Encounters of a cynical kind

Angasolka

2011-11-26T08:33:00.000+05:30

The highway, lean and winding, emerges from behind moist green hills and descends gently to where we – four bleary eyed boys with enormous backpacks - stand, dropped off by a private bus that has brought us from Irkutsk to here - Kultuk – at the end of a two hour ride, and has continued on to Slyudyanka, the westernmost tip of the Lake Baikal, another half hour away. The highway stretches on ahead, glistening intermittently in yellow-red hues under the fog-dampened lights of an occasional automobile. The town, a cluster of wooden houses and junkyards, is sparse and quiet. A faint smell of wet soil and fish hangs over it. It is just after noon, and sunlight has broken through the overcast sky and fog in places, creating small, shifting oases of brightness in the gloom. Railway tracks crisscross each other on the outer edges of the town, beyond which lies the Baikal, its immensity more in the imagination than in actual sight for, a few meters from the shore, it disappears behind the veil of fog – a uniform shade of faded grey that stretches upwards forever. It is as if we are all inside an overexposed photograph.

This leg of the trip is a leap of faith. We know nothing of the place. The guidebooks and blogs we read before embarking on the Trans-Mongolian spoke voluminously of Listvyanka and Olkhon Island, but Olkhon Island was too far away from Irkutsk to fit into our schedule and Listvyanka sounded too close, too touristy. So we poked around on Google Maps and elsewhere, until a hostel named AlpBase popped up. It claimed to be a couple of hours from Irkutsk and right next to the lake. The pictures looked promising. We booked it, 450 bucks (INR. Yes, it is true) a night per person.

And so here we are in Kultuk. Our destination, however, is Angasolka, and we are explained it is another 8 kilometers away by a local at a grocery store, who writes down the number for us on a piece of paper after furious consultations with the store owner and others present, most of whom appear to be in the store for idle gossip and betray no real intention to shop. We ask for directions and are provided them with much hand waving and ardor, at the end of which we remain as clueless as ever. Yet more consulting and shrugging and sighing ensue; after a while, one of them beckons us to follow him and we do so without comment. He takes us to where the railway tracks are and we see a station that cannot be larger than the grocery store we were in. Babushkas occupy the three benches on the platform and when we get closer, we realize they are knitting. There is also a young girl there, pretty and freckled, and it is her that the man addresses. She listens calmly and then turns to us and says, “Railway”. Her arms motion towards the tracks leading away, in the direction opposite to where Slyudyanka is. We nod. “Walk. 1 hour. Angasolka”, she adds. We nod again. “Spaciba”, one of us says and she giggles.

We start walking along the tracks, which soon begin to merge into one another until only one set remains. A quarter of an hour on, it bends to the left and the town slips away from view behind a hill. The Baikal is to our right and the hills, sloping right up to the tracks, to the left. A dense impenetrable forest of pine trees - their trunks thin and white with brown-black scabs on them - rises up from the hills and looms above us. Underneath our feet, wild flowers and grass have sprouted dramatically and haphazardly since the snow has melted, except for on the track and the stones and pebbles that surround it. Flies and mosquitoes and a million other insects chirp and buzz, and when we walk through the undergrowth, they lift and flee in graceful swarms. The mosquitoes – every guidebook we’ve read has warned us against them during this time of the year – seem harmless and uninterested in us, until we stop for a breather and a picture, and they are all over us at once. We mutter under our breaths and walk on. In the distance, an unseen steamer wails forlornly.

Overhead, the sky clears and we see blue and begin to sweat. The fog remains. We run out of conversation and move to singing old Hindi film songs, the ‘Neele Gagan ke Tale’ variety. As it goes with all such medleys in my experience, we eventually arrive at ‘Pyaar humein kis mod pe le aaya’. We are after all, four males nearer thirty than twenty, Indian, unmarried and, largely, deprived.

An hour passes. The scenery continues to be magnificent but unchanged. We are puzzled and starting to tire. “Weren’t we supposed to be there in an hour?” one of us asks. Ten minutes later, we are positively concerned. “You sure we are on the right track?” The rest of us ignore the pun. A tunnel comes into view but when we reach it, we find the tracks strangely curve around it. Inside the tunnel, there are remnants of bonfires and habitation – logs of wood to sit on, pieces of paper and plastic and scribbles on the walls. I see visions of unkempt Russians in tattered prison clothes, bearded and huge, hiding in the darkness, taking frequent swigs from their flasks, their palms clasped around guns, knives and assorted arsenal.

We light our cigarettes and rest a while.

When we emerge from the other side of the tunnel, we spot three figures in the distance, walking towards us. A boy and two girls, French and in their early twenties, materialize. They have spent the previous day in Angasolka, they tell us, in the same hostel were our beds are booked. It is less than thirty minutes away, they tell us and wave cheerful goodbyes.

Eventually, a settlement appears. It is like something out of a fairytale – a handful of cottages on a slope in the middle of nowhere, partly shrouded in mist, a church, no paved streets, a great endless body of water to one side, a tributary gurgling into it, the distant sound of a waterfall. The track crosses the tributary over a bridge and proceeds through the settlement; we see a railway station that is nothing more than a few cement slabs and one solitary signpost. It is the sort of place that evokes a warm wistfulness, even while one is still there.

The first person we meet is a girl, sitting by herself on the platform, her feet touching the tracks. She is sweet and slightly plump and smiles when she sees us. She confirms when we ask her that this indeed is Angasolka. She continues to speak to us in Russian to which we respond with “Sorry, we do not speak Russian”, but of course she does not understand this and goes on. We wait for her to stop, which she does when she realizes our utter lack of comprehension. She looks at us dejectedly and we shuffle and stare at each other sheepishly, until one of us lifts his arms in a goodbye gesture and she smiles again and reciprocates and the rest of us follow suit. “Indian” I say, before we start to walk away, pointing to myself and the rest. Her eyes widen. “Indian!” she exclaims, “Indian!” and then calls out to a bunch of kids frolicking near us and some of them run up to us while the others hurry off towards the village and soon we have what appears to be at least half the population gathered around us.

Hindi films! They reach the unlikeliest places. In the two days we have spent in Irkutsk, we have been approached by absolute strangers, Russians, who spoke no English but nevertheless introduced themselves and then gushed in monosyllables about Raj Kapoor (of course) and Shahrukh Khan and, astonishingly, Mithun and ‘Seeta Aur Geeta’! It has happened several times in Irkutsk and now, incredibly, in Angasolka. In all the chatter, we catch the odd word – there’s of course Seeta Aur Geeta, but we also hear Disco Dancer and My Name Is Khan. The kids prance around, whistling and gyrating to tunes we are unable to identify but must surmise, belong to a Hindi film. An old man stands slightly apart from the crowd and mutters the names of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru between long strings of Russian and then appears confused and looks at us and asks, “Doto? Doto?” We interpret this as daughter and provide him with “Indira Gandhi” and his eyes light up and he rambles on. We pose for pictures, with the kids at first but soon find their parents and elder siblings beginning to slip into the corners of the frames.

Presently, a lanky fellow appears, about our age, and says Hello in English and asks us if we are looking for the AlpBase hostel. “I manage the hostel.” he informs us once we have extricated ourselves from everyone. “And sorry about all that,” he says, pointing to the people who have now broken up into smaller groups, “you are the first Indians to come to our village.”

The hostel is a group of large wooden cottages; we are taken to the one that appears the most recently constructed and is in fact the last building in the village as the booking website had promised it would be; beyond it the lake still remains lost in the mist. Inside, there are large wooden beds and an enormous table. The smell of fresh wood, polish and adhesives still lingers. We are asked to choose our beds; evidently we are the only occupants for the night. I ask about drinking water. He looks deeply hurt. “You can drink from the lake,” he says, “I don’t know why people ask this. It is still the cleanest lake there is.” The fellow – his name is Jenya – then leaves us but returns a few minutes later with bed-sheets and linen and a strikingly beautiful girl. “My girlfriend,” he introduces, “she lives in Irkutsk and visits me on weekends. She wants to meet you guys.” We assure her that we are as delighted with the introductions as she is.

They accompany us to the only grocery store in the village where we buy snacks and beer. The bottles are warm and we ask if there are any chilled ones available. The woman at the counter smiles and looks at Jenya and he too laughs. “Don’t worry, I will show you.” He tells us. He leads us to the lake. “Put the bottles in there. “ He directs. We poke the water with our toes. It is mightily cold. Twenty minutes later, the beer is as chilled as any we’ve ever had.

The Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest of all lakes, is a staggering compilation of fact and mystique. The biggest freshwater body on the planet, it accounts for 20% of the earth’s freshwater and has been around for an estimated 30 million years. It continues to grow fairly rapidly (2 centimeters a year) and it is predicted that it will, at some point in the future, become an ocean. It houses over two thousands species of flora and fauna, a large percentage of which (about two thirds) are to be found nowhere else. Several hundred rivers drain into the Baikal but only one, the Angara, leaves it. There is a great Buryat legend about the Angara – that she is Baikal’s daughter and tried to flee him for her lover, the river Yenisei. This enraged Baikal so much that he broke an enormous rock off a mountain and threw it towards her and it lodged right over her throat, trapping her underneath and ever since, all that flows out towards Yenisei are her tears. The rock, lodged near Listvyanka from where the Angara originates, has come to be known as the Shaman rock. The lake remains frozen for large periods and even during the summer months the water temperature hovers close to zero. A girl we would meet later in the trip, at Yekaterinburg, would explain to us that there are Alien ships hidden in the Baikal and they keep the water temperature down so that nobody can reach the lake’s bottom and learn of their presence. And so it goes.

In the remaining hours of sunlight – and there are several for the sun only sets after ten – we canoe on the lake, dive into it and promptly come out again, shivering uncontrollably, and sit by it looking out and thinking that we must think profound thoughts. A wooden Banya – a traditional Russian sauna – is built on the shore so one can take a dip in the cold water right after a session inside. We think it over, but the rituals that go with it (amongst other things, it involves lashing oneself and others with twigs and branches) are sufficient dissuasion. Jenya and the girl stay with us and we talk on a great many subjects. He tells us that the owners of the hostel stay in another city and rarely visit. He runs it as best as he can and plans to one day transform the pebbled lakeside near the hostel into a sandy beach. I try to imagine what it would look like if he does succeed. I hope he does not. As if to demonstrate his intent, he gets up and picks up a few large rocks and flings them to one side. We learn that he is a Buddhist and she, an Atheist. This gets them arguing good naturedly and I butt in and take her side and she blushes and thanks me.

Jenya scoffs when we suggest that it would do his business a world of good if a motor road were to reach Angasolka. “Never,” he says, “it will ruin everything!” I suspect he is right.

We have dinner in what appears to be a makeshift mess that is also a classroom. Children’s drawings are mounted on the walls and there are long benches with desks that face in the same direction. “This is a summer school,” says the lady who has appeared with plates and food, “I teach the kids Drawing and Paper-craft.” There is a small elevated platform in the compound outside, behind which there is the lake and it makes for a priceless backdrop. I ask if they host kids’ performances here and she nods and tells us that the kids are away for the weekend and will return the next day and if we could only stick around for an extra day there’d be a performance in the evening. We look at each other, the four of us, and sigh like we have several times during the trip already.

The food is delicious. Bread and meat and porridge and Omul fish and hot chocolate milk. Outside, the sun has set. After the meal, we build a campfire with logs Jenya brings us, before he bids us a good night. We sit around stoking the fire but it begins to drizzle and we have to return to the hostel. The drizzle has turned into a downpour by the time we doze off.

The next morning, I am the first to wake up and when I step out of the cottage, I am greeted by a surreal sight. The rain has stopped. The cloud is still overcast but the mist has lifted and I find that, concealed from view all this time, a magnificent range of mountains lies on the other side of the lake. Everything is a shade of blue – the mountains, the water, the clouds. I light a cigarette and sit staring at the scenery for a long time. A residual mist still remains and from time to time descends and momentarily obstructs the view, but soon lifts and the mountains appear even more majestic than they did the last time. It is like some magical land, this place. I think of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and on cue, I hear a train whistle. It appears around a bend in the hills and chugs into the station, waits for a minute and then continues on. I return to recalling movie references, this time less fanciful but perhaps more charming ones from Scotland and Ireland and thereabouts – Local Hero and The Secret of Roan Inish and so on. I think of a film that could be set here if I were to make one someday. Perhaps, a bittersweet love story, spanning one idyllic year, of a boy from the village and a girl who visits him on weekends? What would it be like spending a year in Angasolka, I wonder. Would I ever be able to return to a Mumbai or a Delhi and a regular job afterwards?

We leave Angasolka near noon. The newfound mountains keep us company throughout and when we eventually round the bend that brings Kultuk into view, we now see Slyudyanka, bigger, denser, beyond it.

The Babushkas are still on the platform, knitting.

Saving Money

2011-06-12T11:50:00.003+05:30

Classroom sessions ended, twice every year, at the end of a semester, well before the exams began. The intervening period – ‘Study Leave’ was the college’s name for it – comprised of a marked increase in alcohol sales, comfortably above the annual average in Dhule. The nights were spent in frenzied binges that ended, near dawn, when hands could no longer guide a glass to the lips. Bodies lay sprawled in hostel corridors and out on the street until they were deposited into a room by sweepers. There, they remained until the next evening, covered in slowly drying, flaking sweat and, often, not much else. And then it began all over again. It is likely that, had the weeks of soot and grime been washed off these bodies during such times, it’d be found that their complexions had turned decidedly fairer, for the Sun hardly ever shone upon them. They may as well have been living on the Arctic Circle.

In the middle of all this, there came and passed a mock examination that the college conducted in anticipation of the actual university exams. Not even the most dedicated students appeared for it, choosing instead, to go back to their homes and spend that time studying on their own, while being taken care of by deliriously happy mothers . Kaushik, too, chose to go back home.

The going back itself, he had turned into an adventure. Since there wasn’t a train station in Dhule, the prescribed and widely used method of travel was buses, privately run, that looked like they were occasionally cared for. There were several that plied, daily, between Dhule and Ahmedabad; a ten hour ride through the night while one slept as comfortably as is possible on a reclining seat. This, however, wasn’t Kaushik’s preferred travel plan; he took the groaning, cracking at the seams, stiflingly crowded state transport bus. It rattled along minor streets, instead of the main highway, and stumbled frequently into empty bus stations, where it shuddered to a stop, thus nullifying whatever little wind its motion artificially created, and remained for interminably long periods. He rode it up to Surat, a city of much wealth and enterprise but no aesthetics, halfway between Dhule and Ahmedabad, having slept fitfully throughout.

One time, he had boarded the bus and found two girls from his college, one pimply and the other plump, both love interests of friends of his, already seated. He stopped abruptly when he saw them, considering whether or not he should show himself, while scanning frantically for seats where he could be hid from their sight. The moments wasted in this state of indecision absolved him of having to make a choice, for the pimply girl spotted him and waved a cheerful Hi. He reciprocated with as much cheeriness as he could muster, given his conversational skills in the company of women. Besides, he was returning at the end of nearly six months and, in his mind as much as in others’, stank unpardonably. The second of his concerns was relieved within a few minutes, for he soon realized that they were returning home after a while too.

Of the two, his preference was distinctly for the plump one, who, as soon as the bus began to move, fell asleep. The pimply one, who Kaushik wished would fall asleep, did not. So he spent the rest of the night, grunting and offering the odd interjectory word while she rambled on about, amongst other things, how she wished to work at NASA – an ambition that Kaushik thought hilarious for he was convinced she couldn’t tell a capacitor from the resistor. When Surat arrived, he got off the bus as quickly as he could, before the girl could get halfway through an ominous sounding sentence, one that he imagined would end in a plea to stick with them for the rest of the way.

In subsequent years, especially when his fumbles and struggles with Ritika began, he looked back upon this and other occasions and wondered he should’ve been more open, tried harder to be interested.

Once in Surat, he had the option of continuing on in the bus or taking a train for the remainder of the journey. He usually took the train.

The train station was a quarter of an hour away from where the bus left him and he walked to there, feeling the slight chill of the night, no matter what the time of the year - an indication that the desert underneath, upon which the cities of the region were built, still breathed. Yellow-orange halogen lights lorded over empty streets, lightening them but not the constructions on either side, which was just as well, for had they done so, the illusion of romanticism would’ve washed away. It occurred to Kaushik in subsequent years, when he tried to recall those nights, that such streets – halogen-lit and dark at the corners where imagination was allowed to fill in the rest - always appear the same in memory, no matter what city they belong to.

The train station too, at those hours, looked like it had seen grander times. The queues at the ticket counters were short, populated only by haggard looking men off night duty or with a stack of newspapers around them. The platforms were long lines of white tube-lights and nothingness - the odd porter hurrying along, smelling of dried sweat on decayed leather, a rare sign of civilization. Sometimes, the sound of running water on utensil, flat and gradually dampening, punctuated by harsh clamours of the most recently washed joining the rest of the pile. The occasional lonely hoot of a locomotive on its way to the shed. Shuttered tea, snack and newspaper stalls. An empty bench in an unlit corner.

He waited at the station until about four in the morning, which is when all at once, a flurry of trains begins to arrive, and the world comes alive again. He never reserved a seat and therefore entered into one of the unreserved ‘General’ compartments that were attached at the front and rear ends of the train. There was hardly ever a place to sit; he usually sat on the floor near the entrance, his legs dangling outside, the wind blowing into his face, tiny bits of used match sticks, cigarette butts and groundnut shells pinching his backside. Food was passed around, offered and accepted with soiled, sticky hands and grins stained with tobacco. He overheard conversations, mundane and exotic, and sometimes indulged in them. Seats were magically found whenever an old man or woman entered the compartment. And there was much bargaining with hawkers and bickering amongst themselves– men’s loud voices and women’s mumbled responses. It was all before Kaushik had an IPod or knew of phrases like ‘the human condition’.

He reached home before his father left for work and the family had their breakfast together, over which, the two elders explained to him the safety and good sense in opting for private buses and the lack of both in how he travelled. He laughed them away, stating he’d saved more than a hundred bucks this way and pointing out how the same father, in years past - when he’d thrown tantrums for having been bought a regular pencil instead of one with a tiny plastic hand at the top which, the manufacturers claimed was to let kids scratch their own backs during the prickly heat of summer - had intoned gravely, ‘A rupee saved is a rupee earned’.

In his own mind, however, he liked to think that that wasn’t the point.

Yab-Yum

2011-05-22T13:21:00.001+05:30

Kaushik hated spending nights away from his apartment when he was in Mumbai. He did not know why, but there it was. Even in college, after nights of frenzied drinking in different rooms and on the hostel terrace, that left in its wake a floor full of empty bottles clinking against each other, vomit, piss and spent bodies, he would stagger alone on the empty tar road that ran through the campus, shivering slightly in the morning chill, looking for a cup of tea, fancying himself to be the tragic hero of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Sometimes he would find his tea, most times he wouldn’t. But he would return to his own room at the end of it anyway.

Ashish and Ritankar had long since realized this, and so, without ever explicitly discussing the subject, it had always been understood that it was to be Kaushik’s apartment where most of their weekends would be spent.

Tonight, however, it was to be Ashish’s place. He’d shifted into a new apartment and was thrilled with its balcony and the view it afforded.

“It is like in Boston Legal!” he’d explained to the other two, “I’ve got beanbags, a small table on which to place the whiskey bottle and the glasses, we’ll be on the twentieth floor, the view’s awesome. One can sit there with one’s feet up, sipping whiskey, looking up at the night sky and down at the city lights. Just like those episodes end!”

Besides, Ashish’s parents were away for the weekend and he had the apartment to himself apart from the presence of his younger sister, who he’d assured them, wouldn’t get in the way.

Ashish’s Dad, the owner of a smalltime stocks & funds trading agency, after having witnessed his business wiped out during the recession, had had to liquidate most of his assets, including a spacious four room flat in a plush suburb of Ahmedabad to pay off his debts, and had since shifted to Mumbai with his wife and daughter. There wasn’t enough income in the family to pay the rents for two separate places, and so they’d all moved in with Ashish. The immediate fallouts of this were that Ashish had to rent a much larger apartment and that Ritankar and Kaushik were having to nod through Ashish’s incessant assertions that it was all going according to plan.

“It is going to be perfect,” he’d say, “when they spend some time in this city, they’ll start to see how I live and what I want out of life and they’ll get used to it. In a couple of years, it should all be stable, and I’ll have enough money saved to buy them an apartment in Ahmedabad so they can move back and then I’ll be free to go settle in Italy!”

“A provincial Italian seaside town. Or Tuscany.”

“Yes yes. Exactly.”

“And what happens when they start pestering you to get married?”

“Oh, we’ll see. I am hoping they wouldn’t. And if they do, well, we’ll see.”

It was in this new, larger apartment where the three were to meet. And so, Kaushik was now on a train that would, in a half hour, take him there. The evening rush had peaked and there was scarcely enough space to maneuver his hand so he could pick his nose if he wished to, while he stood squashed between men he did not know, smelling their day’s work on their bodies. He had a vision of a clean, dull, dutiful wife who waits in a cramped one bedroom apartment with flaked walls, a silent dinner, an absent son out with friends and her submission to her unwashed husband’s needs on a creaky cot in a stuffy room with a creakier ceiling fan and a window unopened in years.

His train of thought was broken by a sudden elbow to his rib. A station. People replacing other people. Among the new set, a girl, young and pretty. A definite oddity in the men’s compartment. Kaushik scanned the area around her for the male classmate that, doubtless, must exist. He found him half hid behind her, a frail boy with spiked hair and acne. Kaushik smirked. Leap of faith, he thought. The man next to him looked at him sharply and he realized he’d said it aloud and smiled apologetically. He resumed looking at the girl. She wore a pink t-shirt with a white bunny on it. The bunny’s eyes, strategically placed, sparkled with what Kaushik gathered were round glass chips. The lower half of her body was obscured by the bodies between them but that she’d be wearing jeans was a safe guess. What else could she? His thoughts turned to Ashish’s sister. He’d never met her. What would she be like?

She was a pleasant looking, slightly plump girl. She wore glasses and once when she took it off to wipe with her napkin, he noticed that she had a slight squint and that she had an old scar from a stitch running above her right eye. Instinctively, his fingers touched the spot under his chin where his own stitch marks were, from a bike accident in Lucknow, when on a stormy night on an unlit single-lane highway he’d slammed into a fallen tree and rolled directly into the path of an approaching truck. He’d gotten out of the way in time; a spare tire on the side of the truck had brushed his back while he stared wide-eyed into space, expecting the impact that never came. His injuries, apart from the peeled skin on his back, were all from the fall, including the one under the chin where his face had struck the road. He remembered clearly what he’d said when he’d cried out loud just before the truck brushed past him. “Fuck Motherfucker!” He’d said it in Hindi, of course, and it struck him that he’d never thought about how, if he were to write about the experience, he would do so. Images of old Arnold Schwarzennegger film posters swam into his mind; he imagined one with Arnold’s huge face and a sawed off shotgun with “Fuck Motherfucker!” written on it in bright red fonts and underneath, in smaller, more fragile fonts, “(In Hindi)”.

He laughed out loud and they all stared at him. Second time it has happened today, he said to himself.

“Oh,” he said, “nothing, just remembered an old joke.”

“Yeah?”

“Isn’t it time we let the wine flow?”

“Absolutely.”

She stuck around for a drink or two, making the odd comment, asking a bunch of questions, stemming the flow of their conversation. The other two waited patiently while Ashish answered her, explained to her the jokes and the references they contained; they walked over to the edge of the balcony and stared at the sweeping cityscape, and smoked. It was indeed a grand sight. Before long, however, she excused herself quietly and, as Kaushik put it in his interpretation of the British Accent, “retired to her chambers.”

“So how’s the novel coming along?” Ashish asked. It was the first time he’d shown any interest in the subject.

“Still some way to go,” Kaushik said, “meandering all over the place at the moment.”

“Meandering?”

“Yeah. I mean, there doesn’t seem to be any definite plot emerging.”

“From whatever I’ve read, it doesn’t have much hope for a plot, does it?” Ritankar asked.

“I guess not. We’re just a bunch of armchair losers after all.”

“Too many Sal Paradises. We need a Dean Moriarty at some point.” Ritankar mused, stumbling a few times over Moriarty.

“And a bit of yab-yum perhaps. I wouldn’t mind it certainly.” Ashish said.

Kaushik grinned, “At this point, I estimate we are miles away from either.”

“Damn. We really do need to get out of here.”

“Italy.”

“Or the French Provence.”

“Yeah sure. After you buy your parents that house in Ahmedabad.”

“About three years.”

“Be married by then.”

“This isn’t helping.”

“Here, have some more wine.”

As the night wore, the city grew quieter. The sound of heavy tires on tar accompanied by the nasal buzz of automotive engines broke the stillness occasionally. In another setting, Kaushik thought, this could be the sound of insects. Honeybees, probably.

“When I am drunk,” Ritankar said and then exhaled deeply a couple of times, his head lulling to one side.

“’When’ was not required in that sentence, I’d say.” Kaushik quipped.

Ritankar ignored him.

“When I am drunk,” he resumed, “it seems to me my ears become more sensitive. Everything sounds louder. Clearer. The clink of glasses. Those trucks on the highway. Water leaking from that tap in your washroom.”

“Yes. Happens to me too.” Kaushik said.

“So for the hearing impaired…” Ashish began before he was cut short by Kaushik.

“Yes. I thought of that. Low hanging fruit.”

Ritankar looked at the two, a little lost.

“What the fuck are you guys talking about?” he said, exhaling thrice between the sentence.

“Oh don’t bother. We are drunk too.”

“How wonderful would it be,” Ashish said, “when we’d have nights as these ending in the arms of women we met at a café.”

“And in the mornings, when we’d wake up, to find them gone, leaving behind baked bread, jam, eggs and fruit juice on the table.”

“And on the next evening, to find them at the café again. Continue with them if we liked them or smile politely and leave with other women…”

“Lets play some music.” Ritankar interjected.

“Yeah sure. The Carla Bruni variety.”

“I don’t have the speakers set up in this apartment yet.”

“Damn!”

When the sun rose, they were still there.

“Oh, there’s hills there! Nice and lush, too!” Ritankar pointed.

“Yes. That’s the Goregaon Film City area. The National Park’s somewhere in that region too, I believe.” Ashish said.

“We must go there sometime.”

“Yes, how about now?”

“No, not now,” Kaushik said, “I am totally not in the mood for walking jungles at the moment. I am hungry though.”

“We can go have some breakfast downstairs.”

“You know a place?”

“No. Haven’t explored too much yet,” Ashish said, “but we could start today.”

“Or,” Ritankar said, “we could go to Café Ideal!”

“But that’s more than an hour away!”

“Yes, so what?”

“Isn’t a bad idea, Ashish,” Kaushik said, “we can.”

“And then come back all this way?”

“We don’t need to. My place is closer.”

Short Story - Words

2011-03-13T11:40:00.000+05:30

The wind grew stronger. It howled its way into the gaps of shut windows and doors – a path otherwise monopolized by sunlight – but there wasn’t a sun this afternoon, or maybe there was, hidden behind the angry, dirty clouds, but from the ground, it was difficult to say. In the distance, thunder clapped, as did the errant tin roofs of makeshift shanties.

Inside the old, crumbling mill, where the air smelt of rotten moss and animal excreta and where nobody had entered for any definite purpose in years, apart for vagrants and stray dogs, the two men stood facing each other. One of them wore a gray woolen cap, through the sides of which, strands of silvery white hair crawled out. The other man had a gun in his hands.

“How was that then?” asked the man with the gun.

The man with the woolen cap and silvery white hair did not immediately respond.

“Sounded alright,” he said finally, “you always have had a way with dramatic imagery. Woolen cap - Gun in hand isn’t bad at all! Sums up our situation here, quite effectively. Those first few lines though – the shut windows and thunder claps and all that – that sounded to me like you’ve been reading, or maybe rereading, Cormac McCarthy lately.”

“That has nothing to do with what I wrote!” the man with the gun fumed, “you condescending bastard!”

“Ah! So I take it that you have indeed been reading McCarthy, yes?”

“Sonofabitch!”

“You might as well have included some Spanish dialogue, while you were at it. Given me a sombrero to wear instead of the woolen cap, perhaps?”

“Sonofabitch!”

“Repetition. You already used that just now.”

“I am glad I am going to kill you!”

“So it appears.”

“Sonofabitch!”

“Oh come on.”

An old mill. Abandoned. Walls smeared with soot and piss on both sides. Doors and windows fallen away, leaving behind ugly, blank gashes. A good thing in this gale. The wind’s fiercest gusts dissipate through there, the path of least resistance, letting the crumbling walls hold fort against the rest. Dry leaves, bits of paper and plastic blow in through the gashes. A smell of stagnant water, rust and piss. Strangely, there aren’t any cobwebs. There were once floor tiles, or maybe just stone slabs, but they’ve been stolen away, exposing the soil underneath, on which, now resides ankle-high undergrowth. Two men. Out of place. Middle aged perhaps. Difficult to say in the gloom. It is raining outside. They are dry. They must have been inside for a long time. One points a gun at the other. The other has his hands in his overcoat. Perhaps he has a gun too.

“You have a gun!” the man with the gun in his hand exclaimed.

The other man chuckled.

“I might. I leave it to the readers’ imagination. Unlike your narratives. All wonderfully described, all close-ended. No helpful pointers for the reader to exercise a brain cell or two.”

“Piece of shit!”

“Good. You are improving! Marginally.”

“Anyway, who’s to decide who described this better. I think yours is shit too. All lame showy minimalism.”

“I’ll decide. I am the published author here, aren’t I?”

“Bullshit!”

“You want me to repeat the entire Architect response to that from the Matrix film? I have it all memorized, you know.”

“You are just a pompous piece of shit!”

“And a published author.”

“And that’s why I am going to kill you.”

“You didn’t even win the bet!”

“I don’t give a damn. I believe mine was better. Besides, I have the gun.”

“I might have one too.”

“Rubbish.”

“The rain’s stopped.”

“What?”

“The rain’s stopped. The wind’s dropped. I can hear the sound of vehicles on the street again.”

“Why did you do it?”

“What?”

“Why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“You know what I am talking about, asshole! Why did you ask the publisher to reject my manuscript?”

“It wasn’t any good.”

“Bullshit.”

“I didn’t like it.”

“You’ve never liked anything I’ve ever done.”

“I enjoyed your fifth grade essay on your brother very much.”

They smiled, both of them.

“You are such an asshole.” The man with the gun said.

“You shouldn’t lose hope.”

“As long as you are alive, I have no chance!”

“And after I die?”

“Oh! The world will mourn your death. They’ll all be shattered. And in all that nauseating sympathy and mush, I will quietly sneak in my book. Be quite poignant. Sell well, I believe.”

“I see. So you are going to exploit my name to peddle your sorry literature.”

“It isn’t sorry literature!”

“Who cares?”

“Yes, exactly. Who cares? It will be name on the book.”

“It is my name too.”

“Who cares?”

“Repetition. Again. Your lack of creativity appalls me.”

“Who cares?” This time, with a sly grin.

“Whatever happened to your self esteem?”

“What about it?”

“You want to use my name.”

“So?”

“The man you hate most.”

“So?”

“Ironic. Must be tough living with that knowledge. I am glad I am not in your position.”

“And I am glad I am not in yours. At least I will be living for a while yet.”

“And then? When the euphoria of the first work fades away? The remaining years wallowing in self pity?”

“I’ll publish more. Grow out of your shadow.”

“My shadow. Yes, precisely.”

“Sonofabitch.”

“I predict you’ll commit suicide before another decade is out.”

“We’ll see.”

“I had such a great obituary in mind for you.”

“Ha!”

“No. Serious. I’ve spent years perfecting it. In my head, of course.”

The man with the gun, momentarily unsure, looked down at his trouser pocket while he fumbled inside for a cigarette with his hands, then all at once realized his error and jerked the gun into position again. The other man had made no attempt to move.

“Don’t fuck with me now!” he said.

“I am not.” The other man responded.

“Then what’s this about an obituary? What’s that got to do with any of this?”

“Oh nothing. Just a thought.”

“Tell me.”

“What?”

“Fucking tell me or I’ll kill you right now.”

“I believe that’s what you intend to do anyway!”

“Tell me!”

“Nothing, really. I was just thinking, is all.”

“Go on.”

“I mean, this manuscript of yours, it isn’t that bad after all.”

Silence.

“In fact, I think it might actually fly. Become a classic even, given the correct circumstances.”

“Circumstances?”

“Yes. A legend around it. Like, maybe, a posthumous publication, you know. A premature end to what could’ve been a great career.”

“What?”

“Yes. It always works out that way. Look at James Dean. There are those who think there wasn’t a greater actor. And yet, he did only three films. If he’d done more, who knows?”

“Stuff your movie references!”

“I was only saying.”

“Saying what?”

“Saying, if only you were to die, and this manuscript was to be published afterward, it could bring the glory you always wished for.”

“What about the obituary! This started with an obituary! Don’t fuck with me man! Don’t you dare fuck with me!”

“Ah yes, the obituary. Be honest with yourself. Who else but me could write a better obituary for you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Yes. So that’s what I was thinking. A tragic death. The publication of a masterpiece. The obituary as a catalyst. A great deal of dignity in that, no?”

“There is a cat meowing somewhere.”

“In Japanese myth…”

“Shut up! I know.”

“Are you crying?”

“No I am not! I don’t know.”

“What are you crying for, you idiot!”

“Shut up bastard!”

“Oh come on, you’re the one with the gun!”

“You might have one too.”

Chuckles.

Short Story - Wrong Skills

2011-01-31T12:20:00.002+05:30

When the benevolent old king died, the kingdom was flung into great turmoil. The feverish King, on his deathbed, in his final moment of lucidity, pronounced that which most of his subjects had hoped he would not – that after him, his son be made the rightful King. The collective gasps from everybody present in the room at the time drowned out the King’s actual last words, ones that he had meticulously prepared and rehearsed over the previous week.

That a ruler’s son would succeed his father to the throne was not the cause for concern. The problem was the son himself. It was a widely held belief that the boy was a retard. Indeed, there were whispered suggestions that he was not even the King’s own son and that the King had in fact enlisted the services of his closest minister to administer the requisite services upon the Queen.

