Ria, are you ok?

Chapter 23

111 - Ria

"...so this year I became even more single. Like I'm slowly drifting away from the prospect of dating by distancing myself from reality. By creating a mental gap that divides me from the rest of the world. It's not that I don't want to date anyone. I am afraid of the fact that they won't be good enough for me. I'm afraid of the fact that no one is good enough and I am too different to be able to connect with others in a way I would find meaningful. And then there's Gwen. She can't tell between right or wrong so she would get into deep trouble without me. I feel responsible for her. Responsible, amused and amazed, all at the same time. She's like a rollercoaster of..."

"We're here," said the taxi driver I hired after I returned the car to the rental agency in Islamabad.

He dropped me off at the house I had rented for Gwen. After paying the fare and watching him drive away, I looked at my hands to make sure I wasn't dreaming. It's believed you can't look at your hands in a dream. My hands looked OK. I was probably awake. And I probably killed a man this morning.

When I opened the door, Gwen was sharpening her pencils. The room was not as untidy as I expected. She looked at me, grinned, and stood up with a pencil in her hand and the pencil sharpener in the other. In the corner of the room, there were two buckets of what seemed to be decomposing fruit.

"What is this? Are you making your own alcohol?"

"Yes, but I also wrote a book."

"So, the book is supposed to make up for the alcohol."

"Yes. Ta da! What do you think?" Gwen handed me a pile of freshly-printed A4 pages numbered from one to seventy-nine. The front page that served as a cover, depicted two cats from behind, walking side by side in what looked like Vancouver's Robson Street. The title of the book, written above the cats and the busy street was: 'Think about the cat'.

"It looks good, but we seriously need to talk about the alcohol. If you were doing it in Vancouver I wouldn't bat an eye, but we're in a Muslim country and this is really illegal here. I don't mean illegal as if you were growing weed back home, I mean like really, really illegal. I'm talking death penalty illegal!"

"OK. But you like the book cover, right?"

"It looks great."

"Want to read it?"

"Not under the gun, why don't you go take a walk or something and I'll read it while you're away."

"OK. I'll go shopping. They have this animal market where they let you play with ducks and rabbits and..."

"Have fun."

When she left, and after I made sure the door was locked from the inside, I poured the alcohol down the drain and washed the buckets with something that looked like bleach. I poured the rest of the bleach down the drain to mask the smell. I placed the buckets into a rubbish bag and tossed them in the dumpster outside the house.

Once that was dealt with I went back in and checked if there was something to eat in the fridge. There was nothing but fruits inside. Bananas, pears and two bags full of apples which I suspect were the ones she was making the alcohol with. Munching on a banana, I started on the book.

The book, having seventy-nine pages instead of eighty, made me slightly uncomfortable. To make things worse, the page seventy-nine was almost full, she could have written a few more sentences to make it eighty but she didn't. She doesn't care about those kinds of details though. She is pragmatic like that. Seventy-nine or eighty pages meant nothing to her as long as the book was well written, easy to read and understand by adults and children alike.