Chapter 1

‘I cannot lie,’ I lied.

He made a face. I could not tell whether he approved or not. I wondered what lie would get his definite approval. ‘I really cannot, you know,’ I reiterated. ‘I have tried and failed, with unfailing consistency.’ This seemed to get his slight approval, but not his conviction. He shrugged, turned away, as if wanting to go back. It was getting dark but that was certainly not the reason why Koutuk wanted to go. It was probably because he felt resentful and defeated. He has become a loser, I said to myself, a loser to the core. This is how people lose, not because someone else wins, but because they give up. I saw the shimmering lights of the Queen’s necklace from Land’s End. There is so much hope that this city gives, so much to fight for; look at this loser – he turns to go away, from me, his only hope. We started back towards Churchgate, quietly, looking down at the cracked pavement, like what was happening between us. Like the BMC would never repair this pavement, I was not interested in doing anything to this relationship either.

Fat women in pastel coloured T-shirts and dark tights ran towards the end of the city. Their paunchy husbands followed, walking. Women are so conscious of their figures, why are the men so careless? Two old men, probably retired from the civil services or the armed forces or something similar, with waxed moustaches sat on a bench searching for the African coast in the Arabian Sea. Well-trimmed moustaches, white shorts, and ironed T-shirts. One of them was smoking; the other seemed least bothered. What fun to be old and friendly! You just keep looking towards Dubai or someplace in Africa and there is no need to lie to your friend. Koutuk did not seem to notice all this. A near black woman in a glaring pink sari dexterously covered her head, with sugar candy in one hand and an undernourished kid in the other, also moving towards the end of the city. The goon-like creature accompanying her could be her husband or her brother, I could not say, they kept their distance. A couple of eunuchs blessed a couple with a couple of kids. Koutuk saw that and hurried his pace. I smiled to myself. This fellow is afraid of the eunuchs! I felt sad at the same time. Koutuk was not like this.

Of all the people that knew us, only Koutuk, Komal, and I knew that we weren’t in love. Everybody else was sure of a wedding event in the near future. Komal was meeting Parineeta today. A couple of days ago Komal and Koutuk argued over his past life. Argument led to a near walkout by Komal with a promise to expose Koutuk’s past to Parineeta, unless he confessed about it himself. Koutuk wanted me to tell Komal that all that she knew about his past life was all misinformation. It would only harm his relationship with Parineeta, and how much he loved her and a whole load of balderdash, which would save his life and his to-be wife. He was pleading to my relationship with Komal, to my ability to convince Komal to keep quiet.

‘Think about it man, this could mean the end of me and Pari,’ he whimpered, ‘you know how much I love her.’ We were standing below the ugly rhomboid digital clock at Churchgate. Half of Mumbai’s population was scurrying around to get home to fight with their wives after they fought with the bus conductors after they fought with fellow commuters. The red colon in the clock was blinking between a red six and a red eleven.

‘I told you I couldn’t lie.’

‘You can try, at least?’

‘She would see right through me, and the she will ask me a difficult question and I won’t be able to answer it.’

‘See what you can do, I leave it up to you. You are my best friend,’ he said with an air of finality.

I lit up; he looked down on the floor as if searching for words that would convince me to lie. I was getting angry. He suddenly looked me straight in the eye, for the first time that entire evening. He said, ‘Do something.’ He walked off to the first platform, and got into the 6:14 Andheri Slow. I was amazed. Koutuk never travelled by slow trains.

I was to meet Komal at seven at the Asiatic. Komal came three minutes late and apologized for nearly thirty. Within that long apology, I came to know that she was very busy, after a long time her company was recruiting six more people for ticketing sales, and she had been busy filling all the forms and stuff. She talked on without a pause. She was tired, dishevelled, and definitely overworked, but she looked so fantastically fresh. I was not paying attention to the details of the telemarketing applicants. I was looking at her. We went to Satkar to have our daily dose of coffee.

‘So how was your day?’ bang came the question.

‘Oh, fine, nothing special,’ I replied, gathering my senses. She never seemed to notice that I notice her so much.

