Swimming in a Fish Bowl

This morning, Albert Wallace of the bent back but aristocratic nose woke up disheveled, shortly before a subdued autumn sunrise in a dimly-lit, painstakingly unadorned apartment, and after only a few moments of lying there in a trance, slipped his feet into his fading crimson rubber slippers, and promised himself he is so not gonna take shit from anyone no more. He straightened himself up and took brisk steps to the mirror, because of course the best way to avoid his fears was to confront them, and splashed freezing cold water into his face, furiously, fifteen times. 

“I’m gonna go out today, and I’m gonna talk to people!” he told his mirror image with an unsure enthusiasm, but with such loudness that one might as well imagine he was planning on conquering the Everest in his boxers. Once a popular creature with enviable looks, a reputation for expertise in all things from Probability to Literary Theory, and, even, a guilty taste for the rowdy humor of large groups, he had somehow found it difficult to get back on his feet after his former girlfriend, Anita, had suddenly left him for her long-time best-friend Patrick Boehner, who even Albert had grown a social fondness for, over time. But that was two years ago, and for what it’s worth, Patrick Boehner had by now married another fine woman, and Mr. and Mrs. Boehner are expecting a daughter next month, as some harmless facebook stalking has revealed.

For some months now he had felt no pleasure in most things people seemed to love, and often wondered how he, himself, had shown such keenness for the same activities in the years before. Every time he would discover himself tagged in a facebook photo by one of his acquaintances, the accompanying taglines that were usually on the lines of “Awesomeness”, “Amazing fun” or “Best day ever” left him nonplussed. If they hadn’t mentioned it I would never have known, he would muse. 

In the earlier days, he used to occasionally do stand-up at a local comedy club, and although he still appreciated the mechanics of humor and continued to be able to construct, methodically, laughter on other people's faces, he had found it increasingly difficult to elicit his own laughter, and felt uninspired, even, by the virtue in giving other people a good time. 

He had gradually become unmotivated to excel in his career as an Accountant, and the final straw came two months ago with his rather public firing, since which time, he hasn't applied for another job. It was the day after the firing that he first attended our yoga class. 

But today was different. He looked palpably determined in his freshly ironed, crisp white shirt and linen trousers getting ready for the Interstellar show at AMC New Brunswick. Unusually chirpy all morning, he played his favorite music from The Beatles to The Doors at full volume while he vacuum cleaned the whole place. But it was really when he began humming along and grooving rhythmically to the high points of these happy songs that I really knew today’s different. Very uncharacteristically, he also nudged me to wear my dark azure top, telling me how it enhances my breasts in a “menacing way". I was, like, woah!

I’ve been living with him for the last two weeks, but contrary to what others in the class think, we are not sleeping together; the only reason I’m living here is that we were both scared of living alone. Scared of ourselves, perhaps. We keep each other sane. And useful.  

“Let’s get going now” I cried at 5 minutes to noon, “we will have people from the class, all waiting. We’re also grabbing lunch before, alright!” 
“Just a moment, honey. I am shaving.”
“C’mon now. It’s not a party! And what’s with ‘honey’? I am not your girlfriend, okay?” I said, and put on Breaking Bad on Netflix. I was in the middle of season 5, and it’s getting crazier every episode. It’s so addictive, oh my god. It wasn’t until the episode was over that I realized Albert is still inside. What a bride-to-be, this guy.

“Albert! Dude. I’m gonna go by myself.”

No voice responded.

-- 

The doctors just told me there is scope for revival, but added that it was “in everyone’s best interest to be prepared for all eventualities.”

I don’t know whether we were lovers or just close friends or just two random depressed people who, as a matter of mere convenience, were each other’s support group. Whatever we were we weren’t anymore.

Sid Shoulda Said - Part 2 - Kruger Ganley, Then and Now

I’m feeling positive about an impending promotion. Last Friday, my boss asked me out to lunch. Well, to go together and pick up lunch from Sarvana Bhawan, to be precise, but that’s almost as good, definitely a signal. Then he got an important call so I had to go pick it up for us both. But why must I worry about a free lunch gone expensive, since what mattered was the signal, and that, as you’d agree, remains intact. I know that because he also complimented me yesterday on my work migrating the trading books to the new platform. “That was helpful”, he’d said. I’m actually a statistician working with market and macro data, so this was not, in the strict sense, a part of my responsibilities, falling clearly as you can tell in the domain of IT professionals, but it wasn’t terribly difficult and the whole exercise gained swiftness by orders of magnitude if I collaborated with the IT guys, so I figured why not. I can’t see how this isn’t exceeding expectations, unless the expectation is that I set up technology, do accounting, trade billions and serve chai and butter-toast to everyone while they play Oprah in the comments sections of Humans of New York.

So, yeah, it’s all looking good. Bonus and promotion announcements are still a month away, and my match dot com profile is already half-ready. In fact, what’s pending is just putting up my pictures, but, of course, that is the all important part. I do have a couple of nice pictures of mine from 2009 and 2010, and with just a little retouching, I should be all set. Uncle Baburam’s daughter Madhuri was very gracious about offering to “do amazing things with these pictures” at no cost, and although I’m quite tempted to take her up on the offer, I think I’ll hire a digital makeover expert from U2RHot for eight hundred bucks. What can I say, I’m not fooling around this time. And Madhuri should be focussing on her studies, Kindergarten is a crucial class.

You wouldn’t guess it from looking at me now, but my first six months at Kruger Ganley were a dream. I started at this job on the 23rd of June 2009, about two weeks after the graduation ceremony, and exactly four months from the day I’d started dating Swati. It was a phenomenal year, 2009. Everything about that year was perfect. If I left a problem in an exam because I’d have no clue how to solve it, I would later discover that the problem itself had being scrapped for some trivial linguistic ambiguity in the way it was written. This ball I hit out towards the hostel windows on the second floor, while playing cricket on the narrow alley next to the building this one time, went straight to the singular window without a pane, thus saving me the huge fine I was going red with dread about as the ball made its way up the projectile. Nothing could go wrong. Nothing could go wrong in the crazy unbelievable way that I now regret why I never dabbled in gambling or sports betting while it lasted. If I were ninety years at the time and left for a morning walk in a fit of rebelliousness and trembled on a rock, cursing everyone I ever knew in my head in the microsecond I imagined I had left with me on this planet before I hit the ground, a hot, top-naked girl would have come running from the woods, stopped me from falling, and kissed me passionately for no discernible reason. God was that kind of kind. 

The day I got the job, I got myself five Park Avenue shirts, one for each weekday. I would show up at work early, and smiled at everyone as they came in, just as uncle Baburam had advised. People seemed to like me, I stayed late and got everything done faster, taking workload off other people on my team who had been here a little longer, and have since all bought yachts and mansions and left the firm. My boss was supportive and treated us often, but I have to say under a different boss I might have learned a wee bit more. Most of his mentoring revolved around giving me such illuminating pearls of wisdom as “It is what it is”, “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do”, and “That’s what it should do, you’re right, but the reality is it does whatever it is it does”. He could spend an awful lot of words explaining things which were explained just as well in zero. During meetings was always on display his unique ability to talk for an hour about nothing except what he’ll be talking about for the rest of the hour, until the hour was over, and we exchanged pleasantries and left. Was this the secret to multiple Brooks Brother suits while paying for your kids’ piano classes at the same time, I always used to wonder. I only stopped when he was fired a couple of years ago. The new boss, let's call him Aurangzeb, has proved to be very hard to impress. In the last two years, he has only taken me out for lunch once. That was two months ago, at Suburban Tadka. At the restaurant, when the waiter turned towards me after taking his order and I was putting on my greedy smile, about to blurt out the most expensive dish on the menu, he butted in and ordered something for me entirely on his own discretion. “Just what I’d wanted”, I remarked heartily. The waiter gave me a look I will not go ahead and describe, before turning back to him, clearly aware of his only customer that mattered, “So how spicy would you like it, high, medium, low? Medium, I suppose?”
“Yes, medium.” said Aurangzeb.
“Ok, sir”, said the waiter and began to leave, when he was stopped again.
“Wait, wait, wait. Actually, do very medium. Infact, very, very medium.”

That is not the sign of a man who doles out promotions easily.

Alpenliebe

For the fourteenth time in as many weeks, Vasudev Bakhshi was faced with the question of what to do during the two and a half day long weekend, when the office admin girl, Alisha Bhatia of the blunt nose and domed forehead, began giving out candies at every desk with a cheerful, if shrill, cry of "Happy Friday", stopping at every desk, and before he knew talk of what everybody was going to do on the weekend filled the colossal yellow-lit hall lined with fifty thousand desks, or so they seemed to Vasu, who, obese as he was, had been running the tip of his index finger along the periphery of the opening created between two ridiculously stretched buttons of his grey linen shirt, and wondering what it was that he used to do with his weekends during the summer four months ago when Sonia, his wife and a professor of Geography at the University of Bundelkhand, was home for the vacation and, to his surprise, he couldn't remember anything of import, neither any elated partying like when they were both collegiate and hungry for each other's touch all the fucking time, nor, thankfully, any crazy, viscious fights characteristic of the year before when she was still working in the city, although he did recall a certain Aarohi's phone number scribbled on the last page of one of her books, a number that he had committed to memory with a suspicious, foreboding fear, a fear that it wasn't Aarohi, but whoever Sonia took her increasingly numerous cigarette breaks out on the backyard to probably converse with, always in what he imagined a voice so low her own shadow couldn't overhear, but why o why o why couldn't she have talked about it, what is the worst that could have happened? Little Ridhi wouldn't be screaming in her bed every night, and I would at least have been able to eat this candy.

