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India Today
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- India Today
Dimple Kapadia: The return of romance
(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated November 30, 1985)In 1973 she was the miniskirt-wearing Bobby-girl of everyone's dream and the silver screen's teeny-bopper goddess who came, conquered and went away. And then life imitated art through a dramatic marriage with superstar Rajesh Khanna—twice her age at that time, a total eclipse from films, the birth of two beautiful daughters, a traumatic separation, and her rising mermaid-like from the sea this year, in Kapadia is one of the most gorgeous women on screen today. But how has the Bobby girl grown into womanhood over the years? What strange imprints of experience her eventful life has left on her face that the film-goers now find so compelling? As a teenager, she was part nymph, part imp. At age 28, it is still Dimple all right, but blended totally anew. How did it happen?The change is of course something that the Dimple Kapadia of today would not readily like to admit. Because for the past three years since her return to movieland, directors obsessively thought of her—in the words of Saagar's maker Ramesh Sippy—"as Bobby grown over the years". No wonder the hemline was lower, but the neckline too was lower. But, alas, the real Dimple Kapadia is no grown-up clone of either Bobby, the fisherman's daughter in the screen Mills and Boon story of Raj Kapoor, or Mona, the "grown-over-the-years" Bobby-girl cast as an innkeeper's daughter this time round. Dimple has acquired a totally new persona in her second incarnation. It is more elusive than the old one, more complex, and perhaps more now, spread-eagled over a huge grey boulder after climbing 1,500 feet in one burst up a hill 80 km from Bangalore on the Bangalore-Pune highway, at the location of Feroz Khan's blockbuster-in-the-making, Janbaaz, Dimple surveys her face before a shot in a heart-shaped looking glass, and says: "I think all my life's story is condensed in my face. It is neither innocent nor coy. It speaks volumes." It does no sugar-candy actress in Bombay's film and today has got so much of tautness tied up with so much of beauty. Khan looks through his camera once for a close-up of her near the climax of the film, and mumbles almost to himself: "No other girl has so much of pent-up aggression."But it is not aggression alone that makes Dimple Kapadia unique, for there are far more intertwined shades of expression under the layers of Max Factor on her face. Says Mahesh Bhatt, the new and subversive messiah of serious cinema in Bombay's entertainment industry: "Dimple Kapadia has gone through so much in her life that she need not read up the text books of method acting to play a real woman. She only has to be herself." The valuable compliment could not have been timelier. Bhatt announced last fortnight that Dimple was the heroine of his next film, Kaash, with Naseeruddin can't believe it. It is perhaps the most serious artistic challenge I have ever faced in my career," cooed Dimple as the offer filtered in through long-distance telephone from Bombay to the lavishly appointed farmhouse of Khan on the outskirts of Bangalore, where the Janbaaz unit is putting up. She was feeling higher than the top of the cliffs where all the unreal movies had taken her for shooting dance sequences through heavy filters. "I feel like doing a step right now, yeah, great heady feeling to know that I can play a real character at last, I mean someone who exists in flesh and blood, may be in the next house down the lane."In Dimple, the yearning to play the "real character at last" is perhaps the natural backlash to the event-filled, high-voltage life she has all along led. The first taste of its unreality comes off as soon as one steps into the overpoweringly decadent home of the Kapadias at Juhu in are no familiar stacks of doubtful trophies in the living-room: only rows upon rows of cutglasses, Belgian and not-so-Belgian, punctuated by peeled off plaster on which apathy and sea-wind have wrought strange cobweb patterns. It could indeed be the ideal set for The Cherry Orchard; one only has to imagine the sound of the falling axe. And the male members of the family, father Chunibhai and brother Suhail, are almost never to be vague reply is: they have gone abroad for treatment. The ailment is deliberately left unspecified. What is more important is the tomblike silence that surrounds the inmates of the house—mother Betty, who is perennially cagey, and her two sisters Simple and Reem, who would shy away from any conversation on their illustrious didi on the ground that she is "her own spokesperson.""The life and happiness in our house