Chapter 29: Drinking Games
Back in the bathroom at the Prajapati party, Veena received a Happy New Year text from Nalini-amma. It made her grin. She replied through the grin, closed her eyes and rested her head on the flush tank when Seher returned with a couple of ‘size 12’ drinks.
— “Why are you grinning like you do when you are having sweet dreams?”
— “Just got a text from Nalini-amma, it said: Hap-hap-hap-happy Birthday, Tamizhselvi! It has the emoticons for a pointing finger and an explosion next to it.”
— “How is that funny?”
— “It’s not funny-funny. It’s nostalgic-funny. She’s textually impersonating our gardener impersonating Rajinikanth.” Veena’s family gardener in Chennai had a stutter and the only English greeting he knew when she was a child was Happy Birthday. (He’d wish her with that for almost anything including her exams.)
— “Here’s a drinking game. I will name things. If they don’t make you reminisce about Nalini-amma, you will take a sip.”
— “Sure.”
— “Comb. Puris. Compass box. Omelette. Motorcycle. Milk cake–”
— “This one time, I was so stoned that I finished a box of milk cake which Nalini-amma had bought to take to the temple.”
— “Bells. Pundit. Cycle. Milkman. Door. Window. Flowers. Wait, I already know that one.” She thought for a second before she looked at the whisky in her hand. “Hangover.”
— “The hangover.” Veena paused her sipping, after thirteen sips and the one small milk cake story. “There was the morning of the day I left Chennai. It is a little connected to the flowers story only.” Veena took another sip. “So I told you how the only thing she asked to change when she married my dad was the flower bed?”
— “Yes.”
— “On that morning, I woke up from the farewell party my friends had thrown me the night before. I remembered the pack of cigarettes I bribed Nalini-amma with. I looked around the house, knowing how much I was going to miss that house. It had been the same ever since I could remember it. Nothing had changed in the years since my mum died.” Except there were fresh flowers every morning.
— “Come here.” Seher wrapped her arms around Veena completely.
— “I saw her in the kitchen a few minutes after that hit me. I just broke down as soon as she turned around and smiled at me. I had no idea why. I just did.”
— “You remember that boyfriend of yours, the one in a metal band?”
— “What does Paul have to do with Nalini-amma.”
— “Kuch nahin par listen, no.”
— “I was stalking him on Facebook and apparently, he is domesticated now. He wears a blue shirt and beige pants.”
— “So?”
— “So that makes you like the Beige Countess. You bite a guy and he straightens up.”
— “What has that got to do with anything?” Veena started slapping Seher’s body through the hug till it broke. “Also, where’s Danan? I think I’ve puked long enough for it to be a real situation. I also need a cigarette.” She splashed some water on her face.
– “Acchha, check what Niyati is upto.”
– “See, these seem like nice tracks that I have heard of…” Veena stopped texting Niyati when a track ended and a new one began. She looked up at the ceiling as she smiled while predicting (inside her head, obviously) that second track right. The same happened with the one after that too.
In the living room, leaning against the frame of a window, Anuj was busy talking to a couple of people who had read his book and absolutely agreed with the crux of it. He sought Avantika as soon as he got out of that conversation. She was smoking with Kartik and Ishani’s group. Without stepping in front of Ishani, he just made eyes at Avantika who excused herself and met him halfway to the hall, in the corridor. The corridor walls were lined up with framed pictures and (prints of) paintings. On one side of their conversation, was a waist-up shot of two naked women, in burqas with floral wreaths. The other side of the conversation was Edvard Munch’s The Scream except it had Batman in an Adam-West-purple suit doing the scream, and the faint shadow in the background was clearly Alfred’s because it was holding a shadow of a tray.
— “Avantika! I can’t die here.”
— “What is stopping you?” Avantika had a bottle of soap bubble solution.
— “I care about what most of these people think.” Anuj did.
