Chapter 21

before we get into this chapter—

Sponsored by Wattpad x ThingsBook. But I mean every word.

I started writing this book because I was tired of having no place to put my thoughts.

A journal didn’t work. Neither did a twitter thread. Or a conversation where I had to manage someone else’s feelings about what I was saying. Just somewhere that was mine. Somewhere I could collect all the pieces of myself that didn’t fit neatly anywhere else. The film critiques that turned into essays about colourism. The romance that was also about identity. The anger that was also about love. The brown girl experience that mainstream media keeps trying to flatten into something palatable and simple and small.

This book is my collection. Kaalia and Roman are my collection. Every essay I’ve snuck into a chapter, every reference to bell hooks, every time I’ve made you sit with something uncomfortable—that’s me, putting my things somewhere they belong.

Which is exactly why ThingsBook makes sense to me in a way I didn’t expect it to. ThingsBook is a space to collect your things and curate your world. Your aesthetics. Your references. The images and ideas and pieces of culture that make up who you are before anyone else gets to define you. And for us—for young women of colour who have spent our whole lives being told our tastes are niche, our references are too specific, our inner worlds are too much—having a space that says no, actually, your collection matters, your curation matters, you matter? That’s not nothing. That’s really kind of everything.

My ThingsBook will be completely me, unfiltered. Sinners screencaps. Book reviews. Poetry. The specific shade of brown skin that Hollywood keeps underlighting. Monsoon rain. Giant pandas. bell hooks and Bridgerton in the same breath. The dinner table where I smiled and said nothing, and this book where I finally said everything. Add me at @moonsarai and let me get the chance to read yours too—I genuinely want to see what you’re collecting.

Your collection tells the story of who you are. Start building it.

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Okay. Now we go back to Kerala.

***

Text exchange—Aadhya Khan & her cousin Vansh, same evening

Vansh: I was going to find her eventually

Aadhya: Vansh I found her through a fisherman

Vansh: fishermen know everyone

Aadhya: you know everyone! that’s the only thing you’re supposed to be good at!

Vansh: I asked around

Aadhya: you asked three people

Vansh: I asked more than three people

Aadhya: you asked your friends. your friends are twenty-six year old men who watch cricket and know nothing about elderly women named Kimaya

Vansh: …

Aadhya: pack a bag. we leave tomorrow morning. for a week

Vansh: tomorrow MORNING? a WEEK? 

Aadhya: six am

Vansh: Aadhya I have work

Aadhya: this is more important than work

Vansh: do you know what my boss will say

Aadhya: I don’t care what your boss will say. do you know what sixty-four years feels like, Vansh? do you?

Vansh: …

Vansh: fine. six am.

Aadhya: thank you

Vansh: you’re going to owe me so much

Aadhya: if this works I will owe you everything. if it doesn’t work I will never speak to you again. those are the stakes. goodnight.

Vansh: those are WILDLY different outcomes

Aadhya: goodnight Vansh

Vansh: stop saying goodnight when you don’t want to talk to me anymore. it’s 5 pm

***

It turned out Priya had been a distraction. I wasn’t eating dinner with her or Aadhya—something I found out after we arrived in the kitchen to find only two plates set up at the table. Through the screen door leading to the back of the house and the ocean, I noticed Aadhya and Roman stumbling towards us through the packed sand. Roman seemed to be hiding something behind her back.

“Kaalia! You’re early.” Aadhya said this while darting a dirty look at Priya.

“Hardly,” Priya scowled. 

Aadhya stepped past the screen door and into the kitchen, but Roman remained outside. I glanced between them. 

“Well, go on outside, pyaari,” Aadhya said. “What are you waiting for?”

“What did you do?” 

“Nothing! I didn’t do anything. I just . . . helped someone who wanted to do something.” 

I patiently stared her down, refusing to look at Roman behind her. “Which is?” 

Roman stepped forward and held her hand out, palm up. Her hand glistened under the setting sun, fingers studded with thick, detailed gold rings and gems. The fresh mehndi inked on her palm formed a perfect flower, inviting me to touch it, to grasp her hand in mine. 

I did it without thinking.

In my peripheral vision, Aadhya nudged Priya with the kind of look that said: I told you so. 

“Will you give me the privilege of taking you out to dinner?” Roman asked, holding my hand, firm. “And by out, I mean on the beach behind us. There are candles. And music. And fresh seafood.”

There is no lifetime or timeline in which I would ever say “no” to you. The thing that escaped instead was: “No. I mean, yes. Yes. Definitely, yes.” 

