Part-Time Devdaas...

by Rugved Mondkar

  “Shooting a show after it loses its plot is like trying to have sex after losing erection,” the director had said to me. Then who the bloody fuck cares? Actually no one does, and that is how this country works, I concluded.

  I switched the TV off and got back to staring at things. Devika was terribly organised with her stuff. Her dad’s job kept posting him in different cities every year, so after the second year of college, against her parents’ wish, she chose to live in Mumbai with her grandparents. Since then, she hardly lived with them. It had been more than six years that she had been living alone, so the house hardly had anything that gave a familial feel to it. Right from the chillum with its holder to a two-feet-long, four-and a-half litre bottle of Chivas 12 in the showcase, everything was purely Devika.

  Back in our college days, Hrida and I had spent many afternoons at her place. Hrida. And she was back in my thoughts. I went through every single thing I had said to her. I felt an inexplicable level of rancidness inside me. I was through with the beer and its alcohol content wasn’t enough to daze my thoughts about her. I opened another bottle and gulped three hundred millilitres of the beer. One thing I had learnt about myself from my excessive college drinking days is that it took exactly ten minutes for the alcohol to kick in. So I pushed in another two hundred millilitres and caved in on the couch. One, two, three... I began counting numbers, trying hard not to let her thoughts kick in before the alcohol did. Would she be feeling the same pain? did I actually mean nothing to her? forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty... she’ll come back, don’t worry. no she won’t; remember how you begged her not to? At seventy-four, I stopped counting.

  “Seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven…” Devika continued. I turned realising I had been so lost in counting out loud that I didn’t notice her standing beside me.

  “How long have you been standing here?” I asked.

  “Since thirty-five,” she said staring at me. “So it has come to this now?”

  She turned to leave, I caught her right hand and pulled her close and held her hand against my face. I hugged her and rested my face on her belly. She leaned and kissed my hair.

  “Give it a month, you’ll feel better,” she said as she stuffed the bowl of chicken in the microwave, “Trust me, the first month is the toughest.” She began to place the plates on the dining table.

  “Later it’s a cake walk.” She said as the microwave beeped.

  “Come, let’s eat.”

  I sat staring at the floor; she pulled me up by my arm.

  “You should have called mom,” she said as she stirred the chicken with the ladle.

  “You spoke to her?” I said.

  “Ya she called me in the afternoon.” She served me the chicken, “She said that Uncle found your bike in Greenwood Park in an abandoned state.”

  “I didn’t abandon it. I had parked it there yesterday,” I snapped back. “Fuss is their fuel, they can’t live without it.”

  “How did you get a rickshaw at night?”

  “I didn’t.” I tried to avoid giving rest of the details.

  “Then?”

  “I walked”

  “You walked eleven kilometres?” She began to laugh.

  “I think I should start growing these at home,” she said smiling naughtily as she licked the Rizla to tape the joint. I lit my joint and pulled in a long drag and shrugged as a reply to her. She pulled in a long drag as she caved in on the couch beside me.

  “Do you think she ever loved me?” I asked but she didn’t say anything. I got up from the chair and came to the edge of the open air gallery overlooking the Eastern express highway.

  “Do you think I’ll land up on the highway if I jump from here?” Then calculating the distance I said, “If I take a run up all the way from the living room?”

  “I think you should open the main door. You’ll get another five feet for your run up,” she said trying to control her giggles.

  She rose from the chair and walked to me. She gently clutched my hand, “Don’t worry, you will be loved,” she said and kissed it.

  I put my arm around her waist and rested my forehead on her shoulder. Thank God for Devika! The hurt and the pain had been pacified for a while. But how would I forget her? What was I going to do?

  The door bell rang.

  “It’s past twelve, who the hell can it be?” I said, flinging the joint out of the balcony. It hit the compound wall. Ouch!

  “Your Dad. I called him,” she said as she went to open the door. “You have to go back home some day. We are not married, you know.”

  She opened the door.

