Chapter 23: Onto The Next One
As soon as the elevator door shut, Avantika preemptively put her finger to her lips and stage-whispered. “No cheering till we hit the ground floor. Actorography says, commit to the role even after you have exited the frame.” Anuj tried getting up but Avantika’s shoe pushed his chest down again. “Commit!” Anuj stayed down.
Seher uncorked the bottle she had just stolen and took a swig before passing it to Anand. After taking a sip, Anand tipped the bottle enough to spill a little whisky on Anuj’s face. “To our dear friend Anuj.” He passed the bottle to Veena who took a small sip and passed it to Kartik.
When the elevator doors slid open, Anuj sprung to his feet and walked out. Once they were all out, everyone except Kartik broke into a snigger. Kartik trailed behind everyone with a solemn face as he tapped a cigarette onto the box before bringing it to his mouth.
— “Cheer up, Katti!” Anuj slowed down to let everyone else pass him as he gave Kartik a light. “I died for you, man.”
— “You’ll get over it.” Seher ruffled his hair. Kartik pulled his head away. “Oh, no! Katti’s homophobia⁵² is back.”
Kartik was fine, just numb from all the madness. He still hadn’t started freaking out about what was going to happen to him and his heart in the new year. Staging a death was a different degree of mad, even for the gang. They usually kept the gang violence bits to themselves. Dinner theatre had never occurred to any of them.
Seher, Anuj and Avantika passed the bottle between themselves as they made their way to their seats in the car. Anand was amused despite feeling terrible for what Kartik just went through. But this wasn’t going to bring him down. Having a player hurt on the field only made the game more fierce for him. To him, it only meant that the winning strategy had to be altered just about enough to make space for the hurt player instead of retiring him to the bench.
— “Niyati is pissed that we didn’t take a picture.” Avantika announced from the back. “I had promised her I’ll send her a picture of every death that Anuj dies.”
— “You can send her the picture of this celebration joint that I am rolling.”
— “Not like we had imagined involving an audience member (the ex) in the death. It was supposed to be a self-contained performance.”
Avantika took a picture of Anuj licking the sticky edge of the rolling paper and sent it to Niyati. Niyati who was missing the events of the evening was not even high on the set she was on. Her reply said: “Asshole.” Anand turned on the radio as it started playing Hookah Bar from the movie Khiladi 786.
— “Fucking earworm.” Kartik muttered as he smiled a little. He usually liked earworms.
— “Change the channel!” Seher flicked Anand’s ear. “Not this! Please not this!” She was sitting right behind the driver’s seat. Veena liked the song so she shot Seher in the face without even looking at her. Seher made a disfiguring gesture with her fingers on her face, hit her back against her seat and continued to slide downwards. The song continued playing.
— “So where next?” Anand looked into the rearview mirror to look at everyone in the two rows of seats behind Veena and him.
— “Pali hill. Prajapatis’.”
— “You’ll have to give me directions from Pali market.”
— “Seher knows the place. She’ll guide you.”
— “Quick!” Seher handed her phone to Veena when she woke up. “It’s on a 30 second timer. Put it on the rearview mirror and see if it gets all of us.”
— “Send me the picture.” Avantika passed the whisky to Seher. “I’ll have to send it to Niyati.”
— “Tell her to check Facebook in about ten minutes. I’ll tag her.” Seher was happy that the framing was quite perfect. It had to be. Before jewellery designing, Veena used to walk around Chennai with a DSLR. She still had the camera, just hadn’t used it in ages because she didn’t want to think⁵³ about it.
There were too many people and too many cars on the road. It was like navigating through traffic at a pilgrimage place where instead of beggars you have drunk or waiting-to-get-drunk people — in groups, in pairs, by themselves looking at their watches or cellphones as they headed to some party or some bar.
The police had upped the number of barricades for New Year’s Eve. This was important because nobody, not even the cops, wanted to give the peddlers of morals a single piece of information as leverage against the rising levels of freedom in the city. And in the process, if they ended up making some money, then they deserved it, didn’t they?