‘You were to meet Koutuk today, weren’t you? ‘

‘Yes,’ no more. I remembered Koutuk’s look at Churchgate.

‘I met Pari at lunch’

My heart missed a beat. ‘Uh uh.’

‘You won’t believe this.’

‘What?’

‘She is calling it off.’

‘Calling what off?’

‘You know? Pari and Koutuk. She is calling it off.’

‘Why?’ I lit up another.

‘I cannot really say.’ She said, waving her hands indiscriminately in front of her face as if that really stopped her from inhaling the cigarette smoke. ‘She gave a lot of vague reasons like she was feeling stagnated and that they were not going anywhere and that Koutuk was not doing very well in his job and their future seemed so bleak. But I think there is more to it. She did not look me in the eye once while she was telling me all this. I feel bad for Koutuk.’

‘Look who’s talking, till yesterday you were going to be the reason for their break up.’

‘I would have never talked to Pari about Sunday. I just wanted Koutuk to understand that a past life, as much as we want it to go away, comes back, sometimes. I just wanted him to know and tell Pari about everything. At least Pari should know about it. I thought he would tell Pari, rather than me telling her. It is then for them to sort it out between themselves. Why should I go and tell all the gory details? Anyway, I have better things to do.’

‘Like?’

‘Like having coffee with you and discussing why women are still not liberated in our country.’

That, my friend, was a smile that could bring a dead man to life.

‘What time do you have to get back?’ It was already eight.

‘I have another forty-five minutes.’

A girl walked in with two prospective grooms. The grooms were smiling, real hard, each trying to out do each other’s smile-width. When they got to the table, they were vying for the place beside her. I wanted to shout across from where I sat – in front of her man – in front of her! You are courting! The girl was having a good time. Komal asked for another round of coffee. We continued talking for another hour and a half. She left with the smile that could bring a dead man back to life. I went back to Satkar and had another coffee.

###

My mornings were pretty standard; I commuted with a million other dreamy and ambitious sardines to the south side of the city to make our millionaire dreams come true. Every day, for the most of us, began as a struggle with waking up in time to match the municipal water supply timetable. Mothers, working or otherwise, got up late midnight to match the timetables of their sons and husbands. It then followed a hurried five to ten minutes walk to the bus stop, where a bus ensured that we reached in time to struggle with the trains and a million fellow-sardines. The super-efficient trains of Mumbai then took us wherever in time for our next struggle – with customers, supervisors, bosses, colleagues, and the like. Reverse what you just read, to know how we managed our evenings and our way back home.

But the evenings had a saving grace for me – the coffee with Komal. I guess that was what kept me from moving away from this city and moving to another wannabe-city in the country. And somewhere each of my fellow sardines had something like this that made them do what they did every week day without fail, like clockwork. Coffee with Komal manifested in many ways. For others it meant the six-thirty show at Eros, or bhelpuri on the roadside, dangling your legs at sea at the Queen’s necklace, cheap alcohol and rich philosophy at a congested bar, shopping at Fashion Street, or one of the other million things that made the sardines stay in the rut. I did not expect being a hardware engineer at BitWise Computers to make me a millionaire, ever. Though, I did have dreams of making it big, living in Malabar Hill, Colaba, or Cuffe Parade, getting my chauffer-driven Mercedes Benz stuck in the slow moving traffic during peak hours. Nothing extraordinary. Just like any of the zillion people that walk this reclaimed city.

BitWise supplied assembled computers, sold them to companies like Globex Travel & Tours – a company as unimaginative as BitWise. These were the early nineties, and every computer related company was a permutation of bit, byte, micro, soft, comp, and tech. In early ‘93 I had gone to Globex to explain to Mrs. Joshi the relation between additional RAM (read additional cost) and better performance. I cared less if she bought additional RAM or not – a support engineer wasn’t going to get commissions like the pompous Dhrubo Chatterjee – the sales guy at Bitwise. I saw Komal smile through the ugly brown ageing sun-film on the glass of Mrs. Joshi’s cabin, and then I suddenly became interested in helping Mrs. Joshi with her problem. I inferred: if I could convince her to buy RAM, I would have to come to install it, and there could be more such computers, and more such visits that I would have to make. Business, trade, and commerce started making sense.

