Chapter 17: Keep Calm and Limber Up
Anuj was sure Kartik was going to return weeping because some kid took away his candy. While that meant it would be time to leave the party, it also meant that it would be his time soon, to die. He wanted his first death to be dynamic. It needed to have some pop and sizzle. When he mentioned that to Avantika, she said that he would need to limber up before the act.
Anuj did not have any real problems. He had a failed first novel and a failed first (real) relationship, and suddenly everything he knew about himself stopped making any sense. Like any self-worshiping narcissist, he quarantined himself from the rest of the world like an obsolete file system. Initially, seeing Seher for brunch every weekend was worse to his system than the VAT, service charge and service tax were to the bill. While he had gotten used to paying it, it had made him emotionally bankrupt.
Of course, Seher had “won the break-up” as Kartik and Anand had put it. She had moved on before he had and then even after he had moved on, he hadn’t flirted with a single girl yet. Once when Niyati had asked him if he needed a wingman to “you know, finally move on”, he had said, “Imagine getting used to drinking the best whisky and then trying to look for the same high in cheap vodka.”
He had started dating when he was thirteen. It was easy to sneak someone up his ancestral Calcutta mansion. The fact that everyone he knew had at least started on beer and pot by the time they were fourteen made things easier. Cheating his way through four long and steady relationships (one of them being long-distance) through Calcutta and Delhi — Bombay and Seher had been a different ball game.
As a part of his limbering up, Anuj moved his shoulders in a circle, one after the other, in sets of five. Avantika returned with three pieces of kebab on a tissue and started eating. Anuj bent over and he noticed that he could fit his glass of whisky between his fingertips and his toes.
— “What are you doing?” Seher poked Anuj’s rib.
— “He’s just limbering up. We’re about to go dancing before he dies.” Avantika was polishing off the kebab as she replied without looking up.
— “If that’s true, then that’s not how you do limber up.” Anand straightened Anuj’s knees.
— “He hates dancing at parties where no one’s dancing.” Seher stood right in front of him. “And before you met us, weren’t you the lurk-around-with-a-drink types?”
— “Not when it’s the last thing I am about to do before I die.” Anuj got back up, feeling a head rush before dipping down again as his voice rose and fell.
— “Why do you need to limber up though?” Veena bent enough to pull his head up by his collar. She needed a play by play because she hated missing a cue. She’d rather get the guys to explain a joke early on.
— “My physical activity for the past six months has only ensured great forearms.” Anuj showed her his forearms. Veena laughed into her drink as some of it splashed out of the glass. She slapped his arms away.
Veena had always found porn funny like one found camp movies funny. The only exception had been gay porn, which she had discovered fascinated her. Seher had always hated porn. Niyati had gotten used to it because her first couple of boyfriends had made her watch some of it with them. She’d be watching the actresses’ faces for their expressions.
Kartik had reached the balcony door and was waiting right outside. He took a large gulp of Seher’s whiskey and watched Anjali listening to her ex talk as he addressed their entire group. Anjali looked up to see Kartik outside the door. They made eye contact and Kartik smiled. She smiled back. Beat this but the music scratched to a stop as a synthesizer called out from the opening of Usher’s DJ Got Us Falling In Love Again. It was some kind of an extended cut and not the radio edit because the build-up to the track took its own sweet time.
Kartik passed the whisky glass into his other hand, which was already holding the joint. Keep smiling, don’t stop smiling, keep smiling, don’t stop smiling, he kept repeating to himself inside his head. He pushed the door open with his newly free hand.
— “Hello! Long time…”
— “Kartik?” Anjali smiled warmly. “You still look the same!”
— “You look so different. And hep, I must add.” One could see the warmth fill his face as he pictured college Anjali in t-shirt and jeans. He was this close to zoning out before he heard Anand and Veena’s voices inside his head saying, “Maintain eye contact.” He noticed Anjali looking at the joint. “Oh, where are my manners? Would you like a drag?”
— “What is that?” Anjali’s ex wasn’t very happy about whatever was happening. He looked at Kartik with a look that said, “Chhutta nahin hai, aage badho.”
— “No, thanks but you’ve brought that in this non-smoking part of the party.” Anjali held her purse with both her hands as her drink rested on the table.
— “Oh, that’s alright. This is not a cigarette, it’s just a joint.” Kartik felt some of his commitment to smile fade away as he noticed the ex’s eyebrow.
— “You’re offering her drugs?” He moved way too close to her. Anjali shifted a little to establish an inch’s gap between her and the ex.
— “Good one.” Kartik laughed. (He never really laughed.) “This is just some hash.” Nobody else did. The awkward pause after that made Kartik withdraw the joint to his own lips. He looked at Anjali and then dropped his hand to his side as a wisp of smoke marked the trajectory of the joint’s tip.
Anand watched Kartik through the glass door with his eyebrows prepared to hit iceberg mode. Inside his head, he watched an offense player getting closer to the D-line after being passed the ball at the halfline.
— “From the looks of it, he is flying a MIG made of Russian spare parts and assembled by starving Chinese kids. I think he is in need of some backup.”