came to an end the day I and Rajesh got married," Dimple now reminisces almost clinically. And it was really a marriage on which some of the weirdest film scripts could have been written. Rajesh Khanna was 32 at that time, flush from the success of a string of chart busters, and Dimple, at 16 and preening her feathers after Bobby, was just waiting to be swept off her feet in a whirlwind came to know him well precisely seven days before the marriage. We were going together to Ahmedabad for some kind of a show on a chartered flight. He sat next to me all along but did not utter a word. Just as the flight was about to land, he turned towards me, looked hard into my eyes, and said he wanted me to marry him."There were very few young women then who could say no to the superstar's offer, for Rajesh was indeed at the zenith of his popularity. "What was I compared to him then? A one-trick pony!" But there were other reasons too for Dimple to be overawed by Khanna. Till end-1970, weeks before Raj Kapoor selected her for the role in Bobby, she had suppurating warts on her fingers which everybody took for fact family friend Raj Kapoor had one day come to their house to see her on hearing the rumour, and, according to Dimple, was so pleased to find that her affliction was indeed not leprosy that he at once decided to cast her as Bobby. "I really swung between the extremes. From the danger of being ostracised by the society, I almost overnight found myself as virtually the darling of the millions. I was thankful to my fate. So thankful that I could have accepted the hand of anybody at that moment."advertisementBut there was something oddly rebellious about Chunibhai himself, the scion of the family that owned the Killicks Nixon group of industries, who was driven out of the pack for his love of the horseflesh. But being a punter and a bookmaker was not what broke the camel's back. The wealthy Khoja family, which embraced Hinduism only with Chunibhai's father, Laljibhai, and which accepts the Agha Khan as its religious mentor even now, disowned Dimple's father the day he agreed to Raj Kapoor's proposal to let her sign for Bobby."When I was a child, my parents took me to Agha Khan, and he named me Ameena. Beautiful name, it means the dignified one". The marriage with Rajesh Khanna was hopelessly one-sided and almost totally lacking in dignity. Khanna put a ban on her acting career promptly after the marriage. But that was the time when, in the wake of Bobby's success, incredibly lucrative offers were coming her way, one of them being to play the leading role for the movie great Manmohan Desai."They were offering me Rs 5 lakh for a film in those days," she says. If true, it was decidedly the highest rate in the industry at that time paid to women artistes and only marginally less than the fees Dimple reportedly commands now—Rs 6 lakh."I was too young to realise the importance of Bobby for my career, but from the day I entered Rajesh's house, Ashirwad, I somehow knew that the marriage wouldn't work." Life at the oddly spacious Bandra bungalow, overlooking the sea, was full of experiences that seem like harrowing nightmares to Dimple now. Most notable of them was the arrival of "my first rival"—a glamorous star of the times—on the third month of the marriage."I was not in the least bothered by the procession of women who walked into Rajesh's life thereafter, but the marriage was certainly not based on any equality. It was a farce, but it took me such a hell of a long time to realise that!" Ironically, the slide-back in Rajesh's career also began with the the resounding success of Aradhana, Anand, Aap Ki Kasam, all released between 1969 and 1973, his career graph began finally dipping with Namak Haram, where Amitabh Bachchan, the man who would finally take over the mantle from him, was aided by the script to outshine him Daulat Duniya, Prem Kahani, Mahachor, Bundlebaaz—the bombs piled upon each other. "It was my first encounter in life with failure," Dimple says. "When a successful man goes to pieces, his frustration engulfs the entire surroundings. It was a pathetic sight when Rajesh waited at the end of the week for collection figures but the people didn't have the guts to come and tell him."There was an upheaval in the house every day, and almost every night battle scenes were being enacted. After their separation, the film press in Bombay even reported acts of gross sadism, such as Dimple being subjected to cigarette burns and whipping. No one denied the reports."I left the house thrice earlier, but every time I went back home I felt sorry about the whole thing and came back. Both Rajesh and I were unable to accept the failure of our marriage. But I realised I wouldn't survive as a human being if I lived there any