Chapter 2: Prince Charming Aur Main

## Chapter 2: Prince Charming Aur Main

ZARA

After my shift, I toss my apron into the bin, sling my jhola over my shoulder, and step outside into the October Pune air. The air that can't decide if it's still monsoon or already winter and has therefore settled on a humid compromise that makes my hair look like I've been electrocuted by a cloud.

My flat is a twelve-minute walk from Rustom's. There are three different routes I could take, and I let fate, specifically, a random number generator on my phone that I've named "Kismet"; choose which one.

Today Kismet picks three. The long route, through the lanes behind Ferguson College, past the wadas with their carved wooden balconies and the old peepal tree where someone has tied a hundred red threads and nobody can remember why.

My phone rings. Lavanya's ringtone, "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai," because my sister is nothing if not on-the-nose.

"Are you on your way home? Stop and get milk. And dahi. And that green chutney from Chavan Kaka's stall, he closes at seven."

"Thanks, Lavanya," I say, making my voice as appreciative as I can manage for a person who is being parented by someone exactly fourteen months older than her. I love my sister. I miss my sister. I do not love or miss her belief that I will perish of malnutrition without her supervision.

A pause. "You're not going to stop and get it, are you?"

"Nahi!"

She sighs. Lavanya's signature sigh, the one she has been deploying since I was three and will, I am certain, sigh at me from the afterlife. "Because you're a twenty-four-year-old adult woman who doesn't need her didi telling her what to do?"

"And?"

"And you've been living without me for six months and you've been managing milk and dahi and chutney on your own."

"Exactly."

This is mostly true. I forget more often than not. But whether or not I eat my cornflakes dry is my problem, not hers.

"But listen," I say, "this is only the second time this week you've bossed me around. That's progress. I think you deserve a gold star."

She laughs. I laugh. And then neither of us laughs, because the laughter covers the thing we don't say, which is that I miss her with a constancy that surprises me; surprises me because I am a person who loves change, who adores the unexpected, who would happily move to a new city every six months just to see what the chai tastes like there. But I am not a person who loves the specific change of her best friend moving a four-hour drive away to Nagpur because she married a man named Sachin who works for an IT company and who, I am forced to admit, makes her happier than I have ever seen her.

We chat until I reach my building — a three-storey walk-up in Deccan, the kind of building where the staircase smells of phenyl and everyone's cooking and the specific Pune fragrance of proximity.

Six months ago, Lavanya and I were sitting on my bed in our shared flat, eating Maggi at 11 PM, and I said, "I want someone to share my space with."

Lavanya raised one eyebrow. The eyebrow of an older sister who has Opinions.

"Someone to do things with," I continued. "Someone who's always up for going places. Someone who'll be happy to see me. Who'll miss me while I'm at work. Who won't judge me for eating Kurkure for breakfast."

"You mean someone who's not going to go off and marry a Sachin and move to Nagpur?"

"Exactly. So I've decided I need either a boyfriend or a dog."

She, the blissfully-in-love sister, voted for boyfriend.

I got the dog.

---

I knock on Pushpa Auntie's door; flat 2A, directly across the landing from mine. The door opens and Badshah launches himself at me with the velocity of a small, furry missile.

Badshah is a Indie dog, the kind of dog that Pune produces in quantities that suggest the city's secondary industry, after IT, is canine manufacturing. He's the colour of milky chai, with ears that stand up when he's excited and fold down when he's guilty, and a tail that rotates like a helicopter blade when he sees me. He's not a purebred anything. He's a mutt in the most magnificent sense of the word; a genetic collage of every dog that has ever lived in Deccan, assembled by evolution into a creature of perfect, chaotic joy.

I scoop him up. He licks my face with a desperation that has been separated from his person for eight hours and has spent those eight hours convinced she was never coming back.

"This chhota sa raja," Pushpa Auntie says, grabbing Badshah's face and rubbing his cheeks with the vigour of a woman kneading dough, "was a perfect gentleman today. We watched three episodes of CID together. He sat on the sofa and barked every time the inspector said 'Daya, darwaza tod do!' He has a future in crime investigation, I think."

