Chapter 51: We’re Leaving Ground
Kartik finished his drink and stubbed his cigarette on the underside of the wooden plank (that was nailed on top of the wood columns that made the balcony). “I’m heading down to get a drink. Any of you want something?” Kartik’s call was answered by four of the band members. They raised their hands up as their faces continued their performance. “I can’t carry five drinks, someone will have to come with me.”
Anand raised his hand and walked towards the staircase with Kartik, leaving Jeevan to stand with Anuj and Avantika. Kartik walked down the steps with Anand by his side and the band decided to follow them. The guitarist held the guitar more firmly under his armpits as he walked along with the band. The drummer clapped to replace his much beloved window pane and two of the other band members joined him. As they kept crossing people, the people either started singing with them or bobbed their heads up and down to the clap beat. The song spread like a virus.
— “I’m trying to keep a low profile, it will help if you guys just walk ahead. I swear I will pour you your drinks without disturbing your performance.” Kartik turned to the band. He had stopped right at the edge of the stairs, exactly one step away from Anjali’s line of sight.
— “Yes, please guys.” Anand pleaded on Kartik’s behalf as well. “It’s been a rough night for this guy.”
The band did not budge. They just stood still, blocking Kartik from walking past them and back to the balcony. In fact, the guitarist started walking into Kartik who was then forced to take a step down (backwards) and then a few more. He feared tripping on the people sitting on the stairs so he turned. The people had already moved from the stairs because they had seen or heard the band coming down. (Some, of course, just moved because their friends moved.) The vocalist had stopped singing after the first stanza and was providing an extra trumpet to the saxophone noises the girl had been making. “Puhm-puhm, puh-rah-ruhm-puhm-puhm…” The melodica was playing the synthesizer bits. The only parts that the vocalist screamed were the timely, “IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!” Kartik decided to look down and go straight for the bar. If he couldn’t see her, she couldn’t see him, right?
By the time, they reached the bottom of the stairs, Veena and Seher had stepped out of the loo and were waiting there. As Anand and Kartik passed them, Veena grabbed Anand by his wrist and pulled him away. Kartik who was looking at his feet and quietly walking ahead of the band did not realise that Anand had vanished. He had one goal in mind — to get drinks for himself and the band.
This had to be the freakiest moment of his life. Inside his head, this didn’t hold a candle to the first time he had copied during an exam. The paranoia of this moment superseded the first time he got high on pot. He was beginning to feel his socks getting drenched and his palms getting moist. “Anand, is she around? Anand? Can you see her?” Fuck you, Anand for not responding.
Without looking up for a moment, without tripping on anything, without running into anyone, Kartik somehow managed to reach the spot where he couldn’t see his feet anymore. Instead, his thighs were pressed against the table that was the makeshift bar. He could see the juice boxes, the large bottles of soft drinks, alcohol bottles (some empty, some half empty) and some empty glasses with cigarettes ashed in them. He shifted sideways to look for empty glasses just so that he didn’t have to turn his head. He lined up five plastic glasses from a stack in a cellophane pack. He picked up a bottle of vodka and started to pour it in one of the glasses when he heard a shocked voice.
“So is this your idea of a grand romantic gesture? Bringing along a band that is playing the song from Maine Pyaar Kiya.” There she was — Anjali — standing at the bar with a friend.
Kartik looked up and then looked down again at the glass of vodka which he was filling but his hands were no longer under his command. He looked up again, this time with a surprised face. “Oh, hi. I didn’t know you were at this party.” Despite the obviousness of the lie, it was not the lie that Anjali had thought it was. Kartik wondered if it made any sense to try and explain but what if she kept screaming and didn’t let him speak at all. His mind played a loop of him walking with his hands cuffed and a black cloth hiding his face just like they did with non-political criminals on news channels. The news ticker below the looped footage said, “Man arrested for harassing girl at New Year’s Bash.”
“What? Are you stalking me now?” Anjali turned to her friend (the one who had invited her to Enky’s party). “Do you know this guy?”
Her friend stepped forward. “Who invited you here? Does Enky know you are here?”