Roman squeezed my hand. But first, I swivelled around to face Aadhya.

“So were you actually packing this whole time or were you just setting this up? Is the trip to see Kimaya even real?” 

“The trip is real. I am leaving tomorrow morning. And we’re having a few guests over, too.” 

“What? Who?” 

Aadhya rolled her eyes. “I thought you would have figured it out by now. Your friends, pyaari. Remember? The American ones? Don’t tell me I have become your best friend already. I thought I would have to work a little harder to steal that spot.” 

“You—how? Where will they stay?” Akila, Louise, and Khajee had never specified a date. I had been too caught up in work to remember to ask. The last message in our group chat was from last night; Khajee had texted us to say Heated rivalry this heated rivalry that but where are the lesbians??? Nobody had mentioned vacationing in Kerala since Khajee had spilled the news on that phone call weeks ago. “And wait, why do you know this and not me?” 

Aadhya ignored my last question. “Well, I promised Khajee my room while I’m gone—I must show us brown women some favouritism, you know, it’s only right—and Akila and Louise will each get their own guest room.” 

Roman tilted her head, as if she knew about my friends visiting too, and this was the only part she was surprised about.  “Wait a second. I thought you didn’t have any spare bedrooms? Akila and Louise each get their own room?” 

“Yes. Now all the spare rooms really are all taken.”

“They weren’t taken before? Why have I been sleeping on a couch?” 

Aadhya made a sad face. “Looks like you’ll have to sleep with Kaalia. Too bad.” 

“Wait. I don’t understand—” 

Aadhya shoved me outside, next to Roman. I stumbled into the sand. Roman steadied me. Grinning extremely widely, Aadhya slid the glass door shut behind me. A distinct clicking sound followed, which could only be the sound of the door locking. That sound was followed by several others: the windows slamming closed one by one in other areas of the house, on cue, as if all the maids had been commanded to shut them in unison.

“She’s just locked us out of the house until she gets what she wants, hasn’t she?” I said. 

Roman blew a curl out of her face and frowned. Her lip ring glinted in the sunset. Her short hair was half up, half down, with gold cuffs clipped to the ends of the coily front pieces. She wore a white linen shirt rolled to the elbows, the front unbuttoned halfway, revealing a hint (more than a hint) of cleavage spilling overtop a lacy black bra, and loose pants. 

“What do you mean? What does she want?” 

My eyes found Roman’s. I fought to keep a giddy smile off my face. Dinner on the beach had been entirely Roman’s idea then, not an idea Aadhya had slyly suggested. Us getting stuck outside wasn’t part of Roman’s plan, which meant she had been tricked by Aadhya, too. I felt my smile turning into a real, wicked grin. This had been Roman’s idea. She wanted to take me out to dinner on the beach. Without Aadhya’s interference.

I watched Aadhya wave at us through the glass. She gave me a thumbs-up. 

“She wants you,” she shouted, muffled through the glass. Her voice came out garbled and mostly unintelligible. I put it together through some sort of desi telepathy. “Do not waste this opportunity!” 

“What was that?” Roman’s eyebrows knitted together. “What did she say?” 

“Nothing,” I said. Just like that, I was an accomplice to Aadhya’s operation. “I’m starving. We should eat.”

“Don’t lie. What does she want?”

“I don’t know.” 

“You have your lying face on.”

“I do not have a lying face.” 

“Do you really think I know nothing about you?”

“You’ve only known me for like two months,” I said, knowing all too well how much you could learn about someone in two months. In two months, I had discovered the ZIP code of her childhood address in California to her archived student club debate in her third year of undergrad. If someone gave me a year and a month from the past thirty-five years, I could probably tell them off the top of my head what Roman had been doing at that time and where she was located. But Roman didn’t know that.

“In two months, you’ve become my—” Roman stopped. Shook her head. Her voice softened. “I know plenty. Enough to know you definitely have a lying face.” 

“Well, what is it, then? Describe it to me.” 

“You raise your eyebrows. Just a little. Yeah, like that. You always cross your arms, too.” Roman glanced down at my crossed arms. I quickly uncrossed them. “Your left cheek starts twitching.” I self-consciously pressed a hand to my left cheek. “And when you think you’ve gotten away with it, you always itch your nose. If you’re scared of being caught guilty, though, you’re probably cracking your knuckles.” 

I immediately stopped cracking my knuckles.

We both glanced back at the screen door in time to see Aadhya mimicking two little creatures with each hand. She pressed them together in what was undeniably a children’s puppet-show imitation of a kiss. When she realized she had caught our attention, she made a shooing motion to us, gesturing down towards the beach. Hurry up with it.