I started applying my mind to the job. Sold more RAM than what Globex required and more than what Dhrubo ever sold, and finally got to install RAM on Komal’s machine. She worked there as a ticketing agent, lived two suburbs away from me, with her retired father, a younger brother, and a mother who was a very good cook. She believed in the power of computers and more RAM. It worked for me. All I wanted to do was see her smile. That, my friend, was a smile that could bring a dead man to life.

Life really started shining for me on a grey, gloomy, rainy day, on July 16, 1993, at 5:30PM to be precise, when Komal gave a distraught call at Bitwise. Thanks to the badly assembled computers at BitWise, Komal computer crashed at leaving a lot of itinerary things to be printed and sent to all the well-to-do people who travelled abroad in airplanes that belonged to different countries. We worked till eight in the evening to recover the data, print it and send it. Mrs. Joshi, the kind soul that she was, asked me to please drop Komal to the station, if it wasn’t too much of a bother. No problem, Mrs. Joshi, you made my day, maybe even my life. The rains helped, delaying the trains and increasing the train to sardine ratio. I offered to drop her home if she wanted to avoid the rush.

That was the first evening we stopped for a coffee at Satkar, and we haven’t let go of that place as yet.

###

The bus was speeding even more. It was a beautiful bus. It looked even more beautiful in the night. It had those thin fluorescent lines running along its side. I was getting tired, running out of breath. But I had to catch the bus. I had to. I could not afford to miss it. I ran faster. I was about to catch the bus, but when my walkie-talkie rang, I had to let go off the bus. I stood still on the wet road. The sodium vapour lights made an abstract reflection on the roads. The walkie-talkie rang even louder, and it sounded like a very bad land line.

I woke up with a start. The telephone was ringing. My HMT said it was three-fifteen in the morning. ‘Hello?’ I whispered in the mouthpiece. I hate it when the phone wakes you up. You always wake up with a start and you always sound groggy.

‘What happened?’ Koutuk asked.

‘What are you doing, up so late?’ as if it mattered to me.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he nearly barked. I was sure he had had more than one beer, too fast.

Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why:
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

‘Is that why you called me, are you mad?’ I barked back.

‘Didn’t Komal tell you?’ a suspicious return bark.

‘No, what?’ a barking lie

‘I thought you cannot lie,’ he reflected.

‘I cannot,’ I lied back.

‘Pari called it off, she called me a couple of hours ago and said “Let’s call it a day, Tuku, things won’t happen, things won’t work. Don’t call me back ever, I want to forget you as soon as possible.” And she hung up. Just like that.’

I was not sure but I sensed Koutuk crying, not tears and sobs, but the one where the heart cries, when people make those contorted faces to express their pain and they are actually trying hard not to show the pain. Like the films on the Hallmark Network, like Shah Rukh Khan before he found directors who didn’t tolerate nonsense.

‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow, is that all right?’ I offered.

‘Yeah, fine,’ he seemed not to listen, and what I said did not seem to bother him.

‘Take care,’ I said, nearly meaning it.

A grunt from the other side signalled the end of the conversation. Koutuk was not like this. A month later Pari married a rich, educated farmer from Ratnagiri. The same night Koutuk slashed his wrist. I never knew he was capable of such bravado. His parents tried a lot to understand from me, the reason for his death.

‘I know no reason why he should have done such a thing, he seemed so happy,’ I lied.

