Goa, Chicken, Lies and Carry

Goa: Chicken, Lies and Carry

By Nathan Gitonga

Sitting across the table was Priyanka, a charming young girl from Jamshedpur. The first time I met her, I thought she was a good subject to write on. She had many qualities on her face value that even an amateur writer would find compelling to explore on paper. She had this uncanny way to impress anyone even if she discussed a boring topic like achievements of President Bush in molding America to a friendlier partner with other nations! Somehow she would make you agree that Bush was the greatest president ever and that in his tenure America made more friends including Iraq.

I felt a little guilty thinking of her as a subject matter to my short stories, yet she was my girl friend and someone who really loved me for that matter. Like many other evenings, we sat by the beach shanties of Calangute Beach in Goa. We wanted to make every sunset a moment to cherish and we did. This was our last full day in Goa and I couldn’t think of anything better than the time I had had with Priyanka. I stood there, watching her talk, (she loved to talk) and wondering if it was really true that finally I was sitting with a girl who had completely changed my life.

I watched the sun set beyond Vasco into the Arabian Sea. Priyanka was now a silhouette against the background of the setting orange sun. Even then she looked beautiful. Her outline was bolder, revealing her sexy figure that made men turn. I kept losing track of what she was telling me but it was something related to her relatives who had tried to cunningly take their family wealth. I was more engrossed in admiring this unequaled beauty in front of me and tracing our path together.

The path begun on one of those days you stay in the house bored with nothing to impress you. It’s a day when you just switch off your cable TV after browsing through the two hundred and forty three channels five times and nothing there makes you happy. Well, on this particular day I was really bored and a little upset. My fiancé (not Priyanka) was giving me headaches. After our engagement, she had suddenly become high headed and wanted to control every affair in our lives. She had made me change jobs two times and was now working in a small company in Navi Mumbai, which was miles away from where we stayed just because the company was part of their family business and I would get more time to spend with her.

My fiancé Vennela hailed from Kerala just like me but our families had settled in Mumbai. I knew her when she was still a baby and I was in second grade. Though very young at that age, I still remember how her parents had brought her to our house and joked that she is going to be my wife. As years progressed, we became close friends, went to same college and got jobs in the same company. By this time our parents had already arranged our marriage and it would be a matter of time and we would be officially married.

Though she was my friend, Vennela and I really didn’t have much spark as lovers. She was a more orthodox south Indian, brought up in lifestyle of Mumbai metropolitan lifestyle. The results? I can only say a female Hitler. She slowly evolved from a cheery friend who loved and respected me to an austere, possessive and later cold girl. I wished her evolution was on reverse. She should have been authoritarian when we were not so close or engaged and loving when we were. But here I was, stuck with someone I was getting afraid of.

I must say I tried my best to make things work between us. When she became my girlfriend, I started behaving in a rather romantic manner towards her. I always waited for her after college, dropped her to her place when she didn’t have a bike and took her for coffee almost every evening before going home. And while I was in my second year of college, my parents shifted to Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala after my father got a job there as school principal in a catholic school. Though we had lived in Mumbai since when I was a small boy, my mother was really not happy. She did not want her children to grow out of Kerala. She feared that we might be like ‘children of Mumbai’ as she called them, who according to her had embraced immoral western culture.

Well, after they went back to Kerala, I was left alone in Mumbai and this gave me some freedom to invite Vennela for occasional dinners or to spend some time with me on Sunday afternoons. For a while we were so happy and madly in love. During the times we spent together in my house, I could touch her in a romantic manner and after a few more visits, we were kissing regularly. I was shocked when I learnt that at twenty one, she had not kissed any guy. I had kissed a dozen women by that time. By the time I was sixteen, I was introduced to a ‘gang’ of friends from Bandra who taught me the tricks of life.

Tricks of life meant that one was able to identify a girl from a popular eating joint and pursue her till she became your girlfriend or you at least kissed her. I became addicted to this game since I found myself on the winning side. I learnt what girls wanted in a boy and used my knowledge as a hook to fish them. I always caught the naughtiest and even before I learnt their full names I would have kissed them already. But the game had to stop at one time. It is the time when I realized that there was something going on between me and Vennela. From then on I stopped going to Bandra.

I was happy to settle down with Vennela as my girlfriend. I loved her beauty and I felt more secure in this relationship since she was someone I knew from childhood. Things went on so well until a year after my parents went to Thiruvananthapuram. She was a regular at my house now. She didn’t have to be invited; in fact, she had a spare key to my house. At times she would lie to her parents that she was going to spend a weekend with her friends and she would come to my house. I had introduced her to what love was all about and she was learning fast. The problem was she was getting too attached to me now and I felt a little guilty that I didn’t protect her innocence.

But after our relationship moved from innocence to intimate and quite physical, a form of fear crept into Vennela. She feared losing me, yet I was not even thinking of leaving her. But who knows, this could be a classic example of women instincts. I guess it was this fear that made her suggest to her parents that we should make our relationship official, which they did a day after we graduated from Mumbai University.

to be continued.....