longer. I got totally neurotic because I was prepared to do go to any extreme ...only in order to extract a smile from him."The most widely publicised marriage of the early '70s between Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia thus virtually came to an end when, one day in April 1982, Dimple, accompanied by her two daughters, Twinkle and Pinkie, then aged eight years and five years respectively, arrived in her parents' home, determined not to go back this time. Dimple was at last prepared to put up a fight. She had already negotiated with Sippy for the role in Saagar, paving the way for her Rajesh and Dimple are still fighting in court over virtually every issue: the custody of the children, alimony, share of property, share of investments, "for a share of even the most insignificant thing that we ever possessed between ourselves."Dimple admits of having an involvement with another person during the period that her marriage with Rajesh had lasted. "It was a selfish involvement. I was experimenting with myself. I had to. I wanted to find out what was wrong with me as a woman." She puts up a brave front, but the separation must have left her a very insecure person. And she never got over her sense of guilt for having been the cause for her family's being cast off by her grandfather, and then the humiliating raids complete with metal detectors and sniffer dogs. Chunibhai reportedly became a changed man afterwards, withdrawn into a shell, and shy of company. "I was the favourite child," Dimple chokingly says, "and everything went wrong in my life."Saagar, Lava, Patal Bhairvai, Arjun, Manzil—Dimple has been deluged with work ever since her return to films. And, in the three years, she and Rajesh have done their best to make sure that they don't have to run into each other. It is only early this year, during the dubbing of Lava, that they met on the staircase of the dubbing studio. "He looked pale and thin. I invited him for a cup of tea and he said he'd come. But 15 minutes later, when I enquired, I was told that he was gone."However, Dimple is not nostalgic but regretful for having taken so much in her stride, "having suffered at the hand of blind emotion, and inertia". But the gap of 10 long years has landed her up in the new realities of the film industry which has only lately emerged out of a long period of absolute male domination and is again on the lookout for faces, lovely feminine faces, well-scrubbed and glamorous, which can set the wheels of moviedom in motion all over Kapoor, Dimple's co-actor in Janbaaz, reveried: "She is the most beautiful woman on screen since Madhubala." That may or may not be true, with a close contender like Rekha still being around. But it was left to Perez Khan, whose Qurbani hooked the nation on to disco fever and the pretty face of Zeenat Aman a few years ago, to give vent to the most accurate assessment of Dimple: "You look at her on a long shot. You see a good body, but there are many such that you're sure to find all around. Move the camera closer. Well, a remarkable face, something that always seems freshly washed, but made somewhat alien-looking with that longish nose of hers and the watery eyes. But now look at her big close-up. It is not at all the face of a woman who is acting her part: she is a woman who is just dying to be herself on screen."In an industry dominated by its cerebral Shabana Azmis and highly paid mannequins like Jaya Prada and Sridevi, Dimple Kapadia is the unabashed announcement of a return of to India Today MagazineTrending Reel
Newsroom
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
Anzac weekend short story: Toxic, by Michelle Duff
When she walked dripping into the lounge, hair wet from the shower, she took one look at Hamish and dropped her towel. He was holding her phone. —How long has it been going on for? His blue eyes blazed. She wanted to pluck them out and blow on them gently, cool them off. But the messages were there, and he had read them. It was too late for niceties. —Has what been going on? She was scrabbling around on the ground for her towel. Her hand wouldn't work. She dropped it again, banged her head on the bookshelf, hard. It brought tears to her eyes. Ouch. —Are you alright? He wasn't looking at her. Lovely, generous Hamish, couldn't help being nice even when his slutty girlfriend had taken his heart and ripped it clean in half, then stomped it all over the floor to leave a Rorschach ink splot that read she's fucking crazy, bro. Leave her. —I thought you didn't like Anton? —I don't. —So why are you—wait—so fucking wet for him? Roz felt sick. —Hamish, don't. I'm not. —Aren't you? Because it seems you love it when his dick gets hard for you—or has that changed since . . . last week? Really, Roz? Here, let me