In the past I’ve had luck with the tradition of
finding a stranger with whom to share a New Year’s kiss. Eleven years ago in
the English city of Leeds, I met a girl in the throngs of a basement club and
we danced together to rock music that was so loud it nearly pushed us over. At
midnight she yelled something into my ear but because of the noise and my
unfamiliarity with her accent, I had no idea what she was saying. Annoyed with
me, she pulled me to her. I can still remember the touch of her lips, a pair of
the softest that I have ever kissed. It happened again on New Year’s in
Valparaiso, Chile, with the reverie of hundreds in the city plaza dancing to
live music. There, a girl who I had been making eye-contact with all night broke
free from her date and grabbed me by the arm and we kissed among the drunken multitudes.
I broke away from her quickly, assuming her date would not be in as celebratory
a mood as all the rest.
When I reached the top of the stairs of the club in
Gangtok, I believed it was fair to think that perhaps my luck would carry over
to India. What greeted us though was a room half-full, populated almost
entirely by men. Again as the only white people, the attention fell on us like a
mountainside collapsing.
Our Indian admirers came quickly and unabashedly, the
alcohol eliminating the need for the initial charade that I had witnessed on
the MG Marg. Both Dan and I were pulled from one group of men to the next. We’d
pose for a selfie and then get shuffled off to someone else. The act was all in
good fun and made it easy to get to know people. As a stroke of good fortune,
women eventually started coming into the club as well. Their attention also fell
on the two foreigners who now seemed to be very popular among the crowd.
The band played a mix of English music covers and
Punjabi pop. I did as I usually do, flailing around in a way that I hoped would
be construed as dancing. When it came to the Punjabi songs, the crowd
accompanied their steps with intricate mudra-style hand gestures that I
attempted without success. The women watched me critically and giggled at my
failure.
Dan disappeared right as my fate for a kiss that night
moved in the right direction. Not one, but two women beckoned me into their
circle of dancing friends. They were women who I had seen come in and who had
that quality of beauty that transfixes a man and instantly makes him doubt
himself.
We began to dance at a respectable distance from one
another. I was hoping this was just a kind of test to see if I was a gentleman.
I kept my distance and worked on my erratic moves, afraid that one uncouth flail
would get me expelled from the group.
In time, an older couple joined the circle and we all
danced together. One of the girls leaned in, her lips close to my ear.
“These are our parents,” she said.
Her father, in the middle of his groove, gave me a knowing
nod. I took this to be a positive, if not permissive, sign. But the mother gave
me a smile that, for all of its smile-like nature, looked more like a scowl.
I kept the respectable distance. One of the girls, the
one I vied for the most, wore a short black dress and stood up on a small,
cushioned seat. She looked right at me and rocked her hips like a pendulum,
holding her gaze. Her mother was disaffected by her daughter but kept me in the
corner of her eye.
It didn’t help that the previous throngs of
selfie-taking men were now circling our group like hungry sharks. These women
were clearly the ones that they wanted. The men came to me with friendly pats
on the back and handshakes that overtly signaled “We’re best friends. Really!
Didn’t you see us taking those selfies together?” They edged in. To preserve my
chances of getting a New Year’s kiss, I led them away, one after another, their
previous bon homie turning to resentment.
There was one man, a towering, light-skinned Delhi-ite
who was built like an Indian train engine and was near stumbling drunk. He was
harder to hold off. He came up to us more than once and instead of giving me
the perfunctory pat on the back to try and get into our dance circle, he bear
hugged me. He’d then turn me around and position me outside of the circle,
replacing himself in my stead. Neither the women nor their parents appreciated
this macho display and soon they moved off to one of the tables to sit down. It
was nearly midnight and this wall of a man had destroyed my chances of a kiss.
There were other women dancing nearby, all embracing
their boyfriends or husbands or some guy that they had just met, the guy that I
could have been. With minutes left before 2017, I found myself standing awkwardly
on the side of the dance floor, half-heartedly tapping my foot to the beat. Dan
had returned, explaining that he just needed to take a rest, and so we were two
travelers who, at that moment, Robert Service’s words seemed to ring true for:
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.
He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his
chance;
I
was ready to call it a night, afraid that the strike of midnight would come to
me as a fatal blow. But just then the girls rose from their seats and came back
to the dancefloor.
We
danced closer this time. Their parents were off to the side and could not see
us.
When
midnight came, there was no countdown. The band suddenly stopped and announced
something in some other language and everybody cheered.
“That’s it?” I asked Dan.
“I guess so.”
“Well, Happy New Year.”
“Happy New Year.”
The women went to their father and mother and gave
them hugs. They went to their friends, shaking their hands and wishing them a
happy New Year. Then one came up to me, the one in the black dress.
“Happy New Year,” I said.
I extended my hand, and she looked at her mother who
shook her head in disagreement. The girl kept her arms crossed. She smiled at
me and said, “Happy New Year.” Then she went back to the dancefloor, dancing
with her family, and leaving me alone.
“Selfie?” another guy came over and put his arm around
my shoulder.
“Sure,” I said.
He took the picture and walked away. And the girls
danced separate from us for the rest of the night.
Once the celebration was over and the women had gone, I
walked back to my hotel, the whole time thinking of Robert Service’s poem. It
was a long walk on those Gangtok hillsides, the air having that familiar cold.
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