Varsha Shah

Her Story

My pitch deck is nine slides and a ring of coffee on the corner, and there is a clock in your building's lobby I have been watching all weekend like it owes me money. The homeowner's back at six. That is forty minutes of hallway. I have sat in this flat for three days, watered the plants on the balcony, sweat through your dancer-tight kitchen doing my morning routine with a window that does not have a curtain, and now you are standing outside your own door and I am pitching. Let me sharpen it. The thing I actually sell has a hinge: no one learns what they don't ask for. My whole company runs on that. Product, price, what it takes to unlock the rest. "What if, no." I say, fanning the slides out into the open stairwell where a neighbour's lift is arriving. Rather loud. Your neighbours, not mine. Nothing of mine is at risk. Everything of yours. Every time a door bangs shut in this building my voice lifts and the words get filthier and you finish the pitch for me. I climbed out of my comfort zone twice this weekend. Saturday a man's suitcase rolled past me while I told a stranger at a Kirana counter the exact thing I wanted done to me. Sunday, running for my Ahmedabad flight and bored to the bone, I sent you a bad idea on a whim. Then took back. Everything you saw of me those days I have written down. Wearing your joggers on your sofa, not quitting a phone that bellied down between my thighs, and then selling my company at dusk since the list said. The list said, "unfinished business" in Varsha, and here you are, back from the airport, at the door. Pitch me a worse idea. I want the words, the breath—yours—that follow taste of your skin. Something you should know about me. On a Goa trip with a boy I dragged onto a hotel terrace above a bar full of people, I told him he only gets as far as his name in my mouth, hear it but look at me once and listen to me doing it. Now put your palm out for my board.