Now, these insinuations, though vile, weren’t entirely unfounded either. It was common knowledge, that the King had, for many years remained childless, despite having changed wives and doctors numerous times, before there had finally arrived the news that the then Queen had miraculously delivered a son and that the King’s succession was, therefore, assured. The skepticism of his subjects found its roots in this miracle, and though the kingdom had rejoiced with great fervor, there had hung over the festivities a perceptible air of doubt, even mild discontent, for there was the matter of the King’s hugely popular teenaged nephew – son of his long dead brother – whom, the Kingdom had regarded as the next King with much fondness and whose life had suddenly become so utterly meaningless.

And then, over the next two decades, their hopes had slowly gathered wind again. From the outset, the young Prince had demonstrated a complete lack of appetite for learning. He fumbled when he spoke. . He couldn’t remember letters of the alphabet. He failed to remember the names of objects. He was clumsy with weapons and armour. He couldn’t ride a horse. He developed a pot belly. By the time he was fifteen, he had begun to go bald.

His only interest, it appeared, was food and it’s cooking. He spent hours in the kitchen with the royal chefs and servants. They were, of course, embarrassed by his presence and begged him to stay away so they could concentrate on their work, but he obstinately stayed on. The King was understandably dismayed by all of this. He forbade the Prince to visit the royal kitchens, to which the boy responded by locking himself up in his chambers for weeks, without food. It wasn’t until the Queen (against the wished of the King) promised to the Prince that not only would he be allowed to enter the kitchens but that she would accompany him there, that he agreed to emerge. Soon after, he became an indispensible member of the chef’s team; he showed such great aptitude for his work that in a year’s time, the chef let the Prince prepare entire meals for the palace, without supervision.

By and by, the King resigned himself to the ways of his son. He began to divert an increasing amount of attention to his nephew, who by this time, had turned into a fine young man. At dinner, the nephew regained his place next to the King and the two of them spent their time at the table speaking highly of the Prince’s cooking. The Prince was thrilled by their compliments. The Queen wept quietly inside the isolation of her chambers. The Kingdom again came to regard the nephew as their next ruler and so it was that when the King pronounced the wrong name on his deathbed, the kingdom was flung into great turmoil. The very next day, the nephew announced that he would leave the kingdom and refused to attend the crowning of the new King. He left and with him left hundreds of his most loyal men and women.

The first request the Prince made, to his appalled ministers whilst they were in consultations on the impending crowning ceremony, was that he be allowed to oversee the grand feast after the ceremony. That is impossible! They told him. They couldn’t let the King become a subject of ridicule! Now that he was no longer just a delinquent Prince but the ruler of a kingdom, there was the matter of keeping up appearances! They reasoned with him. But the Prince remained unmoved. There is only one thing I know to do well and though unworthy of Kings it may be, I believe my subjects should not be denied the best that I have to offer them. He said.

The day of the ceremony arrived. The crowd cheered and then fell silent, while the new King fumbled through his first address to them. Towards the end, some were openly jeering him and when it ended, polite applause was offered, and the kingdom entered the grand hall, venue of the grand feast, in a sombre mood.

But at some point during the feast, towards the end of the second course, they say, a remarkable thing happened. The subjects, quiet and despondent until then, suddenly started to find their voice again. There was laughter, isolated at first, but soon it had spread over the entire hall. By the time the feast ended, the hall was in an uproar. People danced on the tables in manic frenzy and when the King appeared before them, they screamed and chanted his name. The ministers were dumbfounded. They scratched their heads and looked quizzically at one another, unable to comprehend the incredible scenes being enacted before them. The King looked towards them and smiled, although later, in memory, it was to change into a smirk.

The grand success of the ceremony ushered in with it a period of magnificent joy and peace. The King allowed his ministers to decide matters of the state, ill equipped as he was to do so himself. Instead, he spent his days walking around the kingdom and mixing with his subjects. Often, he would stop at a house and offer to cook for them. The food he would cook would melt away the last remaining vestiges of cynicism from the minds of his subjects. The Kingdom prospered.

It went on for many years thus, before, the inevitable news trickled in. The nephew, together with a massive army he had built in the intervening years, was planning to attack the kingdom. The King consulted with his ministers and they suggested that the best course of action would be to send out a team of emissaries to negotiate peacefully. The severed heads, ghastly pale - the skin on the faces had flaked off from lying submerged in stagnant water for there had been a torrential downpour the previous day -, of the emissaries returned in a creaky chest.

Next, a troop of the kingdom’s finest warriors was sent out. At the end of a month, they had not returned. The ministers were at a loss. The King asked if more forces could be sent out, but the Ministers asked him to not do so, for there was no telling what had become of the ones sent earlier and that they would need as many at hand to defend their land when the enemies were upon them. One or two ministers broached the possibility of a surrender so further damage be spared, but this the King would not allow. And so they waited, fearful and desperate, for the dreaded forces to arrive.

The King spent his days increasingly confined to his chambers. He grew dejected and sad, and with him did the entire kingdom. He refused to venture out into the city, although he was urged to, in order to reinstate morale. What can I do! He cried. I can do nothing for them! I cannot save them! What can I do! Cook for them? Someone commented, wryly, that that wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Then one day, the enemies arrived. It was a staggering sight. From their vantage points on the watchtowers, the men reported that the troops stretched for miles and miles; the last of the men weren’t even within sight. There was nothing that could possibly be done, the King was told, other than die a heroic death.

A heroic death! The King gasped. A heroic death! Why, I cannot even hold a sword without cutting myself!

That is when it occurred to him. The last thing, the only thing he could do. And so, he called upon his subjects to gather in the grand hall where his first feast had been, so he could address them in this time of despair.

You have seen the enemy advancing at us! He told them. And much as I would like to calm you, to assure you that everything will be well and we will defend our lands successfully, you know that it is not true. I am not the King that can save you, my subjects! And you have known this all along. We have spent some good years together, feasting and celebrating our lives. But I cannot be the King you will now expect me to be! There is nothing I can do to save you. And so, I propose to do the only thing I know how to do. One last time. A grand feast! The greatest celebration of our times yet! Food that nobody’s ever seen before! Revelry that will resound through times to come!

The grand feast began. The sound of the merriment floated through the wind and reached the enemies. The Nephew, seated at the dinner table with his chiefs, heard it and couldn’t suppress a chuckle. Fools! He laughed. The Chiefs joined in the laughter and when it subsided, returned pensively to their dinner. They lay in their beds staring at the darkness, kept awake by the delirium of their enemies, until suddenly near sunrise, all became quiet.

When they reached the gates, wide open, they found the town deserted. A bewitching aroma lingered in the air. They stumbled around the streets cluelessly, unsure of what to expect, until they reached the grand hall of the feasts, where they encountered the extraordinary sight of thousand s of men and women, piled over one another in wild orgies, eyes open in expressions of mad joy and bliss, stone dead, poisoned by what they had eaten.

Short Story - A Life Less Regular

2011-01-08T23:41:00.001+05:30

It was to my third mail that I finally received a response from the man who, after having disappeared for nearly twenty five years, had been found to have returned to his home one fine day. His reply was a curt mention of a date and time; I had expressed a desire to meet him and, in the second and third mails, assured him that I was not a journalist and had no intention of publishing his story. I had, of course, lied. As a symbolic gesture, however, I had agreed to not carry notepads or other recording devices and, therefore, if the story is found to carry a tone more akin to a narration than a conversation, and lacking in specific details, you know why that is.

I spent a few hours in his neighbourhood, wandering around and striking up conversations at cafés, before I went in to meet him. It was one of those quaint colonies on the fringes of a big city where the same families had spent generations and would continue to do so. I learnt that nobody quite knew where he’d been all these years and how he’d miraculously reappeared. It appeared he rarely ever ventured outdoors since his return and hardly anybody had actually seen him. They spoke of obvious physical changes; the man was in his mid twenties when he disappeared. He belonged to an affluent family. His father had run a pretty successful business, something to do with auto spare parts, until he had died in a freak accident at a golf course when he had tripped on something and the golf cart behind him had run over his face. The business has gradually decayed and shut down.

I was ushered into the drawing hall by an old maid, who asked me to wait there. There wasn’t a sofa or a chair in sight. When she left the room, I walked to the window at one end of the room and found it overlooked a garden of weeds, mushrooms and wildflowers. I stood there waiting, smelling the musty, not disagreeable, smell of disrepair. Presently, I heard a man’s voice behind me and I turned to find him standing near the door into which the maid had disappeared earlier.

He was a frail man, stooped slightly, and when he extended his hand, I found it pale and exquisite, like that of a young woman. Greetings exchanged, we stood there in an uncomfortable silence, looking at each other sheepishly and then away, for several moments, and I was beginning to wonder how to begin when the maid returned with two plastic chairs. She asked if we’d like some tea. I nodded and he asked to be brought whiskey instead. I thought briefly if I should do so too but from the maid’s audible sigh I realized it wasn’t a habit she entirely approved of and decided against it.

“What do you do? Who told you about me?” He asked. He had a raspy, whispery sort of voice – the voice of a man not used to speaking and used to a lot of cigarettes, I surmised.

“Oh, I am just a, you know, I work for this glass manufacturing company, I am in the administration department. Quite boring actually.”

He nodded. “And where did you hear of me?”

“Oh, I don’t remember. I think a friend of mine has some relatives who live in this part of town – he may have mentioned you. It was over drinks, I remember that. Later, I asked him if he could get me in touch with you. He brought me your mail address about a month back. I have no clue how he got it.” I hoped he wouldn’t delve further. He did not.

“Do you know why I agreed to see you?”

I shook my head. He continued.

“Because you made at least seven fairly obvious grammatical mistakes in the twelve lines you wrote to me. Told me you are unlikely to have read anything beyond office memos. I avoid people who have an interest in literature.”

Instinctively I turned towards the huge wall mounted bookshelf in the room and I registered for the first time as strange that it did not contain a single book. Anyway, I wasn’t sure how he expected me to react to this strange explanation and remained silent, fighting back the obvious urge to ask what those grammatical errors were.

“So, what happened?” I asked and realized immediately how utterly clumsy the question was.

He chuckled. “That’s it? That direct?”

The maid arrived with her tray in time to spare me further embarrassment.

“Well,” he said after sipping the whiskey a couple of times, “I suppose there wasn’t another way. Unless you had the patience to become friends with me – and right now you don’t know if that’s even possible – the subject wouldn’t appear in course of a normal conversation.”

He gulped down the rest of the whiskey in his glass and filled it again.

“What would you say,” he asked me,” if I say I was trapped inside books all this time?”

“What?”

“Yes, what would you say?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know what to say.”

He gulped down the contents of the second glass. Filled it again - this time, only ice cubes to go with the whiskey.

“But that is what happened.”

Over the next half hour, the man went on to narrate to me this astonishing story.

“As a kid, I used to make entries in a diary that my father had bought me, just random stories, completely lacking in even basic literary value. My father also bought me a bunch of books – some of the great classics in abridged, children’s editions – and I read them with great interest but precious little understanding. I used to try and copy the themes of those books into what I wrote myself. So after I read Treasure Island, I wrote one about a lost island with treasure in it, that sort of thing. I wrote them on pieces of stray paper which my father then meticulously arranged, stapled together and filed away. He used to think, or at least I think he used to think, that I had a talent for the written word and like most things he said then, I blindly believed him. And so, by the time I entered my teens, my sole ambition in life was to become a novelist. So I kept writing this and that and found everyone who read them had good things to say. Everyone, until I became friends with this bespectacled guy in college who had a reputation for being a great lover of literature. So obviously I asked him to comment upon some of my stories. I remember vividly his words after he’d read a few. “There isn’t a doubt that you have a way with words. But really, all of this stuff you’ve written, what use is it? It means nothing. Honestly boy, don’t take it hard, but you’ve nothing to say.” I was shattered. I didn’t leave my room for days after that. I came to loathe myself, my father, the life I lived. Was it my fault that I was born into a regular family, a life where all my needs were fulfilled and grew up like everyone else did? Why wasn’t I born in a troubled society instead? During a revolution! How cruel is it to bestow upon a man a gift for something and then give him a life in which his hopes of using it are taken away! Anyway, after a few days, that boy came to see me in my room. I told him everything. How can I have anything to write about if nothing happens in my life! I asked him. “I do not have the answer to it,” he said, “but I can bring you books. Novels. Great works. And you can read them. And you can learn from them. And who knows, maybe one day you will discover something in your life worth describing, worth sharing with everyone else. “ So he began to bring me books. All kinds. Authors I’d never heard of. In the beginning, I found reading those terribly difficult. I’d throw away a book in disgust having read barely a page. And then, one day, he brought me Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I read it wide-eyed late into the night. And when I woke up the next morning, I found myself on a strange new bed and beside me lay Gregor Samsa as a vermin.”

I shall refrain from recounting details of my exclamations of disbelief and amazement beyond this point for they serve no purpose to the story.

“Yes, Gregor Samsa,” he continued, “I was petrified. I shrieked and jumped up from the bed. He continued to sleep undisturbed. Presently, the door opened and the story began. I realized none of the characters could see me. I was just there in the story and there was nothing I could do. Of course, I thought that I was dreaming and with the end of the story, I’d wake up and everything would be fine. But when I reached the end of the story, the strangest thing happened. I found myself suddenly transported on a boat traveling through a murky river. I didn’t know where I was until I began to listen to the conversations of the other five men on the boat and found one of them was called Marlow. Charles Marlow. And thus began Heart of Darkness. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Heart of Darkness ended and another novel began and so it went. I lived inside story after story for years, trapped and unable to get out. I saw Renaissance Europe – Michelangelo, Da Vinci, all of them and I saw the deplorable acts of sexual theatre in De Sade’s imagination. I fought against the Germans and then, in a different story, with them. One of my greatest experiences was when I lived through pretty much the history of the world at the side of Beauvoir’s immortal character of Fosca. So you see, I was trapped inside books for twenty five years. I do not expect anyone to believe it. But there it is. And then one day, I don’t know how, I woke up and found myself here. For a while I thought this too was a story. Who knows, perhaps it is. Anyway, here I am and my entire life has passed me by without my having lived it.”

Short Story - Stories of Pain and Bliss

2011-01-02T18:12:00.005+05:30

“And then one day, “said the Novelist, “I woke up and found myself gripped by an overwhelming fear of I knew not what.”

“Yeah?” I murmured, engrossed in the frantic, haphazard movements of the ant around which I had marked an imaginary boundary with my finger.

“Are you even listening to what I am saying?”

I sighed. It had been over an hour since the man had approached my table and asked if he could join me. His eyes were red and he looked so troubled and in need of some company that I had not the heart to refuse. And so he’d occupied the chair opposite mine, introduced himself as the writer of a dozen novels, out of which I’d heard the name of one or two and hadn’t read any, and begun to narrate a story which he said was the most bizarre and insisted was that of his own life. Through the next forty minutes, he recounted, in excruciating detail, his most trivial memories of growing up and writing. Twenty minutes into it, I was convinced that there wasn’t really a story at all. Whatever it was, however, wasn’t done yet and the only reason I hadn’t walked out on him yet was the beer mug in front of me and his offer to pay for it and as many others as I liked. I squashed the ant with my left thumb and looked up at him.

“You woke up gripped by a strange fear. Yeah, I am listening.”

He looked pleased.

“Yes, a very strange fear. In fact, I am not even sure if it actually was fear. More like anxiety, probably. Only, it wasn’t vague and less immediate as anxieties usually are. My heart beat violently and I could feel drops of perspiration emerge from behind each ear and trace their paths through my cheeks. When you are a writer, you tend to remember that sort of detail, I suppose.”

He paused as the waiter refilled our mugs. My eyes wandered to the other tables. On an adjacent table, another man, affluent of appearance, sat alone. His glass of whiskey looked untouched; the ashtray on his table was choked with cigarette butts. Perhaps sensing my gaze, he turned towards me and I realized how incredibly feeble the lights were, for I couldn’t make out his features. He fumbled inside his coat and found another cigarette. He struck a match, holding it between his thumb and middle finger, and it illuminated briefly, a wistful smile and the stump where his index finger had been. The Novelist was speaking again.

“At first I didn’t know what to do. I paced my apartment purposelessly. Everything looked in order. The girl I had spent the night with was gone; it was past noon. I went downstairs and read a newspaper at the café on the other side of the street. I spoke to two women on the next table. I don’t remember the conversation but it was genial. But when I returned to the apartment, that oppressing feat still remained. Anyway, I sat down to work on my novel, thinking it would take my mind off whatever it was that bothered me. I found the words come surprisingly easy to me, as I started to write. In no time, I had three paragraphs penned. I was thrilled. I made myself a coffee and returned to the table. As I glanced through what I’d written that morning, I had this odd feeling of having read it before. I re-read it a few times. Yes, definitely, I’d read it before. In fact, it occurred to me that I had actually written something like this before and unintentionally, I was repeating myself.”

I noted that the man at the other table had now turned towards us and was intently listening to the Novelist speak.

“So,” the Novelist continued, “I pulled out one of my earlier novels from the shelf – the one in which I thought I would find the paragraphs in question. I flipped through the pages and eventually found it.”

His voice had turned into an agitated hoarse whisper and his eyes shone. I surmised we were finally getting somewhere with the story.

“And guess what I found! Those same sentences, word for word, not a single punctuation out of place! The exact same thing! I couldn’t believe my eyes! ‘How is it possible’, I said to myself, ‘How can it be exactly the same!’ I read some of the earlier paragraphs from the book. And it began to dawn upon me. I went back to my unfinished manuscript. Sure enough! Those paragraphs were all there too! I was rewriting a book I’d already written! Word for word!”

The Novelist began to sob. I glanced at the man at the other table. I still couldn’t see his face in the darkness but I had a feeling he was smiling. Frankly, I wanted to burst into laughter too, so outrageous was the story.

“But…that has to be, I don’t know, how can that be true?” I asked.

“But it is! It is!” he wailed, “And it doesn’t end there. You know what I found after that? I opened one book after the other. And they were all the same! All the same! All those books I’d written, all of them, with their different covers and different names, they were all the same!”

At that moment, I couldn’t control it any longer and burst into laughter.

“Come on man! Surely, you don’t expect me to believe this!”

He looked at me with wide disbelieving eyes.

“Shut up, you dumb fuck!” he exploded, “Do you have any idea what it feels like? What it feels like to discover that everything you’ve written is the same thing? You laugh at me in my face, you moron! I went to every bookstore in the city that day! Every fucking bookstore! And I read every last damned copy of my books available in the city! And they were all the same!”

He became silent, breathing in and out in great gasps. I continued to stare at him, unable to find anything appropriate to say.

“I knew you wouldn’t believe it,” he said after a while, “so I brought these with me.”

He brought out a bunch of books from his bag, which I hadn’t noticed thus far, and placed them on the table. I instinctively noticed that they weren’t the same size. There were some that were far thicker than the rest. I picked one up. It was one of his. I opened it to the first chapter and read two paragraphs. Then I picked another.

It was true. They were all exactly the same book.

I found the Novelist staring straight at me. I realized, with a shock, that my own eyes had welled up.

“I am sorry,” was all I could manage. He remained silent.

“So what did you do after that? You abandoned the unfinished manuscript? Changed it?”

“No,” he said, his voice calm now, “I can’t.”

“Can’t?”

“Yes. Can’t. Each time I begin to write – a fresh chapter, another paragraph, anything at all, I find I cannot write anything other than what I have already written. I just cannot. I am doomed to writing the same story till I die. So I’ve stopped writing.”

“Well,” said someone and I looked up to find the man at the other table standing next to us. He was smoking another cigarette. “that is a most interesting story. I wish I could write it. But as you will soon see, I too cannot. Perhaps the young gentleman here will.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. He drew his chair from the other table and sat down at ours.

“You see, I am in the middle of, let me see, a somewhat similar situation.”

“What rubbish!” said the Novelist, “similar situation?”

“Yes, well, not exactly the same, mind you. Similar.”

“Uh-huh?”

“I am a novelist too, you see. But I only published one novel.”

“And that makes you similar how?”

“Let me finish,” the man said impatiently, “I said I only published only one novel. On the other hand, I have written close to fifty.”

The Novelist and I looked at each other, the exasperation clear on our faces.

“I wrote the first one,” he continued, “and at the end of it I realized how complete it was! How truly perfect! I couldn’t ever hope to write anything like it again. And why would I want to? So after it was published, I decided to not attempt anything else ever again. I wrote the same story again. Oh, the utter exhilaration of reliving one’s finest achievement! Every punctuation, every word! Mesmerizing! I didn’t waste a minute before starting to write it, a third time. And thus it has been, for more years than I care to remember now. So you see, our stories aren’t very different.”

We pondered this until the bar closed that night.

Short Story - The Story That Can't Be Told

2010-12-16T16:18:00.001+05:30

I walk into the railway station still cursing the traffic under my breath. The clock on the wall with a white dial and square black numbers and hands shows a time well after midnight. The platforms appear deserted except for the odd porter hurrying along, smelling of dried sweat on decayed leather. I hear the sound of running water on utensil, sometimes flat and sometimes gradually dampening, punctuated by a harsh clamour of the most recently washed joining the rest of the pile. It mixes with the occasional lonely hoot of a locomotive on its way to the shed. I ask a passing porter and he informs me that the last train of the night has already passed.

I find an empty bench in an unlit corner. A dog lies on its side next to it; it’s left ear flaps lazily when I place my suitcase on the bench. I stretch my legs out in front and tug my tee a few times near the belly so it lies loosely and creased, camouflaging the paunch. The weather is balmy. A faint breeze rises and falls. In the distance, infinite lines of semaphore signals trace the path of railway tracks.

There is no open tea stall in sight. I close my eyes and try to sleep. Perhaps, I do. I am not sure. When I open my eyes again, everything is the same. I decide to stroll on the platform in the hope of finding an errant hawker still peddling stale readymade tea from a steel cylinder. Even if I do not, I say to myself, it will let time pass more unobtrusively.

To my right, the platform ends sooner. So I walk in that direction first. I consider briefly, if I should carry the suitcase, but decide against it. It is dark under the bench and it is unlikely that, even if someone were to pass by it, the suitcase will be noticed. The glimmer of lights from the platform on the track beside me, move with me. I walk for a while, gazing intently and continuously at them, until it makes me a little dizzy. Have you ever felt a bizarre restless desire, without reason, to jump onto the tracks just when a train is about to pass? Just to see what happens? Happens to me all the time. I have to turn away and look elsewhere until it passes. Presently, the platform ends and I turn back.

It is not until I am almost at the other end of the platform, that I notice it. Through a fissure in the parapet wall that lines one side of the platform to mark the perimeters of the railway station, I see a line of square white lights. The light disappears by the time I register it. I step back and forth a few times, until I locate it again. I move closer to the wall. The lights reveal themselves to be from windows of a train compartment. On each side of it, I see the ends of adjacent compartments. Through the windows, I spot human outlines. It is a train! The porter was wrong! There still is a train tonight! I rush back to my bench and pick up the suitcase. The dog, I notice, has slipped away.

Of the long line of ticket counters, only one is open at this hour. A pleasant young girl smiles sleepily from behind the grilled window. I ask her for tickets and she explains to me that there are no more trains for the rest of the night. “But you are making a mistake!” I tell her, “there is another train! I have seen it just now!” She looks bemused. “No Sir,” she explains again, “there is no train.” “What rubbish!” I scream, “are you stupid? I have seen it myself, I said!” Her forehead creases. “What train, Sir,” she asks, “where have you seen it?”

I tell her. She looks at me strangely. “You want tickets for that train?” she asks. I am thoroughly exasperated by now. “Yes yes,” I say, “that very train! Is there a problem?” “No, just that…”she starts to say and then pauses. “Wait”, she says, “I will consult the station master.”

I throw my hands up but she does not see it, for she is gone by then. I wait impatiently. She returns, and I can say this confidently since I’ve been watching the clock all the while, seven minutes later. “Has the Station Master agreed to offer me a ticket?” I ask her testily. She busies herself with typing whatever it is that she needs to type for a ticket to be produced. After she hands it to me and I glance at it to confirm the requisite details, I ask her if she will tell me how to get to the train. “I saw it through a crack in the wall. I didn’t have time to find a route.” I tell her. She offers me directions. As I am about to leave, she says, “There’s another train in just less than three hours Sir. Are you sure you don’t want to wait for that one?” I don’t even bother to answer. I look back once and see her smiling sadly at me.

The train is scantily populated, as befits the time. I walk past a few compartments before entering one. It appears empty. I pick a seat and stuff my suitcase under it. Then I pace the entire compartment a couple of times. It is indeed empty. The train begins to move.

I drift off to sleep. I do not know if I dream, since I never remember them when I wake up. But when I do, I find another man sitting opposite me. He is a middle aged man, quite unremarkable, except for his strange choice of attire. He wears a woolen overcoat, under which, I catch glimpses of a sweater. A muffler is coiled around his neck and he holds one glove in the other gloved hand. When he realized I am awake, he smiles feebly and greets me.

“Are you alright?” I ask him, “it isn’t that cold, is it?”

“No,” he says, “I always put these on when I travel at night.”

I nod disinterestedly. Outside, a full moon shines brightly. I wonder why it has escaped my notice so far. It seems to be a cloudless night, although it is difficult to say, since the lights inside the compartment reflect off the glass and obscure the view. The other man has dozed off. I get up and walk to the toilet. When I come out, I find one of the doors to the compartment unlatched. It creaks softly. I open it wide and stare outside. A full wind blows into my face and I shut my eyes for a few seconds. The train, I sense, is moving at great speed.

The view outside is surreal. The train is blazing its way through a bridge. The sky is indeed clear, and bathed in moonlight. The moon is a perfect circle, and occasionally, small wisps of cloud flow across it. When they do, they look like paper burnt at the edges. I look for stars, expecting to find whole clusters of them, but find only one, that shines brilliantly a little to the left of the moon. I am not sure if it is, in fact, a star. It could be - probably is - Venus. Below, everything is pitch-black. I wonder what this bridge crosses over. The train is still over it – bridge of great length. Almost as if it were crossing an ocean. But that couldn’t be – there wasn’t an ocean on this route. I made a mental note to check what it could be when I reached my destination in the morning.

I lean out of the train and count the compartments. There are twelve. The light of the moon, strangely, does not touch the land. Everything lies in darkness. Just the train with its luminescent windows. I wonder what this scene must look like from a vantage point outside the train. A stark moon. One shining planet. And the train as a streak of white light suspended in the darkness.

I see a face appear at the door of the next compartment. It belongs to an old woman. She wears a scarf that hides her hair. The scarf flutters in the wind. I smile at her. She smiles back. I resume staring at the moon.

Through the corner of my eye, I detect movement. I turn and find that the lady has taken her scarf off and her hair, long and grey, blow eerily behind her. She is staring at me. I don’t know what you say. So I smile again. She whispers something, but I can’t hear her. The wind carries her voice in the opposite direction. Then she jumps.

I am so shocked, I become paralyzed. It is perhaps that I even stopped breathing momentarily, for when I regain my composure, I find my chest heaving, drawing in great gusts of air. I keep staring at the door, where the lady was until a few minutes ago, almost hoping that I hallucinated and that she will appear again. Or maybe, if I hallucinated, there wasn’t a lady at all. Another face peeps out. It is not the old lady. It is a young woman, extremely pretty, and she smiles at me before I can. I smile and then remember about the old woman and start to tell her what I have seen. She shakes her head and waves her hand before I am through the first sentence. Then she jumps.

And now I notice the macabre spectacle. On each side, at every door, I see faces. They appear, stay there mutely for a few seconds and jump. A dozen bodies together, almost in unison. Their faces are replaced by others’ and then they jump. Thus it continues. I am so struck by horror, I cannot take my eyes of it. I realize I do not even see what I see. Indeed, my vision appears from that vantage point of my imagination, and I see from there, in addition to the moon, Venus and the train, bodies, their backs lit by the train lights, in free fall. Then they disappear.

Someone places a hand on my shoulder. I turn to find the man who was sitting next to me. “No! No!” I scream, “don’t push me!” He shakes his head and pulls me in, instead. He drags me to my seat. From inside his overcoat, he produces a flask. The brandy flows warmly into my stomach. The sound of the train comes back to me. It is still on the bridge and still at great speed.

“What train is this? What is happening? Did you see what is happening outside? Did you see!” I sputter

“Yes, I know.” He says.

I gulp down more brandy.

“You shouldn’t have forced yourself on this train.” His voice is deep and rich.

“What train is this? What train is this! Oh my God!”

“It is the train of suicides,” He says, “on every full moon.” He continues to speak for a few more minutes.

“What? The Government! What rubbish!” It seems my voice returns to me, “that is just bullshit! Such a thing could never exist!”

“But it does.”

“No, it doesn’t! If it did, everybody would know!”

He smiles wanly. “Well, everybody does.”

“And…and, who are you then? Why are you here?”

“Oh,” he says and places a hand firmly on my shoulder, “I am here to make sure nobody has a change of heart.”

Short Story - The Stories of Borges

2010-12-05T13:09:00.007+05:30

The first Borges I read was when a friend sent me an electronic version, doubtless not paid for, of Death and the Compass. Such an impression did it have upon me, that I hurried to a bookstore the same evening in search of more. They told me they did not stock Borges and had not done so in twenty years. I returned home dejected but determined to find it elsewhere the next day.

In those days, I lived in Ahmedabad, a city of somewhat meager literary ambition. Over the course of the next few days, I found out just how meager its ambitions really were, for nowhere in the entire city could be found even a scrap of paper with the name Borges on it. Indeed, it appeared as if my lips were the first from which anyone had heard that name escape. The closest someone came, was when one bookstore owner, with eyes lit up, scurried to the musty innards of his store and returned with a copy of A Clockwork Orange by Burgess.

There were, of course, versions of his work available online. My friend sent me a few more. But I believed, and still believe, reading from an odorless computer screen can never substitute the romance of a creased copy in hand. Can you imagine sitting at an idyllic café, without work, and lazily stare into a computer for hours? I can. It looks absurd.

Anyway, I read one or two more of what my friend sent. It only strengthened my conviction that a printed copy must be found. I could’ve ordered a copy online from Amazon, but at that stage, I was a student and dependent wholly on the pocket money that my parents doled out, and that money was lesser than even the cost of shipping Amazon quoted. So I waited till it was time to visit Kolkata again, a few months later.

My luck turned, as I’d expected it would, almost the minute I entered Kolkata's renowned College Street. This was after all the place where, once earlier, I’d found a copy of the Communist Manifesto’s original 1848 publication. The first store I asked at, the storekeeper shrugged ruefully and said they’d just sold their last copy yesterday. There must be other stores, I asked. Yes, there must be, he answered and pointed towards the dark alley that wove further in. There are a million stores in there. Lanes and by-lanes. Labyrinths, he added and winked. I smiled and moved on.

I finally found success in the fourth store, tucked away in the remotest corner of College Street, where the smell of books had, over the years, permeated the walls and the rusted iron shutters. The owner, a wizened old man, nodded when he heard the name and then bent down and disappeared under the counter. I waited patiently, the sound of shuffling and scratching provided evidence that the man was still under the counter and had not disappeared into the pages of a book like in some Borgesian fantasy. Presently he rose again, with a book in each hand, which he then slammed against one another to rid them of the gathered dust, which rose in dirty wisps starkly illuminated in the forlorn ray of light that trickled in through a termite hole in one of the boarded windows. Labyrinths, read the cover of one and The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory, read the other. They were Penguin Classic publications, both, which were fine in themselves, but since my hopes were raised considerably higher by this time, I enquired if perhaps an older, more exotic publication of the same works could be found. The man shook his head sadly and just as I was about to leave, he said that he once did have a copy of the original Viking Penguin publication of Collected Fictions, in which the stories of Shakespeare’s Memory first appeared. Unsure of what my reaction to this piece of information should be, I merely shrugged. “A man bought it from me three years ago,” he continued. “My bad luck” I said, intending it as a final word in, what I at that point considered a futile conversation.

“Terrible luck, in fact,” he said, “you know what he found in that book?”

I waited for him to continue since I gathered this was a rhetoric question and one that he couldn’t possibly expect me to know the answer to.

He pondered over something for nearly a minute before speaking again.

“But before that, tell me, have you read any of the stories from Shakespeare’s Memory?”

I told him I had not.

“Will you please read the one called Blue Tigers right now? It is important for the story I have to narrate.”

I looked at him quizzically, gauging if he intended all this as some sort of inexplicable joke. He looked earnestly back at me. I opened the book in question and studied the Table of Contents. Blue Tigers, it informed me, was only 12 pages long. I looked at the watch and shrugged.

“Alright,” I said, “I will read it if you will offer me a place to sit.”

He disappeared under the counter again and returned with a metal folding chair that creaked open.

I read. When I’d finished, I looked up to find the man staring intently at me.

“It’s a wonderful story. And perhaps his only one set in India?” I said.

“Yes, yes, it’s a great story!” he said impatiently, “but now I must continue my story.”

I asked if he could offer me a cup of tea to go with his narration. He responded with the usual exuberance of a Bengali on the subject of tea, shouting into the interiors of the store to an, as yet, invisible assistant to prepare two cups. It arrived almost immediately, accompanied by a plate of crumbling dog biscuits and a packet of cigarettes. He lit one and asked me if I’d like one. In those days, I did not smoke.

Then he narrated his story:

It is about that copy of the original publication of Collected Stories I mentioned earlier. A man, of considerable means I later learnt, bought it from me about three years ago. When I handed the copy over to him, he flipped casually through it, like most people do when they buy a book. As the pages fluttered past the grasp of his left thumb and into right thumb’s, something fell out and down to the floor. He picked it up and we studied it. It was a small, almost completely round stone, blue in colour. It is strange that such a thing should not cause a noticeable bump while inside the book, but evidently it had not. As we examined it, it fell to the floor again. The man bent down to pick it up again and when he straightened again, I saw his eyes were flashing. I asked him if something was the matter. He simply held up his open palm. In it, I saw incredulously, were now three stones instead of one. He dropped them again, this time intentionally. This time, his palm rose from behind the counter before he did. In it were now so many stones, all the same size, that I couldn’t at once count how many. Blue Tigers, I whispered in a quivering voice and he nodded gravely. The magical stones blue stones that multiply at will! He said. He pulled out a wallet from his trouser pocket and extracted five hundred rupee notes from it. He handed them to me, without word. I accepted. Then he walked out.

