Part-Time Devdaas... (4 page)

It took me forty-five minutes to reach her college. I could see her sitting on a bike parked in front of the college. I hopped off the bike as Raghu parked it at a distance behind her. Turning back, she smiled at me biting her lower lip trying hard not to laugh. She was glowing even in the gloomy light of the tube light. There was a moment of silence with both of us quietly smiling at each other. For the first time in nineteen years, I could literally feel my heart beating. People say it’s butterflies in the stomach, but for me, it was a hurricane inside me making me unstable beyond limit. Blushing, I tucked my hands in my pockets and stood there staring at her, unable to speak. There was this mojo about her that gave me the same numbness every time I saw her. Everytime she smiled, with me, at me, for me, I was in a daze.

“I was worried I wouldn’t get to see you today,” she said and began to laugh.

I just continued blushing.

“It’s okay if he smokes around me. Why does he have to stand a mile away?” she said looking at Raghu. I whistled to call him and he joined us.

“I don’t mind riding triple seat,” she said

“Oh, no, I’ll take a rickshaw,” Raghu said.

“You take the bike, I’ll collect it later,” I told Raghu.

“Ya ya, sounds perfect. We’ll take the train,” she said before Raghu could object.

The train station was a kilometre away. We walked instead of taking a rickshaw and her hand rubbed mine a couple of times. I had this intense urge to hold it, but Raghu’s words were screaming in my head:
“do not scare her away
.”
s
o I resisted.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“I’m offended!!” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think I was so dumb that I wouldn’t figure out your little arrangement?” she asked, really looking  offended. I just smiled.

“I knew it since the pav bhaji day at Badshah.”

“That early?” I asked shocked, as she laughed.

“But your appearance at the theatre was flawless. When I thought of it at home, I was quite amused at the coincidence.”

“You thought about me?”

“Big deal!” She shrugged.

We jostled our way into a crowed local train. It’s relatively easier to enter a gents compartment with a girl in tow. She negotiated a place to stand at the door with an uncle. I stood in front of her with both my hands on her sides. I was barely a few inches away from her face, but I ignored noticing her proximity to me. I had to look away, because looking at her meant being scarily close to her face.

“You smell nice,” she said.

I turned to look at her and we ended staring in each other’s eyes, smiling.

“
Beta station aagaya, aage jao warna utar nahi
paaoge
,” the uncle brought us back to reality. We hurriedly got down.

Hrida lived minutes away from the train station. She asked me to go, but I insisted on walking her home.

“Heard you have a paper tomorrow,” she said

“From whom?” I asked

“I have my sources too, you know,” she winked.

“Have you been even keeping tabs on me?”

“Well, not exactly. I sometimes filter out what Neha keeps talking about,” she said and smiled.

“Hrida...” I said as she looked at me, “I think I am in love with you.” I was shit scared but I had to tell her how I felt.

There was a long silence till we walked to the gate of her building. She turned towards me and said, “Is it okay if I give you the answer tomorrow?”

“Okay, I’ll wait for it,” I said with a grin.

“All the best for your paper,” she said as she left.

Having exams on your birthday is like divine punishment. Even if you are least bothered about the paper, people around simply stonewall you from any possibility of fun. The paper went clean as it came because I spent most of the time drawing margins and numbering the pages. I painstakingly wrote the answers to the questions I knew the answers to and then only the questions to ones whose answers I had no clue of. I submitted my paper an hour-and-a-half before time. The professor raised her eyebrows but I was more interested in what was about to happen eleven kilometres away.

I tried calling Hrida but she cancelled the call. I checked the watch, It was 4 p.m.,
Must be in class,
I thought.
I’ll wait outside her college
.

I reached her college in twenty minutes.
“I’m waiting outside, near the PCO.”
I messaged her. She didn’t reply. Four cigarettes and an Aarey lassi later, I called her again. It was 5.30, and she cancelled the call again. Another forty-five minutes later, when almost every student in the college had left, I messaged her
“Where are you?”
She didn’t reply. I called Neha and she told me Hrida hadn’t come to college that day. I messaged Hrida again
“Hey, Neha said you didn’t come to college today, hope you are okay?”
I waited for another thirty minutes outside her college for her reply before leaving.

It was past eight when I reached home. I went straight to my room and locked myself up.

“I’m waiting for your reply”
I messaged her, but there was no reply again and I was going paranoid. I spent next two hours fretting about what might have happened to her. I had called Neha, Shashank, Raghu and anyone who could have any info on her. No one did.

It was at 11.45 p.m. when I got a message that read:
“I have a boyfriend. I’m sorry I should have told you sooner. Hope your paper was good.”

