Amruta nods and points towards the bar. She knows that if I delve too much into it, I will want to control every aspect of Gaurav’s life again. I need to let go.
‘It’s an all-inclusive hotel rate. Everything’s on the house,’ she reminds me. ‘Hey? They are there.’
‘Who?’
‘Seems like Aanchal has made a friend.’
I look in the direction of the bar. With an arm around Aanchal, stands a man making Aanchal laugh. Tall, rugged, handsome.
I hate him immediately.
8.
Aanchal Madan
‘Vanita, I think we are done now.’
‘Let me check the pictures first,’ she says and takes her phone from me. She swipes through them with quick flicks and rejects them outright. ‘Look, just hold the phone straight. Don’t tilt it. These are basics, Aanchal.’
‘I can help you out,’ offers Saket.
‘I don’t trust you yet,’ remarks Vanita.
‘But I’m done, Vanita. All these pictures look the same to me,’ I protest. ‘Let him do it. He’s good at this kind of thing.’
I hand over my phone to Saket who refuses it.
‘I have my camera,’ he says and fetches a smallish black and silver Fujifilm camera with retro mechanical dials jutting from it from his backpack. ‘I dabble.’
Vanita throws him a murderous glare. ‘Saket, you better do better than dabbling. This is the last time I will be hot in a very, very long time. So either I come across as a centrefold model, or we keep taking stops for pictures before we get to Old Town Phuket.’
‘She’s going to be amazing through the pregnancy and right after,’ I tell Saket.
But Saket has already walked away, training the viewfinder of his camera everywhere. We’re at the edge of a field, but Saket’s not thrilled with the setting.
‘We need to go inside,’ he says. ‘Capture a little more. The frame has to open up a little more, got to get some perspective, too flat right now.’
He’s a bit of a perfectionist. For the last couple of years, he had been tinkering with what he calls the ‘most intuitive tennis trainer’, meant to be used by players to practise forehands and backhands and whatnot. I never told him this—though he probably knows—it seemed a bit childish. A small black machine spitting out balls. Is that worth leaving your job for? I had wondered then but shut it down inside me. Because I have been wrong about this kind of thing before. The day Gaurav declared he was ditching engineering to dive into gaming full-time, I lost my mind. We’d both fought our way out of poverty, clawing through on the merits of exams. His decision felt like a reckless step back towards our bleak past, that cramped single room with its leaky walls and crumbling plaster, shadowed bythe constant fear of how we would make it to the month’s end. If not for my acceptance into SRCC, we might never have escaped that life. But he ran away and snapped all contact with us for a year till Daksh found him out. Gaurav was right, and so was Saket. His toy got funded by a bunch of ATP players who called the machine ‘pure perfection’ and said that he ‘could transform the game’.
Vanita swipes through the pictures on Saket’s camera. With each swipe, I see Vanita fall more in love with herself, as if that were possible. She looks up at me. ‘I approve him. You’re allowed.’
‘Was that all it takes?’
‘You have a guy who’s invested in taking pictures,’ argues Vanita. ‘He’s going to document your life. What else could you possibly need in a guy? Also, I looked up his toy. Good stuff. Childish, but good.’
Saket lets out a chuckle. His eyes light up every time he does it. There’s an optimism, a constant happiness in his eyes that’s borderline irritating because it’s so pure. He’s like a quiet, untouched beach. That’s what makes him more confusing to me. At any given time I’m thinking about something and then thinking about thinking about that something, and I’m regretting thinking so much, and I’m fearing that I am overthinking things—and he’s just there, still, happy, smiling.
Vanita doesn’t ask the cab driver to make any other stop on our way to Old Town Phuket. She’s obsessed with her pictures and is telling Saket how the pregnancy will progress, and planning when they should do a shoot. Once we get there, without us asking, Saket explains to us where we are and insists we should get pictures.
‘Have you been here before?’ asks Vanita.
‘I watch a lot of YouTube videos. I take the fun out of discovery,’ he says with a broad smile.
As we meander through the colourful streets of Old Town Phuket, Saket keeps clicking pictures of the buildings that are painted in an array of pastel colours and have intricate facades.
Vanita leans into me and whispers, ‘Can’t he get those pictures from the Internet? Shouldn’t he get us in the pictures too?’
‘Why don’t you go and tell him?’