Chapter 2

Every lower middle class two-room home in Mumbai has a cot that has four to six thin cotton mattresses on it, which more likely than not, are not made to fit the size of the cot. In a family of four, every night three of these mattresses come off the cot and the family sleeps on them and the head of the family sleeps on the surviving mattress. Every morning the three mattresses go back on the cot and make carpet area, sans the carpet, available for the day. My home was no different. My mother, brother and I slept on the floor, and my father, after calculating salaries and wages for the railways, slept on the remainder mattresses on the cot. I had never seen it any other way for the past twenty years. Each night of my youth on the mattress was a wish to make a lot of money so that my mother could also get a good night sleep on a comfortable mattress. My father could rest in an armchair and read all the news papers that he wanted to. My brother, well he could take care of himself. I cared less

I often went to Koutuk’s house to study. I often stayed back and we watched the beautiful girls in his building. Koutuk’s father used to work for an advertising agency. He had everything that I wish my father had. They lived in a plush housing complex in a flat on the twelfth floor, overlooking a well manicured garden. He had enough beds in his house for eight people. They even had eight cots! Koutuk’s father was a person I looked up to. He spoke like he knew everything in this world and seemed like a man who was capable of doing anything. He even travelled to London and New York. He knew so much. His mother was like a mother that we all know; loving, caring, affectionate, and a disciplinarian. I thought this was how all mothers in the world were. Most of my friends had mothers like this. Most celluloid mothers were like this. I wished my mother was like this. Koutuk’s mother was the mother I never had. Koutuk was an only child. He had everything he could wish for but Koutuk didn’t wish for much. He was a happy person – by default. Most things never hurt him or caused him anguish. He never felt the need for things. Maybe this happens when you know things are available and possible.

In school, Koutuk somehow managed to get a rank, ace his tests, answer all questions. He understood integration and differentiation like it was simple division. I could barely do the first step of integration. I could barely spell calculus. I managed to pass my class however, always, and get promoted. Koutuk and I were last-benchers. For eight years we sat together. Our school was a like home to us, more than what we actually called home. It was the best place in the world. We had our nooks and corners. In the school ground we displayed our prowess at athletics, to appreciating looks from the girls. For eight years we ate from each others’ lunch boxes. We did a whole lot of things other than studying. We decorated our desks for all the grateful juniors to see. We inscribed the euglena on the desk, labelled the euglena, all its excretion points and the nucleus. We participated in debates. We were house captains, rivals, in good spirit. I was the geography teacher’s blue eyed boy, Koutuk, obviously was the Math teacher’s. Whatever we did, we did together. We ruled. In the last year of our school, academically the most critical year of all, we fell in love. Both fell in love together, unfortunately with the same girl.

Anita Ulall was God’s gift to our otherwise insipid life. She made life, and all the things that parents kept telling us, seem so much worthwhile. She had come from a place in South India that I didn’t care to pronounce. She was a fairly reserved person, when she joined class. In a class where every girl looked either like your sister, mother or a teacher, she evoked newfangled feelings in our pubescent minds.

I have read many books, by many authors. It seems that the protagonist always looks at the eyes of a character and describes the entire personality. To save my life, I have never been able to do it. I get to know people when I work with them. The authors say, “They were beautiful and clear eyes, yet they had a hint of pain in them, a pain almost forgotten, yet they sparkled to look at the future that awaited them.” Bullshit. I have never seen pain in eyes. I have seen it on bodies or contorted faces. Eyes, when I see them are big or small, coloured or not. Anita had brown eyes, small, pretty, and perfect for the longish face that she had. She had lips as if Arjun had stencilled them out of his bow. I still won’t be able to explain it to you like most authors do, I am not an author myself; it was just her – in her entirety, that made you want her – forever – by your side.

That entire year I slept a content person. I said to myself, “Sleep tight, think of what the stars might.” The sentence rhymed; didn’t make much sense, but it didn’t matter. Anita was a part of my life, she was mine. Short of reading Mills & Boon, I was a hopeless romantic. Anita did strange things to us. Koutuk’s grades started falling, mine started looking better. Back home, my father was gloating at his upbringing. My brother thought I was cheating in my unit tests. My mother just nodded with a hint of a smile. I didn’t care.

That entire year went by, full of love. Neither of us ever expressed our love. We just became more distant. I studied alone; I didn’t go to his house. The community building that we lived in, had a well lit staircase. Rich people paid tax for the electricity on my staircase. Koutuk studied at home, at a desk, with more stationery than he required. The text in the textbooks was not making sense for him. None of our overtures towards Anita were obvious. With Anita, we exchanged biology journals, worked on a science project together, met after school, joked, and laughed, hands in pockets and feet drawing imaginary geometrical shapes on the floor. Koutuk and I employed every skill to get her attention. Everyday was pregnant with the hope that the next day would be the day that we could claim our love from God himself, or herself – in this politically correct age. Those days, God was a guy; he made sure Anita was a part of our lives. He was the best.