Roman shook her head, looking baffled, then narrowed in on me again. “Don’t lie to me. What does Aadhya want that I don’t know about but you do?” 

I sighed. “Isn’t it obvious? She wants us to kiss.” Cracked under no pressure. “Or she’s not letting us back in the house.”

“You’re saying, we’re locked out of the house indefinitely? But the sun is setting. It’ll be night soon.” She started leading us toward the beach anyway, my hand clasped in hers, watching me patiently to make sure I didn’t slip.

“Not indefinitely. Unless you plan on never kissing me.” My eyes found Roman’s. An evil spirit had possessed me. “And I didn’t peg you as a coward.” 

Roman stared at me for only a beat in surprise before catching herself. “What if I never kiss you?” she said. “You’d spend the rest of the trip out here.” 

“Aadhya would never let you in by yourself. You’d suffer with me.”

“Maybe I want to be here to see you suffer.” 

This time, it took me a beat to recover. I thanked the setting sun for partly obscuring the redness of my cheeks. “I didn’t know you had a thing for that.”

Roman slowed her walking down the winding, sandy path when she realized I had terrible coordination. Her gaze lingered on me, attentive. Way too attentive. “Suffering is fun. But it’s the begging part I enjoy most.” She said that with the low, dark voice of someone likely well-versed in the art of edging someone until they were crying. I pictured her pretty face between my legs, her full lips shining, my thighs slick. How long would I stubbornly refuse to beg? How long until she broke me? 

I made a low, noncommittal hum sound in my throat.

“Besides, it could be fun,” she added, as if she didn’t notice the effect her words had on me. “Getting trapped out here. We could make a little fortress on the beach. Scavenge some food. Light fires at night to keep us warm.” 

In an effort to compose myself, I asked, “You know how to light a fire?” 

“No, but I’m sure it’s simple enough. We’re two successful, smart, PhD-holding women. We could figure it out.” 

“I think starting a fire might be, I don’t know, harder than you think?” 

“There are eight-year-old camp scouts. You’re saying an eight-year-old could light a fire and not me?” 

“I think a trained one could. Have you ever even been camping before?”

“No. Camping is a white people thing.”

“And yet you’re so confident you could survive in nature without help?” 

She shrugged. “Animals do it. Our ancestors did it. It can’t be that hard.” 

I just stared at her. 

“What, you think you could survive and I couldn’t?” 

“No! That isn’t the point. The point is that we would both definitely die. We have such cushioned urban lives in New York. I cannot believe you of all people suffer from delusions of—of ecological grandeur.” 

“I do not suffer from—” The gently sloping hill to the beach finally made way to a large, flat rock overlooking the water. A handwoven, colourful basket with elephants sewn on the sides waited on top. Dozens of long wax candles had been lodged firmly into the sand like spikes, flames flickering in the wind, and traditional Kerala music played from a Bluetooth speaker perched precariously atop an actual coconut. “I don’t suffer from any delusions,” Roman finished.

The orange sun bathed us in honeyed light. The whole scene was surreal. Her long, dark lashes fluttered, her perfect, angular eyes bright but abyssal. It seemed she was waiting for my reaction. Her stare captured me and dragged me down, down, down. But I’d lock myself up and throw away the keys any day so long as the cage belonged to her. 

I swallowed. “You did all this?” 

“Aadhya did all this, really. I paid for it. And stressed about it for three days.” 

“You stressed?” 

She helped me sit down, arranging my skirt over the sand without me asking, as if it were as natural to her as putting on her jewelry in the morning. “I stress about you constantly. It’s exhausting.” 

“That’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.” 

Roman sat next to me and reached for the basket. A single eyebrow raised. “That’s deeply concerning.” 

The food was perfect: grilled fish, coconut rice, mango curry. The music swirled around us, softly, sweetly. It even felt as though the ocean itself was performing for us, on Roman’s command: waves rolling in steady rhythm, orange-and-red light dappling the slowly darkening water. 

We began eating, but the knot of tension in my stomach wouldn’t ease. I decided just to ask.

“Do you think, if we’d never come to Kerala—I mean, say there was no trip, anywhere, hypothetically—that we’d have—that you’d have still wanted to take me to dinner?” I hoped she understood the double meaning behind my words. 

Roman paused for only a moment. “I took you to lunch, didn’t I?” 

“As an apology. For thinking I was a robber. And a stalker.” 

“I never take employees out to eat,” she said. “Alone, I mean. You were . . . you are the first.”

