Part-Time Devdaas...

by Rugved Mondkar

  “Your filmy career is influencing you too much. Quitting engineering was the biggest mistake of your life. You should have listened to us, but you chose to trust a random girl over your parents and look where she got you.” after the break-up, Hrida had suddenly become a stone in a shoe for everyone around me.

  “You are almost twenty-eight years old, still an undergrad, working for peanuts with no future.”

  My mother in described my present and predicted my future in one sentence.

  “That is why you are supposed to listen to your parents and not strangers. We had plans for you but you chose to ruin them for your juvenile schemes. When I look at kids your age, it shames me. You’ve disappointed me, Arjun...”

  “Yes Aai, I am a huge disappointment to you, to Baba, to Radhika and to everyone I’ve ever known. Thank you, you guys provided me with everything I wanted. I’m sorry I didn’t turn out to be the ideal son. Sorry I didn’t suffocate myself in the rotten atmosphere of engineering and chose to follow my selfish dreams. I’m sorry that I don’t have an eight figure pay package. I’m sorry that I’m a complete failure, a classic drunkard and a hopeless loser.” the uncivilty in my voice notched up with every sorry.

  “There, I apologised for everything. wait a minute, did I miss anything?” I said hopping on one leg fighting with my shoelaces.

  “Oh and yes, sorry I fell in love. I should have sought approval from my control freak of a mother before I did. Can I please go to sleep?” I said and threw the shoe away. She didn’t respond.

  “Is that a yes? Haan? Can I go to sleep?” As soon as I said, that my face felt a mighty slap from Dad.

  “I hate you both!” I screamed in a rage.

  Mom’s eyes finally welled up, ultimately satisfying me.

  I stormed off to my room and crashed on the bed.Demonic faces began to laugh at me as I closed my eyes. The ranting had blown up most of the alcohol in my body leaving behind a scanty amount, barely enough to flare up the laughing faces and doze me off. I had to make sure I slept before the daze faded and the voices took over.

  “One… two… three…” I began counting numbers, my best weapon against the voices.

  “Twenty-one… twenty-two… twenty-three…” Visuals of Hrida getting married flooded my mind.

  “Thirty-nine… forty… forty-one…” I saw Devika’s teary-eyed face as the cab zoomed off.

  “Just go fuck yourself loser!!!” Raghu’s voice screamed.

  “Seventy-five… seventy-six… seventy-seven…”

  “You are just somebody that I am ashamed to say I loved.” Hrida’s voice said.

  “Hundred...hundred and one… hundred and....” I slept.

  I woke up to two voices – a screaming girl and a begging guy. The velocity at which my life was changing had stunned me. After the fight, I moved out of my parents’ house and started sharing a house with three extremely opposite characters. My senior at work Ashwin, a highly sexual character who needed to get laid every night. His girlfriend-worshiping surd cousin Humpy who was petrified of her, and his almost bi-polar background dancer girlfriend Tamsin. Sleeping to Tamsin’s thunderous moaning in the next room and waking up to her violent screams was a daily occurrence. Their topics of fight would range from as trivial reasons as Humpy forgetting to wash their left over dishes to leaving his stinking sock in Tamsin’s clutch to some grave ones like Humpy objecting to Tamsin spending time with random guys from work late at nights to Humpy’s father disapproving of her religion. The volume of their voices would depend on the seriousness of the fight. Going by Tamsin’s hysteric screams that day, it was clearly a serious one. Usually I got to hear just screams and a few muffled sentences, but that day I was sleeping in the living room since Ashwin had had a ‘friend’ to stay over the night before so I was witnessing the fight between these two half-naked people from two feet away. Humpy had forgotten to wear a condom while having sex with Tamsin and now she had missed her period.

  “...you know how high we’d gotten that night. I thought I wore it but I wasn’t sure.” Humpy whined as he followed her everywhere around the house with morning wood in his underwear and socks on his feet.

  “So if you weren’t sure, you should have fucking told me!” Tamsin in her translucent lavender panties and a white ganji screamed and threw an ash tray at him. It hit him right on his head. Thank god for his turban else he would have had to flaunt groovy stitches on his forehead for the rest of his life. I covered my face with the quilt and turned the other way to give them some privacy.