Badshah, sensing he is being praised, sits tall in my arms with Badshah's open-mouthed grin, knowing he is the centre of at least two universes.

"Then we had biscuits together. His was a Parle-G, mine was also a Parle-G, because Parle-G is for everyone. Oh, let me send you the photos."

Pushpa Auntie pulls out her phone, a phone she operates with confident incompetence, certain technology exists to serve her and not the other way around. "My Parth says I should use the Google Photos. I call it the Googla. He says that's wrong but I tell him — arre, it's not a person, it doesn't care what I call it. And if the fun name is right there, why would you use the boring one?"

I set Badshah down. He runs three circles around my legs, the canine equivalent of a victory lap: and sits at my feet, looking up with an expression that communicates, with a clarity that human language cannot match, I have been waiting for you my entire life, which in dog perception is approximately seven hundred years.

I pull up the photos Pushpa Auntie shared. Badshah wearing a tiny vest that she's knitted. Badshah sitting at the dining table with a plate of biscuits. Badshah watching CID with an expression of intense concentration.

"Pushpa Auntie, you should start an Instagram for him."

"Insta-what? Beta, at my age, the only gram I care about is the one the doctor measures my sugar in."

I hug her, thank her for giving Badshah such a good day, and cross the landing to my flat.

My flat is small. This is Pune: every flat is small, and the ones that aren't small are in Baner, which is technically Pune the way Pluto is technically a planet. My flat has one bedroom, a kitchen the size of an afterthought, a bathroom where you can simultaneously shower and reach the toilet (a feature the landlord described as "efficient"), and a living room that is half dog toys and half craft projects in various states of completion.

I take my hair down. The curls, freed from the bun that has been containing them like a dam contains a river; explode in every direction with the enthusiasm of things that have been repressed and are now expressing themselves.

I fill Badshah's bowl. While he eats, I grab the leftover paneer bhurji from the fridge and eat it standing up, because I am twenty-four and I go to work early and I get hungry early and a hungry Zara is a Zara that nobody, not even Badshah — wants to be around.

When I finish, I sit on the floor with Badshah and say, "What are we doing today?"

He barks. Badshah's opinion bark, loud and specific.

I grab a piece of paper and a marker. This is our ritual, I write options, Badshah chooses. He has an eighty percent success rate of choosing "Walk" or "Dog Park," which is either impressive decision-making or predictable Badshah behaviour, given his two favourite activities are walking and the dog park.

"Okay. Options. One: walk. Two: finish the jhumka earrings I started making from polymer clay. Three: dog park." Badshah's ears go up. "Four: research new cities to live in. I'm thinking Pondicherry. Good food, art scene, the beach." His ears go down. "Five: cook something complicated. Maybe a chocolate lava cake."

I place the paper on the floor. Badshah studies it with the intensity of a CA student studying a balance sheet. He walks around it. Sniffs each option. Makes a show of deliberation.

Then he puts his paw on "Dog Park."

Predictable. Magnificent. Correct.

---

The dog park is in the garden behind the old Kelkar Museum: a square of grass surrounded by trees that is, by unspoken agreement, the place where Deccan's dogs conduct their social affairs. It is eight minutes from my flat, and Badshah walks it in six because he has Badshah's distinct determination, every second not spent at the dog park is a second wasted.

We arrive. Badshah is off the leash and into the social ecosystem of the park within four seconds: greeting a Labrador he knows, sniffing a German Shepherd he doesn't, performing the elaborate canine diplomacy that involves tail positions and ear angles and a vocabulary of sniffs that communicates more than most human conversations.

I sit on the stone bench near the gate. The evening is the exact Pune October evening — warm, golden, the light falling through the trees at an angle that makes everything look like a painting by an artist who has decided that the world deserves one more hour of beauty before darkness.

A man sits down on the other end of the bench.

