outside India, I’d like to know how the Indianisms and local cultural references felt to you.

Thanks for reading! I’ll be posting one story every day for a month (today is day 4). To get the upcoming stories in your inbox:

You can read my previous stories here.

1. Abe teri ma ki is the Indian version of your mom.