Photo by Kallum Linnie

‘Wholeweat tortilla, please. Brown rice. Chicken. Black beans and veg. Salsa. Sour cream. Chilli. Guacamole. Cheese and some lettuce, please.’

‘That it, love? That’ll be nine euros.’ The front of the line is the worst place to have a bottomless tote bag situation. There were keys, loose stationery, a copy of  Judith Thurman’s Secrets of the Flesh, perfume, and odd bills from the past week. I always keep the bills, it’s a habit my wary father has crippled me with. Once my wallet decided to show itself, I swiped my Forex against the machine. ‘Error. Transaction Failed’. I reached for a twenty euro note. ‘Sorry love, we don’t take cash’.

I felt the nerves, like spiders shooting webs through the pores of my skin. My hands were cold and clammy, I hadn’t eaten all day, and it was supposed to rain soon. Our apologies crashed into each other, and I began to step away from the counter. For the twenty minutes that I had waited in line, a couple of women behind me had been chatting away in a foreign language. I’d wondered what it was they were saying, making up dialogues in my head to pass time. ‘My rent’s just gone up and I can’t even afford a new vibrator.’, ‘I keep telling you, dump the guy and you’ll have one less kid to worry about’.

One of the women touched my shoulder now, ‘What’s the matter?’, I thought of the optics and winced; ‘Indian Girl Holds Up Boojum Line; Wastes a Chicken Burrito with Guac While her Country Continues to Starve.’ ‘My card’s not working actually, I’m not sure why’. She pulled hers out in one felt swoop, and asked the cashier to bill our orders together. I insisted on paying her in cash, but only had a five and some twenties. She took the five. ‘Don’t worry sweetie, I got you’.

I walked down Abbey Street with my lunch in hand, sobbing. I was overcome, with the urge to hug her, to freeze her words for later, to tell her I’m mending a broken heart in this cold country and that she was the warmest part of my week. Maybe it was a woman thing. Maybe she reminded me of my mother. 

I went on my first date with a white man four weeks after the breakup. I watched myself going through the motions, kohled my lower waterline like my grandmother had taught me, picked an outfit that flattered my waist, shared my location on the group chat, and sulked. I looked alright in the mirror, but there was sweat collected at my hairline from the guilt stubbornly lodged at the bottom of my throat. 

In the lift on the way down, my phone lit up with a text from Ruhi, ’Have fun ! Text if you want me to call you with a fake emergency !’ Ruhi had been on her first date a few days prior. They went to Wetherspoon, where the wine is three euros and the cocktail pitchers are large enough to wave off the red flags. She texted us about it after, ‘We didn’t kiss, is that normal?’

The date had gone well enough. Ruhi said she wasn’t attracted to him, but the conversation was good. He’s a cinematographer so they talked about Ladybird for a bit. She told him that she’s a sapiosexual, with a regular affinity towards STEM guys. They spoke about ‘fun’ things too, she’d said, like astrology and Phoebe Bridgers.

‘So you were born in 2001 then?’, he’d asked her on the walk back.

‘2002 actually.’ 

‘Wow. I’m 24 next week.’

The date ended early and they haven’t spoken since.

Most of the people I’d match with on the apps were older than me. My date that evening was twenty-four, a confirmed adult with a dating history and all the baggage that comes with it. He was tall and hunch-backed in a way that made him look contemplative, pensive but not unapproachable. His technicolour fleece gave him enough of a personality to interest me. He had picked the restaurant and I walked in without any expectations. Bonobo was dimly lit– I searched the room for a table that would force us to sit across from each other, and lied about it seeming like the warmest spot. 

He smiled a lot, even when there was nothing amusing about the conversation. We talked art and politics and Love Island over a couple of pints, the air was thick with mystery and the smell of fresh pizza. We asked each other all the right questions. He told me he plays the bass in a band called Private People in Public Places and laughed at my jokes like he got them, but I’m not sure he did. I had to repeat myself every few sentences, his Irish accent thick with naivety.

‘Sorry, what did you call it?’

I laughed it off, ‘It’s an Indian thing. Anyway, what’s it like, dating online in Dublin?’

‘I just got out of a six-year relationship actually, so I’m still figuring it out.’

I nodded. Suddenly, this stranger so far away from familiarity, had a look in his eyes I could recognise. I wondered whether he was searching for bits of her when he looked at me, like I was doing with him. The truth is, we were two sad people replicating old relationships over beer, and in that moment, I felt a comfort I didn’t know I was looking for. 

I found myself unfurling, giving the evening a chance. He excused himself before returning with an offer to switch tables, to which I conceded, surprising myself for the first time that night. We got a corner with a coffee table, more pints and a sofa. He slid in after me. I was so in my head I forgot his name; Dean, David, Daniel? I sort of wished he was a woman.

