My gaze shifted from the 6’4” tower of dubiety before me to the brightly lit floor around us. We had the interest of the business bay, which we now faced. There were seven men and two women. Fingers on keypads and eyes on the white tee. Sudha was in her cabin, hammering away.
‘So?’ I asked, turning on my heels.
I did a flip-flop as soon as I sat down. I suddenly wanted to do a takeaway.
‘Why?’ Ravi asked. He looked so forlorn that I changed my mind again and said we could do a quick coffee. ‘Very quick,’ I added, just as he started to smile.
‘I know you’re a busy lady,’ he said, keeping the smile, meaning nothing more than what was articulated.
That run-in with Andrew had unsettled me.
‘Andrew Brown has joined the paper,’ I said. I don’t know why, but it felt like dropping the joker from an already disconnected hand in a game of rummy.
I had mentioned Andrew to Ravi when we started dating. I had lauded the man’s brilliance, even introduced him to Andrew’s blog. I had also said we were close friends who dated briefly before going back to being friends. The mood was light and the fractional disclosure somewhat flippant. Ravi didn’t pose Andrew Brown questions that day or any other time.
‘You are reunited with your friend!’
Friend? I laughed. It was a hollow sound.
Ravi was the most uncomplicated person I knew. It might have something to do with him being an on-the-surface kind of creature. Not in a frivolous way, only that it is his core. He didn’t feel too deeply. He didn’t bleed, at least where people and relationships were concerned. My antithesis.
Hari Rao, Karnataka’s longest-serving chief minister, who walked away from politics after three successive terms, is Ravi’s ‘grandfather’. Hari Rao lost his son, daughter-in-law and two grandkids in an air crash towards the end of his third term in office. Ravi was rumoured to be Rao’s wife Kamini’s nephew. He was adopted a couple of years before the horrific accident. The family referred to him as the grandson, presumably because of the age difference between him and Rao’s progeny.
That Kamini was an only child further fuelled the parentage debate. There was some talk that Ravi was a distant younger relative’s son. He had Kamini’s eyes and nose (I downloaded a picture of the former CM’s late wife and held it against Ravi’s profile picture). They had the same square build, were of middling height and were remarkably broad-boned.
Ravi had told me that he was Hari Rao’s grandson shortly after we became friends; that was enough of a personal introduction. He had gone to medical school only because his grandfather wanted him to. The Raos owned a chain of multi-speciality hospitals around the state, which also catered to the economically challenged sections of society.
I put down Ravi’s on-the-surface personality to his early life. Just as well, actually, that he wasn’t the touchy-feely sort. To be adopted, and so publicly at that, with his grandparents ostensibly being the only parents he knew. Then to have those second set of parents lose their only child. I didn’t broach the subject of his biological parents after the first time I had involuntarily asked who they were. Not quite a do-you-prefer-cheese-or-whipped cream-frosting question.
It was the third or fourth time I had met him. He repeated that he was Hari Rao’s grandson and sat there smiling like some sort of a phantom.
Yeah, but what do your parents do?The question had almost slipped out of my mouth. I’m slow sometimes.
Hari Rao had all but thrown in the towel after the death of his son. Barely living. As heavy as that loss was, I’ve often wondered how Ravi didn’t ask,What about me?Was Ravi inconsequential? Didn’t he want more? Quite the opposite, he’s superbly adjusted. There are pictures of him breakingdown after he lit Kamini’s funeral pyre (googled that, too; it makes my world go around).
‘Yeah,’ I said, taking a sip of my coffee. ‘I’m reunited with my friend, except that he’s more boss than friend.’ The caffeine trickled down my pharynx. The heat of the beverage warmed my spirit, calmed my nerves.
‘How is that?’
I explained Andrew’s hiring to Ravi, adding that he could take over as the executive editor of the newspaper soon. I had repeated all of this so often in the last few weeks, I was simply reciting it now. As if it were a poem that didn’t rhyme.
‘You guys were classmates, right?’ Ravi asked.
‘Schoolmates.’
Ravi came into my life the day Andrew exited it.
It wasn’t easy allowing him in. Not just because of what I had shared with Andrew, but for about a year, I had harboured hopes that Andrew would call or message. How could he not? I swallowed the question with another sip of the brew.
Looking at Ravi leaning back on a library chair, I thought this friendship wouldn’t have been possible with anyone other than Ravi.
We are antonyms; if we were typefaces, we’d be Bold and Light. I could get lost in a book; he hadn’t read anything long form beyond a college textbook. Movies were not his expression, and I relied on them to get me on my feet on a bad day, feeling them in my step. He had no interest in politics; I was in the business of news. He never had a job. Not the 9-to-5 variety or even the 11-to-9 kind – his MBBS degree was never really put to use. But I always yearned for financial independence. I knew I needed a job the moment we laid my mother to rest.
It was his personality, however, that allowed me to take the chance.
About a year or so after we started dating, Ravi told me that it wasn’t easy for him to trust because he wasn’t sure what women – or in an arranged set-up, the families – were after: his inheritance or him. I didn’t ask, but I figured he had been let down in a few relationships. That day, as he dropped me home in his car, he reached across and kissed me on the cheek. He gave me a ring the following year.
I never wore the ring, and he didn’t ask me why. Not once. It is ornate, and I’m sure there are people who think it gorgeous, but it wasn’t my style or size.