Kartik, meanwhile, had filled an entire 200ml glass with vodka and the bottle was empty. The band, whose sentiments were hurt when they were accused of playing Maine Pyaar Kiya, started playing it more aggressively. The lead singer screamed the ‘Final Countdown’ line louder, almost going off-pitch. They swarmed around Kartik, cutting him off from Anjali as the saxophone-voiced girl winked at him.
Kartik quickly distributed the drink from the glass into four other glasses, as the band continued to perform all around him. He shook a few of the boxes to see which of them still had some juice in them. By the time he was done finding mixers, he had five different coloured drinks in front of him: Cranberry, Coke, Pineapple, Sprite and Orange. Everybody except the guitarist took a drink and all of them turned around. They flanked Kartik from all sides and marched on like they were escorting him to hoist a flag. The girl with the saxophone voice put a straw in her drink and offered the guitarist a sip.
Anjali’s friend called Enky on his phone and the word ‘stalker’ was heard loud and clear by Kartik despite all the band tamasha happening around him. By the time the band and Kartik reached the base of the stairs, Enky showed up. He blocked the band from going any further. Anjali and her friend were standing right behind him.
The band suddenly stopped playing and started chanting together: 10… 9… By the time they reached 8, the entire studio was chanting with them. Or as people with their bodies touching any of the old wooden interiors would say: The entire house was chanting with us. The CFL lights all over the studio went off and a multitude of colourful lights painted the studio in tones of red, blue, green, fuschia, yellow and purple. Kartik just held his drink, looked down and waited for these moments to pass so he could just get away from it all. Anjali’s palm had curled into a tight fist as she counted down inside her head. She was waiting for the ruckus to end so she could get Kartik thrown out.
Enky couldn’t wait any longer. He ignored the situation at hand because being the host he had a lot of people to hug. People who had shown up to celebrate his new space, some people who he used to play with, some old girlfriends and even their new boyfriends. He hugged all of them without letting the band out of his sight.
That was when Kartik felt a hand poking at his gut. He grabbed it to see Seher poking him from the other side of his moat of musicians. He tapped on the shoulders of the girl who stood between Seher and him to let her in.
— “I heard Anjali flip. What did you say?”
— “I wasn’t even looking at her!”
— “Just shut up now.” She grabbed him by his collar.
— “Not like I have a choice, do I?”
— “Good. Also, one more thing…” She hugged him.
The last three counts ended with the entire band screaming: “2… 1… HAPPY NEW YEAR!” They hugged each other and shouted names of people they knew who then rushed towards where they were standing so that everybody could hug everybody. From the top floor of the studio, it looked like everybody was gravitating slowly towards the black hole that looked exactly like Kartik and Seher’s hug.
Anjali’s friend reminded a joyous Enky of Anjali’s stalker. Kartik, who was no longer hidden by dedicated and upcoming musicians, felt naked. Enky dodged his way through the festivities with Anjali and her friend following him. When he finally did get to Kartik, he saw Seher hugging him.
— “What?” Seher looked up at Enky.
— “Is he with you?”
— “Yeah.”
— “This girl here said he is stalking her.” He pointed to Anjali and her friend.
— “And who is she again?” Seher cracked up, as she turned to Enky with one arm still around Kartik.
— “She’s my friend.” Anjali’s friend stepped forward. “I invited her here after he was bugging her at another party.”
— “And who are you?”
— “I’m Enky’s friend.”
— “Oh, really?” Seher dished out one of her dimpled smiles for Enky, the one that was famous for making boys think that the smile was for them and them only. “How do you know her Enky?”
— “I… I… I know her through a friend.” Enky fumbled as Anjali’s friend just stared at him while he was trying to remember how he knew her.
— “Okay, okay, stop!” Kartik stepped forward. “This is getting too awkward to go on any longer.”
— “You don’t have to talk to an idiot, Katti. If they don’t get our love, they don’t. Fuck ‘em.” Seher broke into a bit, as she pulled him closer by his collar. “It is just you and me against the world, baby.”
— “Sort it out.” Enky gave up. “I’m off to celebrate.” He raised his hands and walked towards the crowd of friends who were waiting for him. “IT IS TWENTY THIRTEEN, SHITHEADS!”
— “Seher…” He nodded at the vocalist who was facing him while being a part of a group hug. “I think the band and you have managed the impossible: my balls have fallen back into their place.” He turned around to look at Anjali.