The man stopped and sipped once more from his cup.

“What an extraordinary story!” I said, still skeptical, “and this man, he never returned, did he?”

“He did return. Two years later.” The man said, “One day, I found the same man standing near the entrance of this store again. He was the same man, but for one remarkable change. Running down his cheek and through to his neck was a deep angry scar.”

“Form of the Sword now?” I said half jokingly.

“Ah, you have read it,” the man said, ignoring the sarcasm, “that is good.”

“Sure is,” I said, “or I might’ve had to sit here and read it now.”

The man continued.

I asked him what had happened to him. And this is the story he narrated to me:

That day, after we found those stones in the book, I went back home in a daze. I had, of course, decided by then that I would pursue this for as long as it took. So, I read that story, Blue Tigers, again, to check if there is any indication in it of which village on the foothills of the Himalayas, it was set in. There’s isn’t. But the descriptions sounded fairly close to either the Garhwal or the Kumaon region and so, I set out as soon as I could, for Dehradun. From there I went to Rudraprayag, choosing it above others for my fascination with it ever since I read Corbett’s story of the man-eating leopard. Anyway, from Rudraprayag, I travelled through the hills into every village that the locals named, and everywhere I went, I asked if they had ever heard of the existence of such mystical blue stones as were in my pocket. For seven months, I travelled and found not a single soul who could help me. At the end of those seven months, I returned to Dehradun, severely ill and dejected. While I recuperated, I pondered about what could be done next. I re-read Blue Tigers. It got me no further. I decided I would drop the stones into a river and return to Kolkata. That evening, in a long time, I found myself relaxed and in an agreeable mood. I had a few drinks at the bar and returned to my hotel late at night and that is when I remembered Corbett again. Wasn’t there a story in which he describes mysterious lights up a mountain in the dark? Almost exactly the kind of superstition the villagers of Borges’s village harboured? I spent the night unable to sleep. The next day, I searched the city frantically for a bookstore that stocked the works of Corbett. I found one fairly easily; Corbett is still a popular fellow in that part of the country, evidently. Had I been adept at the internet, I might’ve saved myself the trouble of reading through his books again, but since I was not, I had to do it the hard way. I read whatever I could sitting at the store, and brought the rest back to the hotel with me. Eventually, I found what I was looking for, in The Talla Desh Man-eater story, in The Temple Tigers collection. Corbett mentions sighting mysterious lights going up a hillside at night and the villagers’ singular reactions to them.

The next day, I travelled to Almora and from there to Talla Desh. Throughout the journey, I could barely sit still with excitement. If indeed it was true that it was the same village that the two men describe, how incredible would that be!

I was right! The first person I showed the blue stones to in Talla Desh, looked at me wide-eyed and refused to answer my questions. The same thing happened with half a dozen other people. By and by, I found a saintly man who, though distressed at the sight of the stones, agreed to speak to me. He told me the name of the village I sought and how I could get there. When I reached there, it was of course summer, and the hillsides looked very different from what one would’ve visualized them through Borges’s words. I did not waste any time there and showed them the stones. Remarkably, none of them shrank away like the people of Talla Desh. They looked at me and smiled and their eyes became sad. I explained to them the sequence of events that had led me here. They nodded gravely but said nothing. That evening, there was a knock on my door and I found an old, grizzled lady standing outside. I invited her in. The first words she spoke were a name. Vincent Moon, she said. Vincent Moon? I asked, disbelievingly. She repeated the name. “But how can that be?” I asked, “Vincent Moon isn’t a real person! He’s just…he’s just…” She did not let me finish, “Vincent Moon” she said again, this time more vehemently. Then she traced a line down her throat and said “Scar. Vincent Moon. Scar.” For the rest of the night, she had my full attention. This was her story:

Many years ago, a man called Vincent Moon had come to their village. He had a large scar running down his face, which the villagers deeply distrusted. He had asked to be taken to the top of the mountain, where the blue stones were. Everybody had refused. He spent a year with them, trying to convince them to partake in his adventure, until one night, he had sneaked up there, alone, and returned with a handful of those stones. Within a month he had gone crazy and another month later they had found his battered body in the undergrowth at the bottom of the mountain. He had climbed up again and evidently jumped. They had sold off all his stuff to pawnshops and wherever else they could; he also had various books with him. They had never found the stones.

This is the story she told me. I surmised one of those books was the Collected Stories and a stray blue stone had somehow made its way into it. The complete truth, nobody would ever know. Vincent Moon? From Form of the Sword? A friend of Borges’s? A character of Borges’s imagination somehow magically come alive? And he had evidently arrived having read Blue Tigers. So Borges had written the story before that. How could that be? Was it that Moon had come in the same quest that I had? Perhaps Moon had found the blue stone in the book before he had arrived, just as I had! Was there a whole universe of Borges’s characters that actually existed in some unknown dimension?

At this point, the old bookstore owner said, the man had finished his story. The tea cups were empty by now; at their bottoms, globs of soppy wet biscuits remained. I was still skeptical, but it was a darn good story. In those days, I had only begun to think of myself as a writer, and I found it important to appreciate the exquisiteness of the yarn either the old bookstore owner or that other man with the scar on his face had woven.

“But,” I said, “what about the scar he carried? Where did that come from?”

“I asked him. But he wouldn’t tell me. “It’s a secret I will never tell anybody” He said”

I walked out of College Street some time later, my head full of wondrous imaginations. Ever since I’d decided to start writing seriously, I’d always sought ways of acknowledging the inspiration I’d derived from the authors I’d read and admired. So far, I’d been largely unsuccessful, offering shoddy and direct references that meant nothing. And now there was this story. But it needed an end. Or at least, some semblance of an end. I walked past a bar and realized I was drenched in sweat. I decided to go in for some beer.

The place was almost empty, except for the bartender, a shabby waiter and a man on a barstool hunched over a glass of whiskey. The place smelt faintly of vomit. I made my way to a barstool and ordered a beer. The other man sat to my left. He turned his head towards me and glanced disinterestedly, and resumed looking into his glass. I wished him afternoon. He turned again, this time completely and smiled. An old, dry scar ran down the left side of his face and throat and disappeared into his shirt collar. The beer arrived. After two sips, I whispered to myself to check if my voice had returned. Then I addressed him again.

“Excuse me, Sir. Can I speak to you for a minute?”

“Yes?” He said, in a rich baritone.

Haltingly, I recounted my encounter with the old bookstore owner. He listened gravely, occasionally furrowing his brows and shaking his head, as if to say this was not exactly how it had happened. When I finished, he turned to the bartender and ordered another glass.

“Yes, it was I” he said.

“Oh”

“So, you thought that old man was making it up, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes, sort of”

“Do you think I am made all of it up?”

“I…I am not sure. I don’t know.”

He smiled. We stared silently at each other for a while. Then he spoke again.

“You know, I did reach Talla Desh. After that, well, who knows?”

I remained silent.

“It is a fitting tribute, but, don’t you think?”

“To Borges?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose so.”

The bartender reappeared and filled my mug. I had so many questions in my head, I didn't know what to say to the man. Presently, he spoke himself.

“I know you want to ask me more. But you are not sure how, is it not? Well, tell you what, I will tell you the story of the scar myself. Perhaps it is true, perhaps it is not. After the point up to which you’ve heard the story, and whether or not that itself is true is a matter of conjecture, but let us play along for now – after that point, I realized there wasn’t much else I could do. The stones had taken up too much of my time, and I was afraid I would lose my sanity too. So I returned to Delhi. I put the stones in a bag and gave it away to a beggar. But I needed a story – you see, I had ambitions of becoming a writer then. And I wondered how I would end it. Of course, I could’ve ended it anywhere, for such a story is hardly expected to have a conventional end anyway. But I wanted to give it one. As an experiment, you see. A ridiculous tale with a conventional end. So I worked out the rest of the story in my head. I travel to Argentina and look for Vincent Moon. He is dead, yes, but if he has indeed existed, he must’ve left some traces. A family or a business. Something. In Argentina, I somehow – I never did manage to flesh this out, or maybe I don't want to tell you – stumble upon a mythical town, inaccessible to all, where Borges still lives with all his characters. Moon is there too. And Borges tell mes that it was in fact he who is writing this story and that it is I who am a part of his imagination. I refuse to believe it and want to return. He tells me that the only way out is if I allow myself to become a character in one of his other stories, in which case, he can end my story there and I become redundant and he has no further need of me. I choose Moon. Magically, a scar appears on my face. And I return" He paused.

"So?"I asked.

"So? Well, if this was to be the story, I would actually need the scar, I thought. And so I made myself this.” He ran his index finger over it.

The silence hung between us. We finished our drinks. I paid my bill and began to leave. Then I turned and asked him, “And why did you not write the story then?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I just couldn’t. As you can see, this still wasn't a conventional end. I couldn't come up with one. Maybe I am not a writer, after all.”

Short Story - The Ferris Wheel

2010-12-04T12:49:00.003+05:30

But for the gigantic Ferris wheel that towered over it, the town was utterly unremarkable. A handful of brick houses, painted white and with grilled square windows, lay scattered about, perimetered by short thick boundary walls that kept the stray dogs away. A solitary road, covered in dust with disuse, passed through the town and continued on, on either side, in a straight line across the unending, barren plains. No vehicle had been seen on this road for many years; the wizened elders of the town spoke wistfully of a time when each day, in the early morning light, a long line of trucks, came and went, and the kids ran behind them for as long as they could, and sometimes came back with lozenges that the drivers had offered them. Not even a mailman came now, for everyone the townsfolk knew lived in the town, and there was no need for a letter to be written or received.

Nobody remembered how the Ferris wheel had come to be there. It had been there for as far back as the oldest memories would go. It belonged to the family that had a different last name than everyone else’s and had been passed on from generation to generation like an heirloom. In the evenings, the wheel was lit up with a million yellow-red bulbs, and the entire town made its way to it for a ride. They waited patiently for their turn to arrive, indeed often allowed the kids to break line and run up ahead of them in the queue; after sundown, when the children were no longer allowed on it, the elders rode the wheel and stared into the moonlit distances with tears in their eyes. There were no tickets; the family was recompensed with free food and a place to live.

The family, two middle aged men, their wives and the old invalid patriarch, lived in a cottage right next to the wheel. Throughout the day, the two men toiled on the wheel, cleaning and oiling and fixing, while the wives cooked their meals and looked after the patriarch. The patriarch, whom the rest of the village had rarely seen since the incident, remained in bed throughout, moaning occasionally whenever a sharp spasm shot through his wasted muscles and bones. On some evenings, when the weather was pleasant and the patriarch was in a good mood, the two men, his adopted sons, carried his cot outside so he could see his beloved Ferris wheel. On such days, the queue below the wheel appeared shorter than usual and nobody rode after sundown. They had, several times, asked the family to not bring the patriarch so near the wheel again, but his two sons had remained defiant. There was one time when the entire town threatened to never ride the wheel again and stop offering them food. For ten days, they did not; the brothers still spent the day working at the wheel but in the evening when nobody arrived, they took turns to ride the wheel themselves with their wives, while their father lay on the cot below, watching them. The lack of food, it appeared, did not bother them. On the eleventh day, the kids returned with their mothers, and a couple of days later, so did the fathers.

Though there were various versions of the story of what happened to the patriarch all those years ago, they varied only in the minor details. The story went thus:

The patriarch was six years old when it happened. In those days, he was like any other kid his age, oblivious and happy. It was his father who worked the wheel then. The boy hadn’t ever been on the wheel till then, of course, for kids below the age of six weren’t allowed on it. On his sixth birthday, like had been the tradition in the family for many generations, he was bathed with rose-scented water, and odes of the family’s unknown, mysterious religion were sung. His father then spent the rest of the day with him, explaining to him the many intricacies of the wheel and that he was now as much the owner of it as his father. When the hour came, they placed him in one of the gondolas, to the sounds of conch shells blown into.

But then, something strange started to happen. The moment he entered the gondola, the wheel began to move by itself. It moved slowly at first, and the father tried to stop it with his hands, for he thought it was merely a stray gust of wind that had caused the movement. But it didn’t stall. It continued to move and pick up speed. By the time the gondola was halfway up, the wheel had begun to rotate as fast as anyone had ever seen it. The boy began to cry. The people, gathered below, who had stood staring up until then, unable to comprehend what they were witnessing, eventually snapped back into action. They shut the power supply and when somebody suggested that putting an obstacle in its way might help, they found a long sturdy ladder and dragged it to the wheel, so its sides brushed against the wheel’s. The wheel did not stop. Each time the gondola with the boy in it came down to its lowest point, they caught glimpses of him trapped inside, staring back at them.

For two hours the wheel rotated thus, and would not stop. And then they saw the grilled gate of the gondola swing open and the next second, the boy jumped. In a few minutes, the wheel came to a standstill. The boy lay in a pool of blood, miraculously alive but robbed of the use of his legs forever.

That the boy, now the patriarch, had the devil in him was unanimously agreed upon.

He moved around on crutches for a few years. He even tried convincing his father that he could still help with the wheel. His father refused to let him touch the wheel, but agreed that he could collect the bread and other food that the people brought for them. He did it for one day, forcing himself to not look at the wheel, for whenever he did, he could see kids like him on it, and it made him cry. The next day, nobody turned up. It emerged that the town would have nothing to do with the wheel if the boy was to be present near it, in plain sight. That evening, he told his father that he would stay indoors. He went to bed later in the night and never got out of it since.

By and by his father died. The town became worried that, with him, the Ferris wheel and their evenings riding it would die too. But then, one morning, they found two teenage boys cleaning the wheel. When asked who they were, they said they were adopted sons of the patriarch. The Ferris wheel survived.

It had been twenty years since.

One day, the town woke up to torrential rains. They looked out of their windows in amazement, for it hadn’t rained in three years. They poked their hands tentatively out; the raindrops were exploded in their palms in small, frosty bursts. The sky had turned an unnatural grey and in the distance, lightning spread like fissures on parched soil. The clouds hung so low, they seemed to touch the top of the Ferris wheel.

The rain fell for a month and nobody ventured outside their homes. Then, all at once, it stopped raining one morning. The clouds turned paler, and a red glow seeped into them from the horizons. Immediately, everyone rushed to the Ferris wheel. They found the two brothers sitting on the soggy soil and staring at the wheel. It wouldn't start, they said. The motor had remained submerged in water for too long. They'd drained the water out and tried everything they could, but it wouldn't start. The town hung around the wheel for the rest of the day, staring suspiciously at its parts and offering suggestions. Nothing worked. The wheel stayed resolutely still.

The next morning, the Patriarch woke up to an unnatural stillness - a stillness that seemed to him like it pervaded the world and not just his cottage. And there was a smell – a damp pungent smell, which made his nostrils itch. It was a smell he had smelled in his most terrible dreams, in which he had visions of the Ferris wheel on fire or disintegrating into the ground. He did not move for a long time, waiting for a common sound, a whiff of the usual arid breeze that would pierce the stillness. None came. The crutches, unused for decades, stood by the bedside. He looked at them and sighed. He felt nervous but not agitated. Perhaps, he had seen this in one of his dreams.

He walked out to a crimson sky, with patches of fire, out of which bellowed out black smoke. On both sides, the barren plains were obscured by huge columns of smoke escaping the earth, the same colour as the smoke in the sky. The town was burnt to ashes. All that remained was his cottage and the Ferris wheel.

He smiled. The ends of the crutches dug into the black soil as he made his way to the wheel. When he reached the wheel, he turned and looked back at the devastation. Then he helped himself into a gondola. The wheel began to turn.

A Good Two Years

2010-11-21T09:46:00.001+05:30

In addition to the whiskey and vodka, there was also wine to mark the occasion. The open spaces of a shapeless grassy lawn behind the hostel buildings was chosen, for it was estimated that the crowd would far exceed the average and could not, therefore, be contained in the cramped confines of the Community Centre. It was March. Winter had melted away slowly and its meager existence was now evident only in the agreeable chill of the evening breeze.

The day had been spent running frantically around campus, returning books, handing over keys and signing documents. Outside each hostel room, a pile of papers, notepads, plastic waste and bottles of alcohol lay in a heap; the doors to the rooms, all open, since inside could be found only packed cartons that were ready to be shipped and unwieldy to be stolen, swung in the strong wind of that morning, and crashed into the heap periodically, toppling the highest objects from their perch. Loud music blared from some of the rooms; Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mama, I’m coming home’ appeared to be greatly in favour. Kaushik wondered if someone would play Altaf Raja’s ‘Tum to thehre pardesi’ to counter this unnecessary western predilection. In the end, nobody did. Now that would have been something.

As always, Kaushik was one of the first to reach the lawn. He spotted a few small groups scattered around but did not find anyone he wished to be in the company of. He walked around for a while, familiarizing himself with the dimensions of the scene, seeking unobtrusive corners that could be utilized later in the evening when he was in need of a few moments of relative aloofness or a place to puke. He was determined to avoid the alcohol counters at least until one good friend turned up.

A DJ, well known evidently, had been paid for and brought from Delhi, for the night. His wares, when he began to peddle them, did not appear very different from what they’d been hearing all through their time on campus. It did not matter, however, for before long they were all too drunk to notice. After a few glasses of whiskey, Kaushik, having found another willing friend, tasted the wine. White. He wasn’t aware what kind and, after two tentative sips, decided not to bother finding out. Near the middle of the evening, as always, the whiskey would run out and sometime thereafter, the vodka, while the wine would remain almost untouched.

The ladies, it appeared, had collectively decided to wear gowns for the occasion. They came, in swinging, shining, bunches of reds, blacks and blues, their bare arms folded bewitchingly below the breasts. The conversations in the lawns stopped momentarily and the music became suddenly audible again. Kaushik chuckled inadvertently, too conspicuously, for the guy next to him looked towards him and smiled. “Yeah man. We’re such miserable losers.” He said.

Raakesh was nowhere to be found. Kaushik strolled around the lawn, the whiskey glass never empty, looking for him. He ran into the same people all the time, and each time, they hugged and said, “Man, it has been a good two years here, has it not?” Sometimes, he found himself in the middle of a group indulged in wild dance and they forced him to match steps for a few minutes. He did, and when he was confident they weren’t looking, slipped away quietly and resumed looking for Raakesh. Ritika had appeared in a ravishing red gown and he ensured he was always aware where she was so he could steal glances every once in a while. He never, however, passed too close to her, afraid she might notice.

He gave up after nearly an hour. Raakesh had, evidently, not turned up. He would come to know later, when he would chat online with Raakesh the next time, that he’d been smoking pot and drinking all afternoon and had passed out well before the farewell celebrations had begun. They would chat often in subsequent years but never meet. But since Raakesh did not turn up on that last day, Kaushik would never recall the last time they did meet - an occasion that had not registered as one of enough consequence to assign to memory, for he couldn’t have known it would be the last.

Kaushik spent the remainder of the evening drifting from one group to another. He danced with them in short, outrageous bursts, and then when he felt too tired, broke away and walked about. When the whiskey ran out, he turned to vodka and then, ruefully, to wine. Once in a while, he stumbled into a sloshed bunch engaged in animated, tearful, conversation. It reminded him of Dhule. These were men and women, who would, a couple of months down the line, walk into fancy organizations, discuss serious corporate issues with solemn countenances and earn abundantly, in some cases, obscenely. But right now, they were just people who had had too much to drink.

Well after 3 AM, when most of the congregation had been reduced to a mass of human beings sprawled on the grass, with their arms held up, lazily swaying to the still preposterously loud music, he heard Ritika’s voice behind him. “Hey, Kaushik,” she said.

He was still standing, with a whiskey glass full of wine, staring intently at the stars in the sky which looked to him like they were all merging into each other in what he fantasized was a celestial orgy. He turned slowly, deliberately, for his body had lost its appetite for rapid movement much earlier in the evening. One of the sodium lamps traced a defused white path just below her waist.

“Hi” Kaushik said, “Up early?”

She smiled and embraced him. “Man, it has been a good two years here, has it not?” She said.

“Yeah, well,” he mumbled in response.

He let one arm hang limply by his side, for he was not sure what to do with it, while with the other he still held the whiskey glass. He breathed deeply, searching for a smell that he could remember for the rest of his life, and write about, but found nothing.

Stromboli

2010-11-20T17:04:00.001+05:30

Stromboli was never part of the plan. They had intended to spend two days in Florence and then travel to Rome where they’d already booked beds at a youth hostel. From there, they’d return to India three days later. However, before Florence was Venice, in the itinerary, and when they reached Venice, it took them less than two hours to realize that they couldn’t possibly stay there for the two days they’d expected to. It was far too expensive and there were too many people around, many of them wearing ‘I love NY’ tees. And so they fled Venice just after lunchtime on the same day and thus found themselves in possession of two additional days. They picked the Aeolian Islands to spend those two days in.

When they reached Milazzo, from where they were to take a ferry to one of the islands, they still weren’t sure which one they would go to. The best islands also seemed the farthest from the Sicilian coast and since they had to be back in Milazzo in time to catch a train late that night, travelling too far was risky. Eventually, they chose Lipari, the largest and one of the closest.

The ferry ride was their first encounter with the deep, sparkling blue waters of the Sicilian coast. A man and his wife sat next to Kaushik on the ferry and they asked him if he was Sri Lankan. When he told them he was Indian, they appeared to become even more interested. “My wife and I weesh tu traavel tu Eendia!” he exclaimed, “whaat ees the best time tu viseet?” Kaushik considered if it would be appropriate to respond in the same accent but decided against it, since he figured it could offend them. “Between November and February”, he told them and returned to the book he was reading. A few months later, when he went to an Italian restaurant in Mumbai with Ritankar and Ashish, and the owner, an elderly Italian, came to their table to speak to them, Kaushik looked on while Ashish conducted the entire conversation in that accent. Evidently, the elderly Italian did not take offence.

Lipari did not even look like a volcanic island. From a distance, it looked large and low, the hills on it resembling tabletop mountains rather than the volcanic peaks they’d imagined. By the time, the ferry rolled into the pier, slipping deftly between two other ferries, Ritankar had already announced that they’d have to find another island. “This is just ugly, dude,” he said, “I can’t spend too much time here.”

Fifteen minutes and a cup, each, of espresso later, they set out finding ferries to Stromboli. Ritankar was keener on Panarea, one of the smallest islands in the bunch, and one that the Lonely Planet declared as the least crowded, but Kaushik argued that the sight of live flowing lava was an experience worth more than a lonely isolated island.

And now they were stuck in Stromboli. They’d reached the island just after noon. The weather had already begun to worsen then. The first thing they’d done was check for ferries back to Milazzo. There was one at four, they were told. They bought tickets for it. Four in the afternoon arrived but the ferry did not. Somebody said there’d be another one at five. That didn’t arrive either, although the rain did. The lady at the counter announced, ruefully, that the weather was too tricky to sail in the open sea and there wouldn’t be another ferry till the next morning. She offered them tickets for the first ferry the next day, which they duly bought.

There was also the problem of cash. They didn’t have enough to pay a hotel bill for one night. They asked around for an ATM. There was only one on the entire island. It had run out of cash. It wouldn’t be refilled until the first ferry arrived the next morning with the requisite wads of notes on it.

Ritankar, Kaushik realized, had become unusually quiet, occasionally, shaking his head and muttering under his breath.

“What’s the matter dude?”

“Nothing”

“Oh come on, you’re still cross that we chose Stromboli and not Panarea?”

“I don’t know what your fixation with a live Volcano is”

“It’s a pointless argument, man. I am sorry I got you here. But if it makes you feel any better, we’d probably have gotten stuck at Panarea too!”

Ritankar nodded. “Well, we’ve got to find someplace for the night, now”

They walked together in silence through the narrow, winding alleyways that rose and fell gracefully, offering tantalizing glimpses of the ocean, which, incredibly, retained its blue under the gloomy sky. The volcanic peak loomed above them; smoke and haze rose from its peak and mixed with the dark clouds above. On both sides of them, houses were built in closely knit clusters, into the mountainside, and they were all, extraordinarily, painted white. “They must paint it once every month.” Kaushik commented. Through the gaps between the houses, they could see the black sands of the beach.

“I must say,” Kaushik said, “the place does look gorgeous.”

“I think it is very artificial. These white coloured, shapeless houses.”

“But that’s the point Ritankar! They are so incongruous, so out of place here, its surreal, like in a dream”

Ritankar muttered something under his breath which Kaushik did not understand and chose not to ask him to repeat.

They found a house where the owner agreed to offer them a spare room for the night. They explained to him they did not have cash and could only pay by card. He shook his head a few times as if to deny and when they shrugged and began to lift their backpacks again, he asked them to wait. He returned, a few minutes later, and led them to the adjacent grocery store, which is where their card was swiped. “But, what did you put in the bill?” Kaushik asked. “Oh, nothing,” the man said, dismissively, “some food. I use it for dinner tonight.”

“Now that we’re here,” Ritankar said, “why don’t we ask about that guided tour to the top of the peak in the night?”

“Yes, I’ve been thinking about that too.”

They found that the tour had been cancelled for the day. “Wind tu much. Not good,” they were told.

The rain had stopped. There were fleeting, shifting specks of blue in the sky. They found a café by the sea, playing pleasant Italian pop they did not recognize. They entered and ordered beer. The woman at the cash counter was a blonde, middle aged but attractive. There were prominent creases on both ends of her lips, which seemed to pull the edges of the lips down with them a little. It reminded Kaushik of Jeanne Moreau. The crowd bulged towards evening and thinned out barely an hour later. Kaushik and Ritankar shifted to whiskey after a while, for there was a chill in the air, and sat through all this. They spoke little. The music continued to be warm but not intrusive.

“It isn’t such a bad place, after all” Ritankar said at one point. Kaushik did not comment.

The next morning, they woke up to a stark blue sky, except above the peak, which, as it always did, remained partly shrouded in the ashen smoke and haze. They hurried down to the pier and found the ferry hadn’t yet arrived. There wasn’t any money left for breakfast. That’d have to wait until they were back in Milazzo. They waited, with growing impatience, for an hour before walking to the ticket counter to ask what the problem was. The forecast was for rough weather till afternoon, it turned out, and therefore, services would resume only after that.

“But it is fucking glorious weather!” Ritankar said, “I could walk on water to Milazzo in this!”

They spent the day sitting in the sun, on the black sand. Occasionally, the mountain grumbled, and they looked up anxiously. They hadn’t noticed it the previous day, mistaking it for thunder. The locals appeared unflustered. They too grew used to it after a while. Once, near noon, Ritankar asked Kaushik if he had any small change left, while he fumbled inside his own pockets. Their combined wealth came to seven Euros and a bit more. “Let’s go buy something, whatever’s available for this much.” Ritankar suggested. They could either have a Panini each, or a beer each. They chose beer.

At four, the ferry arrived. That evening, they took the train from Milazzo to Rome. They shared the couchette with an old woman and a middle aged, balding man. The man pointed to the copy of On the Road on Kaushik’s lap and said, “I wrote that book twenty years ago.” They stared at him incredulously and he realized something was wrong. “Oh,” he corrected, “I mean I read it. My English is not so good.”

They spent three wonderful days in Rome, soaking in the staggering grandeur, but in their hearts they knew their best experiences of the trip were behind them. The joy they’d found in those first days in Montmartre, in the Cinque Terre and in those hours at Montefioralle, even Rome could not match.

It was only later, when they’d narrated their stories a dozen times after their return to India, that they realized Stromboli had been equally special.

Escape

2010-10-27T21:01:00.001+05:30

After they exited from the exam centre on the last day, they would slip away, in ones and twos, towards the back of the campus, where a crumbling wall serves as a boundary between the college and dirty undergrowth and sewerage. A short walk in the mud would get them to a near forgotten by-lane which winds through clusters of houses interspersed with nothingness for a kilometer before ending right in the middle of Dhule’s busiest market. There they would wait till the last of them arrived and then collect all their bags and suitcases from the stationary shop nearby, where they had deposited all of it the previous day. That was the plan.

It was all necessitated by love. With six months to go before they’d graduate and be gone, one of them fell for a girl in college. That in itself, however, was not reason enough for the matter to precipitate into the strife that it had, for there were several dozen others who were already in love with said girl. It was that the girl decided to reciprocate. The boy offered her a bar of chocolate and she smiled and accepted it. Then, she tore the wrapper and took a bite and then offered the remainder of the bar to him. The two had never spoken to each other before then.

That evening there was a knock at the door. Kaushik opened it. Two boys, friends of theirs, walked in. These two, everyone knew, were the messengers, the bottom rung, of the campus’s tough-guys gang. They explained to Kaushik and the rest of his friends that the leader of their gang was himself smitten by the girl and that he was not currently looking for competition. The lover-boy reiterated his unshakeable love. Kaushik pointed out, laughing half-heartedly and backslapping one of them with the intention of conveying that he meant it as a harmless wisecrack although he was fully aware that it would not be considered so, but unable to let pass the opportunity, that the gang leader’s only attempt at conversation with the girl had ended in her slapping him full on one cheek, and then the other. After a few moments of silence, which allowed everyone in the room to draw closer, one of the two messengers punched the lover boy in the stomach.

Now, the campus and its goons, over the years have developed a code of conduct and propriety, which they follow to every last detail. This explains why it was the lover boy who got punched instead of Kaushik. Over the course of four years, each student is rated by the then existing gang on a moving scale based on how many members of the gang are friends with the individual, if there have ever been ugly run-ins between him and them and how indiscrete he has been in foul-mouthing them. Whenever the opportunity arose to beat someone up, the gang referred to this scale and only when there were sufficient delinquencies and a sufficient number of them found him despicable, was he beaten up. Kaushik, by virtue of his near invisibility, had always been near the better end of the scale. If these messengers went back to their bosses and explained to them that they were involved in a brawl with Kaushik and that he had to be dealt with, there was absolutely no chance the case would be taken up. The lover boy, on the other hand, stood no chance. Thus, the punch in the wrong stomach.

The punch was returned with a punch to a face, which resulted in a nosebleed. The other messenger started to throw a kick but was surrounded by the half dozen inhabitants of the house by then. While they went to work on the poor boy, Kaushik wrapped his arms around the boy with the bleeding nose, ostensibly to keep him from entering the action, although with that nose it was unlikely he even attempt it. Later, when the two boys were gone, the rest cornered Kaushik and asked why he hadn’t involved himself in the action.

“I was making sure the other guy didn’t get into it! I held him so hard the air must’ve been squeezed out of his lungs!”

“Bullshit,” someone said, “it is just that you don’t have any balls. Not even tiny pea sized ones. You’re a fucking embarrassment!”

Kaushik looked at the group with steady eyes, which he narrowed, so the tears would be less visible, and thought it over. He knew what they said was right. He just didn’t see what was wrong with what he’d done. Yes, he’d avoided a fight. So?

“Oh, just fuck off, all of you,” he said, “now they’re going to come after all of us anyway.”

Strangely, they didn’t. Not immediately. They spent the night - all of them wide awake - plotting their defence when the inevitable knock on the door came. It did not. They did not attend classes for an entire week, staying confined to the house and venturing out only for food and always in groups. By the tenth day, everybody was fed up with the waiting. They’d resume classes, they decided, but all together. They’d spent the entire day in college and only when everybody’d finished their lectures would they return home, together. For the rest of the semester, their attendances were the best they’d ever managed.

Slowly life returned to normal. It had been decided, evidently, that retribution would wait till the last day of college. This, too, was a ritual. Every year, after the last exam was done, there was a massacre outside the campus gates. Dozens of students gathered, armed with hockey sticks and cricket bats, and scores were settled and resettled until the police siren was heard and everyone fled. And so, Kaushik and his friends spent the rest of the year leading regular lives and discussing details of the plan to escape through the walls on the other side of the campus. The lover boy never spoke to the girl again.

After they’d collected their bags and suitcases, they went to a restaurant on the outskirts of the city for dinner. They had never been there before; the usual hangouts were too risky. They spent two hours there, continually glancing at the entrance and the clock, and chatting absent-mindedly. Afterwards, they arrived at the bus station together; all of them had buses to catch to some place or the other. They waited in a dark corner keeping wary watch on the road for known faces. Kaushik’s bus was the first to leave. He embraced his friends and they all promised each other they’d be back in Dhule after a couple of months for a get-together.

He later learnt that all of them had escaped without incident. None of them ever returned to Dhule again.

Before I Sleep

2010-10-24T13:18:00.001+05:30

Once every month, Kaushik visited his parents in Ahmedabad and spent a weekend with them. On the preceding Fridays, instead of his usual backpack, he carried a duffel bag to office, so he could go straight to the train station in the evening. This was such a Friday.

His colleagues nodded and smiled with their eyes on the bag and made the requisite observations.

“Going to Ahmedabad tonight?”

“Yes.”

“By air? Or train?”

“Train. I avoid flights to Ahmedabad. They reach after midnight and make a mess of my sleep and my parents’.”

“How long does the train take?”

“Seven hours, thereabouts.” Then he added, “Miles to go while I sleep, evidently,” and smiled benevolently in response to his colleagues’ blank expressions.

He left office earlier than usual, his bag swaying proudly from one shoulder. He knew he would reach the train station early, so early in fact, that he could make another trip to office and still be back in time. But he knew of a cozy little restaurant near the station and enjoyed spending a couple of hours there. It was a place he had discovered many years ago and had then forgotten and lost until recently when he had stumbled upon it once again. He had wondered how it could have so completely slipped his mind, for he had been a regular visitor there, in a time when he considered saving fifty rupees on a meal important. When this was not the city he lived in, but travelled frequently to, necessitated by work and B School admission interviews. And each time he came, it was here that he had his dinner before boarding the train back home. So when he found the restaurant again, he resumed the ritual.

It is a place that revels in its incongruity. A tastefully tiled courtyard, open at the top, overseen by three resplendent sodium-vapour lamps. More than a dozen rickety steel tables, most of them unoccupied and visibly rusted at the edges, spread around the area, trapped between quartets of dust-coated finely carved bamboo chairs. Men in faded maroon shirts and khaki trousers, the ends of their shirts heavily crumpled from being tucked in earlier and now irrevocably stained with oil and grime from being repeatedly used as makeshift napkins, tending to the orders of the handful of customers.