The bottle of whisky immediately found its way under the seat. Anuj licked some saliva onto his fingertips and extinguished the joint, which was in Avantika’s hand.
— “Danan, cops to your right.”
— “Right when it was my turn in the circle.” Kartik rolled his window down and lit a cigarette. “This sucks balls.”
— “Don’t spiral, buddy. We still have two more parties to go to.”
— “Maybe I should just go home.”
— “Shut up.” Seher put a gun to the side of Kartik’s head. Avantika put one to the back of his skull. Anuj’s gun joined Avantika’s as she moved hers to make it look like they were going for an eye each.
— “Put your hands away.” Kartik blew smoke right into the car. “They are not guns. I am not a part of this game.”
— “But you are!” Avantika screamed from the back. “According to Actorography, you can’t back off now. You participated in the death of a character. You even checked his pulse and lied about it not being there. If you leave now, the continuity of this reality will be lost. Things might never be the same again”
— “Whatever she said.” Seher cackled. “And stop being such a pussy and get your act together.”
— “Yeah buddy, what if we end up running into Anjali again.” Anand’s hands worked the wheel and the gear stick. He looked at Kartik in the rearview mirror. “Maybe this time, it will be a truly neutral space.” Kartik could only see his eyes.
— “I believe it will be tilted more in your favour.” Veena turned around and dug her knees into the front seat.
— “Sit back properly before the cops stop us!” Kartik’s long and crackling drags left a long flaming ember at the end of his cigarette, some of it turning grey by the second.
— “Even if the odds of running into Anjali are one in a bazillion, that is still more than what the odds would be if you didn’t show up at all.” Seher made a clicking sound with her tongue and teeth and cocked her invisible gun. Kartik tossed his cigarette out.
— “Wrong thing to tell an engineer.” Anand corrected Seher. “They are used to ignoring negligible values.” For Anand, a rejection was a negligible value. One shouldn’t ever miss and tell, he believed.
— “Shut up, Aam aadmi.” Seher looked Kartik in his eyes. “You got what I meant, right?” Kartik nodded.
— “Yeah dude, stop seeking attention.” Anuj relit the previous joint with one hand after he looked out the windows to see if the cops were all gone. Avantika and him still had their fingerguns pointed at Kartik.
— “Kartik. Just stay, buddy.”
— “Not the first time I succumb to peer pressure so fine!” Seher, Anuj and Avantika fired their fingerguns. Kartik dropped in his seat.
— “Just to be sure.” Seher put the gun right to his chest and fired two more rounds. Kartik’s corpse shook twice on his seat to acknowledge the last two bullets.
— “I invoke the zombie rule⁵⁴!” Anand knew he had to walk Kartik through this one.
That was very Anand. He never disagreed with anybody outright. He’d only suggest something or walk you through a seemingly spontaneous situation so that he could prove a point. Say you disagreed with him over the size of chocolate chips at your favourite dessert place. He wouldn’t tell you that you were wrong. But the next thing you know, you’d be at that dessert place, commenting on the chocolate chips and he’d gloat. On the surface or even a couple of layers in, no part of the decision of being at the dessert place could be traced to him.
However, in Kartik’s case, Anand did not really have a plan. His only concern was to make sure all six of them stuck together for the rest of the night. He wanted, nay, needed Veena to be nothing short of ecstatic all through New Year’s Eve. The only way that could happen was, as Niyati often said, if continuity of cast was maintained.
⁵² It wasn’t really homophobia as much as aversion to being touched. The gang liked to call it homophobia to pull his leg but that’s a story for later.
⁵³ She had taken up photography with her then single cousin who later lost all her cool and joined the family business after she got married. Veena felt betrayed (because they also stopped hanging out after that). The bizarre part was that when she finally met the cousin at a family function, it felt like having met a stranger. Half the reason she was an artist was because of this “cool cousin”. On hearing the news, she swore she’d never lose her “cool”.
⁵⁴ As described in Chapter 6: A Brief History of Gang Violence; the zombie rule: If two or more people shot you simultaneously, and one of them invoked the zombie rule, you had to respawn as a zombie. After which, you stayed a zombie till your next drag from a joint.