— “No, darling! I won’t let you leave me for some two-bit NRI bitch!” Seher suddenly seemed to be overcompensating for all these years of not really committing by putting it all into this one bit. Kartik couldn’t leave her hanging. It would be like not high-fiving someone who had their hand up.
— “Don’t make me shoot you…” Kartik drew an invisible gun and put it to Seher’s temple. “You know I will.”
— “I’d rather die by your hands than see you go after someone else…” Seher’s hand grabbed Kartik’s collar. She slipped the other one to her holster.
The band stopped hugging and shut up. They could feel the tension in the room. Someone switched the colourful lights back to normal. The saxophone-voiced girl produced a chuckle that sounded like one of a vamp right before she set the screen on fire with an item number. As soon as that someone, who had switched the lights back on, heard the girl’s chuckle, he switched back to the coloured lights. A loud stage inhale followed the laugh before she punctuated it with a very definitive: “Dance.” The guitarist started strumming. The drummer started clapping to the beat set by the strumming. A few seconds in, the girl sang, “Back door cracked, We don’t need a key, We get ’em for free, no VIP sleaze.”
— “Let it be on the record. I didn’t want to do this…” Kartik cocked his gun, taking a step back.
— “Let’s sort this like men, shall we?” Seher drew an invisible sword and pointed it at the pistol barrel made out of Kartik’s fingertips.
— “Like that?” Kartik dropped his gun and pulled an invisible sword out too.
— “Tsk.” Seher cricked her neck sideways and smiled, “Aise hi hain hum.” And just like that a swordfight broke out in the area between the staircase and the bar.
People started clearing the space as the inaudible clangs of their swords filled it. At the top of the stairs, two of the acid trippers were staring at the proceedings in disbelief. They could see glowing, crescent-shaped swords, made out of sheer white light, clashing against each other as sparks flew. Till at one point both of them were holding their swords at both ends, pushing the swords against each other till Seher kicked Kartik and both of them fell back a few feet.
— “NAHIIIIIIIIN!” Anuj slid down the railing of the stairs to land right between Kartik and Seher. “You will have to go through me before you can even touch her. If anyone has to die tonight, it has to be me.” He pushed them apart spreading his arms like he was pointing a sword each at both of them, or maybe a sword and a scabbard. No one knew for sure except for Anuj, Kartik, Seher and the acidheads.
— “Get out of the way, Anuj!” Kartik looked Anuj in the eye for a brief moment before returning his sharp gaze to Seher.
— “SWAAAMMMIIII! Iss kulta ke liye aap apna jeevan kyun tyaag rahe ho?” That was Avantika, with a hand to the side of her head, running down the stairs to the sounds of an inaudible sitar’s escalating sadness. “SWAAAMIII!” Following which, Anuj ran his fingers over his throat to let her know that the melodramatic Hindi was not working. But it was too late, she was now standing between Seher and Kartik with Anuj.
— “Now this bit is moving too deep into slapstick territory.” Anuj exchanged glances with Kartik and Seher. “Also, all blades are disallowed except for daggers.”
— “Anjali! Can we just have a conversation?” Kartik kept stealing glances at Anjali. “Don’t tell me Anand and Veena are coming down next to top this nonsense! This is turning into the climax of a Priyadarshan dud!”
— “No, they’re busy doing it somewhere in this studio.” Seher half-grinned. “She had that wicked look on her face when Enky was showing us around.”
— “So there is nobody to provide a ruling on whether we can go this slapstick or not?” On realising the rhetoric nature of his sentence, Anuj dropped his arms only to spread them back again in their original position. Except this time they were swords pointing at both Kartik and Seher.
— “Nopes.” Seher chuckled. She was holding her invisible sword steady, her eyes jumping from Kartik’s to Anuj’s and back.
— “Perfect.” Kartik tossed his sword aside and ripped open the invisible trenchcoat that Avantika was wearing as he put the other hand in the invisible trenchcoat’s invisible pocket. With the invisible detonator in his hands and his eyes looking for Anjali (who he had lost sight of in this chaos), he shouted, “If you guys don’t back off, I will blow us all to bits.”
— “Ghanta!”