  The ‘abandoning the bike and disappearing act’ pushed my parents to ground their twenty-seven-year-old son for a month. In a way it worked for me because all the calls from work or friends would be filtered by mom, so I didn’t have to explain my ‘deserting life’ act to anyone. I stayed locked up in my room all day. I would eat my dinner in my room too. After Radhika got married, I was the one my mom would hound with her questions, calls and restrictions. “You’ll know when you have kids,” she silenced all my protests.

  One day, late in the afternoon, I heard my mom speaking to someone. From her tone and excessive cordiality, I could tell it was a girl. She screamed my name to call me.

  “It’s Devika...” she said, then covering the mouth piece of the phone she threatened me “...you better behave yourself or next time I’ll chain you.” No matter how old you are, you’ll always be sacred of your mother’s angry eyes and god had given extra scary touches to my mother’s eyes. “Hello,” I said.

  “Be ready by eight. Kartik and I will pick you up,” she ordered.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Raghu’s arranged a party for Shashank.”

  “For what? Oh shit!” It was 19 December. Shashank’s birthday.

  “You didn’t wish him, did you?

  “Hang up,” I said.

  “Bye, be ready...” She said “... and the party is a surprise, so don’t blow it up.”

  I dialled Shashank’s number but it was out of coverage area. Birthdays weren’t a big deal for us, but since the time Shashank went to the US for his MBA, there had not been one decent party we had attended. Now when he was back we decided to throw him a party. It had been in planning for months, but after the break up my brains had been too fried to remember anything.

  Kartik picked me up at quarter to eight. Devika wasn’t in the car. He told me she wasn’t ready so he picked me first. His car was a cherry red 1994 Ford Crown Victoria. It looked like one of those cars used in New York as cabs. I wondered where he’d gotten it in India from. He told me he had worked on it in his father’s garage and fitted it with some random sports car engine which he bought as scrap. The doors made queering noises and seats were damp. Its interior smelled like it was an address to a rat’s grave. I daringly sat in the car.

  ‘So, Arjun, how do you like my baby’s roar, haan? He asked attempting a weird accent while he inhumanly throttled the car. To me it felt more like a buffalo’s snore than a roar.

  Kartik, like his car, was of random make. Five feet six inches in height and dairy milk brown in colour, he was partly bald and had the rest of the hair cropped like an army cadet. He had a paunch too. Devika had been dating this bozo for five months. When we first met him, all of us took turns to go to the loo to laugh. Whenever in conversation with him, I had an acute itch of mimicking his fake accent, but for Devika’s sake, I behaved myself.

  Devika was waiting at the gate when we reached. For an instant I thought I saw Kartik actually slurp his drool off his lips when he saw her, but I don’t blame him because for the first time in all these years, even I checked Devika out. A knee-length blue off shoulder dress made her look even fairer. A black belt with red stones on the buckle, red stilettos with a clutch completed her outfit. Highlighted cheek bones, blue eyeliner combined with pink eye gloss and the extra something that she did to her naturally pouting lips made them look more luscious and kissabl
e. She was truly drool-worthy. She hugged me as I got out of the car. She smelled awesome. She sat in the front and I took the seat behind Kartik.

  “Why are we leaving the city?” I asked as the car swerved on to the highway.

  “Because the party is in Khandala,” Devika replied.

  “Wow!” I fist pumped.

  “Isn’t it great?” Kartik said, clearly missing the sarcasm.

  Devika slapped my knee as I chuckled. It was going to be a highly enjoyable two-hour ride, listening to awkward gear shifts forcing the car to wail like an animal being butchered.

  I cursed myself for taking the back seat as the car’s air conditioner only cooled the front of the car. I was so cooked that anyone could have easily taken a bite of me. I looked like I had taken a shower with my clothes on. I was never sitting in that car again, I promised myself. Finally, the beats of the music could be heard from the farm house. I jumped out of the car as soon as it halted and walked to the desk at the entrance.

  “Arjun...” I told the bouncer at the entrance.

  “Stag for now, sir?” he winked at me checking my name on the list.

  “Yes,” I said realising it was the first time in seven years that I was walking alone to the party.