remind you . . . —No. Roz put her hand over her face as Hamish pushed the phone towards her, the screen bloated with a giant picture of Anton's erection. God, it was obscene. When he read the texts out loud, they sounded like a child's attempt at Mills and Boon. She really didn't even like Anton. His back was always sweaty and sometimes after sex he smelled like burnt crumpets. It was disarming. And he liked Coldplay. Ugh. Why would she fuck such a sicko? She wrapped her arms around herself, tight. —Ham, I— He had thrown her phone away and was sitting on the couch, his head in his hands. —I can't do this anymore, Roz. She kneeled in front of him, took his wrists. He didn't look at her, but he didn't pull away either. She stroked his forearm. —I'm so sorry, okay? I'm so so sorry. It didn't mean anything. It was just—stupid. It was fucking stupid. You know I haven't been myself lately and— He didn't leap up off the couch. He didn't yell. But when he looked up, the eyes which had once searched her—had told her yes, I believe you hold infinite depths, had held her in their warmth while he filled her emptiness with the length of him, as she dug her fingernails into his skin and begged him to stop, cried out, no, please, yes—had turned to ice. She knew then it didn't matter what she said, and also that she couldn't live without him, she couldn't. The world they'd created together could not just be shattered like this, so easily. —I don't know you. —Don't say that, of course you do. —No, I don't. I've tried to help you, Roz. You think I don't see what you're doing to yourself? I've tried. But I can't keep doing this. —But I love you. I can get better. He ran his hands through his hair, which flopped back into his eyes immediately. God, he looked like such a boy when he did that. When she had first met him, he'd been playing guitar in a corner of the pub. It was hands down like that scene in PS I Love You—or was it Love Actually, or a Marian Keyes novel she read once? Whatever, it was a meet-cute. When they were in bed for the first time a week later, he peeled all her clothes off as if she were a ripe fruit, a guava bursting from its skin, flesh ready for the taking, and just when she couldn't she couldn't she was going to—he whispered in her ear; I saw you. Just that. I saw you. —I honestly don't care anymore, Roz. —What? Yes you do. It's just this job, it's been stressing me out, all this election shit—I think we just need a holiday, both of us. We need a break. She grabbed her phone, swiped blindly. —Look, here's a great place in the Cotswolds. We can go for the weekend, lie in bed, you know (she looked at him, forced a bright smile, he hadn't moved, fuck, say something) get that great cheese from the market, it can be just like last time. She wished he hadn't laughed just then. It sent fear shooting up and down her body so sharply for a moment she mistook it for arousal. She dropped her towel. —Come on then, she said. Her nipples were hard from the cold. —One last fuck. It was the worst thing he had ever said to her, and it must have cost him to say it: —Roz. Those eyes again. —You are fucking poison. Once he left it got easier. She could stay at work until all hours, volunteer for extra shifts, and when they ended it was an easy roll onto the pub for after work drinks, and then easier still to say yes to the little something that was offered, feeling it fizz under her tongue. She'd been working at The Telegraph for two years by then and had been bumped up to the national investigative team after breaking two big yarns in a row—one cracking open a beloved television presenter's sordid past as a wife basher, and the other revealing a Tory MP's taxpayer spend on high-class hookers. They didn't call them sex workers at The Telegraph. —You know they're hookers, I know they're hookers. Why the euphemism? They get paid to fuck. —Well shit, who made you the moral arbiter of women's rights? —Fuck off, you know I love women. Anyway it's true, isn't it? The deputy news editor was tracing around the edges of her bra with his fingers. A bunch of them had been for dinner at Ava Mario, downing bottle after bottle of Spanish red to celebrate Roz nailing a front-page splash about a schoolgirl murder. At some point she'd returned from the bar to find it was just she and Anton left. He had paid for this hotel in cash and she was wrapped in a sheet, with her hair pulled up in the shower cap. She'd put complimentary face masques on both of them. She walked over to the window, saw the Millennium Wheel spin, marvelled at the lights, so many lights. Who had thought of putting them all out there like that, tiny pinpricks in the dark? The world was full of good people, and she was one. Roz was an integral member of the reporting