Chapter 9: The RSVP
Kartik faked a few dance steps. He knew he had to if he wanted his phone back. He danced with Anand and Niyati who slowed down for him. Knowing well that Anand would not have broken a beat to just get the cellphone back from him, he slipped his phone out of Anand’s pocket saying, “Thank you.” He returned to the table and waited for the Facebook app to refresh over the rotten 2G connection.
— “Yes! We are at least sure of one of the parties we are going to tomorrow night.”
— “We are?” Veena’s eyeballs rolled up to look at Kartik as she lowered her head a little.
— “We have to.” Kartik thrust his phone screen in Veena’s face, and then Seher’s, just so that she didn’t think that was a private conversation. (She would never.)
— “What am I looking at?”
— “Anjali just RSVPed a yes to her college group’s party! And Anand has been invited to that party because he used to work with her ex’s best friend.”
— “Don’t you think her ex will be there as well?” Veena did not want any galatta on her watch. Party dramas demanded levels of coherence that Veena never wanted to be prepared for.
— “I know. Who cares. I am sure she’s over him. Please, please, please, please…” At least, that’s how it looked on Facebook. One day couply profile picture and ‘in a relationship’, next day a Warhol-filtered selfie.
— “Fine! It is on the table.”
For the careful observer²⁷, each of the sentences that Kartik said had an infinitesimally small delay between them. During the delays, Kartik’s eyes shifted focus like he was there but he had blanked you out. He was thinking of every relevant update from Anjali’s timeline. Anjali had even deleted all the old pictures and uploaded cropped versions of a few (in which she looked happy and amazing) of the same. Veena looked at Anand who felt her eyes on him and looked in her direction.
Kartik took a deep breath as his face shone with the joy of a thousand bubble wrap bubbles popping all at the same time. He pulled out two new dance steps that nobody had ever seen him do and he danced towards Anand to tell him about it. Kartik also called for the flaming shots as the music got louder and spunkier. Niyati stopped dancing and grabbed his hands to hold him steady.
— “WHY ARE YOU SO HAPPY?!”
— “BECAUSE WE ARE GOING TO PARTY TOMORROW!”
— “You are going to party tomorrow. I am going to Bangkok.”
— “She’s going to bang cock…” Anand chuckled as he plonked himself down on the couch, which had become the parking lot for a bag and three (large enough) purses that morning. The front tip of his shoe nudged Veena’s ankle. “All good?”
— “I need a smoke.”
— “One second.”
Anand glanced at all the drinks lying in front of him and chose Niyati’s mojito to take a sip from. He then picked up Anuj’s pack of Milds from the table and the two of them headed to the smoking spot.
— “You know that if nothing works out, we can always round these idiots up at our place?” Anand lit the cigarette. “I promise I’ll flood the room with party supplies.” Anand did not really care as long as Veena and the gang were all around.
— “Oh no, nobody likes to party more than us.” Veena really wanted to head out. “You said it yourself, we are the IPL!”
— “So now you find it amusing and not around everyone?”
— “Shut up, you just want to go to the party supplies store to buy stuff so that you can camouflage the buying of your air gun.”
Niyati and Kartik joined Anand and Veena at the smoking spot. Seher did not feel like moving. She stuffed her face, watching Anuj and Avantika dance while enjoying the warmth that Veena left behind on her seat. Her mind was stuck on Veena’s comment about her having a type. Maybe she did need to mix it up a little, get into a care-based relationship. She was twenty-seven so maybe not right away but in a couple of years she would want to have someone permanent. No, not marriage but at least someone she could move in with. For hygiene issues. Then she remembered an episode of the TV show she had been copying off a colleague’s hard disk over the office network (following Kartik’s directions over phone), where the lead girl tried to break her pattern. It made her laugh inside her head, which made her break into exactly half a smile, which to an outsider would look like a smirk.
At the end of the song, Anuj bowed out and walked towards the men’s room to take a leak (and roll a joint). Avantika wondered if she should grab a smoke with Niyati who was standing with Veena, Anand and Kartik, or join Seher by herself. The snark on Seher’s face kept most people away from her when she was sitting alone.
