Chapter 40: A Brief History of the Mumbai Marathon
Veena and Anand were in the honeymoon phase of their relationship (and so was the group). Veena had insisted that the gang needed to run the marathon together. She believed that it would bring them closer. October heat had just ended and the weather was beginning to get better, and to top it all, love was in the air and everything seemed possible — including them surviving a 42.2-km run.
Anuj objected and Seher followed. This went on for a week. Every time they met, Veena brought up the marathon following which Anuj broke into Zizek’s ‘First as tragedy, then as farce’ in an Eastern European accent. (Although his accent sounded a lot like that of an extra pretending to be Russian on a badly produced American police procedural.) That did not stop Veena from going ahead and signing the rest of the gang to the group discount for the marathon training package at a gym (which according to Kartik’s calculation fell on the centroid of the polygon that all their houses made). Veena picked that gym because Seher had been told by one of her colleagues that John Abraham went to that gym.
Seher and Anuj showed up after the workout to smoke a few joints. Seher, of course, had the perfect excuse to not run — she would be covering the marathon for the magazine and that would be a lot of work. That did not stop her from getting baked as fuck through the marathon. After the marathon, almost every public gathering that the gang participated in became an excuse to get baked as fuck — the anti-corruption protests, the anti-rape protests, the anti-terrorism protests, the pride parade with Gay Jasbir, the save-the-environment walk, etc.
Anuj borrowed one of his colleague’s scooterette for the day. (He couldn’t take Anand’s car because he hated driving.) Seher and he would ride for six kilometres on the lanes parallel to the marathon track to find a spot to smoke and roll. With a joint in hand, they would walk to the footpath of the road that had been blocked to be the marathon track. The gang would show up one after the other — Niyati first, followed by Anand, Veena and Kartik (in that order). By the sixth joint and six kilometres away from the finish line, the gang was pretty fucked. Kartik kept stopping every time he saw a plane fly over their heads and stared at it till it went out of sight, or till someone reminded him that he was still running. (A good bet: Every time he saw a plane, he thought of America and every time he thought of America, he thought of Anjali and how one day he’d be on a flight to be with her.)
Veena felt like she was getting dehydrated by the second. She stopped and waited for herself to crash. Anand carried Veena on his back through the last hundred metres or so. That was the day Veena became aware of what she coveted the most about Anand — his shoulders. She couldn’t get over the feeling of her arms hanging off his shoulders. The way his shoulder muscles felt under her arm-wings. The way her breasts were pressed against his back and her cheeks were pressed against his wet hair would stay imprinted in her memory forever. Meanwhile, Niyati who hadn’t stopped for the last joint was far ahead of the gang, keeping pace with some of the celebs, just in case you know, her picture ended up being on the front page of any of the tabloids the next day. (It did.)