The last few months of school year bought the pangs of the final exams, dread of the future seeped slowly. Marks and an admission to engineering or medical wasn’t so much the issue. I was more concerned what I would tell Anita’s father. Engineer or Doctor? I hated biology. Couldn’t do anything worthwhile in Math. What if I became an actor? Film stars make a lot of money. Her father would ask me about my future and how I would keep his darling daughter happy. Ignore the fact that I had no idea what her father looked like, what he thought, or what he believed. I didn’t even know if her father was alive or not. I just assumed that he was. These were the days of getting influenced by feature films – our ethos, in fact our life itself, was shaped by how a boy and girl in love would break the barriers of the world and live in some forest or a village that even Arundati Roy wouldn’t know. The potential father-in-law was always a moustache wielding, 303- toting, ex-defence person who killed people in war. He smoked a pipe or a cigar. The children would rebel, the boy would work in a quarry or cut wood, never mind that the boy was a management graduate from some godforsaken city in America.

Koutuk was a true romantic; I guess he would have become a lumberjack, if the situation called for it. His father could even afford him a management degree from that godforsaken city in America. When I think back, I think he could’ve become a lumberjack, I could not. He had that edge over me. I hated hard labour. Why was it so that true love and reality were always enemies? I would rather study hard and clear my medical entrance. In fact, I would rather be an accountant or a bank officer and have half the year off in holidays and paid leave, even get loans at low interest rates. If my father pulled a few strings I could become a Travel Ticket Examiner. A TTE career had great potential; imagine the amount of bribes from ticket less travellers. The second largest railway network in the second most populated country, summed up to a good earning. Forget calculus, my basic mathematics was good.

For all these dreams and plans, not much happened, except that Koutuk and I slowly parted ways. Anita of course moved on after the exams, without a trace – her family moved to Mizoram. Is that a place where anybody goes? The only thing that we knew about Mizoram was Aizwal – its capital. That too because our geography teacher made us remember by heart, the capitals of all twenty-two states. That’s how many we had then, before every individual in the country felt like having one for himself, or herself. They gave it the reason of good governance and regional focus, good governance is not slave to size, all it requires is the will.

Our love for Anita remained as unexpressed as the draft of a novel in a publishers trash can. There were no shrieks, no groans, no wailing, not even contorted faces, just a silent death. No grievance, no tears, life went on as usual.

Chapter 3

Temperature is a form of texture. In the way we feel it. In the way it makes meaning to us. Temperature, like texture is recognised when we feel it. My index finger, with a mind of its own, moved up and down my fourth glass. It was half-empty. I smiled. I am supposed to say it is half-full. The temperature at the top of the glass was different than that at the bottom of the glass. My index, as if asking the glass to either empty itself completely or get a refill and top the glass with ice. I smiled a bit wider. That’s me, looking for stability and consistency; my index finger is so much like me.

I left the glass and laid back on the sofa. The ceiling had concealed lighting. They could give as much light as they wanted; they were barred from being on stage.

Your’s is to give, not to seek

Had I read that phrase somewhere? I didn’t remember. It did sound very biblical. If I made that up, it was nice; I should write it down somewhere. I should remember that the phrase is all about love. The bar was empty, save for the weary and dreary penguin-dressed waiters, waiting for me to attain rum nirvana. They could not ask me to leave, there was too much commerce was at stake. I leaned forward to my glass again. I let my index finger do its own thing again. I looked at the clear liquid in the glass. Long way, I said to myself. From cheap dark rum to a sophisticated white. From cheap smoky bars to this well-ventilated and well-stocked bar manned by penguins, who themselves go to cheap smoky bars for their nirvana. One of the penguins replaced the chips that I had not eaten at all. You always get more of what you don’t want in life. I thought about Koutuk, five years had gone by. I haven’t have had a friend like him, since he gave up on the one thing that I know he wanted. Komal and I didn’t talk about him. He was confined to my memory dungeons, from where I often heard shrieks that tortured me.

