Chapter 46: A Brief History of Anuj and Niyati
Anuj and Niyati had bonded over — no prizes for guessing — pot. But not like how the rest of the group had bonded over pot. It happened when she landed in Bombay with about seven kilos of sweet, sweet hash, which she wanted to sell at two thousand a tola (after putting about two kilos in the freezer for the gang). This was a particularly delicate period in Niyati’s life. She had had no assignments for about six months and was running out of her savings. She wasn’t going to ask her dad to pay her rent after the fight she had gotten into with the entire family before she had moved out. They had everything back in Patna including a giant farm where once upon a time, they provided single source opium to the dens of a particular Chinese drug lord during her great grandfather’s time. Of course, everything had gone legit now. Her elder brother was working with the Tatas. The middle brother was taking care of the farms but growing real stuff there and not narcotics. He had even tried his hand at a baked goods chain but it hadn’t grown beyond two shops. Her job description would have been to get married into another old bigwig family from the city. That clearly went against everything she wanted to do.
During that period of unemployment, came the cleansing trip Niyati felt she needed to take. She went to McLeodganj and then higher up in the Himachal. She stopped at Tosh where she met a group of Americans and Europeans who had all picked up hash by the kilo for their three months in the Himachal. She decided to hang out with them from then on. When she returned to Bombay, she was carrying about seven hundred tolas or seven kilos of the best hash to be found at a price of four hundred rupees a tola.
Till about halfway through the train journey back, she wasn’t nervous because while she was perfectly aware of the fact that what she was doing was illegal, the word ‘smuggling’ hadn’t hit her yet. Inside her head, she was just on a holiday and making some extra money to pay for it. The trip had ended up being a bigger saver than what she had expected because you don’t spend money when you are sleeping with an American in the mountains. While outside of Bombay was another story, Niyati had never dated a white guy in Bombay. That was her street credit⁷⁶ among the girls. (Both Veena and Seher had dated a white guy at some point or the other during their Bombay stay.)
Midway through, when she realised what she was doing was “smuggling”, she decided to commit to being a smuggler. She wore sunglasses, put a scarf around her face and acquired the walk of an airhostess who was walking out of the airport with the object of the orchestrations of a well-suited, extremely intelligent brain. She put on a playlist of remixed 70s Bollywood background scores (that she had acquired from one of the French guys) on her phone as she stayed baked through the rest of her journey.
On a Tuesday night, she was to sit with whoever showed up to weigh and cut the hash into two tola bits and pack them neatly. The only people who were willing to burn the midweek midnight oil were Seher and Anuj. Anuj had done this a lot in his Delhi days and come season time, Seher had found herself at some-friend-or-the-other’s packing party.
Kartik had lent Seher an old electronic weighing machine from the back of his father’s shop. Niyati and Anuj sat the whole night with colourful plastic packets (that Niyati had bought), a couple of knives and animal moulds stolen from a kid holding them on the street. Seher, the official roller for the evening, was the first to crash (because she had had a new HR manager at her magazine job, who had decided to make life hell for anyone who clocked in a minute later than he/she was supposed to).
After which Anuj and Niyati kept taking turns to roll through the work and cried till they laughed over an entire season of Workaholics. Midway into the packing, Niyati went to the kitchen, got a horizontally-sliced carrot and carved what was an almost perfect replica of the logo of Workaholics onto it. “I made a new stamp.” So now, each fat tile of hash had an animal growing out of it on one side and the word WORKAHOLICS stamped into the other.
⁷⁶ According to Actorography, no “superstar” ever “dated” a white person unless it was a white celebrity.
