Chapter 48: Suits, Rockstars and the Featured Band
The gang entered the studio, passing groups of people who were camped out in the small garden outside the building, chattering, flirting, getting baked, getting drunk. A giant bowl of pop corn fell off one of the balconies as they heard a guy scream: “THERE ARE PEOPLE SITTING OUT THERE!” That guy would be Enky, the host of the party and the owner of the studio. Enky was famous enough for everyone who mattered enough to know who he was and unfamous enough for the averaeshwars to not care. For the uninitiated, he was the guy responsible for the sound arrangement that makes it look like your favourite reality TV musician is performing in your living room. He managed that when he was fourteen and interning with a sound engineer who was working on one of the first singing talent shows. Enky was pissed with his boss for not listening and changed the arrangements when he had gone for a cigarette break.
There were as many people at that party as there were in the other two put together. Simply because this clique had fewer people, percentage-wise, if you looked at the city’s population. The music at Enky’s party either hadn’t arrived in this country or hadn’t been released anywhere. Every now and then, someone would invoke the spirit of Bandra by playing a track that a few people would jive to. You know, like the one by Dire Straits.
In one of the rooms upstairs, there was a batch of people sitting on beds that were neatly lined along the walls with a disco ball hanging in the centre of the room and a couple of laser beams going nuts. These people were tripping on acid. There was exactly one completely sober chap in there. The e-poppers (at least most of them) were in Goa. Seher, Niyati, Avantika and Anuj had tried e. Anuj and Avantika, separately, had tried acid in the past. Seher, Niyati and Avantika had tried salvia, not Anuj. Anand, Kartik and Veena had been nothing but potheads when it came to “drugs”. The gang did try some cheap acid in Goa once, and every now and then Kartik swore he saw some man or woman whose head was a balloon about to explode. Niyati saw energy lines, connecting people on the streets. Seher never said a word, so nobody knew what she saw. Not even Anuj, who was dating her then. Anand and Veena couldn’t stop touching each other because they saw their auras ripple every time they did.
For Seher, Enky’s party was her hunting ground, more so than the Prajapati crowd — that had too many steadies. She hated busting open the steadies despite knowing how simple it actually was (for her) to do so. She had been through a couple of filmmakers, a few musicians, a couple of journalists and at least one producer ever since she had moved to Bombay. Sometimes she was just ticked off at seeing one her victims making do with someone lesser than her, and that pushed her to up her game from where it was last.
— “How are these people allowed to just sit around here?” Kartik believed in the law. “Don’t the neighbours complain?”
— “So, this boy. I think he will pass the prejudicial test you subject all the boys to.” Seher was walking slowly with Veena, with their elbows locked together. “Come with me, let’s find him.”
— “What prejudicial-” Veena laughed as she realised what Seher was talking about. “Oh yes, there are suits and then there are rockstars. So you’re saying this boy is neither.” Veena and Niyati had come up with this classification of the boys and that had gone from being a conversation to being Actorography canon. The first time Seher had introduced Veena to Anuj, she had doodled a guy with long hair and a triangular guitar onto the cafe napkin.
Anand followed Veena and Seher to look for the boy Seher wanted Veena to judge. Unnoticed by the rest of them in their various excitements, Kartik stood frozen exactly three steps into the studio. He had spotted Anjali at the end of the central corridor of the giant house. She hadn’t spotted him yet. Anuj and Avantika decided to head to the bar when they realised that Kartik wasn’t tagging along like he ideally would have. He just stood there, with his hands in his pockets. His eyes were blank, unfocused, his face was pale (and according to Avantika he was spiraling inside his head).
— “Kartik, bar?” Anuj waved his hand in front of Kartik’s face.
— “What happened?” Avantika touched his arm.
— “Anjali.” Kartik’s hand jerked back a little on being touched.
— “Not again, dude! Just let her go already.” Anuj put an arm around him to drag him to the bar (which was a couple of tables with a white sheet over them).
— “She is here!” Kartik shook his arm off but did not budge from his place.
— “No way, this night just seems like it is coming around full circle.” Avantika laughed as she nodded at Anuj, who nodded back. Both of them pushed Kartik from either side till they reached the bar.
— “Kartik, what are you drinking?” The bottles were all just lying there. There was no bartender. The best bottle of booze on the table was a Blender’s Pride Reserve.
— “Vodka. With anything.” Kartik’s hands refused to exit his pocket.
— “Are you masturbating her out of your system right away?” Anuj made himself a whisky. This was the only solution he gave Kartik over the years of watching him pine.
— “What the fuck. NOOO!” Kartik’s hands immediately popped out of his pockets as he looked at Avantika in defense despite the allegation having come from Anuj.
— “Then let’s go find a spot on one of the many balconies, I don’t think I want to hang around indoors after that long walk.”
The three of them walked to the wooden staircase, along the length of which, there were people sitting kneedeep in drunk party conversations. Avantika was the first one to start climbing up, making a pathway for Anuj and Kartik to follow. She smiled at a couple of people she thought she knew from some party or the other. Anuj smiled and high-fived one out of roughly twenty people. This guy had been a follower of his blog long before his book was released. Anuj hadn’t blogged in over a century.
Kartik was busy trying hard not to look in Anjali’s direction as he hurried his way up the steps right behind Avantika. He leaned back against the wall at the upper end of the staircase and sighed when he was sure that he was definitely out of Anjali’s line of sight.
