Part-Time Devdaas... (18 page)

“Ummm... not now… let’s do it maybe a hundred years later.”

“Rascal!” she punched my arm. “You wait and watch what I do to you now.”

“You really scared me.” Making sure no one noticed my public display of affection I held her hand tightly.

“You too,” she said, and bit my shoulder.

I
t took me six kilometres of drunken driving and one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two footsteps to reach the door of my house. I held the frame of the door and replayed the whole journey from Pyaasa to my complex in my mind and tried to think if anyone had seen me walking with my trademark drunken sway or if I had bumped anyone off with the car. The blurred visuals of me speeding in the narrow lanes, the sound of the car screeching at sharp turns and thuds of overshooting a speed breaker sent chills down my spine. I rested my head on the door and ballooned my cheeks to heave a sigh of relief. I should stop drinking, or at least driving after drinking, I warned myself.

One litre of alcohol had done a magnificent job on me. My eyes closed themselves and the body drifted to sleep. A few minutes later the brain restarted itself and woke the body up. The bed was inside the house and I was still outside it. I stuffed my hands in the pocket to find the keys.

“Crap!”
I had forgotten to take them when I left home that morning. I virtually smacked my head but it was a little too late for the happy realisation. I twitched my eye to look at the time in the watch. I would rather sleep at Pyaasa than wake Mom and Dad at 4.13 a.m., but I wasn’t ready to go through all the foolhardiness again. I took multiple deep breaths to pump oxygen in the body to revive itself from the drunken daze and pressed the doorbell. As I heard the chiming of the doorbell, I prayed that mom wouldn’t open the door.

“Good morning, Baba,” I said to Dad fixing a grin on my face.

“What happened to your keys?”

“I forgot to take them. Sorry had to wake you up,” I said entering the house trying to not slur my words.

Dad went to his room without responding. I held the handle of the door to maintain my balance. I carefully leaned to untie the left shoelace, but as soon as I loosened the grip on the door handle, I fell sideways, bringing the shoe rack down on me, making enough noise to wake the neighbours. So before I could do anything to save the situation, the lights went on. I was lying in a heap of shoes and sandals. From the corner of my eye, I saw ‘the Mother’ standing a few feet away from me. I got up and tussled to remove the shoes, trying to avoid direct eye contact with her.

“Hi Aai,” I said looking into her raging eyes. She scared me so much that I gave up on removing the other shoe and began to sway-walk towards my room with one shoe still on.

“Will you care to explain yourself or you don’t feel the need to?” she said.

“I’m sorry I forgot the keys.”

“So you’re only sorry for forgetting the keys?” There was no good way to answer that question so I chose to go mute.

“Do you realise how horribly you’ve ruined your life?” There hadn’t been a how-to-handle-your-life lecture from Mom for a while so it was only fair that I gave her a chance to stuff my ears with all the clichés available in the ‘lecturing your child’ handbook. I slowly walked myself to the couch and rested my ass on it.

“Have you looked at what you have turned into? You can’t even handle yourself.” I was so drunk that I needed a support for my head; so I buried my face in my palms.

“You are an exact definition of what civil society calls an alcoholic; a drinking, falling, throwing up piece of food, doing nothing other than being a nuisance to people. Life isn’t a movie, Arjun. That a girl leaves a guy and he drinks his life down the gutter. You have to accept that God didn’t want you and Hrida to be together.” Mom spoke as if god himself had hissed his plans into her ears.

“Your filmy career is influencing you too much. Quitting engineering was the biggest mistake of your life. You should have listened to us, but you chose to trust a random girl over your parents and look where she got you.”
a
fter the break-up, Hrida had suddenly become a stone in a shoe for everyone around me.

“You are almost twenty-eight years old, still an undergrad, working for peanuts with no future.”

My mother in described my present and predicted my future in one sentence.

“That is why you are supposed to listen to your parents and not strangers. We had plans for you but you chose to ruin them for your juvenile schemes. When I look at kids your age, it shames me. You’ve disappointed me, Arjun...”

“Yes Aai, I am a huge disappointment to you, to Baba, to Radhika and to everyone I’ve ever known. Thank you, you guys provided me with everything I wanted. I’m sorry I didn’t turn out to be the ideal son. Sorry I didn’t suffocate myself in the rotten atmosphere of engineering and chose to follow my selfish dreams. I’m sorry that I don’t have an eight figure pay package. I’m sorry that I’m a complete failure, a classic drunkard and a hopeless loser.”
t
he uncivilty in my voice notched up with every sorry.

“There, I apologised for everything.
w
ait a minute, did I miss anything?” I said hopping on one leg fighting with my shoelaces.

“Oh and yes, sorry I fell in love. I should have sought approval from my control freak of a mother before I did. Can I please go to sleep?” I said and threw the shoe away. She didn’t respond.

“Is that a yes? Haan? Can I go to sleep?” As soon as I said, that my face felt a mighty slap from Dad.

“I hate you both!” I screamed in a rage.