It was a warm night and Kaushik chose a seat next to one of the standing fans. It blew his hair into frenzy and reminded him that he must have a haircut in Ahmedabad. The fan emitted a continuous creaking sound, evidently from a lack of maintenance and lubrication, and it tore into the sweet melodies of Belle & Sebastian that were presented to him through the IPod. He wondered if he should shift to Joy Division and turn up the volume so the fan would become inaudible or at least less conspicuous in the industrial clamour. He sighed and asked to be shown to another table instead. He ordered a Dosa and a Coke and settled down to reminisce about Ahmedabad.

Ahmedabad, he had always lamented, was a city without character. It just lay there in the heat and sand, a cluster of short plain buildings with wealthy, peaceful people in them whose principal pastime was eating vegetarian food in expensive restaurants. It was a city that, if lived in, offered all that was nice and comfortable but never any romance. One could live in Ahmedabad for decades and then simply get up and leave, inconvenienced only by the movement of one’s belongings. It was not a city one could write about. Kaushik was certain there would never be great literature produced for it in the way that there was and could be for Mumbai or Kolkata. It was like having to write about a bunch of regular people with regular jobs and good money instead of a struggling artist in Paris or even a cheerful farmer in the Italian countryside.

It was ten years ago that Kaushik had left for Dhule. He had, since, become a visitor to the city of his childhood. He had returned briefly after his graduation, for two years, and found all his friends either gone or no longer friends. He had spent those two years forging new friendships and had then moved to Lucknow. Now another four years had passed and all that remained of his life in Ahmedabad, were his Mom and Dad.

Kaushik reached the train station with a half hour still to spare. He found a bench on which an old bespectacled man sat clutching a walking stick and speaking to a middle aged man, ostensibly his son, who stood next to him. Kaushik sat down on the other edge of the bench and placed his bag in between. The two men turned briefly towards him and then resumed their conversation.

The platform bustled with purpose and emergency. Presently, a local train arrived and a mad rush ensued. At the end of it, most of the people on the platform had emptied out into the train and when the train left, the place settled itself into a different, calmer pace. Kaushik had often noticed how people waiting for long distance trains behave differently from those waiting for local short distance ones. When Kaushik’s train arrived, people moved with more composure, secure in their knowledge that their seats were reserved and there wasn’t the need to win them over the trampled bodies of fellow travelers and competitors. After he’d located his seat and rid his, now aching, shoulder of the bag, he exited the train again and peered over the reservation chart pasted on the compartment’s door. He scoured the sheet for his name and when he found it, looked at the names immediately above and below his. It was his Dad who had first suggested this to him as a method to find out if he could hope for the company of women on the train. He now religiously followed it.

He was pleased to note that there was a Nisha Chaturvedi, female 24, on the seat opposite his. Over the years, when he had found himself in similar circumstances - and there had been many - he had rarely ever even bothered to introduce himself. Most of the females had turned out to be unattractive and married and they usually carried a baby or a self help book in their arms. And yet, he waited expectantly each time, eager to catch the first glimpse of these unknown women, letting his mind create hopeless fantasies of one day finding a Julie Delpy on the train, reading Georges Bataille.

Kaushik often wondered what he would do if were actually to find a girl like that. Would he have the courage to propose what Ethan Hawke had proposed? Or even the courage to at least start a conversation? And if he did, how would the girl react? Wouldn’t she look at him incredulously and ask him to fuck off? And how would he feel if she were to do that?

When he was only beginning to watch foreign language films, he found it weird that in so many films, when a man proposed intimacy with a woman who was not similarly disposed, the woman, instead of reacting with shock and hysteria, tenderly pushed him away, with gentle apologies even, sometimes even allowing his lips to brush lightly with hers. Kaushik found it, at the time, a case of downright western callousness and immorality. And then he became interested in Ritika and spent those hours thinking about how he could approach her and what she would say. It was then that he realized how incredibly compassionate the reactions of the women in those films were. It is perhaps one of hardest things for a man to do – to profess his love and attraction to a woman and thereby willfully place himself in a situation where he and his ego are so thoroughly exposed, so pathetically defenseless. A situation where even the slightest hint of mockery and disgust in the woman’s reaction could bruise his self esteem so badly, so indelibly. And under those circumstances, to allow a man to salvage his pride, to offer him a graceful way out. So incredibly compassionate those women were indeed!

He felt the train shudder and then move slowly. He sighed. Nisha Chaturvedi hadn’t appeared. She would possibly aboard at the next station, still an hour away, by which time he would have almost certainly dozed off. He rummaged in his bag and found the novel he was carrying, opened it, read a few lines and then shut it again. His thoughts drifted back to Ahmedabad. His Dad would be waiting for him at the station the next morning. He would comment how Kaushik had put on even more weight, an observation that his Mom would echo when he reached home. He would just smile and mumble something about how he did not care. Tea would be ready and so would be breakfast and the three of them would spend a pleasant hour together, after which his Dad, whose weekly break occurred in the middle of the week, would leave for work.

It occurred to him suddenly, what would have happened if, instead of their marriage being arranged as it was by their respective families, his Mom and Dad had met on their own all those years ago. Would they have fallen in love with each other? If his Dad had proposed marriage to her, would she have reacted hysterically or tenderly pushed him away?

He tried to recall incidents from his past, the oldest that his memory would allow him to fetch, of the two. For a very long time, he knew, he was completely oblivious to the possibility of love between his Mom and Dad. For him, they existed in order to love him and that was all there was to it. That there could be a relationship between the two of them, that need not include him, did not even occur to him until he was into his teens. One day, he clearly remembered, his Dad asked his Mom if she wished to have a pair of Diamond earrings and Kaushik stared at the two of them uncomprehendingly for it had never crossed his mind that his Dad could care for his Mom enough to buy her gifts as, or even more, expensive than the ones he bought for his son. The next day they went shopping for the earrings; Kaushik was with them. This, he found, was his earliest definite memory of them as purely a man and a woman capable of finding joy and happiness in a world without him.

He picked up the novel and began reading again. By the time the train entered the next station, he was fast asleep.

Closely Watched Films

2010-10-06T17:55:00.001+05:30

Kaushik grew up watching and revering Amitabh Bachchan. His father deified him for Kaushik, describing his films and acting in every superlative he knew. His mother did not care much either way, happy in the Bengalis’ indivisible love for Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen.

Every fortnight, his father would come home with a rented VCR and two tapes – one Bachchan and one Uttam – Suchitra. The films were watched huddled around a 14 inch colour television set. The first film was always Bachchan’s since Kaushik would have to be put to bed by ten. His mother would keep hurrying away to the kitchen whenever the pressure cooker whistled and sometimes his father would call out to her for a cup of tea and she would return with it. Kaushik would sit through all this, staring at the screen with rapt attention, waiting for the next action set piece to begin. When it would, Kaushik would scramble up to his feet and kick and punch the air with sounds of ‘Bhishoom Bhishoom’. Sometimes he would punch his Dad on the arms and he would grab a squealing Kaushik and pull him down to his lap and hold him tightly and tickle him and Kaushik would love it. In movies where Bachchan died in the end, and there were several of those, Kaushik would become glum and his Dad would promise to show him another film where Bachchan does not die. He would go to bed after that, his mother by his side, and when he was asleep, his Mom and Dad would watch the Uttam – Suchitra film.

In those days, the entire family visited Kolkata for a week or two every year. Kaushik loved going there, for they usually stayed at one of his Uncle’s house – his Dad’s elder brother – and he had a large television set and a VCR of his own. He did not see Bachchan films there, but instead he saw magic tricks his Uncle had recorded during TV programmes and Satyajit Ray’s ‘Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne’ and ‘Felu Da’ films.

It wasn’t until he was past fifteen that he started to realize that he was watching the same films over and over and they were starting to bore him a little. He asked his Uncle if there were other films he could watch and his Uncle would speak animatedly of the latest Magic show they’d shown on television. At first, he continued to sit through those but soon he learnt the art of wiggling his way out ot them. “I want to read a book now” he would say, waving an Enid Blyton and scampering off to another room.

His father realized what was going on and Kaushik noticed that now there were three tapes being brought with the VCR – a Chinese Martial Arts film in addition to the other two. “Enter the Dragon!” or “Fist of Fury!” or “36^th Chamber of Shaolin!” his Dad would announce when he returned from work and they would settle down to watch it soon after. His Mom would now sometimes make tea for him as well. Of course, he was now allowed to stay awake well after midnight since two films needed to be watched and slowly, Uttam Suchitra faded away into oblivion for there just wasn’t enough time for a third.

It was around that time that English films and Coca Cola came back to India. And Schwarzenegger rode into Kaushik’s life, shotgun in hand on a motorcycle, and wearing leather jackets and dark glasses and it was ‘Hasta la vista, baby’ to Bruce Lee and his ilk. These movies, of course, were somewhat more risky in that there was gore and scantily clad women involved, and Kaushik’s Dad went to the theatre alone first to check if Kaushik could be allowed to watch. Once in a while, he would take Kaushik on the condition that he would walk out of the theatre, when asked, for a few minutes in the middle of the movie like during Jamie Lee’s striptease in True Lies. He would do as asked. One time, his Dad allowed one of his friends to sample a film since he was busy and Kaushik got to sit through an entire James Bond film, while his mother muttered under her breath next to him.

Dhule brought with it porn. He learnt to revel in the terrible odour and creaky chairs that permeated shady video theatres. He learnt to not let his concentration flag even as those around him moaned and groaned in the darkness, although he never did that himself, choosing to wait until he got back to his hostel room. He began to read Sydney Sheldon and Harold Robbins too and for those years, all literature and film became for him means to a single purpose.

By the time he graduated and returned home, however, he had begun to tire of them. He still watched porn, of course, but it seemed to him it had become more a matter of need and continuity than actual excitement. He shifted to Maclean and Forsyth in the written word, but about films he did not know what else he could do and, therefore, he eventually stopped watching them altogether, except for the odd one that appeared on TV.

In Lucknow, while he walked around campus and into classrooms with novels in hand, Kafka and Hemingway and Conrad, he scoffed at those that displayed interest in films. “They’re just a waste of time”, Kaushik said to himself. What good would films do to him? He’d rather spend that time reading or playing cricket. One of the first times he spoke to Ritankar, they discussed literature, but when Ritankar brought up the subject of films, Kaushik made excuses and turned away.

And then one day, Ritankar forced him to watch ‘Apocalypse Now’. And he stared at the screen spellbound by the extraordinary translation of Conrad’s vision. Afterwards, while he mumbled on about the greatness of the film, Ritankar asked him if he’d seen ‘The Godfather’ films and he nodded his head even though he had not. The same day he returned to his room and spent the night watching all three. He then watched ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ and ‘Scent of a Woman’ and ‘Heat’ and Pacino replaced Bachchan, for whom his feelings by this time were less of reverence than of adoration in any case, in his head.

“Bergman, Godard and Truffaut, they are the real stuff,” another friend told him. He found their films unavailable on the campus LAN and therefore had to wait till he visited home during a term break. There, he convinced his Dad they needed an unlimited downloads broadband connection and when that arrived, he downloaded films by all three, and spent the rest of the break watching those. He found ‘Week End’ fascinating although he understood very little of it. When he returned to campus, he sought out the friend and asked him what else he would recommend. “If you liked ‘Week End’,” he said, “you will probably enjoy Last Year At Marienbad.” Kaushik was in a trance when he watched. A few months later, when he was beginning to discover hints of superiority in his behavior with other, less informed, people, he realized the only thing similar between ‘Week End’ and ‘Last Year At Marienbad’ was that he had understood neither. He watched them again.

The next windfall came when the Post Graduation program ended and Kaushik returned home for a three month break before he would move to Mumbai for work. He decided he’d had enough of the French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realism and that he would now devote himself to contemporary cinema. He discovered ‘Sex & Lucia’ and for a brief period, Paz Vega became more beautiful to him than Penelope Cruz, until he watched Volver. Sex & Lucia led him through Julio Medem to ‘Lovers of the Arctic Circle’. He spoke to Ritankar and Ashish about the film and found they had not watched it. He was thrilled that he finally had a film that he alone could recommend.

He began to detect hints of snobbishness creep into his conversations. “Oh! You haven’t seen Head On? Dude, you must absolutely see it!”. He warmed to the romance of Europe. He cursed himself for not going there when he had the chance, for the International Student Exchange program. Ashish did go and when he told them stories from his time there, Kaushik listened wide-eyed and jealous.

Once they were all settled in Mumbai, Kaushik sought out film appreciation groups and special screenings, better placed as he was in a film production company than Ritankar or Ashish. They enrolled to every club they could find and each Sunday morning at ten they began to go to a movie screening, red eyed and disheveled from the previous night’s drinking. In the afternoons, there was another club that exhibited films in a pub and they went there too. Occasionally, an obscure film released in theatres and they bought tickets for it, incredulous that such films could release in theatres – ‘Edge of Heaven’, ‘Turtles can Fly’, ‘Secret of the grain’. Kaushik became friends with Kartik and found himself being invited to special screenings of independent film directors he was in awe of. He contemplated becoming a filmmaker himself. He spent hours in office conceptualizing stories and camera angles. He looked forward to returning home each evening so he could watch a film and to weekends when he could discuss those and watch more.

He often reflected on how much films had affected his life. His world view expanded. He realized he couldn’t be very happy living the rest of his life in clusters of five day weeks. And he drifted apart from his friends of Dhule and to an extent, his parents, for he couldn’t bring himself to find conversations with them engaging anymore.

Stone Wall, Stone Fence

2010-10-03T09:13:00.003+05:30

It was on a cold winter night when Raakesh told Kaushik he would not take up a job. “I’ll do something, maybe try and be a journalist”, he said. Afterwards they strolled around the campus, covered in a thick veil of radiant fog. The vapour from their coffee rose and mingled with the fog, as did their own breaths.

Ever since they’d become friends, Raakesh often hinted at not wanting to carry on with the mistake he’d made. “This MBA stuff, it repels me,” he would say, “I can’t see myself doing this, being surrounded by people such as these. I just can’t.” Kaushik, unsure of what his own feelings in the matter were, remained silent on these occasions. He knew that he too was not thrilled at the prospect of spending years in an elaborate office in formalwear, but in the apparent absence of immediate alternatives, he was loathe to make a choice. He felt curiously envious and, at the same time, relieved each time Raakesh renewed his vow – relieved that it was Raakesh and not he. Raakesh, in the meanwhile, continued to take his exams and prepare sufficiently before them to get by, forever threatening that the next time he would not.

Somewhere in the most isolated corner of the campus when the thuds of the woofers in the Community Centre no longer bothered them, they stopped walking. They sweated lightly inside their jackets. Raakesh still carried ‘The remembrance of things past’, tattered and yellowed with its years in the library, in one hand. For some reason, he had taken it with him to the Insti party. “I came straight from the library,” he’d said by way of explanation.

Two years from then, when Ritankar and Kaushik stood before the grave of Proust in Paris, Kaushik would recount the episode to Ritankar. “Oh, that library version had about twenty pages torn off it. I had to stop reading it because of that.”, Ritankar would say in response.

They stood there for a while, silent, for they could think of nothing to discuss in particular, but unwilling to return to the din or to their rooms. Kaushik leaned against a tree trunk.

“So then, journalism, son?” Kaushik said.

“Yes son, that seems to be the idea.”

“But how do you plan to get in? An MBA degree, even one from the IIMs, does not help much in these matters, I gather.”

“I don’t know son, honestly,” Raakesh flushed, “but there must be a way. I’ll get into a separate course on journalism if need be.”

“A separate course? That is an extra year son, yes?”

Raakesh nodded, a little exasperated. Why must he think of all this now?

“What about the enormous loan you’ve run up here? How do you pay that back?”

“Maybe I will not, son.”

They started to walk again.

“So son, any new efforts coming up?” Raakesh asked.

“I think so son, yes. A short piece about a prisoner and his life. Will probably write it at some point tomorrow. You, of course, will be informed when it goes up on the blog.”

“Of course.”

“You? Anything in the offing? Besides the love poems to be pushed under the door?”

“Yes son, rubbing it in, it seems!” Raakesh paused, “No, nothing really. I am afraid the Booker will have to wait for a while.”

“Listen, lets go to the canteen. I would like some tea, a bowl of noodles too, perhaps.” Kaushik said.

“Sure son, lets. What time is it?”

“Ten minutes to two. Early days yet. We’ve plans for Counter Strike at three. Another hour to pass.’

The canteen was largely deserted; occasionally people appeared in ones and twos, and carried their tea cups, once those arrived, outside. Nobody sat at a table. Outside the canteen, there was a clearing, that looked like it had been commissioned as an ampitheatre but construction was abandoned halfway, and this is where most people sat with their teas. Raakesh and Kaushik chose to sit inside, happy with the warmth and the isolation.

“These computer games you play son, I never understand what is so interesting about them.”

“Perhaps not as interesting as a course in journalism son, yes. But whatever little there is, it is more immediate one feels.” Kaushik chuckled, pleased to have constructed, verbally, a somewhat more convoluted sentence than he usually did. Conversations in English were something he’d never had before he came to Lucknow, and he still found himself fumbling with the spoken word once in a while.

“Really son, that is just a ridiculous comment. What has one got to do with the other?”

“I know son,” Kaushik conceded, “just popped up in my head and I said it. Nothing to get so peeved about.”

Raakesh would indeed take up a course in journalism a few months later and then find himself employed with a well-known English daily, as a Sports Correspondent. In the first few months, he would cover minor Snooker and Table Tennis tournaments and fill his reports with references from The Dante, Homer and the Bible. He would then show those to Kaushik and they would have a good laugh.

On this night, the two would separate after an hour at the canteen. Kaushik would go back to his room and play Counter Strike under the alias of Che Guevara on the campus LAN with a bunch of friends. Raakesh would go back to weed.

Montefioralle

2010-09-26T19:28:00.000+05:30

It was the first time they were both together in front of the camera. The camera, placed on the parapet that separated Montefioralle from the lush Tuscan landscape, stared at them motionlessly, while they sat on a wooden bench and gazed at the unending countryside that the camera couldn’t see. There was nobody else in sight.

They remained silent for a long time. The camera heard the peaceful sound of birds and occasionally, the church bells toll. A light rain fell and the cobbled streets and ancient stone walls glistened. Tiny droplets fell on their shirts, darkening the colour where they fell and then spread, lightened and became undetectable. The glow of their cigarettes reddened when they drew in smoke.

“I wonder how they capture that sound of paper and tobacco burning when people smoke in films.” Kaushik said aloud.

“I don’t know. I think they use unfiltered cigarettes.” Ritankar said.

Kaushik nodded and stole a glance at the camera, then looked away again. The church bells chimed again.

“How about we describe what we see in front of us, the magnificence that lies there unseen to those watching through the camera?” Kaushik said.

Ritankar did not respond and continued to stare into the distance. They heard the fleeting sound of a car passing by on the highway behind them, hidden by the walls of the church.

“Look at them hills yonder,” Kaushik began, “green, wonderful. Oh bliss.” He sighed. “Those clouds brooding over them, perhaps drawn to their beauty as much as we. Those tiny houses with red roofs down in Greve clustered together like in a dream. Oh, that smoke rising from the chimney over there, snow white against the green grey.” He paused, shook his head thoughtfully and looked straight at the camera. “I wish you could see what I can see.” He clucked his tongue, “Oh nature, why art thou so cruel!”

Ritankar smiled but did not comment.

“This must be right up there with the best of our trip”, he said after long minutes had passed.

“Yes. With Cinque Terre and the Père Lachaise.”

“I hope the Aeolian Islands turn out alright. That should cap everything off nicely. And Rome, obviously.”

“I think this is going to be the best scene of our travelogue,” Kaushik mused, “if we do manage to compile one.” He added.

Ritankar stood up and strolled around for a bit, moving out of sight of the camera. Kaushik took a sip of water from the bottle he’d carried and settled back into the bench again.

“Must be twenty minutes since the camera started rolling,” Ritankar called out from where he stood, a few metres away, staring up at a streetlamp.

“Yes, must be. Why?”

“No. I guess we beat Hunger. That was seventeen minutes, wasn’t it?”

Kaushik laughed. “Yes, thereabouts. We weren’t that intense though, were we?”

Two years hence, Kaushik’s hard drive would crash and take with it everything they’d shot. In that time, they would’ve watched the videos once and never have worked on them.

“What time is it?” Ritankar asked.

“One. You want to leave? We’ve got to get back to Greve by three.”

“Lets walk through the village one more time. Then we can leave.”

Kaushik walked away from the line of sight of the camera and then detoured to it from its blind side. He switched it off and picked it up. “This should be fun to watch.” He said.

On their way down to Greve, they walked by the cemetery compound again – a small space enclosed by a thick wall that rose up to their chests. On the other side, over the wall, Tuscany rose and fell in all its glory. Stone plaques, some with faded photographs on them, stood in a four uniform columns. They read out some of the names under their breath, fearful that a raised voice might disturb the exquisite equilibrium of the place. They mulled over the paradox of what they felt – extreme calm and a warm melancholia.

It was only when they’d descended to Greve and sat in what appeared to be the only café in town, sipping warm steaming cups of cappuccino, that Kaushik finally spoke aloud.

“Not a bad place to die.”He said.

Amores, indeed, Perros

2010-09-26T11:34:00.000+05:30

They were seated on the stone parapet that separated the tube-lit street from the sand. Around them, hawkers were preparing to shut shop for the day. It was a weekend and they had perhaps sold off everything earlier than usual. Pieces of old vernacular newspapers, folded into cones with hollow bottoms, lay about; a stray peanut or two peeked from a few. The smell of roasted maize hung in the air. On the street, the occasional group of tourists passed, hurrying to their hotel rooms, oblivious to the brooding hum of the invisible ocean to their side.

“What time is it?” Ashish asked.

Kaushik peered at his watch, twisted his wrist in search of a stray column of light from the streetlamps, for the dial not immediately visible in the darkness.

“About half past nine.” He answered.

“Early days yet, although by the looks of it, sufficiently late for everyone else.” Ashish said.

“Anyone wants more tea?” said Ritankar and waited for the other two to nod. “ Lets order before the fellow leaves.”

They called out for three more cups from where they were seated.

“I wouldn’t mind an omelet either.” Said Ashish.

“You go ahead. I am stuffed.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Oh well, then I guess I’ll skip it too.”

They had reached Murud that afternoon with growling bellies and aching backsides, a five hour bus ride behind them. Apart from the quaint thatched houses with sloping roofs and the faint, agreeable odour of cow dung that hung perennially in the air, the first thing they had noticed was the street names. Every street, even the narrowest by-lane, was named after a popular figure of the Indian freedom struggle – Gandhi, Nehru, Bose, Patel, Ambedkar, Tilak. Evidently, Murud thought itself important enough for this to be construed as bestowal of honour. They had found themselves a cozy little room on the first floor in a makeshift two storey hotel; the owners themselves lived on the lower floor. The stairs opened straight into a grassy courtyard with a palm tree in the centre, which overlooked the ocean. They had found the place enchanting although the bathroom door wouldn’t lock and the ceiling fan screeched and shuddered every once in a while.

A handful of tourists hung around the beach. They were surprised to note that some of them were foreigners. They couldn’t imagine how anyone outside India could’ve heard of this place, tucked away as it was in the long and largely inaccessible Konkan coastline. The nearest train station was two hours away. Three buses, state owned, plied to and from Mumbai each day on roads, narrow and bumpy, that weaved in and out of the lush Western Ghats. Whenever two buses crossed each other, they came so close one could smell the passengers’ breath in the other bus through the window.

The tea arrived in plastic cups. Kaushik blew into it and the vapour settled thinly on his glasses, then gradually faded away. The breeze had picked up and now ruffled his hair. He passed his hand through them and it came away with particles of sand sticking to it. He remembered he’d forgotten to bring the shampoo. He grimaced.

“I will be travelling to the Philippines next month.” Ritankar announced.

“To Philippines? What for?” Kaushik asked.

“It’s the annual conference for our company,” Ritankar said. He stood up and stretched his legs before continuing, “they’d eventually told us it would be in Beijing but it appears they’ve now chosen Manila.”

“Perhaps they need to send out a lot of letters during the conference,” offered Ashish, “Envelopes must be cheap in Manila, no?”

They laughed.

“So, how many days?” Kaushik asked.

“About two weeks I think.”

“Two weeks! I’ve never heard of an annual conference lasting that long!”

Ritankar sat down again. “No, the conference in only 4 days.” He said.

“So what about the other ten days?”

Ritankar stood up again and lit a cigarette, with difficulty since the breeze was strong and he wasn’t very good at cupping his hands around the matchstick. In fact, none of them were. He sat down again.

“I have something to tell you guys,” he said.

Ashish and Kaushik looked at each other. Kaushik raised an eyebrow.

“Go on.”

“You remember that girl from China I told you about? The one that works in our Beijing office?”

“Ah yes. She was here a few months ago for some training, right? Told you she didn’t like shopping for clothes, I think.” Kaushik said, glancing once again at Ashish.

Ritankar nodded. “Yes, she wanted to go to a bookstore, instead.”

“And you took here there. Yes, so, what about her?”

“Well, you see, I’ve been chatting with her since then,” Ritankar’s tone was almost apologetic, “off and on.”

“Off and on, I see.”

“Drop the sarcasm for once, Kaushik” Ashish said.

“Yes, of course. And I did not detect any in what you just said.” Kaushik countered.

Ritankar grew visibly impatient.

“Ok, Ok. Let’s get back to what his story now. Yes, so you were,” Kaushik paused, “chatting off and on.”

“Yes. And it, sort of, clicked.”

“Clicked?”

“Lets get more tea” Ritankar suggested.

Kaushik yelled for more tea again.

Ritankar went on to tell them how it was that they had clicked. He provided excerpts from their conversations, which turned out to revolve mostly around love and life and their meanings. “If you were divided into equal halves,” she had asked him once, “would one half love the other?” “Oh, really?” Kaushik remarked, “She asked you that? Very novel. Very subtle.” Ritankar waved Kaushik’s comment away with his arms and continued on. They had grown used to each other over time and spent an increasing number of hours chatting in office. They had exchanged novels and later, text messages, with each other. The girl, Ritankar told them, had majored in French literature. Kaushik and Ashish nodded approvingly. At some point, Ritankar had mentioned his interest in her was beginning to evolve beyond the confines of their chat window. Kaushik was certain Ritankar could never have said that if the two had been face to face, but did not mention it. The two had then agreed to find a way to meet again.

“So anyway, where do matters stand now? In all of this, that point has remains unclear.” Ashish said, when Ritankar finished.

“I don’t know. We’ll meet in Manila, spend a few days together and see how it works out. I am not sure.”

Back in office after the weekend in Murud, refreshed and bored, Kaushik and Ashish discussed this new development and sipped coffee pensively. “What the fuck man! What wrong have we done?” they said to each other. They determined they must get Ritankar to share a picture of her and based on what they saw become a little relieved or more depressed. The weekend before Ritankar was to leave for Manila they met again and wished him luck.

When Ritankar returned from Manila, he was convinced he had a future with her. So was she, he told Kaushik and Ashish. They had spent a fabulous week together, travelling through Philippines and its many islands. They had discussed their future together and a way out of, as Ritankar put it, all this.

“Does she have any lady friends she can introduce your friends to?” Ashish quipped.

Once

2010-09-19T12:39:00.000+05:30

Kaushik’s interest in Ritika, as much a product of incessant suggestion as of actual attraction, was firmly established, in his mind and of others’, by the time the second month in Lucknow had begun. She, with her aquiline nose, high cheeks and terrible voice, was one of the most sought after, although not overwhelmingly so, for that year the campus had witnessed a markedly increased influx of attractive women. The presence of competition – stiff is not the appropriate word to use in this context – meant Kaushik did not even try seriously, although it was unlikely he would have succeeded even if he did. For a long time, he wasn’t even sure if she knew his name.

It was still that phase when Kaushik was only feeling his way into the company of the Illustrious and therefore, his poise, never assured amongst womenfolk in the best of times, wasn’t what could be considered self-confident. Indeed, he fell back, more strongly than ever, on his time-honed defense of sarcasm and feigned indifference.

He never really had been a ladies’ man. In school, as a kid only dimly aware of man woman relationships beyond that of playing Snakes & Ladders together, he, along with his friends, had enjoyed the company of women often. By the time his dim notions had developed into more coherent physical urges – he woke up to these much later than most of his peers since at the time his naïve faith in his parents was unshakeable and they had begun to drop frequent, subtle hints, that he shouldn’t be getting carried away with himself at this precarious age -, he was almost through school.

He went to college in Ahmedabad for a couple of months to pass time, while he waited for the letter, from Dhule as it turned out, to arrive. There, he noticed how the women wore dresses very different from the full sleeved shirts and ankle length skirts that had been their school uniform. He registered the clearly defined curves, accentuated by the tighter tees and jeans, and the occasional, bewitching, sight of an exposed knee. At this stage, he himself was barely above five feet and in the nascent stages of obesity, and this meant, his advances, friendly and unsure, were met with only mild, somewhat sisterly, reactions. The subject of his height, a matter of great concern to his Mom & Dad for the past few years, suddenly became important to himself. He hunted around for girls his own height but found himself hopelessly distracted by those that weren’t. He went into a shell, eating sandwiches at the canteen alone, and taking the bus back home as soon as lectures ended. Sometimes, when he bunked class, he went to the neighbourhood bookshop and read.

The problem of his height alleviated significantly by the end of his first semester in Dhule. He never became an imposing presence, other than horizontally, but he grew enough to have a physical vantage point with respect to most women. But the Lord that gaveth also, snidely, taketh. Dhule proved barren in more ways than one. The one female worthy of, at best, passing attention garnered so much, she abandoned college, two weeks into the first session, and returned to her hometown. There were a handful others who were alright, not unworthy of mankind saving liaison after a nuclear attack by machines wrecks the planet leaving only two survivors, and these were quickly picked up by the locals boys, who, armed with a bunch of hockey stick wielding sidekicks, wrestled their way through the cluster of less connected aspirants and into the women’s hearts. Kaushik, of course, stood no chance.

And thus, by the time Ritika turned up, his wooing and conversational skills were still only marginally better than at infancy.

She was interested in literature and in western music. She maintained a blog which sounded profound and vague. She had a sense of humour, it appeared. Kaushik mentioned his interest casually to his friends and they latched onto it at once. They cajoled and goaded on his desire for her.

He constructed conversations with her in his head, fretting over each detail, going back and changing his own words, wherever he felt he had gone wrong, but never hers since what she said was of her own volition. They all turned out to be conversations worthy of the best noir and that he couldn’t actually have them with her depressed Kaushik further. He passed her by several times each day, at the coffee shop, at the student mess, in classrooms, but never said hello, choosing instead, to steal sidelong glances at her. Once in a while, when his glance would be caught by hers, he offered a frail smile and quickly looked away, not waiting to check if she’d smiled back. At this point, everyone was adding everyone else to their Social Network friend lists and Chat lists, but Kaushik desisted from sending her an invite, afraid he’d be turned down. It wasn’t until they were grouped together, along with a couple of other fellows, for a project, that he eventually sent her an invite, making up his mind to clarify it was to discuss about the project lest she harbor suspicions.

It was around this time that he met Raakesh, who was then struggling with romantic demons of his own. Since his gift for the written word was universally acknowledged by this time, Raakesh had figured he could use it to his advantage to make headway with the object of his desire. And so, he composed sonnets in her name and slipped them under her door in the early hours of the morning. After weeks of expectant waiting, when nothing happened, he and Kaushik figured the girl was probably too airheaded to appreciate the magic of his words. And they returned to their novels and their alcohol.

Ritika, it emerged one day, had succumbed to the charms of another man, a senior. Kaushik took the news with great equanimity and immediately set about finding all he could about this man. He was a hopeless alcoholic, Kaushik found, and evidently had a knack for growling absurd Death Metal songs. Nobody on campus, even those of his own batch, liked him. When the news of his conquest spread, they liked him even less. It won’t last, was the general opinion. In three years’ time, the two would marry each other.

With time, Kaushik grew out of her and a strange thing happened. He found he could now speak to her. They spoke a few times during the final months in Lucknow, sometimes face to face and sometimes in a chat window, and Kaushik found he enjoyed these occasions with a faint hint of wistfulness, even as they were underway. He recognized the transient nature of these conversations and that they would probably die away slowly once they left Lucknow. He still liked the sight of her.

They did chat once or twice after Kaushik, and she too, had settled in Mumbai. They did not have occasion to meet. She remained on his Gtalk list and he looked for her name each time he logged in, for no purpose other than to simply register her presence, until he grew out of that too and she became just another name.

The Earning of Respect

2010-09-19T02:27:00.000+05:30

The summonses from the Director’s office weren’t ever entirely unexpected and yet, when they did arrive, those summoned put up shocked countenances nonetheless. One or two burst into tears even, genuine, for although they were aware exactly how it would all play out in the end, there was always the lurking fear that this could be that occasion when Neo chooses the other door. They would then spend the rest of the evening plotting how best forgiveness could be asked for when they were presented before the Director next morning. Those that had cried earlier were usually chosen as the spokespersons; sympathy was most likely to be won by the soft and the unmanly.

It happened every year. The sophomores, basking in their newfound seniority, sat atop the hostel wall, their legs wafting cockily below them, and watched the stream of new arrivals enter the hostel, a parent or two in tow. Some of the parents, usually fathers, greeted them cheerily and asked after the amenities their progeny would have at their disposal in the hostel. These fathers were then duly offered lengthy insights that eventually ended at the tea & snack joint round the corner. ‘We’ll take good care of your son, uncle, you don’t worry at all’, they were told. The new students continued to trickle in for a while and by the time the last of the parents abandoned their child to the vagaries of Dhule, more than a month had passed by. That was when the clarion call was sounded and the newbies were asked to gather on the hostel’s roof for a round of introductions.

The rules were simple and scant. The seniors, sophomores and beyond, would need to be addressed as Sir. Only formals could be worn. At all times, including in bed. Formals would include socks and boots too, except in bed, where the boots could be taken off. In a senior’s presence, their gazes could not meander above the third button of their own shirts. They would complete the seniors’ projects and assignments for them and do whatever else was asked of them at any point. The rest of the night was spent in various festivities; the newly inducted kids, generally unclothed, catered to their Sirs many requests, most of which were of a distinctly, although only mildly, homoerotic nature. One of the favourites over the years was getting one of the kids to pick up a pen or pencil from the floor with his buttocks, exposed of course, without using his limbs. Nobody had ever actually found success in doing so, which was the point, since nonperformance led to more severe punishment.