Sid Shoulda Said - Part 1 - The Short Term Goals of Sid Chat

We broke up three years ago, Swati and I, but I have to confess I have been thinking about her a lot lately. Being a man of indubitable character that I am, however, I won't call her. I strongly believe that it is very cheap to constantly call and text your ex-girlfriends, especially when, as in this case, they categorically cut your calls upon feeling the faintest shadow of your number upon their phone screens the fifteenth time they see it in a day.

My ex-girlfriend, the one who, some would say, I obsess excessively about, was the proverbial woman of substance, intelligent and driven, and I the typical man of substance abuse. She was also conventionally good-looking, had curls, big eyes, exquisitely shaped, soft lips, and a slim, affable personality. I knew other guys wanted her. I have no idea why she ever decided to date me with my flowing nose and fluffy arms, even though I admit my hair were the stuff of many a man's envy when shampooed. But that was rare, and besides, my teeth are a shade of color between yellow and green for which there is no name yet, as no other specimen of said color has ever been found in recorded history. She, on the other hand, brushed and flossed twice a day, and visited the dentist often. Her nose was pointed yet smooth, very much like a carefully sculpted nose made by a meritorious master's degree student of nose sculptures. In contrast, my own was made by an underpaid fast-food worker, who, when given this unexpected, unseemly task of making a nose, said what the fuck and made another samosa.

So I can only guess that she misconstrued my ugliness for my nerdiness, and gave in to her sapiosexual tendencies. I forget what the modern expression is, way out of my league, I suppose? But it wasn't the fact that she was physically attractive that drew me to her initially. It was that she was a girl, who would talk to me. That really was all. To really understand my obsession these hundreds of years later, you have to consider what had been happening with me in the years before.

I was precocious. As a toddler, I was already challenging the stereotype the whole world had been cooking up for ages about how all kids were cute. I do not remember a great deal of those days, but I do remember being constantly passed from one eager pair of arms to another reluctant one, before the latter would begin a frenetic search for the next victim. I am often told by my parents that I was the miracle kid who never peed his pants. Little do they know it was because I was so embarrassed already, I couldn't afford it. When I grew a little bit and reached the age when children start thinking they know shit, I realized that I was, after all, at least, a real funny dude. That was a big respite, I have to say. Every morning when I walked into the class, my classmates burst into instant laughter. I never quite understood, though, why they would hide my tiffin-box and leave chewing gum and pins on my chair and fail to tell me. To tell you a little secret, I never enjoyed that part as much as they thought.

But enough about me. I have to do something about this obsession with Swati if I am to have any hope of getting promoted. I have been slaving away for 4 years as a Junior Analyst at this bank, and each passing year that I find out I did not make Senior Analyst, the guilt of being a total failure gnaws at my chest hair. Before uncle Baburam, who was then a Senior VP also at Kruger Ganley, set me up for this job interview with an effusive recommendation, I had been looking for a year already. For a long time before that I had struggled with the question of what to do with my life. Everything I tried always felt either too easy or too difficult. Nothing was just the right level of challenging, except probably getting naked, but I've got to admit I could never have monetized that. Anyhow, as soon as I started working here, I knew it was for me. Plus I was over the roof that I had money to spend on my dates with Swati. Here I go again! No more talking of Swati, that bloodsucking bitch.

I have to get promoted this year. I promised myself I will only send out matrimonial ads when I can mention I’m a Senior Analyst. My brother thinks I’m a moron for wanting to mention Senior Analyst, which, he says, is an oxymoron of a title. Yes, he says things like that ever since he interned at this literary magazine, Intellectuelle, that sells exactly as many copies as it has employees, because there are only as many people in the world as pretentious. “What are you trying to tell girls, that you are the senior-most junior-most person in the bank?” he goes. What does he know about online matrimonial MO with his average build and his face that is not remotely annoying, and who the hell awarded him the pedestal to consider himself qualified to pontificate his literary hogwash over me. Besides, isn’t Junior Analyst a pleonasm, smartass?

By the way, I’m Chaturvedi, Siddharth Chaturvedi. Get used to the name, you will be hearing a lot of me. If there is one thing about me everybody strongly agrees with, it's that once I start coming, I keep coming.

A story from the pre-mobile-phone era

Mrs. Sarita Jaiswal waited for her son at the schoolbus' designated stop but the bus did not come. She sat anyhow under a warm Gulmohur tree. Every five minutes or so a bus passed, and at the sight of each of them she would stand up, anticipating her son, and then go back under the tree. She called Mr. Anand Jaiswal, her husband and a generally thoughtful person. He was not on his desk, being engaged in a generally useless meeting, and could not take her call, so Mrs. Jaiswal called Mr. Subhash Khatreja, her cousin and a generally business-savvy marble trader. His shop was close by, and in fifteen minutes he arrived at the bus stop, fetched his cousin sister and just as they sat in his car to go to the kid's school, the kid, Vasu Jaiswal, a class fifth student at Delhi's Frank Anthony school and a generally mischievous kid, jumped down from the tree to tell them he had been here all this while. But the car had left just before he could yell at it, and he was left standing there with nowhere to go. He knew that the house would be locked so he did not bother going home but left instead for the closest video game parlour. At Frank Anthony, his mother and uncle were worried on finding that Vasu had been dropped at the bus-stop, and rushed back home in a frenzy expecting him to be sitting tired and hungry at the doorstep. But when they reached he was still playing video-games at the parlour, so they contemplated calling the police. An hour passed, and they had almost dialed hundred, when Vasu came leaping and bounding after having won all his games, his shirt untucked, and necktie tied to his forehead like a headband. Mr. Khatreja approached him aggressively, intending to give him a verbal dressing down, but before he could, Mrs. Jaiswal ran forward to Vasu and hugged him tight and long, and kissed him numerously. Mrs. Jaiswal, after all, was his mother, and a generally cool woman. Mr. Jaiswal could not be reached, when he was called again, this time out of a need for storytelling. 

Moral of the story: The useless meetings are generally the longest ones.

Words

I had been mulling over it for months. Five, six. I didn’t tell anyone. It was not something you could tell someone and still hope not to be evaluated. But I was consumed by the question like mint in ester. I wondered about it on my way to work every night. In the mornings, I couldn’t sleep because I wanted the answer right then, that very day, every day, for months. I was thinking about it when I dragged myself into the airport, for a new city now, and my parents waved me prolonged goodbyes from outside the glass wall. I was thinking about it also when I walked for the first time into my new place of work, the newly acquired free office stationery making things easier for a while. I was thinking about it when I knocked at the real estate agent’s door and a woman with manly sideburns, the receptionist as a matter of fact, welcomed me in. When I first visited home two and a half months later, there was a lovely little camera waiting for me. I was thinking about it as I stared into its lenses while it stared at others: why don’t I write more often? Why don’t I write?

When recently I met an old friend I was making mental notes of his adultnesses*. I liked him for them. I liked him by and large but I was on the lookout for giveaways at all moments all the same: those exaggerated truths, that baby lie, that question he’d ask me acting as if he didn’t know the answer.

The last I'd seen of him before this was when we were both nine: we weren’t as clever then, not by a long shot, but we weren’t as stupid either. I wasn’t. As a kid, I wasn’t writing a short story in my head when I should have been up with real, in-the-present-moment frolic.

(*except his round inchoate male breasts that came as not sucha pleasant surprise; I remembered him as a marathon runner in the making.)

Long story short: I was writing a short story when I met a long lost friend. But when I actually sat down to write, I couldn’t put pen to paper. Not only that. Whenever I would really get down to the business of writing – at this point you can imagine me in front of a blank word document on the screen, my fingers hanging just above the keyboard in paralysis, my eyes intent on the pixels laughing in my face – I suddenly wouldn’t want to.

While I tried to sleep today an answer the texture of an arrow seeped into my aching eyes. It was discomforting, and unlike what I had imagined, the coming of it didn’t make sleeping any easier. I like framing sentences, it told me, and I like adding one sentence to another. I like thinking up the odd witty remark, I like capturing the shy detail, I like imagining things in my head, I like hypotheses. It said I love how strings of words are jot together to resemble baritone musical notes, it said also that I like writing words and sentences and paragraphs that among themselves form mathematical patterns.

What it also told me, sadly, is that I have nothing to say to the world.
I have no desire to tell anyone what I think about what. Not directly, not through stories.

I didn’t want to believe all this, but it also told me, as if shoving evidence between my breaths, to go see people’s status messages on facebook. Not what’s in them, but just the fact that they were written. That these people, among them people who can’t put together a coherent phrase on being offered salvation as reward, that these people often had something to say to everyone. They wanted their voices to be heard, their thoughts to be known. While I didn’t, I really didn’t.

I know it’s not a happy or even an intelligent story, but what the heck, it is the story for today. I can't let the writer's block last forever just like that.


THE END
_________________________________________________





PS. Dear Curious Minds, mint in ester doesn't lead to anything or mean anything.
Except possibly that shallow frills excite smart minds.

Raingod

“Have you lost it?”

The person on the other end of the phone replied something. I don’t know what. But this distraught looking man standing next to me on the bus stand, with a large brown overcoat meant for someone larger than him and a large black umbrella meant for me, kept shouting the four words repeatedly on the phone, sometimes cupping his hand around his mouth, mostly not. If he released spit when he shouted, you could not know it: such was the rain.

The important part here is that I did not have an umbrella. It was raining furiously; the raindrops nearly hurt you as they made contact. The bus stand was not actually a bus stand, but a place where people waited anyhow and therefore buses stopped to fetch them. Meaning there was no shade, and I was feeling sort of cold in the rain, especially when a thick trail trickled down the back of my ear through my neck into my shirt. That shivered me, and for a brief moment I would shake like Shakria’s bum.