  Raghu saw me and came running to me with a bottle of tequila and pushed a nice sixty millilitres shot down my throat. He pulled me inside while Devika and Kartik followed us.

  The party pimp had done it again – poolside dance floor, open bar, more girls than guys, empty rooms and mind blowing music – everything typically Raghu. Our college friends, long lost girls from school, their friends from college, chat friends, Facebook girls, random girls, girls we met at the events we worked on, and even the girls we met at James Coffeewala and Pyaasa were there. This bastard had been in touch with every single one of them. I have to confess that for a minute I felt like a hungry man in a free for all cafeteria. But the happiness didn’t last for long.

  “Where the fuck is Hrida?” Raghu asked as he pushed another shot of tequila in my mouth. I didn’t say anything, and a girl pulled Raghu on the dance floor. I headed straight for the bar, and swigged down a mouthful of whiskey.

  As Shashank entered, a spot light followed him on the dark dance floor and led him to the cake. The lights came on and there were screams and woohoos wishing him. The girl he had brought with him fed him the cake. The tequila and the whiskey had begun to kick in. The volume of the music increased and the lights began to move faster. Raghu pulled me on the dance floor. I flicked a bottle from the bar and followed him. Shashank kissed me as soon as he saw me. I couldn’t tell if it was the music or the whiskey that was intoxicating, but I didn’t care as long as it kept Hrida’s thoughts away from me. One more sip directly from the bottle and my body began to move, the substandard downmarket moves breaking out of me. Within minutes I was dancing alone in the middle of the dance floor. A cheering crowd circled me. Raghu and Shashank joined in; I looked for Devika and pulled her in too. Kartik followed us. The world around me began to spin. I gazed at the people around. As the music got wilder, I emptied the bottle, took a deep breath and closed my eyes. Hrida was smiling at me saying she loved me and that she’d kill me if I ever went away from her.

  “I love you too...” I slurred.

  I felt my hands holding a female body by the waist. Her hands cupped my hands and her body began to sway with mine.

  “Just be close to me, always...” I said, my eyes still closed.

  “I will,” the girl said as she turned around facing me. I opened my eyes. My hands still feeling her body slid further down her waist. Her face was an inch away from mine. I blinked my eyes twice in the hope to register her face, but I could only see her blurred image. I suddenly felt lip-glossed lips kissing me; strangely even in the loud music I could hear her breathing heavily. It took a few minutes before I reciprocated. She let me loose for a second, looked at me and then caught my hand to pull me away from the dance floor. The music began to fade. I was out of the party. And the kissing and gnawing of our lips began again.

  “Poncho, what the hell?” Raghu’s voice whispered in my ears. The girl was now biting my neck.

  “Chutia, are you fucking out of your mind,” he asked in a hissing voice. “What if Hrida finds out?”

  “Nothing will happen, she’s already left.” I giggled. Shashank joined us.

  “What do you mean she left?” Shashank said.

  “She is gone. Out… of my… life.” I whipped my hand in the air like a sword.

  “He is zonked; I’ll take him upstairs.” Shashank began to pull me by my hand.

  “I broke up with Hrida,” I said pulling back my hand.

  “You what?” Raghu yapped. “Why?”

  “What happened?” Shashank asked in a relatively less agitated tone.

  I silently walked away.

  “Hello boss? I asked why?” Raghu asked.

  “She fell out of love with me.”

  I dialled Raghu’s number and left a missed call, a standard procedure of intimating each other. Why waste two rupees fifty paisa on a call? Five minutes later, he came down with the cake. It was twenty minutes to midnight. I started my bike and hit the highway rather than taking the alleys and pulled the throttle realising we were not going to make it to Shashank’s place before twelve. I quietly enjoyed the cool December night air brushing my face. I caught Raghu’s eye staring at me in the rear view mirror and raised my eyebrows to ask what happened.

  “What does he do?” Raghu asked.

  “Who?” I tried to sound as oblivious as possible.

  “You know...” he ate the rest of his sentence.

  “You know who?” I said adjusting the mirror for the conversation.