  “I am sorry baby, let’s go take care of it,” Humpy said meekly.

  “Right! This is the third time you have done it. Do you know what your fucking ‘taking care of it’ does to my body? I look like a pale panda with those dark circles, I can barely move my body at the rehearsals and to make things worse, I bleed all day long...”

  The information was getting a little too much for me. I got off my make-shift bed and walked past them to the kitchen, pretending I wasn’t listening.

  “Morning, pretty boy!” The tone and volume of Tamsin’s voice suddenly turned civil and endearing which quite baffled me.

  “Morning Tam, Humpy,” I said, trying to sound unfazed by the ongoing riot and their nakedness. “I’m gonna go make some coffee. You guys want some?”

  “I’ll have, I’ll have.” Humpy said raising his hand like a school boy eager to answer his teacher. Tam stared at him in rage.

  “You are a sweetheart, I’d love some.” She said and blew a kiss towards me. I smiled and left while the yelling continued behind me.

  “So what do we do now?’ Humpy whined, ‘Should we keep it?”

  “Have you lost your mind completely? let’s keep it? and what?...” their voices faded as I entered the kitchen.

  I wondered what had kept them together all this while. If it was the love, then sanity was too steep a price they paid to maintain it.

  Why can’t there be a perfect relationship where there is no conflict between the couple? why can’t God just blow some magic dust and say, “Here this is the person for you to spend rest of the life with. Go live happily ever after.” Why does love always have to be mixed with complications, tears, sadness, war of wills, heartbreaks? I guess happily ever after comes with an expiry date, may be that is why the romantic movies do such good business world over. I plugged the morning psychobabble as I walked back in the living room with coffee.

  “...you got some timing to screw things up. This had to happen when my parents were gonna come.” Tam yelled again looking around for something to throw.

  “Here you go,” I handed her her mug before Humpy got hit by something else.

  “Ahh, how I needed the coffee.” Tam said smelling it, her tone flipped again.

  “I’m sorry, but when are they coming?” I asked.

  “You didn’t tell him, didn’t you?” she turned to Humpy in anger.

  “Hey no, my mistake, I forgot.” I quickly covered up and saw Humpy’s relieved face.

  Tamsin had lied to her parents that Humpy owned the house and she lived alone with him, so whenever they came to visit her, the roommates had to bunk outside the house till they were in town.

  “They are coming tonight, but they’ll be gone by tomorrow,” she said apologetically.

  “Oh come on, its no big deal, I’ll manage.” I said.

  Office that day felt like a fish market, crowded with girls parroting lines of the lead heroine’s sister’s part that we were auditioning for. These lines will haunt your dreams tonight, I told myself as I walked past a girl rehearsing the dialogues. Sleeping on the couch had gifted me a sprained back. I opened the door to the audition room and hoped that we found our girl soon, else the pain in the back shaken with terrible acting skills of the rejectables would make a lethal cocktail towards the end of the day.

  The lighting was done, and the camera was ready to roll.

  “Aroga Singh!!” Shilpi, my colleague called out a name peeping out of the room in the cor
ridor. “Did you see that? It’s a freaking gaggle outside man, it’s going to be a loooooong day,” she said and blew out air making a whistling sound as the girl walked in.

  “Hi, write your name and number on the board.” Shilpi instructed the girl, she did as told.

  “Thanks, now give your profiles please.” I adjusted the camera focus, the girl obeyed with a smile. “Thanks, I’ll give you the cues if you want.”

  “Okay, thanks.” The girl said dabbing her under eyes with a puff.

  “It’s okay, Aroga, the character you are auditioning for is a dying leukemia patient, so it’s fine if you flaunt your dark circles,” Shilpi said impatiently as the puffing extended beyond permissible time.

  “I’m ready, so let’s roll.”

  “Action!” Shilpi ordered. The girl took a deep breath and began.

