Every time I return to my little flat in Elsewhere, I open the front door expecting to find chaos. Fires raging out of control, rats falling out of the ceiling, that kind of thing. This time, however, when I walk in the door I bring my disaster with me. In the form of another person. Yes. This time I am equipped with The Partner.

We have been travelling for 28 hours, all the way from Delhi. We changed planes in Paris, arrived in Boston and took the Peter Pan Bus to Elsewhere. The Partner’s nickname is Bins and he’s a French national. He grew up in Pondicherry so he speaks English with a strong Tamil accent. Both his parents were French but he’s lived in India so long that his DNA has sprouted peepul saplings. That’s what he believes, anyway. I believe that living as a permanent foreigner has made him an outsider to all cultures. It’s probably the only thing that connects us: I grew up away from my ethnic homeland too. By the time I returned to India as a child, I had become a global foreigner, native of Noughtistan.

Bins is a wiry string-bean of a man, with mouse-grey hair that he wears in a long scrawny plait. He has a bony, angular face and extremely pale skin. Glass-grey eyes. He’s also a professional malcontent who would enter Paradise and still be annoyed because there’s nothing to find fault with. So it’s no surprise that he’s complaining the moment he enters the flat. “What’s that smell? Something has died in here.”

I explain it’s the air-freshener. It’s called Spring Rain. I left three dispensers open when I left, because otherwise the flat smells musty when it’s been closed for a while. “Tcheh!” says Bins. “Politician’s funeral!” According to him, all artificial fragrances remind him of the mounds of decomposing marigolds used on official funeral pyres. He runs around the little house tugging at the venetian blinds and pushing up the window sashes.

I run behind him, shutting all the windows again. “We’re on the ground floor,” I scream. “If you leave them open we’ll both become museum exhibits at night, when the lights are on!” Plus it’s winter and there’s still snow on the ground outside. The central heating’s very efficient, but the moment the windows are open it’s instant Siberia. “Who’s looking?” he screams back. “We’re in the decadent West! No people left anywhere — only security cameras!” Eventually we compromise on four windows remaining shut, including (thankfully) the bathroom.

If it isn’t already clear, let me underline the fact that we don’t get on especially well. Even though we’ve been legally partnered for at least 30 years and are both in our 60s, we behave like the central character in The Life of Pi — clinging to a tiny raft in the ocean of Existence, with a hungry tiger at one end of the flimsy vessel. The only difference is that there are two of us and each one thinks the other is the tiger.

(Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist writes about her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column)

Next episode: Encounter therapy

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