Subway or Nobu?

TW: mention of sexual assault and police violence

I’ve been to Nobu, and I didn’t have to pay a penny. It’s because I met one of my exes in Chicago after our breakup. He went to a university in Indiana for undergrad, and I was at a university in Wisconsin. Within the first month of the first year, we decided to meet. We were still broken up then, but we thought, oh, why not meet one last time? We were in a grey area, sort of, after the breakup, where we really liked each other but didn’t want to date each other because it would be long-distance. This went on till November. Anyway, when we met in September. One of his friends was then celebrating his birthday at Nobu, and he invited all of us. So he asked me if I wanted to have Subway or Nobu. I didn’t even know what Nobu was then, nor did I care about it. Well, Subway in India and Subway in the US are really different. The meat isn’t flavorful enough in the US, and I didn’t know which sauces to put in my sub. At that point, I had only had Subway once before in the US. I tried Teriyaki Chicken with honey mustard and mustard, and it was nasty. I had the perfect Subway order in India: toasted bread with cheese, Tandoori Chicken, and basically all the garden vegetables they had to offer, with honey mustard and mustard. Clearly, I hadn’t perfected the Subway order in the US. So I still wondered, then Subway or Nobu? Subway also meant spending more time alone with him, we’d also get to walk around after and talk. Nobu meant meeting his college friends, while being in a grey area, so how should I act, ‘couplely’ or friendly? Well, I couldn’t make a decision, so he made the decision that Nobu made sense, or else his friend would have felt bad for missing his birthday. Honestly, I wouldn’t have ever gotten to try Wagyu Beef if it wasn’t for that decision, let alone have a fully paid for multi-course meal at Nobu. So, through my indecision, I somehow chose the taste of Wagyu Beef over spending more time alone with him. It was a fun night, though, but maybe I should have chosen Subway, because I didn’t know then that it would be the last time I would ever see him.

I have mostly been in bad relationships. I don’t have good ones to look back at, as much as I wish that I did. Well, this was the only nice one that I’d ever been in. But again, whenever I bring this up, my best friend starts to laugh, and I get it. We all grew up together in school, started dating during COVID-19, and met only about 6 times. To be fair, I ran out of words to explain what it felt like. He wasn’t even my first everything, and that doesn’t specifically matter to me, but a lot of people feel this form of attachment to someone who is their first everything, I suppose.

It’s weird getting into a relationship, right as COVID-19 started. India had a strict lockdown at the time. There were many WhatsApp forwards going around, one of them being of police hitting people with lathis, bamboo sticks, if they were found walking around for no specific reason. Also, another WhatsApp forward that was going around was of the police making people do uthak baithak, which is essentially squatting but used as a form of punishment, sometimes. We warned my mom about this, but she still broke the rules and went running at 4 am because she couldn’t stand a day without exercising. No one would be outside at this time, so she got lucky. She would say that the WhatsApp forwards should be taken with a grain of salt. At the same time, my aunt, who is a doctor, started talking about how people were taking the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. The early days of COVID-19 were weird. One day, people came out onto their balconies and banged pots and pans for 10 minutes to show support for healthcare workers.

Schools became online. We didn’t really study anything in the classes. Most of the teachers wouldn’t care whether our video was on or off, so most of us would turn it off and sleep during classes, especially the morning ones. Getting into a relationship during this time, when life immediately feels so dystopian, is weird. Will the world ever be normal? What is the new normal?

My grandparents moved to Thane at this point, and I was displaced from my room to the living room. My parents, my grandparents, and my brother each got a room. But even then, at night, I’d call him, sometimes talk really softly, or sit on the balcony and talk so no one could hear us, I’d let mosquitoes bite me just to talk to him.

It started with the calls that went on for an hour, then longer, I think the longest that time was probably four. We were just friends. At that point, ‘we’re not really strangers’ didn’t exist. That game feels very juvenile now, anyway, so I don’t know what resource we used or how we found those types of questions, but we’d ask each other those daily. I guess, in some ways, this orchestrated that emotional intimacy, and we started to know each other really deeply. I mean, mostly, I was really interested in getting to know him, so even after those questions, I’d have more questions come up in my head, and I’d keep asking. He didn’t really have as many questions about me, though, but I didn’t mind that. I don’t really like talking about myself. The more I got to know him, the closer I felt, I could hear myself sounding sillier on calls with him.

So I got the courage to tell him I have feelings for him, and he admitted he has for me too. The next day, I asked him on a video call if he wanted to date me and told him I’m in love with him. He didn’t say that he was in love with me, too, but that’s okay. I was just expressing my feelings towards him. Really forward of me, I must say. He said he needed a day to think about it, and I’m like, fine. I wasn’t really anxious. I knew he’d say yes. At that point, I remember he sent me a post on Instagram, something about being a Marvel fan and how dating someone who was a Marvel fan too would be really incredible. I admitted to him that I’m not a Marvel fan, and he jokingly said that he’s now a 50% unsure about dating me. Well, anyway, I got my answer then, and we started dating. But we decided this relationship would only last until the end of school, and that we’d break up before we both had to leave for university.