The band was still at it and the girl was still singing. “Too late, we’re taking names, we don’t mess around…” That line was followed by half-a-second’s pause as all the musicians froze before the girl arrested the track. “This place about to… Bloooowwww, ow, ow, ow, ow-ow-ow.”
Kartik took his thumb off the invisible detonator as he mimicked a loud explosion in slow-motion, which lasted the entire stretch that desi-hipster Ke$ha spent on the word “Blow”. Seher, Anuj and Avantika kept up with the explosion in the way they moved. Avantika mimed an outward explosion from her body as she crumbled right on the spot she was standing in. Seher turned a little to avoid the explosion as she blew herself towards the bar. Anuj jumped backwards to fall onto the stairs. The acidheads in the distance felt the wave of the explosion go through them as they fell backwards themselves. They swore they saw Avantika become a being of light before turning into a pitch black silhouette through the course of the explosion. They swore they saw the explosion happen, and a glowing turquoise mushroom cloud arose from it.
The band continued playing and everybody else in the vicinity (that is the entire ground floor of the party) fell silent. The ambient noise from the party upstairs and outside continued. Even before his thirty seconds were up, Kartik’s head popped up to see if he could spot Anjali in the calm after the bomb. She was outside the door, on the pathway that went through the small garden towards the main gate. “Anjali… ANJALI! Wait a minute…” He scrambled up and ran.
— “What Kartik?” Her fists clenched her purse and her cellphone tight. “What do you want? Haven’t you embarrassed me enough for one night?”
— “Do you want me to call the cops, Anj?”
— “No, please, just give me a minute.”
— “I am sorry. Tonight has been crazy. I just want to tell you, I am sorry if I made you feel uncomfortable. I don’t know what I was thinking all these years. I just wanted to hang out with you, know more about you, but I always felt that you wouldn’t really want to talk to me. That was all on me. You shouldn’t have a terrible night or feel crappy about any of this. I had built up for this perfect moment when I would meet you, what I would say, what we would talk about. The jokes I would use to get your guard down so that you’d see me for the nice, fun guy that I am. This may sound particularly weird but I haven’t even imagined you naked, or imagined us having sex. I forgot to ever consider what you wanted. I forgot to ask you what you wanted. My friends kept warning me about it but I’d never listen. The you inside my mind may or may not have anything to do with the real you. It might have a whole bunch to do with the you on Facebook but I forgot that the me on Facebook was not even me really. I mean, even if we had had a pleasant conversation at Vishal’s, and I had succeeded in taking you along to the other two parties I had planned, I might have even thought of our kids’ names — yes, we’d have two.”
— “KISS HIM!” Someone in the lawn crowd screamed.
— “Yeah, no, buddy, but thanks for the support.” Kartik laughed as he waved the guy off.
— “It’s okay, Kartik. Let’s just forget about this, okay?” Being blasted in her face with a rambling confession seemed to have settled her down a bit.
— “I will do that if you let me buy you brunch this coming weekend.” Kartik’s posture improved with Anjali’s lowered guard. “There is this awesome restobar called Fruity Monkey, where my friends and I hang out.”
— “You’re saying you will be over your crush on me in a week?”
— “I am not saying I will get over the Anjali-in-my-head in a week but I’d at least like you to not remember me as this crazy stalker guy.”
— “What was the drama that happened at Vishal’s party? I got a lot of messages saying that one of your friends died when the ex punched him?”
— “Yes… I mean no, nobody died.” Kartik laughed. “Although Anuj was a lot more realistic then than the nonsense we just pulled here.”
— “We’re not usually that slapstick.” Veena’s voice stumped Kartik as he turned around to see Anand pat her shoulder, asking her to shut up. Veena’s pitch rose. “What? I’m only trying to help!”
— “So nobody really died?”
— “No. We’re all here. It was just a bit.” Kartik couldn’t stop grinning.
— “What?”
— “I promise to explain it to you when I see you next weekend?”
— “Maybe.”
— “Maybe’s good.” He smiled. “Thank you. Have a great twenty thirteen!” Kartik turned around and took a deep breath. He did not want to watch her leave.