My flatmates are all queer. Sean and Aoife are bisexual like me, but somehow around them, I worry I’m not gay enough. I trip over my words in an attempt to use the right vocabulary, fit in, watch RuPaul over dinner, and pretend I empathise when really, I’d only ever been on one date with a woman. There’s something easy about dating a man; they’re quite simple. Predictable. Eager. 

‘Can I kiss you?’ I was worried I’d forgotten how to kiss a stranger, but my lips moved like muscle memory and for a moment, I felt sexy. The way he said my name was sexy, ‘It’s Shanaia like Shania Twain,’ till I remembered I was named after a Zorastrian prayer. I flinched. The whole ordeal–  his hand on my thigh, the false privacy of the nook, his ochre stubble– felt momentary, fleeting in a way that made it all as if I was a stranger in my own body.

‘Do you want to get out of here?’ he asked, ‘I have a little house up in Howth, it’s a thirty-minute train ride and I’ve to be back in the city tomorrow anyway.’

“You have a house?”

‘Yeah, me and Jesse the drummer, right by a cemetery actually. It’s part of this artist residency thing so I don’t really pay rent.’

“Oh. Cool. Or you could come to mine, catch a train after? Since it’s not too late anyway?”

He held my hand most of the way back. We kissed some more, in the rose garden at Trinity, behind the Berkeley library, at the tram stop, on the green line, in the lift on the way up to the fifth floor. I could hear Sean in the living room, chatting to Aoife about being Quaker, ‘See, I’m not religious but I do believe there’s a bit of Jesus in all of us’. We skirted past the kitchen and found ourselves by my window, struggling in turns, to draw the blinds. I went into the bathroom to take off my makeup, contemplate the possibility of romance and squirm at the way my shoulders looked in a racerback. 

When I walked out, he was looking through the books on my shelf like they would tell him more about me. Plath and a selection of downcast novellas looked back at him with equalising scrutiny. ‘Is this your sister?’ He walked around my bedroom, tracing odd bits of my old life; threatening my privacy, making the space feel less like home. It suddenly occurred to me that he would never truly understand where I come from, never recognise the little hill in Mussoorie from the photograph of my grandparents, never say, ‘The best momos I’ve ever eaten were at Kalsang Friend’s Corner’. All he could say was that it looked beautiful. 

The fact that he was a stranger hit me like a truck, but before I could catch my breath, there he was again, in my bed now, where I had slept alone since the 2nd of September. “I feel oddly comfortable around you,” he said, ‘Here, you’ve got some sleep in your eye, let me get that for you’. I felt the urge to shake him and scream, ‘Get out!’ but instead, I smiled and asked him if he’d like something to drink. ‘A bit of Indian hospitality goes a long way,’ my grandmother used to say. 

He traced my body like my bedroom or my bedroom like my body. Either way, his hands were cold and unwelcome. I tried directing his gaze, his fingers, the motion of his lips, but the white man’s burden seemed to weigh heavy over us both. I became convinced he was attempting to save me from myself. So I let him try, for a grand total of seven minutes, after which he hit the shower and I blocked him on Instagram. 

I woke up nauseous the next morning. I could feel the Guinness and self-loathing rising like a beige tempest in my throat. Sex had never made me feel so pathetic, so bloated, so ugly. I walked to my 9am lecture on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home with a heavy sack of dread tied to my feet. The Liffey looked unusually still. Conversations on the street buzzed in my ears like mosquitos in the thick of an Indian summer. ‘Somebody Else’ by The 1975 was ringing in my head and suddenly I hated the sound of Matthew Healy. Everything seemed to annoy me. It could have been the cold sweat I was breaking out into from obsessively layering, or how much I hated myself for sleeping with the white guy, or that all I wanted was to know that someone loved me like I had been loved before. 

The Hamilton Building was as crowded as usual. I swerved past the large group of Engineering students discussing dams and the problem of plankton and managed to get my favourite seat in the very last row of the lecture hall. On the projector, was a graphic from Bechdel’s memoir. It read, ‘Feminism is the theory and lesbianism is the practice.’ The girls in the seats beside me were snapping their fingers, ‘Facts,’ grinning like children at Christmas. They wore their mullets and waistcoats like the women back home wear their saris– pretty armour, a glorious sheathing. I wanted so badly to be like them; to look as gay as I felt. 

That evening, I switched the settings on my dating apps— unchecked the box beside ‘Men’ and spent the next few hours scrutinising my profile. I couldn’t stand the thought of seeming unimpressive to a woman. The next morning, I woke up to a comment from a girl I had liked. She had short hair, cool shoes and a good taste in music. I thought she was funny. We decided to go to the Big Romance down my street. Nerves were dripping from my fingers like pizza grease the whole walk there. I was terrified. 