“Have you ever accused anyone of being a crazy criminal stalker the first time you met them, though?” 

Roman choked on a laugh mid-bite. “No. But one time I let Eva do the hiring on her own, and when I saw Iseul getting into the building on the security camera footage for the first time, I called the police.”

That explained why Iseul had nodded so understandingly when I had told her about Roman being paranoid.

“Yeah, that’s pretty bad.” 

“Tell me about it.”

“So why me?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Why did you take me out to lunch and not Iseul?” 

“Because you’re . . . you,” Roman said, gesturing wildly in the air, as if I was asking her an incredibly simple math equation and she couldn’t figure out why I didn’t know one plus one equalled two. “It would have always been you. Even if we didn’t go to Kerala. Even if, right now, in an alternate dimension, we were in the office together. It had to be you. Nothing else would have felt right.” 

That didn’t sound like the kind of thing a casual fling would say. It definitely didn’t sound like what happens in Kerala stays in Kerala. 

“Jazmine said I’m your type,” I blurted out. “She said you like artistic brown girls.”

Roman rolled her eyes. “I matched with Jazmine’s childhood best friend on Hinge—yes, I had a Hinge phase—like ten years ago. I dated Maitreyi for a year, then called it off. I guess she is a bit like you, in the sense that you both have a gorgeous brown shade of skin and big eyes and big curls. She was creative, too. A screenwriter.” She shook her head, almost frustrated. “But besides that, she didn’t look like you at all. And she wasn’t—I don’t know how to explain.”

“Try.”

“I have a hard time with faces. I don’t like telling people that, because I deal with so many faces daily, and it would be rude to just say, ‘Who are you again?’ so I use context clues and features and voices and other identifiable things. Some faces are particularly hard for me, though. I called it off with Maitreyi—well, one of the reasons I called it off was because I couldn’t recognize her face so well. When I looked for her in a crowd, I couldn’t find her. Every time we slept together, and I woke up to her the next morning, she felt—looking at her felt perpetually unfamiliar, like looking at a stranger, every day, and pretending you loved that stranger. It sounds bad. I know. It is bad. If I saw her today, I wouldn’t know it was her. Maybe there’s something wrong with my brain. That’s how it’s been with all of my partners. No matter how hard I try, their faces just won’t stick in my head. It’s like the world is trying to tell me it’s not permanent. Don’t get used to it. Like they’re meant to be a stranger.”

I waited, breath held, unable to take another bite of mango curry. If I exhaled, everything would come crashing down around me, this beautiful dream of this beautiful, brilliant woman saying, “It had to be you. Nothing else would have felt right.” And I needed it to be real more than I needed to breathe. 

“But that day I saw you at the carnival,” Roman said. “That day. The day I met you.”

The sun had almost finished setting. We sat suspended in the midst of a dark, dusky, purple sky, the wind blowing the candles out one by one, leaving us in near-complete darkness.  

“I can’t,” she said, softly, “get rid of your face. I have it memorized. The slope of your nose. The curve of your cheek. The mascara flecks under your bottom lashes at the end of a long day and the little cracks in your concealer.” 

“Okay, now you’re just insulting my makeup skills.”

“No.” Roman shook her head. Adamant. “No—I love it. You look even more beautiful. Everything about you is so beautiful. I love your makeup. I love your face. You are imprinted in my mind. Do you understand that? When I close my eyes, I see you. When I open them, I see you. I see your face in patterned rugs in the living room and kanikonna flowers on the windowsill. I see your lips in the condensation on a glass of water and the shape of your jaw in the pebbles that line the road. I see the curve of your ear when the moon waxes and the soft swell of your cheek when it eclipses. I couldn’t forget your face if I tried. You are making me insane, Kaalia.” 

If an afterworld existed, I hoped it was here, now, this very moment. I could spend eternity within these heartbeats, in the breath between Roman’s full lips forming one word and another, her ever-dark eyes so sweet and yet impenetrable, looking at me, and me only. About to say something we both knew she couldn’t take back.

“You have no idea how insane I am about you,” I said. “I’m not joking. I wish I were joking.” 

“And if that isn’t bad enough,” Roman continued, shaking her head, “I just . . . can’t stop thinking about you. It scares me. I wake up in the morning and I think of you. I call my lawyer and I wonder what you’re doing and what poem you’re annotating. I do paperwork long after you’ve gone to bed and I imagine how beautiful you are, how peaceful your face must look while you sleep. And I—” 

I screamed.