team. She had guts. She had what it took. She didn't understand why some other reporters were so passive. Her mission when she caught the train to Reading was to get the story. She didn't think about failing because she'd never done it. Roz had woken the photographer up at 4am so they could scramble two kilometres across muddy paddocks to arrive at the back door of the farmhouse—quaint as fuck, straight from the Living channel—and get the scoop from the dead girl's mother, who was out the back hanging out the washing when they arrived. She stood shellshocked in floral while Roz probed her gently, helping her with the pegs until she invited them inside. As the door to the house swung open, Roz felt the familiar mix of dread and adrenaline, the internal fist-pump. Afterwards they drove past the rest of the vipers' nest, stuck hanging out at the end of a long driveway out the front. Roz waved to them sweetly with her notebook, enjoying the confusion crystallising to realisation on their faces. 'EXCLUSIVE: Schoolgirl shock: 'We won't stop until our sweet girl gets justice'', the headline read. Roz had written most of the story before she even interviewed the mum, so it was just a case of inserting the quotes and filing from the car. When she got back to the newsroom, she was a star. The editor clapped her on the shoulder, told her what a great get it had been. Don't party too hard, he said. Her next assignment was to chase the father. —Don't worry about him, you know you smashed it. Anton was rubbing his nose aggressively. —I did, didn't I? The girls' family had really wanted to talk, they had wanted to pay tribute to their beautiful lost daughter. The mother had been tripping over herself to drag out the photo albums. Roz had to make her excuses and leave after an hour—she could only hear so many stories about how much little Frances had loved her brothers and sisters, and her smile lit up a room, and she was a talented swimmer and she just loved Rusty, that's the dog, didn't she? He really was her best friend, she was volunteering at the SPCA, we've still got the medal she earned at the dog show. Then all would fall quiet, and the silence bred darkness; it's all just so pointless, she was so innocent, what kind of person would do this, what kind of—the mother couldn't bring herself to swear, she'd sucked in her breath—what kind of creep? Why us? We told her never to walk home that way. It's not safe. Will you put that in? Make sure you put that in. Roz had nodded her head politely, tilted her handbag so she could see her phone. She already had the quotes. Thank you so much, I'm so sorry for your loss, she'd said, pulling her shoes on and closing the door in one movement, before they tried to hug. She wasn't huggable. Anton's eyes were bugged out, black depths. They were entombed in his face, rimmed ghoulishly by the masque. They had work the next day. He had managed to crawl over to her and was pawing at one bra strap. She realised, with frightening clarity, that he wasn't human. That felt right. —Lucky you come free, eh? No catches. If she turned around she couldn't see him, but she still had to grit her teeth. The affair had gone on much longer than it should have. Technically, once Hamish found out, it was no longer an affair, but by then stopping just seemed token. Plus, Roz worked hard. Hamish had never really understood. How could he? He'd never seen death up close. Roz straightened up fresh from her desk to see the editor- in-chief standing above her. On a key to the map of his person the spindly red lines would read: drinks too much, and the gut spilling out over his belt buckle would be indicated by a circle: white male privilege. She knew he cheated on his wife. The celebrity chef. His wife, that is. The affair was with a junior sub-editor. —Roz. We need to talk. She shut down her computer and picked up her handbag preemptively, shoving in two of the four pairs of shoes under her desk. She would miss the heels, which she knew made her calves pop, but she could never wear them without getting blisters so it was all to the good. As she passed the sports desk she threw out a cheery smile to Gav, one of her favourites. His face registered alarm. Sweet, sweet Gav. They were in a glass enclosure in the middle of the newsroom dubbed the fishbowl. She had lost count of the number of people she'd seen storm out of here, crying. She only felt calm, and vaguely horny. His face swam in front of her. —We have to let you go. We've had complaints. The checks on his shirt separated, then put themselves neatly back together. —From who? —I can't say. She knew it was Anton. He'd been eyeing up the new social issues reporter for weeks, and she'd caught them leaving in the lift together a couple of days ago. Not that