She didn’t know it was my birthday, yet she had given me a gift. And that’s how my nineteenth birthday came to an end.

W
inters in Mumbai can get chilly. Not as painful as Delhi or Pune, but cold enough to prompt Mumbaikars to pull out the warm clothes who otherwise are happy sweating all year. Eighteen years in Mumbai, and I had forgotten what real winter chill felt like. So even in the not so boastful low temperature of fourteen degrees, I cuddled under the quilt. The noise of my phone whirring on the side table woke me up. It was 7 a.m., It was a message from her.

“Open your door…”

It took me a while to pull myself out of the bed. I sauntered into the living room, my eyes half open, still trying to acclimatize with the awake world. I opened the door. There was a small box neatly gift-wrapped in white shiny paper, pink hearts of different sizes, and tied with a blue ribbon. Inside the box I found a four-inch long soft toy wearing a light blue t-shirt on which was written
‘Binny Rabbit’.
Under it was a letter which read.

On this day, when god chose to send you to this planet, I ask him to bless you with love, happiness and infinite reasons to smile. I hope in all these years you’ve realised that your smile makes a lot of hearts skip a beat.

Love, Aditi

The gift and the letter thing was a little too mushy for a thirty-year-old me, but I have to agree it brought a smile on my face. Me smiling had become a rare phenomenon. I had strictly reserved smiling for professional purposes.

After my return from LA, I had changed my number so it was going to be a quiet birthday. No calls, no messages and no expectations. I made myself a mug of coffee and sat at the window. The window had instantly become my favourite place when I first walked in; it was so spacious that even an ogre could stretch himself to take a nap. The view from the window was amazing. The yellowish light of the rising sun dispersed in the morning haze spread over the sea. I could see gently swaying small fishing boats docked at the makeshift pier, small huts with hanging fishing nets on the roof lining the shore, people jogging on the sea front, and children waiting for their school buses. Sipping on the coffee, I looked around the house. It resembled the storeroom of a shopping mall stacked with boxes stickered uniformly. The reality of living alone began to sink in.

I began to unpack the boxes. Curtains, bedsheets, clothes, utensils, more clothes, the microwave, buckets, and toiletries began to jump out. The house now resembled one raided by the income tax department. I opened the last box, and stared at it. It contained memorabilia of the seven years of my relationship with Hrida. I took the box and came back to the window. Going through the gifts we had given each other was like reading the synopsis of the life we had spent together. The photo album she made me on one of our anniversaries had a compilation our snaps with her comments. From an uncountable number of soft toys we had gifted to each other; dozens of love letters she had written; bus, train, and movie tickets of the special days we spent together; and hundreds of Polaroid snaps taken at parties, pubs, picnics, college festivals, and birthdays. There were music CDs she had made to cheer me up or for the dance parties we organised, a string of my guitar that she broke trying to play a song for me, and her handkerchief with which she had wiped a gaudy lipstick she tried at a shop (I had stolen it from her). There was a bag containing twenty-one gifts and a note with each one of them for my twenty-first birthday. It had a miniature whiskey bottle and a note
“what I can do to you, she can’t;”
a pack of condoms and a note
“I know you won’t need it but just in case to be safe;”
a t-shirt that said
“sold to the young lady besides me;”
and a pair of biking gloves with a note
“till the time I learn to ride”.

I stopped looking at it.

It brought Hrida back to me. I could clearly relive my days with her. Her eyes which could read my thoughts, her enticing smile that left me with a whirlwind inside me, her kisses which made me feel loved, her warm hugs that made me feel wanted, her smell that made me long for her, feeling of her fingers gripping my hand, her touch that made me feel alive, It all came back. I had to stop. I hurriedly dumped everything in the box. It had been three years since I had broken up with her and I was still holding on to these things which only brought me pain. I had asked her to leave me forever. But I couldn’t accept the fact that I had to live the next forty odd years of my life without her. I had to forget her. In a fit of rage I took the box to the dry area, threw in a crumpled newspaper, cracked the seal of the whiskey bottle and emptied half of it into the box and set it on fire. I watched every single thing burn. Tears started rolling down my face when I saw flames beginning to engulf a photo of us, first my side of the photograph and then gradually Hrida’s face disappeared in fire. I broke down.
i
t was the first time since the break up that I had cried. I gulped the remaining whiskey and threw the bottle in. I stood by it, crying for the fifty-six or so minutes that it burnt. But not anymore, I promised myself. In the past three years, I had scourged myself enough out of guilt. I had hurt too many lives in my pursuit of self-destruction. I had kicked away all the people who loved me. I didn’t know how long I would live or who I’d live with, but I decided I was going to be happy.