This was the first time in a long time that the gang saw his eyes light up and his smile spread completely from cheek to cheek. Anand was dabbing the back of his neck with tissues and Veena was fixing her bra through her top. Avantika stood there with her hands covering her cheeks and mouth like a beauty queen who had just been told she had won. Seher stood there with her hands behind her back, grinning like an idiot. Anuj leaned against the frame of the door, striking a cool pose.
— “WHAT?” Their general silence put Kartik on the edge. “I thought I’d get one free invite to brunch after suffering through all the idiots some of you bring to brunch.”
— “Paadvani toh haunh nahin…” All of them said this together. “Aney tofdi maa naam lakhaava chaalyo.” Everybody including Kartik burst out laughing.
— “Our poor baby!” Veena put both her arms around Kartik as he stood there with his arms by his side. “They grow up so fast, don’t they?”
— “Kartik, you’re a disgrace to the family. Calling an out-of-caste girl-” Anand had a finger raised before he stopped midway to look at Veena. “I didn’t know we were doing supportive parents.” Veena just shrugged through the hug.
— “Niyati says that those explosives couldn’t have been put to better use.”
— “You and me…” Seher hugged him. “We need to hang out more often, don’t we?” She put a handful of ice (that she was holding behind her back) into his shirt as he jerked away from the hug.
The rest of the party was fairly predictable. Lots of dancing. More substance abuse. With various people. But mostly with the rookie college band. Lots of pictures taken and Facebook and Twitter timelines spammed.
Oh crap, there had to be some ends that weren’t tied properly in that mess of a climax. So starting from where Kartik walked out chasing Anjali: Anuj, Seher and Avantika got up from inside their invisible chalk outlines. Seher climbed up the stairs to have “a” talk (not “the” talk, but “a” talk) with Jeevan, where she ran into Anand and Veena. Anuj and Avantika kissed for a brief moment. Let’s forget all the drama and go to that moment. When both of them respawned, they stared at each other, sharing one common thought: “That was death number 3.” A surge of energy brought them closer as they jumped first and then they hugged where he literally lifted her up a little and Avantika’s arms clinged around his neck. After which, the obvious happened, they kissed. Of the four seconds that the kiss lasted, Seher flashed in Anuj’s head for about a fifth of a second. After the kiss, Anuj being the asshole that he was, grinned at Avantika. “I thought we were doing a bit.” Avantika won the bit by saying, “Do you mind doing it for a bit longer?”
Meanwhile, Anand and Veena emerged from one of the studios to look at Jeevan who was eagerly eyeing Seher as she climbed the stairs towards him. He had watched the performance underway in the space between the bar and the stairs on the ground floor. He thought about joining them just like Avantika did but he wasn’t sure what part he’d be playing or how would he fit in.
— “Tell me they didn’t go crazy-ass slapstick.” Veena asked Jeevan as she fixed the hem of her skirt from all sides, making sure none of it was still bunched up.
— “Oh, I think on all counts, they did.”
— “You kids can’t be left alone for a second, right?” She screamed as she started down the stairs to meet Seher mid-way to take her downstairs with her.
— “Would you know where I can find some tissues? Or Avantika?” Anand asked Jeevan like he was talking to him about the weather.
— “Downstairs.” Jeevan pointed to the stack of tissues at the bar and then at Avantika and Anuj who had just locked lips.
— “Good, thanks.” Anand patted Jeevan. “See you around, buddy.”
A puzzled Jeevan followed Anand down the stairs, where they stopped for a moment to see Veena whack Anuj on the back of his head for kissing Avantika. That was when Seher registered Jeevan tagging along. Her face obviously hit an iceberg at the sight of the black t-shirt and black jeans.
— “Sorry, Jeevan.” She smiled and kissed him on his cheek. “I’ll call you sometime. Bye.”
— “What?” Jeevan was tired of being kissed on his cheek. He continued following them, albeit a bit perplexed and hence slower than the rest.
— “Arre bhai, I am really sorry.” Seher stopped once again as the rest of the gang did too. “I will call you soon, okay? Also, you can stop following us now. We are already following someone who is following someone else. That’s already too slapstick.”
They tumbled into their positions at the door after missing Kartik’s long speech. He had just invited Anjali to brunch. The first clear sentence they heard him say was: “I am not saying I will get over the Anjali-in-my-head in a week but I’d at least like you to not remember me as this crazy stalker guy.”
