Recap: Lata Ghosh, a management consultant based in London, is headed for Heathrow Airport to fly back home. Home is Calcutta, where she had studied at Presidency College and earned the moniker ‘Helen of Troy’ 20 years ago. 

“May I sit here?” 

Lata Ghosh looked up from her book. The owner of the voice was a tiny South Asian girl in an orange coat and cap, clutching a white owl with one hand and a sparkly bubble-gum pink backpack in the other (at which point her ensemble totally fell apart, thought Lata, with a half-shudder). Terminal 5 at Heathrow was thickly crowded with returnee South Asians and their noisy offspring. 

“Of course,” Lata said, moving her bag to the floor, “But shouldn’t you remain with your... umm, adults?”

The little girl flicked her bangs from her forehead. “My parents, you mean? No thanks. They are trying to feed my brother and I’d rather not have that goo on my new coat.”

“Well, all right then,” Lata shrugged. “As long as you don’t miss your flight.” 

The child, by now, had sat the owl next to herself and her backpack next to the owl. She crossed her legs daintily.

“Where’s your... adult?” she asked. 

Lata looked up from her book again and bit her lip. “Umm... I am my own adult?” (Mostly, Lata hated the American habit of casting regular replies as questions — “Where do you study?” “Harvard?” — but, for the first time, she discovered its utility.) 

Her interlocutor narrowed her eyes. After deciding that Lata was old enough to be her own adult, she got busy with her backpack, giving Lata the perfect window to offer a well-then-happy-journey-have-a-good-life sort of nod, and return to T.C. Boyle’s The Relive Box. It was another of those travel rituals that could be traced to Manjulika: you bought a new book to read on a journey — and mind you, no potboiler or whodunit. A worthy book. To accompany your worthy self. 

Lata tried to focus on the beautifully composed lines, but soon found her attention wavering. Was it the smell of coffee wafting in from Caffe Nero’s? The surprisingly robust sibilants of Gujarati from a bunch of stockbrokers across the aisle? The sight of a large sniffer dog licking a baby’s toes much to the delight of its hippie parents?

The girl in the orange coat had a scrapbook out and a bunch of colouring pencils on her lap. But her attention was wavering too. 

“Wait!” she cried suddenly, poking Lata’s arm in mounting hysteria. “Is that...?” Now her eyes widened into saucers, her fingers pointing to Lata’s open-mouthed bag on the floor, inside which glistened an almost-magical, silver-black pool, “An iPhone X?”  

Lata smiled, “That’s right. You have a good eye, kid.”

“But it only released yesterday. My dad said there was a wait list.” 

“I have my sources.”

The child allowed herself to be impressed. “Hi,” she struck her hand out, “I’m Payal. But you can call me Pixie. You are?”
“I’m Charulata. But you can call me Lata.” Lata grabbed her bag, a sudden affection welling up in her. “And yes, Payal — I think I prefer that to Pixie — you can have it. For now.” 

Pixie Das Biswas was used to driving hard if nuanced negotiations with her own adults over the uses of their devices and the sharing of their passwords — and, even then, her success rate hovered at fifty per cent. She was so overwhelmed by the impossible generosity of Lata, a complete stranger-adult she nearly did not sit next to, she nearly would not have met in this life, that Pixie found herself hopping off her seat and giving Lata a hug. 

In the process, her colour pencils clattered all over the tiles.