He was standing to my right. While telling you about how in this rain you couldn’t know if he unconsciously spat as he screamed, I forgot to tell you that you also couldn’t tell if someone's eyes had tears flowing down them freely if they stood unumbrellaed in the rain.

At least he didn’t seem to come to know.

But that could also be because he was so caught up in his own mess. You can never be sure.

You can never be sure about him, my husband.

Wheels

Yesterday morning, I whistled and Papa said don't. But I've just learned it, how to whistle. Raghu whistles all the time and his father laughs and sings and whistles along. Papa says it's bad. I ask him how and he just repeats that it's bad and looks at me with a look that says it's really really really bad, so I believe him. But I believe him only for the next fifteen minutes, after which I'm again all 'why is it bad why' in my head. It's such a pain. Yesterday when Raghu was whistling I told him it's bad, and he just laughed loud. He said if it were bad his dad would surely have told him. Right, right, I thought, and we both whistled to the tune of 'If you're happy and you know it clap your hands'. We're so good at it, both of us. He is a little better, Raghavendra. We've named him Whistlendra in the class. It's so much fun. I think it is. Sudeep and Upasana too. But I am going to make sure I don't whistle when I walk to the bus-stop in the mornings with Papa. Ever since I've learned it it's just become impossible to stop. I'm whistling in the bus, in the recess, in the playground, in the music period, and to tell you a little secret, even in the SST period, but there less loudly than usual, because she'd get really hyper and call my dad school and then he'll be really mad. Ok, he won't be mad, but still. Ever since I'd fallen off the rickshaw and cut a huge bad wound and caught an infection so they had to cut the thing off, or amputate as Dr.Salve says, my dad has never scolded me for anything. He behaves as if it were his fault. I don't even feel in any way incapable or in pain now, for a long time. As for being caught whistling by SST ma'am, and being complained about to dad, and him being called to school, and informed about how I'm not behaving: I wouldn't mind it even if he were to get mad, but that he'll also maybe be embarrassed, and I don't want that at all. It's really not such a big deal to stop, I think. I will.

Yesterday was a sad day. Sad and beautiful, my dad wrote in his diary. My dad doesn't know that I know he writes a diary, so obviously he doesn't know that I know where his diary is. So obviously he doesn't know that I read it. Sometimes I think that he'll get mad when he comes to know, but then I think he won't be mad at me no matter what. But then I think he will be, in this case. And then again I think he won't be, and it goes on like this. So for a lot of days I kept going crazy tossing between both possibilities all the time, but of late I've realized that there's no point to all this fretting and that I should go on reading them because I love to. And so far, in a way, I don't with confirmation know whether it's even a bad thing to do. Only after I get caught and my dad discusses matters with me, and specifically tells me that it’s a bad thing can I really know for sure and certain if it's even a bad thing in the first place to be reading his diaries, right?

“An amazing and sad and beautiful, beautiful day. Miss you a lot today.” he has written, to be precise. And he didn’t write anything more yesterday, which is rather unlike him, for all his daily diary entries seem to be longer than my English textbook’s stories, so much so that almost every day I find myself leaving them midway even though I’ve never found any of them boring me. But I think that I’ll never find reading anyone’s diary boring, whoever the person, however written, whatever described.

Omg I’m still on the subject of diaries. So yesterday was quite a day, if you know what I mean. Raghu and I were, what else, whistling. And joking and shouting. In the bus on our way back. This is when I’d told him it’s bad, whistling, and he had laughed and .. all that I told you earlier about. My brother was sitting on the window seat, and then I in the middle, and then Raghu next to the aisle. He kept looking out of the window, my brother. His name is Vartmaan and he’s really not like me, like he’s not always hollering and whistling and laughing to other people’s annoyance, like Raghu and I do. But today the way he kept looking out of the window -- with no regard or attention to our awesome frolic inches away from him -- he seemed a man who knew something no one else does. Morpheus. Not really, but sort of. “His silence was unsettling even by his own silent, unsettling standards” my English teacher would say, that sucker for alliteration.

I don’t quite understand him, Vartmaan. His life consists of, I think, acting subservient to hot girls and therefore often getting snubbed by them, while taking the ones who’re not hot for granted and saying them things he wouldn't to hot girls, basically being himself, and then getting snubbed by them too. And then being sad about the whole messy scheme of things and unable, I guess, to mingle with us kiddies. He doesn’t find our jokes funny, which confirms to me that he really must be a grown-up. Or adolescent. What’s the difference anyway. He says it’s a different world altogether in the senior school but that he can’t explain to me how. I know for a fact that our subject, Science, gets divided into three components physics, chemistry and biology, each of them bigger than our whole Science subject. And that SST will be divided into History, Geography and Civics, of which History alone is said to be bigger than all our present class 5 subjects combined. Said to be so not just by him but all his friends too. Even Dad seems not to disagree about it. But I doubt that that’s what he’s referring to when he calls it a different world.

He kept striking the seat ahead with his middle finger in a way we strike the striker while playing carom. And kept humming a low pitched English song. And intermittently writing something on his mobile phone. Which seems to be his most favourite pastime ever since Dad got him a mobile phone early this year. He didn’t look sad, but every time I noticed him in a small breath stolen between our raucous laughter and antics, he seemed to notice me looking at him and immediately looked back away out into the roads, as if consciously trying to keep me at bay. Don’t entertain me, I’m not entertaining you. Something like that. I couldn’t have guessed what awaited us, and I have a faint feeling now that he could.

When we got home we saw something that literally blew our heads away. Honda Activa!! Hotter than all the girls Bhai loses sleep over. I can’t tell you how awesome it looked. You’d be thinking ‘just like all other new Honda Activas, you jackass’, but no, it was prettier. The bike was there on the porch, a tilak under its headlight. Tenant’s maybe. And then we walked in and Dad was there to open the door, leave taken from his office. Now something’s the matter, I started to think. But he just opened the door and went straight back in nonchalantly after a brief “hey wash your hands kids, and remember to hang your uniforms properly in the almirah”, a novel in his hands, two of his fingers inserted into a particular page near the beginning as he held it. Now there I saw a cake on the table. It might not surprise my school mates as much to see a cake at home but at our place a cake means someone’s birthday at home. But it was no one’s. And just as we get close to the cake, glitter and ribbons all fall over our heads from a bag on the ceiling fan I hadn’t yet noticed, through a lever-and-pinion mechanism he’d got installed, maybe that morning itself, for such special-effects, and which he was operating from his hiding place inside the kitchen next to his room. Then he appeared in a flash and jumped happily while saying “Vartmaan’s Activa’s finally here!!” cheerily and loudly, especially the word ‘here’. He doesn’t usually act this youthful enthusiastic way, our Dad. I felt full of feelings that I couldn’t name.

Though now I think I could have, and should have, used the opportunity to whistle in front of him and he wouldn’t have minded.

This had been on the cards for a long time, I think. Ever since Rajat had got one last summer, my brother had been after my dad to get him one too, a Honda Activa. Rajat’s this guy in our tuition centre who has a big belly, and whose arms can’t help hanging away from him at an angle when he walks, because there’s so much fat on his chest-sides. He’s boastful of his Parker Pens, his swiss knife, his Activa of course, about that he smokes Marlboro, about his Dad’s three cars, about that he travels in Aeroplanes. I’m sure not even air-hostesses smile at him. He’s already ballooned to the point of bursting, but he still wouldn’t stop it, Rajat the boaster. But my brother doesn’t understand. He just had to get the bike, he wouldn’t have it any other way. My dad said he’d just got him the mobile phone, but no, he wouldn’t have it any other way. They say wisdom comes with age. What a myth. He’s more than five years older than I.

Then my dad came up with this bright idea up all parents’ sleeves. He promised my brother that he’d get him what he wanted if he scored eighty percent marks in his class Eleventh, first term exams. To tell you the truth, I’d felt vaguely wronged when I got to know of this arrangement, having got A+’s and A’s all my school life, and not having been offered great rewards at mediocre successes like these. And as much as my brother wanted the bike, I’m not very sure that the lure of it pushed him any harder towards getting higher, better marks. He seemed much the same to me and soon I got over my earlier vague sense of being wronged when I realized it was unlikely he’d get that far. But sometimes I did think how out of the world it would be if he did somehow get 85 or something and earned the Activa. I both wanted and didn’t want him to get it.

Wanting more than not wanting, that is.

Three days ago, results for the first term were declared in our school. Let’s not dwell over my results, I’d just tell you in short that they were capital A Amazing, my marks. My brother though fared not as well as I’d have liked him to, or as Dad would have liked him to, or as he’d have liked himself to. He’d got sixty eight. I was a bit sad about that. Like for a day and a half. That’s as long as I normally can be sad about a single thing. How my brother felt, and my Dad – I’m sorry but I really don’t know. They must not have been thrilled about it either, but as a ten year old writer that’s as much insight I can give you about others’ feelings. I really don’t know how they felt inside, though what I can tell you is that, I felt pretty terrible about not being able to feel, or even guess, how they’d be feeling about it. Perhaps it’s not a big deal after all, but sadly enough I was not sure about that either.

So basically the point I’m trying to drive home here is that it was a big surprise – the Activa that Dad had anyway got for him. Bhai, who of late had been pretty economical with his smiles, couldn’t control his beaming, all teeth and jaw smile. You could see excitement all over his face, eyes so joyed with disbelief that you’d think Shin Chan won the Nobel prize for Physics. Dad was … again, I’m so sorry readers, I cannot explain. I see a tree full of fruits, I love the tree, its fruits and its shade, I always want it to be there, I’d be really sad without the tree, but how the tree feels at any point I’m far too ignorant about. Did that make any sense?