Her eyes adjusted to the red tint of the vinyl bar, and mine to her face in that light. She chewed her gum like she knew she looked good. By the second pint, I began wishing her hands were on me, but it was my first time on a date with a woman. ‘You make me nervous,’ the words slipped out of my mouth before I could catch myself. “You don’t look nervous.” She asked me about India, my five-year plan and my favourite sushi place in Dublin. She listened, told me about her job as a journalist at a gay magazine. We talked about food, coming out, Omar Apollo, The White Lotus, and the city. I wanted to know everything about her. Then she asked me if I’d ever dated a woman. “That’s okay girl, relax,” she put her hand on mine when she saw my face change shape like blood origami. 

 

It was exciting, different– the complication of respect, of admiration, the possibility of great love. Meeting her made me believe that my lesbianism could, like Bechdel’s, be ‘a revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind.’ When she kissed me, I wanted her to do it again. She did, till we were in my bed and almost immediately, I wanted her out of it; not because I didn’t desire her, but because I wanted to know her before I touched her in that way. 

 

We went dancing a lot. I liked being seen with her. I liked sharing her breath; not only when we were kissing, in the George under the strobe lights, but in conversations about our mothers. I wondered if this was what it was always like, being with a woman. It surprised me how there wasn’t one thing I would change about her, how I didn’t want to be selfish with her, how I’d catch myself feeling content in just knowing her. The sex was awkward at first. We laughed at how easy it was to get it wrong, ‘Is this okay?’ Slowly we learned each other’s bodies like the texture of a favourite book— the thickness of each page, eyes adjusting to the size of the font, how the spine feels in your hand, words like limbs across an alloyed whiteness. 

 

A couple of weeks before my flight home to Bombay, we got dinner at Lee’s on Parnell Street. ‘It usually takes me ages to get food with someone,’ she said after a good twenty minutes of scanning the menu, ‘I’m always so nervous about getting or giving someone the ick from how either of us chews our food.’ I shook my head, ‘Is that similar to how you’d want your own room if you ever lived with someone?’ ‘Exactly, it’s a tricky thing, getting comfortable. Anyway, do you want to split a plate of spring rolls?’ It felt good to be someone she chose to get food with. 

 

She scoffed her pad thai down like she had been hungry for months. That’s how she always ate– even when we were snacking on Maltesers or eating cereal in silence while we worked. It was almost like her insatiable appetite wasn’t just with food, it was with conversation, chemistry, or a good song on the dance floor. I was the same in this city of art and beer and the possibility of being queer. We were both hungry and knew that this had to come to an end soon, so we decided to relish it, to take smaller bites, to chew slower, eat the chillies and polish our plates clean. 

 

She nibbled on the peanuts I gave her from my chicken till I was done with my meal. We were full and happy walking to the bar down the road. Half an hour before closing, she pulled up the ‘30 questions to fall in love’, replicating the worst date she’d had with an old girlfriend, thinking it’d be funny. It was until we realised how much we were enjoying ourselves. I held her face as she told me about how when she was 16 and forcing herself into pretty dresses and ballet flats, her mother had said to her, ‘The most beautiful you’ve ever been was when you were little, and dressed like a boy because that was when you were most yourself.’ It made me want to cry. There she was, sat in front of me in her favourite red jumper, hair parted down the middle, silver rings on her right hand, so beautiful in the warm light. 

I had been reading Elif Batuman’s The Idiot for a class on autofiction, she ‘kept thinking about the uneven quality of time–the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.; A couple of weeks ago, she had taken me to the Abbey to watch the Weir. It was her first time watching a play, but over drinks at Pantibar after, she offered me the ticket, ‘Do you have a memory box?’ I didn’t know how to explain to her that what she had given me was a way out of the box— a whole part of myself I suddenly had the privilege of knowing.

 

A couple of days after finals week, my friends and I went on a two-day trip to Doolin. We took the train to Galway, got caught in the rain, grabbed lunch at an Esquires, and made it just in time for our bus to the seaside town. The skies on our way there were overcast. I could hear Taylor Swift through Ruhi’s AirPods while Anusha spent the majority of the ride on FaceTime with her boyfriend, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll text you when we get there,’ ‘Baby, look at the cliffs in the distance, can you see the sea?. From my window seat, it looked as if we were driving into the storm, I had ‘Teenage Riot’ by Sonic Youth in my ears and all I could feel was restlessness; an inconsolable itch to be in so many places at once. 