she cared, but he was exactly the kind of guy who would think she would get jealous and try to punish her for it. —Does Freja know you're cheating on her? —What? —Does Freja know. You know, I saw her just last Friday. She's looking good. Love her new show. —Fuck off, Roz. —I know Anton's been talking shit about me. If you're taking advice from the guy I've been fucking, I can talk to the woman you're not, right? His cheeks were red. Fuck he was fat. —That's enough, Roz. —You know what? It's actually not. I'm your best reporter. I put it all out there every day for you, I throw my life down the drain for you—she was yelling, now, heads were turning behind the glass, whoever designed this shitbox hadn't soundproofed it—and this is how you repay me? You can take your job. Take it, and shove it up your arse. There was a monitor next to her. She picked it up. —Don't— She couldn't remember throwing it. Three days later, she woke with a pounding head, a hectic bandage around one hand, and a letter of dismissal in her inbox, which she deleted before reading. The empty vodka bottles strewn around their (her, sorry, her) apartment and her bank account told her she had drunk everything in the house and snorted everything she could afford. She didn't look at her call log. She transferred some money. She didn't talk to anyone. She booked the next available flight. As the houses around Heathrow dropped, monopoly-sized, beneath her and the airplane wheels thunked up into place reassuringly, she closed her eyes and fell instantly asleep. In Auckland, she hired a car. It had been more than a decade since she'd done the trip, but she was still surprised to find the roads had changed. It seemed wrong that the immutable paths of her memory had been carved up in this way. The new Waikato expressway threw her, and instead of following her nose down the North Island she'd dutifully trailed Google maps into a black spot, where she lost reception. She had been pretty sure this was the fastest way, round the back of the lake, but everything felt foreign. She was fine until the deer. The road was clear and then she was staring directly into two large brown eyes, the creature's silent fear refracting through the windscreen from where it stood, frozen, in the middle of the road. She pumped the brakes and came screeching to a stop, engine idling in the tussock. Every muscle in the animal seemed to twitch simultaneously, and it turned and bolted back towards the forest. Her hands shook on the steering wheel. Bon Jovi sang on. Soon after that, she picked up the hitchhiker. He stood underneath a battered sign outside an old petrol station, which creaked in the wind when she leaned over the seat and pushed the door open. He ducked his head. —Where you headed? —Wellington. —Are you a murderer? —Not that I know of. —Like, you're not a murderer, or you don't know if you're a murderer? He shoved his face deeper into his jacket. A muffled laugh. —I'm not one. —I can take you most of the way. Jump in. He pulled his hood back, arranged his bag at his feet. She snuck a look. He was maybe a bit older than her, thick eyebrows, strong jawline. His fingers when he held his hands out to the heater looked long and graceful. He had an accent. —Man, thanks for picking me up. I'd been waiting for hours. —What were you doing out there? —Some farmer gave me a ride, but I wasn't really listening to where he was going. I thought it would be further. —Ah. Yup. Been there. Roz could still feel the chill from the freezing hours she'd spent outside Rangipo Prison once, after making the same mistake. —Where're you from? —Argentina. You? —I'm from here. It's my first time home for a while. —Yeah? He looked at her. —How long? The Argentinian pulled out his phone. —May I? It was punk; she thought she recognised it. NOFX. He turned it up loud and Roz was glad of the noise. They drove along for a while like that, Roz focusing on the road as the relentless pines tipped themselves into curves and then hairpin bends. —Your country is beautiful. They emerged from the bottom of yet another valley, fronds of native bush, an ancient rail bridge rising on their left. Birds folded themselves into origami in the pale sky. He didn't say much at first and she liked it that way. As the landscape softened around them, they started to talk. It reminded Roz of going out on days-long jobs with photographers, when you only had each other for company. It was harder to be self-conscious when you didn't have to make eye contact. By the time they reached the outskirts of Taumarunui, she knew that he'd been held hostage in the wilderness when working for an aid organisation in Puerto Rico and his parents had split when he was little, when his mum had moved to the States, taking his little