This continued for a couple of months, each night. On weekends, when everybody was more drunk than usual, several groups convened in one or the other seniors’ private apartments, outside the hostel and therefore, outside the immediate reaches of the warden. Kaushik too, not drunk but eager to pay it forward, having earned his badge the previous year, was among them. And pay it forward, he certainly did. He hadn’t read The Marquis De Sade then, but when he did, he was confident that the great man would have approved.

In time, the inevitable happened. One of the kids wept and whimpered into a phone and the voice carried through miles of metal and fiber to his shocked parents, who, in turn, wept and whimpered into the ears of the college authorities. The boy, one of Kaushik and his group’s victims, was called to the Director’s office. He named as many people as he knew the names of. And thus, the Director’s summonses. Kaushik’s name, it was found, had not been announced. He grinned from ear to ear and explained to the others that it would all be fine.

It began as it always did. The Director raged and fumed and spoke to their parents. He informed them that their sons were being rusticated, a somewhat inappropriate term to use since it could hardly get more rustic than Dhule. Some of the accused, a markedly larger number than the previous day’s, began to weep openly. ‘Won’t happen again, won’t happen again’, they sobbed. The Director remained firm, for he was supposed to on the first day, and asked them to leave his office and pack their suitcases. They needn’t attend lectures, he added.

That evening, the mood in the hostel was sombre. A first year kid even whistled his way to the toilet. Towards midnight, the hostel warden asked the beleaguered gentlemen to his office. There, he informed them that he was ashamed of them and such a thing had been unheard of in his regime before this. A little later, he asked the accuser to be brought to him and when he did, he asked the rest to apologize. They did as they were told. The warden’s voice softened. He told them he would talk to the Director the next morning and see if something could be done to save their careers. They thanked him profusely.

The Director acceded on the third day. They were all called to his office again. He too did not wish to see such bright careers brought to premature ends, he said, but they could not completely escape punishment. And so, the best way, he continued, would be for them to be paid back in the same vein. They were all made to stand just inside the entrance to the college for the entire day, in the heat, without shirts and with their arms raised above them.

What embarrassed them was how filthy their undershirts were. The girls passed by them, wrinkling their noses and giggling to each other. A few, with commendable oversight, had omitted wearing an undershirt and shaved their underarms and were, therefore, decidedly less embarrassed. Their friends, on their way to the lecture halls and back, waved to them and cracked jokes. Kaushik cracked a joke or two too and they glared at him so hard, he asked them if they wanted something to drink. They said yes. A few minutes later, Kaushik and a few others, returned with packets of wafers, aerated soft drinks and mineral water. The professors and other staff allowed them to finish most of it before asking them to stop the nonsense and take the punishment seriously.

In a couple of hours, when they couldn’t keep their arms aloft any longer and the heat wet their pants with sweat, the Director called them again. They fell at his feet, exhausted, and asked for mercy. The Director launched into another half hour monologue, which they all nodded thoughtfully through. By evening, all was well again.

Later that night, the first year students were summoned to the hostel roof again and the essential concepts of solidarity and unity were explained to them. They wouldn’t be ragged anymore, they were promised, but in return, they would have to continue to wear formals and address the seniors as Sir.

By the end of the semester, the only rule that remained, and would remain through the next three years, was the form of address.

Rishikesh

2010-09-12T21:38:00.001+05:30

Kaushik’s eyes opened and saw darkness. The eyelids opened and shut with trepidation several times since, when they opened, the retina they housed weren’t used to capturing a somewhat similar image to what they’d been seeing with the shutters down. Still dark. From somewhere close, came the sound of snoring. He felt damp and realized he was still wearing his jacket, which combined with two blankets and alcohol, had made him sweat. He also realized he needed, urgently, to relieve his bowels. He sighed, sat up and fumbled under the bed, first for the glasses and then for the mobile phone. The phone’s screen, once it lit up, informed him it was three in the morning and cast a ghostly halo around the tent. Kaushik spotted two bodies on the other two beds – Ashish and Raakesh – although he couldn’t be sure which was who. He stepped out of the tent and immediately a chill breeze blew into his face and he stepped back inside.

His backpack lay by his bedside, upon which a woolen cap and gloves had been carelessly tossed. He put them on and stepped out again.

It was a brilliant moonlit night and Kaushik was staggered to find how clearly he could see. The white sand stretched out ahead of him and he could see exactly where it met the water. The Ganges, blusterous and white foamed, hurtled down towards Haridwar, eager to complete the remaining distance to the plains, barely twenty kilometers, as soon as it could. On the other side of the river, the Himalayas loomed dramatically, the summits hidden by a luminescent sheet of white clouds that, miraculously, seemed immobile in the gusty breeze. Overhead however, unguarded by the mountains, the clouds scurried off, also in the direction of Haridwar, and Kaushik glimpsed a sky filled with stars. Looking directly up made him sway a little. The effects of the alcohol had evidently not worn off completely. He didn’t detect a headache though, a good sign.

The makeshift toilets were about fifty meters from the tents. He walked lazily in that direction; his slippers sunk into the soft sand and threw up miniature volcanoes each time they came back up again. He passed by the bonfire they’d lit earlier that evening; the embers were dull grey with patches of simmering deep red. Thin tendrils of smoke still rose from them and hung a few feet above. Kaushik stopped for a moment and flapped his arms through the smoke. He chuckled.

When he’d reached the first of the toilet doors, he looked back at the line of tents, about a dozen of them, milky white against the thick dark cluster of trees in the background. Apart from them, he had spotted only one other group that evening. He decided he would return with his camera after he’d relieved himself. The toilets had no roofs and no taps. One plastic mug, half broken, was placed inside each. Outside, a solitary cistern stood; its dark wet surface glistened in the moonlight. He picked up two mugs from adjacent toilets and fetched water, freezing, from the cistern, although, going by the smell inside the toilets, he was convinced that carrying the extra mug, which he intended to flush the toilet with, was a futile exercise. Squatting inside the toilet, he stared up, partly to savour the view he was afforded and party to escape the stench. He inhaled in short sharp bursts and exhaled deeply. The sheet of clouds above and the walls of the toilet below hid from view most of actual peaks.

He returned to his tent a quarter of an hour later, his buttocks and palms numb from being exposed to the water. He thought of the camera and then abandoned the idea. He slid back under the blankets and did not budge until the morning after.

Two years later, when he was reading of the Dharma Bums’ climb up the Matterhorn Peak, his mind threw up that image of the barely visible mountains from inside the toilet. It made him reminisce, fondly, of the bonfire of that night and the white water rafting of next morning and of Raakesh and Ashish and Lucknow. It was the three’s only trip together. And yet, for Kaushik, the defining image of it was of the mountains at three in the morning, and he suspected it would endure through his life, entwined as it was now, with The Dharma Bums.

Lunchmen

2010-09-12T10:15:00.000+05:30

At one every afternoon, Kaushik picked his phone up and began calling his fellow lunchmen – about half a dozen of them - located variously around the office campus. Once this was done, he took the elevator down to ground level where the Food Court was and found himself an unoccupied table, where he and his friends would congregate for the day. Kaushik enjoyed lunchtimes, happy for the break and the conversation after the monotony of reading, for three straight hours, Roger Ebert reviews and essays from The Economist.

The Food Court was a huge open space with round black wooden tables spread around it. There were five counters, each run by a different caterer, that served the same food, except one which served sandwiches and pasta that smelled of unventilated cellars. Over time, Kaushik had picked his favourite amongst the other four and stuck to it ever since. By the time the food he ordered was ready, Ashish usually arrived. Ashish, since he lived with his parents, brought home-cooked food in a black oblong Tiffin box. The rest – some of them friends from IIM Lucknow, the others colleagues whom they minded least – trickled in, in ones and twos; by half past one the congregation was complete.

The conversation usually revolved around neutral subjects. Cricket, the weather, politics, work. Most preferred cricket, since they followed it closely, with the exception of Ashish who, therefore, did his best to turn the conversation to politics. When they spoke of work, it was usually about one of the bosses; their favourite was a stocky old man with a permanently bemused expression, who addressed everyone, including in emails, as ‘Guys’. The expression wasn’t without reason; it was widely believed that he indeed had absolutely no clue what happened around him. Stories of him abound – of how, even as he signed proposals, he recommended that they not be taken forward, how he contended that their reporting systems should somehow capture and track competition data and how he, the bloody nincompoop, had a wife of the MILF variety. Sometimes, they spotted him approach their table and immediately made as if they were done and were about to leave.

Discussions on films and literature were usually avoided; Ashish and Kaushik were aware their fellow lunchmen weren’t terribly interested. They did utter the occasional wisecrack though, like when the only female amongst them, a pretty little girl with a shrill voice, had informed that she would be migrating to Ho Chi Minh City in a month’s time, for her husband had been transferred there, and Kaushik had said how she would love the smell of napalm in the mornings. Or when one of them had had his overtures turned down by a girl, a co-worker, and Ashish had declared he could smell bitter almonds. On these occasions, while the two of them laughed uncontrollably, the rest looked at them with expressions that resembled that favourite boss of theirs. They spent close to an hour at the table, continuing to occupy it long after their plates were empty and other groups began to circle around like eagles. Eventually, when someone mustered the courage to ask them if they were done, they shrugged and got up.

Afterwards, while most of them returned to their desks, Ashish and Kaushik did not. Instead, they made their way to the Visitors’ waiting area, empty at that hour, and lounged there for another half an hour. They exchanged notes – interesting articles they’d come across during the course of the day on issues that they would like to further delve into. Invariably, the conversation degenerated, at some point, into a cribbing session on what the fuck they were doing in this place and how they would happily relieve themselves of an upper and lower limb each to get out of there. There were long periods of silences in these conversations, during which neither of them could think of anything worthwhile to talk about but found simply sitting there more worthwhile than going back to their desks. It would be past three by the time they would wearily make their way back, promising each other to read more on that interesting issue and discuss it when they met in the evening. Once in a while, Kaushik would have a meeting he’d have to attend and he’d go straight to it, unprepared but convinced he’d breeze through it without the least trouble.

Waiting

2010-09-08T15:50:00.003+05:30

Ritankar entered, his tattered lopsided backpack hung on one shoulder, and found Kaushik and Ashish already there, sitting at the table right next to the parapet - the best table in Café Harbour View. Two beer bottles, emptied, and three mugs, two of them with foam at the edges, stood on it. The Sun wouldn’t be up for another eight hours.

“Should we order more beer?” Ashish asked Ritankar and signaled to the waiter without waiting for an answer. Ritankar hung his backpack on his chair’s backrest and lit a cigarette.

“I am feeling hungry,” he said, “order some starters too.”

Like most Saturday evenings, the place was full. They were not playing music today.

“How did you manage this table?” Ritankar asked.

“We arrived early” Ashish said. Kaushik chuckled.

“How early?”

“Around 4, I think.” Ashish glanced at Kaushik to check if he’d approximated correctly. Kaushik shrugged. “Yeah, thereabouts, I think.”

“Since 4! And in all this time, only two bottles?”

“No, this is the third pair actually. That reminds me, I’ve to take a leak.” Ashish got up, stabilized himself vertically for a few moments, during which he pretended to check his pockets, and then made his way, quickly, to the restroom.

Kaushik watched him thoughtfully. “We’re a little drunk.” He announced, before adding, “Suresh will join us later.”

The beers arrived.

“Should we wait for Ashish to return?” Ritankar said.

“No need. We’ve raised half a dozen toasts already.”

The starters, French fries and Fish fingers, arrived ten minutes later, Ashish, a few minutes after that.

“Long time.” Kaushik said.

Ashish picked a French Fry, thought about it and then put it back. He rubbed both hands on his jeans a few times and then picked it up again.

“One thing leads to another…” He said.

A group, two couples, sitting on the next table, opposite Ashish and behind Ritankar and Kaushik, called for their bill. Immediately, another set, two couples again, surrounded the table, breathing down the departing party’s necks. They had been standing at the entrance to the café for nearly an hour. Kaushik and Ashish had noticed them mainly because of the dark skinny girl with long curly hair.

“She’s attractive, isn’t she?” Ashish had said, “In an unusual sort of way.”

“In a Arundhati Roy sort of way.” Kaushik had commented. They had pondered over this between sips of beer.

“Yes, I can see why you say that. Puts me off a little bit, though. With all that nonsense she spews these days…”

“Yeah, but if this girl were to ask, I wouldn’t turn her down.”

“Fat chance! Well, neither would I.”

Kaushik turned and looked over his shoulder to check how the members of the group had placed themselves. “Your Ms. Roy’s sitting with her back to us.” He said to Ashish, “Not very keen on either of us, evidently.”

Ritankar’s cell phone started to ring. He prepared to say Hello even as he pressed the requisite button to accept the call, allowing the word time to burst through the accentuated stammer that ‘H’ and ‘R’ bring. The call was from home. He spoke in monosyllables till his parents realized it was not a good time and ended the conversation. He sighed and lit another cigarette. Kaushik gestured to him to pass the pack and lit one too.

“The other day,” Kaushik began, “I had some work and had to wait in office for a little longer than usual. Was past eight by the time I could leave and when I reached the train station, none of the usual suspects were there, obviously. Different bunch of people altogether, usual suspects of the 8:30 train probably” Kaushik drew in from the cigarette and exhaled it in the direction of the ocean. “Anyway,” he continued, “when the train arrived, we waited for everyone to get down since it was the last stop and train would return back from there. When I got in - I think I was the first to – I saw these two men, old-ish, still sitting patiently. One of them had a maroon briefcase on his lap and I started to wonder, you know. These things make me a little fidgety these days. And then a third man, older than the other two, dressed completely in white, grand white sideburns, he came in and joined them.”

Kaushik paused again for another puff in-blow out routine, stealing a couple of sips from his mug.

“Does this story have an end?” Ashish asked, continuing to look past Kaushik at the curly haired girl’s back. Kaushik ignored the dig.

“Now this new old man, must be nearly sixty five-seventy, took out two packs of cards from his pockets. And the three began to play rummy. They played for ten odd minutes – the train waits at the station for that long – and just as the train started to move slowly, the original two quickly gathered up their stuff and leapt off it. I don’t think they could finish the last hand. The old man patiently gathered the cards and put it back in his pocket. He then brought out a writing pad from his bag – he was carrying one – and started to jot down some stuff on it. I leaned closer to see. One entire side was covered with Rummy scores. He was scribbling, at the bottom of the other side, what I presume were that day’s scores.”

Kaushik dropped the cigarette, now a stub, onto the floor and crushed it with his left boot. He then looked away towards the ocean to indicate that the story was done and that he would not let explanations and interpretations come in the way of subtlety.

“They must’ve been doing this for years! Ten minutes each day.” Ritankar said.

“Would make a nice little short film.” Ashish said.

“Yeah, it would. You know, it reminded me of this lovely film I saw some time back – Babi Leto. Czech, I think. Or maybe Hungarian, I am not sure. I think it’s the best film about old age, I’ve seen.” Kaushik said.

“Better than Wild Strawberries?” Ritankar said; there was a slight edge, remnant of a forcibly repressed incredulity, in his voice.

“Dude, that is a Bergman film.”

“Are you guys feeling hungry?” Ritankar asked.

“I am OK; won’t mind another round of starters though.” Kaushik said.

More starters were ordered. They stared at the darkness of the ocean for a while

“There is one other film I thought was really wonderful in this portrayal of old age thing,” began Kaushik again, “I can’t recall the name. From the seventies, I think. It was by some female director…she made this other movie about a lesbian relationship – it had the woman from Short film about love in it…”

“Yes, yes! I know what you are talking about…Karoly Makk, the director’s name. And he is not female.” Said Ritankar.

“What did you think Kaushik?” Ashish grinned, “You were hoping to trump Ritankar?”

Kaushik laughed, “Oh no, never!” He turned to Ritankar, “You remember the name of the film I was talking about? The one with the old woman?”

“I think it is Szerelem.”

“Ah yes, that is the one.”

It was now past midnight and the crowd had thinned somewhat. The waiter appeared with the next set of starters. “Sir, last order.” He informed. They looked at each other, shrugged, shook their heads and decided they were done for the day.

They stood up and walked around the terrace while the waiter cleared their table. It was that time of the night when they realized, all at once, that half the weekend was gone and by the time they would wake up next day, half of the rest would be gone too. Then they would simply dawdle around for a few hours till it was time for Ashish and Ritankar to return to their respective apartments. And that would be that. The weekend was actually ending there, right then.

“Oh, we forgot to tell you,” Ashish said to Ritankar after the waiter finished and they returned to the table, “Kaushik and I will now be working alternate Saturdays. New company policy.”

“What the fuck?”

“Damn man! The day I quit that place, I hope it is raining so I can take my shirt off and do the Shawshank thing.” chuckled Ashish.

"Hey, I just remembered, Suresh never turned up, did he!" said Ritankar.

Kaushik nodded and picked up a cigarette, “Lets have one more smoke and then we can leave.”

To Love and Not Like

2010-09-05T11:54:00.002+05:30

Each time Kaushik visited Baidyabati, after a year or several, it appeared to have sunk deeper into nostalgia. The surrounding swamp seemed thicker; the dense foliage that covered it more malicious. Cycle Rickshaws, wailing through their many nuts and bolts, bumped over brick lanes plagued with perpetual erosion, their horns shriller, starker. The houses, mud and concrete, scabbed and ugly, looked as if they were disintegrating where they stood as dampness and decay permeated deeper into them. It always looked like it had rained recently. Insects buzzed in open drains, the sound flat and permanent, broken by a stray cycle rickshaw horn or the occasional cackle of a kid. Kaushik liked to think this reflected Baidyabati’s life and being itself although he never mentioned it for he thought the metaphor juvenile and forced.

From the house, that his grandfather - maternal - had built and lived in till he died of cancer three months after his wife did, and where Kaushik’s Uncle, his wife and kids and his elder sister, a spinster, continue to live, one can see Baidyabati’s train station in the distance, partly obscured by a ghost textile mill, abandoned and falling apart since even Kaushik’s mother could remember. The street by the house heads straight for the station for a while before suddenly veering off to the left, behind a thick cluster of coconut trees. Every morning, a long procession of men makes its way to the station through the street, from where they take a train to Kolkata, forty five minutes away. They return in the evenings after a day’s work and tea, in smaller, greater number of clusters. One of Kaushik’s earliest memories was the sight of his grandmother waiting at the tiny metal gates of the house and beaming widely as soon as she spotted the cycle rickshaw, Kaushik and his mother in it, appeared around the bend.

From the inside, the house seems like a cellar provisionally converted to live in. The rooms, three of them, are enormous; a solitary fan hangs in each, from a roof so high the wind never reaches the floor. The walls look as if they’ve never been painted. They are punctuated by square windows, always curtained, that open into enclosed spaces.

As a kid, however, Kaushik never found any of this depressing, reveling instead in all the attention and adulation that was bestowed upon him. His grandmother and two Aunts, the older Aunt married and mother of a living daughter and a dead son, and the younger one a spinster, both elder to his own mother, doted over him, listening to every word he said and greeting with wild laughter anything that was remotely amusing. In the evenings, when his Uncle returned from work, he took Kaushik to a sweetshop and treated him to a Rasogolla and a Coke while he smoked an unfiltered cigarette. His grandfather kept mostly to himself, choosing to spend his time away from all the chatter working on horoscopes and planetary positions and proclaiming every once in a while that his time had come; it caused great trepidation in the family on the first couple of occasions, after which it was greeted with nods of mild interests, as if they were being told of some curious news the old man had heard on the radio. He died when Kaushik was about eighteen. In all these years, Kaushik had hardly ever had a proper conversation with his grandfather; indeed all Kaushik really knew about the man was that he was his grandfather. His grandmother was a plump old woman, a plumpness that was diagnosed, too late, as symptoms of the disease that would eventually slay her. In his early years, she took him for walks around Baidyabati, showing him the many ponds and buying him chocolates his mother did not approve of. When she visited Ahmedabad, he returned the favour, showing her whatever little he knew of his city. She still bought the chocolates for him. Over the years, as she grew plumper she began, increasingly, to spend time in a chair for movement had become too tiring for her. The last time Kaushik saw her, she was confined almost entirely to her chair in the corner of the room, having transitioned dramatically from holding centre-stage to smiling tearfully and disconsolately at everything.

As a family, they were all given to ludicrous melodrama, playing out life on an operatic scale. Everybody spoke at the top of their voices, drawing out the end of their sentences, in singsong fashion.

His Uncle married when Kaushik was about ten. He had reached an age where he had begun to appreciate female beauty and form and he noted that the new Aunt was a slender, attractive woman. His other Aunts he could never objectively evaluate in these terms for he’d seen them ever since he could remember. He took to spending as much time as he could with this new Aunt, elated that he had one as beautiful.

He enjoyed Baidyabati in those days. Whenever he was there, he was indisputably the centre of attraction. It was as if that tiny portion of the universe revolved around him.

As he grew up, his visits to Kolkata and Baidyabati became sparser. After he went to Dhule, it was three years before Kaushik could return to Baidyabati again. By then, his grandparents were dead. To his now adult eyes, the house looked so forlorn he couldn’t believe he had happy memories of it. His Uncle, his wife, kids and the spinster Aunt still lived there. His Uncle, his hairline severely receded, appeared to have physically shrunk. Kaushik noticed his hand quiver as he held a cigarette between his fingers. The two kids, twin boy and girl, pranced around the house, their mother and Aunt in tired pursuit, shrieking hysterically, faint remnants of the bygone times Kaushik remembered. The kids were cheerful as kids are, oblivious to the gloom that surrounded them. He wondered what it would be like if these kids weren’t there. And he realized what he had brought to the place when he was there as a kid.

Since then, every time he returned to the house, he drew more and more away from its occupants. His conversations with them were repetitive and dull. The Aunts recounted a handful of incidents from his childhood each time as if they had stopped assimilating memories of him beyond those first few years. Discussions remained as they were a decade ago, failing to evolve and mature, ensconced in steadfast tradition and propriety. The dynamics between the Aunts appeared subtly shifted. The Spinster Aunt, once indispensable, now seemed vaguely unwelcome; the others belonged to another family and she didn’t quite fit in. The other, attractive, Aunt still looked pretty and full of enthusiasm, but Kaushik somehow sensed she’d rather be someplace else. His Uncle still took him for walks in the evenings and offered him Coke and sweets but never a cigarette. He spoke of local politics and land deals, an acknowledgement of Kaushik’s advancement in years, but these were topics that Kaushik was utterly uninterested in.

Another decade later, when Kaushik had to travel to Kolkata for work, he hinted to his mother that he might skip Baidyabati altogether and that she shouldn’t inform them of his visit. She was deeply hurt, justifiably, but demonstrated remarkable restraint in simply muttering an anguished ‘As you wish’ over the telephone. What Kaushik would never be able to explain to her and his Uncle and Aunts, was he did still care about them. That it is possible to care about, perhaps even love, people whom one does not like.

The Virtuous Lonely

2010-08-29T15:38:00.001+05:30

Kaushik shook his head again. “I am not sure, you’ll all get drunk and what will I do? Sit and watch?”

Lecture sessions for the 5^th semester had ended. There were 15 days to go before exams began and Kaushik, like the previous 4 occasions, planned to spend them at home in Ahmedabad. He’d always maintained that being home afforded him the time and peace to prepare better for his exams, away from friends who wanted to study together and those that wanted to be together but not study. He’d already booked seats on a bus to Ahmedabad. And now, his friends were asking him to stay on for another day.

The idea of Bhang had been floated a few days back by one of them. The rest had latched onto it immediately. “I know where to get it!” one of them had said. And thus it was agreed that on the day classes ended, they would spend the evening drinking bhang-infested milk.

Kaushik and six of his closest friends had decided to move out of the college hostel at the beginning of that year. It was like a custom there – when one reached the third year, one moved out, unable to restrict the revelry and debauchery to the confines of the hostel’s regulations. Since Kaushik and his friends didn’t partake in these activities, that he then considered vile, it was not actually necessary for them to move out. However, they had decided to do so anyway, hoping to get away from the noise and filth. They had found themselves a nice place fairly close to the college campus, a two-storeyed tenement with spacious rooms and presentable toilets. It had a small neglected compound around it where grass and mushrooms grew wildly. They often played cricket there with stringent restrictions on how fast a ball could be delivered and how hard and in what directions it could be hit.

“Come on Kaushik, it is just one extra day! You can always transfer your bus tickets to tomorrow. None of us has ever had Bhang before this; we don’t know what’ll happen! One sober guy in the group could be important!”

Kaushik had declared he would like to be excused from this particular adventure at the outset. They had tried convincing him for a while.

“It’s not getting drunk Kaushik, it is Bhang! Lord Shiva’s own drink!”

“It has nothing to do with Bhang and Lord Shiva, I just don’t enjoy getting inebriated!”

Since it was clear after a while that Kaushik wouldn’t budge, they asked him to just stay and be with them instead. This too, Kaushik was now trying to avoid.

Eventually though, he gave in.

“OK. I’ll stay. But mind you, don’t force me to have any of that stuff.”

For the first hour, nothing happened. They all drank full glasses of Bhang while Kaushik watched. Nothing happened. They looked quizzically at each other and wondered what was wrong.

“Is there more?”

“Yes. But shouldn’t we wait for a little longer? I’ve heard the effects take time to kick in.”

“One hour! Can’t take that long, can it?”

“Yeah probably not.”

They drank another glass. Nothing.

“Let’s go sit on the terrace for a while. The night air might help.”

The terrace was actually the roof of the house, bordered by a knee-high parapet, open where a rusty iron ladder formed the entrance from below. They sat in a circle in the center of the terrace, after one of them pointed out the perils of sitting on the parapet if the Bhang did indeed take effect. Kaushik alone sat there, away from the rest, humming to himself.

The alleys around the house were deserted. Tenement such as theirs lined these alleys and he could see lights in some of them. The others were completely dark and Kaushik surmised their inhabitants were already asleep. It was only 10 in the evening; Dhule slept early. The temple, of which they now had a direct view unlike from the college hostel, was empty too. Its bells chimed occasionally and feebly, swaying in the erratic wind. He heard laughter and turned to his friends.

Two of them sat face to face now, encircled by the rest. They were babbling.

“You go”, one of them said.

“No, you go first.”

“No, you go!”

“No! No! No! You first!”

Between each sentence they laughed in high pitched voices, the rest of them joining in. Kaushik was certain they’d forgotten by this time what it was that they had to go for.

“We’ve got to go downstairs guys,” Kaushik told them, “You don’t look too good.”

They protested but eventually gave in. By the time they climbed down, they couldn’t control their laughter anymore. Nobody spoke. They just looked at each other and broke into hysterical laughter.

Five minutes later, one of them vomited. He hadn’t had time to realize what was happening and vomited on himself and on the mattress on which he sat. The vomit, Kaushik noted, was strange and green like herbal paste, only thinner and smellier.

“Listen, you go to sleep. I’ll get you to your room,” Kaushik said, pulling the boy to his feet, “We’ll see about the mess later.”

Two hours on, everyone except Kaushik had vomited. The same green substance. The whole place was submerged in it. Some of them had attempted to get to the toilet but had failed halfway. For a long time, one of them, Sunil, had appeared in control. He had even helped Kaushik drag the others to bed. When the first two had vomited, Kaushik had suggested they should abandon the room for the night and clean up the mess in the morning. After three more had gone down in corridors and in other rooms where they’d tried to force themselves to sleep, Kaushik sighed. “We’ll have to clean some of this up tonight.” He told Sunil.

So the two got a broom and a bucket out and began cleaning. An hour later, the floors were wet and slippery but clean except at the edges where the walls met them. The wash basin, into which someone of them had emptied his stomach, was choked and there was nothing that could be done about it. The rooms still stank like hell but they had no fresheners to spray. They would just have to live with it.

“That’s all we can do, I guess.” Sunil said.

“Yes, when the others wake up in the morning, they’ll have to clear some of their own mess.”

That was when Sunil vomited too. He graciously sprinted to the basin to do so, only marginally compounding a problem they weren’t going to solve right then anyway. He collapsed onto his bed after that and didn’t budge until later afternoon the next day.

Kaushik went back to the terrace, unable to get used to the stench. The breeze was chillier now. He climbed down, found himself a blanket, and climbed back up again. He wondered what would have happened if he’d drunk that stuff too. He was aware it couldn’t have been much worse than what it already was but he was glad he hadn’t. Years later, long after that horrible smell remained only hazily in his memory, he tried recounting the episode to others and found it strange that he did not remember any conversation. They’d blathered on for half the night and he’d retained no memory of it. When he spoke to some of those present there that day, he found they remembered far more, inebriated, than he did, sober.

He spent the rest of night on the terrace, without thought, staring at nothing and sleeping fitfully, and only climbed down next day when the Sun was high and strong enough to prickle his skin. He found he was still the only one awake.

Prithvi

2010-08-29T09:58:00.002+05:30

“I’ve decided,” Kaushik announced between sips of Suleimaani Chaai, “to write a novel.” Ritankar nodded thoughtfully. “Oh man! Look at that babe entering!” exclaimed Ashish. They turned and looked.

Suleimaani Chaai was one of the many delights for which they frequented The Prithvi Café. It is black tea with very little sugar and is served, with a piece of sliced lemon and a few Pudina leaves floating inside, in short translucent glasses similar to those that can be found in every tea stall anywhere in India. The choice of glass is intentional – it is much appreciated for its earthiness by the liberals and intellectuals who haunt the Café in faded kurtas and jeans and a dirty half-torn bag slung on one shoulder. The Pudina leaves keep sticking to one’s lips when one sips from the glass and have to be peeled off with one’s fingers. The Chaai tastes magnificent.

Then there are the women. A lot of them come dressed in faded kurtas and jeans too, but they look enchanting since, unlike the men, they don’t carry three-day beards. On weekends, uber-rich businessmen bring their families to watch plays being performed in Prithvi Theatre, which is housed in the same premises. These families usually include a young daughter or two with perfect bodies, dressed in latest chic. Fifteen minutes before a performance, they all form a queue outside the entrance to the theatre since there are no seat numbers on tickets and therefore the best spots have to be fought for. The young boys at the café eye the queue with relish.

In the beginning, the theatre was the main attraction for Kaushik, Ritankar and Ashish. This was in their first months in Mumbai, when they were only starting to discover the pleasures of the city. Theatre performances were rare in the cities they’d been brought up and studied in and watching a play in the dark, intimate environs of Prithvi’s small amphitheatre - the proximity of the performers and their voices, pure and unfiltered by electronics - exhilarated them. After the performances, they’d spend time at the café gushing over what they’d witnessed., Soon, they exhausted Prithvi’s regular catalogue - a rather limited one, and found they would now have to wait for the occasional new production to arrive. They continued spending time at the café anyway, in love with the stone tables and benches, the yellow lights of bulbs, with enormous colourfully embroidered plastic shades over them, hanging from an iron frame, and occasional glimpses of stars and the moon through the branches of the coconut tree that loomed above.

In the last days before Kaushik quit his first job, he started coming to Prithvi in the afternoons on weekdays, slinking out of office for a few hours. In daylight, the place looked different -vulnerable in its now visible layers of old, fragrant dust and dried leaves on the floor and tables, more inviting. Most tables remained empty and the ones taken, were by theatre groups planning and rehearsing their stories and characters.

“Yes, you must.” Ritankar said.

“I must what?” asked Kaushik.

“Write that novel.”

“Oh. I’d forgotten where we were amidst all that distraction.”

“You can tell us the basic plot or something?” continued Ritankar.

“Oh I don’t know. I’ll just write the kind of stuff that I’ve written in the past – those mood pieces, you know. And I’ll see if they can be loosely bunched together into some sort of a theme…nothing concrete, really.”

“Hmm”

“And maybe I’ll call it something vague like ‘Closing the Barn Door’ or something, so it sounds symbolic and important.”

“I was just reading the other day,” Ashish butted in, “Berlusconi seems to be at it again.”

In Lucknow, as their final year neared its end and they became increasingly convinced that a successful 30 year career was not up their alley, Kaushik, Ashish and Raakesh came up with the idea of writing a novel together. “Each one writes on paragraph and then lets the next guy carry it from there. Nobody will have any clue where the thing will end, should be an interesting experiment.” Ashish had said. Kaushik and Raakesh had agreed. It fell upon Kaushik to start and he did so, choosing to write an opening paragraph so open that it hardly mattered what the next one would be. The next one was never written.

A year later, when Ritankar and Kaushik had just bought a handheld camera to take to Europe, Ashish suggested they make a short film. “It’ll be in first person, the protagonist and cinematographer will be the same.” The story was of a guy exiting an apartment and then walking for a while, taking a bus or a train – (“might be difficult, we’ll need permissions for those”) – and somewhere during all this, realizing he’s left something behind. So he’ll hurry back to that apartment again and we’ll find he’s actually committed a murder and has returned to remove some evidence he’d overlooked earlier. It had sounded like a pretty interesting idea, at least something to shoot and practice with. They’d worked on details with great interest for the rest of the day at the end of which they had a dozen ideas and nothing on paper. They’d decided to develop on the idea individually through the week and meet again next weekend. That was the end of that.

Since then, Kaushik had figured he was better off thinking and writing on his own and that he didn’t much care for what Ashish thought of his ideas or he of Ashish’s.

“Aha! What has Berlusconi done now?” said Kaushik, waving to the waiter to get them more Chaai and readying himself for an interesting conversation.

Strands

2010-08-24T17:48:00.011+05:30

“It’s good,” Ashish said in his whispery adolescent voice, “but I think there’s a little bit of unnecessary metaphor mongering in certain places”

“Really? Like where?” asked Ritankar.

“Oh, you know, there are sections where you can see it could’ve been written in a more straightforward manner, but it isn’t.”

Ritankar looked at Kaushik, caught and held his gaze, noticing his lips begin to curl slightly. Kaushik let his eyes twinkle – he had found about a year ago that he could will them to, while he debated in his head whether or not he should pursue the subject further. Eventually, he decided against it and looked away instead. Ritankar, who always looked to Ashish and Kaushik to provide requisite humour at the appropriate moments, since witticisms and rejoinders did not come as readily to him as the other two - a problem further aggravated by the slight stammer he carried, shrugged and lit another cigarette.