The weather back in Dublin city had turned and the shop windows were decked out with pretty wreaths and sleigh bells. The panic was setting in. I was a few days away from the end of the semester and I was afraid that the wave of self-discovery had just hit me, but that I didn’t have enough time to ride it, to taste the salt. The water was still cold from where I was standing and I began to worry that I hadn’t said enough in my lectures to be memorable, made enough solid friendships to be missed, or dated enough women to know how to take my sexuality back home with me and wear it with the same ease as I could in this European winter. Time was slipping fast and my post-break-up, eat-pray-love inertia was threatening to give way. What if I was leaving all the new parts of me behind? 

‘Babe, I have to hang up now, the next stop is ours. Of course I’ll send you pictures. I love you. No, I love you more. No, me. Okay bye.’

On the last day in Doolin, we walked into a second-hand bookstore on the only main street in town. It smelt like old books, but not in a French press and vanilla-adjacent sort of way. It was musty, seemingly unfrequented, and the handmade jewellery hanging in the widow had visibly gathered dust. The walls were crowded with first editions, spare playbills, and lots of Oscar Wilde. Ruhi and I warned the others that we would be a while. 

Between the pages of a ragged Brontë sisters’ biography, I found a postcard dated 1981. It read. ‘With Much Love, Your Darling Elise.’ I asked the lady at the desk if she knew more about it, but she said there were so many postcards over the years that she’d forgotten. Her name was Cindy and she told me that she’d send her husband similar postcards from New York before she moved to Dublin to be with him in the ‘80s, ‘It was a time when secondary education was really seeing the fruits of its labor, see here, this collection of Irish writers for instance,’ she limped towards a crowded shelf and picked out The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction.

 

She told me how she’d cried through most of the book, overcome with nostalgia for an Ireland that quickly ceased to exist, ‘It was overwhelming how my early years in Dublin were such a shared experience for young people either in love or loss. Now, even though it’s severely lacking women writers, I’d say you’ll really get your money’s worth with this one.”’

We began to talk about our love for secondhand books– the way they’re worn in like a pair of jeans or shoes that fit better once they’ve learned the shape of your body. I tell her about the one we have back home; how Blossom Book House on Church Street is always choked with hungry readers on Sunday evenings. Cindy asked me for a recommendation in return and I told her that the best book I’d ever read was Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. She sighed, cocked her head to one side and pulled out a frayed copy from the shelf behind her, “We read it in book club over quarantine, and I’ve got to tell you, I get it.” 

I smiled, revelling in my Indianness. There I was, sat on the floor of a secondhand bookstore somewhere on the coast of Ireland, listening to this 65-year-old stranger read her favourite line from my favourite book out loud to me like a prayer, an affirmation, the kind of magic that happens in a dream, ‘Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.’

I read her mine, ‘If you are happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count? Estha asked. “Does what count?” “The happiness does it count?’ 

Cindy let me keep Elise’s postcard. I gave her four euros for the Picador book and thought about Estha and Arundhati Roy on the walk back as the sun evaporated across the scaling Cliffs of Moher. I began to wonder if the happiness I felt with my burrito in hand on Abbey Street, or lying on my back next to the girl I liked, listening to Dean Martin in the dark, or sitting cross-legged on the Turkish rug walled in by decades of stories in a bookstore by the sea, would last me all the way back to Mumbai, or to a summer afternoon years from that moment. 

On my last weekend in the city, I bought a waistcoat. The pleats hung loosely around my chest, but it almost fit perfectly. Perhaps I would grow into it or learn to like how it fits over time. I walked back from Grafton where a loose weave of low-hanging string lights fingerpainted the road with spots of red, green and blue that crawled across the street each time the wind blew. The Fifa World Cup final was on and Argentina was winning, 2-0 when all of a sudden, the crowd gathered around the Spire began to shout. Mbape had just scored two goals in a matter of a few minutes. I stopped outside a pub to watch with the rest of O’Connell Street. The tension was palpable, everyone was waiting with bated breath for Argentina to take home the victory. 

Anusha and Ruhi were on their way back from the library. I sent them my location, and the three of us, arms interlinked, found our way to a spot near the front. We screamed with the crowd each time either team attempted a penalty shot. When Argentina scored the last goal that would earn them the winning title for the first time since 1986, people went wild and I began to cry. It was overwhelming knowing I only had one night left in this beautiful city, and second, feeling so full of friendship and one euro donuts that the idea of settling for a smaller life, a box, a past self was for the first time, impossible. I was deathly afraid of satiating my appetite because, where do you go from there? 

I juggled an unfamiliar catharsis, not knowing whether or not to let the light in, but I was wearing my waistcoat and there was a half-rainbow in the sky. It was like Roy wrote, ‘The bleached bones of a story’. What felt like the threat of personhood, was really the overwhelming possibility of contentment. I couldn’t think of anything as simultaneously terrifying and liberating as the ache of it, the torture of the becoming.