Chapter 30: The One Before The Interval
Seher left Veena outside the loo, in pursuit of some people she had to say hello to. She was walking the fine balance of tipsiness on which she usually agreed with what anyone said. At the right amount of tipsy, there was almost nothing Seher would not agree with you on. The only condition being your niceness. And this time around, she had agreed to go dancing when two other girls had insisted that she go dancing with them. (If she hadn’t been at the right amount of tipsy, she would have turned away to perform a bonsai barf in the name of dancing for anybody from the gang.)
From outside the loo, Veena called Anand to check where he was but nobody picked up. If she had just turned left to look at the end of the corridor, she would’ve spotted him. She called Kartik next, who gave her directions to the smoking spot.
When Veena reached the smoking spot, Anand’s forehead had lines because Seher was missing. Seher couldn’t have been missing. She was supposed to be with Veena. He pulled Avantika aside and asked her to go find Seher. Anuj joined Avantika in her quest and Kartik grabbed Anand’s arm.
— “Why do you have iceberg lines on your forehead?”
— “It was supposed to be perfect.”
— “What was supposed to be perfect?”
— “Nothing. Now, we’ll have to go find Seher.” He still couldn’t get himself to think about what he was about to do. His face was blank, except for the damn iceberg lines.
— “Where’s the joint?” Veena grabbed Anand’s arm.
— “What joint?”
— “I thought that is why Kartik called me here! I was puking.” She giggled and added air quotes to the word ‘puking’.
— “Why didn’t you send Seher to tell me if you were puking?”
— “Nooo, you dummy.” Veena slapped his arm before putting her hand around it. “I had to escape a social situation. Acchha tell me now, why is your forehead like the top view of the railway line?”
— “Oh, nothing, just that my phone is plugged into the amplifier.”
— “No wonder I’ve been tripping on the music for a while now.” She got onto her toes, put her arms around Anand’s neck and kissed him with her drunk rubber lips, which meant she kissed him unstoppably. “I love you, Danan.”
— “I love you too.” He held her by her waist, stumped at the public display of affection. His hands (he swore by pure muscle memory) lifted her up just enough so that her drunk toes didn’t have to bear her weight completely. All of that while he cursed everybody in the gang for not being around at that moment. He couldn’t have planned a better moment than that. It couldn’t have gotten more romantic than that, in the exact spot of his choosing.
Meanwhile Anuj, whose job had been to retrieve Seher from the dancefloor, obviously had failed. Not because he couldn’t drag her out but mostly because everybody remembered the party when Seher and he had “danced their balls off”.
Avantika returned with the tragic (for Anand) news that Anuj and Seher were dancing and from the looks of it, they weren’t going to stop till they were out of breath. Anand counted that as two songs. That meant that everything wasn’t over yet. He still had time. Some last minute improvisations became imminent on his part.
On WhatsApp, Niyati speculated about Anand’s ‘perfect’. Messages from Bangkok buzzed in by the second. Anand was not someone who freaked out like this. Even when he participated in a group iceberg face bit, his iceberg face wouldn’t have lines on his forehead. Lines on the forehead were reserved for situations in office only.
Avantika grabbed Kartik’s arm and hooked her other hand around Veena’s elbow to drag them to the dancing room. Anand did not budge from his spot. Veena tugged on his arm to drag him away. He asked the people with the snow cans and soap solutions to go dancing with them. Veena made an iceberg face about that invitation for about a second before she realised that she was too tipsy to care if they were going dancing with a group they had just met.
The gang was ushered onto the centre of the dancefloor, where Anuj and Seher were going at it. They were twirling, clapping and dancing to moves that were forged right in the heart of Bollywood. Avantika tried hard to break Kartik’s mood along with his one-step dance repertoire. When it came to dancing, Kartik was like a movie hero from the 70s. While it would be completely appropriate to say that Veena loved dancing, Drunk Veena’s affair with dancing was more torrid than the purest of loves. Anand and Veena were soon circumnavigating the entire dance floor, spicing it up with tango moves and salsa steps. In his head, Anand counted one more track to the one he was waiting for — Hugo’s cover of Jay-Z’s 99 problems.
At the end of the second last track, he winked at Avantika and then looked down at the fake snow can in her hand. Avantika nodded and shot snow into the air and continued dancing. The rest of the stoners who had followed Anand into the dance room took Avantika’s lead and filled the room with snow and soap bubbles. Somebody else pulled the balloons off the walls and tossed them around as they bounced between all the dancers. The centre of the room would be officially clear of everybody by the end of this track. Except for the gang and another couple, who were able to maintain the same levels of dancethusiasm as the gang. Others, threatened that they might come across as eyesores to those who were watching, stepped back.
That was when there was a break (which was flooded by applause from the people watching) because the bootleg Anand had on his phone started exactly after two seconds of silence. Indie artist Hugo’s sharp voice broke into the air, “If you’re having girl problems, I feel bad for you son…” The entire room shouted the next line and then began clapping with the track.
Anand let Veena roll out of his arms to do a drop. He held her hand tight as he dropped backwards himself to ask Kartik to hold a lighter up. Kartik suddenly pulled out a fresh move from up his sleeve, did a clap and a full turn as he passed Anuj and Seher to mutter at them, “Lighters.”
