Sameer Sir was one
of them. Adil knew where he lived even before his coffee visit. Sir
was near the age of superannuation when he taught us, and soon
after retiring he had left the city to live with his son who has a
business here. I didn’t have a clue or I would have surely met him
after joining college here. Maybe not, because I am not so hung up
on old times. Anyway, when Sameer Sir accepted Adil’s friend
request, they exchanged phone numbers and spoke to each other. So,
Adil had Sir’s address almost from the time when his blog was
getting hits all day. But I had no idea about the sneaky game he
was up to.
It was after a few
months that Adil showed me a graphic of his remaining steady
followers. He had mapped them out slowly, patiently by matching the
time of comments to the hits on his blog posts. Say, if Rita
commented on a post about Surabhi at 4.15pm, and the tracker showed
only one hit on ‘Surabhi’ at that time, Adil labelled the visitor’s
IP address ‘Rita’. He would then wait for Rita’s next comment to
confirm his deduction. If he got the same result thrice, there was
no room for doubt. With two matches, he was 90 percent certain. And
so, bit by bit, he had built up a map of our acquaintances across
the world. He could have been a spy, or anything he wanted to be
had he not got stuck on the idea of writing for a living.
Poor Sameer Sir,
he had no idea what a creep Adil could be. All the time he thought
his dear student was worshipping him, Adil was sitting on the other
side laughing at his expense. Well, it was funny indeed because
Sameer Sir kept returning to read about himself. Sometimes he read
the post three or four times in a day. He was obviously a man in
love with himself although he always taught and seemed to practise
humility, and had much to say about the vice of vanity. And besides
this strong self-love Sameer Sir also gave away one of his secrets
unknowingly to his favourite student.
At first, I
refused to believe it but Adil showed me his log of the times
Sameer Sir had read the post about Rupa Ma’am. Rupa Ma’am had been
very graceful, but she was also nearing 50 and none of us had the
hots for her, but it made perfect sense that old Sameer Sir should
have been smitten by her. Oh, it was hilarious, but it was sneaky
too. It was like watching someone from behind a one-way mirror.
I wonder how Adil
managed to keep a straight face when he met Sameer Sir that
evening. The old teacher must have felt duty-bound to treat him to
some moral wisdom. How did Adil keep himself from laughing aloud?
When I met Adil over coffee next morning, he told me Sameer Sir had
an old scroll of the Ten Commandments hung on his drawing room
wall. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, hahaha, Rupa
Ma’am wasn’t his neighbour’s wife, right?”
I laughed with
Adil but I also felt uneasy in his company. Was he a sincere chap?
Wasn’t it time I asked him to leave?
***
About Zeba I
didn’t know until the night before, and had I known I wouldn’t have
allowed Adil to carry on his game. But now it is too late. I was at
work when he called for me at the hospital front desk, telling the
receptionist that it was urgent. They are taught to ignore such
panic calls but when the caller says they are calling from home,
the receptionist can’t very well tell them to go take a walk.
Adil hadn’t ever
called me away from work like this before, but still, I called him
up to ask what the trouble was. Come home, he said, not sounding
like his calm, unflappable self at all. I rushed to the flat and
found him setting at the edge of the sofa with a mug of coffee in
hand. There was another empty mug before him. He never has two mugs
of coffee together, says the second mug never feels as good as the
first. Obviously, something had disturbed him deeply. But I was not
in a mood to crack mysteries. In fact, I was fairly annoyed at
being called away from work. It better be a good one, Mr Adil, I
was thinking, waiting for his explanation at the door.
“Zeba is coming
here,” he said, looking at me with pleading eyes. “Here!” I jumped
and looked questioningly around. “She’s in India. She wants to meet
me the day after,” he said. No, no, this wasn’t the true story.
This couldn’t be the true story. After the heartbreak and the
bitterness all those long years ago, this couldn’t be happening
just like that. There was obviously something I didn’t know, or
hadn’t been told.