A crab crawled out of the basket and bolted toward me at full speed. One, two, three, four—ten sharp legs stabbed the sand, moving toward me for what could only be a long-plotted assassination attempt. 

“Roman, help! It’s going to kill me!” 

But Roman had already lunged in front of me to protect me, like some kind of action hero. Though she tripped in front of the speaker-coconut and knocked over three candles. The crab, offended, changed directions and began chasing her.

I clapped my hands over my mouth.

“I’ve got this!” Roman shouted. “Don’t worry! It’s all under control!” 

Roman Alvarez, CEO of a multi-million dollar publishing house, Stanford-educated, currently pursuing a lawsuit against billionaires, Cambridge PhD, was running around in circles on a rock in Kerala being chased by a crab. My screaming dissolved into laughter. So much laughter I couldn’t breathe. 

“This,” I gasped, “is the most romantic disaster I have ever been involved in.” 

“That’s deeply concerning, again!” Roman said, while the crab darted at breakneck speed towards her ankles. 

“Still think you could last in the wilderness on your own?” 

“I had a vision!” She looked genuinely afraid. If I weren’t laughing so hard, keeled over in the sand a safe distance away, I might have helped. 

“Your vision included a crab assassination attempt?” 

“I couldn’t have predicted the crab!” 

I hadn’t seen a real crab in years. The image that lingered in my mind of Sebastian from The Little Mermaid was swiftly being replaced by the horror of snapping pincers and the ten-too-many legs of the crab before us. I would have nightmares about this.

The crab paused opposite Roman. The rock stood between them. Its beady assassin eyes fixed on her like it knew she needed a break and wanted the challenge of catching her to be more exciting. 

“I think it’s playing with its food,” I whispered, forcing myself not to look away lest it resume its target on me. 

“Its food?”

“You. You’re the food.” 

Roman, hands on her knees, panting: “Crabs. Are. Herbivores. Aren’t they?” She didn’t look away from the crab either, as if, like me, she feared it would seize the element of surprise and attack.

“I’m pretty sure they’re opportunistic omnivores,” I whispered.

We both lost it entirely. Snort-laughing in the near-darkness. 

Maybe the crab didn’t like being the butt of the joke. Or maybe it realized we wouldn’t make for the best-tasting meat. It turned and scuttled toward the ocean.

Roman breathed heavily, still laughing. “I think I broke the speaker.” 

The music played at half-volume, tinny and warped. 

“And I think I ruined dinner.” 

The food we hadn’t eaten yet had scattered over the makeshift table-rock, sticky bits of rice and splotches of curry.

“You didn’t ruin dinner. The crab tried to kill me and you rescued me. You saved us from ending up as crab dinner.” 

The sky was a deep violet blanket. Stars dotted the fabric like punctuation marks. And the music from the speaker, though barely there, was still sweet. 

Roman held her hand out to me. Palm upturned, the mehndi flower inviting me in. I moved without knowing I was moving. I put my hand in hers even before she said, “Dance with me?” 

If the crab came back and decided to finish its assassination plot, I could die happy. “There’s barely any music.” 

“There’s enough.” 

“What if the crab tries to kill us again?” 

“Then I’ll protect you.” Roman pulled me closer, a few inches away still, but close enough I could see the reflection of the violet sky speckled with stars in her eyes—shining, reflective pools of liquid light.

I closed the last few steps and drew her to my chest. She placed her hand at the small of my back and I wrapped my arms around her neck. This close, I could smell her perfume, warm and woody with vanilla underneath. She looked at me like I was the only thing in the world.

“You ran away from the crab,” I whispered. 

“I was strategically repositioning.” 

We melted into each other, our bodies fitting against one another like puzzle pieces, swaying slowly. The music crackled and resumed, like radio static with a bad signal, the speaker close to its death. Garbled lyrics and violin music escaped at random intervals. It was awful. It was my new favourite song.

“I want you,” Roman said against my neck. Her voice made my skin tingle with warmth. “God, I want you, Kaalia.” 

“Then have me.” 

***

Mwahahaha sorry to make you wait another week…

Thank you for being here. Genuinely. I built this book as a place to put my collection. Go build yours. And enter the sweepstakes while you’re at it, for $4,000 to go somewhere that feels like yours too. (Hey, maybe you can even go to Kerala and cosplay Roman and Kaalia).

Thank you so much for following me on Chai for Two‘s journey. For full details on the sweepstakes and prizes, be sure to check the link here. It helps me out as an author (and a student!!!) and it would mean the WORLD to me <3

The Official ThingsBook x Wattpad Sweepstakes

Love,
Meera