In A Mumbai Local: A Short Story

In A Mumbai Local

Your head feels hot. Electricity singes the weird hair on the back of your neck. You can feel eyes on the maybe-patches of grease behind your ears, and you rub at the area embarrassedly.

Kaya. She’s here again.

From your peripheral, you see the pair of double crossed legs. Kaya is a puma searching for prey in the forest of the 1 o’ clock Borivali local. She’s hungry and she’s pissed.

And she's in your compartment for the second time this week.

This isn’t coincidence. She's here for you. She can smell the fear filling up the air around you like a skunk’s odor.

Kaya isn’t just another girl you’d see in the VIP section of a cheap club. She's a bear in an undersized zoo cage that is a pair of dangerously wide ripped jeans.

But you know she’s stood up and standing at the door with a dancer’s grip on the pole, her hair open and flying with the moving train. Leaning her head out to get the wind in her face, like a dog out of a car window. In a way that isn’t obnoxious, you wish you were the

You'd bring her for lunch to your place.

"Jet Airways...," she'd say about the cutlery, holding her fork up, watching her bastardized reflection on the thick part. "Your parents are perfect."

Your dad would smile and nod, pained, desperate enough to take the compliment. Kaya would sit there glowing in her perfect skin.

"Help her," she'd say, indicating your mom setting the table. "You can discuss me in the kitchen."

"You can do so much better than that," your mother would reprimand, while you run the dishes under water. You’re thinking, If this isn’t love then you’ve been misinformed.

Then, a day months after that meeting when your parents have cut off from you and you don’t have a job, you'd recognize the misfortune. When you try to bring breaking up up, she wouldn't threaten to kill herself, she would threaten to kill you. Nobody leaves Kaya. Capiche?

There’s movement behind you.

You freeze at the shadow growing behind you. You cough nervously, choking on spit. This is the special, magic moment that will change both your lives. A cold shiver crashes through you like a tidal wave that masks the warmth of anticipation.

And it’s this other dude who walks past, taking the shadow with him. You glance back to the door, and she’s not there. Must have gotten