How It Is

Short Story by Nidhi Arora

A writer’s surreal dreams of Lord Ganesh offering magical but flawed gifts parallel her struggles with writing and a strained relationship.

By Nidhi Arora — About everything and nothing

Image source: public.work

That night, again he came into my dream. His crimson dhoti looked more orange in the yellow light in my room. He wore a matching garnet necklace that went all the way down to his belly and a fine line of shimmer down his trunk, so fine, you’d almost miss it, except, you wouldn’t. From somewhere within the many folds of his dhoti, Moushak leapt out and ran into my bedroom, his nails scurrying on my marble, setting my teeth on edge.

Ganeshji looked around my room. His eyes rested briefly on the bowl of now-cold dal-chawal on my desk before looking away.

From another fold of his dhoti, he pulled out a pen and offered it to me. It was a fountain pen, exactly like the one Amit had given me that evening, except it was light grey instead of turquoise and the phoenix was black. The nib was pristine and perfectly round.

“It’s a magic pen,” he said. His voice was soft but came with surround-sound effects.

“Does it write well?” I asked. I met new pens with a mix of excitement and scepticism.

“Like butter. You’ll have trouble stopping.”

I scribbled my signature on the last page of my notebook. He wasn’t exaggerating. It was smooth. Probably the smoothest pen I had ever held between my fingers. The scribbles flowed and flowed, almost on their own, pulling my hand along to keep up.

He waddled over to my dining table and examined the fruit tray. He carried his ample figure with grace, his anklets jingling shyly. He threw the rotting banana in the bin, proceeded to open the fridge and found the mithai dabba. There was a half-eaten besan laddoo. A baby cockroach climbed out of the box.

“Thank you,” I said. “I needed something like this. Maybe this will unlock my words.”

“It will. You can write forever with this, the ink won’t run out…” He sniffed the laddoo, inspected it from all sides and put it in his mouth gingerly.

“Ever?”

“Mmm…hmmm.” The laddoo must’ve melted on this tongue, sealing his mouth from the inside.

“Magical indeed,” I said. I drew wavy lines in my notebook.

“That’s not the magic though,” he said. He walked over and lowered himself onto the bed beside me. He hesitated before adding, “It has an eraser.”

I looked at the top, bottom, inside the cap, no eraser.

“It’s invisible,” he said. “And erases the good bits.”

I looked at him. He did not make eye contact.

“I can write them again?” I offered. It was a good pen. I wanted to keep it.

“It will erase them again…anything that reads well, and leave the rest on the page.”

“So I’ll be left with reams of mediocre writing?”

He nodded without looking at me. 

“And that helps me how?” I didn’t bother hiding my irritation.

“You wanted to write...”

“Yes, and I want to write well, stuff that people will want to read. They won’t be able to read what they don’t see unfortunately. Some of us are mere mortals here.”

He stared at his feet. They were pedicured. It was a deep maroon, the colour of red wine on a sunny winter afternoon. Like my Lakme Fearless. In fact, it was Fearless.

His face fell, then brightened again. “I can tweak it, you will write well, but not so many words. Will that be better?”

“That’s what I do right now, thank you very much.”

His face fell. “Sorry, this is all I have.”

He rose with a sigh and summoned Moushak with a squeak. Moushak came out of my bedroom, a large cockroach in its mouth.

“I don’t bring meat in the house,” he said, getting defensive, “But he’s allowed outside.”

I dismissed it, grateful for the free pest-control. Moushak climbed into a fold of his dhoti.

I gave him the pen back. Ganeshji cast a last look around my room and stepped out of the window. I followed him to see where he went. There was no sign, except for an orange sari drying on the balcony below mine.

***

I could tell if Amit had had a bad day by the number of questions he shot at me about mine. Here we were, at Cinnamon, another café we hadn’t tried before, him asking me, again, how I planned to finish my draft if I spent all my time editing other people’s work. The real problem, of course, was his own soul-crushing job and his boss, who refused to acknowledge his existence. There was an opening in the Mumbai team that he wanted to apply for without her knowing.

“Why don’t you just tell her?” I asked.

“And face her wrath?”

“She’ll find out anyway, sooner or later,” I said. “She might appreciate the honesty and maybe she’ll appreciate you more.”

“That’s not how corporate world works,” he said. “I need to negotiate the package before she gets to know. Plus I don’t really want to leave you. Who will keep track of yours words?”

He meant it helpfully, like a mentor. But I couldn’t remember the last time I had put in even one hundred, let alone five hundred a day, a magic number that he had stumbled upon somewhere on the internet in his research for writing advice.

