Chapter 27: Getting Along
Anuj and Seher parted ways after their first round of social-whoring. He joined the film critic, the film writer and Avantika’s nemesis. That group had been joined by a woman who had directed the last big romantic comedy. (It was about a national level cyclist and a national level swimmer falling in love.) Seher walked towards a whiter group of people. Somewhere else, a loud voice boomed above all music, impersonating the charismatic leader of all Bengalis: “You… You are the total maoist!” Not a lot of people laughed.
Anand excused himself from the group Veena and him were standing with. As long as Veena and that girl continued discussing rom-coms and pop songs, she would not need an exit any time soon. That meant that he could take a break. He joined Kartik and Avantika standing at the bar.
— “This house is huge. Let’s go look around.”
— “What does this guy do for a living?” This was the second time Kartik had been to the Prajapati party.
— “He runs an advertising company.” This was Avantika’s first time. “Also, he’s old money.”
The three of them walked past a few doors. One had a bunch of people hanging out with their drinks, in circles of threes and fours. Most groups had an ashtray, but only one had an actual ashtray. The others used somebody’s finished drink. Avantika and Kartik politely smiled at a few people who threw them a collective glance.
— “Wow, there must be at least a hundred people at this party.”
— “Seher said that last year this party had at least two hundred unique visitors.”
The other two doors after that one weren’t very different from the first one but the third was the poker room. Anand nodded at the guy dealing, who nodded right back. This wasn’t where Anand wanted to hang out that night. The last time he played poker with some people from that room, he only remembered whisky and the sunrise when they wrapped up.
The sex ratio of this party was more or less even. Like this was the ideal society that everyone aspired to be a part of. Everybody seemed to be having a great conversation about books and movies and fashion and music and capital punishment and national and international protests and the rights of women and how to get away with genocide and everything the nation actually wanted to know.
By the time they were done checking out all the rooms, they reached the tall windows of the last room, which wasn’t a bedroom or a study or any room for that matter. It was just an empty space at the end of a corridor. It had wires jutting out of sockets and holes. There was a group of people sitting on the grooves of the sliding windows, rolling a joint. Ishani, the girl who opened the door, was one of them. The walls were decorated with fairy lights and a couple of lamps made out of rough handmade paper sat in two of the corners.
The three from our gang waved at the fellow stoners as Anand pulled out some of the maal (that Anuj had given him earlier) to play stoner chicken⁶². Their roller raised his mix to acknowledge Anand rolling. Anand responded the same way. After the two rollers greeted each other, one of the guys in the group got up.
— “Hi, I’m Harsh… Oh, sorry, you’re rolling.” He offered Kartik the same hand to Kartik, who shook it. “This is David, Ishani, Avinash and Sara.”
— “Kartik.”
— “Anand.”
— “Avantika.”
— “Yeah, we just met Ishani out at the door.”
— “Right! You guys are Anuj and Seher’s friends.” Ishani suddenly felt more comfortable so as she asked Kartik, “What was wrong with you?”
— “Oh, don’t worry about it. I was a zombie then.”
— “This is a weed joint, by the way.” Harsh lit his joint and passed it to Avantika.
— “Oh, this is good. Where is it from?”
— “David knows.”
— “Aunty.” David was still getting out of work mode. His eyes were still in a daze after having stared at a monitor for hours in a small and dark, soundproof cabin.
— “There is always an aunty, isn’t there?” Anand laughed. “Can I get a roach?”
— “To Aunties everywhere.”
Later in this conversation, they learnt that both of them were talking about the same Aunty. Right before they segued into the what-do-you-dos. (Kartik and Anand really stood out with what they did.)
— “Wow, an investment banker.” Harsh laughed. “That must be a one-of at this party.” He was a graphic designer at a newspaper.
— “So you make softwares like Word and Excel?” Ishani had never met a software engineer in her life. She knew they existed because she kept reading about them in the newspaper.
— “Yes, something like that. Except for big companies who want custom solutions.”
— “So like software for the customs officers?” Even Avinash was curious. He had a couple of cousin software engineers but they never spoke of anything but cricket and movies.
— “No, no, by custom I mean, whatever the companies want those softwares to do, like manage their employee database and stuff.”
— “Ohh… Like that.” That was all of them together.
— “My parents keep telling me to invest, man…” The word investment was something that Harsh never understood. Money was something that always came and went. “I can’t understand shit about all this stuff.” Seeing Anand struggle with transferring the maal to paper, Harsh offered his palm to help.
— “This is a weird roach.” Anand took the unusually long roach from Sara.
— “I call it The Audrey.” Sara smiled.
— “Clever.” He finished the joint and lit it.
The conversation veered in the direction of the studio Harsh and David worked for and how Ishani knew Seher and Anuj (through a common friend), and how Sara had just returned from her American degree in journalism and was looking for a job with some magazine. After getting a drag from both the joints, Anand put his hand on Kartik’s shoulder and looked at Avantika. “You guys good here, right? See you in a bit.”
Outside in the hall, Seher and Veena had joined their smaller groups to form a bigger group so that in the joint chaos, Seher could lure Veena into a drinking game.
— “This game is called Art and Culture.”
— “What’s that?” They excused themselves to get refills.
— “Hashtag DoAShot is trending. #DoAShot every time someone says art or culture.” Seher was already on twitter typing in the second sentence before she explained it to Veena. “Every time, in a group someone uses the words ‘art’ or ‘culture’, we have to take a sip. Used to be a shot the last I remember playing it.”
— “Sure. I don’t think people use the words art and culture so much. It’ll be fun to spot.”
The two returned to the large group they had just left.
— “See, now that movie was art.”
— “The music! It captured the punjabi culture to the T. I can totally imagine my mom saying such a thing…”
Veena didn’t know it was going to be that easy. She wanted to laugh so she bit her lip, using the pain to make an unpleasant face (like she was about to puke). She brought her hand to her mouth. She excused herself to walk in the direction of the loo. Seher excused herself to go check on her friend and she swiftly walked towards Veena and grabbed her arm mid-way to pretend to comfort her into the bathroom.
Meanwhile, the #DoAShot tweet had been seen by almost every one of Seher’s followers. It got retweeted a good seventy-four times. A bot tweeted to Seher telling her she was trending in the Mumbai area.
— “You couldn’t hold your laughter in for two exchanges in a conversation? I had a #DoAShot prepared for every group at this party.” Seher pinched Veena’s lovehandle.
— “As much as I’d like to find out how all of those work, don’t ever introduce a game to me in a stoned space in a public state. Or wait, is it stoned state in a public space? Whichever, you know, I need to prepare myself with painful images that stop me from laughing.”
— “We’ll have to stay in here for a while, if you want to hold solid on the puking lie.”
— “Meh. Let’s hold solid. Although, that reminds me, do we have enough fluids?”
— “Crap, that bottle of whisky is in the car!” Seher unlocked the door. “Wait, let me see if I can get my hands on another bottle.”
⁶² Playing stoner chicken (idiom): When two groups of stoners run into each other, and both of them are in posession of a joint in progress, whether they will get along or not will depend on whether the first group to finish rolling passed the joint to the second group or not. If they did, it was a party. Because then at any given point from then on, there would always be two lit joints. Usually, the ones who didn’t pass were either noobs or maalitists — elitist about the maal they were smoking.
