The Benefit Season (2 page)

‘
Just getting out of
Delhi- entering Faridabad’.

‘
So far! I miss you
already!’

We’d just had lunch that afternoon at
Faridabad, but I don’t care to remind her; ‘listen, I have
something to ask of you’, I say instead.

‘
What? Ask.’ I could see
her tilting her long neck with curiosity.

‘
It’s not something you
ask on a phone’.

‘
Then?’

‘
It’s something you ask on
one knee’.

There is silence on the other end for a
while. Then the stars twinkle again and all is well with the world.
‘Well, I’ll be waiting for the question then, Arjun’, she says
shyly.

‘
And I for the answer,
girl’!

There is nothing more to be said after that
really, as we hang up and dream of how it would be, as we take
things to the next level: from always inseparable to hitched
forever.

ϖ

Chapter
2

Lele and Lily

This being my first visit
to the city, I am not prepared for what hits me when I step out on
the Mumbai platform. Everyone is in a tearing hurry and I, in
everyone’s way. Pretty women in saris casually shove their elbows
in my face to get past, while Dabbawalas spawn all over the
station, crushing any and every toe that comes their way. The
humidity, and stench of compost and dead fish is too much for me,
and I am soon drenched in sweat, wishing I had chosen breathing
cottons over the smothering synthetics that stick to me like a
second skin.

Luckily they’ve sent someone to fetch me; a
jovial-looking man with pink jowls standing firm like a rock in the
sea of surging humanity, holding a placard that answers
unmistakably to my name. Over his arm is slung a garland of glum
carnations, and in his fingers bends a withered rose; most of its
petals lost to the jostling crowd.

I walk up to my savior. ‘Hi, I’m the guy
you’re looking for’.

‘
Arjun!’ he says
accusingly, bending backwards a little at the waist and jabbing the
wilted rose at me.

‘
Your man,
yeah.’

He looks at the name on the placard and then
at my face, finding no resemblance. ‘Sanjay Lele,’ he shrugs. ‘
Here’, he says, offering me the choice of the garland and the
single stem. ‘They say the florists get them from the graveyards,
but you can’t be sure’.

‘
Thanks’, I say; wincing
as I unwind the dying garland from his arm, and pluck the wilted
rose from his fingers; and place them like wreaths upon my
bags.

‘
Here let me help you with
those’, he says, motioning to my luggage. Picking up the folded
newspaper that I’d jammed in the straps, he turns and disappears
into the crowds without glancing back.

I stand there for a moment, gaping. Too
proud to hire a coolie at this age, I shrug, and lugging my burden
on my shoulders, I follow the man out of the station.

He hadn’t reached far though: he was stuck
at the gates, arguing with the weary TC about a platform ticket
that he’d forgotten to buy. As I pass them I nudge Lele aside
gently and waving my train ticket under the TCs nose, say some
gibberish in Punjabi and drag the griping motor mouth out after
me.

‘
Hey, thanks for that’, he
says later.

Before he can begin to explain, I am already
in the rear seat of the company car with my bags stacked next to
the driver.

‘
Actually, Monal ma’am
sent me’. He remarks as we drive off, narrowly missing a pregnant
holy cow, a rusty wheelchair carrying an abusive old Parsi, and a
blind man selling fake Ray Bans.

‘
She is all into first
impressions. I am supposed to give her a feedback’.

‘
What do you do, other
than conveying first impressions’, I ask, holding a hanky to my
nose. We are driving by the sea now and the stench is so
overpowering that I can almost see it, weighing down like a shroud
upon the dingy slum-city.

‘
We are in the same team-
you, Lily and I. We answer to our team leader, Mrs. Monal. We have
ten-odd teams in Operations, each handling a couple of accounts-
from five to ten stars. We look after everything for our clients:
from getting them new contracts to their investments; real estate,
stocks, the paperwork, and anything else that they might ask for-
anything. You know what I mean?’

I nod. I’d heard of the whimsical icons-
mostly cricketers. The rest were grounded people.