I typed a number on my cell and stared at it. After musing for about twenty minutes, I dialled the number. When you behave like a jerk it, takes time to accept it, and it takes even more time to say sorry if you don’t have enough guts in you. It took me two years to accept it, but I wasn’t going to waste any more time to apologize. The caller tune at the other end died when no one answered. I waited for a moment and dialled again, a hideous voice again screamed at me to copy the caller tune later continuing to a song.

“Hello?” finally someone picked up, “Hello?” the voice said. I kept quiet.

“Hello?”

“Is it okay if I say sorry over the phone?” I said.

“Poncho?” Raghu said.

“How have you been man?” I said with a choked voice. There was a long pause.

“Happy birthday!” he said, his voice strained. “Where are you?”

“Below your office. Leave right now, we are going for lunch,” I said commandingly. “I mean, can you leave right now?” I said correcting my tone.

He began to laugh.

Raghu had been working with his dad at his construction firm after completing his engineering. I took a chance and found him there. Raunak Uncle had a dream that one day Raghu and I would run his company, but as I said, I had hurt too many people.

I got out of the car as I saw him walk out of the lobby. Formal wear, leather shoes, gelled hair and a paunch. He had changed a lot. We hugged tightly and he even kissed me. If you want to feel what actual love is, hug someone who has really missed you and you’ll know. He gave me a hearty punch in my stomach. I almost fell down with the impact.

“
Bhenchod
!” he said “How are you?”

“Less of a jerk than the last time we met,” I smiled trying to conceal the pain.

“I missed you, man,” he said.

“I missed you too… was just busy hating life.”

We sat in the car.

“You look so fucking fit. Your filmy friends are getting to you?”

I laughed. “What happened to you? You look like Raunak Uncle’s bonsai version.”

We laughed.

The amount of things I had missed out on in the past years was unbelievable. I parked the car outside Cafe Gulshan in Matunga. The
kheema
pav
and
bun
maska
was our staple diet during college days.

‘Milds right?’ He asked as he bought a pack of cigarettes.

‘No, I’ve quit!’ I smiled.

‘You are fucking with me, aren’t you?’

‘No, I’m serious.
i
ts been nine months now.’

‘Fuck, who
is
doing all this to you man!’

Lambu the waiter recognised us as we entered. I wondered who would name a four-feet-tall man Lambu. Whoever did so was cruel. We sat at our old corner table.

“
Do kheema, char bun maska, do
Thumbs
u
p,” Raghu ordered.

Lambu repeated the order in a squeaky voice and left.

Back in the days, we called it the
durbean table
. It had a clear view of the main gate of the college across the road. We used to rate girls on ten and then those girls would have the privilege of getting hit on by us after college. Every morning before going to college,
Gul ki cutting chai
with the daily update on the girls was a must.

“Six, Nine, full ten, and four,” Raghu murmured as he stared at the girls walking out of the gate. I smiled.

“Long time man,” he said reminiscing our days. I nodded my head.

“So... tell me about her,” I said noticing his ring. Radhika had told me about his engagement.

Lambu came back with our order.

“She is lovely...” he lit a cigarette. “Really nice, you know after all the Poojas and Priyankas and the XYZs, I really needed a Ruchika,” he said as the smoke escaped out of his nostrils and mouth. There was a glint in his eyes when he spoke about her.

“After a while I figured I was incapable of finding myself a real girl to marry, so I just got it arranged,” he shrugged and pushed the cigarette into the ash tray.

This came from a guy who seven years ago in a drunken debate with some random guys at the adjoining table at Pyaasa had declared,
“Jis din iss Raghuvir Joshi ne khudko arranged marriage ke hawale kar diya, usi din is gand pe Chutiya tattoo kar dena...”
pointing to his bare white ass.

“She is like my anchor, she like completely neutralizes me when I get out of hand.”
h
e began to laugh.

“I’m really happy for you man.” I was glad that God had made someone to tame this crazy bastard.

“When is the wedding?” I said.

“23 December,” he smiled wryly.

“Wow, that’s close!” I called for the bill.

“I’m so happy you are back. I would have shot you had you missed the wedding like you missed Shashank’s.” He slapped my hand.

“Where is he?” I asked as I picked up the bill.

“Bangalore. Fuck, he is bloody pissed at you.”

“He should be, for if it were me, I would have slaughtered him.” I paid the bill.

“He is coming on the 21
st
. Let’s do something.”

“
Pakka.
”

As we came out of the cafe, we caught each other staring at the girls at the college gate.

“Good old days!” he said.

“Good old days!” I repeated after him and sat in the car.