Then Dad and he made each other eat the cake. And made me eat the cake, and rubbed cream on my cheeks, you know, the usual cake fun. No pictures were clicked, maybe because we were so completely absorbed in the present we couldn’t get out of it enough at that time to anticipate how dearly we’d reflect on it when it becomes the past. Now you’re thinking this sentence is not from a ten year old writing. This is. I’ve copied it from somewhere. Briefly, they left to get ice-cream, my brother and Dad, on the new bike. Meanwhile I rang Raghu up and shared the good news. Bragged, for once.

In the evening, Bhai left for his tuition classes on the bike. He would meet Rajat there, on his older, maybe less advanced model. I wished I could see for myself how it would all turn out, the scene, but I’d quit going to the tuition classes a couple of months after I’d joined when I’d met with my accident. I never started going back again as Dad and I both agreed I didn’t really need the formality. I waited at home to listen to the anecdote when Bhai comes back.

At the time he was expected to be back, Dad was waiting for him outside the house, sitting on his scooter. I fancied them having a race, brother and father, from my windowside study table on which I draw pictures of these old people whom news channels are always after. The ministers and statesmen and all. Yesterday, as Dad sat on the scooter outside, the wind giving his shirt many turbulent wrinkles, I was drawing him. Probably the need for recording the day had emerged by now. My sketch was interrupted when he suddenly stood up, smiling wide, waving his hand. In 20 seconds Bhai was in my view too, the two of them talking, same height, similar features, Dad’s smile much bigger though than my brother’s.

Dad saw that the bike was much soiled. Like an enthusiastic kid who has just got a new bike as a prize for his efforts, Dad cleaned the stains off the Activa with a duster, and asked him, my brother, to sit besides him for a ride. I quickly ran out to the porch to see dad flying it into the green horizon. A little dangerously even, like an adolescent maverick.

It was the happiest of all the days I remembered. I was doing my homework when they came back. We had dinner, and chatted, all three of us, about moviestars and cricketers and the programs I love to watch on TV. Then we went to sleep in our rooms, only no sleep met our eyes. My brother and I sleep in one room. As I pretended to sleep, I could hear sobs from the adjacent bed, my brother’s. What?!

My brother was sobbing uncontrollably. I asked him what happened, but he wouldn’t answer. I said I’d call Dad, which he was sure I wouldn’t, and said nothing in reply. He just sobbed, and sobbed. Tell me what’s going on, I demanded. “You’re a very good boy, Guddu.” he said. “That I am”, I said matter-of-factly, “but why are you all sappy”. No answer, again, but he did calm down in a while and went to sleep soon after. I don’t quite know what our relationship as brothers was, or how we were as compared to how other brothers are. Anyway, whatever we were we are not anymore.

In the morning today I saw Rajat escaping the school walls to go to Priya, the multiplex he’s always bunking and going to with his gang. Apparently, his dad has got him a car now, a beautiful, white car, into which he promptly dived and scooted around at mad, bad speed. A Honda Jazz. Till two days back, they made me want to whistle.

The Opening Paragraph to a long experimental Short Story I wrote when I was unemployed¹

They were tired all of them and their shoulders all hung like the hangers we hang our clothes on. The stale smell of fallen beer pervaded the room. I am not talking about a certain, particular day. I am talking about everyday, right after noons, which in their world played the part of mornings. Let me continue. There were two actual ashtrays and a textbook doubling up as one, but there were no cigarettes anymore in the room to be smoked, only dead butts. Everyday at 1 PM, let me repeat. The glass window amplified greatly in hotness the hot sunrays beaming into the room and forming a distorted rhombic yellow on the floor into which they by turns all of them inserted their inward-sinking heads. They gleaned some kind of pleasure from the frankly harsh and intolerable heat seeping into them, their eyes, their malfunctioning noses. They fashioned themselves one with nature when they did such things, like imagining themselves a battered rock out of a volcanic eruption now resting in an undiscovered desert. Their throats swelled from cigarettes and alcohol disturbed their bowels and they thought they were somehow now one with nature, whatever being one with nature means. Probably they empathized with the similarly sad state nature is in now, but I'm not so sure about that. Anyway they were not all nature and sun and moon and trance. Some CDs lay strewn towards the laptop which in turn had been flapped open a little too much, at 130 degrees or something, as though they would climb up the wall and sit next to lizards to watch what they thought was a great movie. They were always watching what they thought were great movies. They were all for the most part living in a movie themselves, one which they thought great too. Great in a non-commercial, classic, cult, arcane, acclaimed, misunderstood sense, let me specify. That they were messed up and far from ideal and that the people they disliked² disliked them gave them the willies they truly adored. That while Orson in the next room got ready and bathed in perfume and tucked his shirt in and sung a sweet soft tune and winked at them as he passed their room while walking into a day full of painless although meaningless gestures and nothings gave them a feeling of spiritual superiority that as hard as I may try I cannot explain to you since to truly understand that part you've got to be one of them, like I am.







____________________________________________________________________

¹Now I mostly only write emails followed by Regards Name Designation.
²which happened not to exclude a lot of people.

Making Tea

There was nothing to do today, just as there was nothing to do yesterday and the day before and the day before day before and so on ad infinitum. As he woke up the images of last night were still fresh in his head, of how he had spent the night changing channels on television: the exact perilous slant at which he held the remote control hanging loose from his fingers in a way you would think he somewhere inside wanted it to fall off and be damaged so he could not use it anymore and would have to explore other options for killing time than watching dumb chat shows on night television. What’s wrong with that, though, he repeatedly asked himself without opening his mouth; for someone who knows his great* education is done and being a parents’ kid time is done and employment is elusive and underemployment is offensive and, as a consequence, money is scant and girls are wary and friendships expensive, television can at least always be given a positive spin as informative and geekily fun and diverse while having one of those justifying, self-exonerating, vote-of-confidence seeking conversations, which thankfully** didn’t even take place all that often now. Every two minutes last night he would look back from the television to the housefly sitting on an arm of his sofa to see if it was still there eavesdropping on his pathetic boredom. It was always still there. He did not wave it away as he’d convinced himself that the very act of its eavesdropping on his boredom is meant to tone down his boredom, employing that same sad theory he used to give meaning to every random thing as something put in the precise place it’s put in and not the trillions others so that something terribly meaningful could happen according to God’s design. But he didn’t know if God was there or not, so the whole thing was a little messed up in his head. Like all the other things. Now when he’d woken up in this same place next morning, alone and workless and without something bad-ass to look forward to, he did once if truth be told consider switching on the television again for hope something tailor-made for his tastes*** would be playing on one of the four hundred fifty plus channels that his subscription made available to him, the subscriptions placard momentarily whizzing past his eyes with the letters Bring Life Home written in big bold bright red in the centre and two suggestively clothed, big breasted, all thighs and calves girls on both sides of the caption. But since last night’s dismal performance of the four fifty channels combined had totally turned him off, he instead walked into the kitchen to spend some time. He made himself a cup of tea; he did not particularly want to have tea but then it**** was something that as a child he saw his elders did every day and had made a mental note to himself to remember in his adulthood as a most noble convention: it always kept the atmosphere at home pleasant. For a while at least.


____________________________________________
*Really?
**Or not?
***Although if you asked him to describe what it was that constituted his taste, he would have had a very hard time.
****i.e. Making Tea.

A Hot Afternoon

It was the summer of 2005, the baldheads in Delhi could have utilized their heated skulls to make omelets in a flash, but here, from the air-cooled insides of Rajdhani Express, the irritated hustle and bustle of the swarming humankind on Platform no.6 seemed entirely needless, slightly absurd. I hadn’t even finished stowing away my luggage to a corner under my berth, when the pantry-boy, zippy and as if fresh from a bath, appeared before me to register my nod for the lunch; and sir, ‘veg or non-veg?’
Life was good.

‘Non-veg’ I replied promptly, even as my mind took me thirty minutes back in time, my Mother telling me from the door of the house how these train-guys barely marinate their chicken, and so how unhealthy it can be. And why have all that non-veg anyway when I have packed you these aloo parathas! Resting my bags on the banister against which I had stopped, acting already tired, I had replied nodding sagely with limpid honesty dripping from my eyes, ‘Of course Ma !’, the way I always respond to all of her suggestions.

In a moment a girl my age came huffing and puffing with two bags, one of which hung forward from her neck like a nursery-school kid’s water-bottle, and sat down heavily on the berth in front of mine, freeing herself of all the weight. She didn’t particularly care about the luggage very much, and let it lie rashly on the floor. I had nervously straightened myself up in the meanwhile, characteristically, at being suddenly brought into a lone girl’s vicinity.

She wasn’t very tall, maybe five feet two, but her lithesome, slender figure cloaked that amply. When shortly she eased herself with her head thrown back, as if dissipating the tension from that oddly hanging bag, I remember it had occurred to me how her neck was quite long for someone her height. It was crawling with all those fancy janpath bead-bands, I thought she was trying to divert attention from the length of her neck with them; ‘but hey, nothing fools me’, I remember smiling inwardly.

No, she did not bowl me over at first glance, at least no more than any other carefree, bead-band wearing, slender-figured girl would have. On a side note all carefree, bead-band wearing, slender-figured girls bowled me over pretty readily. But then, that longish neck, what a weakness it is for some people - people like me. If Vipin had been by my side, I am sure he would have raised his eyebrows in his own peculiar way, which, peculiarly, doesn’t forbid you but rather encourages you hypnotically.

"Hi … Bangalore?" I began, consciously employing the least words possible, lest my tremulous confidence reveals itself piss-off-ing-ly.
"Oh yeah yeah yeah, so you’re going to PESIT too?" she said looking at the folder in my hands. She spoke lightening fast. If I were in her place, I’d have just finished saying ‘Oh yeah..’ in the time she completed the whole of her sentence in. PESIT was, and maybe still is, an engineering college in Bangalore, and that’s pretty much all that I know about it. I can tell you the full-form, but who cares?