Anuj and Seher continued to keep step with the beat as everybody chanted loudly with the chorus. Avantika stopped to look at Kartik when he stopped dancing and raised his flaming lighter up in the air. That was when the imaginary lightning bulb above his head glowed so bright that it exploded.
— “Motherfucker. He is doing it!”
— “He is doing what?”
— “Lighter.”
— “What is it that he is doing?!” Avantika was about to text Niyati.
— “You’ll see. Don’t text Niyati. Just lighter!”
— “Okay, okay.” Avantika opened a lighter app on her big phone screen and waved the LED flame in the air.
By then a couple of people on the periphery of the dancefloor had taken Kartik’s cue and raised their lighters up in the air as well. Anuj and Seher stopped and Anuj used the same app trick as Avantika. Seher used an actual lighter. The lighter trend spread like a virus. Before the second stanza of the song, the entire room was flooded with lighter flames (or animated lighter flames on phone screens). Thirty-two, to be exact. Seher grinned at all the lights and climbed onto the bookshelves (emptied a few hours before the party) to take a picture.
Anand twirled Veena around a couple of times and right before she stopped spinning, he was on one knee. In a room filled with bubbles, fake snow, lighter flames, their favourite song and spectators.
Veena’s eyes widened as she stared at him in disbelief. Just so that she wouldn’t fall, she put her palm on Anand’s head. The people, who were chattering and singing loudly, couldn’t feel the tips of their thumbs burning (from the hot metal tops of their lighters) because of all the excitement and inebriation.
Anand grinned from ear to ear and ran his fingers around Veena’s ankle. His eyes looked right into hers before they looked down at her ankle (for a brief moment to let her know that he was lifting it). She continued staring at him in disbelief and let him lift the foot to rest it on his knee. Seher squealed from her position and switched the camera to video mode.
— “Veena, I am good at a lot of things — presentations, boardroom meetings, talking clients into giving me their business, talking my bosses into giving me great appraisals, talking our friends into doing your bidding…”
— “Stop.” Veena’s voice flooded the entire room with disbelief. “Stop right there.” This is not how she had imagined it. Her eyelids got heavier and tears trickled down her cheeks. “Please, stop…”
She had always wanted to visit the jewellery store with Anand, pick a ring and pick a great poolside venue. It had to be on a weekday where all of them would take an off and go to a resort on the outskirts of the city. It had to be a weekday because that would ensure that there was nobody else at that resort except for the gang. While that would have felt regal, the situation she was in while spiraling into her dream proposal, felt euphoric. Or maybe the euphoria was just the weed and alcohol.
Anand’s fingers held a platinum anklet, halfway around her ankle, the ends of it waiting to be locked when Veena said, “Yes, yes, a million times, yes.” But that happened only in Anand’s and possibly Kartik’s head.
While Anand was blinded by his optimism despite Veena’s “Stop!”, Kartik was the one who said, “Uh-oh.” Avantika’s phone did not stop buzzing. Kartik’s phone buzzed exactly four times. The first three messages read: “He jumpcut⁶⁴ to it? Why did he jumpcut to it? Did you know?” The fourth one said, “If you don’t have me on Skype in the next 30 seconds, I will exile myself right after I tear your limbs off.”
“My thumb is burning, can’t you just say yes?” Someone from the crowd yelled over the music, which had filled the silence of the room like an elephant (painted white) dropped in a tank of water that was built to fit exactly one elephant.
“This is the most beautiful moment ever.” She ran her fingers into Anand’s hair. “I couldn’t have done it better… The anklet! You have nailed every last detail.” Veena’s mind did somersaults.
This was not what they had decided. Their last conversation and the subsequent agreement was a four year plan — living in for a year and a half after having dated for two and a half years. They had moved in after dating for a year and a half. That had messed Veena’s calculations a little but she was fine by that because she was happy. But not this. She was getting engaged a year earlier than she had planned. In her head, it wasn’t twenty fourteen yet. It couldn’t be right. Did that mean she would have to start having kids before she was thirty? Her eyes screamed iceberg and she couldn’t help but grin through the panic attack on the dancefloor. That grin wasn’t a fake one. She couldn’t have pulled that off. Not after all that whisky in the loo. That grin was not fake because the anklet had reminded her why she loved Anand, and why she wanted to spend her life with him. That was when the song finished its part in this bit: “Ninety niiine prooblemmms… But a bitch ain’t oooonnee…”
⁶⁴ According to Actorography, a jumpcut is when someone skips a lot of their natural narrative to one of the probable futures in it. Niyati had always said, this was the darkest of all the devices in Actorography. You don’t jumpcut unless you are sure that only banalities awaited in the natural narrative between you and post-jumpcut you. If the narrative is made up of more than one party, then all parties involved should be aware of, and accept the jumpcut. Although, the biggest pre-requisite for a jumpcut is a balanced ensemble. If your ensemble is not balanced, you shouldn’t ever try a jumpcut. And sometimes even in a perfectly balanced cast, an amateur Actorographer can fail while trying a jumpcut.