The same chip-replacing penguin interrupted my thoughts. He gave me a threatening smile – fill up or pay up. It’s all about money, honey, I knew all about that. I told him I’d pay. I went back to the hotel room and raided the mini-bar to help me continue my thoughts.

###

We met five years after school. I was lazily hanging out of the door of a Churchgate bound local, while it had stopped for a few seconds at Mahim to collect more burden than it could handle. A train pulled up on the other platform. He stood straight at the door looking purposefully ahead, his thoughts probably not far away from him. He shouted out for me. Just then, my train had collected enough sardines – it moved.

I shouted back, “Bandra, platform 1, below the indicator!”

He acknowledged; we smiled, waved to each other.

Those were probably the longest twelve minutes in my life. I changed at Matunga and took a train back to Bandra. He was waiting for me. We shook hands, hugging was not yet the norm. We decided there was a lot that we had to catch up so we went to Mahim, call it providence – that is where we were supposed to meet. Mahim had this dingy beer bar – for the uninitiated, a beer bar serves only beer – that was run by an Iranian. Any place that that had the look of an Irani place was assumed to be run by an Iranian. Even if it was run by a Parsi or a Muslim, or for that matter anybody. I had read somewhere that the Parsis came from Persia, which is Iran, really. Fars is a province in southern Iran, where the Parsis apparently hail from. Somehow it all made sense and just added up. Irani was more convenient.

Going there made even more sense because this place served beer at just two rupees premium for chilling the beer to a good temperature. The chilled beer helped Koutuk and me warm up. There was so much unsaid when we left school and went our ways to do our own thing. We talked of friends who were in touch with, which did strike me as ironical, because, we, the best of the friends were not in touch. We talked of fathers and mothers being the same – just getting older. Koutuk had done his engineering; I told him I was a physics graduate – the second tier future citizen of the country. I see things changing now, but in those days you were worthwhile only if you studied after school for four or more years. They were so many graduates in the country, it was not funny. Or maybe it was.

The formal conversation started reaching its natural death. We went quiet for a minute that seemed to stretch for an hour. Koutuk broke the awkwardness with a subject that I wouldn’t have broached,

‘Are you in touch with Anita?’

‘No,’ I said, quicker than I wanted to. The funniest emotion I have ever felt is guilt. It doesn’t matter if you have done anything wrong. Even if there is a possibility of guilt, we get shrouded by this monster.

‘She got married year before last, she’s expecting now.’

‘You are in touch!’

‘No, I met Jason a few days ago, he told me’, he was staring at me, I was not sure if he was ready to break into a smile.

‘That’s news, who is the guy doing all the mischief?’

‘Jason,’ he said as if it was obvious; I looked at the peanuts that were fast disappearing. He wanted me to ask who it was.

I wished I hadn’t asked. Jason was the only rival Koutuk had as far as getting good scores in school was concerned. Jason and Koutuk were fierce rivals. I just made a face back to him, as if I didn’t approve and looked away.

A man in his forties was sitting alone at the table next to us. He seemed to have a permanent glum expression. He was looking towards the door, into space. I shivered when I saw such people. They indicated to me, what life would be for me if I did not do something about it, fast. I felt a pang of guilt again. My father had mortgaged a part of his pension and all of my mother’s jewellery to get me admitted to a private course that taught you how to assemble computers. His supervisor’s son was doing the same thing. My father was assured that assembled computers were the future. Here I was, skipping the class and having beer. I didn’t want that guilt. My father had done all that he could. He could have just let me go, lived the rest of his life with his wife in comfort in the measly pension that he got. I don’t recall my mother ever spending any money. I would have taken care of myself. If I had studied sociology, it would have helped me understand why families in my country are like this. But in 1987 sociology had no known future in my world unless you wanted to walk the great slums of the city and talk about vasectomy, condoms, and three-year distancing of the two children that the government mandated.

‘You have a girlfriend?’ Koutuk brought my idealistic thinking back to reality.