‘
The marketing guys go
after the rising stars, and poach the established ones from our
competition. They rake in the business and normally rookies like
you are made to sharpen their teeth in marketing before they are
allowed to sit in the glass cabins and knock items off the clients’
wish lists. You must know someone big in the company already to
make it to ops’, he says.

‘
I am as surprised as you
are Lele- you can tell Monal ma’am that- at this direct assignment
to the knee of the celebrity for a promising shot at sucking
up.’

‘
Initially, you will stay
with Lily and me at the company guestroom at Prabhadevi. It’s close
to our company office at Worli. ‘

‘
Not for long I hope. Plan
to settle down on my own ASAP.’

‘
A romantic interest,
aha!’ Lele says, mentally filing the information away, no doubt as
part of his “
first
impressions
” brief.

ϖ

Meanwhile we reach the colony where I am
going to stay, for a short while at least; till I bring my romantic
affairs to a satisfactory conclusion, and slip the 22 carats of
gold with 2 carats of the shiny stone around the third finger, and
pitch tent with Aarti.

It was funny- I had never looked at Aarti as
my “ romantic interest”; she’d always been an indispensable part of
my narrative; she completed me; without her I was like a shoe
without lace… or a shoe without its pair…

Our building, the Centurion Park, facing the
sea, seems tired of having weathered the lashing coastal winds and
rains for so long, like a bent old lady done in by the times. Mean
looking dogs- the usual infestation of Indian habitat; chase our
car as it reaches the gates, till a sharp stone flung by a guard
finds its mark on the rump of one of them, leading to their hasty
and noisy retreat. The lift isn’t working so we take the rickety
stairs to the fourteenth floor; the idling lift operator
condescending to help me with the bags, as we huff after the
light-footed Lele.

Lily, who answers the door, is cheeky,
chirpy and chaste. She rubs her cheeks against mine and hugs me
tightly as if she’s known me for long. Then she holds me at an
arm’s length and says unabashedly, ‘my, you’re so devilishly
handsome! You do work out, do you?’

‘
You’re so mean- you
didn’t help him with the bags!’ She turns to Lele, when she notices
the sweat on my brow.

‘
Look at him; does he look
like he needs help with the bags’? Lele smiles and walks into the
kitchen to apply his expert nose to the aromas wafting in, and stir
with the ladle the culinary artifacts under construction. Before he
can poke a finger into the curries and bring it to the watering
mouth Lily sets upon his backside a curt frying pan and shoos him
back out to the lobby where I stand, undecided of the general
direction of my chambers.

‘
Show him his room’! She
gently rebukes.

Lele slaps his forehead in guilt and leads
me to a backroom that provides an unenviable view of the mainland
with its haphazard glassy towers dug like stakes in a graveyard of
shanties with blue plasticky or rusty tinny roofs. I quickly
freshen up, change gratefully into a light cotton suit and walk
into the terrace to view the crescent beachfront and take in the
smells of the sea. The monsoons have arrived and I can feel the
rain in the winds that carry in from the Arabian Sea. Lele is
fixing Scotches for himself and Lily, and wondering if I would have
one as well. I refuse and opt for a lime and soda.

‘
It’s not that Lily cooks
always; she is liberated! When she doesn’t feel like cooking I
order the home deliveries or bring home the takeaways on my way
from office. And I get to fix the drinks’, he says, carrying Lily’s
drink to her in the kitchen.

‘
Hi, are you hungry’, Lily
asks, wiping her hands on her apron and flicking away the sweat on
her brow, before taking a swill from her Scotch. ‘ Just give me a
couple of minutes.’

‘
Why don’t you take him to
the terrace and enjoy the breeze, before you spill something in my
kitchen’. She pushes Lele out with a carrot and turns her back on
us, settling the argument once and for all regarding the ownership
rights to the hallowed fireside.

Lele walks to the fridge and lets out a
howl. ’What happened to my soda?’

‘
It’s in my drink’, Lily
shouts out from the kitchen, laughing.