As Lata and Pixie crawled on all fours, scooping up the pencils and giggling uncontrollably at the ridiculousness of it all, Lata saw, through the legs of the Gujarati stockbrokers and the baby’s stroller-wheels and the open-toed sandals of the hippie parents, a medley of moments flashing before her eyes. Parallel lives her other, un-train-wrecked selves were leading elsewhere in the world: the house with a garden and a three-car garage in Connecticut, with Aarjo and his dogs; the sunny, airy flat in Bandra, with Joy and his instruments, filled with delicious smells of sex, cigarettes, and fish cooking in coconut milk; the apartment in London with Ari, their shared books and cats and so many plants. But in all the homes, in all her other avatars — professor, food blogger, hedge-fund manager — she suddenly saw this version of herself, rolling on the floor with Pixie (a Pixie with better dress sense) gathering colour pencils from nooks and crannies, and laughing as though it were the most hilarious thing on earth. It caught her off-guard. A sudden, hot liquid seemed to course through her arteries and veins, scalding her palms and the bottom of her feet. 

“Where’s the phone?” the flesh-and-blood Pixie demanded. 

“Since when did I become so conventional?” Lata asked herself, scowling. This is what Calcutta did to her. Unravelled the well-knitted being she was busy preserving through the year — and she hadn’t even landed. She crammed the hot stuff back into her heart or uterus or wherever the hell it originated from, lifted her palm, and flashed Pixie the phone from three feet away.

“Thank god,” said Pixie. 

***

Forty-five minutes later, when Pixie’s parents came looking for her, pushing her brother in a stroller and trailing several bags and suitcases, Lata and Pixie were sending animojis to themselves. 

“Pixie,” Nisha called, and then louder. “PIXIE!”

“Oh, hi,” Lata smiled, getting up. Pixie ignored them. 

“It’s time for us to go, Pix,” Nisha nudged.

“Is that an iPhone X?” asked her husband.

Lata suppressed a smile. 

“Ei, wait, wait,” the dad said, slipping into Bengali. “Aren’t you Helen of Troy? I am Bappa. Bappaditya Das Biswas? Statistics? I was two years junior to you and Ronnyda and Aaduri and the whole gang? Chomchom was in my batch, remember? He is in California now, coding for Facebook. Nisha, this is Charulata Ghosh. Are you still Ghosh? She came first class first in economics.”

Lata peered at Bappa Das Biswas. Behind the solidness of his paunch, his sophisticated horn-rimmed glasses and receding hairline, she tried to find familiar wisps from the past — and indeed, something stirred, a faint trace of a memory, leaves falling from a tree in slow motion.

“Didn’t you sing?”

Bappa smiled bashfully. 

And then it came to her, as vivid as though it were from a week ago. A young Bappa, a head full of curly hair, lustily singing Esho shyamala sundara outside the canteen in August, as clouds roiled in the sky and a rain breeze quickened the air. The others in their group had smirked and packed up their CAT question papers, ready to leave, but she and Ronny had walked up and joined the little clot of people around the singer. 

“This is my wife, Nisha,” Bappa was rambling on. “Our son, Posto.”

“And...” Nisha added, “It appears you have already met our daughter, Pixie. Where...?”  

“She is going to Calcutta, like us.” Pixie spoke up. “But unlike us, Lata is not moving back permanently.”

“Chhee,” said Bappa, “Lata Pishi. Where are your manners?”

“What do you do?” Nisha asked Lata. “Where do you live? Are you travelling alone?”

“She is an investment banker, she’s travelling alone,” Pixie said impatiently. “Will you please give me my ticket now?

Then I can check in with Lata Pishi and get a seat next to her. Wait,” Pixie narrowed her eyes again and addressed Lata, “You’re not flying business class, are you?” 

Everyone laughed. 

“Let’s head that way,” Bappa said. “Meeting you after so many years, Latadi, it makes me so nostalgic. Nisha, I can’t tell you what a cult following she had in college.”

Pixie collected her owl and her bubblegum pink bag, all the while carefully holding onto Lata’s phone.

“Your hair is such a lovely colour,” Nisha sighed,  falling in step next to Lata. 

“A lot of it’s gone grey, Nisha,” Lata confided softly, “Underneath that golden honey brown.”

(To be continued)
This is Chapter 2 of The Romantics of College Street, a serial novel by Devapriya Roy for t2oS. Find her on Instagram @roydevapriya