For the first month, I joked around, but with some seriousness, I told him, “Let this be a trial period, to see if we are even compatible before telling our friends.” So that’s what we did, and by the end of that month, he realised that he loved me too, and then we told our friends about each other. My best friend wasn’t surprised. They saw it coming.

The relationship was almost entirely based on words, spoken over calls and in texts. After a point, there’s only so much that there is to talk about during COVID-19. The days were almost the same for both of us, quite stagnant. So we watched a lot of things together: movies, shows, and YouTube. It was comforting.

But then came our first disagreement, when I had to choose whether to stay in the relationship. And this was really tied to the Hathras rape and murder case. This case sparked a lot of conversation online about rape culture and how pervasive it is in India, especially. Many people shared their experiences on social media. And, I shared mine too. And, he was friends with the guy who sexually assaulted me, because we went to the same school, and the guy who sexually assaulted me got away with no consequences whatsoever. So we spoke, I cried, and told him I don’t know if I can date him knowing he is friends with him. But, at the same time, I couldn’t ask him to choose between him and me. It seemed unfair. They had known each other since kindergarten, and we just started dating. I decided to continue dating him because, anyway, we’d break up in two years. He eventually stopped being friends with him within that month.

Things started to open up a bit in India, and after a point, we could go meet people. So we thought: finally, let’s meet. We had known each other for years before that, but I was still nervous to meet him because I knew him differently now. So when we met, it was a combination of how we knew each other as friends in school before dating, and also how we’d talk on calls and in texts.

Time was moving quickly. We had a few schools in common on our list, but we weren’t even considering attending the same university. We never talked about a future together. We spoke about a future where we were seeing other people.

Then came the delta wave in India. Everything was closed down again. The delta wave was scary and ominous. The names we heard now of people passing away were more familiar. I had joined multiple WhatsApp and Instagram groups and, whenever I could go online, scoured Twitter for oxygen cylinders for people who needed them. There just weren’t enough resources. So many lives just lost. The healthcare system in India was at its breaking point. It was all getting to me.

At the same time, I was on a cocktail of medicines. I used to have chronic migraines, about five days a week, since I was 10. They somehow went away after I moved to the US, possibly because of this treatment. I’ve grown up being in pain, though, mostly. So the neurologist at that time tested all the different medicines, a few migraine ones, and a combination of antidepressants, which were also used to treat migraines. One ENT, ear-nose-throat, specialist also diagnosed me with TMD, temporomandibular disorder, and prescribed anti-anxiety medicines. So this cocktail of medicines, whether it was chronic migraine, TMD, or anything else, started really affecting me. Many days, I would wake up, stay in bed, not having the energy to get out, and cry all day, and I wouldn’t have any reasoning for why I was feeling how I was feeling.

So, through all of this, the calls at night with him or the messages felt really soothing. He wouldn’t really understand what I was feeling like, or even understand who I was as a person, and I didn’t expect him to, but just knowing that there was someone out there who was there for me was enough.

A few months before the day we decided to break up, I thought maybe we should go our separate ways, because being with someone when you constantly feel sad is a lot. Why would they choose to spend time with me, who is almost always sad, when they could be spending time with someone else who is much happier? He said that we’d break up anyway, a couple of months after, so why not just stay together till then, so we’d still be there for each other, and I guess, that was a fair point, then.

So things were opening up again in the two months leading up to our breakup. We’d only met twice before, and we met four times during those two months. In one of those times, I smoked my first cigarette with him. The second-to-last time we met was really fun. I never romanticise Mumbai rains, but we walked around a lot in Powai in the rain, jumped into the puddles too, and ate Subway together. So we broke up, the last time we met. I gave him a handmade gift to remember me by, and he gave me his hoodie as I was sitting in the auto.

Perhaps we should have stopped talking after the breakup, because it would have been the best way to end the relationship and remember it by, but we continued talking and got into a grey area. We tried to stay in it as long as possible, till one day in October. I did something that hurt him, and I didn’t even expect that it would hurt him. He still wanted to be in the grey area after that, but now, with the guilt, I needed to know whether this was going somewhere, so I asked him if he wanted to be with me. He said no. He wanted to keep talking, but I just couldn’t talk to him, so I cut him off, and when I reached out to him months later, he didn’t want to talk anymore. So we stopped talking completely.

It hurt for a while after. Did what everyone does after a breakup: stayed in bed for days, cried a lot, and went on a dating spree, added songs to our Spotify playlist, hoping he’d see. But, I guess the hardest pill to swallow was that he didn’t want to talk to me at all, and making peace with that. Time really helped with that.

I’ve changed so much as a person since then. The thought has crossed my mind, what it could have been like, but in reality, if I am the person that I am today, we wouldn’t have lasted, because now, when I think about it, even then, the calls and the messages masked how fundamentally different we were as people. But I’m grateful to have the feeling that there was someone out there when I really needed it.

For a while, I’ve questioned what love feels like, and I guess, you just know it, and I knew it then.