Seher was taking a picture of her half empty margarita glass and tweeting it when Avantika sat down. If she was going to party with them, she needed to bond with Seher, right? Seher turned around to facebook a picture of her friends standing in a huddle and smoking. The smoke, the bright sunlight and a good filter on the phone made everything look beautiful.
— “Niyati was right.” Pause. “You really can wear anything and make it look classy enough to belong wherever you are.” Seher was wearing a plain white t-shirt and turquoise harem pants. The ensemble also had a dupatta which she would loop around her neck.
— “Hi. And thank you?” Seher locked her phone and put it on a stack of dry and clean paper napkins.
— “Come on, you’re just being modest now. She was telling me about this one party where you had shown up wearing jeans, a vest and no accessories or make-up whatsoever.”
— “Cheers to that.” Seher was not being modest. In fact, she was being quite the opposite. She was also not sure if the new girl actually got what she was trying to say with her style.
— “Yeah, cheers to that!” Avantika, of course, was confident that she was in. “So you work at a magazine?”
— “Yes, actually, I do.”
— “Is it fun? I mean I’ve never written a word since the essay on my English exam in the tenth standard.”
— “Haan, it is kinda fun. Most of the time, at least.”
— “Can I ask you something candidly?”
— “Ask away.” Seher was now sold. She hadn’t expected Avantika to use the word ‘candidly’. She had, in fact, expected Avantika to ask something candid without a forewarning or without any idea of the situation.
— “How do you do it?”
— “The job?”
— “No, I mean carry off whatever you are wearing.”
— “Two simple tricks to this.” There were two explanations to this. Seher was not going to go for the longer one about art and style and trying to say something and comfort. “Confidence.” She pulled her foot up onto the seat (like how she was sitting earlier) to feel the confidence she was talking about. “And boobs.”
— “You’re talking like a producer who wants to see me in his trailer before my two lines.” Avantika giggled with the defenses of someone being flirted with.
Seher put her foot back on the floor. She suddenly wasn’t sure of what not to say to not sound like the creepy producer. Like she was stuck on the precipice of the conclusion that boobs and confidence are like science. You can cure unheard of diseases or you can wipe out an entire species of anything if you had enough of both.
— “So which party do you think we’re going to tomorrow?”
— “I’m not sure. All of us have at least one in mind. What about you? Don’t you have other plans than to fill in for your friend?”
— “Oh, I’d do anything for Niyati. She has helped me a lot in the few months that I have been in Bombay.”
At which point, Ahmed showed up with sixteen flaming shots — two for himself and fourteen for the crew. Eight had three layers of colour and a blue flame to top it all. The other eight were blood red in colour.
— “Well, Avantika, it was nice meeting sober you. Hope to meet the drunk you after the shots.”
The smokers returned, dancing to an actual electronic track this time. The music had changed with the continuing influx of people at the restobar. With the entire place turning into a watering hole in a Kenyan Safari on Animal Planet, the DJ did not have a choice but to play popular EDM and hip-hop numbers. The afternoon sun sent heat waves and unbearable brightness onto the terrace. Ahmed put the tray of shots down and waved at one of the waiters to unroll the canape at the edge of the false ceiling so that the inebriated didn’t feel blinded or even exposed for that matter.
²⁷ In Actorography, The Careful Observer is a training module. It is the second training module after Become Invisible. In this module, you are taken to a place with people familiar to you and you are to observe the small things, the microexpressions between expressions.
²⁸ That was true and Anand had no rebuttal because he had already bought the air gun. And the party supplies. They had been carefully hidden under the driver’s seat, the one place he had figured Veena wouldn’t look. He did not care where they went as long as Veena and the gang were around. In their last year of engineering, when Kartik and him were drunk-dancing with a whole bunch of dudes to whatever was the big item number song that year, they made a resolution. “This is the last all-dude party we’re going to. Next year onwards, if there are no babes, we aren’t going to party.” — “If there is no Anjali, I am not going to any party at all.” They stuck to the resolution for the next year and stayed home watching all the Star Wars movies back to back. Kartik had never seen two of the three. The year after that, Anand had started dating Veena. After which, he would never use the word “babes” and mean it ever again.