  “So it’s official, isn’t it? There is no cure for me?” she hurriedly blabbed and blanked out. “I’m sorry, give me a second please.” She grabbed her dialogue sheet.

  “Okay, I’m ready.” She chucked the script.

  “And action!!!”

  “So it’s official, isn’t it? There is no cure for me?” Her tone bland, with no sign of pain of a dying person, “I know I’m gonna die, but I’m fine with it. I don’t have any regrets about my life...” and she blanked out again.

  The same process repeated with most of the girls that followed her. Some went blank after the first two lines, some flawlessly zwooped through the lines but gave acting a miss, one of the girls began to cry even before she started, some failed to match the role so argued over length and pretended to refuse it. Then there were these two girls who almost cracked the scene right and gave decent performances. Shilpi and I switched sides with every alternate girl, with the hope that the next one who walked in would be our girl, but the tapes kept exhausting, faces kept changing, mugs of coffee kept coming in, but the one we were looking for eluded us. The back pain had worn my patience out, so I crashed on the couch. Shilpi’s cordiality too had evaporated out of her body making her a degree thornier with every next girl.

  “Tell me when you are ready,” Shilpi said curtly.

  “I’m ready.”

  “Action!”

  As the girl said the lines, her voice seemed unbelievably familiar as if I was almost sure of who it was. I opened my eyes to confirm.

  “What I’m worried about is you, Pooja,” Kintu continued.

  “I know that after mom died, you’ve felt responsible for me, you’ve been there for me every time I needed you. Not once have I missed mom or dad; you gave me everything I’ve wanted.” I stared at her fair freckled face in the display screen of the camera as she delivered her lines effortlessly.

  “I’ve seen you not having a life because of me, and that is not a good feeling to die with. so promise me, you’ll be happy after I’m gone,” her eyes watered.

  It had been more than seven years that I had seen her. So much had changed about her, the short ponytail had given way to shoulder length hair. The blue denims and lemon yellow tee she wore revealed less of her body than before. There was no trace of the patented bitchiness.

  “For once let someone else take care of you. Akash… I mean, yes, I know how you feel about him, and you probably don’t know this, but he loves you too. promise me you’ll give him a chance, this is the one last thing I ask of you before I die.” Kintu sobbingly concluded and there was a long silence. Shilpi and I exchanged the we-might-have-gotten-the-girl look. It took a while for Kintu to recover.

  “Hi, are you alright?” Shilpi warmly asked Kintu as she opened the door to see if there were any girls left.

  “I’m fine. it’ll just take a while,” Kintu said and chuckled as the tears kept coming.

  “Please take your time.” Shilpi said, “Can you believe it? She was the last one!” She returned to me and whispered, I nodded my head in disbelief. “Will you stay with her while I run her tape through boss?”

  “Oh ya, come soon.”

  Shilpi rushed out to show Kintu’s audition tape to our director; I stayed back in the darkness behind the camera, contemplating whether to show myself or not, while Kintu decked herself up.

  “Hey bye… say bye to Shilpi from me, will you?” Kintu said as she gathered her stuff.

  “Ya, I’ll do that.”

  “I’m sorry I don’t know your name.”

  “Arjun!” Ashwin banged the door open and barged in before I could open my mouth. “Are you done?” he asked me.

  “Yes, give me a minute, I’ll wrap up,” I said as Kintu stared at me.

  “Hi, Ashwin, I’m the 1st AD,” he said extending his hand towards Kintu.

  “Hi, Kintu.”

  “Just saw your tape, it’s brilliant.” Shilpi entered behind him. “You’ll hear from us soon.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What did boss say?” he asked Shilpi.

  “He’ll get back.” Shilpi said.

  “You chuck it man. Shilpi will take care of it.” Ashwin said pulling me by my hand.

  “Where are you guys going? Can I come please?” Shilpi begged.

  “It’s a boys’ night out, sorry,” he said rushing out of the room, dragging me with him. Kintu smiled at me before I got out of the room.

  “What is this place?” I asked Ashwin as he parked his car below a building.

  “It’s a bar.” He stretched and pulled out a whiskey bottle from the seat pocket. “Here, swig a couple of pegs,” he said after gulping a few millilitres himself.