I had lost touch
with Zeba after she got married and went abroad but I had known her
longer than Adil. She had been my friend in school since we were
little kids. Adil had come into the picture much later, when he
joined our school in class 8, and I had mediated in so many of
their quarrels when their romance started after leaving school, or
had it been on even before that? Neither of them admitted to being
in love while in school, so I don’t know. Anyway, that was a long
time ago and even their breakup was years behind us.
I sat down facing
him and stared into his eyes. There was guilt there. “What have you
been up to?” I demanded, sensing at the same time that I had
probably, unwittingly played a role in whatever was happening now.
“Nothing,” he said firmly, “absolutely nothing, old chap. I haven’t
done a thing. It’s she who wants to see me”.
I shook my head
disbelievingly and waited. “How...why? You haven’t been keeping in
touch, the two of you, have you?”
He rocked back and
forth slowly, gripping the empty mug in both hands, and then smiled
mischievously after considering my question for a few moments. “I
wrote to her, but only recently. She’d been trying to get in touch
for a long time. Don’t try to pin the blame on me.”
“What does she
want?” I said.
“Search me,” he
said, again with that mischievous smile.
“Look, Adil, stop
fooling around if you want my help. Otherwise, I ought to be
getting back to work since you are perfectly fine.” I rose to go
and said sternly, “I will remember this joke and hold it against
you for a while”.
“Stay, stay,” he
said, “I really need your help. You are my only friend.”
“Fuck off.” But I
sat down, curious to know what he had got himself into. And
how.
“You remember the
blog?”
“Of course.” My
fear was beginning to come true. “But I don’t remember you writing
about her. In fact, I thought you pointedly left her out of your
reminiscences.”
“No, old chap, I
wrote about her. Only, I didn’t mail you the link, knowing that you
never cared to visit it anyway. And I didn’t share it like the
other posts either. It was very much a public post, only I didn’t
announce it like the others.”
“That’s not true,”
I said, “I did follow the blog but not after you stopped posting to
it regularly. You must have written about Zeba after that.”
He nodded in
affirmation. “On her birthday in October. You remember the date,
don’t you?” He said it in a mocking tone but this time I cast my
eyes down guiltily. Could he have known, could he sense my jealousy
now?
“No, I don’t,” I
lied, “she was your girlfriend”.
“Yes, of course. I
forgot.”
Why this sarcasm?
Was he accusing me now? I looked at him angrily but he remained
silent for a while.
“You said, you
posted a piece about her on her birthday,” I prodded him.
“Yes, I did. But
she didn’t see it till several days later. It was my mistake. I was
just being my foolish self-important self, counting on her to visit
the blog every day, even on her birthday, as if she wouldn’t have a
party to go to, a husband and friends flattering her, children
occupying her time...”
He sounded so
bitter, I knew he had forgotten about whatever he meant to
insinuate about me and Zeba.
“What was it
supposed to be, this piece about her? A gift, or a bait to ruin her
happiness? I don’t remember you posting about me on my
birthday.”
“I was testing my
power over her,” he said, and for once I had no difficulty in
believing him. It had been a game, a hunt.
“Did she write to
you when she read the piece? How did you come to know she had read
it?” I said, waiting for his blog to open on my phone. I wanted to
read this piece, this bait he had cast. What would induce a firm
woman like Zeba to forgive Adil everything and come running to meet
him. How had he weakened her? I wanted to know how a loser like
Adil had accomplished what I would have never dared to do.
“No, she didn’t
tell me. I just knew. The tracker. You remember Sameer Sir?”
So that was it,
just as I had feared. He had mapped Zeba, but how? There are at
least a dozen of our common friends in London. How did he know it
was her?
I just shook my
head to show I did not understand.
It was past
midnight and he rose to brew more coffee. “You want some?”
“Sure,” I
said.
I read his post
about Zeba. He had written it carefully, picking bland words
deliberately, as if to tell the world: “I love her very much but I
don’t want you to know this”. He had not painted her glowingly like
the others but truthfully as only someone who knew her better than
the others could have.
The smell of warm
coffee filled the room and I wondered how long the night would be.
