He was addicted to it, spent hours doom-scrolling through transition videos, chatted up girl fans, tallied likes on hispictures and tracked how others were doing, and showed up at tournaments with bloodshot eyes, where he discussed videos more than strategies. My dire warnings fell on deaf ears. I waited for the obvious. Something had to give. And then, in a moment of glaring oversight, in a small tournament in which he was a heavy favourite, he misjudged his smite on Baron Nashor, allowing a thirteen-year-old noob to steal it with a basic attack—a blunder.
‘Burn my phone, bro,’ he had begged me after the humiliation. ‘And don’t let me do anything on my own.’
‘I’m not going to argue with you. I will tell you what to do and you do it. Got it?’
‘Got it, bro.’
‘I’m not your bro. Call me Bhaiya.’
As team principal and part owner of Phoenix Rising Gaming, I manage his—and the team’s—online presence, brand deals and collaborations. Other team managers tell me I have done a great job building a team of unmarketable weird nerds with bad haircuts into a recognizable brand. Gaurav, too, likes to credit his success to me. But it’s far from the truth. Gaurav’s a once-a-decade talent. I just remind him not to throw it all away.
But there’s one person who thinks I’m a parasite, a bloodsucking leech sucking on Gaurav’s blood.
Aanchal.
Aanchal argues that Gaurav, the premier gaming prodigy, can throw a stone into a crowd and it will hit someone who can manage the team. She tried to poison Gaurav’s mind and persuade him that he doesn’t need a selfish manager like me who, at the end of the day, will only look out for his own interests. Gaurav doesn’t believe his sister. Not after what she did to me.
She’s the gold standard in being selfish.
2.
Daksh Dey
The office of Phoenix Rising Gaming—of which Gaurav and I are part owners—is situated in Netaji Subash Place, on the fourth floor of Mata Rani Building. On most days, the lift is out of order, and we’re forced to trudge up four flights of stairs to reach our damp, windowless office.
As a matter of shared principle, we overpay our people and cut costs everywhere else. If our company had a mission statement, the word stingy would be in it.
We have three exceptionally miserly people in accounts, two remarkably efficient editors in post-production, four team members of Phoenix Rising and me. The centrepiece of our office is the gaming room. This is where we have spared no expense. This is where Gaurav and his team spend up to sixteen hours a day honing their skills on top-of-the-line gaming equipment and recording live streams for the online channels. The rest of us sit at a long table facing the gaming room. It’s a cramped, no-frills office that would never win the Best Workplace award. But we make it work. Right next to the gaming room, we built a tiny podcast studio which we rent out to podcasters. It’s a small but steady revenue source.
As I arrive at the office, Amruta Thakur is already in the studio, hooking up podcast microphones to her laptop. She’s in a zipped-up black Nike windcheater and black tights. Inside the windcheater, I know she’s wearing a black sports bra. She calls it her ‘uniform to tackle the day’. She owns multiples of this uniform. Apart from these, she owns three black dresses: one dangerously small for an occasional wild night (hot!), one that’s business-like (intimidating!), and one that’s perfect for ared carpet (elegant!). She insists that wearing black is the only defence against stains. As a mother of two boys, she’s a bona fide expert on stains. Her eight-year-old twin sons, Naman and Nishant, two of the most well-behaved, sincere, obedient boys I have ever come across, now copy her, refusing to wear anything but black Nike athleisure.
Amruta Thakur had recorded her first podcast on her phone, as a way to vent about life, about her husband—who ate and drank too much, thought full-body check-ups and cholesterol measurements were a scam, and died too soon—and about herself who had been stupid enough to get married at eighteen, did not use contraceptives, and got pregnant with twins immediately after. ‘I’m tired. I’m done. I’m exhausted. Motherhood is overrated. Sometimes I think about how my life would have been without them. I would be free. I could do anything, go anywhere. And then I get sad. What would I do without them?’ she said in her very first podcast. You could hear one of the infants crying in the background.
She ran the solo podcast for three years before she shut it down abruptly.
I would never have found her podcast if, on a particularly rough day, I hadn’t googled, ‘4 year old sister. No mother. Frustrated. Any parenting tips?’ On the third page, I found her podcast, ‘The Accidental, Reluctant Mother’. It was no longer active, but there were hundreds of episodes.
The rating was 3.2.
But when I read her description, ‘Mother and widow at 18, twins, both cute, both annoying’, the connection was instant. I was twenty at the time, and fate had dealt me a cruel hand as if it had something against me. Maa had died in an accident, Baba was dead on the inside, we had no money, and I had a four-year-old sister to take care of. I was struggling. The podcastwas godsent, as if tailor-made for me, as if fate was now feeling guilty and was throwing me a lifeboat. I latched on desperately.
Her voice was a gentle balm on my frustrations of having to raise Rabbani all by myself. I would put on my earphones and she would whisper in my ears, ‘It’s okay, everyone fucks up.’ ‘You forgot to pack her lunch? It’s okay! Everyone fucks up.’ ‘You shouted at your child, it’s fine, everyone fucks up, but don’t do it again.’
Then, as I got a hang of things, and Rabbani grew, I didn’t find myself needing the podcast that much. It had helped me to the shore. I could breathe again. A year passed and then another and then another. Amruta Thakur slipped from my mind.
But then suddenly, a year ago, when we added the podcast studio in our office, Amruta popped up in my mind.
I went searching for her.
‘No one listened to my podcast, except my kids,’ she told me when I met her in her tiny office at the college in Noida where she taught history.
In my mind, she was eighteen, loud, forceful because that’s how old she was in the first episode of her podcast. But in front of me, with a pair of thin spectacles resting on her nose, a bunch of assignments in front of her, was someone mellower. She still looked eighteen, though. Her small 5’1” frame and rather cute face were deceiving.
‘Your podcast used to be the best part of my day,’ I told her.
‘I used to get a lot of hate. Listeners used to say I didn’t deserve to be a mother.’
‘Is that why you stopped?’