The problem was not what to write. I had the idea. It was a nebulous one, but it was there. The protagonist is faced with impossible choices. She is in love with her drunk maths professor. She can either go for her PhD and become a professor like him, or stay back and marry him. She cannot have both. She wants the clean-cut world of theoretical maths, but not without him. She wants him, but her mind will implode without the maths. She digs herself so deep into this pit of what-ifs that she can no longer see the things in front of her. There was a whole book in this idea, but I just couldn’t make a headway into the opening scene. Once in a while a good line would pop in my head and I would put it on paper, which was about as effective as buying a duster to clean the house.

“Plus it will take you a while to join me there,” meanwhile Amit was going on.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. We had been together for four years now. The thrill of him picking me up from my office in Gurgaon and driving all the way to Rajouri Garden was beginning to wane and we were running out of things to talk on phone about for the hour it took him to get his own room in Noida. He never forgot a birthday or an anniversary, discovered new cafes for us to explore, listened while I whined about the self-important writers I worked with. There was not a new pen in the market that he had not gifted me.

But his constant nagging colored everything a flaccid grey. I wanted to tell him that I looked forward to going to bed these days, to meeting Ganeshji, but I knew he wouldn’t get it, he’d ask what was the point of it, it was just a dream, that I should not waste time on things that are not there. So I said nothing about it. Nor about the fact that I still hadn’t broached the subject of a transfer to Mumbai with my boss.

That night, Ganeshji came in a beige dhoti. He was missing his earlier ebullience. He waddled over to my fridge while Moushak headed straight to my room.

He pursed his lips at what was in the fridge, which was foul smelling milk and the end slices of bread. He walked past the dining table and over to my window sill to inspect a plushie of himself, another not-so-subtle gift from Amit. But even the god of beginnings had not been able to help me with the beginning of my novel. He studied his ow replica, flicked off the dust with a finger, slowing down he felt around the belly.

“Do you think this is a realistic rendering?” He looked at me earnestly, urgently.

I saw him sucking his belly in, ever so slightly.

“No way,” I said, waving his worry away. “It’s a plushie, it’s meant to be soft and cuddly.”

He wasn’t convinced. He then walked over to my nail paint collection. He examined all the bottles and started sorting them, keeping the dry ones on one side. To the slightly thickening ones, he added a bit of remover and shook them. He picked Mustard Master and came over to where I was and lowered himself onto the bed.

“Could I…?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. It matched his dhoti perfectly.

“I have something for you too,” he said. He handed me a pair of brown shades. “Wear them and all good things happen to you.”

There was no brand, no fancy case, but the shape was decent. It sounded too good to be true.

“But…?”

“You won’t remember any of it,” he said apologetically.

“You mean, I’ll be happy in the moment, but later when I try to recall it…” I went on, hoping he’d run with it.

He didn’t elaborate.

“I won’t remember it?”

He nodded emphatically, approving of my grasp of the deal at hand.

“So what will I remember? Nothing?” Was he offering to erase memory altogether? Or time?

“Everything,” he mumbled, “except the good parts.”

“Meaning I’ll be left with a stack of bad memories?” Best to confirm.

He lowered his head, trunk cradled in his hands.

“This is exactly like that pen, you just changed words to memories. You think we are idiots, or what?”

“You’ll live a good life. Just that you won’t remember it. It’s not a bad deal, would you at least consider it?”

Like a sasta door-to-door salesman who knows his products are third class, he persisted without hope. “I can tweak it if you’re not happy with it. Would you rather have bad stuff happen and not remember it?”

“Why does everything you come up with have to be like this?” I almost shrieked.

He shrugged. “That’s just how it is.”

He looked so despondent that I offered him a zero-sugar protein bar from my bag. He read the ingredients and didn’t look sure. I broke off a little piece and asked him to try it, just to taste. He obliged me, but politely refused the rest of it.

***

Amit accepted the transfer, although it wasn’t an attractive offer. All day, everyone at work kept congratulating him and he kept getting irritated. We were in a café called Coffee and Conversations. Their coffee was bitter and our conversation was not turning out to be very different. I tried asking when he would go, where they would put him temporarily, but any talk of Mumbai only made him more cross.

Instead, he started off. When was I going to ask my boss about moving to Mumbai? What was my word count looking like? What was I doing with a 20 rupee no-name ball-point pen, where was the fountain pen he gave me last week? When I told him I dropped it and dented the nib, he lost it.

He said I didn’t value anything he gave me, anything he did for me. It wasn’t the things, it was him that I didn’t like. He had asked for this transfer so he could earn more, so I could write, but it was not going to work if I didn’t do my share, was it?