‘Nope,’ if I was with anybody else, I would have tried to look ashamed. Not having a girlfriend was de mode.

‘I don’t either,’ he said, an unquestioned answer.

Brothers in arms, band of brothers, whatever, we were bonded again. The beer bottles emptied faster with animated talks about good times. Of good teachers and bad; of girls that could have been more than classmates in school photographs. It was a good evening. It was sunshine at its best.

We talked a lot more. More intimate than we were ever before.

###

It was three in the morning. I was looking out of the window. Taxis were still looking for long distance fares; the odd late worker was hailing a hopeful taxi for a long distance fare. How marriages happen! The city of life; the city that never sleeps. I wondered if room service would restock the mini-bar at that time. It still had enough stock in it for me to go on for an hour or two. It’s better that I call them at four in the morning, I smiled wickedly.

There was a hard knock on the door with the natural assumption that the person in the room is asleep. Another penguin greeted me with a good morning.

‘Sir, there is a lady at the reception who insists on seeing you at this time. Will you please come down?’

I asked him to send her up.

‘Sorry sir, our rules do not permit entertaining lady guests in the room.’

‘She is my wife; I have been waiting for her. Please get her to the room and please help her with her luggage.’

‘But sir, this room is booked only in your name,’ a last ditch effort. Protocol and SOP seemed to be giving way to fear of a bad decision and taking undue responsibility.

‘Yes, I was not sure whether she will come, but I have booked a double room.’ I offered.

‘Yes sir,’ he succumbed to the fear of backlash. I smiled back, thanked him and passed gracious currency in his hands. His late night shift made sense to him, bowed slightly, and went down to get Komal and her bags to the room.

‘Your Mom is not very happy with you’, she said as she surveyed the room.

I nodded

‘She hoped that you would call at least to tell her that you are fine, if not that then at least to check if she is fine.’

I nodded once again.

‘Don’t you want to know how I know of all this?’

‘I was about to ask, did you speak with her?’ I lied.

She flung a pillow at me. Of all the people I lied to, Komal was the only person who could see through. I still lied anyways. My guess was that, someday I would succeed. Only, there weren’t many times that required lying to her. She said things that would make me lie.

‘Call her! Is it that difficult?’ she nearly cried out.

I went to the mini bar and replenished my drink. ‘How was your flight?’

‘It was good, like a flight should be; nothing great.’

‘You tired?’

‘No Eddie, not at all!’ I was the Executive Director in the company I worked for. Komal had since chosen to call me Eddie. Eddie was her title for me. Thankfully, she kept it to herself.

‘I left by the early morning flight,’ she continued, kicking off her shoes, ‘I had a full day meeting in a stuffy room, came back by the evening flight, which was delayed by three hours, and it took me another hour to get a cab to this place because it is so close to the airport. Why on earth would I be tired?’

Sarcasm, a friend told me once, causes peptic ulcers – whatever they may be. I have never bothered to check if it is true. I didn’t want to tell her that, not now. We loved talking but, somehow it seemed to me that that was not the best subject this early morning. I could apologise, and ask her if she wanted food or a drink, I could let her continue the conversation to whatever she wanted to talk about, I could stop refilling my drink, because that action of mine could trigger another adverse conversation.

‘And that’s drink number?’

Boom!

If I could get paid for forecasting what this girl was going to say, I would have been a millionaire.

‘Three,’ I know I should have said seven.

‘Right’

‘Seven,’ I confessed.

‘I wish we were really married. I could become a nag.’

I smiled a defensive smile.

The Albatross: An Introduction

UPDATE (To the UPDATE below):

Chapter 3 is up.

UPDATE (To the UPDATE below):

I thought I’d write anyway.

UPDATE:

The Albatross was beaten to the publishers’ desk by another writer, who doesn’t have a day job, and is now a best-seller. At least I know now, what this could have been.

Till some original idea finds it way in my head, not much will happen here. In the meanwhile, thank you all for your encouragement, comments and criticism.

Cheers!

PS: the posts have been removed and moving them to a static page on this site. I’ll link the page as soon as it is up.

–xox–