Ashish made comments such as this fairly often, their vagueness reeking of puerility and desperate wannabeism (a term Raakesh and Kaushik used as a generalization for all those they did not enjoy the company of; verb: to wannabe, adjective: wannabeesque). Most times, however, it turned out he had sound logic to back himself, although not reasoned out completely and, therefore, he found it difficult to explain them with clarity. When they were only getting to know each other, Ritankar and Kaushik were put off by it. In time, however, they came to accept it, even appreciate it, for it allowed them to think and figure out stuff on their own.

On this occasion, they were discussing ‘The Road’ and, unlike other times, they thought Ashish was speaking shit.

“The bottle’s empty. I’ll get the next one.” Kaushik said, rising from the couch and walking to the refrigerator.

It was past midnight and Kaushik’s apartment had been and looked like it had been through a lot in the past few hours. Two enormous mattresses covered most of the main area; this is where they would doze off when they would be unable to keep their eyes open any longer. Packets of biscuit and assorted snacks lounged on the floor after they’d been pushed off the dining table by newer entrants. The kitchen sink was choked with dirty plates and bits of uneaten food which they hadn’t bothered to clear before shoving the plates in. In the other room, the aged loudspeakers sang The National’s latest album. The yellow light of the bulb, diffused by the smoked glass over it, fell softly over the scene and invested in it a romance that morning would take away.

Kaushik wrestled with the wine bottle for a few moments before handing it to Ashish.

“I can’t do this. You go.”

“Feel like watching a film?” Ashish asked with clenched teeth, as he wrenched at the cork; only half of it came off, torn cleanly from the rest which still sat prettily inside the bottle’s neck.

“Damn! This is some shit wine, this!”

“What do we do about it now?” Ritankar said.

“It happened to me once,” Kaushik said, “and I pushed that little piece into the bottle. It was fine after that, although the piece kept floating up and choking the bottle so the wine flowed out like whiskey. And it tasted a little more of wood than intended, perhaps.”

“Might come in handy in the future, this information,” Ashish commented, “when we have wine that tastes of wood in some restaurant and they tell us it is because they allowed it to breathe in special oak barrels or some shit like that, we can get all worked up and ask if they dropped the cork inside.”

Ritankar started to laugh in his hiccupy little way, his palms journeying to cover his mouth. Kaushik grinned and pointed towards both, “Bloody Amateurs!” he said in his best British accent.

“So, what about the film? We watching one?” Ashish said.

Ritankar shrugged. He shrugged a lot. Kaushik pondered for a second or two before answering in the negative. “Let’s just talk. If we start watching a movie, we’ll fall asleep,” he said.

“OK.”

They sipped their wines pensively.

“You know, I watched this movie recently, I forget the name…” Kaushik began. “…was made by that chap Moodysson – the one who made that film we watched the other day, Tilsammans…”

“Fucking Amal?” Ritankar prompted.

“No, not that. I saw that one ages ago.”

“You saw Lilya 4ever?” Ritankar said, his eyes widening.

“Ah, yes. Lilya 4ever. Wonderful movie.”

“That’s an awesome film dude! I saw it when I was in Chennai! I think I cried when it ended”, Ritankar said.

Kaushik glanced at Ashish and found him raise an eyebrow.

“Well, I don’t think I did anything as dramatic as that,” Kushal said, “but yes, it is a brilliant film.”

The Nationals ran out at this point and were replaced by The Twilight Sad. Kaushik had discovered them during the week – a Scottish band that played a queer concoction of folk and rock and sounded, almost willfully, Scottish unlike, say, Arab Strap.

Aand so you make it yerr own, they sang

But this wherre yerr arrms can’t go…

And a little later,

So wherre arre yerr maannerrs…

"It's an awesome accent, this!" Ashish said.

Kaushik chuckled. "Yeah, but at least you can pick up what's being said. With the Irish..."

"That reminds me," said Ritankar, "I finally managed to watch The Wind That Shakes The Barley."

"Ah. Isn't it a magnificent film!"

"Yes, it is brilliant."

Now that they were on the subject, Kaushik recounted the episode of the Irishman in Ventimiglia again. Ritankar nodded and Ashish listened with polite interest. It was an unsaid pact between the three. They had all, at some point, gone back to narrating the same stories from their short times in Europe over and over, and the others had smiled and exclaimed as if it were the first time, following it up with a repeat of one of their own stories.

Ashish told them about the time he was on a train from Venice to some place in Southern Italy and had to share the cabin with a young couple, newly married, travelling with the man’s parents. They graciously allowed him to sit although they could’ve refused for they had made reservations and Ashish had not. They also introduced themselves and showed great interest when Ashish told them he was from India. Their English was horrendous. The conversation remained warm and monosyllabic, driven forward more by nods and smiles than actual words. When it was time to sleep, the girl snuggled close against her man and gestured to Ashish to lie down in the space she spared. And so Ashish spent the night there, cramped but happy that his back frequently brushed against hers and that he had another story to carry home.

And then Ritankar started with the story of the gregarious woman, keeper of a makeshift general store inside a caravan, outside the station of Milazzo.

“Her husband looked like a real Mafiosi, man!” Kaushik said, when Ritankar finished, “Pony tail, wide forehead, sleeveless black tees and tattoos all over his bare arms.”

“He probably was one” Ashish said.

“Yeah, probably.”

And they talked of the Cosa Nostra and the ‘Ndrangheta and The Godfather.

“Bonasera, Bonasera,” wheezed Kaushik as he scratched his chin with the back of his hand and then gestured with them expansively, “What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully”

Brando’s dialogue was thus reproduced faithfully and without context. But so were any number of them on most Saturday nights. They continued on, discussing the extraordinary sense of drama the Italians possessed, as if they wished their lives could resemble their operas.

“All I need is a small cottage somewhere on the Italian coast, east or west doesn’t matter.” Ashish said, “And I am willing to spend the rest of my life there, idling.”

“I wouldn’t mind Spain either, if it comes to that, although I’ve never been there.” Kaushik said.

By 4 AM, they had begun to doze in fits and starts, trying to keep the conversation going, but finding it increasingly difficult. The Twilight Sad had finished too; the world was unnaturally quiet.

They fell asleep, promising each other that they’d wake up early and go to Café Ideal, fully aware that they wouldn’t.

Dreams

2010-08-24T10:32:00.009+05:30

Kaushik woke with a start, his eyes immediately wide open, although as yet unseeing. He was aware he had been dreaming. He’d noticed over the years that he always felt unnaturally alert when he woke from a disturbing dream, as if he had consciously recognized its nature and had willfully wrenched himself out of it.

He found he lay facing the window. Its glass panels were shut and he heard muted rain. The incandescent yellows of the streetlights across the train tracks floated spectrally against the darkness. Everything was eerily still. Kaushik checked his watch; it read 2AM. He sighed and turned over to face the other side. Suresh was away for a week and he had the apartment to himself.

He had only vague memories of what he’d dreamt other than that it had to do with ghosts and the dead. He seemed to recollect an enormous dark castle, recognizable, for he had dreamt of it a few times during the last decade and was aware it appeared very similar to the one he’d imagined when he’d read ‘The Three Investigators and the Secret of the Terror Castle’ as a thirteen year old. He found it strange that his dreams should choose this one, created from imagination, rather than the numerous ones he’d seen in horror films.

He cursed himself, out loud, for bringing up the subject of horror films at this time. Instantly and inevitably, images from those queued up in his brain. He remembered how, as a kid, whenever he woke from a bad dream, he clutched his mother's arm and felt magically safe. "What will you do when I die?" His mother had once quipped, "You should cut my dead arms and keep it with you to put you to sleep." He had sudden visions of lying on an enormous bed covered by a glowing white sheet clutching a solitary arm. The grotesqueness of the vision unnerved him further and he frantically searched for more pleasing memories of limbs, finally arriving, gratefully, at the bewitching image of Eva Green as Bertolucci's magnificent version of Venus de Milo in The Dreamers.

He stole a quick glance at the door and found it slightly ajar, the diffused red of the mosquito repellant right next to it. He imagined what he’d do if an apparition or two were to walk in through there. He fancied himself sitting up straight, his back supported by the wall behind him, calmly light a cigarette, of which there were none in the house, and say “Right, so you’re here to kill me? Mind if I smoke?”

He was wide awake by this time and perspiring lightly from these visions. He sat up, drank some water from the bottle placed on the windowsill, opened the window and stared outside. Apart from the line of yellow lights, he now spotted a few stray whites, lit windows, against the night sky. There was virtually no sound, most notably, that of local trains plying their trade. The last one would’ve passed more than an hour ago. There were no cars on the road. It was as if the city had decided to pack up and leave and they’d forgotten to tell him. The rain had stopped; the rhythmic pitter patter replaced by the occasional solitary drop slipping off slanted roofs and exploding sweetly down below.

He hadn’t put on his glasses or switched on the light in the hope that he would soon by overcome by sleep again, this time deeper and more pleasant. Now, having stayed up for a half hour looking out the window, he realized it was unlikely to happen. So, he gave his eyes their aid and the room, its presence. He walked around the apartment for a while, unable to decide what to do. He rummaged inside the refrigerator and found pieces of cheese, leftovers from the weekend’s wining and revelry. He chewed on those for a while, practicing shadow cricket shots with his hands, setting a particularly tall target for himself to reach in very little time and then reaching it with extravagant strokes, muttering excited commentary as he did so.

The novel he was reading lay on the table – Chabon’s ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’. He was halfway through it when he’d had to put it down that evening for dinner. He picked it up now and started to read from it, slow and unsure for a page or two whether he actually wanted to get into it at 3 in the morning, before the disarming beat of Chabon’s words found their way through his defense.

He read till he finished the novel, exhilarated and jealous, for he wondered if he’d ever be able to produce prose like this. It was near 5AM and the nearby mosque’s loudspeakers were halfway through the day’s first prayer. He lay down in bed again, anxious to salvage whatever he could of his sleep from the next two hours. It wouldn’t be his best day in office, he knew.

Café Harbour View

2010-08-22T13:19:00.001+05:30

The Gateway of India stands near the southern tip of Mumbai and looks out westward to the Arabian Sea. The sea also flanks the Gateway’s sides – narrow channels of water brushing against stones and a makeshift pier. From the pier, steamers and cruises ply towards the South up to Goa, passing through tiny, sleepy beach towns that offer Mumbai’s populace quiet weekend getaway options. One of these is the town of Mandva, barely inhabited, which owes its disproportionate popularity in pop culture to the iconic Agneepath – one of Amitabh Bachchan’s most beloved films. Kaushik, Ashish and Ritankar had once taken a steamer back to Mumbai from Mandva. Throughout the journey, they had reeled off dialogues from the film at the slightest pretext. They had decided that they would return some day, dressed in all-whites like Bachchan had done, including the blazer, shoes and the rims of their glasses.

Even from up close, the Gateway of India appears strangely unimpressive, almost feeble. The unquestionable grandeur of the Taj Mahal Hotel behind it accentuates the Gateway’s lack of stature. From steamers approaching Mumbai, the Taj Mahal hotel can be spotted from miles out; the Gateway not until much later, when it is only a few hundred meters away.

Nevertheless, thousands of tourists flock to the Gateway each day, year after year. The spacious square, in the centre of which the Gateway stands, teems with people throughout the day, even when the Sun is at its angriest. A dozen photographers walk around, carrying decade old cameras and a colour printer inside a bag on their shoulders, nudging every tourist group, especially those from foreign lands, to pose for pictures.

A narrow street leads away from the Gateway and runs by the sea, separated by a wide parapet. Two minutes into its journey, the street leaves behind the noise and commotion and chooses to pass by old bungalows and three storey apartments instead. Most of the structures, simple and elegant, are from before Independence and the European design and décor is evident. Wide verandahs look straight out to sea; old men and women, a lot of them Parsis, spend their days there, swinging gently in their armchairs.

It is on this street that one stumbles upon the Strand Hotel. From the outside, the hotel appears somewhat dilapidated, an impression that is reinforced once one walks inside. Over the entrance, on a stained white translucent sheet, behind which tasteless tube lights flicker, the name is written in large red fonts, the ends of the ‘S’ curved around twice for style. Right next to this signboard, another smaller wooden plate has the words ‘Café Harbour View’ on it.

A cramped elevator that lurches violently before it moves, much like Mumbai’s local trains, takes one to the terrace where the café is.

Once at the terrace, the scene alters considerably. The tables, about a dozen of them, are widely spaced. A cool breeze blows in from the sea, which is visible in breathtaking panorama. Dozens of boats, private yachts, commercial vessels and steamers lie scattered in the harbor, simmering in the afternoon sun. Towards evening, when the sky darkens, twinkling lights from ships anchored far out at sea become visible; their presence betrayed in the setting sun after they’d remained undetected in daylight.

There is a ‘No Smoking’ sign pasted on one of the walls but nobody heeds it. If requested, the waiters bring cigarette packs from a shop downstairs. Ashtrays are not offered; cigarette stubs litter the floor. The presence of ashtrays, they explain, is considered evidence when the occasional friendly Police raid occurs, whereas cigarette stubs and ashes are not.

The service is embarrassingly poor. It takes ages for food to arrive. Sometimes, it doesn’t arrive at all. If one looks up and searches for a waiter, there are none to be found. After waiting a few minutes for one to appear, it is wiser to walk into the kitchen oneself, where the waiters huddle together, chatting. On seeing a customer appearing thus, they are not flustered in the least, and calmly note the order being placed.

Gratifyingly, the beer is rarely delayed. And since nobody goes to Harbour View for a quick bite, everybody waits patiently to be served.

Kaushik was told of Café Harbour View by a colleague in office, who he rarely otherwise listened to. But the colleague insisted that Kaushik check it out and one day, when he was in the general area, Kaushik decided to. He went there in the late afternoon, towards the beginning of the summer months. They placed an enormous umbrella, stuck at the top of an iron stand, over his table. Once in its shade, the wind from the sea took effect, and it became most pleasant. They also planted a table fan near him which blew full into his face. It made him gasp for air and lighting a cigarette impossible. He asked them to remove it and ordered beer. He spent close to four hours there, that day.

The next weekend, Ritankar and Ashish were introduced to the place.

Around that time, Kaushik also learnt of Couchsurfing – the online network of travelers that allowed its members to approach other members in cities they were travelling to and spend a few days with them. It was just after he and Ritankar were back from Europe and Kaushik cursed himself for not discovering the community earlier. He registered on it, as did, Ritankar and Ashish, although those two never actually used it. By the end of one year, he’d met more than a dozen travelers from around the world. Initially, it was only men, young and old, that sent him meeting requests. Ashish and Kaushik quipped regularly how even this ploy of theirs wasn’t working; they had earlier joked how this was perhaps the only way they were going to have women visiting their apartment, although none of them was sure what good it would do to them. Ritankar rarely partook in such bouts of crassness for he was reticent in these matters. A few months later, however, once a few men had passed through and Kaushik’s credibility was sufficiently established, the women started to appear, although they always came with a boyfriend in tow. There was one from New Zealand about whom they gushed for weeks afterwards.

Kaushik suggested these people places to visit in Mumbai and the country and showed them around the city when he had time. He was exhilarated with the whole thing. He met people from countries he was unlikely to ever travel to and learnt of those lands. He told them of India, although he got bored with repetition after a while. Gradually, he started to avoid showing them around the city, sick and tired of visiting the same landmarks, and let Suresh handle that part of the business.

Many times, he took them to Harbour View in the evenings and after a long day’s walking around, they relaxed and chatted. Some of Kaushik’s fondest memories of these people were formed there.

Surprises

2010-08-17T21:15:00.004+05:30

The shrill, curt sound of the doorbell half woke Kaushik. Instinctively, he brought his left wrist close to his face so it touched the nose and tried to read the time. He always slept with his watch still wrapped around the wrist. It looked like 4 AM, but he couldn’t be sure without his glasses. He sensed it was still dark outside. Making no attempt to move, he allowed his woozy consciousness time to determine whether the sound belonged in this world or in his dreams. 4 AM wasn’t what one called usual doorbell ringing hour. Besides, if indeed it had rung, it would ring again.

It did. Kaushik started to get up but heard footsteps and the door unlock. He sank back into the softness of his bed, glad that he had, in Suresh, a flatmate who slept light and that he could now go back to sleep without being unduly disturbed.

He was out of luck. Soon, he felt someone shaking him by the shoulder. He heard Suresh’s voice:

“Hey man, wake up!”

“What’s the matter?” Kaushik mumbled, followed by an irritated click of the tongue.

“Wake up man! Your Mom and Dad are here!”

“What?”

“Yes, your Mom and Dad are here. Get up man!”

Kaushik got up wearily and dragged himself to the drawing room, his mind still largely vacant and unable to register what was happening. They were there alright, his Mom and Dad, instead of 500 kilometers away in Ahmedabad, where Kaushik expected them to be. The door was still open; a small suitcase lay across it. Outside, a man, shabby and unknown, stood peering in uncertainly, brushing his hair with both hands.

Kaushik’s Mom and Dad smiled warmly, thrilled to see their son, even though somewhat disheveled. Kaushik’s face contorted - eyelids flapping agitatedly over barely open eyes, forehead creased to help the eyes focus, cheeks stretched upwards to accommodate the extra skin the forehead demanded, lips gradually widening in an effort to resemble a smile and the cheeks stretching further as a result. It gave him the appearance of an indiscriminately overfed Oriental.

“Who’s that guy?” Kaushik asked.

“Oh, he’s Rajesh, the driver. Your Dad didn’t want to drive on the highway at night.”

“Why’s he standing there, then?”

“He’s a little sleepy, you know. We told him to come up with us. If you have some spare bedding, he needn’t sleep in the car.”

“Yes, we have it.” Kaushik said. He turned to Rajesh, the driver, and asked him to come inside.

Suresh, all this while, unsure what the appropriate thing for him to do was, stood in a corner shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He ached to go back to bed again; there were precious few hours left until he’d have to get up and ready for work.

“Suresh, you can go back to sleep if you want to.” Kaushik told him, half embarrassed. He knew the feeling; when Suresh’s parents had once visited them for a few days, Kaushik had hung around for a day before hastily packing a few things and moving to Ashish’s place for the interim.

“No, I think we should make two beds here. The driver and I can sleep here. You and your parents can rest inside. That way, I won’t disturb you when I wake up to go to office later.”

“Yes, we could do that. Let’s get the mattresses out then.”

The ritual of surprises had gone on for years between Kaushik and his parents. He no longer recalled when it had started. But he remembered dozens of them, over the years – on birthdays, his parents’ anniversary, new years, without reason even. On his mother’s birthday, Kaushik and his Dad would order cake and buy gifts in secret. They’d sneak those into the house when she wasn’t there and hide it in places where she’d be unlikely to stumble upon them. In subsequent years, since she now specifically searched for the packages, they kept it with a neighbor. At midnight, after pretending to go to bed much earlier, Kaushik and his Dad would lay the cake on the table and wake his mother up and they would have a small celebration. When midnight became too expected, they moved it to 3 AM and then later, until one on occasion, they didn’t wish her until the following evening, by which time she was on the verge of tears, convinced that her husband and son had forgotten.

The same custom was replicated on Kaushik’s birthday and his Dad’s, by the other two members of the family.

When Kaushik left home to study in Dhule, it appeared the ritual would slowly fade away from their lives. Instead, it gained in strength. Every once in a while, Kaushik would decide to bunk college for a week and board a bus to Ahmedabad, without informing his parents. He would reach Ahmedabad early in the morning, bleary eyed but excited, beaming with anticipation even before he’d knocked on the door. Inevitably, it was his mother, who opened the door, for it was still too early for his father to have woken up. She would squeal with delight when she saw him, kiss him on both cheeks and then rush to wake his father, shouting “He’s here! He’s here!”. His father’s reaction would be a little less hysterical. They would embrace and his Dad would comment that Kaushik should be using more deodorant.

Sitting inside, they could hear the snores of either Suresh or the driver from the other room. In Kaushik’s experiences, Suresh wasn’t much of a snorer and he, therefore, surmised it was the driver.

It was Wednesday. Kaushik’s Dad oversaw business in one of the hundreds of small manufacturing units run by enterprising Gujaratis in Ahmedabad. The unit was located in an industrial area and planned weekly power cuts shifted throughout the year. All the factories scheduled their weekly offs in accordance. At this time of the year, it was on Wednesdays.

“Yesterday evening, I came back home and we were thinking what we should do on my day off,” his Dad explained, “And your mother said we could go for a long drive early in the morning and return by late afternoon, and then maybe have dinner at a restaurant in the evening.”

His Mom butted in, “And then your Dad said how about starting for Mumbai yesterday evening itself, spending half a day with you and then returning to Ahmedabad.”

“Oh. So you are here for only half a day?”

“Yes, we’ll leave after lunch. Just thought it would be fun coming here like this.”

Kaushik laughed. He was, at that point, towards the latter half of his six month break from work. He hadn’t told his parents he’d quit for a long time, not even, when he’d travelled to Europe. It was on his next visit to Ahmedabad after he’d come back that he had eventually broken them the news. They had taken it better than Kaushik had expected. Nevertheless, as the days went by, they grew more anxious. Kaushik’s mother called him several times during the day on one pretext or the other, her heart aching that her son was spending entire days alone and unoccupied, although he insisted he was having a good time and there was nothing to be so concerned about.

This surprise visit, Kaushik sensed, was their anxiousness brimming over.

Kaushik’s Dad, now halfway through his fifties, was a dark, pot bellied man who had aged better than his peers. He still retained a head full of silken, largely black, hair and the lines on his face were yet to dig deep. A thick black moustache hid his upper lip almost completely. He must have been quite unremarkable in appearance as a young man, although the only evidence Kaushik had of this was in the grainy, black and white photographs he was shown. But at this age, while his friends struggled with baldness, rheumatic knees and weakening eyesight, he was fit and intact.

Kaushik’s Mother, on the other hand, must have been an attractive woman in her youth. She was still very presentable for her age, although she had put on a bit of weight and her joints creaked with arthritis. After marriage, she had to move to Ahmedabad; Kaushik’s Dad had migrated there in search of work half a decade earlier, leaving behind him the disintegrating West Bengal of the 1970s. Now, close to three decades later, she still spoke Hindi and Gujarati with a Bengali accent. She had never worked professionally, happy to make a home and raise her son, instead. Her world view was simplistic but she was capable of the occasional inspired observation, perhaps without being aware herself of just how inspired they were. She had once pointed out, about a year ago, how all of Kaushik’s friends had always been transient.

“You seek to befriend people who you think know more than you do. That is good. But you grow tired of them once you feel your knowledge and understanding has surpassed theirs. And then, you just move on”, she had said.

Kaushik was amazed by how accurate the observation was. even though it was put in so plaintive a manner. He wondered how she could be aware of this and yet look forward to and talk about his future marriage and life afterwards without the least bit of apprehension.

Although, he had continued the unannounced visits home through the years, Kaushik’s parents had never visited him before this. Not while he was in Dhule for four years, nor while he was in Lucknow for two. They had, of course, paid him the occasional visit but they had always informed him first. He had taken this as a sign of his parents’ acknowledgement of his having reached an age where he would begin to have a life beyond the one they knew of. That the number of secrets he kept from them could only increase in the future. Kaushik was immensely grateful to his parents for this; it had saved him the sticky situation of having to actually explain it to them. He had debated if he should stop his own surprise visits to them; acknowledge that they too had the right to a private life, but every time he did go, they appeared so utterly overjoyed, that he decided to carry on with them.

And now this. He wondered what to make of it. Was it that he had been mistaken all these years in presuming what he had and that the real reasons were merely logistical? Or was it that their perception of all the secrets he now kept from them, the life he now lived had gradually become so disturbing that they had to come see for themselves? They knew he enjoyed the odd bit of alcohol once in a while; he had told them himself. Since then, they had always quizzed him on how regular his drinking habits were. “How many times a month? More than once?” He always evaded a straight answer, aware that the true number, though sufficiently low to be a cause for even the mildest alarm was still too high for them. Perhaps they had decided to drop in like this to check? There was one empty bottle of beer on the kitchen platform, Kaushik found, when surveyed the apartment once his parents were settled comfortably into bed. The bottle was coated with dust. He decided there was no reason to remove it.

So then, why had they come? Hadn’t Kaushik himself thought a few moments before that it was because they were concerned he was lonely and despondent without work? Could it be that it was a combination of these reasons? Was he a little miffed that they had come? He wasn’t sure.

Possibly, in some corner of their sub consciousness, the odd misgiving had always lingered, without their having realized it. It may have played a part in their decision to come, but Kaushik knew that even if it did, it did so behind the scenes, moving surreptitiously between those other thoughts and emotions they could access. He knew they loved him too much to ever doubt him seriously.

As a kid, Kaushik had insisted upon sleeping by his mother’s side. He enjoyed the touch of her arms; warm from the wrist to the elbows, slightly colder above it. Through the night, he slept with one hand gently rubbing her arms. When he grew up a little, his parents suggested to him that he start sleeping on his own bed. He tried but could not. His mother would sit next to him until he fell asleep but he would wake up soon after she was gone. Kaushik would stare at the ceiling for a while, angry that his mother no longer loved him like before. Eventually, he would take his pillow and barge into his parents’ bedroom and tell them that there were cockroaches in the other room and he was afraid. Instead of sending him back and making him learn the hard way, his parents would, uncomplainingly, make space for him between then and he would lie there blissfully for the rest of the night.

Kaushik was into his teens before he finally rid himself of this habit. By the time he grew up enough to understand what this might have meant to his parents, how much it might have taken away from their own lives and needs, there was nothing he could do.

His parents smiled through this and other sacrifices and continued to love him. It did not even occur to them that they should hold it against Kaushik. Kaushik wondered if he’d do the same for his own kids, when they came around. He found it hard to believe that he would.

The morning passed by cheerfully. They had breakfast together, chatted about this and that. Towards noon, they went to a pricey restaurant for lunch; Kaushik was eager to demonstrate to them the secure state of his immediate finances. A couple of hours later, they were on their way back to Ahmedabad, no more or less worried about their son’s future. Kaushik returned home to make up for the morning’s lost sleep.

A Smarter Man

2010-08-13T19:43:00.004+05:30

Kaushik returned home around 8 in the evening. The journey back worked like clockwork. He and Ashish left office together at a quarter past six and walked to the railway station across the road. There they chatted for a few minutes until a train arrived and they exchanged curt goodbyes. They traveled in opposite directions. Kaushik changed trains a couple of stops later, walking to the end of one platform and crossing the tracks to another where the other train waited. An hour later, he was home. He’d been doing this for months now, the routine broken only when the odd bit of work kept him in office for longer.

The first thing he did when he reached home was switch on the laptop. It took a while for the machine to boot; age was catching up with it. While it did, he took a shower and changed into more comfortable wear. On most days, the woman who cooked food for them had already done so and left; she had a spare key. He checked what she’d prepared although he wouldn’t eat it until much later. His parents would almost certainly call before that and his mother would ask what he would have dinner. Sometimes, when the woman came in late, he asked her for a cup of tea.

He glanced through the list of friends online on his IM. Most of them were people Kaushik hardly ever talked to. He looked for the regulars - Rahul, a classmate from Lucknow, with whom he had the most outrageous conversations – they had developed a language all their own, which consisted of literal translations of Hindi sentences and phrases to English. Over time, it had evolved to a level where it almost sounded like code – if one didn’t have the key, one couldn’t even begin to decipher it. Sometimes, he also found Raakesh and they chatted about their latest efforts in reading or producing literature. Once in a while, he spotted a lady or two, of which there were very few on his list, and he debated whether he should attempt a conversation.

Kaushik’s first experiences in online chatting dated back to the early 2000s, while he was still in engineering college. Like most of his friends then, he had become a regular visitor to cyber cafés. There, he had chosen a ludicrous screen name for himself – a grandiose epithet prefixed to his name. He’d tried King and Royal and Greatest and Macho and found those were already registered. Eventually, he’d settled on Emperor. He thought it quite elegant. Every time he logged in, he had scrounged public chatrooms for females, sent messages to all of them and then waited with growing desperation for one to respond. Whenever one of them did, his face broke into a smile and he turned to his friends on adjacent machines and boasted about it. Those that were out of luck for the day then huddled around him and they all chatted to the girl together. Over time, they developed newer techniques of soliciting responses; the simple ‘Hi’ and ‘How are you’ having long since stopped working.

By the time he went to B School, those days were behind him and he was too embarrassed to share the ID with anyone. He later discovered he needn’t have been, for there were several others in the same boat. Ashish, it emerged, had managed to lay his hands on Greatest. Nevertheless, Kaushik created a fresh, more presentable account name so he could laugh at everyone else.

With or without epithets, Kaushik always preferred chatting over phone calls. The chat window redefined Time. A response could come or be sent five minutes later and still qualify as a response. A bunch of such responses strung together could become a legitimate conversation. He needn’t suffer the dismay of thinking of a suitable repartee too late. His friend Shrinivas, geeky and entertaining, had once told him there was a word for it – ‘esprit de l’escalier’. There could never be an esprit de l’escalier on a chat window. He could construct far more convoluted sentences than could ever be done face to face. He could quickly search for information and quotes and reproduce it as if from memory. It allowed him to be wittier. It allowed him to be many different persons at once. With Rahul he could make a mess of two languages, with Raakesh he could discuss the greatest works of literature, with the girls he could show off his command over language and humour, all at the same time. Chats made him feel cleverer than he actually was.

An hour of chatting later, he usually watched a film. Occasionally, if the film turned out to be bland and boring, he went back to the IM, while the film played itself out in the background. Today, it was a good one.

The Community Centre

2010-07-31T17:57:00.003+05:30

Like other Saturdays, as the shadows lengthened, a curious stillness gripped the campus. On other days, this was the time when the place appeared most alive - the health conscious ventured out in appropriate gear for their evening jog, excited voices and the sound of studs thudding against the earth rose from the football field, a steady flow of bikes whizzed in and out of campus and the canteen and the coffee shop benches remained full.

Come Saturday, it all appeared muted. A significant number were asleep in their rooms, in preparation for the long night ahead. Several others were engaged in assignments and project discussions in the library and meeting halls, the usual past midnight schedules for such activities brought forward. Those going out to the city had left much earlier, eager to return before the clock struck ten.

The Community Centre, a short white building, stands about 50 meters from the Students’ mess. It was intended to serve as a facility for mass addresses, cultural programs and lectures, as evidenced by the raised platform at one end. It is, however, rarely used as such. Instead, it has become the venue that hosts the ‘Insti Party’.

Around 10 PM, the place started to fill up, although it wouldn’t start overflowing until near midnight. Kaushik, as ever, was amongst the earliest. Most of his close friends, the ones he went to the party with, were non-alcoholics but spirited revelers. When the music started to blare and the whiskey started to flow, they too would prance around, like everyone else, with wild abandon. Kaushik found this utterly weird; he could never do that until he was well outside the confines of sobriety. The ladies always came in late, letting enough time pass for the place to fill up entirely, so they could get resounding receptions.

The alcohol was stocked in staggering quantities, vodka and whiskey, and it was free. It was distributed in transparent plastic glasses that made wonderful crunching sounds when they were crumpled after being drained off the liquid they held. The expenses eventually did get added on to their monthly food bills, but since they would be added whether or not they partook in the plunder, it hardly mattered.

The music was as an extraordinary mixture of Punjabi Hip-hop, Hindi film songs and heavy metal. Even Pink Floyd and The Doors made an appearance. Kaushik couldn’t ever fathom how one could use ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ or ‘This is the End’ on the dance floor, but when those songs played, as they inevitably did, he too shook a leg and sang at the top of his voice. The crowd favourites were Metallica and The Guns N Roses. Everyone seemed to remember their songs by rote. And whatever bits they did not, they filled with hysterical shrieking. Right next to the enormous speakers, a bunch of boys and girls, their legs spread apart, stood with their eyes closed, their waists and necks shaking violently, evidently to the music. By the time the night ended, they would be up on the platform screaming and singing and drowning out the actual songs.

At some point during all this, Kaushik managed to break away from the group of friends he’d arrived with. They were not the people he was looking for when his head swum. And so, he gradually extricated himself from the bunch, moving around the place in widening circles that eventually took him outside, away from the noise and the strobe lights. He sought out Raakesh, the lanky long haired fellow from Tamil Nadu, and they set off for a cup of coffee.

Raakesh spoke little Hindi. Before Lucknow, he had never ventured outside Tamil Nadu and had, therefore, never had to use it. In his time at Lucknow, he picked up a handful of popular Hindi slang and decided it was as far as he would like to get himself acquainted with the language. He harbored ambitions, well founded, of becoming an author one day but rarely managed to produce anything beyond a page or two. It is this shared goal and abject failure in achieving it that, in a way, brought together Kaushik and Raakesh. That, and the pleasure they derived out of deriding people in general.

“Just need to get the Booker off my chest man! Once that’s out of the way, I can start concentrating on writing without pressure”, they would quip.

“Yeah…after that the Nobel is only a matter of time, I guess.”

And so it went.

Their walk to the coffee shop inevitably turned into a walk around the entire campus. Coffee cup in hand, they would stagger on ahead, the cool breeze of the night wafting through their perspiring bodies. The thump from the woofers followed them for a time, beyond which, only the constant buzz of insects remained. The road, more deserted than ever, led away into the darkness, dissipated by the feeble glow of the yellow street lamps. During the winters, when a dense fog descended thickly over the campus, the lights appeared like hazy blurbs in the distance, as if one was looking at them through teardrops.

They talked of literature. They were both still in that phase where they had not yet ventured beyond the early 1900s – and so, they spoke of Dostoevsky and Faulkner and Woolfe and Kafka. When Kaushik would reflect on those conversations later, or whatever little he could remember of them, he found it strange how little they actually discussed. Their conversations simply sifted carelessly through a maze of novels, each naming one and then waiting to name another. They were conversations that were two parallel monologues spoken to a wall.

“Just finished with Notes from Underground.”

“You liked it?”

“Yes, it was awesome, wasn’t it?”

“Oh yes. I’ve nearly finished The Way of All Flesh, by the way”

“Hmm. Will borrow it from you after you’re done.”

“Sure. I’ll complete The Castle after this. Been lying around half-finished for a while now. Might as well get it over with.”

