A Long Way Home

by Mitali Meelan

  Vartika refilled the glass and pushed it towards me. ‘Drink this and sit down for two minutes.’

  I gave her a look, then picked up the glass and downed the water in one go. I could also do with eating some food as I hadn’t had any since last night. ‘If only I had them,’ I said to her, placing the glass on the table. ‘I’ll just send this to the illustrator and make a call to the apartment owner,’ I muttered on my way out. ‘If I cancel now, he might find a better tenant than me before the month ends.’

  That night, Vartika and I were squeezed against each other on her single bed, watching the Big Bang Theory and eating instant noodles. It was ironic that two ardent chefs would stoop down to the level of eating frozen and processed food, but after cooking for a thousand mouths, at the end, there’s little energy left to crack an egg for your own self.

  Refilling my bowl with more noodles and worrying about finding the right staff, I paid little attention to the show. But letting the television play was still comforting.

  ‘Isn’t he your brother?’ Vartika asked out of nowhere. She was scrolling through her newsfeed and I was preoccupied with my thoughts, my ears dreading to hear the sound of rain. The workers had cleared up the place as promised, put the unfastened doors to dry over the counter, just in case. But it would still not let me have a good night’s sleep.

  I only put a halt to my mind’s chatter when she held out her phone to let me read. ‘An anonymous blogger reveals his identity and turns into an overnight internet sensation,’ read the headline of an article.

  There was a thumbnail of someone who looked like Arihant, but I couldn’t be sure. I clicked on the link and it took me to Buzzgram’s website. On the third line, they had revealed the blogger’s name. Sitting straighter in the seat, I read further. It talked about this semi-popular blogger writing about his life and garnering readers for the past two years. They had quoted a few paragraphs from Arihant’s ‘confessional blogpost’, or so they called it, and put up a link to it.

  ‘He is your brother, isn’t he?’ Vani asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I confirmed, exiting the article to read the comments. Someone had put a link to his Facebook Page and had written: I was there when he had only 200 page likes. Over a hundred comments were pasted below that.

  Damn, he’s hot! Does he have a girlfriend?

  I didn’t think he was a guy.

  Peeps, go like his page! Support him! He’s amazing!

  Such an overrated person. Internet makes anybody famous nowadays.

  I have not just read his blogs; I have lived through them. I almost cried when I read the part where he wrote, ‘He’s always had the support (of his readers). He just took too long to see it.’ *sniffles*

  Who was that girlfriend of his? Such a heartless bitch. Who would want to leave a guy who writes poems for you?

  This is going to fade away. It’s just curiosity that has the internet chasing after him. Except for writing about his lame life, he’s pretty much a nobody.

  Want to earn 10k per month by simply being on Facebook? Check this out.

  I clicked on Arihant’s Facebook page and it had over 27k likes. His bio had nothing but his name on it with a smiling face. He had shared a dozen posts from different pages where he was apparently featured or interviewed.

  ‘Wow,’ Vartika said, reading along as I scrolled. ‘Who knew you had a celebrity at home?’ This was a little baffling, mostly because I couldn’t decipher why he was famous in the first place. To find out, I went to his website called ‘Life as I see it’.

  ‘Did you know about this?’ Vani enquired, stealing a mouthful of noodles that lay forgotten in my plate.

  ‘Obviously not,’ I mumbled. ‘Who reads so much anyway?’ I wondered aloud, seeing the unending scroll down, post after post after post. Then I clicked on one that caught my attention.

  ‘Middle Child Syndrome,’ it read.

  Our house is pretty match box sized. One room, one bathroom, one living room with kitchen as an extended part of it and one storeroom (that has been converted into my brother’s room).

  The first five years of my life, I slept with my parents in their bedroom. My brother had always had a separate bedroom. Even when young, I can recall, he rarely mingled with the rest of us. His presence stood out, as a separate entity from the rest of the family. He was like the moon in a star-studded night sky. All celestial bodies are a part of the night, but moon is just on its own. I guess he liked being that way, not being part of any of the group surrounding him. Is it because he thinks none of us will understand him or even if we do, will not accept his ideologies, whatever they are? Or is it because he just likes sticking out from everyone else, thinks of himself as someone above us, too good to fit in?