‘
You mean, in that short
interval- between making up my mind to have that soda and walking
to that cabinet over there to fetch the opener- my soda has been
filched? It gives me déjà vu- a similar thing happened to my
solitary pastry when I opened the fridge this
afternoon’!

‘
Stop crying over spilled
soda…and pastry’, she says.

Lele and I go out to sit in the terrace. We
sling our legs over the chic sandstone balustrade- interpreted in
pink once, now greyish and cloudy with all the coastal showers and
animal footprints.

‘
I played cricket in the
Ranji’s. Lily was in Hockey- nationals. You were in the track and
field I believe’, Lele asks.

‘
Ahem’. I nod.

‘
Who’s the lucky girl’, he
pops the question suddenly.

‘
She is a shooter- someone
I grew up with. Same background: army kids, simple, grounded,
sporty, self-made; nothing remarkable. And her dad thinks I am
beneath her.’

‘
How’s that?’

‘
For one- my dad didn’t
rise as high as him, and two- for joining this company!’

‘
How’s that’?

‘
He thinks cricket is a
game played by 1.3 billion people; only 13 of them have to be on
the field at one time. The rest do the talking.’

‘
No no! We are like
Brahmins; guarding over the deities the masses revere. Our offices
are the temples to their enduring edicts, and our souls- pledged in
lifelong consecration’!

Lele pauses for a long breath and a
lingering sip. ‘We are in the business of religion here- don’t let
the old man fool you into believing anything else.’

‘
That sounds like a sermon
from the pulpit’!

‘
Yes, cricketers are gods,
we- the keepers of faith, and the public- the faithful! They
believe in the perpetuity of their fame, and we perpetuate that
belief. You can’t last in our business unless you believe you are
blessed in their aura’.

‘
Do you have any gods of a
denomination other than cricket?’

‘
Yes… some. From boxing to
badminton to tennis… the list goes on. But see, on the one hand you
have potboiler fiction, and on the other, dull parliament news.
Them non-cricketing folks need a lot of spit and polish before
they’re ready to be put out on the shop window, and even then there
are few takers. It’s nothing personal- it’s business- mate. And
it’s not my view, it’s the exit polls man!’

‘
He giving that holy crap
again?’ Lily, who had meanwhile pulled up a chair and lit up, says.
She smiles and leans forward towards me. ‘Do you drink or do you
not?’

‘
Only when someone forces
it at gunpoint’.

‘
So tell us something
about yourself’, she says. ‘ Do you do no wrong?’

‘
He’s simple and grounded
and on autopilot. And so is his girlfriend. Her dad thinks he’s a
loser though’. Lele butts in, volunteering the info.

‘
Shut up,’ Lily says,
booting his shin.’ Who’s the girl? Is she pretty? Have you proposed
her yet?’

‘
I plan to- when I’m face
to face with her’.

‘
And so far- were you not
face to face?’

‘
I was- but love was slow
to dawn upon me- and when it did, I was facing the naked butt-end
of the Indian public out in full force upon the railway tracks. I
was hoping for a softer setting…music, silver candelabras on white
muslin…and roses; that sort of thing for going down on the old knee
and bunging the bad news to the poor girl. She’s very traditional-
that girl- she won’t settle for anything less than two pure,
solitary carats of a girl’s best friend, and that takes some loving
in the heart and some cash in the bank ‘!

‘
Well, wish you luck with
that!’ She says and scoots off as the cooker toot-toots and calls
out to her.

‘
So, tell me something
about your Mrs. Monal Nagrath’, I ask.

Lele was supposed to bring news to his
mistress, not the other way round. He unfurls the sails of his mind
and lets the air fill them up; wondering what trivial lifebelt of
her sojourn on the high seas of life could safely be tossed my way;
without he drowning himself with it. He looks over his shoulder and
on seeing no witnesses, says, ‘ she’s the best, she really is’, and
clams up.

‘
And she’s a slave
driver’, adds Lily, who has joined us again after attending to the
business of the toot-tooting cooker. ‘She was a javelin thrower and
now finds practice in hurling men out her door. Only one person
matches her skill at hurting people- her husband’.