— “That’s not why you got into this, son.” She blew a line of bubbles at Anuj. “You got into this because you really wanted to die. Show me some of that commitment.”
— “But… Where did you get that?” Anuj flapped his hand in front of his face to fight the bubbles. “But I can’t. They’ll think I’m an idiot.”
— “We’re all idiots.” Avantika slapped Anuj right across the face. “That is the core philosophy of Actorography. And Anand found these somewhere, he said.”
— “What? This is real life!” Anuj touched his reddening cheek. “Don’t bring in the religion Niyati is trying to start!”
— “What is wrong with we are all idiots? If there is something that we need to do, to become more comfortable in a social situation, then we need to do it.”
— “Even by that principle, I am very comfortable in this current situation.”
— “Or are you?” Avantika did a dramatic-turn-and-stare-in-the-eye. “Imagine dramatic music playing every time I say this, okay?”
— “I am. And no, I won’t.”
— “Or are you?” She added an unveiling palm to the mix as she repeated the previous action.
— “What are you doing?”
— “Or are you?” This time, she did the unveiling palm, the dramatic turn and stare in the eye as she added slowly fading echoes of “Or are you? Or are you? Or are you?”
— “This is not working.”
— “What I mean to say is…” She was about to do the dramatic turn and stare once again before she stopped. “I can’t think of any more garnishes⁶³ to add to the ‘Or are you’. So what I really meant to say is: You are comfortable with the idea that you won’t be able to fulfill your New Year’s Eve resolution of dying at every party. You’re quitting. You’re a quitter. Do you want to be called a quitter, one-time-author Anuj Dutta?”
— “I am not a quitter.”
— “Then grow a pair and prepare to die!”
— “Are you doing this all by yourself or is Niyati on a Whatsapp conspiracy to ruin my life?”
— “She was sending me keywords like cue cards.” Avantika shrugged, holding her phone up. “And I was building the sentences on my own.”
— “That was pretty good.”
— “Oh, Actorography ka kamaal.” Avantika did an accurate Achyut Potdar impression as her grinning head dropped till her ears were in line with her risen shoulders. “So where do you want to die?”
— “I don’t know yet. This house has far too many options.” He started walking towards that last room where Anand, Avantika and Kartik were hanging out with Ishani and the gang.
Around this crowd, Anuj never had any doubts about where he stood. He thought of himself as a voice in the narrative of the country and the writing it was producing. He didn’t think of himself as one of the big voices that defined the sub-continent but a small one, a minority (to be more specific an anarcho-syndicalistic minority). Every now and then, someone asked him to write a guest column, asking his opinion on some latest event in the country and he often ended up pontificating about looking inwards. Seher had hated his guest column voice. She didn’t so much mind the couple of pieces he had written about the recent elections in West Bengal and the meaning of ‘development’ in Gujarat. She had found them funny. ‘Features-funny’ was the adjective she had coined for those pieces. None of the pieces received any comments. Although, his guest column pieces had had an unexpected following from spiritual junkies, the ones whose comments spoke about having similar thoughts and experiences in an Art of Living or Isha Yoga program.
— “Heyy, Anuj! Look what your friends found us!” Ishani held up a spray can filled with fake snow. Her friend Sara held up the looped wire from her soap bubble bottle.
— “Yeah, I found them in the room where people were dancing.” Anand lied. These cans had been nestled under the car seat since Friday, when after work, he had stopped by the party supplies store. There were four cans of snow, five soap bubble bottles and a packet of white balloons which he tucked in his back pocket because the Prajapatis had already decorated the house with balloons for him.
Soon enough, the joints got over and the drinks were gone and everyone got tired of playing with bubbles and snow. Some of Ishani’s group got up to get drinks. The snow stayed hanging from the walls. Some of the bubbles seemed too comfortable to pop.
⁶³ You know what garnishing is in the context of food, right? Now, if your words are the food preparation, then according to Actorography, your actions are the garnishes you add to make your food more impressive.