  “The boyfriend,” Raghu asked sounding more uncomfortable than I would have been.

  “I don’t know, and actually I don’t care.” I raised the speed.

  “You should at least know whom you are competing with,” he held me by the shoulder as I braked for a municipal corporation funded crater.

  “There is no competition, Raghu. She has a boyfriend that means she is not available, so there is no competition.” I said as I made a sharp turn to enter Shashank’s complex.

  “But this is ridiculous man, shouldn’t she have told you earlier?” Raghu said getting off the bike as I parked it.

  “Look, it was my mistake.” I was surprised at my defensive tone. “But it’s over now. Honestly I’ve forgotten about her,” I lied. “Anyway, it’s Sachdev’s birthday, so let’s not botch it up with my chuttadgiri. Seriously, I’m fine.” Raghu stared at me knowing I was lying.

  “Hurry up, just two minutes left.” Raghu said and poked the candles in the cake. I lit them with my lighter while Raghu rang the door bell.

  “Happy birthday, Slutty... Happy birthday oh dear Slutty...” we began to sing as Shashank opened the door. We made him cut the cake at the door itself. Raghu plastered most of the cake on his face and I followed.

  “Put some more,” Neha whooped.

  “Hey, you are here too? Swift move, Slutty.” Raghu elbowed Sachdev and hugged Neha.

  I froze when I saw Hrida sitting on the couch. It had been twenty-two days since I had seen her. She was wearing the same purple t-shirt and black jeans that she had worn the last time I had seen her. The only additions were her hair that she had pulled back with a hair band and her eyes carved with kajal.

  Shashank cut the cake that Neha had gotten for him. She gifted him a shirt and ordered him to wear it. He obediently went to his room and came back wearing it. I occasionally peeked at Hrida from the corner of my eyes trying to avoid direct eye contact.

  “Arjun, Rageshwari misses you very much.” Neha said noticing me stealing glances at Hrida.

  “Who?” I asked confused.

  “Your sweetheart ya… the girl you were eyeballing in the theatre that day?”

  “The Third Girl” I said to myself. Everyone began to laugh at me. I looked at Hrida sheepishly. She smiled
at me forcing my heart to jump in the ribcage. Her glowing face, her eyes trying to figure out my thoughts, that mischievous smile, pink kiss ready lips, and then, I have a boyfriend! Her voice screamed her message in my head. It was getting unbearable to be around her. I was sure I would do something nasty. I messaged Raghu asking him to wrap up. Raghu looked at me; realising my discomfort, he stood up stretching his back.

  “Let’s go honey, I won’t let these monsters bully you anymore,” he told me as everyone laughed.

  “Wait I’ll drop you.” Shashank said. “Let Hrida go with Arjun… they stay close by.” Shashank’s arrangement had stunned me a little so I didn’t see it clearly, but I think he winked at Raghu while Neha and Hrida exchanged a look.

  I started the bike and Hrida climbed on it as if it were a horse, first standing on the foot rest with her left leg and then throwing her right leg across practically wobbling the whole bike. She clenched the shaft behind her with both hands. I could see her face in the left mirror. In the right mirror, I saw Neha clutching Shashank’s arm and jumping up with a smile as we left. There was something cooking.

  I exited the complex compound and took the highway. It was twelve-thirty and the temperature had dipped significantly. A smile popped up as the cool air swept Hrida’s face. For the next seven minute or so, there was fluttering sound of wind and my eyes shuttling between concentrating on the road and looking at Hrida’s smiling face in the mirror. If it was one of the Priyankas or Poojas, I would have made my move, but with Hrida, it felt horribly wrong to keep looking at her knowing that she had a boyfriend. Just one more time I convinced my high-principled self. As I shifted my eyes from the road into the mirror, I gawked right into the big dark brown eyes. She smiled at me and I looked away.

  “You know I owe you a humongous apology, right?” she said. I peeked at her again, defying my mind’s ethical authority.

  “For?” I decided to show my resentment by using bare minimum words to reply.

  “Ruining your birthday?”

  “You didn’t,” I said with a straight face.