‘Love you too, jaan,’ he responds. ‘I hope you sleep well tonight.’
I haven’t slept for more than two hours since the last of my twelfth board examinations. The nightmares of not scoring enough to get into SRCC keep me awake.
But one nightmare haunted me more than the others.
In the nightmare, Vicky is inside the gates of SRCC, and the gates are closed in my face. I keep standing there clutching my marksheet, my future in tatters.
It seemed so real, I cut a deal with God.
I drew a small swastika on my palm in deep red. I promised I wouldn’t let it wear out till the results were announced. But in return for a small favour. If one of us had to get into SRCC, it should be me, not Vicky.
Vicky, of course, doesn’t know that.
‘I will try to sleep,’ I tell Vicky. ‘You’re my jaan, you’re my everything. I need to go now, jaan. Everyone is waiting.’
‘No.’
His words have a vice-like grip over me. He knows if he asks me to stay, I will stay. My body, my heart, surrender to his will. But every time I talk to him, I wonder if God will manipulate the results to favour me. Or if hearing my prayers would make him act the way he hadn’t thought of earlier. Every time I darken the swastika in my hand, I feel like the world’s worst girlfriend.
‘You can go,’ he allows me.
‘Thank you, jaan. I love you.’
‘Same, jaan, same.’
He disconnects the call. Then I delete the call records.
Later, we order room service after confirming twice that it was complimentary. Two pizzas, two portions of biryani, two chicken burgers and one daal-khichdi. We start watching a movie on the big flat-screen TV—a movie we have watched before, but here in this room, with the quiet air conditioner blasting cold air, the movie feels different. Gaurav orders dessert, popcorn and cold drinks in quick succession. Don’t be vulgar, Papa warns Gaurav but orders another helping of gulab jamun. Maa sends pictures she has clicked during the day to her neighbourhood friends. Papa burps intermittently because he has overeaten again. All of our worries are wiped clean. There are instances I have been truly happy but none of them beats what I feel in this moment.
What would I not give for every afternoon of ours to be like this? On a soft bed, with the TV on, with a smile on my parents’ faces?
I would giveeverything. I would give everything for this.
4.
Daksh Dey
I’m alone on this mile-long beach the resort has carved out for itself. I have been up and down the beach multiple times, staring at my phone, waiting for Sameeksha’s text. The network is four bars, but I still wave my phone in the air from time to time just in case. I call her again. There’s no answer. My thumbs hover over the keypad, never touching it, as if once I start typing, I wouldn’t be able to stop and I’d send her something stupid and desperate like‘I will die without you, please text me back’.I put the phone in my pocket. The water of the ocean washes up to my feet. It was warm and inviting in the morning, but now in the dark, the cold, gurgling ocean looks terrifying.
I hear feet splashing in the water and a boy’s bickering voice. I turn and I recognize their faces immediately. It’s the girl and her brother from the morning.
They were the only ones in the lobby who were laughing and giggling despite the unprofessionalism of the guy from Mahindra Vacations. After the breakfast buffet, I saw them on the bus to the Cellular Jail, the first stop on our itinerary. Her mother must have clicked a hundred pictures from the bus itself. The girl and her brother kept arguing and I wondered if Rabbani and I would have been the same had our age difference not been sixteen years. Now Rabbani will think of me as a God-like figure, an elder brother who knows all about the ways of the world. I prefer this. A little later, the girl went on darkening the swastika in her palm. The boy’s father gave him his phone and he shut up for the rest of the ride.
Then I spotted the sister in one of the little cells, listening to the tour guide, anger and pity dripping from her eyes. She held up the group, kept lobbying questions at the tour guide, and despite the fury in her eyes, spit flying in the air, flailing hands, she looked stunning. When I first saw her at breakfast, I had brushed off her prettiness, thinking it was Sameeksha’s absence that was making me search for nice faces, consoling myself that, in the worst case, if she does leave, the world has enough beauty. But I knew the moment the light fell on her from the little window of the cell that I would never forget her face. She wore a whitesalwarsuit with self-work on it, and the fact that I remember what she wore in the afternoon surprises me, and she glowed. Her face reminded me of an article I once read, which said the right ratios, angles and mathematics is what makes beautiful people, beautiful. I imagined her God and creator immersed in their art, carving out her bones, slicing her skin. His palette crowded with bloody scalpels, torn veins, skin drafts; his mind obsessed dangerously with getting those ratios right to the point of madness. Her face sliced and sewn to reach perfection. She’s about 5’6”, slender and has a heart-shaped face that ends in a sharp chin. A slight shadow of acne on her face only heightens her beauty. Her lips are full and chapped
and every time I have seen her, she’s making them worse by touching them. I knew at that precise moment what this warm, gooey feeling in the pit of one’s stomach is. This feeling of wanting to out-focus everything but that face. A crush. A pointless somersault of the heart based purely on how someone looks. But how someone looks isn’t a trivial detail. Right now, she’s in a frayed T-shirt, pyjamas, and I wonder how she can still look like she’s taken care to dress.
‘Hey.’
They don’t hear me and keep on walking.
We are only three in the entire Mahindra Vacations group who are in the same age bracket. The others are too old, or too young. Old parents, new parents: that’s the target segment of holiday packages. I have been on enough of these holiday packages to know that eventually the parents band together and the younger people stick together. If I don’t make friends with them, it’s going to be an extremely long week.
‘Hey!’ I say, trotting alongside them. ‘Hi. I met you guys in the morning. I was the guy with the ice cream. Daksh. Are you guys going kayaking tomorrow?’
The brother stops and looks at me with an icy stare. ‘She has a boyfriend. Vicky.’
‘I hope he’s treating you well,’ I say to her.
