What happens when one goes from obscurity to celebrity, overnight? Thirty-year-old Arya Alvarez is a travel manager at Isle Z, a luxury travel company in Singapore where she creates bespoke trips for celebrities and influencers. Discretion is her specialty at work and personal life: Few people know that she’ s fled her home city, Manila, to get away from the scene of a devastating break-up. When she travels to Svaneti, in the Republic of Georgia, Arya briefly encounters the mysterious Dave in a remote village high up the Caucasus mountains. Intrigued, she posts his photos on Instagram— which goes viral the very next day. Turns out, Dave is Davit Nadibaidze, a famous yet reclusive artist who’ d retreated from the public five years ago and Arya is the first person to see him since he disappeared. In less than twenty-four hours, Arya gains hundreds of thousands of followers. She’ s deluged with invitations to talk shows, influencer parties, and celebrity junkets, all as her social media apps overflow with DMs, tags, and comments, both nice and nasty. Men are suddenly vying for her attention, including her ex, Jake.
Claire Betita de Guzman is a Filipina writer based in Singapore and author of four novels: Miss Makeover, Budget is the New Black, Girl Meets World, and No Boyfriend Since Birth, which was adapted into a TV series by Unitel Productions, starring actress Alessandra de Rossi. A former journalist, she started as a lifestyle reporter for the broadsheet Today before becoming a lifestyle editor for international and local magazines including Cosmopolitan Philippines and Harper’s Bazaar Singapore. She has led talks, workshops and panels at literary events in Southeast Asia, including the Singapore Writers Festival and Poetry Festival Singapore. She studied Journalism and graduated cum laude (with honours) at the University of the Philippines. She has taken writing courses at the University of Oxford in England and was a fellow in literary workshops in Europe and Asia, including Miradoux, France, Bali, Indonesia, and Tbilisi, Georgia. She is co-author of a poetry collection, Dreaming of the Divine Downstairs, and co-editor of Get Luckier, an anthology of Philippine-Singapore writings.
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Ghim Moh Food Centre, Singapore, 10 a.m. At first, I thought it was a prank. A phone call, from an unknown number in the early hours of the morning—4:22 a.m. to be exact—and so I had answered without really looking. When I did, no one was on the other line. Instead, I got a series of voice messages, this time on my WhatsApp.
‘I would like to paint the portrait of this person who has revealed me.’ It was a low, almost husky voice that sounded both smooth and lilting. A sexy voice that made me sit up, despite the ungodly hour. Somehow it didn’t sound so sinister. In fact, it felt warm and charming, and despite myself, I felt drawn to it—and whoever was it, instantly.
That was the first voice message. It didn’t take a minute for me, no matter how groggy I was from sleep, to know that it was Davit.
‘I would like to meet you, Arya Alvarez.’
How did he know my name? How did he get my number?
I jumped out of bed, clicked on the light, and immediately pressed call back. ‘Mr Nadibaidze? Davit?’ I said, when I thought I heard a click. ‘Are you—are you in Svaneti? In Georgia?’
No answer. What was that, Arya? Flustered, I realized I didn’t even know the questions to ask. I stared at my phone as it hung in limbo, and watched the screen as it ended the call automatically. And then, as if roused, it started emitting a series of beeps as more voice messages came in through WhatsApp.
‘Meet me at the Ghim Moh Market. The hawker centre. Stall number fifty-seven.’
That sounded familiar. My breath caught. Davit Nadibaidze was in Singapore.
And then, as if he heard my thoughts, the next voice message was: ‘I’ll be there, Miss Alvarez. I expect you there, too. This morning, ten o’clock.’
And then: ‘This is important.’
Did I hear that right? I played the audio message again. That was it: Davit Nadibaidze wanted to meet me, at one of the busiest spots—the hawker centre, of all places—right here in Singapore.
I felt a flash of fear, my mind racing. Was he suing me? Would I be served with a legal document? Oliver had talked me through this, but in my state of distraught, I had only half-listened. I still didn’t know how these things went.
And then I felt my jaw tense, the fear replaced with something akin to anger, as another thought occurred to me: This was all a prank. Just like some of those that were mixed in with the DMs, the tweets, the emails, the comments that had been flooding my social accounts all this time.
I was ready to drop it. Ignore it like some of the messages that I’ve gotten so far that ranged from silly to downright nasty. No reaction was the best reaction in these cases, was what I’ve started to learn since this whole thing blew up.
But I found myself taking a shaky breath as I pressed the little microphone on the left side of the messaging app, tilted my phone so the tiny speakers were close to my lips, and said: ‘Mr Nadibaidze, if this really is you—how will I know this isn’t just a prank? Because it really just might be. Thank you, and I’m sorry.’
For a minute or two, nothing. All was dark and silent in my room, in my and Nhi’s flat.
I thought so. I had been hyped up for nothing, roused from my already erratic sleep since this whole thing went viral. I threw my phone on my pillow, and got ready to slide back into bed. I was desperate for sleep.
And then there it was. A photo of the finished painting, taken it seems, by Davit himself, that very day I was in the village of Ushguli in Svaneti, Georgia. With shaking hands, I picked up my phone again. I recognized the background, the messy palette he was working from, glistening with oil paint.
If I were to not overthink this and go with the simplest, easiest explanation, it would be that Davit had taken the photo himself, to show me that it was him.
I had no say in this. But then, I also didn’t give him the chance to say anything when I posted his photo and videos, did I? I had to meet him.
I sent out another voice message: ‘I’ll be there. And I’m sorry for—for what happened.’
This time, there was no more answer. No more audio messages, and no more photos.
Desclaimer: This excerpt is published with the permission of Penguine Random House South East Asia
Categories: Booklist
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