Chapter 37: Getting There
— “So what do you want to do now, heartbreak kid?” Anuj slapped Anand’s back as they continued to stroll in the rough direction of the sea.
— “We’re walking to Bandstand, right?” Kartik did not like walking in any direction without knowing where he was heading.
— “I’m not really sure. The evening had been planned and without Veena, I’m not really sure what the plan for anything is.”
— “I am going to ask you this only once. What exactly happened?” It took effort for Anuj to show empathy to a fellow man.
— “She said she loved me and she wanted to be with me. Except she wasn’t sure if her answer to my proposal was a yes.”
— “Tell me what she said, in exact words.” Kartik was sure that if he knew the exact words, he would know what Veena exactly meant.
— “Will you guys stop being a news channel dicking around with exit polls till the actual results are around?” Anuj was sure that nobody could know what any of the girls they knew meant unless they spelt it out. “I mean how long do you actually have to wait? An hour? Two?”
— “She did that awkward, overtly sexual gesture?”
— “Yes.” Anand was biting the skin around his thumbnail. “Although, ‘the move’ was a little sloppy because she was tipsy.”
— “So you know what the move was giving cover-fire to, don’t you?”
— “If I knew, I’d be sure, right?” Anand spat some chewed skin out. “Right now, I am not sure if whether she wants to be with me is a lie or whether her not being sure of wanting to be with me is a lie.”
Meanwhile in the car, from the middle row of seats, Avantika passed the joint to a driving Seher, who pumped up the bass on the music system and the volume on her phone. She had plugged the phone into the dangling audio jack, one end of which had been plugged into the aux slot. Beats dropped out of the car windows as Seher took a drag of the pact joint and Katy B’s voice flooded the insides of the car with a mission.
— “Bandstand or Carter Road?”
— “Carter.” Avantika answered for Veena who finally unfroze when her mind started tripping on the streetlights that zoomed by and the wind that blew into her face. The number of cops on the street continued to multiply as they drove from the innards of Bandra towards the edge of the suburb.
— “Do you want to go to this other party I’ve been invited to?” Seher asked Veena when they were stuck in the middle of a random jam that had sprouted right in front of them.
— “What party?”
— “Just some friends from Delhi are having their diaspora party in Bombay, and as a member of the Delhi diaspora club, I have been invited.”
— “Is there really such a club?” Avantika wondered why she wasn’t invited to become a member of that club. She had stayed in Delhi (before moving to Bombay) long enough for that to have happened. Seher didn’t dignify Avantika’s question with an answer but she ended up getting her answer from Niyati anyways.
— “I can’t believe it. He pulled a Kartik!” Veena blurted in the silence between two tracks as her nerves started to calm down.
— “He pulled a Kartik?” Avantika stopped transcribing after Veena’s first sentence.
— “Anand pulled a Kartik. I am his Electronics Anjali, except his is a success story.” Then realising that Avantika was actually asking for Niyati, Veena said, “Just type “He pulled a Kartik.” for Niyati. She’ll get it.”
— “So that makes you Finance Anand’s Jewellery Veena?” Seher chuckled as she worked the wheel.
— “Yes! Exactly.” Veena reacted like she had just seen Anand’s picture on the cover of Competition Success Review where instead of a certificate, he was holding a picture of her making a kissy face at the camera.
— “How did you come to that conclusion, my little genius?”
Seher was against the concept of soulmates and perfect romances, and may have at times jokingly bet against Anand when hanging out with Veena. But if you cornered her (as Anuj did one night, when he locked her legs with his and held her hands down as they faced each other while resting their heads on one pillow) then she would say that as an individual case study, she was happy she knew these two. “Chutiyas.” She’d think any time either of them acted dumb like how Veena was acting that night. But Seher didn’t have a choice. She knew she had to stand by Veena no matter what decision she took.
— “You saw how well that entire scene was set up?”
— “Are you sure you are only mad about being Kartricked?”
— “I believe I think so. Why else would I be mad? I mean I do love that metrosexual moron to bits.” Veena shifted sideways onto her seat, putting one foot between the two seats so she could look at Avantika and Seher both. “We met at a party. I thought he was cute and he thought I was beautiful…”
— “Niyati says ‘Kartricked’ was a good one.” Avantika interrupted Veena’s rant, her eyes glowing in the screen light.
— “Then there was the series of pokes, likes and comments till we started chatting on Facebook and then on Gmail.”
— “That’s a match I’ve watched! Why am I listening to the highlights from a drunk radio?” Seher took a sharp right to find one of the lanes that would open into Carter Road.
— “Yes, I know but I am just revising it one last time before-.”