"Yes" said I, trying to look unaffected by .. I don’t know what it is that I always try to look unaffected by. Anyway, I was actually going there, to PESIT. No, really. God Promise. Yes I was. Wow. Then she began quizzing me on how good that institute was, and I kept cooking up weird answers, and when there would come over an abrupt silence I would fill it up with rationalizations for why I said what I just said, interspersing all this claptrap, of course, with that odd compliment or two which she accepted graciously. ‘These are going to be some real promising years there.. there’s no way I am taking admission anywhere else’, I was already fast-forwarding life two months, in my head.

“I may as well take up the lamest course at the lamest IIT this year, I have that option too somehow.” I told her in a tone that was meant to sound self-deprecating but was of course secretly self-important, ironically. “Oye that is great!”she said loudly, but then everything that she spoke she spoke loudly, as if there were someone-outside-on-the-platform she was trying to reach out to. She smiled so cutely though, that I think we should replace the word ‘loud’ that I just used with something like ‘blithe’, alright? Alright.

Someone-outside-on-the-platform there actually was. He soon came in with two more bags, one on each shoulder, sighed unnecessarily at seeing her seated and came and sat down next to her. She then told him I was going to PESIT, then told me it was her brother, I acknowledged, and from what I can recall I had my gaze momentarily stopping at his mustache as I was greeting him, and he did seem to notice that instantly; probably he was quite used to it, his mustache all bushy like bristles of an overused toothbrush.

She stood up when it was already some twenty five minutes that we had boarded the train, and rushed outside to get some potato chips. I wondered what lazy slob this guy was to be relaxing here while she was running around for trivial things at the last minute. "Your Sis is intelligent, I know how I’ve just about managed the cut-offs."I said. He smiled suspiciously, and I shrugged it off and began peering from the window if she was to be seen coming back, but he kept looking at me blankly.

"Hey body shody! Real good physique you've got dude." I said to this guy, mainly because all that blank staring of his was making me feel uneasy.
"How old do you think I am. Take a guess. Take a guess." he said with his hands, deliberately or not I do not know, before his mustache.
'With or without the mustache' I wondered.
He looked 35 to me, but I thought answering with a much lower number would make his day. It wouldn't hurt, after-all, to humour the elder brother of your to-be-something.
"24!" I said, hoping that it flatters him and that he doesn't find it sarcastic.
"Try again. Try again" he said. Did he say everything he say twice over ?
"Ok. Ummmm. 28! I just wouldn't believe you if you tell me you're more than twenty eigh..." I said before he cut me short.
"What yaar!! I'm 19. Kya yaar.!!" he was mad. The first meeting with bro-in-law went awry, I thought. Happens. No worries. All's well, I told myself.

Soon, the announcement was made, the train was about to take off, and she still hadn’t returned. As the wheels first rolled I got up quickly and began running towards the doorway, then watched the guy following me and subdued my stomping footfalls to mere brisk walking, and in a few moments was down on the platform staring out into the crowd teeming with people waving tata-bye-bye to their kins in the train, and some looking at me, bizarrely, in dull sympathy. ‘These fools are blocking the way for her, I am sure, and for these foolish trivialities. Dammit!’ I punched my laps and rushed back in before it would be too late. If I had seen someone munching on chips then, I think I would have snatched the pack, crushed it and thrown it out of the door. ‘Where is her brother now, that useless joker?’ I wondered while walking slowly back to my berth. There he was now - in front of me, walking back to our compartment from the door at the other end of the bogey with all the energy that he had till now saved for his funeral. ‘What now?’ I spread my arms out irritably. ‘What’s the big deal’ he replied ‘twas just a pack of chips. I don’t have them anyway.’

"And your sis ?"I asked.

“She’ll surely have them on her way back home. She loves them. And she knows that I am seated on my allotted seat comfortably, so she can relax. Chillax. Anyway, I must confess I am a little nervous about the counseling now. My rank is such a border case. You said you too just about managed the cut-offs. Hopefully, we should end up in the same branch. Nice nice.”

“Wow! It’ll be fun!” I struggled to get the words out of my mouth, “I guess I just need to catch some sleep now dude, please wake me up when the lunch arrives, will you?”

“Sure.”

“Lovely.” I mumbled drably into the pillow lying on my stomach and dozed off, and probably proposed to her in grand fashion before the slob could wake me up for lunch. And then the chicken wasn’t all that bad either.

The Neighbour

(Excerpt only)

He had been so, so utterly sad for a month now that he could have very easily been made to fall in love. Only in his early twenties, and by most accounts having an enviably bright future ahead of him, his ennui stemmed from what was, in his assessment, the scantiness of suspense. All of his actions – of the day, of the week, the month and so on were etched set on the back of his skull. Rick Bland, the shrewd meets chancy stock-trader by the day, was a mere bland self-traitor by the night. Every night he wondered why he didn’t know what to do with the inflowing money that the day had left him – really, what wretched misery.

It was a Sunday, the hot summer Sunday the most enchanting, the most poetic constituent of which is beyond a glimmer of a doubt the Air Conditioner, and he had been lying in front of it on a bed reading a book of investment mantras that, as the promise went, had all that he needed to know. One could be excused for thinking he was having a good time. Anyhow. Riffling through its pages in a manner of dissatisfied impatience, he suddenly threw the book he didn’t know where, and screamed violently complaining of he didn’t know what. The pressure-cooker, had, burst.

In a matter of seconds though, he had to calm himself up, our mannered lad, our controlled explosion - as soon as was heard approaching the unmistakably dragging stead of old Karen, his neighbour. Into her last days perhaps and alone, she was excusably attracted as much towards the ugly as towards the cheery. It’s much more likely though that she was in fact so enormously repulsed by her own being, that everything else seemed pleasantly inviting by comparison. The scream, vague and short, had spurred her curiosity like she’d spotted a UFO, clear and huge.

She asked him standing at the door ajar if everything was fine, and if she could help him in any way. He, fit, 22, wondered guiltily and she, frail, 74, looked on patiently. As if his paradigms of well-being had been given a wild jolt by this most polite of questions, he clutched the mattress on which he still lay supine even as he said that he was quite all right and was sorry for having disturbed her; his last words trailing off into an abashed, inaudible mumble. He got up thinking desperately of something to talk about with her, to give her company. This was his only atonement, told his conscience; maybe he knew inwardly what ailed a lonely soul in a lavish flat the most. He knew also, after-all, the genesis of his scream, he thought to himself and pouted at the delayed awareness of it. Jump, stand up. Here we go.

After hustling her to the sofa with an amiable, encouraging, requesting face, he rushed at once to the kitchen to make her some tea. She wouldn’t mind some wine, she said with a giggle even as her only surviving frontal upper-jaw tooth hung trembling in a warning to betray her any second. Rick laughed back; ‘Sure, sure’ he said leaning towards the bar.

They gelled readily, and it hadn’t been long before Rick found himself pouring out to her glass the well-kept secrets of his life – his childhood which was spent in a doleful slum outside Upington, that his parents turned up their toes turn by turn when he was still in his teens, how compulsion brought him to Cape Town, and how serendipity made him, a trader’s servant, a trader. He knew a handful of people here outside of his work: the grocery-guy, the pizza-boy, and, and well, that’s that. Sigh. Old Karen gave him a laser stare at this, ‘And me?’, she asked acting somewhat mischievously to have been hurt. ‘What an endearing embarrassment!’ thought Rick, and hugged her at once in true grandsonly fashion.

Days, now, consisted of caring for and being taken care of. Rick brought something new, something special to eat every evening, even though eight out of ten times she, accustomed for years to just porridge and flakes, would be unable to have it. He didn’t mind it, and she? She just loved seeing him lick up his dishes. On weekends, he would take her on a drive to the countryside, where the two of them would watch birds and canals, and occasionally some wild animals, and more rarely still, some spectacular mansions.

“You have weird tastes, I mean, for a 22 year old, don’t you?” she said one day, taking Rick in by surprise.
“Hey, I thought you liked it!” he replied.
“It’s not about me. I’m asking about you.”
“Ha ! I have no taste, I don’t think so. I just like that you like it. That’s all.”
“H’m. You don’t know many girls, do you?” she dropped it.
“Any.” he muttered trying his best to look the other way.

They spent a lot of time fishing that day, and she amazed herself at his enthusiasm after each catch: he would jump and shout like he’d landed on the Moon. ‘He said he liked all of it just because I liked it, that’s all. Was that what he had said?’ she self-talked servicing her rusty, senile memory, when she heard the loud honking of horns: Rick was already prepared to go back, enjoy his catch, on his plate. The drive back home was, ok, it wasn’t exactly awesome with fishstink and karensnore each trying to upstage the other in trying to be Rick’s major headache. And then, we're home; a sparkling new Mercedes parked clumsily already in this cramped, crumbling garage that only this fishloaded MiniCooper was used to getting into.

Rick looked towards Karen, who was still noisily asleep, and considered the possibility of the Mercedes being a surprise present; not that he was desirous of any; not that he would be averse, either. ‘This wasn’t required, but, umm, it’s, wonderful’. In their interactions it had become clear to him that Karen came from a notably affluent family scattered across the globe due to her sons’ professional pursuits. Her husband, of whom he had faint recollections from his first few days here, was a sprightly old man of much local recognition whose funeral had been attended by his patrons in the trading line too. But how is that even remotely a part of the equation, he wondered as he pulled the key out after stopping the car. ‘Would it be proper, Rick, to accept it; wouldn’t it amount to a fee for companionship?’ he froze with a lurking abashment, his arms poised on the steering wheel, the barely resting legs confused in mid-air about their future course of action, and eyes, as if parasitic, swinging alternately between Karen and the mirror with a squeamish restlessness.

