‘He’s blatantly into you, Maya. Why don’t you give him some sort of indication that you’re into him too?’
‘Firstly, I’m not into him,’ I said weakly, aware of how lacklustre my response was. ‘And secondly, he’s leaving in a few months. There’s no point.’
‘So, tell him to stay!’ Dina began flailing her free arm about, as if the more she waved it around, the more I would be inclined to listen to her.
‘I can’t do that!’
‘Why not?’
‘He’s got a job out there! He’s been planning to go for years. I’m not going to make him give up his dreams for something that might turn out to be nothing.’
‘How will you know if it’s something unless you give it a go?’
‘How can I give it a go, Dina? What if he asks me to go to Dubai with him? I’m about to go back to uni! I’ve been offered a place and a scholarship. I can’t jeopardise all that I’m trying to achieve because I fancy some guy!’
Dina grimaced and her silence confirmed that I was making sense. Maybe Zak did like me, but ‘like’ wasn’t enough for us to completely put our plans on hold. And what did I know about ‘fancying’ someone anyway? I’d never been in a real relationship before. I hadn’t even been in a fake one. I had no idea what I would be like as a fiancée, partner or whatever I would call myself while we were courting. I didn’t know what it was like to have real feelings. For all I knew, this was a passing fancy. Albeit a mighty fine fancy. My insides tingled whenever I remembered him standing close to me, looking at me so intensely that it took all my self-control to walk away.
Dina and her babies left shortly after, as it was already past Sami’s bedtime and he was beginning to get cranky. Ma reluctantly let them leave, filling containers with rice and curry because apparently Sami really enjoyed her fried fish and daal and Dina needed to eat well as she was breastfeeding.
After doing the rest of the clean-up, I politely declined Ma’s offer to watch the latest Bollywood movie with her and Baba and went back into my room to peruse the list.
Climbing into bed and pulling the covers over me, I opened the weathered notebook. It was so fresh and pristine when I first found it on the Tube. Now, the black leather was wrinkled and worn, with creases in the spine and stains on the pages. If I ever met Noah again, there was no way I could return it to him in this condition, especially as I had scribbled my notes all over it. After completing each task, I wrote a few lines on how I felt about it. Nothing too deep, but nothing I wanted Noah to see.
Flicking through the pages, I got to number nineteen and swore under my breath. FFS, seriously? There, in the same ink as all the others, Noah had scrawled:
19. JOIN A DATING APP AND GO ON A DATE YOU MISERABLE SHIT 
Tinder= hookups, Bumble and Hinge seem more meaningful. RateYourDate next?
There was no way I was going to join a dating app. No bloody way. Especially not after my social-media debut, when Lucy had plastered my before and after all over her accounts. I never wanted to go through something like that again, where strangers judged me solely on my appearance. I’d spent too much time trying to persuade myself that there was more to me than my looks to now go and put myself on display for a bunch of shallow, immature men to reject me. Not when I had come so far in my journey and was finally starting to believe it.
‘I’m not doing it, Luce,’ I said to Lucy as we sat at our desks on Monday, messing around on our phones but with PowerPoint open so it looked like we were working. Sheila was away meeting clients up in the north somewhere, so we were taking the rare opportunity to mess around all day.
‘Why not?’ Lucy asked as she put together her latest Instagram post. Her social-media presence was gaining traction after she had managed to persuade a couple of micro-influencers to let her style them. My ugly little post was now so far down her feed that you had to scroll quite a bit to get there. It was a massive relief for me and I was working up the courage to ask her to delete it altogether. She had enough content now; she didn’t need my crappy self sullying her aesthetics.
‘I don’t want idiotic men who don’t know me judging me based on my looks,’ I replied.
‘But you look good now,’ Lucy replied, completely missing the point.
‘That’s not the point.’
‘What is the point? I get that you don’t want to be objectified, but you’re not doing it to find love. You’re doing it to try something different and to complete the list. Are you really going to skip number nineteen to make a point to no one but yourself?’
‘I don’t like the idea of people reading a paragraph about me and then ticking a box like they’re doing online grocery shopping. What if I show up and they send me back because I’m not what they were expecting?’
‘Err, firstly, you’re not a balsamic vinegar being substituted for a balsamic glaze. Secondly, how is it any different from that marriage CV thingy your parents made for you?’
‘Did I tell you about that? I can’t remember.’
‘I remember and it sounds the same as online dating to me.’ She had a point there. It was the same, but I didn’t want a biodata in the first place. I only did it to get my parents off my back. But if I didn’t do this, I couldn’t tick it off. And I HAD to. I had jumped in a freezing-cold lake because I was determined to complete that blasted list. I had leapt out of a plane for God’s sake! All I had to do was make a profile and go on one date and then I could delete it forever, tick it off the list and move on to number twenty. With any luck, it would be something pleasant like learning how to arrange flowers. I’d always wanted to do that.
‘Fine, let’s do it,’ I sighed, handing my phone over to the expert. ‘You sort it out for me. I’m going to make some tea. Choose anything from the favourites folder in my camera roll.’
When I got back from the kitchenette carrying two mugs, Lucy was nodding and whispering with Arjun, who was typing away furiously on my phone.
‘There, all done,’ he said with a flourish when he spotted me. ‘You need to verify your face by taking a selfie now and you’re good to go. Thank me later, jaanu.’
Grabbing my phone, I did as he asked and then checked out the profile he had created with trepidation:
MissMayaMarvel
27
London
5’4
