Strangest date I ever went on

A few nights ago, I met a sweet, reasonably well-intentioned Delhi boy at the club and we were sharing a cigarette as we do with our club romances. I have a long-time steadfast rule of never taking my club romances out of the club into the real world but lately, I have decided to break this rule of mine because I felt I was being too close-minded with my dating choices by only dating a string of film or literature majors and if I opened my heart to a gym-going Delhi boy, the love of my life might be waiting for me inside the dancefloor. This boy came into my life in a similar fashion and was quite insistent I smoked weed with him in his apartment right after. That night, I was practicing sobriety so I told him that and left the club immediately with the rest of my friends but he didn’t completely slip my mind. The next morning I received a text from him asking me what food I liked and I said I liked Asian food, and he suggested going out to dinner that very evening. I was skeptical at first but then he offered to pick me up and drop me back home. This was all seeming very new and exciting and I had never been on a date with anybody knowing so little about them before but I decided to leave my inhibitions and judgments behind and have one dinner with this boy. How bad could this evening possibly be? I had no idea what he did for a living, how old he was, or what he even looked like in the daytime but he said he was picking me up at 7 PM. Come that evening, I was sending two texts - my address to him and my live location to my best friend.

He arrives forty-five minutes late, which immediately was irritating to me but he gets out of the car and opens the door for me which redeems him again. I am conflicted about the way this type of old-school chivalry impacts my perception of the way a date is going. There’s some things I like being done for me simply because I don’t like doing those things for myself but I think the heterosexuality of it all is a discussion for another time perhaps, I don’t know. I am convinced that every time I adhere to a gender role, it is somehow more different and subversive than when others do it, I need to stop thinking about myself as an inherently transgressive person. I get into the car and I still have no idea where we were going to dinner. I’m now getting antsy about being in a strange car with a strange man I met on a strange night. Strange things all around. I asked him where we were going repeatedly and then he finally revealed to me that we were driving to a most dreadful part of Delhi - Gurgaon. The whole time in the car, I am trying really hard to make conversation but I keep fucking running into walls. I’d ask him a question, he’d answer it in barely a couple sentences and then there would be the deafening silence of an AP Dhillon song again. He was a couple years younger than me which was a bit weird but definitely something we could come back from. He tells me about his life, his joint family household, his family’s chain of jewellery stores, his college degree that he doesn’t care about, and his great love for techno music. Every sentence coming out of his mouth was a sentence that only a person who has smoked unhealthy amounts of weed in their time could ever say and I truly hate it when somebody has no enthusiasm for their lives. At some point in the car ride, he instructed the speaker to play a Weeknd song and that’s when I knew that this was going to be a long, long night. We get to the restaurant and have a decent enough time, once again, he was very chivalrous - opening and closing the car door, holding my bag, and pulling out the chair at the restaurant for me. I am still futile in all my attempts to reach common ground. I ask him what his favourite film is and he says he really likes Fight Club. I like Fight Club too, as much as the next person but maybe for different reasons than he does. Once this grating dinner is over, I am itching to get out of there and I tell him I am good finding my way back home but he insists on spending more time with me. The night was still very young owing to the severe lack of dinner table conversation and I wanted to see if there was something else he had to offer. And I was bored, It felt like things were already teetering on the edge of disaster, and I was curious to push the limits of this night. And it didn’t hurt that he was quite easy on the eyes so I agreed to go back home with him and humor him for a bit.

I reach his apartment and I am terrified of what horrors could lurk there but I am also curious. A boy’s abode can be very telling of what kind of person he is. I walk into the apartment begrudgingly. AP Dhillon is blasting, and there are five other boys there taking bong rips. This is the stuff of several nightmares of mine. They’re all on some week-long bender in Delhi is what I gathered. Clean house though, I must say. Immediately, I was put off by the idea of being in an unfamiliar apartment with six men who each seemed to be more full of themselves than the previous one. We share another cigarette in the balcony and he offers me dessert. I get to know the other five boys and they seem alright. Many things are happening simultaneously at this point.

All of a sudden, the doorbell starts ringing really loud and I can see in the little intercom that there was another boy who seemed to be our age waiting outside the door. They then proceed to tell me that it was their dealer waiting outside and they didn’t want to open the door because he was extraordinarily clingy and apparently wouldn’t leave for the rest of the night. This guy is ringing the bell over and over again and I am getting a little panicky. How annoying could this guy even be that they didn’t want to even open the door and tell him off? We are all instructed not to move or make any noise lest he finds out there are people in the house. I am of the opinion that they owed him money or had some other disagreement with him and they didn’t want to tell me any of those things, which is fine. But this guy was at the door and he was refusing to budge. After ringing the bell persistently for a few minutes, the unwelcome dealer is seriously angry, he goes outside and switches off the electricity to the entire apartment. So there I am, on a large sofa, surrounded by six men in the dark with only the intermittent light of the passed-around vape illuminating the room. Eventually, we wait until he leaves, go back outside, and turn the electricity back on. Now, I had to leave this protein-powder hellscape as soon as possible. The night had gone on for far too long.

Sitting in the metro, I was thinking about the events that transpired on this odd night. Who were these men actually dating? Why is it that they had nary a conversation topic to offer a young woman in their company? Does it not get tiring to smoke that much weed? I feel a little snarky writing this and also a bit iffy about writing about a date with someone and keeping them in the dark about it but then I realized that this boy probably will never read my substack. I doubt he reads, even. When he texted asking to hang out again, I said I would be taking a raincheck that night, and he seemed to not know what raincheck meant. I think I am safe. As of February 2025, I am formally reinstating my rule of never taking the club out of the club. Some romances are better on the dancefloor. Some chemistries are not of the mind. Some homes are simply not to be ventured into, you know. Several lessons had been learnt that night. Maybe I am better off dating film majors again because a bad date with a film major is at least a vaguely stimulating conversation about the Iranian New Wave.

Also, I am starting a new tradition on my substack: I post a crossword along with my post every month. I am open to feedback on the crossword (and my writing, of course). Here is the link to the crossword.

Thank you for sitting through this weird date debrief and allowing me to try out new writing here every month! Please consider subscribing and coming here every month to help me grow as a writer.