  I guess we’ll never know. Besides, once my sister came along when I was five, I was distracted anyway. She was an adorable chubby infant and she usually pooped in Dad’s arms and slept peacefully in mine. So it worked out great for me.

  I’d say I still get the best of both worlds. I get to learn from my brother’s mistakes, and at times, look up to him. Albeit aloof and passive aggressive, he has a clean heart. A lot of times, he does things for others silently, without making a noise, without leaving behind footprints. And that’s one hell of a quality to have.

  My sister, on the other hand, has simply made me a better guy, a responsible person, if I could say so myself.

  I didn’t think he noticed any of that. In the suggested posts at the end of the write-up, there was another one that I was tempted to click on.

  Reminiscing Childhood

  Finally, I found the right place to shift to. Cheap, good location. The place is stinky and my room-mates (whose names I never remember nor do I care to) are usually passed out drunk. (See now why I don’t want to reveal my identity? I might piss off too many people to do any damage control.) But overall, it’s fine. It will make do for now.

  I went home today to get my remaining stuff and found some old action figures stuffed deep inside the drawer where I kept my T-shirts. I had nearly forgotten them, but seeing those figures, with paint chipped off a figure of Spock and Batman’s one arm broken, it brought back a flood of memories.

  I am told I am the happiest face in the family, always smiling, always ready to party. Even as a kid, I loved to play. I pestered my older brother a lot. He tells me I’d often sneak into his room with two of my action figures, then make up stories around them, the ones that were not the original stories of them. Superman could shoot bullets through his fingers, but couldn’t quite fly when he wanted to. Spiderman could swim at the speed of lightening, but couldn’t make a web in the sky if his life depended on it. In my world, he was called Spiderman because he feared spiders and Batman was called that because he loved bats.

  My brother usually sat there doing his work, whatever that was. He rarely paid attention to me. But once my sister came along, I finally found an attentive audience. She would laugh at my jokes, often untimely, even if she didn’t quite understand them (she usually cracked up when I made sounds or faces for dramatic effect), and she clapped before the climax, sometimes while the hero was dying. (That was another thing I loved about my stories. The good guys didn’t always save the day. The bad triumphed as well, just like the real world.) But I didn’t mind her untimely reactions, as long as I had her undivided attention.

  Once she was old enough to understand my words, I added her in the stories. My brother, by now, was completely sidetracked. I don’t think he cared. In fact, I think he was quite pleased.

  So there I was, creating super worlds. My superheroes went about doing their business all day, but they returned home to my sister (she was always the one they came home to). One of my favourite action figures even married her. Although I doubt if she knows or remembers or cares.

  I think childhood is never forgotten, it’s merely buried. And once in a while, we come across familiar things like these and the memories rush back to the surface.

  I had only read two rand
om posts and I stumbled across my mention twice. I didn’t know what else he’d written about me. Not that I cared, but the curiosity was pulling me deeper into this pit.

  Sleeping in the living room, was another post that intrigued me. I read on, hoping I wouldn’t have to read about myself again. No such luck.

  I was slowly outgrowing the place, my parents’ bedroom.

  Until I was ten, I had been sleeping with them and I didn’t notice the inconvenience I was causing until they began taking turns sleeping in the living room. I was oblivious to it. In a way, I was glad because whenever Baba slept outside, it would mean a deeper slumber for me. No waking up with a start in the middle of the night because of his snoring.

  But at age ten, I came to a realization that our bodies were crammed in a room (mind you, my sister had been added by then) and what Aai and Baba were doing was ‘adjusting’. It happened quite by accident.

  In class, as homework, we had to write a short description of what we saw and heard outside our window early morning, during sunrise, and I was apparently the only kid in the class who took English assignments seriously. So I woke up early one morning to see the sun rise from the window. I opened it and stared out into the distant nature.