‘Aaaaaannchhhi’! You can always count on an old woman to jerk a lost, statue-ed over-thinker into motion, sometimes even when she’s asleep herself. Out they step in a moment into the settling sunlight of a cool evening, and Karen looks at the Merc with an equal curiosity.

They didn't have keyboards back then!

The gentle, distant Sun had become unforgiving in an hour's time. The last smoke was had with whimsical whiffs of cool breeze playfully manoeuvring the smoke as it made its way out after living its character inside the lungs. Now, the surrounding air stood lifeless like a godforsaken rock; and the smoke erupted in dense grooves persistently amassing a trembling blanket, suffocating in its own monopoly.

~

The flyover, otherwise a cacophony, was a trustworthy protector in these times. Even if it weren't, he would still be surveying its bending angles, its chatter under the cruelty of hordes of vehicles, or the fatigue in the pillars that support its weight at its various nooks. He lived here; once the most brilliant student of civil engineering his reputed college had witnessed in decades, this flyover had been his home for the last three days.

His classmates, who had always found him in the company of an old keyboard that he had chanced upon when he moved into his room in the hostel and never in that of his books, envied his acumen as much as his professors were awestruck by his proficiency. In his heart of hearts, he exulted at this giftedness, but also wished he got the gift that he wanted. Music was his passion, his God, but perhaps not his gift. But there was only so bad someone like him could have done at what he loved, he was still way better than the overflowing ordinariness all around him. Day in and day out he practised the symphonies of Mozart, dared to improvise upon them, fiddle with them, flirt with them. This usually continued for hours at a stretch; and it may be true that it also somehow nourished him, for there is no count of how many times he missed the inflexibly timed hostel meals in his trance. By the time he was in his final year, the passion had outgrown itself to resemble an obsession; biographies of Mozart lay all over his room; he made music in the classroom, in the labs, even in his dreams. Salil, his closest friend, who also singularly somewhat closed in on his academic and musical talents, besides sharing endless cigarettes with him over music, stood first this semester. Not that it mattered to Mohan, the rank race; plus it had gone to his best mate, so it was all the more calming. But it was conspicuously unexpected - Mohan who exceeded number twos by huge margins, being exceeded. Salil, baffled himself, sought Mohan to ask what was going on, when Mohan just joked it off by calling him Salieri and calling himself Mozart citing the similarity in names, which of course, was feeble if any. 'Mozart and Salieri', he imagined and swelled.

The days at college were about to end when, in a bolt from the blue, Mohan decided to run away to pursue music. Salil, who had been Mohan's roommate for years, couldn't help feel a pricking concern for Mohan's father - provincial, semiliterate, ingenuous, hearty and by now Salil's Kishan uncle. It was evident from the frequency of his college visits from their native place two thousand kilometres away in the hinterland that uncle's life depended, in more ways than one, on his son. How proud he was of Mohan's education, how he couldn't wait to see the first 'graduate' generation spark up his lineage. Indeed, so ingenuous he was he didn't know Mohan, let alone Mozart.

Salil pestered Mohan persistently to rethink, to not ruin his career, to give himself some time, to take a short holiday, and even to not live a 'delusion', but all to no avail. Mohan vehemently denied being naïvely romantic, and sometimes tried his bit to convince Salil that it was a necessary evil - the construction company employment would render him infertile, bereave him of his purpose, and then 'what use will be the career?', he asked furiously. For some days he defended his as the righteous choice of passion over glory, and then one fine evening, he vanished from the college without any noise. The college mourned a few days later.

It's been two years since, and the college is doing well.

~

Now as the sun had become scorching hot along the left edge under the flyover, and a puddle of dirty water soiled the right, a frail looking Mohan was hard put to find twenty square feet of convenient shade. When he couldn't find any, as luck would have it, he resorted to oblivion as a substitute to solution. So he took out his keyboard, from an unbelievable preservation. It was a carefully crafted case made of construction leftovers that lay everywhere under the flyover. He hadn't sold the keyboard, though it seemed he rarely played it now.

Meanwhile, the suffocating blanket of smoke had by now expanded into a big cloud near the sixth floor balcony of a swanky multi-storey across the road, towards the other end of the flyover. A young man dressed in the finest fabric, sipping the rarest coffee, and smoking the choicest cigarette had his eyes fall upon the keyboard, his once-hobby made him momentarily wonder 'If I could be there'. Two minutes, practical-thinking and a few unsatisfying puffs later, Salil throws his half cigarette out of the balcony, and resumes work on the MS-Excel file waiting impatiently for him back in his cabin.

A few hours passed, the sun relented, the swanky building deserted, and Mohan picked up the half-cigarette thorn-bound upon a cactus plant. Back in his haven, he takes a deep satiating drag, one that also satiated the cigarette itself, perhaps giving it 'delusions' of not being just any saleable commodity.

~ ~ ~

Rumour has it, that two months ago, in the dark of the night, Mozart was heard on this road. Yes, more prominently near that seeping incline under the flyover.

Incomplete Fiction

The Try (incomplete here, complete in the head)

Preface

To the part 1, I had got a comment which said girls were more of backstabbers and jealous than perhaps boys. I don't completely approve of that generalisation myself, and would in no way want that such an inference be drawn from this story I wrote. In fact, for the kind of B-grade storytelling it is, I wouldn't want that any inference of any kind be drawn from it. But now that that comment had made me think a couple of things, I'll ensure that this sequel belies any such notions - boys can be schemers, after all. Simultaneously, I also feel B-grade storytelling shouldn't be met with contempt, the likes of Chetan Bhagat mustn't be trashed the way they are. Why? There's reason. You need B-grade to really value the worth of A-grade. Hideous, yes, but judgements, even if aesthetic, invariably rely on contrast. With this intro, I have cleverly (or so I like to believe) ensured that not much is expected of this mumbo-jumbo written primarily with the aim of assuaging academic monotony.
[Part 1 + Part 2] follows :

Yesterday, Sagar made a startling revelation to all his buddies, including me.

'I love her, guys. I am the Next.'

'Whom?' we asked in chorus, as if rehearsing for some third-rate, forcibly-make-believe street play. Though I never used to get his unnecessary jargon I did get a hint of what his 'next' would be about.

'Aastha, you dumbos.' I heard from him and thought 'who's the dumbo?'

For a second there was the silence of confusion. I suppose all of us were ten percent happy and ninety percent amazed at his courage. Happy for his face was lighted with cheer, a face that had just barely managed to smile mildly for a second when he got a cent in his Numerical Analysis paper, and then made up for it by yawning for a minute. Amazement, was even more obvious. Aastha had dozens of aspirants dreaming of her, and half of them were listening to Sagar at this moment. Though the amazement was at his imagination that made him believe he could win the race. The other day a seminar on 'Heights of Imagination' was arranged by the cultural society people. We never knew he had attended it even as he told us he's going to his room to sleep. Now we were sure he did.

Probably he attended it sitting on the front bench. That is his trademark. Sagar isn't a stud, apart from his grades. But no one knows about his grades. Yes, I forgot to add he's unknown too. Half the class wouldn't recognise him on phone, because they'd not have ever heard his voice.

'Its DCE mate! Where every girl with two feet and a nose considers herself an Aishwarya Rai and all of us some Rajpal Yadav duplicate. And you're talking about the best goddamn material there is.', yelled Abhay. Pretension was never Abhay's forte. But he could have done without this one, I thought. So I went ahead to mend matters so that Sagar doesn't get depressed.

'Great Man! Who knows, you might not even talk to this funny Abhay once you're done. You know what I mean.' I added with a superficial smile and followed it with a wink of an eye that didn't come naturally with the mood either.

'What the hell! I thought you guys would be happy on hearing this. You guys are no friends. You are hopeless.'

None of us said a word, and we agreed to him partly. Apart from Vaibhav who chuckled, 'Better be hopeless than a hopefool!' and then laughed loudly and raised his palms before mine hoping I'd clap my hands to his. That was a tough situation for me. I had already resisted laughing out along with him, but now I had to refuse his clap too. I couldn't resist the temptation. On the spur of the moment, I clapped my hands against his, and then immediately looked back at Sagar and winked an eye at him indicating to him that it's Vaibhav who's the fool. Sagar looked foolishly confused.

After about an hour of conversation in which most of us were hell bent towards pessimism, Rajat finally agreed to help him out. Rajat had a better track record than all the others, so that made Sagar all the more bullish on his chances of success. Though I'd still call the bullishness, pure foolishness, but they were both very proud of their optimism.

Rajat has got this better reputation than all of us, all for nothing I believe. I have never believed his tales about his sky high feats. And none of those feats had been achieved in front of our eyes, we were just told about them. By none other than Rajat himself. All I held about him was that he is my friends' friend who knows nothing better than occupying one computer centre seat all the time and never taking his ass off it, however important the waiting guy's work on the computer might be. He was as happy about his fanlist on orkut reaching two hundred as Mika might have been at the Rakhi Sawant pappi. He is known to have more than a thousand friends there, and doesn't forget to mention at the slightest provocation that he has more people in his fanlist as you'd have in your friends' one. The addict that he is, I wouldn't be surprised if he answers his exam sheets starting with a 'u there?' and putting a :) following correct answers, a :( following presumably incorrect ones, brb before his 'may I go to toilet/drink water' breaks, and gtg at the end of the exam. That might as well be the case infact, coz hiz marx r a bl8ant p8h8ic. He is a humble guy though, lolzz.

Anyways, I went back to my room then, my eyes already strained by the excessive winking.