Mom’s eyes finally welled up, ultimately satisfying me.

I stormed off to my room and crashed on the bed.Demonic faces began to laugh at me as I closed my eyes. The ranting had blown up most of the alcohol in my body leaving behind a scanty amount, barely enough to flare up the laughing faces and doze me off. I had to make sure I slept before the daze faded and the voices took over.

“One… two… three…” I began counting numbers, my best weapon against the voices.

“Twenty-one… twenty-two… twenty-three…” Visuals of Hrida getting married flooded my mind.

“Thirty-nine… forty…  forty-one…” I saw Devika’s teary-eyed face as the cab zoomed off.

“Just go fuck yourself loser!!!” Raghu’s voice screamed.

“Seventy-five… seventy-six… seventy-seven…”

“You are just somebody that I am ashamed to say I loved.” Hrida’s voice said.

“Hundred...hundred and one… hundred and....” I slept.

I woke up to two voices – a screaming girl and a begging guy. The velocity at which my life was changing had stunned me. After the fight, I moved out of my parents’ house and started sharing a house with three extremely opposite characters. My senior at work Ashwin, a highly sexual character who needed to get laid every night. His girlfriend-worshiping surd cousin Humpy who was petrified of her, and his almost bi-polar background dancer girlfriend Tamsin. Sleeping to Tamsin’s thunderous moaning in the next room and waking up to her violent screams was a daily occurrence. Their topics of fight would range from as trivial reasons as Humpy forgetting to wash their left over dishes to leaving his stinking sock in Tamsin’s clutch to some grave ones like Humpy objecting to Tamsin spending time with random guys from work late at nights to Humpy’s father disapproving of her religion. The volume of their voices would depend on the seriousness of the fight. Going by Tamsin’s hysteric screams that day, it was clearly a serious one. Usually I got to hear just screams and a few muffled sentences, but that day I was sleeping in the living room since Ashwin had had a ‘friend’ to stay over the night before so I was witnessing the fight between these two half-naked people from two feet away. Humpy had forgotten to wear a condom while having sex with Tamsin and now she had missed her period.

“...you know how high we’d gotten that night. I thought I wore it but I wasn’t sure.” Humpy whined as he followed her everywhere around the house with morning wood in his underwear and socks on his feet.

“So if you weren’t sure, you should have fucking told me!” Tamsin in her translucent lavender panties and a white ganji screamed and threw an ash tray at him. It hit him right on his head. Thank god for his turban else he would have had to flaunt groovy stitches on his forehead for the rest of his life. I covered my face with the quilt and turned the other way to give them some privacy.

“I am sorry baby, let’s go take care of it,” Humpy said meekly.

“Right! This is the third time you have done it. Do you know what your fucking ‘taking care of it’ does to my body? I look like a pale panda with those dark circles, I can barely move my body at the rehearsals and to make things worse, I bleed all day long...”

The information was getting a little too much for me. I got off my make-shift bed and walked past them to the kitchen, pretending I wasn’t listening.

“Morning, pretty boy!” The tone and volume of Tamsin’s voice suddenly turned civil and endearing which quite baffled me.

“Morning Tam, Humpy,” I said, trying to sound unfazed by the ongoing riot and their nakedness. “I’m gonna go make some coffee. You guys want some?”

“I’ll have, I’ll have.” Humpy said raising his hand like a school boy eager to answer his teacher. Tam stared at him in rage.

“You are a sweetheart, I’d love some.” She said and blew a kiss towards me. I smiled and left while the yelling continued behind me.

“So what do we do now?’ Humpy whined, ‘Should we keep it?”

“Have you lost your mind completely?
l
et’s keep it?
a
nd what?...” their voices faded as I entered the kitchen.

I wondered what had kept them together all this while. If it was the love, then sanity was too steep a price they paid to maintain it.

Why can’t there be a perfect relationship where there is no conflict between the couple?
w
hy can’t God just blow some magic dust and say, “Here this is the person for you to spend rest of the life with. Go live happily ever after.” Why does love always have to be mixed with complications, tears, sadness, war of wills, heartbreaks? I guess happily ever after comes with an expiry date, may be that is why the romantic movies do such good business world over. I plugged the morning psychobabble as I walked back in the living room with coffee.

“...you got some timing to screw things up. This had to happen when my parents were gonna come.” Tam yelled again looking around for something to throw.

“Here you go,” I handed her her mug before Humpy got hit by something else.

“Ahh, how I needed the coffee.” Tam said smelling it, her tone flipped again.

“I’m sorry, but when are they coming?” I asked.

“You didn’t tell him, didn’t you?” she turned to Humpy in anger.

“Hey no, my mistake, I forgot.” I quickly covered up and saw Humpy’s relieved face.

Tamsin had lied to her parents that Humpy owned the house and she lived alone with him, so whenever they came to visit her, the roommates had to bunk outside the house till they were in town.

“They are coming tonight, but they’ll be gone by tomorrow,” she said apologetically.

“Oh come on, its no big deal, I’ll manage.” I said.