Part-Time Devdaas... (5 page)

T
he noise of falling utensils woke me up in the morning. Two pigeons had rampaged the kitchen. I fought them with a frying pan in a half-sleep half-scared state. After winning the war, I came back to the bedroom and sat on the bed trying to restart my brain. Reality hit me hard.
I had broken up with her. I would never get to see her again.
I checked my cell phone; three missed calls from mom and Radhika each, and a message from Dad. Nothing from Hrida. It was really over. The riot in my head broke out again and not knowing how to deal with it, I went back to sleep.

At four in the evening, sleep finally decided to give up on me and I was left staring at the ceiling fan. I wondered if it could hypnotise me and make all the hurt disappear. After staring at it for don’t know how long, I zombie-walked myself to the wash basin. Devika had left a post-it on the mirror

Good morning, chicken is on the menu today,

you’ll have to microwave it, in case you need

an after meal hit there is a joint in the soap case in

the loo. I’ll be back by 6, stay alive till then.

Love, Dev

I found a beer in the fridge, so I skipped the chicken which had sacrificed its life for me. I planted myself on the couch and put on the TV. Each and every channel had the dumbest of characters wearing awfully gaudy costumes, psychotically talking to themselves, plotting lamest of conspiracies like adding extra
namak
to the daal made by Savita, Kavita or Babita and making orgasimic faces after screwing the daal. One of the channels showed a promo of a show which had completed three thousand episodes. Who the fuck cares, I wondered. The people watching it abuse it; the actors, the directors, the spot boys, even the writers who write it, abuse it. I know it because I had assisted on one such production.

“Shooting a show after it loses its plot is like trying to have sex after losing erection,” the director had said to me. Then who the bloody fuck cares? Actually no one does, and that is how this country works, I concluded.

I switched the TV off and got back to staring at things. Devika was terribly organised with her stuff. Her dad’s job kept posting him in different cities every year, so after the second year of college, against her parents’ wish, she chose to live in Mumbai with her grandparents. Since then, she hardly lived with them. It had been more than six years that she had been living alone, so the house hardly had anything that gave a familial feel to it. Right from the chillum with its holder to a two-feet-long, four-and a-half litre bottle of Chivas 12
in the showcase, everything was purely Devika.

Back in our college days, Hrida and I had spent many afternoons at her place.
Hrida.
And she was back in my thoughts. I went through every single thing I had said to her. I felt an inexplicable level of rancidness inside me. I was through with the beer and its alcohol content wasn’t enough to daze my thoughts about her. I opened another bottle and gulped three hundred millilitres of the beer. One thing I had learnt about myself from my excessive college drinking days is that it took exactly ten minutes for the alcohol to kick in. So I pushed in another two hundred millilitres and caved in on the couch. One, two, three... I began counting numbers, trying hard not to let her thoughts kick in before the alcohol did. Would she be feeling the same pain?
d
id I actually mean nothing to her?
f
orty-eight, forty-nine, fifty... she’ll come back, don’t worry.
n
o she won’t; remember how you begged her not to? At seventy-four, I stopped counting.

“Seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven…” Devika continued. I turned realising I had been so lost in counting out loud that I didn’t notice her standing beside me.

“How long have you been standing here?” I asked.

“Since thirty-five,” she said staring at me. “So it has come to this now?”

She turned to leave, I caught her right hand and pulled her close and held her hand against my face. I hugged her and rested my face on her belly. She leaned and kissed my hair.

“Give it a month, you’ll feel better,” she said as she stuffed the bowl of chicken in the microwave, “Trust me, the first month is the toughest.” She began to place the plates on the dining table.

“Later it’s a cake walk.” She said as the microwave beeped.

“Come, let’s eat.”

I sat staring at the floor; she pulled me up by my arm.

“You should have called mom,” she said as she stirred the chicken with the ladle.

“You spoke to her?” I said.

“Ya she called me in the afternoon.” She served me the chicken, “She said that Uncle found your bike in Greenwood Park in an abandoned state.”

“I didn’t abandon it. I had parked it there yesterday,” I snapped back. “Fuss is their fuel, they can’t live without it.”

“How did you get a rickshaw at night?”

“I didn’t.” I tried to avoid giving rest of the details.

“Then?”

“I walked”

“You walked eleven kilometres?” She began to laugh.

“I think I should start growing these at home,” she said smiling naughtily as she licked the Rizla to tape the joint. I lit my joint and pulled in a long drag and shrugged as a reply to her. She pulled in a long drag as she caved in on the couch beside me.

“Do you think she ever loved me?” I asked but she didn’t say anything. I got up from the chair and came to the edge of the open air gallery overlooking the Eastern express highway.

“Do you think I’ll land up on the highway if I jump from here?” Then calculating the distance I said, “If I take a run up all the way from the living room?”

“I think you should open the main door. You’ll get another five feet for your run up,” she said trying to control her giggles.

She rose from the chair and walked to me. She gently clutched my hand, “Don’t worry, you will be loved,” she said and kissed it.

I put my arm around her waist and rested my forehead on her shoulder. Thank God for Devika! The hurt and the pain had been pacified for a while. But how would I forget her? What was I going to do?

The door bell rang.

“It’s past twelve, who the hell can it be?” I said, flinging the joint out of the balcony. It hit the compound wall.
Ouch!

“Your Dad. I called him,” she said as she went to open the door. “You have to go back home some day. We are not married, you know.”

She opened the door.

The
‘
abandoning the bike and disappearing act’ pushed my parents to ground their twenty-seven-year-old son for a month. In a way it worked for me because all the calls from work or friends would be filtered by mom, so I didn’t have to explain my ‘deserting life’ act to anyone. I stayed locked up in my room all day. I would eat my dinner in my room too. After Radhika got married, I was the one my mom would hound with her questions, calls and restrictions. “You’ll know when you have kids,” she silenced all my protests.

One day, late in the afternoon, I heard my mom speaking to someone. From her tone and excessive cordiality, I could tell it was a girl. She screamed my name to call me.

“It’s Devika...” she said, then covering the mouth piece of the phone she threatened me “...you better behave yourself or next time I’ll chain you.” No matter how old you are, you’ll always be sacred of your mother’s angry eyes and god had given extra scary touches to my mother’s eyes. “Hello,” I said.

“Be ready by eight. Kartik and I will pick you up,” she ordered.

“Where are we going?”

“Raghu’s arranged a party for Shashank.”

“For what? Oh shit!” It was 19 December. Shashank’s birthday.

“You didn’t wish him, did you?

“Hang up,” I said.

“Bye, be ready...” She said “... and the party is a surprise, so don’t blow it up.”

I dialled Shashank’s number but it was out of coverage area. Birthdays weren’t a big deal for us, but since the time Shashank went to the US for his MBA, there had not been one decent party we had attended. Now when he was back we decided to throw him a party. It had been in planning for months, but after the break up my brains had been too fried to remember anything.

Kartik picked me up at quarter to eight. Devika wasn’t in the car. He told me she wasn’t ready so he picked me first. His car was a cherry red 1994 Ford Crown Victoria. It looked like one of those cars used in New York as cabs. I wondered where he’d gotten it in India from. He told me he had worked on it in his father’s garage and fitted it with some random sports car engine which he bought as scrap. The doors made queering noises and seats were damp. Its interior smelled like it was an address to a rat’s grave. I daringly sat in the car.