A Hitchhiker's Guide to Bollywood.

I'm cheating a bit by sharing a homework assignment I completed more than a year ago for an online class through Gotham Writers. The instructor's prompt was the first sentence in the story. The rest was up to us, the students, to complete. My add for today is the video for Brimful of Asha. If you can keep your booty still during this four-minutes of beats and hooks, then you may want have someone check to see if you're still alive.

 

“Going My Way?”

Chris began to question the wisdom of this trip. Well, not so much the trip itself; he had ventured to Detroit hundreds of times over the years. But he had never picked up a hitchhiker on one of those drives, or any other for that matter. The minute he swung open the door and the young woman’s tiny frame settled onto the passenger seat, he had the immediate urge to shove her back out, leaving her surprised in the gutter as he raced away. But he didn’t. And he wondered why. And also what had possessed him to pick her up in the first place.

He seemed to be staring at her a little too long, but, if she noticed, she didn’t let on. He drew a crooked line with his eye from the shrouds of colorful fabric that wrapped around her thighs, waist, and shoulder to the tiny pattern of twinkling jewels pressed between her eyebrows. He searched his mental archives of seemingly useless facts: did this mean she was married or single? What, if any, was the difference between jewels and a single red dot? 

His memory returned nothing, and then, not so inexplicably, his head filled instead with Cornershop’s “Brimful of Asha” – a somewhat obscure, but impossibly catchy Britpop song from the late nineties. 

Now she was staring. He abruptly stopped tapping his foot and reached his hand out to greet hers.

“Chris,” he smiled.

“Lata,” she smiled back.

She released the cardboard sign she had been gripping, and it fell to the floor mat, facedown so Chris could no longer read the word “Bollywood” neatly written in crisp black marker. But, of course, he remembered what it said; yet, he still felt compelled to ask where she was headed, since he knew he wouldn't be driving to India today.

“Bollywood, please,” she answered. “I assume you’re going that way, or you wouldn’t have picked me up, right?”

“Right,” he said, wondering if the sound of his answer matched at all the doubt that clouded his mind. 

Chris pulled away from the curb in mock agreement with the mission he had promised to fulfill. His head felt hot, and, like a drowning man, he gasped as he lowered the driver’s side window.

The air was a little cool as it fluttered though his dark curls. He realized that they might look like brother and sister, his amber skin and deep, almost black eyes in close harmony with hers.

He drove several blocks before the silent bubble they were in began to swell and nearly burst.

“Why Bollywood?,” he asked, thinking this was a good place to start…