It was getting close to my out-time, and in a little while I would
feel the need to sleep but we were probably in for a long
coffee-fuelled vigil.
“You didn’t tell
me how you knew it was Zeba and not any of our other friends in
London?”
“I had her street
address, and it matched with the one the tracker pulled up. Surely,
two of our batch mates don’t live on the same street in London. And
anyway, the proof is coming here, to meet me over breakfast a day
from now.” The knife of jealously turned a full circle in my
heart.
“But the street
address. Who gave it to you?”
“Just Google for
Alvi Meats, isn’t that her husband’s family business?”
“Of course,” I
said stupidly. This was no dreamer-loser. The man was an absolute
go-getter, only he wasn’t going and getting what everyone else was
after.
“So you found out
she had been reading your blog and wrote to her?”
“Why can’t you
think for a moment that she, not I, broke the ice? If I had to make
a move, I would have done so 10 years ago.”
“Sorry, that’s not
what I meant. I am just curious how you two got in touch
again.”
“Nothing happened
for a while,” he said, “and I didn’t expect anything to happen
although it’s true that I was angry when she didn’t read the piece
on her birthday. But she kept returning to it, and I was satisfied.
I felt happy even, like the old times when she was mine.”
He got up and
paced about the room in agitation.
“I swear I didn’t
want it to turn out like this. I was happy, supremely happy, to
know, to see, that she still cared enough to read what I had
written, and kept returning to it every few days or weeks. But she,
although she hasn’t told me this, seemed eager to get in touch
again.”
“How?”
“Oh, you know that
mirror site you made for the blog...I never shared the link,
although anyone who Googles my name can find it on my profile.
After a while she started visiting it instead of the blog, as if it
was adulterous to read the main one. The only way she could have
found the mirror was by doing a name search. SHE searched for MY
name, okay.”
He sat down and
thought for a while. “She left an anonymous congratulatory note on
the mirror, but had to enter her email ID for verification, so I
got my first definite proof. I was so agitated after it that I
deleted the mirror site. I honestly did not intend to cause an
upheaval in anyone’s life, even my own.”
“But it didn’t end
there,” I said.
“No, although at
first it seemed to. Last month, she posted two comments on the
blog, anonymous of course, but I knew the words, her style. And
then I couldn’t hold myself back any longer. I already had her
email ID and wrote to her that I knew she was there, across the
screen, that I felt I could touch her, that time and distance would
have to collapse if I made a move. And then I regretted writing
it.”
I sensed his
turmoil and didn’t feel jealous or angry anymore. I wanted to help
him but also felt that it would be wrong. For whom, her family, the
society? I don’t know.
“But it was too
late. She wrote some days later that she felt the same way, and
would I meet her? And again, I listened to my heart instead of my
head. I thought I would lose her by replying with a ‘no’. If
somebody could assure me she would continue reading whatever I
write and reserve a little space for me in her heart, I would still
stop her from coming. But that cannot be. I have to meet her the
morning after.”
We were both quiet
for a while after this. At last I asked him, “What do you want me
to do?”
“Nothing. I just
wanted you to be here with me. I was too agitated, confused,
disturbed. I am fine now.”
I heaved myself
off the sofa with a sigh and went to my room. It was way past my
bedtime, and his too. When I woke up, it was already noon but there
was no Adil or coffee at the table. The newspaper was neatly folded
up with a note stuck on it: “Don’t wait for me over lunch, old
chap, I need to buy some clothes. Can’t wear yours to meet Z. I
have your wallet but your ID card and cab fare are under the
biscuit tin”.
Fuck! this has
gone too far. I have to throw out Adil. The man is a disgrace.
I left for the
hospital in the evening thinking along these lines and when I got
home after the extra long drive to drop the woman colleague, you
can imagine I was in no state for any more of Adil’s nonsense. But
I had to put up with an even worse case of the nerves this time. He
had bought half a dozen shirts and trousers and these were spread
over the divan and the sofa while he tied himself up in knots over
which one to wear.