Part-Time Devdaas... (7 page)

“Shit, shit, shit,” I yelled. The waiter ran to us again.

“Nothing, repeat the order,” Raghu said. “You continue.”

“I’m so jinxed man. I royally fucked a potentially romantic moment with my hung up shit.” I gulped the first drink as the waiter made a second one.

“Don’t worry
yaar
,
hota hai
, and I think she loves you too. So chill,” Neha said and got back to getting naughty with Shashank.

Three drinks later, I messaged her,
“I know you love me so why don’t you just say it.”

It was a huge turn off, she told me years later.

For a week after that night at Pyaasa, I called Hrida once every morning and evening to which she responded either by cancelling the call or by letting the phone ring. I messaged her a couple of times a day. Depending on my mood, the content of my messages ranged from saying sorry to telling her that she was over-reacting, from begging her to forget my stupidity to telling her that I was never going to bother her again but there was no reply from her. I would have met her outside her college but it was vacation time so the colleges were closed. I tried getting to her through Neha, but she stopped taking her calls too.

“I’m telling you she is psycho.
c
an’t you see it.” Raghu said. I threw a lit cigarette at him in anger.

Neha was perhaps right in saying that it was a matter of time. Maybe Hrida was overreacting and she would be fine in a few days. Maybe Raghu was right. What if she was really a psycho. Maybe her boyfriend had come back and she was happy with him.

I crashed on my bed with all kinds of ‘maybes’ whirling in my mind. In the past one month, Hrida had practically turned my life upside down. I was in love, I was frustrated, I was happy, I was irritated, I was confused, I was helpless, and I was anxious. I chose the final maybe that came to my mind, “Maybe I should accept the fact that we weren’t meant to be and forget her.”

I bade goodbye to all the thoughts and closed my eyes to sleep, hoping to clear my mind.

A
fter Shashank’s party, I went into a self-imposed exile. I couldn’t accept Hrida’s absence from my life. There had not been a single attempt from her to get in touch with me and that made it impossible for me to live. The riot in my head had been replaced by endless conversations between my own voices.

“Has she forgotten me?” Voice One said.

“Yes looks like it. Maybe she is already dating someone else,” Voice Two replied.

“No, can’t be,” Voice One stressed.

“Why not?” Voice Three asked.

“Because...” Voice One had no answer. The rest of the voices began to laugh.

“See, even you know it,” Voice Two continued bullying. Voice One began to weep.

“Look at this loser, it is because of him that we didn’t have any life in the past seven years.”

“Yes you are right. Remember how we blew that sweet seventeen-year-old horny girl at Bittu’s sangeet.” Voice Three said referring to a girl I met at Malini Didi’s sister-in-law’s wedding.

“She was Jiju’s cousin, you asshole,” Voice One yelled.

“What about Roxy?” Voice Four asked.

“Who Roxy? Voice Three enquired.

“That girl we met in Chandigarh for that shoot.”

“Hrida was with me then, and I couldn’t cheat on her.” Voice One yelled again.

“Fair enough, where is Hrida now?” Voice Four asked

“Probably in bed with a guy with a Greek-god-like body,” Voice Five said.

“Shut up!!! Shut up!!! Shut up!!!” Voice One wailed.

I opened my eyes, switched on my laptop, and googled
‘Most painless ways to commit suicide’

I clicked the first link that appeared, it said:

‘101 foolproof and original ways to end your own existence on earth’

–              Jump from an helicopter into a valley,

–              Create a spark at a gas station and blow yourself up,

–              Get plastered with explosives and blast yourself in parliament. In case you change you mind at the last moment, the guards will kill you; and if you succeed, at least you’ll do some good to you country before you die,

–              Sneak into a space shuttle and lie beneath the big-ass fire nozzles,

–              Lie down on a railway track and pay someone to tie you in case you choose to run away…

There was not one thing that I could use right at that moment. Plus, I wanted something painless that would kill me instantly. The pain I was already experiencing was enough to last for next seven lives. I didn’t want any more of it.

I ran into the bathroom, locked myself up, and hastily quested for it in the cabinet above the water tank for a few minutes before I finally found it. Phenol. My end. The study of organic chemistry in high school came in handy.

“
Phenol is a strong neurotoxin and when mixed in the blood stream it shuts down neural transmission system and can kill a human body instantly.
”

I had to make sure that I gulped a nice mouthful because if I didn’t die, my mother would kill me slowly with her melodramatic lectures.

I made myself comfortable on the pot and opened the cap of the bottle. I took a deep breath and put the bottle to my mouth. As soon as the contents entered my mouth I felt a horrendous burning sensation. And just as it was about to reach my epiglottis, the voices of all the people I loved screamed in my mind asking me to stop.

“Oh shit I’m actually killing myself!
”

All of a sudden, I spat it all out. I panicked that I was going to die and shoved my head into bucket filled with water. My mouth was on fire. I spent the rest of the night cleansing it.  

“See the gutless loser can’t even kill himself,” a voice mocked me, and the mental torture began all over again.

One morning, five days after my almost suicide day, I was having breakfast with my dad.

“Someone broke you heart, buddy?” Dad asked.

“
Haan
...” I mumbled coming out of my lost world. “No, nothing like that.” I said and smiled.

“You haven’t been eating,” he said looking at my plate.