I don't look at him immediately. I'm watching Badshah attempt to befriend a Pomeranian who is clearly not interested (the Pomeranian has someone who has been interrupted during an important meeting). But I notice the man in my peripheral vision; tall, well-built, the kind of person who takes up space on a bench not because he's large but because he's confident.

"Cute dog," the man says.

I look at him. He's maybe thirty, with a face that is handsome in the way that certain Bollywood villains are handsome. Sharp jawline, dark eyes, the kind of stubble that suggests he has a five o'clock shadow at noon. He's wearing a leather jacket, which in Pune in October is both unnecessary and a statement.

"Thanks," I say. "He's named Badshah."

"King. Good name." The man watches Badshah chase the Pomeranian (who is running away with the fury of a small creature whose personal space has been violated). "I'm Jai."

"Zara."

"Nice to meet you, Zara." He smiles. The smile is practised, not fake, exactly, but polished, the smile of someone who knows the effect of their own face and uses it with precision. "Do you come here often?"

I almost laugh. "Are you seriously opening with 'do you come here often'?"

"I am. It's a classic for a reason."

"It's a cliché for a reason."

"Fair point." His smile widens. "Let me try again. Do you live in the neighbourhood?"

"Deccan. You?"

"I'm not from here. Visiting. Work thing." He watches Badshah with an expression that is either genuine interest in dogs or an excellent performance of genuine interest in dogs. "What do you do, Zara?"

"I make chai. At Rustom's, on FC Road."

"Rustom's. The old place with the brass samovar?"

"That's the one."

"I've heard it's good."

"It's not good. It's the best chai in Pune. Possibly the best chai in Maharashtra. The samovar has been running since 1952 and the recipe hasn't changed in three generations."

He looks at me. The look is appraising — not the appraising look of a man checking out a woman (I know that look; it makes my skin crawl), but the appraising look of someone who is evaluating something. Assessing. Filing information.

"I'll have to come by," he says. "Maybe you can recommend something."

"The masala chai. Always the masala chai."

"I'll remember that."

He stands. The leather jacket creaks, actual leather, not the synthetic kind, the kind that costs money. He gives Badshah one last look, nods at me, and walks away. Not toward the park exit; toward the lane behind the museum, the lane that leads to the old part of Deccan where the wadas are and the streets narrow and the city remembers what it was before IT parks and glass towers.

I watch him go. Something about the interaction sits wrong, like a melody that's almost right but has one note off-key. He didn't ask for my number. He didn't linger. He gathered information, my name, my workplace, my neighbourhood; with the efficiency of someone filling out a form.

Badshah returns, panting, and pushes his head against my knee.

"What do you think, Badshah? Was that weird?"

He looks at me. That Badshah look, opinions about strangers but no vocabulary to express them.

"Yeah," I say. "That was weird."

But I'm a person who trusts the world — who believes, with the stubborn optimism of someone who has been disappointed often enough to know that optimism is a choice and not a condition, that most people are good and most encounters are harmless and most men in leather jackets at dog parks are exactly what they appear to be.

I clip Badshah's leash. We walk home.

The evening fades. Pune settles into its night-self: the city of students and engineers and old Irani restaurants and new glass towers, the city that was my sister's algorithmic recommendation and my accidental home, the city where I make chai every morning for a man named Omkar who has never once deviated from his order and who looks at me, when he thinks I'm not watching, like I am something he cannot account for.

I think about Omkar. About the saffron chai I made him. About the way his eyebrows rose when he tasted it: both of them, simultaneously, like a double sunrise.

I think about whether I should move. About Pondicherry, or Goa, or anywhere that isn't here, because here feels like waiting and I'm not sure what I'm waiting for.

I think about Lavanya. About the tent and the kite.

And I think about the man named Jai, who sat on a bench and asked me questions and walked away without looking back, and whose leather jacket smelled, when the breeze shifted, not of cologne but of something sharper; gun oil, maybe, or that metallic smell of someone carrying things they don't want you to see.

But that's probably just my imagination.

Probably.