I said this was not so, that I did appreciate him, his gifts and gestures, that I enjoyed editing, helping writers polish their work. Mumbai had never been my idea, but he had my support.

That made him all the more livid. For the first time in four years, he said he wouldn’t be able to drop me home today. He needed to go back to work on his handover. I said it was no problem, at which he banged his cup of unfinished coffee on the saucer, paid for both of us and stormed out.

He stormed back in to say that he would drop by on Sunday to collect all these things at my place, including all the pens he had given me. In fact, not just pens, all gifts, ever.

I sat there, caressing my bitter drink. The curtains were light blue sheer. They blew wistfully to the instrumental music. This was as idyllic as things could get. I took the poor, maligned ball-point pen and started scribbling on my napkin. When mine filled up, I wrote on Amit’s.

One of the waiters cleared my table and quietly left a stack of fresh napkins for me. From the corner of my eye, I thought I spotted Mustard Master on his fingernails, but I dared not take my eyes off my writing. I wrote without reading, without even thinking of what I was writing, only focusing on letting my brain talk to my hand. It felt good to see my fingers move that way. I wrote about Ganeshji’s spurious deals, about how I hadn’t seen the resident cockroach family in the last few days, about overpriced coffee, about how it might be a good thing for Amit and me to be apart for some time.

I ordered a vanilla shake and wrote about my protagonist as she visualised her life as a probability tree and followed one branch of it, where she was the professor’s wife. She watched herself making his home as he went to teach, his sonorous theorems echoing in classrooms far, far away, farther than they used to be, the distance between them growing more than she liked, she following him to college to prove a theorem of her own and finding she was correct, when was she not, him looking wistfully at a professor in a grey sari, sitting with her back to the maths department entrance, a very familiar grey sari, too familiar, her own grey sari.

The protagonist tiptoes in and around the big, round table to catch this sari-stealing professor’s face, but she needn’t have bothered for the professor turns to face her and she finds herself looking at herself from the branch of the probability tree, a logical impossiblity.

I wrote till my fingers hurt. It was good stuff. There was more that needed to be written about math metaphors and life conundrums. I switched to my right hand. It managed surprisingly well, but it was much slower and cramped easily. The café was about to close. The waiter had changed out of his uniform and was headed out, helmet in hand. I tipped him and went to the loo. When I came back, the tissues had been cleared away.

That night when Ganeshji came, I was ready with a bowl of cashews, walnuts, almonds, pistachios and raisins. He settled on my bed cross-legged, picked out the raisins with his trunk and delivered them to his mouth slowly, one by one. He put my nail polish between us and cleared his throat.

“How about a nail polish that never finishes,” he said, mustering some old enthusiasm in his voice. “Not just any nail polish, one that can become whatever shade you want it to become.” He looked at me proudly. He had obviously put in thought in this one. “The only bottle you’ll ever need.” He said, cheerily, jingle-like.

I wondered how I’d say no without breaking his heart.

“It could even auto-select, if you want. It can detect what colours you’re wearing and change on its own. Hain?!”

I walked to the dining to choose my words and brought him a banana. He was looking at me expectantly, like his happiness depended on me taking his deal.

“Let me guess…no one else can see it?” I asked.

“You’re not going to take it, are you?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Thank you,” I said, squeezing his hand, “but I’m ok. And you can keep this one, it looks good on you.” I pushed the Mustard Master back toward him.

“You don’t like any of the deals?”

“I’m sorry, no,” I said, as gently as I could. “But I enjoy seeing you and Moushak.”

“I enjoyed coming here too,” he said. He turned, put his legs down, raised himself with effort. “It’s not ripe yet,” he said, giving me back the banana. “Wait for it to become spotty.”

“You keep it,” I pressed it back in his hands.

Moushak emerged from my room empty-mouthed and climbed into the lowest fold of the dhoti.

“Thanks for everything,” he said.

“See you soon,” I said.

He looked at me like I had said something stupid.

“What?”

“I can’t,” he said.

“If I don’t take on of your deals, you can’t visit me? Why?”

“That’s how it is,” he said. He took one last look at the fridge, nodded to me, and walked out of the window.

About Nidhi

Nidhi has lived in India, Singapore and now London, but far prefers to inhabit the world of words. Her work has been featured in journals and anthologies including Best New Singaporean Short Stories, Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, Out of Print, Sonder, The Aleph Review, The Hooghly Review, Cha – An Asian Literary Journal, Muse India, Pluto and Tinkle. Her debut novel, The Lights of Shantinagar is coming out in June 2025.

To read some of Nidhi's work, please visit: https://linktr.ee/nidhiarorawrites

To pre-order her book, please visit: https://unbound.com/products/the-things-we-see