— “This is the problem with top rankers. Life isn’t an exam that gives you preparatory leave, it just happens. You can’t have the right answers.” Seher liked imagining herself as a street philosopher, one of the things that she and Anuj found appealing about each other.
— “So then we started chatting for hours on Gchat. We had exchanged numbers but we stuck to Gchat for a while.” Veena completely ignored what Seher said and turned to look only at Avantika. “So then we started chatting for hours and we would hang out at some party, with some group, at some bar. I mean I was single then but I had just gotten out of a serious relationship.”
— “Did he send you a dick pic?” Avantika had the most pertinent of all questions.
— “No.”
— “See, you’re already better off than half the women who befriended someone on Facebook.”
— “Hahaha!” Seher cackled as she pulled the car onto a single empty spot outside the Carter Road promenade. She parked the car exactly half a foot away from the promenade wall. “Would you like to get some coffee?”
— “Yeah, why not.” Veena stepped out of the car as she opened her clutch, out of habit, to check if everything was in there before she started to cross the road to get to the coffee shop.
The boys talked about taking a cab across the sea-link to see if they could stop the cabbie right in the centre of the bridge to smoke a joint. They gave up when the few cabs they hailed were already occupied. So they continued to walk towards the shore, more specifically towards Bandstand.
— “Do you think in about fifty years, people will start recognising Bombay by the sea-link as opposed to the Gateway of India? Like on coins and tourist guide covers?”
— “Then we can officially become an unrecognisable city. The tourist guide cover will say, Bombay or not — You take a pick.”
— “At least, at this party, people didn’t exactly recognise Veena and me, right? I can’t thank my brain enough that I didn’t propose to her at Vishal’s party.” Anand could not even have had a nightmare that was so terrifying. Even his dreams were his own, to navigate through.
— “Do you really want to walk all the way to Bandstand? Isn’t this what Bandra is all about, the small lanes and big hearts?”
Not sold by Anuj’s rhetorical and cliched embellishments but by the virtue of sheer laziness, the three of them decided to not walk. Instead, they found a compound wall to hop backwards onto. Kartik dusted his hands off after using them to swing himself onto the wall.
— “If I knew about it, I would’ve at least told you not to do it on the dance floor.”
— “You think I wanted to do this on the dance floor in the middle of all those people?” Something ripped under Anand’s butt when he joined Kartik on the wall. It was the packet of balloons that he hadn’t used.
— “Then?”
— “I had squatted on that stoners’ corner because there were barely a few people there! Then all of you had to go dancing!”
— “It is okay, man.” Anuj roasted a cigarette as he stood facing them. “What’s that packet? And Kartik, make me a roach.” Kartik loved using his company visiting card to make roaches. Not just because he felt vindicated but also because the paper they used was just perfect.
— “Balloons that I wanted to use. And it is not okay. I am supposed to be in love with that girl. I have been planning my life with her and if I can’t even figure out what is troubling her so much — ”
— “You are overthinking this.” Anuj was optimistic because he believed he had found faith in Anand and Veena’s relationship. “Actually, you had already overthought it if you felt you needed balloons.”
For Anuj, it hadn’t been easy to fit into this group. In the beginning, he did not care much about the girls except Seher. He believed in using his sensitivity with women only when he wanted to sleep with them. And he had never been in a gang when he needed to be around women he didn’t want to sleep with for long periods of time. When he joined the gang, things changed. Here, he EVEN showed up for the guys-only hangouts when the girls were out by themselves. These patches varied in length. Sometimes, they were only a few hours long, like the evening of the day Niyati moved into her own place after having shared an apartment with Seher for a while. Once it was three whole days, the ones after Anuj and Seher broke up. The longest though was one whole week when Veena was in Chennai, Niyati was in Rajasthan for a shoot and Seher was in Delhi. And in those patches of female absentia, the guys had discovered that the only video game that Anand and Kartik could play with Anuj was FIFA.
— “No way, there has to be something I have got to be missing. Or something that I did wrong. I need to figure that out and make sure I can provide for that before the night is over. I need to SWOT this shit out.” Anand did not will to believe that he was overthinking this. He also believed that there was nothing in the world that couldn’t be solved by sheer overthinking.
— “Was there something she told you that she wanted to do before she got married or before she settled?” Kartik was certain⁶⁸ that Anand couldn’t go wrong with women and relationships.
— “You mean sort this shit out?” Anuj lit the joint he had been rolling.
— “Not S-O-R-T but S-W-O-T.” Kartik explained it to Anuj like the little girl from Mr India explaining the difference between soar and shor. “It’s a management term.”
— “What’s that?”
— “I need to analyse our relationship’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.”
— “You should add SWOT to your list of threats then.” Anuj gave up. “I need to do something with my hands. You guys are boring me to death. Give me those balloons.”