“I’m alright. I’m not feeling hungry,” I was so hungry that I could have eaten an elephant. I hadn’t eaten in days. My mouth was so sore due to the stunt I pulled off the other night that I could barely drink water.

“So what plans for the new year?” Dad asked.

“Nothing yet, but will do something.”

“Cool. We are going to the City Club with Raunak Uncle’s family. Tell me if you kids want to come. I’ll put your name on the list,” he said.

“Sure, I’ll let you know.”

I wasn’t excited about it. Besides, Shashank and Raghu would have plans with their respective girlfriends. Then it suddenly hit me that it was the first time in the history of our friendship that Raghu, Shashank and I were single at the same time. Since school days there was someone or the other with either of us. No girl was ever good enough for Raghu so he was single most of the time. Shashank’s love stories couldn’t last for more than a month or two. But somehow his relationship with Neha lasted for six years while I was with Hrida for seven years. Shashank broke up with her some time after he went to the US. After my break up with Hrida, it was as if the Almighty had blessed the three of us with the ultimate era of bachelorhood. I called Raghu and asked him to meet me at the naka with Shashank.

The naka was originally a municipal corporation transport bus stop on the service lanes of eastern express highway which was encroached and transformed into a cigarette and chai stall. It had a four table seating arrangement where you could munch on
bhajiya
and other snacks with chai all day long. We had innumerous memories of this place. Raghu had discovered it back in the engineering days and it soon became the place to come to when we bunked college. We’d practically live in this shanty from morning till evening. Life was so much fun back then, I thought.

“Five milds and a lighter,” I told the guy at the stall. I lit a cigarette and took our table.

I noticed the guy beside me. I thought I’d seen him somewhere, his charm was very familiar. I asked who he was.

‘Narayan Kaka’s son.’ The stall owner said and smiled.

I smiled too.

Cut to a few years back:

The age group of friends we made at naka ranged from fifteen to eighty. But out of all of them there was this one person who touched my life. A grim looking eighty-year-old man, white hair, dark-complexioned, wrinkled face, body a bit frail but showed signs of what would once have been a hefty physique. He would come in everyday at the same time and smoke his
n
avy
c
ut and leave; he was never out of schedule, for years I saw him like that.

Then one day after his first cigarette instead of leaving he sat on a chair besides me at the stall and ordered a
chai. There was something about this guy that made me smile every time I saw him. That day there was something off with him. I wanted to ask, but didn’t. He smiled back when he saw me staring at him.

‘Do you need anything
Aajoba?’
I asked as I saw him look for something.

‘Do you have a light?’ He said with his
n
avy
c
ut in mouth, I gave him my lighter. ‘Call me Naaru,’ he said as he lit his cigarette and took a long drag.

‘OK, Naaru
kaka,’
I said.

‘Just Naaru, makes me feel good.’

‘OK Naaru.’ I said hesitantly, trying to make a man four times my age happy by calling him by his name.

‘Plus it feels friendly.
a
t my age, you don’t have too many friends you know.’ He smiled, even though there was a mild sadness in it.

‘You look a bit uncomfortable today. Is everything alright?’ I asked.

‘I lost a friend today...’ though he subtly wiped it I noticed the moistness in his eyes ‘...we were friends for seventy years.’ He smiled.

‘I’m sorry, Naaru.’ I said, not knowing what to say.

‘Oh come on, don’t be sorry. I’ll be next.’ This time he grinned. ‘Till then be my friend, trust me, it gets horribly lonely up here at eighty.’

‘I will,’ I said.

‘Live the friends you have, memories are all you are left with in your last days.’ He patted my back lovingly and left smiling.

Months later, when me and Raghu went for his funeral, no one recognized us. Like us, there were hundred others who his family didn’t know, but all of them were his friends.

Raghu’s smack on my head brought me back; the five cigarettes I had bought were in ashes. I needed more; Raghu bought them for me.

“So what’s up?” Shashank asked.

“Let’s go out for New Year’s… out of town I mean,” I said.

“Wow, someone seems liberated,” Raghu chuckled.

“Have you guys noticed that all of us are single?” I said.

“Ya, but where do we go?” Shashank asked.

“Any place full of girls, booze and dope,” Raghu said excitedly.

“Bangkok!” Shashank said

“Bali, Bali, Bali,” Raghu insisted.

“Goa,” I said.

After an hour, when almost each and every country in the world had been suggested, we finally locked down on Goa. 

Goa. The sight of sun setting in the sea and its yellowish orange light lighting up the white sand beach already glamorised by bare imported human bodies was enough to take away one’s worries, for a while at least.

Trinity, a tent suite resort, spread over sprawling fifty acres of land shared a two-feet white compound wall with the whitest of sands of Ashwem beach. The only reason we got the last minute reservation was my dad’s friendship with its owner Mr Charan Awesome. Yes his last name was
‘Awesome’
. I had laughed my lungs out the first time I had heard of him. But the man by all means deserved his last name. He literally was a younger version of cricketer Imran Khan. He was six-feet-three and had neck length grey curly hair. His fair skin was tanned by all the fun and heat endowed upon him by Goa. His light blue eyes twinkled behind the rimless glasses and lean well-worked-out body was any girl’s dream.

“Hi...” I said not sure if I should call him uncle.