— “V, come watch me reject boys.” Seher had tilted her upper body sideways to look at Anuj’s face as he was bent over, trying to touch his toes once again.
— “Not unless you are willing to turn the dial of your meanness down.”
— “Haan, meri maa!” Seher grabbed Veena by her arm and pulled her away. “Just come, will you?”
— “I think I should go in to provide Kartik some backup.”
— “He will be fine. Let him be.” Veena was heard saying as Seher pulled her towards the bar.
— “The faster he crashes, the better it is. You have to let the band-aid be ripped off.”
— “I think you should go in.” Avantika said to Anand as soon as Veena left.
— “The new girl is right. Everybody is better off with a wingman whether they know it or not.”
Anand remembered the party where he met Veena. If he had been there alone, he wouldn’t have walked up to Veena and her friend at all. He pat a bent-over Anuj on his back and then pushed it more than Anuj could bend. Anuj howled in pain, “You bastard!” Anand laughed and walked towards the sliding glass door of the balcony, his eyes on Kartik, Anjali and her group.
Kartik was fumbling around with questions of What-have-you-been-upto-all-these-years nature. They were not very convincing when he asked them because on paper he knew everything Anjali had been upto. She had pursued a masters in computer science and had been working with FriscoNet. His joke about Frisco being a portmanteau of Frisk and Khisko also had tanked. Anjali did not find sexual harassment at the workplace funny. A couple of her colleagues, now ex-colleagues, were suing the company over the same issue.
Kartik thanked his planetary alignments when Anand showed up. He wasn’t sure if the susu pun he was trying to work into the conversation to get a laugh was going to work.
— “Hey Anjali! And hello the ex! Oh and everybody from the old gang is here! Friend one, and two and three and four. How have you guys been?”
— “Dude, we work in the same office.” That was a guy in the ex’s gang.
— “I know.” Anand recovered that one pretty well. “But all of you together is different than you alone, right? Also, Anjali’s back after so long. How have you been Anjali?”
— “I have been good. How is it going with you? You still play football?”
— “Nah, not really. Unless you call shouting at a giant screen in a pub while spilling beer all over playing football.” He paused to laugh politely with everyone. “This job really sucks every last bit of us. What about you? FriscoNet, right? I’ve heard great things about your softball team.”
— “You play baseball?” Kartik’s jaw dropped.
— “Not really. I am more like the extra who carries the drinks and stands in the back of the field where the ball never lands.”
Anand laughed and elbowed Kartik, who realised he had just missed a cue. He caught up and did his laugh-grin. Kartik did not remember Anjali to be a sporty type at all. She was the one who bunked college to support her boyfriend (the ex) from the stands. He remembered because he was in the stands too, cheering for Anand. At one of the games, he had shared a packet of chips with Anjali. After the game, when he went home, he put the packet in between the pages of a textbook. The oil-soaked pages induced many sighs and mysterious smiles when he had used the same book to study for the exams.
Meanwhile at the party, the ex had covered the inch’s distance between himself and Anjali as he added that he was the captain of their department’s cricket team.
— “Good for you, man.” Anand knew that he had now brought the ball right into the opponent’s D-line.
— “Actually, I’d rather light this outside.” Kartik would have missed this cue as well but the extinguished joint in his hand caught his attention. “You guys mind stepping out?”
— “Most definitely.” Anand grinned as he watched Kartik score one.
— “Sure.” Anjali said right after she heard the ex make some disagreeing grunt.
— “We’ll see you in here in a few?” The ex spoke for the group as he smiled into Anjali’s eyes. She dodged them and then cowered as he put his arm around her to give her a see-you-soon side-hug. The group did not get up because they were having land-grabber type feelings about their window-side seats.
Once outside, Kartik leaned against the little patch of wall in between the various wide windows and lit the joint with renewed confidence. He had his trusted wingman by his side and Anjali’s entire timeline flashing in his head.
— “So Anjali, how is the weather in San Francisco?”
— “Oh, it is beautiful. It is like the most productive weather ever.” Her smile out in the open was very different from her smile back indoors. “People are so much more conscious about everything, politics, ecology, everything… Can you imagine I used to actually go for picnics on Saturday mornings to a park? With a basket and a mat, the whole nine yards.”
That smile provided Kartik with the first signs of an opening. The first crack of light after what had seemed like his darkest hour. He started laying the foundation for hope based on that smile. Anand, on the other hand, was gloating. He had successfully gotten Anjali out of her group and into a “fair game space” as Kartik would have called it. (Anand and Avantika would have agreed with the use of the words ‘fair game’. Veena would’ve cringed, Anuj would have laughed and Seher would’ve nukited Kartik’s gut). Anand’s eyes moved to the bar to spot Veena and Seher. His phone buzzed with a message from Veena, “Come to the bar.”
⁴¹ In Actorography, a wingman is just a fellow performer. When you are impressing the camera, you are used to acting opposite another person. That’s where the drama comes from, that’s where the scene comes from and that’s where the dynamic comes from. When you are impressing a person you have never met, the focus is all on you. That is why you always need a wingman.
⁴² We are just going to call him the ex because seriously, do you really care what his name was?
⁴³ You have to allow one Japanese word without translation in this post-global universe.