Sagar came to my room in the evening, and even though I was a million nautical miles deep in my ocean of dreams, his noisy bangs on the door jolted me awake. Unlike in the morning, he was very no-nonsense-goes this time around. He expected from me an estimation of his chances, to which I tried to comfortingly remark that, my forecast simulation project wasn't so advanced just as yet. But like I just said, Sagar wasn't here to hear jokes; bad ones like these - not at all.

Like a formula that clicks just when the viva-voce question is put up to you, the evil thought of fabricating a story to turn him off Aastha crossed my mind. The story seemed to me the quintessence of a necessary-evil, deserving of dethroning Friction. It was, if I may add shamelessly, a Eureka moment. Conscience tried its bit to reject the unworthy idea, but expedience had embedded it oh so rigidly. I told him to check his email the first thing tomorrow morning, while I'd meanwhile get around talking to some of my friends common with Aastha. I was, in fact, buying time for preparation. He left after a while, hopefool.

Later, I scratched my head for half an hour over why I was going to do what I was going to do, despite full confidence that I was going to do it anyway. A slight compunction reminded me of that famous Lalu Yadav one-liner targeted at the Left during the N-Deal debate: Tum agar mujhko na chaho to koi baat nahin, tum kisi aur ko chahoge to mushkil hogi. At the same time, I also felt a little bit Othello-ish. Okay, that last pseudo comparison is only to console myself.


I sat to write him an email. The longest of my life. I made sure I diluted and dilated it with a lot of fondly reflective undertones, and gave the crux a secondary treatment, to give it that guise of ingenuous credibility, to sustain his oblivion of the slightest vested-interests I may have.

___________________________________________________
To: sagartempo@truckdriver.com
Subject : hiii
_______________________________
Hi Sagar,

Here you go.

Last year, I worked for a couple of NGOs. Service was more of a by-product, adding stuff to polish the resume the prime motive. If that makes me sound like a hardened utilitarian, all I can say is No-I-am-not and be wishful that my word be taken for it. Anyway, there was a fabulously good-looking girl working with me in both of them who'd remind you a lot of that 'Swades' actress Gayatri Joshi. A month ago, she erupted out of Sagar, that much-loved South Indian restaurant, while I was chewing on paan outside it. Languishing in a rugged old pair of bermudas, it was almost as though I was caught off guard while she shone in one of those impeccable neo-Patiala-suits. I recognised it as an opportunity to latch on to, but these bermudas repeatedly made me want to slink away. After a fleeting dilemma, I realised I might just get too late. I stood up, put on a calm, nonchalant expression, ruffled up my hair - you know the way they give that SRK-effect, and shouted 'hi' looking at her. 'Hi', she smiled and I began blabbering, without losing a second about how she had slimmed since the NGO days. She nodded in welcome agreement for a while to whatever I had to say. Soon, monotony set in. I longed to come up with something cute and endearing, or at least cracking witty, but for the life of me I have never been able to exude useful charm, particularly when I am itching to. As her sister picked up Tinkle from the magazine-stand, she started telling me how nothing quite matches up to Calvin & Hobbes. I cursed myself for never giving it a try, despite desultorily going through the whole ruckus about it wherever I landed on the internet. A cursory glance over one of its petty pieces and I knew I could go on about it in the most engrossing manner; you know that too, don't you? What a small price to pay for having her listening to me intently. Goddamnit!

I saw Harry-Potters lined up against the pavement. Then, for five minutes I went on unabated about how I had still kept immune to the great Harry Potter mania. I tried my best to convince her of the gravity of the bad times we're in that such frivolous fantastique is adulated as masterly. I lacked conviction in what I was saying but I made sure none of that was palpable. Alright, it was a somewhat despicable attention-mongering exercise, for the kind of attention all things unusual must have. Anyway, I knew I was taking a risk, maybe even clutching desperately at tender straws, but I had to. Did I have to? No, she was already taken. Also, she probably loved Harry Potter more than she loved the guy she loved; I would soon discover through a long, animated carp.

But leave that for later. And anyway how does all that bother you! And yeah, soon came out from Sagar, who, Aastha! Yes, and goodness me, she was with her! Although, what you might want to know, is that she was with him too. Her guy. They were settling the bill while my NGO wali girl had come out to buy her kid sister some comics. You won't believe it, but then do you really think I have the kidneys to contrive such a complicated story?

Now that guy is handsome, Muscular with a bold, italic, capital M, and drives a Pajero. You know what kind of guys drive a Pajero at our age? The prodigal Bad-boys. Ok, you think I am prejudiced. I am only a well-wisher, dude. Go ahead! By the way, I was told his Dad's a political bigwig. Also, I don't think Aastha is as naïve as my NGO wali girl to love a novel-character; or a book, actor or soft-toy for that matter; more than that guy she likes.

Top secret it is that I have revealed to you bhai. But then, what are friends for! Keep it like secrets are kept, though. And wish me luck with the social-worker!

Bye!
___________________________________________________

With that last exclamation mark put, ecstasy overcame me. The only hindrance to this bliss was that I couldn't share it with anyone. Happiness, to sustain, needs to travel. Haven't you noticed that the most hilarious movie in the world seems boring when you don't have a friend by your side to keep passing off those comments on? Those comments that you believe are funnier than the film, after cracking each one of which you swell with self-importance. That I couldn't share this wicked genius with anyone was a slight spoiler, I tell you. Slight, I repeat. The bigger spoiler was waiting to happen.


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The Brothers ( Incomplete .. hazy in the head too)

Kishen started out on the morning paddy inspection very early today. Dawn hadn't broken when he bent over his head to face the chilled handpump water on his head, the gush of cold almost sweeping his head away, but he was enjoying it. Truth be told, he had been enjoying everything for some days now, even the most mundane routines. As the winds blew more and more turbulently, he found his clothing more and more a hindrance to the fun he could have had. He had been like this ever since he was a child. When he was still not an adult, he would accompany his father in the mornings, and occasionally took kid Mohan along. Unlike father and Mohan, who remained glued to their blankets as they walked, he was always tempted to throw away the blanket and run through the winds. With age, that enthusiasm had shrunk, and his jump and jabber filled morning rounds increasingly became reluctant compliances of obligations. For the last few days though, he was reliving old times. Mohan is going to come back after completing his college studies, we hear he is a qualified computer professional now. The last time he was here more than an year back, the occasion didn't call for reunion induced merry-making. Their father had passed away back then, and after a week of sharing the grief, Mohan had gone back without a goodbye, only informing them by a phone call after his arrival at his college, that he had to leave to take some exams. Kishen was furious at him then, and Mohan had started to remain more aloof from them subsequently. His phone calls decreased from daily to weekly to hardly. Letters became far out of question. For Kishen, the guilt had become overbearing. He would curse the day he screamed so madly at him on the phone. 'What could he have done here anyway?', he must have asked himself a thousand million times. In a dramatically pleasant turn of events, Mohan had resumed writing to him now. The last three weeks had witnessed Kishen receiving five of his letters. Why he still wouldn't call them up, was what kept Kishen thinking half his waking hours. 'He's still shy. He always was. Can't call, huh. But writes, just a matter of time before he'll crack his voice on the phone.', Kishen gladdened himself by telling his wife daily. But wait, forget the phonecall, he's coming! The latest letter, recited to him by his eight year old son Vaibhav, reads,

"Bhaiya, it has been long since we talked. I remember you every day, and remember that you couldn't wait for me to come back home from my school in the adjoining village, and never failed walking miles from the fields just to make me those bajra-rotis for lunch that I particularly loved from you, right at the time I was supposed to come back from school. What a chef you were, you'd any day put to shame the five stars here. How do you manage now? Must have got used. I have got a job here. And I'll be back home for two weeks. Meet you on Sunday.


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Born to Stand Out, Trying to Fit In ( incomplete would be an exaggeration)

The boy rose from his bench, the fan still running. He asked his Dad if he could go out for a movie with his friends. He knew Dad wasn't accustomed to thrusting his opinion on him, and wouldn't object. Expectedly, he was allowed. Still, there was a tinge of guilt as he stroked his hair back, and tucked his shirt in at just the right parts, leaving the rest untucked. It was a little discomforting to peep into his wallet too. He wondered if he should be asking for more money. He took five hundred the other day, which he ought to have saved so far, at least nowadays. The guilt would overbear him, he thought and left. At the gate he noticed the tank of his motorcycle empty. He started his mental calculations. Calculations didn't help. He walked to the main road, hoping to catch some bus. He didn't know about which bus to take, asked someone on the stand, misunderstood, boarded and on realising that, got down somewhere.

Somewhere was a dark place. Somewhere was stark dark at One in the noon. A small kid half his age was holding ten sugarcane sticks by his left hand, and fondling an ice filled container with his right, with a grinder making irritatingly scratchy sounds between them.

A man in his eighties knocked a coin on his table, and the small kid's hands started working even more quickly, as though that served to charge the battery of his robotic hands. In seconds he served him the juice, even as the old man looked on, understandably dull on reaction at his age.

The small kid insisted a friend of his to take charge for a moment, while he returned from one seemingly ultra-important assignment of his. Our boy-lost, who stood in the shade of this shop, was in the middle of a useless conversation when the call abruptly ended. An sms followed that informed him his balance had crashed. He was furious, even though at no one in particular. The small kid returned chewing guthka, and out of courtesy had brought one for his friend who sat at the shop. He didn't take it. He nudged him again, to no avail. Visibly, he too was happy that his gift wasn't accepted. He immediately emptied the other pouch also into his mouth. His friend wanted a glass of juice for having been there, to which the kid straightaway refused. His friend ran out snatching two sugarcane sticks from the pile. Our boy,

(I leave it, it'll get way too wayward)

The Audition

This little-known actor had been diligently mastering concealment for years, guided by the notion that it was more exacting than, and therefore superior to, expression. For years, he pursued it with extreme honesty.

