With a roar, Daksh revs his motorcycle and vanishes fromsight.
4.
Daksh Dey
Some words cling to you like memories, refusing to let go. For me, it’s Amruta’s description of my BMW R 1250 GS. She called it an overpriced, thunderous heap of scrap metal, the kind of ride that screams: ‘I’m compensating for something small.’ I can’t deny the overpriced part. But she googled the price of a new motorcycle. My third-hand beauty/beast was a bargain.
Despite Amruta’s morbid warnings and talk of death every time I sit on the motorcycle, nothing makes me feel more alive than the pulse of a 1250 cc engine beneath me, the wind whipping past my face as I merge with the road and everything beyond it. I don’t expect her to understand. She likes her Toyota SUV, which is like driving sitting on a sofa and taking an entire living room with you. Controlling this finicky motorcycle that breaks down frequently and unexpectedly serves as a constantreminder to take nothing for granted. My gaze drifts to the tiny welding joint on the handlebar, holding on for dear life these past six months. It’s a reminder of all the patched-up bits and pieces that make up my own body.
The bike and I have seen things together now. Even that accident, where Gaurav had rammed his SUV into my motorcycle and damaged both the bike and me.
‘I didn’t want to be found,’ he told me in a letter he wrote to me from the rehabilitation clinic. ‘But I’m glad you found me.’
After his career imploded and everyone knew about his addictions, he had fled from all that he knew—his parents, the one he loved, the ones who loved him, the fans who had turned on him—and also from me.
I knew how to be Teflon, so I knew he was too far gone, the decisions he was making were no longer his, but that of his rotting brain. I knew I needed to find him. After chasing dead ends and worrying for weeks that I would find him frothing and dying in some gutter, I found him in Noida, scoring his next fix from the dealer. I followed him into an underpass where he parked but he spotted me. In a bid to run away from me, he swerved his car into me. My motorcycle and I went flying into the divider—my body slammed against the pavement and shattered.
Then he backed up and drove away without once pausing to see what had become of me.
During my hospital stay, and even later, a chorus of voices, including Rabbani and Amruta, echoed with the same refrain: ‘You were nearly gone.’ But their words left a bitter taste, for they were truly saying, ‘Gaurav almost killed you.’
I couldn’t bear to hear it. So, I shrugged off their concern, insisting that the accident wasn’t as dangerous as it seemed and that half of it was my fault for losing control of the motorcycle.Because I know Gaurav would rather die himself than have anything happen to me.
Gaurav and I had not come face to face since his car collided with me. I lay in the hospital, while he was taken away to a rehabilitation centre that barred phone usage. However, letters were permitted. So I picked up a pen and wrote to him. I didn’t feel anger towards him. Instead, I felt like a failure.
I was supposed to be responsible for him, and yet he had managed to hide his addiction from me for over a year. I had brushed away all the warning signs. I knew he had started drinking often—mostly after winning tournaments. I didn’t stop him because I was getting lazy with him. My family had expanded. With Amruta in the picture, I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to babysit him. And then there was the podcast that had gathered steam. And I left Tejal too much to deal with. I let him slip. How could I miss the redness of the eyes, the frequent trips he made to smaller conventions, the highs and lows of his performance, the anger, the crashes?
Entirely my fault.
I had been blind to his struggle, too wrapped up in my own life to notice the warning signs. Even when others had started to suspect, I brushed off their concerns as mere jealousy from haters.
But it was all true.
I got to know of his addiction when the rest of the world did—on a live game stream. He had lines of cocaine hidden only slightly away from view on his gaming set-up in a hotel in Surat. He didn’t know that if one looked closely, what he was doing was being reflected in the mirror behind him. The second he bent over, picked up that rolled piece of paper and took a long sniff, it was all over.
The fans turned into a mob.
All the respect he had earned went up in smoke. All his past titles were tainted. The gamers he had beaten over the years all came baying for his blood. He was banned for life from participating in any gaming tournament. Then came the arrest which the YouTubers kept talking about for a month.
‘DOWNFALL OF THE FAMED GAMER!’
‘SHAME OF THE GAMING WORLD!’
‘THE PHOENIX BURNS!’
‘OVERRATED GAMER TAINTS THE INDUSTRY!’
Gaurav’s social media turned into a cesspool of hate.
He spent a weekend in jail, shaking from withdrawal. We had to pay the police and the judge a major chunk of money to get him out. Within twelve hours, he lost all brand collaborations, he was kicked out of all the competitions, his teammates found new teams.
Then he went on a self-destructive run.
He would talk to no one.
I chased him across cities, tracking his credit card usage, but he was elusive. The police refused to help—why would they? This was a grown man making his decisions. I didn’t feel anger as much as I felt betrayed, a failure, and worried about where he would end up. I was—supposedly—his best friend.
Finally, I found him in Noida. If anything came out of me laying splat, my motorcycle lying broken on me, my bones shattered, it’s that Gaurav decided to enrol into a rehab centre.
