She reaches out for my hand. I thread my fingers around hers.
‘Let’s walk till the end of the beach,’ she says.
I flash her a quick smile and say, ‘What else is there to do?’
We have just left our resort room when two kids—not older than six—run past us in their tubes. Both of us stare at them go.
‘We are not going to miss them,’ I tell Amruta. ‘They are not missing us.’
She nods.
Just then, my phone beeps. It’s a mail from the office. I put it back in my pocket.
‘I thought we had decided to keep the phones in our room,’ remarks Amruta.
‘The handover is a little tricky,’ I reason. ‘Tejal’s doing a good job, by the way, but just getting used to some stuff. The junior gamers like her too.’
She studies my face, looking for any hints, and tentatively says, ‘Will you miss managing Gaurav?’
I weigh my words. ‘I will miss it. But he’s at his peak and he needs Tejal, not me. Tejal’s younger, more clued in. It will be selfish of me to keep going.’
‘He’s also dating her. That’s going to make the transition easier,’ says Amruta.
My face breaks into a smile as I look back on my time with Gaurav. ‘Can’t believe it’s coming to an end though. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened had Gaurav not stumbled into my life.’
‘And what would have happened to him had you not walked into his life?’ reminds Amruta. ‘Had you not managed him, he would still be in the lower rung of gamers. Worse, actually. Had you not given him the Nintendo back in the Andamans, maybe he would never have become a gamer.’
‘His talent is once-in-a-decade. He would have done something big anyway.’
‘But you honed it. You marketed him. Don’t short-sell yourself, Daksh. Just like he would have done it anyway, you would have done it, too. Look at our podcast.’
‘You’re hard to argue with. Thanks for that,’ I say with a sigh. ‘I just hope Tejal stops him from doing stupid shit.’
My blood boils thinking about the little ways he’s harming his career. That’s why it’s even more important for Tejal to step up, stop him, rein him in.
I continue, ‘He has cut down on the partying a little bit. And he just has to stop spending like he does.’
She scans my face. ‘What did he do now?’
‘He bought an apartment in Malad. At 30 per cent over market rate. Says it holds emotional value.’
‘Does it?’
‘It’s the same one I found him shacking up in. Remember I told you?’
An eye roll precedes her response, a silent testament to how often she’s heard this story. ‘How can I not know it? It’s all he talks about in his interviews. How you discovered him, fought for him, made him.’
It’s the story of the stolen Nintendo, as Gamers India had first reported it. About how I met Gaurav for the first time when he was an irritating, gangly fourteen-year-old with scruffy facial hair and a tinny voice, and introduced him to games on my Nintendo. They make me sound good. But the truth is that I wanted to talk to his sister, Aanchal, and though Aanchal had a boyfriend, Vicky, I didn’t care. I had lured Gaurav with my Nintendo so I could talk to her. Gaurav promised to give the Nintendo back but ran away with it to Delhi, while I flew back to Dubai.
That’s where his addiction to games began, which Gamers India got right. Of course, I didn’t stay in touch with either of them.
Four years later, I bumped into Aanchal in Mumbai. She was no longer the nervous girl waiting for her board exam results, crouched in one corner of a hotel’s business centre, but an assured, beautiful woman with pinched shoulders and an unwavering look in her eye, a coffee mug in hand, rising steadily in her corporate job. She told me that her brother had run away and come to Mumbai to pursue a career in gaming. Gamers India also doesn’t know this. All they know is that I found Gaurav shacking up in a flat. And offered to manage him. The rest, of course, is gaming history.
What Gamers India also doesn’t know, the more vital part of the story, is that when I found him, I also found love in Aanchal. And she found love in me, albeit temporarily. It was no longer a crush, but I felt love for her that burns you through and through. But while Gaurav and I lasted, Aanchal ripped my heart to shreds. And after that, I only met Aanchal once. Three years later, at Vanita’s wedding.
So Amruta’s right, we do share history. She was my crush at eighteen, my first love at twenty-two, the first person I truly hated at twenty-five, and she’s here at twenty-seven.
‘Yep, yep. The same flat.’