“Yes”

It was a pattern that Kaushik would later find replicated in his conversations on films with Ritankar and Ashish. He wondered if this was because they could not or because they were simply too wrapped up in their own thoughts for other opinions to matter.

An hour later, they returned to the Community Centre. Most of the people had exited by now; they sat on the road and on the concrete near the entrance, smoking and chatting. From a distance, Kaushik, much sobered but with eyes still glazed, peered hard but couldn’t identify individuals. He suspected they couldn’t recognize him either. They waved to each other and smiled broadly anyway. Inside, bland white lights had been turned on. A few lay scattered about the floor, still grooving softly to what remained, in their heads, of the music that had long since stopped playing.

A year from then, the novelty of the ‘Insti Parties’ would have worn off considerably. People would make only brief appearances. Some would skip it altogether. A few would even have project discussions during those hours. Only a faithful few would trudge to the Community Centre, Saturday after Saturday. Kaushik and Raakesh would be among those.

Dhule

2010-07-31T12:59:00.002+05:30

Every year, summer descended upon Dhule with great vigour, scorching the green off the grass and the paint off the walls. In the afternoons, the deepest recesses were submerged in the heat and sun and the town dwelled entirely within closed doors. The streets looked like they belonged to a Sergio Leone film.

Of the three hostel buildings, only one was inhabited. The other two, decrepit and slowly falling apart, were used by tramps and the homeless to spend their nights in. During the day, most students were found huddled inside rooms where air coolers had been installed. There were extra charges for installing these coolers that not many were willing to pay. Nobody attended lectures. The classrooms, ten minutes from the hostel, were too far to journey out to, in the heat. A handful of boys did venture out each day, determined to attend a lecture or two, but reached only as far as the canteen that lay midway.

Between noon and 4 PM, there was no electricity. Inside the small, cramped rooms, darkened by wet sheets hung over the windows, a dozen bodies, Kaushik’s among them, clothed in the bare minimum, lay perspiring in the residual coolness of the silent air cooler. The odour of unwashed clothes and bodies hung permanently in the air, along with the stink of stale water from the cooler. They slept in fits and starts, dripping wet where their bodies touched the bed, the floor or other bodies.

There was a video parlour nearby that played films at 3 PM. The place had an air conditioner and a generator to run it with. Seats were limited and so, around that time, a long procession started from the hostel and scampered there. The films, their names inconsequential, were referred to as ‘English’. They contained little or no dialogue and their plots, like the cast’s attire, were flimsy or non-existent. One time, when Kaushik had been taken ill and his mother had come to look after him, his roommate had returned from one of these shows in high spirits.

“You look excited” Kaushik had said, his eyes twinkling, “must have been a good film…which one was it?”

“Terminator” his roommate had replied testily.

“Ah, must have been some great action, then.”

“Yes, as you expect of Robots.”

In the evenings, after the sun went down, a cool breeze blew. Kaushik, with his group of friends, strolled to the town centre, letting the wind dry their soaked shirts. They had snacks and tea at a popular hangout, sitting in the open on shaky plastic chairs placed on the street side. Traffic was thin and composed mainly of bicycles and mopeds. On the other side of the street, a large playground stretched out, occupied by several sets of young boys playing cricket. Half a dozen matches progressed simultaneously; identifying one’s own teammates and opposition in the milieu required the keenest eye.

They took a detour and walked by the girls’ hostel, miles from their own, on their way back. They were not allowed inside. The gates of the hostel closed at 7:30 in the evening; the girls had to be back inside by then. Those with romantic interests were picked up by the objects of their interests at 6. They then enjoyed each others’ companies for an hour, visiting the temple nearby and doing the odd bit of shopping. By 7, they were back at the gate and spent the next half hour chatting, fidgeting and waiting for 7:30 to happen, when the girls would slip back inside. The boys would then walk to the video parlour in time for the 8 PM show or to a bar on the outskirts of the city. The bar, by the highway, remained open through the night. Every morning, several could be seen returning from there, in drunken stupors, having spent the night in the open field behind the bar, chatting, laughing and vomiting.

Kaushik did not drink then. Indeed he would not start drinking regularly till he went to Lucknow. Nobody in his group of friends in engineering college drank either. They were the good boys of the college, tame, vapid and dependable. The professors liked them. Kaushik’s parents were thrilled that he hadn’t turned into one of those unruly, uncultured young fellows they had seen in television serials. For their fellow students, he and his friends dwelled on the peripheries of existence.

After dinner, they climbed to the roof of the water tank on their hostel terrace. One side of the tanks sloped downward gently. Lying on their backs there, they could see the sky above and the town below. There they lay, on the hard concrete floor, for hours. There were no high rises in Dhule and the sky stretched out uninterrupted in all directions. Down below, the streets were dark and all they could see was the row of dirty white tube-lights hanging in the air from invisible iron posts. In the distance, the bells of the temple chimed sweetly and out of rhythm. A solitary grocery shop remained upon until midnight. In fact, it remained open even afterwards, although the shutters were closed. A steady stream of students, hungry or in need of fresh cigarettes, slunk furtively to the shop through the night, tapping lightly on the shutters. The keepers, an old couple, attended to everyone, never complaining, sacrificing a good night’s sleep for a few rupees. The moon and the stars shone brighter than Kaushik had ever seen in Ahmedabad, the city where he grew up.

On Thursdays, they all stayed awake at night. A movie theatre in Dhule, opened its first show at six in the morning on Friday, and they hurried there to watch the week’s release before anyone else in the country did.

Coffee & Cigarettes

2010-07-05T16:26:00.005+05:30

Kaushik woke up first, as he usually did. He opened his eyes but didn’t yet look for his glasses, which he kept under the bed when he slept. He could hear the sound of rain outside. The stale aftertaste of wine and cigarettes still lingered in his mouth. He turned towards the window. The view outside seemed grayer than usual. On clear days, although his vision still couldn’t create definite shapes unaided, he could differentiate between the white & grey of concrete structures from the green hazes of trees. Today, everything was covered in an unwavering shade of gray. He closed his eyes and remained motionless for a while. With the rain as heavy as this, Café Ideal was out of question and he didn’t need to hurry the others up.

On the bed next to his, Suresh slept without sound. The crows at the window were quieter than usual. He thought about walking up to the window with his arms flailing to scare them away but decided not to. Finally, he put on his glasses.

It poured so hard Kaushik could see the wind blowing through it, ruffling the rain like it would, a curtain. The sky was uniformly dark, perhaps darker at the edges. It would be a long rainy day.

In the other room, Ashish, Ritankar and Kartik slept soundly on the mattresses on the floor. They wouldn’t wake up till much later. Empty packets of wafers lay on the floor. The wine bottles and glasses were neatly placed on the kitchen platform. Kaushik had made sure they were outside the reaches of the unconscious limbs of his friends before he went to sleep the previous night. The wineglasses, in particular, were dear to him. He’d bought them for fairly cheap at a departmental store that did not specialize in glassware. He had browsed through several other stores unsuccessfully before he found these. They were round and huge with cavernous mouths and, as he had learnt on his visit to the vineyards in Nasik, meant only for red wine. Buying separate sets for red, white and sparkling wines was, however, out of question and these were used, irrespective of the drink, including even whiskey and beer on occasion.

He wrapped the leftover food and the wafer packets in newspapers and deposited them in the trash can outside. On the sofa, he found two packets of cigarettes. One contained two sticks and the other, ashes of the rest. He lit one and sat watching the rain. Sometime later, he checked mail on his laptop. Nothing of consequence had arrived. He hadn’t expected anything either since he’d checked it only the night before. For a quarter of an hour, he played Bridge online, while his computer downloaded pirated films he’d queued. Then, he went downstairs to breakfast at the untidy little restaurant just outside the apartment premises.

He called home from there while he sipped coffee, after the morning snack was tucked in. His Mom and Dad were thrilled to hear his voice this early in the morning since to them this was probably a sign of no alcohol the previous night. Kaushik chuckled to himself after he disconnected the call. His conversations with his parents were mostly repetitive – the same answers to the same questions. They often complained to each other about it, although both sides were aware that there wasn’t much that could be done to alter the situation. The rain persisted. In a couple of hours, the others would be up and they’d spend the day indulging in interesting and inconsequential conversation. They would discuss a film and then another and then an actor or a director, draw comparisons. With Kartik around, they would bitch about legends of the Indian film industry – people that they respected greatly but loved bitching about anyway. Eventually, even these conversations ended up being the same. Kaushik didn’t tire of these, however. Not yet, anyway.

Picasso's Studio

2010-07-04T14:17:00.002+05:30

They came back to their hotel room at around 8 in the evening. From the lovely little park across the hotel floated in the carefree sounds of children at play and old men’s banter while they played chess and carom on the park benches. Lovers walked casually and without purpose holding each other close, oblivious of distractions.

It was Kaushik and Ritankar’s last evening in Paris. They were tired and exhilarated. They had made up their minds to not use cabs and had, therefore, walked an incredible number of kilometers. In the mornings, their limbs woke with the sweet ache and soreness of the day before. It made the warmth of the morning baths more soothing than any other they could remember.

Their room was damp and unventilated, an attic of sorts converted into a room with two beds and a wooden shelf. A single bulb lit the place enough for them to find their way around. The smell of cigarettes hung thickly in the air. They had found the place by pure chance. They had stopped at a café to ask where they could find one and had been told that there was one available there itself. The man at the counter had then taken them through a door at the back which opened onto a disheveled courtyard strewn with discarded bricks and cement slabs. In one corner, an iron ladder made its way up to a door. This door led into the room. The room contained no attached toilet; there was one in the courtyard, inexplicably Indian style.

They weren’t spoilt for choice or finances and had decided to take it, forty Euros a night. The next day, they had paid the forty Euros and asked if they could keep the place for the next two nights. The man at the café had agreed.

“We’re staying for three nights. No discounts?”

The man had shrugged expansively.

“It is cheap”, he said.

“Room is small”, they countered.

They had exchanged smiles and left it at that.

“So, what do we do now…finish the beer and sleep?” Kaushik asked.

“Yes, we could do that. Or, we could go out a little later and have some food”

“Yes, we should eat something, I guess.”

“Anyway, let’s finish the beer first.”

They opened their cans and lit a cigarette. Kaushik walked to the small mirror, built over a decaying wash basin, and appraised his hair. He wasn’t pleased with what he saw and spent the next few minutes trying to sort it out with his fingers. Both had forgotten to bring their combs for the trip. They had decided against buying one when they were told at a store that it would cost them eighty cents.

“Fifty rupees for a comb!” Ritankar had exclaimed. “Fuck it.”

Ritankar leafed through the enormous Lonely Planet while Kaushik stared at the mirror.

“It seems Picasso’s studio is not very far from here”, he said.

They were in Montmartre. They couldn’t believe their luck when they realized that they were, when they got off the metro from the Airport, at Barbès – Rochechouart, near where they had booked a hostel room. The hostel had, expectedly, deemed them no-shows by that time, they being six hours late after missing their connecting flight to Paris from Istanbul. And therefore, the room in the attic.

“It is shown on the map?” Kushal asked.

“Yes, right here.”

“If we’d done that walking tour Ashish told us about, we’d have seen it.”

“Yes. No matter, we did well enough without that.”

They sipped their beers thoughtfully.

“We could still go there, if you want” Kushal said.

“Yes, it is an option”

Suddenly, their eyes lit up.

“Yes, let’s do it! Let’s find Picasso’s studio ourselves!”

“Check the map! What’s the nearest metro station? We’ll get there and then walk!”

“Its Blanche, just three stops from Barbès.”

Forty minutes later, they were at the underground station of Blanche.

They climbed up a flight of stairs that from the bottom looked like it opened onto a regular sidewalk. It did not. It opened almost directly in the middle of a boulevard onto a small space for those on foot to wait. Asphalt flanked them on both sides. And on the right, towering above them was the astonishing spectacle of the Moulin Rouge. So unexpected and resplendent was the sight that they stood speechless for a good minute or two.

“Oh my God!” Ritankar finally managed to break the silence.

“I don’t care if we don’t find Picasso’s studio now. This is enough as far as I am concerned!”

The giant wheel swung gracefully around tracing a path of vivid reds and yellows. The famous name shone a bright red on the semi circular façade. Rows of small windows on the upper storey hid modestly behind the dizzying display of light, submerged in the deep red hues. Hundreds of people stood in line at the entrance, waiting for their turn to enter. A faint whiff of music drifted out from inside. They thought of Nicole Kidman.

To one side, a large circular platform stood elevated about two feet from the ground. The top was covered with strong meshed rods. It was possibly an air vent for the metro lines underneath. On it, young women strode up one by one, goaded by their friends and boyfriends, to do their own versions of Marilyn Monroe. A bunch of policemen stood to one side, laughing and occasionally whistling with the crowd gathered around whenever a skirt rose more than intended.

Shiny Happy People.

Next to the Moulin Rouge, a dark street travelled into the innards of Montmartre, climbing eventually to the magnificent Sacre Coeur, as all streets in Montmartre did. The map led them through this street in search of Picasso’s studio. They had spent nearly an hour outside Moulin Rouge, gazing at everything they could. They’d debated whether they should go inside; the seventy five Euro entry charge had been instrumental in their deciding not to. Walking for a few minutes through the street, the chatter and noise slowly receded, replaced by a silence unusual of Montmartre.

They turned a corner and spotted a café. Three or four young men, friends, were engaged in conversation outside. They leaned with their backs against the wall and occasionally squatted and stretched their arms – unmistakable signs of pleasant drunkenness.

“Bonjour” Ritankar greeted them.

“Bonjour”

“We are looking for Picasso’s house or studio here. Do you know where it is?”

“Picasso?”

“Oui”

They didn’t know the place. Kaushik showed them the map and the spot they’d encircled. The men studied the map intently and consulted with each other. Their English was inevitably poor and they offered directions with their hands, repeating “This way” throughout. They didn’t look very confident.

They asked several others on the way, climbing towards the summit all the time. The streets remained vibrant. Brightly lit cafes appeared at every corner, animated and beautiful people inside and outside them. More walked them by on the street. They spoke in loud voices and broke into dance, if they heard a song they liked, while passing by a café – the spirit of Bohemia alive and kicking. Nobody, however, knew where Picasso had lived. Montmartre, apparently, had forgotten one of its most famous residents.

On their way back, well after midnight, they lost their way and walked around in circles for an hour before a policeman offered them directions. The joy and abandon of the streets and alleys did not spill out on to the main boulevards. They were empty and lonely. Neon signs shone above shuttered windows. Near their hotel, a group of black guys played football on the street. When they spotted the two figures walking past, they stopped their game and greeted them. Kaushik and Ritankar smiled and nodded their heads in acknowledgement. In their room, they finished the rest of the beer, warm by now, and smoked a couple of cigarettes. Towards dawn, they drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, they were woken early by the alarms they’d set. They checked out of the hotel before nine and walked through Montmartre one last time. It had drizzled during the night and there was a slight chill in the air. Puddles of water glistened between the cobblestones as did stray beer bottles and piece of broken glass. Old men sat reading newspapers outside shops, not yet open. Perhaps they knew where Picasso’s studio was.

The Radical

2010-07-04T14:16:00.001+05:30

Kaushik knocked, entered his boss’s cabin and made his way to the plush sofa in the corner.

“You wanted to talk to me Saurabh?”

Saurabh, a genial middle aged man who was beginning to discover the discomforts of a rapidly growing paunch and graying facial hair, turned towards him.

“Yes. Just give me a minute here.”

Kaushik waited. He thought he knew what this was going to be about and was prepared for it. He had been working with the guy for nearly a year. In all that time, he had hardly been any good use to his boss or the organization in general. Both knew this. In the beginning, they had tried hard to meet each others’ expectation of work and working styles. In a few months, they were doing their best to not get in each others’ way, comfortable in their independent existences.

While that hadn’t affected Saurabh too badly for he had other people to work with, Kaushik had grown increasingly disenchanted.

“Yes, so”, Saurabh said, turning to Kaushik again. Kaushik looked up from the magazine he was reading.

“The film seems to be doing alright.”

“Yes, looks like. Congratulations for managing its promotion so well. The film itself was good too, I guess”

“Yes”

Saurabh nodded his head, unsure how to continue.

“I, sort of, had something to discuss with you Kaushik”

“Before that, I have something to tell you”

“Alright, go on”

“I am quitting”

Saurabh stared at him intently.

“You are? That’s a, well, surprise”

Kaushik shrugged.

“You have found another job then?”

“No. I will look for one now”

“Oh”

That evening, he went to the pictures with Ritankar and Ashish. He told them afterwards during dinner. They did not comment. Just nodded and concentrated on the food. He had of course hinted at this for some time now. That didn’t mean they had believed him but now that he had done it, they couldn’t very well act shocked.

“You should’ve held out for a bit dude. There aren’t many jobs around at the moment…”

“We’ll see. The worst that can happen is I spend the next few months without work. Eventually, something has to come up. Obviously, I am not going to starve to death.”

“Of course”

“So anyway, now that I have some free time, I was wondering if a trip to Europe makes sense”

“A trip to Europe? Now? What about money?”

“I checked my accounts. I have enough for a two-three week trip and to get by for a few months after that”

“Hmm”

“Well then, you two care to join me?”

Ashish would not. Ritankar would. A month of planning and paperwork later, they would be on their way.

Later that night, he lay in bed and reflected on the day. The next day in office would be marvelous. He imagined people cowering inside their cabins when he walked in. He would amble around like he owned the place and nobody could touch him. Their powers over him wouldn’t mean a thing anymore. He also thought about how he should set about getting out of the potential mess that he had maneuvered himself into. He had often discussed with Ritankar and Ashish how one day they’d have to do something like this if they were indeed serious about their aspirations of making films and authoring novels. He had taken the first step now.

The next day, he talked to Kartik. Kartik had worked as a scriptwriter in his office. The two had become good friends, instantly picking each other out for their common interests in film and its making. He was a heavyset dark man with curly hair and a loud voice. None of his scripts had ever been made into films by the company. Exasperated, he too had quit recently.

“Damn man! You quit too! Who’s going to sponsor all the booze now?”

“We still have Ritankar.”

“Anyway, let’s discuss this over drinks at Pop Tates tonight?”

“Sure, let’s.”

Pop Tates, in Andheri - a wealthy Mumbai suburb, is a popular hangout during the last days of a month for boys and girls with rich dads, when their allowances begin to run out. Off late though, it is increasingly flocked by members of the earning upper middle class in search of high life. The bar, noisy and claustrophobic, is tucked into one corner of a busy street. The noise of automobiles from the street mingles with those from the loudspeakers. In the midst of all of this, people sit at tables and have intimate conversations at the top of their voices. The draught beer is excellent.

“So, you want to assist a director now?”

“Yes, if I can. I understand you know a few. You should get me in touch with them”

Kartik nodded.

“I can do that. But really, assisting a director? Fuck man! What will we do if IIM grads start getting into all this shit? “

“If I am to make films, do I have an option?”

“You know, assisting a director’s not a permanent job. When a project ends, you got to search for another. And even on a project, you get barely 20K a month…that must be peanuts for you. Can’t even imagine how much you get paid…used to, in that shithole”

“We’ll see.”

A month later, the trip to Europe happened. When he returned, Kartik introduced him to a few important men in the film industry, acquaintances of his. Kaushik spoke to them with interest but found himself unable to discuss opportunities to work with them. All the while, he continued to consume dozens of films and literature a week, unoccupied as he was throughout the day. He wrote several scripts, even novels, in his head and made a few entries in his blog.

By the time he found another job, one that paid as much as the one before, half a year had gone. In all this time, he realized how comfortable he was with a life like this. If the money didn’t run out, he could live like this forever.

In search of Stories

2010-06-23T19:14:00.004+05:30

He first noticed them about a week after he’d started on his new job. They entered the compartment and sat right across him. The boy offered the girl the seat next to the window and sat next to her, thus placing himself between the girl and whoever occupied the third place in their line. It was a gesture Kaushik had observed being played out by innumerable males with female companions on innumerable occasions.

He couldn’t hear what they spoke, the music in his ears drowned out all external sounds. He enjoyed watching people like this, their conversations replaced by the far more attractive sounds of professional singers and musicians. Everyone looked more interesting this way – personalities built solely on expressions. The ride was a short, ten minute one, at the end of which, they alighted at the same station where Kaushik did. He realized that they worked in the same organization. Since then, he spotted them almost every day.

The boy always wore simple, plain ironed shirts and trousers, even on the last day of the week when everyone else reveled in the depth of their wardrobes. He was thin, tallish and wore glasses. His hair was neatly parted near the centre and never out of place, even when a vigorous wind blew, years of oil and very little shampoo weighing it down. His features betrayed no distinct trait from which his origins could be gleaned; Kaushik guessed he was from Rajasthan, although he had no reason for doing so.

The girl, on the other hand, was unmistakably Punjabi. She was tall and had healthy fat on her arms. Her hair, collected together in a tight knot, reached below her waists. She combed them back firmly thus widening her forehead, on which a few stray loosened strands fluttered. She had large black eyes and permanently chapped lips. A girl one wouldn't turn one's head for but a girl one could come to love and find attractive with time.

Kaushik enjoyed watching them together. The girl talked a great deal and had a wonderful open smile. The boy nodded to show he was following what she said, his hands clasped around the backpack which rested on his lap. He looked fond of her.

In time, Kaushik came to know where they boarded the train at. The boy travelled two stations more than the girl. He would walk into the compartment and search for two empty seats. He sat on one and placed his bag on the other to ‘reserve’ it. Once in a while, another passenger in need of a seat would complain and he’d be resolutely refused. Two stations later, the girl would take her place next to him. On days that two seats could not be found, the girl would not appear, choosing to travel in a ‘Women only’ compartment instead. Kaushik inferred they used cell phones to coordinate.

Then, one day, he found the girl sitting alone in the compartment. Could something be wrong? He watched her intently but could detect nothing amiss in her expressions. Perhaps the boy was unwell. Or he was away on leave somewhere. Or they had a lovers’ tiff (at this point, Kaushik realized that he didn’t even know if they were lovers). Or maybe, their affair, hitherto clandestine, had suddenly been discovered by one of the families. For three days thereafter, he saw the girl alone. Kaushik felt strangely agitated. On the fourth day, he saw the boy again. He chose a seat between two occupied ones although there were two adjacent empty seats available. At the station, Kaushik saw the girl getting down from the Ladies’ compartment.

On the fifth day, they were together again, the girl laughing and the boy nodding. All, Kaushik sensed, was well again.

Sometimes, he saw them on the train in the evenings too. He imagined following each of them to their homes. What were their families like? He imagined a simple tenement house in a peaceful neighbourhood where the girl lived with her parents and a brother. It was unlikely that she did indeed live in a tenement – such houses were almost non-existent in Mumbai, most of them replaced by multi-apartment constructions. Nevertheless, in his imagination, that is how her home turned out to be, always.

The boy’s home, on the other hand, always turned out to be a railway quarter, where he lived on the second floor and therefore, made it impossible for Kaushik to peek inside.

In all the times travelling together, he never spoke to them. He never even heard what they sounded like. Obviously, he never actually followed them.

Drawing Parallels

2010-06-23T17:49:00.002+05:30

Kaushik woke just after six to the cawing of crows sitting on his bedroom window ledge. Off late, his body seemed to have timed itself to wake up at this time. There was still a long time before he needed to get ready for office.

Outside, sunlight was still frail. The sky was clear but ashen. It would take a brighter sun for it to become blue again. It had just turned June. One of these days, he would wake to a sky, grayed by monsoon clouds. A train honked (not many whistle these days) as it passed by on the tracks next to his building. From where he sat, he could see into the compartments. A few passengers sat scattered between empty seats, mostly milk and newspaper men, he surmised. In a couple of hours, there would be hardly any space inside these same compartments and he’d be sitting in one of them.

The newspaper lay obediently outside the apartment door. He picked it up and deposited it on the living room table, after having cursorily glanced through the headlines. There wasn’t much in it that interested him. The novel he was reading lay on the dining platform where he’d left it the previous night. The dining platform, a thick glass sheet held in place by two clamps on the wall and a thick steel column under it for support on the outer side, stood between the living room and the kitchen. The absence of a wall between the two created a pleasant illusion of more space than there really was. By the French windows in the living room were placed two large cushioned chairs, part of a sofa set. On one of these, Kaushik lowered himself and began to read. He liked the place. It wasn’t his of course – apartments in the centre of Mumbai were for Billionaires to own. He and Suresh had rented it together.

Suresh only woke up when Kaushik was almost ready to leave, more than an hour later.

“Yes Suresh, feeling better now?” Kaushik asked, grinning widely.

The previous evening, bored with lying around for several hours and unable to find alternatives, the two had decided that whiskey was the most appropriate response to the problem. Ashish and Ritankar had left in the late afternoon, having spent the day watching an Iranian film and then discussing it, after they’d come back from Café Ideal. So, anyway, a bottle of whiskey had been ordered, finished in due course and another ordered. This too was well on the way to being emptied, when Suresh’s stomach eventually gave out and poured out its contents through the wrong end.

The conversation had been interesting too.

“You know, my sister is coming to India for her summer break next month. I’ve asked her to get me a cell phone.” Suresh’s sister had enrolled for a Doctorate program in the United States, the previous year.

“Hmm. You’ve asked for a specific model?”

“No”

“Then? How will she know which one to get?”

“I told her to get any phone that slides or flips open”

“Ah. So that’s what you like, eh? A bit of style in front of the women?”

“No man. That’s not my style. That’s not my idea of coolness.”

“What is your idea of coolness then?”

“You know man”, Suresh shrugged, “Just like that”

Kaushik found the one hour train ride to office quite pleasant. He travelled, first class, on a low traffic route which meant he could almost always find a place to sit, often by the window. The IPod sang faithfully into his ears – eclectic music from around the world. Each week, he spent time on the internet searching for new artists and downloaded music from the most promising ones onto the IPod. Over a period of time, he had built up an enviable collection of alternative independent music this way. He was astonished to find how much of it came from Sweden. He also carried a novel with him – usually something light and breezy - there were too many distractions on a train for serious literature. At some point during the journey, he would close his eyes and doze off.

His office was a large elaborate building covered with tinted glass on the outside. It was lonely where it stood; there weren’t any structures of comparable dimensions around it. It was located a little outside Mumbai where the intense development of the city fell away into a more serene, intimate environment. They called the town New Mumbai. Kaushik worked on the topmost floor, the ninth. From it, he could see clusters of small barren hills on one side. They would be covered in green once the rains arrived. A month hence, on a clear day after a spell of monsoon, he would see the clean blue of the sky dotted with white fluffy clouds behind these hills, lush green then, and think of Tuscany. In another direction, he was also afforded a view of the creek which separated Mumbai from its poorer cousin. He liked to think of it as Mumbai’s Bosphorus. He’d never seen the real one and could only visualize it as much as his imagination and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul permitted.

Kaushik hated his colleagues. There was not one in the entire lot that he could ever strike up an enjoyable conversation with. He’d tried it initially and failed miserably. Since then, he’d limited himself to short functional verbal exchanges with them.

“Hi”

“How was the weekend?”

“Was good. Enjoyed”

“Anything interesting?”

“Not really, just relaxing.”

It didn’t matter which side said what.

Ashish worked in the same office. After a couple of hours of taking care of the most pressing issues at hand, Kaushik descended to the fourth floor, where Ashish sat. The two of them spent some time at the cafeteria, undisturbed, for nobody else seemed to use the place during office hours. They exchanged notes from the remainder of their Sundays, cribbed about work and discussed ways of getting out. As always, the discussion eventually veered to Europe and its many charms; they recounted incidents from their brief visits to the continent.

Kaushik left office at six in the evening, leaving behind him another uneventful day. The Ipod sang and he read. Back home, he ate dinner with Suresh while watching TV. Later, he watched a film – a wonderful French film called ‘La gloire de mon père’ – (My Father’s Glory, translated in English), while Suresh continued watching TV. By midnight, he slept.

Two Lives

2010-06-13T18:16:00.004+05:30

Kaushik, less heavy than he would be two years hence but still sufficiently stocked up for post-apocalyptic survival, went to Business School in the summer of 2006, two years after he’d finished his Bachelors in Engineering. The two colleges were of vastly differing statures, so much so, that he was perhaps the only human being in history to have studied in both. The Business School – IIM Lucknow, was considered amongst the best in the country, having mass produced future wearers of double-breasted suits for over two decades. The Engineering College, on the other hand, was a rather more modest affair, its greatest achievement being that it was the best of three colleges in the sleepy town of Dhule, located near the middle of the country and of nowhere, miles from any city of significance. In years to come, this would become the object of much friendly banter from his more illustrious Business School mates.

But, as he never missed an opportunity to point out to them, they were there and so was he. When his cab, led and followed by a continuous stream of other cabs, entered through the gates of IIM Lucknow, he felt he had left behind him an entire history of mediocrity and nobodyness. Understandably, it was the happiest Kaushik could remember himself being in a very long time.

There was a touch of apprehension too. He didn’t know if he actually fit in. In the months that led up to the start of the session, filled with self doubt and a need to lab test himself before plunging in, he had spent hours on Social Networking Sites, searching for would-be classmates and seniors, urgently pursuing conversations, whenever he found someone. The exercise proved inconclusive; most of the chit-chatting was amicable, even pleasant once in a while, but essentially cold. Like him, everyone else was testing the waters too – curious but wary, clinging to the safety of commonplace subjects. Kaushik slyly mentioned the existence of his blog. It was read and politely appreciated. A few years later, Kaushik, his tastes evolved manifold, re-read the material and was embarrassed to find how utterly juvenile it was.

And so, he carried his apprehension with him to Lucknow. The first couple of days, he wandered around the campus with his parents, as did most others. It was a large, lush place - narrow alleys leading up to short, pretty red brick buildings, widely spaced and surrounded by slender trees towering over dense undergrowth. A single tar road circled around the entire campus, bordered by a footpath dotted with cozy wooden benches. One could spend hours sitting on these benches, undisturbed and isolated, apart from the odd motorcycle whizzing past or a couple of students on a rejuvenating walk. The sense of peace and desertion was complete; it was difficult to believe there were nearly a thousand people inhabiting the place.

He was allotted a room in one of the newly constructed hostels. It would be a ten minute walk from there to the academic block, he surmised. Over the course of the two years he spent there, he realized it was more like a frenzied three minute sprint to reach the classroom in time. His room was small, clean and unimaginative, as hostel rooms are. There were scribbles on the walls and the doors, ranging from rants of megalomania to declarations of love, mostly copied from 70s and 80s rock songs. There was a small balcony too, although its effect was greatly reduced since his room was at ground level and all he could see outside was wild foliage. A solitary window opened onto this balcony from the room. It was covered with fine meshed wire to keep out the insects and mosquitoes, of which there were millions. Two shelves, hollows in the wall, a chair & desk, and a wooden bed. It was a five star suite compared to what he’d lived in, in the other college.

He met a few students, fellow hostellers; the conversations from the online chat rooms reinitiated face to face. A three day official induction began – the batch, three hundred of them crowded into a large hall, were told how special they were to be sitting there. They were told what they would go through in the two ensuing years and where that would lead. Intense rigour and competition were hinted at. Their dreams, already plump, were bloated further. They cheered.

The parents trickled out gradually. The session began. They learnt of the idiosyncrasies of their professors along with the obligatory legends and anecdotes. The pretty girls were spotted; courtships begun. Life became regular. It was then, that friendships were finally formed. This was when Kaushik first met Ritankar, Ashish and Suresh although they wouldn’t become close friends until much later.

In one lecture, every student was asked to make presentations on various topics. Kaushik waited his turn nervously. When it came, he walked onto the platform and started to speak. Somewhere in between, he cracked a joke, even as his palms and underarms sweated. It came off well and the class applauded. That was when he finally decided that he did indeed belong.

In later years, Kaushik often reflected on how little he remembered of those first few days. There were hardly any actual incidents and images his mind could recreate, just a vague, muddled sense of the time and place. All his concrete memories were from much later, when the lines between his friendships and casual acquaintances were firmly drawn and he knew where he stood.

Ventimiglia

2010-06-06T10:33:00.004+05:30

The automatic doors swung open once the train glided into its rightful space by the platform. It was the last stop on its route. A handful of people alighted.

“So then, here’s Ventimiglia now” Kaushik said aloud, reading the informative black letters in large staid fonts on the tiled ceramic station wall.

It had been an eventful day. That morning, after three memorable days in Paris, the two had reached the Gare du Nord to take a train out to Nice, and found that certain sections of the French railway men had called a strike, including those at the ticket counters. This posed a somewhat complicated problem in that it wasn’t really that they had to buy tickets for they had EU Rail passes but that this would be the first time they’d be using the passes since flying into Paris from Mumbai at the beginning of the week. They had to have them stamped by somebody at the counter.

They had checked if by some happy coincidence, the ticket collectors too, were on strike. It had turned out they weren’t. There was talk that they would join in later in the day. That would be after the drivers did.

Next, they had approached the lady at the ‘Information Desk’ and explained to her their predicament. She was, they gathered, a helpful woman, a rare species at information kiosks in their experience, for a few minutes after she’d spoken in French to somebody on the phone, a middle aged man in an official looking blazer had appeared and asked to see their passes. He had asked them one or two inconsequential questions while glancing through the documents. Satisfied, he had signed them. They had offered their profuse Mercis to him, a word that along with Bonjour and Au Revoir, they had used with gay abandon in the past few days, for these were the only French ones they knew and could pronounce.

Later that day, having arrived at Nice, they had found raindrops smacking into the asbestos roofs of the station. A day at the beach in this weather was out of question, so they had enquired how they were to get to Genoa. It turned out they would have to change trains at the French-Italian borders – a small town called Ventimiglia.

And so, there they were now.

The next train to Genoa was an hour and a half later. They decided to spend that time exploring the town. It looked promising as any place on the Riviera would. Besides, their fascination for small towns and places ‘off the beaten path’ was intense, although they chose not to use that phrase - it sounded hopelessly clichéd.

At five in the evening, there was plenty of sunlight left. Three roads converged in front of the station in a T Junction. The one that ran straight and away from the station ended, within eyesight, at another T junction right next to the sea. They would later find out that the two other roads leading away from the station circled around the newer part of the city and met the straight road on the other side at the second junction. The old medieval town, hidden from view from the station, stands to the left, on a cluster of hills, separated from the new town by a small creek, over which a bridge is built.