An upcoming dramatist hosted a lavish gala, inviting one and all. Our immersed actor was peremptorily chucked from the impervious protagonist's role in her cast-to-be; it was an audition in disguise.

Hurt at the discovery, the actor, indelibly proud of his expertise, felt cheated. 'My disguise was beaten, only because it was evaluated in disguise', he protested.

'Oh no, that's how it ought to be evaluated. Besides,' added the dramatist 'To conceal is façade and is pursued with façade, not honesty. It's a beguiling total-transparency, not a cultivated total-opaqueness'.

The dramatist has since risen to the highest echelons of Theatre, the profession of make-believe.

The actor came back crippled that night, and has since been rehearsing normalcy.

Tests time takes

The day has just begun. The birds chirping and flying in groups are making exquisite, amazing formations with an orange rising sun making for a spectacular background. Plus the cool and wavy breeze is leaving nothing to chance in contributing its part to make the entire setup breathtaking. On some other day, his mind would have started pondering over the observational and artistic understanding these birds have and the even more astonishing communication and coordination these beautiful birds put up with the meagre quack-quack or crow-crow uttering abilities they are provided with. But today he is far more absorbed in the ugly affairs of his life, to give any thought to this lovely alternate reality. Such is the maze of life, that these are the only days he is getting up early enough to witness these picturesque, cheering, heartening views , and he has no heart left to savour the cheer.

He had been a lazy fellow throughout. As a kid everyday in the morning his father would wake him up to get him ready before his school bus arrived. His dad would pack his schoolbag according to the day's study schedule and get his other affairs in order like polishing his shoes, putting his I-card in his shirt's pocket and his mother would prepare a delicious lunch for him, something new everyday, while he would just hurry himself through the bathing and other morning activities in the super-squeezed time left before him. Harjeet was almost in his third year of engineering now, but these things had hardly changed. 'Some things never change', he would jovially say now and then to his friends telling them about his morning routine.

A certain Susheel was the ultimate fan of the tasty food prepared by Harjeet's mother, and happened to be his best friend as well. Day after day, he would lick his tongue over his lips in delight at the sight of his lunch and eventually grab the lion's share of his lunch which had many ardent admirers in the class. He would make up for Harjeet's appetite by offering him his hostel mess' not-good-at-all food which he would have missed anyway. Why Harjeet would gleefully accept this trade policy, was way beyond Susheel's understanding. But he wouldn't push for knowing this too, apprehensive that Harjeet's realisation of common-sense would imply his starvation. Perhaps Susheel needed the sensitivity of understanding what bestfriendship was, apart from the common sense - something he thought he was so rich in, maybe rightly so.

Its summer vacations in the college and these two guys have been out of touch. Surprising it seems considering the two are best of friends, but not so much considering the distance between their residences and Susheel's reluctance towards telephonic conversations. Infact 'out of sight, out of mind' is what he had always been like. Yesterday when Susheel came somewhere near Harjeet's house in connection with some child welfare event he was associated with, he rang Harjeet up. Well frankly, Susheel's primary motivation behind calling and meeting him was bragging about the kind of gracious stuff he was associated with.

"Hello! hey, Harjeet I am here at district centre, how far is it from your house" he roared loudly, the screeching sound of buses and cars in the backdrop making for difficult hearing.

"Just five minutes", Harjeet replied.

"Great, then just come over, I am here at district centre"

"Okay, I'll see if I find time", Harjeet said.

Susheel cut the phonecall abruptly, annoyed by Harjeet's reluctant attitude towards meeting up, that too when he had already travelled some twenty-five kilometres in the scorching sun while Harjeet just had to stroll for five minutes outside his house in order to meet him.

"Who the hell wants to meet him anyway"

"I wont even pass a smile at his sight, he deserves a royal ignore"

These were the thoughts swinging in his mind after the phonecall, an egoist's ego had just been hurt.

The day went on, and Susheel did all sort of work this day. Secretly he was ecstatic about the kind of good deeds he's been doing these days - child welfare and all. And when the day's work was over started leaving for his home, chin up, head held high, shoulders broadened - all signifying his new found pride in his very existence. Standing at the bus stop, he was thinking how bogus some friendships can be ,thinking about Harjeet; and had just begun musing about how he'd narrate on gtalk the day's events and his heroics to a new friend after reaching home, when his mobile phone rang.

"I am outside McDonalds, where are you", Harjeet it was.

"Well I was just about to leave in fact. Anyway, since you've come, ok I am coming, McDonalds right ?", said Susheel, giving himself airs.

"Okay, I am waiting."

Susheel sauntered slowly back to the district centre, his intention being to keep Harjeet waiting for a longer time.

He was a little put off with Harjeet's reluctance in the afternoon but at the very sight of his friend a smile beamed over Susheel's face as if all of that anger vanished instantly into the hot air around, and he started humming in parody spontaneously "Happyian di Happiyan di gal ban gayi" [Mr. Happy grabs a bounty, oh yeah!] as he'd usually tease this Sikh friend of his by calling him Mr.Happy Singh and blending in this nickname in some weird punjabi song he'd little comprehend himself. And he was surprised himself that his anger had disappeared automatically.

Susheel was back to normal, to sum up. And kept cracking jokes and passing funny comments on ambling lovebirds around and every other thing. Harjeet would usually appreciate his knack of making everything look funny and laughed heartily at his jokes, but was unusually silent today. As if he understood no context, he understood no laughter.

Quick to gauge this, Susheel remarked ," aaj tere totey kyun udey hue hain bhai" [Why are you out of your wits, dude?]

"kuch nahi yaar" [Nothing, mate.]

"abe tere chehre pe to baara baje hue hain, bhai bata de kuch hai to", Susheel stuck on. [Then why's your face a stuffed astray today .. don't make a fuss .. just bring it up]

"aise kyun bol raha hai, tujhe pata to hoga". [Why do you act oblivious, you must be knowing everything.]

This was enough to sense something really undesirable had occurred, Susheel hastened to ask, " please tell me yaar,I don’t know".

"My Dad expired a week ago", Harjeet said, the strong boy's lips and nostrils vibrating with agony, with painful memories. Just the other day he was telling Susheel that the only reason he wants to strech the limits, work hard and crack the CAT and enter the IIMs was because he wanted to make his dad proud of him, because he wanted to give his Dad every happiness in the world.

And the world moved full circle for Susheel in these last two seconds. Gasping for breath, struggling to take in this hell of a fact, his throat dried as if it had never tasted water. Speechless, out-of-wits, out-of-words, didn’t know what to say, how to console, and if all that is even meaningful now in the first place. Ashamed of the things he'd been thinking about his friend's reluctance. Ashamed that he didn’t even know about it when almost every little known, hi-hello acquaintance from the class had already paid him an assuaging visit in his difficult time. Ashamed that he wasn’t there for Harjeet when it mattered most. Ashamed that half an hour ago he was mulling over why Harjeet wasn’t there for him.

In five-ten minutes, Susheel came to terms with what had initially been a horrible shock. Gathered courage to console, extend help and enquire about the how? and now? of things. The sun set, the days events far forgotten and they left the place to Harjeet's home. Susheel sat on a stool, in two minutes Harjeet's sister came in with a glass of water, and then Harjeet's mother with a glass of lassi. Spellbound with their hospitality at this hour of hardship, he asked, "Aunty, what's the need, you need not take the burden, just sit down, please"

Harjeet's mother, who had maintained her calm could hold her tears no more and broke down, " Had his father been here he'd have left no stone unturned to make you feel special, whenever any of Harjeet's friend came home he'd just pace here and there just trying to offer whatever nice thing he could, we've got to carry that forward. But we can't be like him" and a tear just dropped and ran across that serene, motherly face.

Susheel tried his best to calm things up, his own heartbeat at its all time high with the surge of emotions. And Harjeet all this while, remained quiet as anything. Almost non-living. Then he brought himself up, calmed his mom, and some twenty minutes of memory-living coloured the conversation that ensued, in which the boy and his mom strived to live those happy moments again, trying to make sure they don't let these moments slip this time. Susheel was overwhelmed by the simultaneous utility and futility, the simultaneous everlasting and shortlived traits of this exercise.

Some half an hour had passed and Susheel's mother was getting worked up since she didn’t expect him to be this late. She had called him up meanwhile a couple of times and told him rather firmly to get back soon, since they had to leave for a cousin's birthday party. Susheel was far from interested in attending the party, but also wanted to avoid the conflicts at home that could arise from his absence, he had the task of not letting his mother get too worked up; she is a hypertension patient.

"Aunty, I guess I'll take your leave" he said.

" abhi nahi , kuch kha ke jaana, dal roti hi hai kuch aur thodi banana hai, koi nahi khaa ke jaana, koi ghar pe rehta hai to phir aasaan rehta hai, akele to bahot kamzor ho jaate hain", she said in a soft tone dressed in affection. [Not so early, at least have your dinner first. You know, when there's someone here, we're still okay. Alone, it gets unbearable, really.]

" please aunty abhi nahi phir kabhi", he mumbled. [Please, Aunt, some other time.]

" achha, hamare yahan nahi kha ke jaoge" [Oh I see, you won't eat at our condemned place!]

Susheel uttered, '' nahi nahi , aaoonga main phir , aapke haath kaa hi to khaata raha hoon do saal se roz, itne chaav se" [No, no! It's the food lovingly prepared by you that I have been nourishing on full steam, for the last two years. I'll be back.. ] and rushed his way quickly out of the house before he would too give in to the emotions, and his characteristic loud weeping took over their deeper, prolonged tears.
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