  Sometime later, Baba stirred in his sleep. I held my breath, not wanting to wake him up. But he did, squinting at me to block the tender rays of the sun. But I realized I hadn’t woken him up. He needed to go to the loo and he barely even noticed me standing there.

  He sat up on the mattress laid out on the floor, then made four attempts to get up (I counted). He succeeded on the fifth try and I heard a crack of his knee. While sitting down, he huffed. Later, I heard him talking to my mother about his weak knees, and she telling him not to walk to his office in the morning. The exact conversation went something like this:

  Aai: ‘How many times do I have to tell you? Take an auto from the station. All you save is twenty rupees. We can live with that.’

  Baba: ‘Twenty rupees every working day makes it 520 per month. That makes it over six thousand every year, counting most of the holidays. It’s a lot if you think long term.’

  Aai: ‘Who can argue with you when you talk like that?’

  So the next day, I insisted I was grown enough to sleep on my own and wanted to get a chance to sleep in the living room. Of course, they didn’t allow it, but I played the card of comparison. ‘My brother gets to sleep alone. Why can’t I?’

  It worked. Honestly, it was a lot more comfortable, a lot roomier and if you kept the windows open, you wouldn’t even need the fan. Initially, Baba and I took turns sleeping outside. More often than I’d like to admit, I saw his guilt-ridden face in the morning whenever he saw me folding the sheets. Eventually, with my overenthusiastic act of loving the arrangement, they made peace with it. To this day, I think they haven’t suspected my reasons for doing that. And I intend to keep it that way.

  ‘It’s strange,’ I said, locking the phone and letting it sink in the mattress between us, ‘reading about him like that. Feels like I’m encroaching.’ Vartika held up her fork to my mouth, noodles neatly rolled around it. I took the bite, thinking about Arihant. What he did with Dad was thoughtful, and I couldn’t take away the fact that he’d always been the softer hearted man in the family, the one who actually comprehended emotions and knew what to do with them or about them.

  He’d also been the one to teach Saloni how to ride a bicycle, despite the fact that I was the one trusted with the responsibility. One Sunday morning, I grudgingly took the eight-year-old, pig-tailed, wide-eyed, bouncing kid to the narrow lane behind our building, carrying my old bicycle that Arihant had used and now Saloni was going to.

  ‘How long did you take to learn?’ she asked, shooting one question after another. ‘Do you think I can ride this to school every day? My friend Babita does. She says it’s easy. Is it easy?’

  ‘Sit,’ I told her after I’d adjusted the bike in the middle of the lane. It did not have training wheels so we needed to be careful. Forgetting all that she had been asking me, she squealed and mounted on it. I held on at the back tightly, letting her adjust in the seat. She wasn’t a light weighted kid.

  ‘All the best!’ shouted Arihant from the side, thirteen-year-old wearing a half pant and my hand-me-down Spock T-shirt. Not wanting to miss out the fun, Arihant had tagged along with us. I had always wondered about his definition of fun, which was vastly different from mine. But Mom insisted I take him too. I suspected she wanted that alone time for herself. But Arihant was a good kid. Harmless. So, I agreed.

  Slowly, Saloni began pedalling, wobbly at first. I gave instructions as we tottered forward.

  ‘Don’t let go!’ she squeaked.

  ‘I won’t,’ I told her and held on until she was steady. I slowly released my clasp and jogged along a few feet behind her, telling her to focus, pedal, hold still, as I went. At some point, I stopped running along. It was a few minutes later that she glanced to her side, then turned to look back, widened her eyes at me and crashed onto the curb.

  Arihant and I both rushed to her side. She had begun howling. ‘You promised not to leave me!’

  I picked up her bike. ‘I have to. How else are you supposed to learn?’

  ‘No!’ she sniffled, frowning at me. ‘You’re a liar.’

  ‘You were doing fine without me. Did you notice I wasn’t there until you turned back?’

  ‘I noticed,’ she complained, muttering, ‘I didn’t see your shadow on the ground.’

  ‘You didn’t fall because I let go. You fell because you lost your focus. Now come on, let’s try again.’ I held out my hand to her.