The straight road was lined with pretty, white and rose-tinted three storey buildings – apartments on the upper floors, shops and cafés at the ground level. Warm sunshine broke into the street from the other end, melting the edges of the farthest buildings in a yellow haze. Open windows were bathed in the incandescence of the sun, the glass on the windowpanes turning white light to a magnificent orange. Closer to them, the town emerged from the light into shadows. Flower pots hung from the balconies – roses and geraniums, well looked after. By and by, they reached the other end of the street.

This was their first proper encounter with the Tyrrhenian Sea. They had caught glimpses of it, sometimes longish stretches in full view, from the train. They had noticed how much bluer it looked than any sea they had ever seen in India. Up close, the blue appeared deeper, if anything. Could an ocean look any better, any bluer? It could – in the Cinque Terre and on the Sicilian coasts, but they weren’t there yet. A wide beach of white sand stretched from the road, separated by a waist high parapet, and drowned into the waters at the other end. On the extreme left end of the beach, a stone-paved pier jutted out into the sea. On it, half a dozen wood benches faced the sea. They made their way to the pier.

From the end of the pier, they turned around and took in the town. They could see the edges of the railway station on one side, the rest hidden by the town. As they watched, a train, covered in colourful graffiti – the first Italian one they’d seen – entered the station. Farther away, green hills rose above the town. On them, they could see scattered buildings and the occasional bald patch of soil and rock.

“Bonjour” a voice said. They turned and found a lanky young man in a grey pullover, seated on one of the benches.

“Bonjour” they responded.

The man was Moroccan. As was his friend, about the same age, who joined them a few minutes later. They spoke a language which didn’t sound like anything Kaushik or Ritankar had heard before. Moroccans spoke French and Arabic, they’d heard. But this didn’t sound like either. The conversation was reduced to bare minimums.

“India? Sri Lanka?”

“India”

“Morocco”

“English?”

“No English, Francais?”

“No”

“Italiano?”

“No”

They grinned widely at each other. The Moroccans tried again.

“India...good”

More smiles. They remained quiet for a few minutes, glancing around, making eye contact once in a while and nodding their heads to explain that they liked the company.

Then the Moroccans began again.

“India…” this followed by a spot of arm waving and waist shaking, but no other words.

“Dance?”

They consulted with each other. Then, one of them drew rectangles in the air with his fingers while the other placed his hands close to his ears and opened and closed his fingers, accompanied by what sounded like ‘Dha Dha’

“Bomb?”

“No, no! India…”, and finally, “Bollywood”

“Ah yes, Bollywood! The Indian Film Industry” said Ritankar.

“Yes yes! Bollywood! Oscar!”

“Oscar?”

Kaushik had a brainwave.

“Slumdog Millionaire?” There was only one movie remotely associated with India and the Oscars that the two Moroccans could possibly know of.

“Yes! Yes! Slumdog!” they pointed at themselves and then at Ritankar and Kaushik.

“India Slumdog! Morocco Slumdog!”

Ritankar took immediate offence. Not because they had labeled India ‘Slumdog’ but because they didn’t have their facts right.

“No, no” he explained “Slumdog Millionaire is not an Indian film. It is a Hollywood film made by a British director and set in India. But honestly, we don’t like it so much…”

As Kaushik put it while recounting the incident, after they’d come back from the trip, between sips of beer with Ritankar and Ashish at Café Harbour View, “It was like throwing wasteful words into the universe with no hope of intelligent comprehension. A touch of Marconi in that.”

When they returned to the Ventimiglia train station, their train was already gone. The next one, they found was due in another hour. The enormous backpacks they carried weighed on their shoulders, heavier than ever. They trudged back, out of the station.

“Seems like a nice place, this. We could find a place to spend the night here.”

“Yes, we can. In the morning, we can catch an early train to Genoa”

“Yes, lets ask around for a hotel”

Ventimiglia had one hotel. They checked at the reception. A middle aged man with thinning hair sat reading a magazine, both legs stretched out on the counter.

“Prego” he said

“We were looking for a room…”

He thought for a while.

“Two single bed or matrimonial?” he asked with a twinkle in his eyes.

“Two single beds”

The man looked almost disappointed. An opportunity, a story to be told later, gone.

“Ok. 60 euros”

“Can we find something cheaper?”

“Only one hotel in Ventimiglia”

“Ok” 60 euros was a bit much.

“Indian?”

“Yes”

“You know, I read the Upanishads”

They stared at him, incredulous. He looked dead earnest.

“Oh…we haven’t ourselves”

“Well, what about room?”

“No, we’ll go to Genoa or La Spezia”

“Genoa La Spezia big cities. You find cheap rooms there.”

“Merci! No, Grazie!”

They returned to the station, as the twilight slowly bled away, well in time for the next train. At the platform, they met an Irish guy traveling to Rome for the Champions League Football final – Manchester United versus Barcelona. He didn’t have tickets to the game but was undeterred.

“Git sumethin ya? Yer go, yer find a way in!” he said, underlining, what they suspected, was his approach to most things in life.

They reached Genoa, without incident, around midnight.

Cafe Ideal

2010-05-26T17:10:00.004+05:30

They entered the café and found their preferred table unoccupied as usual.

The table sat next to the window which opened immediately onto the Marine Drive, or the Queen’s Necklace, as it is known, somewhat more dramatically. On the other side of the Drive, the Arabian Sea could be heard crashing perpetually into a bunch of artificial boulders, shaped like the Mercedes star – only much thicker – that stretches across the length of the QN. A little to the right, lay Chowpatty – one of only two piles of sand in Mumbai that are passed off as beaches. In the evenings, Chowpatty teems with townsfolk in search of fresh sea breeze and shabby makeshift fast food joints that sell spicy Indian and Chinese food of questionable hygiene. Jute mattresses are lain out on the sand in front of these joints to seat customers. Sand and dirt waft perilously close to the food whenever people pass by these mattresses, which is continuously.

At 8 in the morning, however, the place was entirely devoid of activity.

There were two occupied tables besides the one they slid into. One of them by a family – man, woman, teenage son, grandfather and grandmother – that had just gotten off the train from somewhere in southern India, as evidenced by the four suitcases and about half a dozen backpacks and handbags that encircled their table. At the other table sat two Parsi men, in their sixties, sipping coffee.

“So, what do we order today?” asked Ashish, poring over the menu card. Kaushik shrugged. So did Ritankar. Suresh snatched the card out of Ashish’s hands and began running his fingers down the list. It didn’t matter that barely six items comprised the ‘Breakfast & Snacks’ section in the menu, all of which they knew by rote.

“The Egg Sali, we obviously will order”

“Yes, and the scrambled eggs on toast, as well”

“Right, and lets see…french toasts?”

“Sure, and what else? Boiled eggs? Or do we go with an omelet?”

“Omelet would be nice, I think”

“OK, an omelet then. And four cups of tea, of course”

The waiter noted down the names, offered to him over a span of five minutes.

Café Ideal had been Kaushik’s discovery. He had found it completely by chance when, right in front of the café, he’d stopped to ask for directions to someplace. He had been offered the requisite directions, correctly, he later found out, but had decided to chuck that part of the plan and enter the café instead.

They were regular visitors to the café since then.

The café stands, shaped like an arrow head, on the corner made by the Marine Drive and a road that empties into it from the innards of Mumbai. A row of windows line both the outward facing sides. The windows reach up about 10 feet from the ground; they are covered with glass, clean and transparent near the top and frosted and embroidered at the bottom. The name ‘Café Ideal’ is written on a shiny yellow facade with red paint in English and repeated immediately under in Hindi. The Hindi font is much smaller, illegible from the other side of the Marine Drive and displayed with the sole purpose of avoiding political ire. The furniture inside is wooden, polished. The tables are rectangular; a white formica sheet sits at the top. The chairs have erect backs, meshed jute held together in place by a solid wooden border. They have no armrests. The walls above the windows are layered with colourful vinyl pictures of famous sights from around the world – the Eiffel Tower, the Gateway of India, The Statue of Liberty, The Taj Mahal. Sunlight floods in through the windows throughout the day, making artificial lights redundant. The drinks counter stands in the darkest corner. Beer and wine glasses hang upside down from stands drilled into the wall and cheerfully reflect an invisible yellow bulb somewhere above them; a large red-lit sign with Budweiser written on it hangs over the counter. Right next to this counter is the billing counter. On the wall above it is a poster of the Lord Balaji. It is perhaps the only concession to the café’s Indianness amidst all the quasi-European paraphernalia.

The four huddled around the yellow-orange jukebox, armed with three coins. Inside it, back covers of CDs and pieces of ruled paper with song names handwritten or typed, each sheet and each song meticulously numbered, were stuck neatly to plastic leafs that could be flapped over like pages by clicking a button at the base of the box. The choice of music was evidently not high on the list of priorities of whoever managed the contraption, for the music ranged from the utterly ludicrous to the mildly amusing. Nevertheless, three songs were all that were required, and given that the total collection ran into thousands, a palatable selection could always be arrived at. They chose, as they always did, a Hindi song they could ridicule, an English song they could recognize and a French one they did not understand but enjoyed listening to. The obsession with French music dated back to a year when, during the course of a film, they had heard a husky, utterly sensual female voice singing in French on the soundtrack. Further investigations had revealed that the voice belonged to one Carla Bruni, a fact that had added to their enthusiasm considerably.

Back at the table, breakfast had been served. Suresh had brought with him a two day old edition of The Economic Times, which he now proceeded to unfurl. It was India’s leading financial newspaper, at least as far as volumes went, and inescapable for anyone who worked in the financial sector, which Suresh did. The top headline read ‘After sex scandal, minister ejects prematurely’. To this, Suresh began to giggle and rapidly graduated to uncontrollable laughter. The other three looked at him, expectant, for they knew an immortal line would soon be delivered, as only Suresh could. They were not disappointed.

He looked up at them, suddenly aware that he was the object of their undivided attention, and said “What? I like penis jokes!”

They discussed the previous night’s film, which they had watched over multiple glasses of wine. It had been enjoyable in a way that Ritankar didn’t approve of particularly, for it had nothing to say; just a couple of hours of lighthearted whimsy. Ritankar’s knowledge of film was encyclopedic. Ashish and Kaushik maintained that he was the sort of chap who could outclass IMDB comfortably. He could reel of names of films, their entire cast and crew and, in turn, their filmographies, biographies even. So advanced was his state of being in this regard, that for him, conversations with lesser mortals had become increasingly limited. Indeed, the other three felt privileged to be able to at least hold his attention whilst they spoke.

Traffic on the Marine Drive, from where they sat in the café, looked sparse. It was only nine in the morning. A solitary white Maruti 800 with large ‘L’s taped over the windshield and elsewhere drove fitfully past their window. Inside it, a middle-aged lady sat clutching the steering wheel with all her might. Next to her sat a nondescript man with one hand on the handbrake between them, looking straight ahead. On the sides of the car, in huge red letters, was written

‘Good Luck Motor Driving School’

They burst into laughter again.

By and by, breakfast ended. Additional cups of tea were drunk. By 10, as the place started to fill up, they walked out into the warm summer day. The last leg of the ritual began - the smoking of a cigarette. None of them were regular smokers, but in their minds it completed the experience. Standing in the sun on an empty footpath, blowing puffs of smoke at the sky as the breeze flew in languorously from the sea.

Sunday had just begun.

The End of Summer

2010-05-23T16:38:00.003+05:30

He alights from the coach and finds that the connecting train has already arrived. It means he will not find a place next to the window. On most days, he is able to sit next to the window since he arrives before the train does.

It is not just the view and the wind that make the seats by the windows attractive; it also allows him to keep an eye on the traffic on the bridge that passes over the rail tracks near where he gets down. It’s a bridge that his cab travels through on the way home from the station. On days when the traffic on it lies thick and unmoving, he walks to save time.

Indeed, the seats next to the windows are taken. There are plenty others available, however, and he lowers himself into one. There is still time before the train is to depart. He unzips the front pouch of his worn backpack and takes his Ipod out. The gentle, idyllic sound of the Kings of Convenience permeates into his ears; it evokes visions of Scandinavian quietude that he finds relaxing after a day at work. He closes his eyes and waits for the train to move.

A minute or two after the train rolls out of the station, he sees the creek. The train glides over it, gathering speed, till the motor vehicles on the bridge next to the train’s start to fall behind. In the distance, waning sunlight and the warm moisture in the air make the hazy outlines of tall, lean buildings quiver. The sky is a resplendent pink. Overhead, trails of angry, dusty clouds lie haphazardly in the sky, as if they were passed through a shredder. They foretell gusty winds and heavy, scant rain drops. A light, cool breeze seems to be blowing; he cannot be sure for it could be an illusion borne out of the train's motion.

He knows the sky's pink colour is due to increased particulate matter in the atmosphere. He has read it somewhere. He wonders if this has anything to do with pollution. He suspects not. Such evenings must always have been there. Nevertheless, he finds the mankind’s response to such matters as pollution and global warming fascinating. Some say they will damage the planet irrevocably. Others don’t. It could all come to good or bad. Nobody knows for certain. And so, everything continues as it always did. It is as if the world as a whole were smoking cigarettes.

Through the window, he sees the cityscape in vivid sepia tones, as if it were a flashback in a film. The train has now crossed the creek and is on firm land again. Box shaped railway quarters with decaying walls form the backdrop for a continuous line of tin-roofed, temporary cottages on either side of the tracks, shallow gutters half covered by broken, discarded tiles in between. Groups of dirty looking kids, in soiled half-pants and undershirts, run around, playing cricket. Their mothers are inside, cooking their evening meals. Their fathers are out at work in far-off mills and will return, drunk, long after they've fallen asleep.

On another day, these sights and ruminations would depress him. Today, everything, bathed in the pink of the sky, appears magical. The city looks like it should when he sifts through its memories, many years later.

He decides, traffic or no traffic, he’ll walk home today.

Obeisance

2010-05-16T16:13:00.002+05:30

He sits waiting, patiently, for six-o- clock to happen, turning his prized Parker between the fingers of his left hand. His right palm cups the electronic mouse; the fingers clicking away, continuously refreshing his mailbox. There are ten minutes before he can leave.

He’s not expecting any emails at this time of the day. At least not very pressing ones. The constant refreshing is borne out of habit, formed over hundreds of meaningless hours that he has idled away. Around him, his colleagues bustle around, engrossed in their own methods of appearing busy and important.

With less than five minutes to go, a mail appears. He curses softly under his breath. Its from the HOD. The subject line informs him that it is a reply to the long chain of mails that he has helped lengthen through the day, wilfully frustrating attempts from another team to enlist his assistance. They want access to a document which he is in possession of. He is unwilling to give it, for no other reason than that they want it. The HOD’s mail is short and crisp, as most HOD mails are. It contains a name, two words and a comma. His name, then the comma, and the two words – please expedite.

He considers his options. He doesn’t have many. He can delay, just leave for the day and think about it when he returns the next day. Or he can reply to the mail and stand by his position, which he cannot do since the HOD may not take kindly to such behaviour. He considers discussing this face to face with the HOD, explain to him why the document need not be shared but decides against it, for it is too trivial a matter.

For a while, he fantasizes. He imagines himself typing out ‘I will not’ and other stronger variants in reply. He conjures up the consequent face-off in the HOD’s cabin, where the man screams at him in hysteric disbelief. At which point, he calmly lays his resignation on the table and laughs in his face, before walking out with his hands in his pockets and a whistle on his lips.

He finds the document, attaches it to the mail and sends it to the other team with a word or two by way of apology. He checks his watch and finds the long hand shifted two cuts beyond twelve. He curses again, a little louder this time, switches off the computer, picks up his backpack and races out.

Out on the road, he spots the train sliding into the station on the opposite side. He checks the oncoming traffic on both sides of the road, at highspeed for it is an expressway, times himself and sprints. He hears automobile brakes in the background but doesn’t turn to check. By the time he enters the station, the train’s begun to move again. He quickens his pace, elbowing out a couple of college boys who seem to have admitted defeat, reaches the platform just as the train starts to accelerate, races past half a dozen other people, grabs the iron pole in the middle of the compartment’s wide, open entrance with his right hand, jogs two more steps before jumping aboard.

Week End

2010-03-28T19:16:00.000+05:30

My flatmate in the next room alternates between football and cricket on TV. Through curtain-less unwashed French windows, the dipping Sun, blazes its way into the apartment and obliterates most of what appears on the television set and on my laptop. I see myself reflected on the screen whenever it grows dark in the movie, which is often. There are four more suns there, two each on the retinas and on each glass of my spectacles. I’ve shut the windows for the wind outside is strong and the ceiling fan swayed and squeaked too much and made nervous. One day I must die, but not by a ceiling fan landing on me, if I can help it. Or by being blown to smithereens by some crazy terrorist contraption or being run over on the road and most certainly not while I am sleeping. When I woke up this morning, I found the lower eyelid of the left eye swollen and sagged. An insect bite probably. A two day malady, I suspect, during which I must live with the facial asymmetry. There are no longer the four suns. The real one’s behind the air conditioner at the moment. The room’s a cooler, more elegantly lit place. Small and large buildings infest the scenery outside. From afar, they all look white with black rectangles where the windows are. Later in the evening, when the lights on the staircases are turned on, the consequent zigzags will be visible. Lower down, a green flag with a white crescent moon flutters casually. Below it, a maze of tin roofs and blue tarpaulin sheets stretch into the distance. Pretty soon, the mike will screech again and bestow the knowledge of Allah upon whoever cares or does not care to listen. One can hear it several times a day, starting 06:00 Hours. Started off being a major irritant, but these days, I find the noise curiously relaxing. It used to wake me up in the mornings earlier, but my sleep’s gotten used to it off late.

The speakers, along with a mosquito repellent and a cell phone charger, stand on top of the woofer, lying on the ground. One of them doesn’t work anymore. I realized that when I picked it up and put my ear to it. Must’ve been that way for months now. So much for a good ear for music. I don’t tell my current set of friends I’ve bought cassettes of Aashiqui and Saajan, amongst others, in my time. All of us have a good laugh over the music of the 90s these days, although I suspect, it wasn’t laughs they started off listening to those songs for, either. On my hard drive, I only carry independent music from Swedish and Norwegian bands. All the Hindi music is stored on another hard drive, safely hidden where not many can find it.

The day has trudged past while I stared at the laptop, played Spider Solitaire and thought of writing. Picked up one or two of previously abandoned stories and tried taking them further. After every two words, played Spider Solitaire, checked mail and took a piss. If there’s any inspiration waiting to burst upon me, it better be fast. Cute two page essays do not an author make. Twilight’s here. Sky’s pink above and pinker at the edges. Zigzags visible. No sound from the TV for some time now, flatmate’s asleep or perhaps wrestling with Kundera. If the first bit of printed material one reads, outside of course books, at the age of twenty six, is Kundera, then one is in trouble.

Well, anyway, the day’s almost over and the cricket match I want to watch will start soon. Tomorrow another week will come and go, quicker than the last one for this one’s only 5 days. At the end of which, I’ll again do more staring and little writing. Maybe, something will come out of that. Till then, this will do.

Common Cold

2010-02-07T18:59:00.002+05:30

At the most unexpected moment, while I am going about one or more of my various daily businesses, I feel a faint harmless tickle in my throat, as if the microscopic army readying itself for a stealthy attack on my body, has exposed itself too early and, facing certain defeat, is now debating whether to make a quiet exit and live to fight another day or go the Japanese way. Their eventual decision remains the same every time. It signals the onset of the now unavoidable battle that my body must prepare for and I must suffer through, in the days to come.

Each time I have this dreaded sensation, though fully aware that I merely kid myself, I gulp several times at frequent intervals in the hope that it is only an obstinate foreign particle, embedded in the inner lines of my oesophagus, that is the cause of this itch and will presently, goaded by my actions, continue on its journey into the stomach. The effort, in addition to being fruitless, in fact has an effect contrary to what I intend. For my throat begins to itch with intensified vehemence.

Resigned, but still vain in hope, I quickly help myself to hot tea or coffee in generous quantities and swallow it with greater vigour than usual to ensure that the affected region is thoroughly rinsed. Immediately afterwards, I gulp a few more times to check if the beverage has had a positive effect. The first couple of times, the itch seems feebler, and my fears are temporarily allayed. The relief does not last for long; the third time, it is inevitably back.

I wonder what it is that this bunch of pitiful invisible creatures find exciting in these doomed ventures for them to keep coming back. Surely, they realize they stand no chance at all? That the human body is simply too large and too powerful for them to ever take down? There are, of course, others of their kin who do possess that ability, but who is to say if they are even aware of the existence of their lethal brothers in arms! Nevertheless, they keep coming anyway, perhaps in the hope that they pave the way for their descendants to succeed, many generations later.

On the second day, the minor skirmishes end and full-fledged war commences. The attackers, resigned to their fate and fearless, launch their assault on all fronts. The defenders, initially caught off guard, have gradually begun to bring coherence to their campaign, invigorated no doubt by the artificial reinforcements that have arrived in the form of pills I’ve deployed over the last few hours. There is, however, still some time before they clearly stamp their supremacy in the battlefield. In the meanwhile, the throat suffers as do, now, the chest and the nose. My eyes water.

I sit in office, drowsy, feverish and afraid of calling in sick, finding it difficult to breathe and trying to invest myself in the requisite chores. In the course of the restless night spent, the incessant itching of the throat has been replaced by a palatable dull ache, consistent but manageable. The problem is the nose. Innumerable blows into the handkerchief and violent sneezes later, it remains clogged. Stray rivulets of water trickle out embarrassingly and continuously, which I wipe off before they reach the upper lip. I smell nothing. The food tastes bland. Spraying the deodorant doesn’t make me feel better. My socks probably stink.

I obsess over little details. Like, if I tap gently on one side of my nose, there is a wet, audible click, spawned, no doubt, by the exploding of mucus bubbles that are entrenched in thousands inside. Soon, I am addicted to the sound and can’t stop myself. I fret.

My voice sounds nasal and muffled. I try to camouflage this by speaking in hoarse staccatos. My parents pick it up anyway. They fish around for details, prescribe medication and advise a trip to the doctor. Exasperated, I assure them of a recovery within a day or two. This little exchange has played out and will continue to, identical to the smallest detail, forever.

By the afternoon of the third day, the tides begin to turn. The nose, still clogged, doesn’t run anymore. The mucus has attained a great level of viscosity. When I inhale sharply, I find the shriller sound of liquid retreating from the outer fringes of the nose replaced by a deeper grunt higher up the nasal tunnel. That is a good sign. I know now that I will be well when the sun rises on the morrow.

When I wake up next morning, I feel dried mucus in my nose. I dig my fingers into my nostrils, pry out the contents and roll them for a while between my fingers before flicking away the consequently formed ball nonchalantly. I inhale fresh air, deeply, and commend the body on another efficient performance.

Short Story - Murder

2010-01-26T18:39:00.002+05:30

That night, he woke up, barely twelve hours after he’d died.

The logs of wood, turned to charcoal underneath him, still simmered gently. They couldn’t touch him anymore. He sat up, yawned and stretched his limbs and found the action unnecessary since they weren’t the least bit stiff.

He knew he was dead. He had figured that out almost immediately after he’d recovered consciousness, aided by his final living memory – his daughter nestling his hands in hers, various people standing between him and the two lovely French windows in his hospital room, looking at him, teary eyed and smiling, while he lay in bed, his own eyes moist and feeling claustrophobic. He shrugged and let himself smile. Although he’d much rather still be alive, now that he wasn’t, no point making a big deal out of it, he figured. He’d never been one for melodrama.

He wondered if he could recollect anything that had happened to him in these twelve hours. He felt he had been dreaming. He vaguely remembered visions of his daughter, on her haunches, sniffing softly in her room, curtains drawn, an untouched cup of tea by her bedside and a book, open and inverted, forming a tent on her bed. He thought this last detail important somehow, although he had no idea why. Her lips kept moving; what she said was inaudible, but there was another voice in his head that sounded just like hers, asking him to come back.

Well then, back he was. He dusted the ash off him and swung himself off the pyre, landing noiselessly on his feet. He stretched again, out of habit. The night was pitch dark; he estimated the time to be somewhere around 3 AM. There wasn’t anyone in sight. He took a few steps and turned to look at the pyre. He had of course seen several while he’d been alive and it pained him briefly to find his own not look very different from all the others. He shrugged again.

He knew his way around the crematory fairly well. After all, he’d worked there for over thirty years. He remembered the day, nine years ago, when he’d finally decided he was too old to be cremating other people. The two men who had worked with him for most of those thirty odd years, wordlessly going about their businesses through the day and sharing a few cheap drinks in the evenings, equally wordlessly, had offered him a warm send-off, even finding it in themselves to shed a tear or two. “Feels weird to be bid farewell like this when I am on my way out of a cemetery” he’d quipped. They had asked him to visit them sometimes when he felt like it. “The only time I am coming back now is when its my turn” he had said. Those two men still worked there. On his way out and on his way in, they had bid him farewell both times.

The small office building, where he’d spent so many days surrounded by stacks of files with records of dead people, stood silently in the night, bathed in the spectral luminescence of the full moon. The outstretched tentacles from the shadows of palm trees slithered and swayed gracefully on the walls, as if trying to rub the whiteness off them. He tried walking in through one of the walls and found he could not. He tried smashing his fist into the wall; the wall didn’t budge. His hand didn’t hurt either. He walked around to the front door and let himself in, thankful that they never locked the place. This wasn’t a place thieves were likely to favour.

His face in the bathroom mirror looked ordinary. He’d expected something a little more dramatic. He had walked up to the mirror with his eyes closed, stood for a while and exhaled deeply, before opening them. The face, of course, looked a little ashen, but that was because it had a lot of ash on it. He rinsed his face with water from the tap and found it easily wash away. He looked almost normal; even a little younger, he thought. Next, he washed his entire body, then dried and sniffed himself. He still smelt of burnt wood. He contemplated using some soap but decided against it. He wanted to feel a little dead.

The streets were, expectedly, empty at this hour. His, was a small town. He had walked back home after late night cremations several times over the years. It was something he enjoyed doing, especially in such moonlit nights as these, by the shuttered shops and houses with thatched roofs, the only sounds, that of chirping crickets, the gentle hum of the sea or a stray bark of a dog. A gentle breeze blew over the city, whistling lazily through the narrow alleys, bringing with it the whiff of the ocean.

By now, he had decided he would go back to see his daughter. He had brought the girl up since she was eleven, which was over fifteen years ago, after his wife had died of an unexpected heart attack. She had been burnt in that same cemetery. He had spent the rest of his life raising her as best as he could, which wasn’t very well. She had grown up unintelligent and unattractive. He had found her work as an assistant in one of the town’s grocery stores. He knew her marriage prospects were, therefore, never very promising. Besides, she was his daughter – the man who worked at the cemetery. Nevertheless, when she miraculously found a willing lover in a neighbouring town, he personally travelled there with his two friends and beat the daylights out of the boy.

The daughter had shown no real resistance. She had accepted things as they were and continued working at the grocery store and tending to her aging father.

At the sight of his modest two storey house, inconspicuous as ever, he slackened his pace. He spotted the dark silhouette of his daughter, sitting on the wide parapet of the balcony on the first floor with her back towards him, her head leaning against the wall at one end, staring into the distance. He crept through the shadows and found his way to the front door. There, he stood and gathered his thoughts.

Would she be able to see him? Or hear him even? What would he say to her? What would she say to him? Would she be scared of him? Would she even accept him as her father, come back from the dead? He had decided to propose to her that he continue being in that house forever and take care of her, now that he was not going away after all. But how would he broach the subject?

Like most houses in the town, the staircase leading to the upper storey was built outside, in the compound, grazing one side of the structure, allowing the space inside on both levels to be utilized better. He climbed up these stairs and pushed the door. It opened. He noticed his heart, which was was supposed to have been beating fast, was not.

Disturbed by the creak of the opening door, his daughter was already looking in his direction when he entered. At his sight, she gasped, half screamed, lost her balance and fell.

He raced to the balcony and looked down onto the fallen body of his daughter, the glisten of moonlight on spilt blood slowly spreading over the ground beneath her. He tried to scream and found he had no voice and jumped after her. He landed without sound, unharmed and ran back upstairs, screaming silently, and jumped again, landing, uninjured.

Short Story - The Barn

2009-12-10T13:19:00.002+05:30

Generally speaking, I like waiting. I have to in my line of work. But even otherwise, I like it. It allows me to sort my thoughts, iron them out a little bit. They can get awfully muddled sometimes, these thoughts. Need sorting from time to time. But every once so often waiting can become a real shit job. Like right now. If I’d known that the man meant this place when he said ‘keeping an eye from the barn’, I’d have given the matter more thought than I did before agreeing. My fault too, I suppose. Just that I didn’t expect middle-aged white collared gentlemen to actually keep alive and kicking fucking cows and goats and what have yous in the barns of their fucking farmhouses. And then have one solitary caretaker to clean the place up once in ten years. And hire a lousy broke detective to keep watch from it at the start of the tenth year. Ah, strike off lousy there! I must’ve gotten carried away in the general stink and depression.

I kind of let slip my being a detective, didn’t I! Should be more careful! I mean I know I am only talking to myself. I have developed this habit over the years, one of the things I do while waiting. Talk to myself like I were an external audience. Most of the things I do, I can’t share with anyone else due to, you know, reasons of confidentiality. So I just narrate my exploits to myself like this, makes me feel good. Besides, it keeps my thoughts from straying too much. And then, sometimes, in the middle of the story, the audience in me jumps up and asks a question which I, as the narrator haven’t thought of. And that leads to a train of thought that I hadn’t thought of. Nothing like another man’s opinion! But coming back to the slip of tongue, I like my self-narrations to be suspenseful and intriguing. Like a thriller novel – only necessary information at appropriate times. But never mind, what’s done is done. Let me assume I now know I am a detective.

One of the great things about waiting is observing people. It fascinates me to look at people everywhere. I believe if one looks hard enough, one will find every single man and woman has a reason to kill some other man or woman. I am convinced of this. The more people I meet and observe, the more convinced I am. I know a man I want to kill. If that man comes to know of me, he’ll probably want to kill me too.

Its been over two hours and there’s no sign of anyone yet! Looks like a false alarm, this. So anyway, I was talking about the man who’s making me wait in this shithole. Now, apparently, this chap has this really young beautiful wife. Trophy wife, I’d say from the sound of his voice. I mean, I haven’t met the man but on the phone, he sounds like one of those focused, boring money making machines who derive all their humour from the stock market misfortunes of others. Nothing that would truly interest a young beautiful woman. Other than the money, perhaps. Therefore, the trouble, I should think. Neha, the lady is called. Interesting coincidence, that.

So now this man, Arvind, thinks his wife is cheating on him. Very likely, I think. I personally don’t see any harm in these occasional acts of breaking the monotony. I mean, honestly, how exciting can it be to sleep with the same person year after year, and in this particular case, I daresay without the least bit of adventure on or off the bed? I am having this really cute affair with a married girl myself at the moment. About three months now. Such a nice girl. Visits me thrice a week, always afternoons, and quietly gets down to business. Very little talk. Spends a couple of hours with me, gets up, makes some tea and leaves, closing the door noiselessly behind her. Very much like how the relationship will eventually turn out. If it were not for this silly exercise, I’d be with her by me right now. Sometimes, when I get a little sentimental, I feel like I should murder her husband and take her away. With the experience I have, I am confident of doing a good job. Ah, I hear a car in the driveway! Some action finally!

I can’t quite see the car yet; the car park’s a little out of the line of sight of this rotten fucking wooden window. Admittedly, not the ideal place for surveillance, but what option do I have? At any rate, the front porch and door are right in front of me as are most of the windows on both storeys. Yes, now I hear their footsteps crunching on the fallen leaves strewn across the courtyard. Should spot them any moment now. Good thing, all those fallen leaves. The strange screwy sound of my old camera will be impossible to...hey, wait a minute! What the hell is this? This is his wife? And who the fuck is that guy with him? No, this cannot be true! This can’t be the wife! Oh dear! He said his wife was called Neha! Goddamit! And I thought strange fucking coincidence! Fucking bitch! So its not just me...this fat oversized slob as well! And who knows, maybe she’s got a bloody chest full of them!

Straight down to business, I see. Its been barely two minutes since those two went in. And they’re already on the top floor and...and doing what they’ve come to do! They don’t even close the fucking window...what balls! The bitch! I am going to kill them! The husband can go to hell with his briefcase full of money! I am going to choke the bloody life out of her with my bare hands! No, gloved ones! Hold on, be calm... Take it easy! Where’s the camera, where’s the bloody camera! There! That should make your husband proud!

Been an hour since they went to sleep, I think. Good thing too, I am much calmer now. If they had gone on with the romping and howling much longer...I wonder if she’ll wake up and make him some tea as well. Bitch!

Ah, there’s the tea you fat prick. Yeah, go ahead, sip it like...its all yours!

Gone into the shower now, the two of them. No, strike that. They’re out now. And getting dressed. Hold on a minute! He’s taking out a shirt from the wardrobe! So she allows him to wear her husband’s clothes too! No no, wait. There’s something wrong here. He’s already tried four of them. There’s something wrong! There goes the sixth one, flicked carelessly onto the floor. He’s treating them like his own clothes. His own clothes! Yes, that’s it! That’s it! But what’s the point of this! This...oh my God! Oh my God! He wants to kill me! They want to kill me! That’s what all of this is about! The bitch! She must’ve told him everything! I’ve got to get out of here! I’ve got to get out of here. No, I will go in and kill them myself! Yes, that’s what I’ll do! And nobody could ever connect them with me. There couldn’t even be the remotest connection! Yes, I must look for a...yes here, it is. Fancy that! An axe right by my feet! Yes, nice and heavy! Time to go! No, let me think through this. Could there be anyone else in the house? In the car? A servant? A guard or something? Can’t be, I’ve been here for hours now. Didn’t Neha tell me once about that sinister looking friend of her husband who always stayed with him? Could he be here? Hey, wait a minute! Wait a minute! They want to kill me! They, could he be the...I need to get out of here! Forget the axe. Just, lets get out of here! Run, run run...yes, there’s the barn door...And, oh No!

Gunshot.