— “Do you think I did to Veena what Raji had done to me?” Anand tossed the packet to Anuj. “Am I getting dumped because I moved too fast into an unknown future?”
— “Three months at twice a week versus three years with one under the same roof.” Kartik held three fingers of each of his hands up. “Tell me when the math of it hits you.”
When Anand met Veena for the first time, he had just got done seeing this girl (Raji), who he had known from his days on Orkut. He had ended up meeting her at the social mixer that was organised by the guy who ran the Orkut group. After about three months of dating her, Anand had ended things because she suggested they should move in together because that would save her rent. She was quitting her job to start a business of her own. “I’m not sure yet. I want to do something with my hands. I will run it from our home.” She had said as she ran her fingers through her long plaits, when Anand had asked her, “What business?”
The girls walked out of the coffee shop to find a place to sit on the promenade. It was strange that there weren’t many people there on that night. It should have been like Marina Beach during Pongal, as Veena would’ve called it if it was as crowded as Carter Road usually was on New Year’s Eve. There were a few couples and a few loud groups. The couple closest to the girls was a burqa-clad woman and a moustachioed man in a long brown jacket and one of those furry nehru caps. Avantika tilted her head sideways as her stare lingered far longer than the usage of the word ‘linger’ allowed. It wasn’t really her fault. The two of them were going at it like the Mayans were right and the world was going to end that night. It was furious and gropey. The girls turned around and faced the sea. Seher and Avantika lit a cigarette each. Veena took alternating drags from both Seher and Avantika’s cigarettes.
— “Should I light one for you?” Not that Avantika minded sharing hers.
— “Oh no, I don’t smoke when Danan isn’t around.”
That was true. Every evening, over a post-dinner smoke, both of them had made a habit to account for every cigarette they had smoked during the day. The conscious effort to cut down on the number of cigarettes they smoked had led to them making a rule that she would only smoke when Anand was around and only by saying the magic words: “Danan, I need a cigarette.” This thought made Veena smile. Anand was allowed one extra cigarette a day for the cigarette breaks at work. How else would he know about office gossip? He still wasn’t senior enough to have an assistant, and that too a loyal one.
— “You love him!”
— “I know that!” Veena slapped Avantika on the back of her head. “I’m just not sure if I want to get engaged this early on.” She then lost steam. “I’m not sure what I want.”
— “Jab bhi someone says they are not sure, they are sure about something else. That is why they say, not sure.” Seher was rooting for Anand and Veena because she liked to believe there was an out. There was a real, romantic out to the charades that life puts you through on a daily basis, an out that led you to someone who got you at the end of each day. Most times that someone kept changing unless you maintained an ensemble⁶⁹ where that someone thrived.
— “I mean, there are so many things I have wanted to do. So many things that I have dreamed of.” Veena sipped on her coffee as her eyes lost focus and all the lights became blurry glitter glued onto the black chart paper sky. “Go to London, fall in love with a dignified and much older white guy with salt and pepper hair and then have a teary goodbye outside an airport when I would leave the city to go chase my passion in another continent…”
Seher couldn’t stand Veena’s pointless fantasy. She put a gun to her head as she made a dhishkyaaon noise. Veena used her fist to make an explosion on the other side of her head as she collapsed sideways onto Avantika’s lap. Avantika wiped brain matter from her face and then put two fingers on Veena’s jugular to pronounce her. “Time of death…”
— “I have never even kissed a girl! How do I know if I am not open to new things?” Veena’s head popped back up even before Avantika was done pronouncing her dead. (The never-kissed-a-girl part wasn’t true but things that had been buried in the past, sometimes, were better off left buried. Hints: Farmhouse party, pool, alcohol, pot.)
— “Find me a guy who will not let his wife kiss a girl because she wants to experiment and I will castrate myself.” Seher dropped her elbow to her crotch to represent a penis as she used the blade of her other palm to saw an invisible set of balls hanging from below her elbow. “I mean, I will literally grow a pair of balls and chop them off with a butcher’s knife.”
— “Niyati says she is willing to kiss you in front of Anand.” Avantika looked up from the phone. “She said I can kiss you too if you want to kiss a girl tonight only.”
— “Tell her that’s sweet.”
⁶⁸ Kartik had never seen Anand freak out like this, be it the commerce girl he was dating when they were in college or the ones after that. They didn’t really discuss them as much but they hadn’t been a group-group till Veena. Things had always seemed easy in Anand’s life.
⁶⁹ According to Actorography, an ensemble for an actor is a mindspace that is shared with other likeminded people, where their inside selves and their outside selves are the same people (or are at least treated the same). If what the ensemble wants for itself or a particular actor are in conflict with what a particular actor wants, the delicate balance of the ensemble is lost and it crashes.