  “Aren’t we going in?” I took a sip from the bottle.

  “Yes, but it’s better to enter in a daze.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will, give it some time.” He took another long sip and dumped the bottle in the back of the car. “How do I look?” He asked as we got out of the car.

  “Complete Shah Rukh...” I said.

  He hurriedly entered the narrow staircase. I followed him. We climbed the dark staircase, before entering a brightly lit room with a reservation desk and a brawny bouncer behind it. He gave Ashwin a jubilant smile the instant he saw him. From the sound of the type of music that played behind the leather cushioned door, I figured where Ashwin had brought me. It was a dance bar. Before I could say anything, the bouncer opened the door and a sonic wave of music, cigarette smoke, and smell of varied perfumes and alcohol hit me.

  It was a huge forty by forty hall with couches lined by the sides of the walls, leaving a large area for the patrons and the bar girls to dance on, the multicolored lights gyrated on the floor while the air conditioner granted it a subzero temperature. Around fifty girls clad in multicoloured flashy saris and lehengas swayed mildly to the music while their faces shot naughty expressions at their respective customers. The customers then showered bundles of money on them. There would be so much of our country’s currency straying on the floor that the waiter every fifteen minutes broomed it in gunny bags as if it was trash. Customers ranged from gangster-like heavily bearded dark guys wearing gold chains and rings to nerdy corporate professionals whose wives were probably under the illusion that their husbands were busy slogging their asses at work.

  The bouncer guided us to a table which I assumed was Ashwin’s regular one. Ashwin tipped the guy and he left. As soon as we sat, the manager walked to us with a smile and shook Ashwin’s hand. The sound of music was so deafening that it was impossible for anyone to have a conversation. Ashwin raised his index finger gesturing the manager to get one quantity of something.

  “Why did you bring me here?” I typed on my cell to talk to Ashwin.

  “To have fun, now shush.”

  The manager returned with a bundle of notes and handed it over to Ashwin. As the waiter made our drinks, Ashwin scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it over to the manager with two hundred rupee notes. Minutes later, the girl in the orchestra began to sing the latest item number and Ashwin’s face lit up with excitement. Then out of nowhere, a fair-skinned girl appe
ared and did a whole three sixty degree turn in front of our table while her red navel revealing lehenga floated in air. Ashwin picked up his currency bundle and began to drop one note after another on her head in quick succession. Then as if to compete with him, Mr. White Pants at the table next to us got up and began to dance around her in an attempt to get her attention. when that didn’t work, he threw a whole twenty rupee note bundle on her in one go, but that just bought him a smile and she continued her pelvic thrusts around Ashwin while his hundred rupee notes lay below her feet. She pulled Ashwin deeper into the crowd on the floor. The scenario everywhere around the bar was more or less the same. The good looking customers easily got the girls’ attention while the ugly looking guys had to empty their pockets to get a mere smile from them.

  Ashwin returned to the table and gestured me to come with him. I followed him out of the hall into the corridors of the lodging area of the hotel. I saw the two girls waiting outside the room, so it wasn’t rocket science to guess that he had struck some kind of package-sex deal with his girl and her friend.

  “Make me proud,” he said and slapped my behind before going into his room.

  I felt an unrecognised hollowness as I entered my room. The girl was a dusky babe with a great body, streaked hair, and an expressionless face. The white glittering low waist saree she wore gave a mind blowing view of her navel. Without wasting any time, the girl began to undress herself. After stripping every piece of clothing on her body she walked up to me and began to undo the buckle of my belt. Her deadpanned attitude made me freeze in my place. Ever since I’d hit puberty, nude women and thoughts of having sex had only evoked blissful feelings within me; but looking at her nude body made me feel disgusted about myself. Her hands began to feel me as she pulled my denim down. She closed in further and began to kiss me, as soon as I felt her lips on mine, I cringed. She immediately backed off, sensing my reluctance. I hurriedly pulled my denim up and buttoned it. There was a completely naked girl standing in front of me, and I felt more embarrassed about my pants being down in front of her.