sister, who he was close with. He'd moved there too in his early twenties, but by then she'd joined a religious cult and become distant. —I should have gone too. I always wonder if I could have saved her. In Taumarunui they got pies. Back in the car, he turned to her. —You ask lots of questions. —Well, I'm a journalist. It's kind of my job. —Do you ever answer them? A family clambered out of a station wagon. The little girl was wearing a cape, lagging behind. The dad picked her up, carried her high up on his chest. —Sure. I guess. —I don't think you do. —What do you mean? —You're very good at changing the topic. —Am I? She risked a glance. The space had shrunk. He smelled nice. He met her gaze, and for an uncanny moment she felt he was reading her mind. His smile was slow and crooked, and his hand hovered near hers. The air stretched tight between them. She could. It would only take an inch. Roz started the engine. —Maybe I should work on that. He half-laughed, scrunched his pie wrapper in his hand. —Yeah. Maybe. As they drove out of town, the ridges in the distance fell, snow-capped, framed in dusty pink. It did look quite nice with the clouds lit up like that, Roz supposed. It made her heart twist in a way she couldn't quite explain. Later, as she pulled to a stop at the intersection of State Highway One, the hitchhiker bent down to scrawl something on a slip of paper. He gave it to her, with a smile. —I'll be around if you don't find what you're looking for, chica. In the rear-view mirror, he shrank quickly. Roz wound down the window and let the paper flutter past her fingers, out into the fading light. It could have been lonely. In Foxton, she turned off towards the beach. It wasn't the right direction. At school she and her friends used to think the giant concrete water tower was a repurposed UFO, or at the very least, a government spy station. She passed the windmill, chopping lazily at the sky. She passed the bottle shop. She fixed her eyes on the horizon. The only other vehicle was a campervan, down the other end of the car park by the surf club. She lifted the boot, shrugged on her jacket, bent her head against the wind. The sand howled grey, licking at her eyelashes. The last of the sunset bounced off the waves. Still the beach remained, stretching languorously to left and right. Roz couldn't see where it ended, no matter how hard she tried. She could walk to Himatangi, catch an eel in the creek, light a fire under the trees. These were all things she could do. She thought about a story she'd covered around here many years ago, when she was a junior reporter, about a local women's weaving group. I wish I could do that, she'd said, admiring their work. But you do weave, one of the kuia had said. You do it with your words. So. She got back into the car. When her mother, Trish, opened the door, her face registered surprise, and then concern. —Roz? Her gardening shears hung loose at one side, a rose thorny in the other gloved hand. —What are you doing here? How did you— —Hi, Mum. The words had no sooner left her mouth than Trish was sweeping her daughter up in a hug, crushing her close. Roz held her arms out to the side, then patted Trish gingerly on the back when the hug didn't look to be letting up. —Come here. Look at you! Why didn't you call? How long are you here? HENRY! Roz used the opportunity to pull back, tucking her hair behind her ears. Her limbs felt leaden, and her eyes didn't seem to be working properly. When she took a step into the hallway, everything looked smudged. It must be the drive, she thought. The light. In London, it was 7am. Hamish would just be waking up, stretching lazily in bed. He was so tall, or their mattress so short, that he always slept with his spine curved around hers for their bodies to fit. She wondered what he would do with the negative space. She doubted he would have filled it yet. He would have to fall in love again first. Her legs buckled underneath her, and she put a hand out to steady herself. She felt a weight shifting. Trish grasped her daughter around the waist and looked down the hall at her husband, who had just walked in, his words of greeting suspended in the air. She nodded, imperceptibly. He took half a step sideways, and pushed open the door to the spare room. A gentle breeze pulled at the gauze curtain. Outside, the crickets began their summer chorus. Taken with kind permission from the powerful new collection of short stories Surplus Women by Michelle Duff (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35), available in bookstores nationwide. The author's cast of characters include Jess, the only one in her friend group who hasn't lost her virginity, and Genevieve, who is being held captive with her gymnastics nemesis from 40 years ago.
