‘You’re not falling, you’re already in love, bro,’ Jagath tells me, as if it’s a matter of fact. ‘And this is not a party, it’s your family. You’re calling her to your inside circle.’
‘Vicky’s still around,’ I remind the both of them. ‘And look around yourself, Jagath. What do you think will happen? I’m not trying to imagine something with her. I know it’s impossible.’
‘I look around and I see that the house looks beautiful, that’s all I see,’ he notes.
‘You know what I mean.’
Jagath lowers his voice to a whisper. ‘She’s going to ask about Uncle.’
Baba is sleeping with his face towards the wall. I had forced him to take a bath today. Every day, it becomes easier to help him towards the bathroom. He gets lighter and lighter. Every day he becomes more bones than flesh. And every day, it becomes harder and harder to shave him. With his skin drying, cheeks sinking in, some hair escapes the blade. Sometimes I cut him. His flinches are sometimes the only expression I get out of him.
After Maa, different doctors had different diagnoses for Baba. One said it was prolonged grief disorder, others said it was depression. Some advised grief counselling, others prescribed antidepressants.
Nothing worked.
I watched him lose weight, suffer from insomnia, cry or not react at all, and go through extreme bouts of sadness. Sometimes he would ask to see Mumma. Every few nights, he would sit up and start crying and blaming everything on Mumma. It helps to blame everything on Mumma. It’s an easy trap to fall into: to blame it on Mumma. It’s because of her that Rabbani is growing up without a mother, and with a father who simultaneously hates and loves her absent mother. It’s because of her that the three of us are living in this ramshackle one-room apartment, three beds lined against three walls of the room. It’s because of her that every month Jagath and Zeenath have to loan me money to tide me over the last week.
In our one-room-kitchen, Baba gets the longest wall. His bed is lined up against the 10-foot-long wall. Next to the bed is a cabinet with his medicines, documents, certificates, medical reports. There’s a small chest of drawers with his clothes: five T-shirts, five pairs of trousers, three pairs of shoes. Out of all the pairs, the left shoe is mint-new. Right opposite Baba’s wall is the smaller wall for Rabbani. But it’s big enough for her to have her little bed; an easel for painting, and drawing, scribbling; a rack for her books, school bag, shoes and her clothes. My side of the room has a window, beneath which there’s a fold-out table that doubles as a desk and the dining table. Right next to it is a makeshift floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. We don’t have a lot of stuff: there are only so many things you can stuff in one room.
‘You’re the first guy I have seen who makes a big deal out of his birthday,’ says Zeenath, scrubbing the wall.
‘A birthday is a big deal,’ I tell Zeenath.
‘VERY BIG,’ squeals Rabbani. ‘BIGGEST DEAL IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE PLANET OF THE UNIVERSE!’
11.
Aanchal Madan
I tell Vicky that Vanita has reached the hotel and will stay over. He believes me when he hears her in the background—it’s a conference call instead.
Vanita’s coming tomorrow morning.
‘It’s laughable he falls for this,’ says Vanita and adds after a pause, ‘What do you think will happen tonight? And don’t you dare say nothing because if he’s as good-looking as you keep telling me he is, you’d better do something!’
‘Nothing,’ I answer. ‘I don’t want to add another lie to my stack of lies.’
‘Vicky deserves every lie and more that you tell him,’ Vanita says. ‘He deserves the worst in the world, and most of all, he needs to die. Slowly. A little arsenic in his food every day will do the trick.’
‘I wish he had really killed himself,’ I say.
‘He’s a coward. He would never have done that.’
‘I actively dream about him having slit his wrists properly and his mother finding him in a pool of blood.’
‘He would leak tar, not blood, his soul’s so black.’
‘We are bad people, Vanita.’
‘No, he is. I always told you that.’
Had I not been blinded by love or whatever it was I felt for Vicky, I would have picked Vanita the day Sanjog had assaulted her. Girls often forget that other girls are their soulmates, guys are just accessories. Had I listened to Vanita, I wouldn’t still be running after Vicky, I wouldn’t have found myself in Rajat’s hostel room, and Vicky wouldn’t have found Rajat and me in that market and beaten him black and blue.
That day, he had left the market with a warning, ‘Now you see what I do with you.’
The next day, he was at my home with his parents.
On the table, there were printouts. I still marvel at Vicky’s vileness. He had taken printouts of the swimsuit pictures I had sent four years ago along with the others I had sent him over time. There were other printouts of our rather graphic sexts, our promises and then of my confession that Rajat and I had been physical. His mother was crying, his father was livid, and there were little slits on his wrists. His mother had caught him with a knife in the bathroom.