— “Aren’t you going to talk to her? Isn’t this your second chance?” Avantika asked Kartik without looking in his direction as she rested the back of her head against the wall.
— “No way.” While he wanted to, the events at the first party had made him think that he was sure that he didn’t want to talk to Anjali ever again in his entire life. He had decided to delete her from his Facebook (but not without consulting the rest of the gang, or at least Anand before he did that).
— “Come on!” Avantika pushed Kartik further into the corner. “Wait, let me ask Niyati. Although, I think she would agree. What is the worse that could happen?”
— “Anjali will ignore me.”
— “How is that the worst thing that could happen?”
— “How is it not the worst thing that could happen to me, especially tonight? When my best friend has decided to get married to one of my closest friends. And all of you are having a ball. Why do you so desperately want me to sulk on a night like this?”
— “Because when you wake up tomorrow morning, you will have had closure.”
— “What closure does he need?” Anuj returned to the conversation after his chat with his blog follower.
— “The Anjali Scene.”
— “Yeah, that scene is over. Just forget about her and move on.”
— “You’re forgetting, she is here!”
— “Then go talk to her and clear things out.” Anuj didn’t care either way. He was only sure of one thing — Kartik needed to move on.
— “What do you think I should tell her?” Kartik made a bonsai stroking gesture with the drink hand as some of it spilled. “That I will never fap to her pictures on Facebook?”
— “You fap to her Facebook pictures?”
— “Fuck, no! But I bet that’s what she is thinking right now.”
— “What makes you think she is thinking about you right now?” Avantika lifted a leg and planted the heel of her shoe onto the wall behind her.
— “Exactly! Why would I want her to think of me, when all she can think of me as is a pervert stalker?”
— “What is she even doing here?” Anuj leaned over the railing of the stairs to see if he could spot her. “Isn’t she supposed to be a suit?”
— “I don’t know, man.”
— “Okay, fuck that for now, let’s go smoke some.”
Avantika was back to leading her way to the balcony with the least number of people. The three of them walked up to the first balcony where Anuj spotted one of his exes and Ishani having a drink with a group of people. Anuj entered, waved at all of them, smiled and then pretended to look for someone. Before the wave, he was sure Ishani had told his ex of the dying incident but after the wave and the knowing smile Ishani gave him, he became sure she hadn’t. He hated himself for having dignity when he asked Ishani, “Did Anand, Veena or Seher come here?” He then turned around to pretend to inform Avantika and Kartik (who was looking at his feet, this time trying not to crack up because he was well aware of what Anuj had just walked into), “They aren’t here.” Anuj walked out of that balcony, stamping Kartik’s foot as he pretended it was an accident. “Sorry.”
The next balcony they entered, there were a bunch of kids standing in half a circle on one side. Two windows opened into the balcony, one on either side of the door. A single, naked fifteen-watt bulb hung from the tapering roof on top. One of the kids had a guitar, another had a melodica and they were playing covers of pop songs. The party music was barely audible in this balcony. It was also the least done-up balcony in the house. Least done-up in a way that either the interior decorator had been completely blind to its existence or the contractor decided to not do it because Enky had haggled too much. This balcony felt more like home to Anuj than any other part of the entire studio. They soon learned that the bunch of kids were actually a band. “Acoustica, with a k.” The vocalist had said when Avantika had asked them. She promptly introduced herself to them, “Avantika, with a k too!”
All of them did a simultaneous head tip when the vocalist shook Avantika’s hand. Other than the vocalist, the rest of the band members were actually tipping their head in Anuj’s direction as he had started to roll a joint. Their groupies, who had gone down half an hour ago to get some drinks, hadn’t returned. (They had found the drummer from a rock band from the 80s that had gone big in this huge minority of a music scene, who then took them along to hang out with his new band.)
— “Do you guys play requests?” Anuj returned their head-tip with a one finger salute.
— “If you’re rolling joints, we’ll play anything.”
— “We can google for the notes if it is a track we don’t know the chords to.” One of the kids waved a giant cellphone at Anuj.
— “We Are Young.”
— “Apt.” The lead singer laughed. “Please make a big, fat weed joint.”
The drummer popped open one of the old windows with a shaky glass pane to use it to provide a nice beat with a snare sound. The chorus would be chanted by every member of the band.
“Give me a second I, I need to get my story straight/My friends are in the bathroom getting higher than the Empire State…”
⁷⁹ An Averaeshwar is somebody who is the god of average. The word was coined by Enky himself.
⁸⁰ A steady is a someone you can only have a stable relationship with — a relationship where the intensity of emotions the two parties feel for each other don’t vary
⁸¹ “Inside their minds, all of them either want to be rockstars or they want to be suits,” Veena had said. While rockstars had been a growing niche, it was the year 1984 that changed everything and turned them into a sect from being just a niche. If not for 1984, urban India would still be ruled by suits. There were two things that happened that year — 1. Sting performed at Rang Bhavan, Bombay. 2. A tuxedoed Amitabh Bachchan rejected the paternal image of a suited Pran and picked up an electric guitar to rock it to Bappi’s Intehaan ho gayi. The masses realised even rockstars felt longing. While suits were alright because you could reprogram them once you had your claws in them, it was the rockstars that were the real challenge.