  She leaned away from it. ‘I don’t want to ride with you.’

  I crossed my arms. ‘Do you want to learn or not?’

  Arihant crouched down next to her and held her scraped knee that wasn’t even bleeding. ‘Does it hurt too much?’ he asked, to which she nodded once and he blew over it. ‘You know how many times I fell off the bicycle until I got it right?’

  ‘How many?’ she mumbled.

  ‘Five.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Five!’

  ‘And how many times did Ishaan lose his balance and injure himself? Six.’

  That was a blatant lie. I had fallen off a whole of two times. He wasn’t even there to see it. But I didn’t interrupt him because whatever he was doing seemed to be working. She’d at least stopped weeping.

  Saloni glanced up at me, her eyes lit up. ‘You fell off six times?’

  Before I could answer, Arihant added, ‘Everybody falls. Without that, you can never learn.’

  She lowered her chin, staring at her knee, and mumbled, ‘But I don’t want to fall.’

  ‘Then you know what? You won’t fall. Not today. I’ll hold on to the bicycle until you tell me to let go. Alright?’

  She glanced up at him, looking hopeful. ‘You’re not lying?’

  He lightly pinched his throat. ‘Mother promise.’ She smiled. ‘Come on, now. You’re a tough girl. Remember what Superman told you when he took you on a flying trip to Metropolis?’

  ‘That I’m the bravest of them all,’ she recited, taking his hand and pulling herself up.

  Turning the bike, Arihant held it in place while she climbed on. I watched them for another minute or so. Arihant lacked the physical strength to give a firm balance to the bike that I could, but as promised, he didn’t leave the handle at all, even as he stumbled a couple of times while trying to keep up. I stayed for two more rounds, then noting my presence wasn’t required, I left them alone. It took her four days to find the confidence that she could ride on her own. On the fifth day, she asked him to let go. Until then, he hadn’t.

  Vartika’s head lay against my shoulder and her voice broke my reverie. ‘Who is this girl “Eve”?’ Vartika had been snooping around the blog some more.

  ‘Eve?’ She sketched her thumb under the sentence where Arihant had mentioned her. I read a few lines before and after that, racking my brain for any g
irl he might have mentioned. I came up with nothing. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Huh. Sounds like she crushed him.’

  I put my plate away. ‘Can we stop reading his blog? It brings up pointless memories. Living away from home is hard enough.’

  She dropped her hand, putting the phone away and craned her neck to peck my chin. ‘Want to forget everything for a while?’

  I glimpsed down at her, raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you have in mind?’

  She smirked. ‘The same thing that’s always on yours.’

  ISHAAN

  I

  n hospitality, staff is what makes or breaks your brand. I couldn’t afford to hire anyone I couldn’t absolutely trust. And despite all those hindrances I had to brave past, finding a staff turned out to be the toughest task of all. Two days before the inauguration, I hired a second line chef and a server, both novices. I rushed them through the training in two days, enough to get past the opening day. And while setting up this business wasn’t a smooth, linear process, I sailed through it.

  Finally, I had a team of seven and a decent restaurant. I still had to add to the décor with vintage artworks, customized tissues and a centralized cooling system, but I decided it was best kept for later, once the place kicks off.

  The restaurant being located near two colleges and a busy marketplace, the opening day was a working Friday evening. We circled in the kitchen as I briefed them, then wished one another. And as I saw everyone take positions, eagerly chatting to welcome customers, I was hit with a terrifying reality, a nauseous feeling settling in the pit of my stomach.

  All these seven people were dependant on my ability to keep this place afloat. And I wasn’t sure I could. While I stood in the middle of my creation, having a minor existential crisis and my thoughts exploding together, the negative and positive combining to form a gibber, I was hoping the fear would dwindle the closer I came to the opening. But it only seemed to grow.

  I excused myself and slipped into the pantry to collect my thoughts, that only spiralled out of control the more I lingered on them. I clutched the side of a rack, palms sweaty and a knot in my stomach that I didn’t know how to ease. I couldn’t be sure how long I stayed there until someone came looking.