Come On Inner Peace

by Sachin Garg

  ‘Ashima, we need half an hour more and then we can leave,’ I said.

  Ashima looked at Vandana and Vandana smiled at her. This was Ashima’s opportunity to make an impression on her HoD. She smiled back and turned and started walking towards her room.

  I went back to bubble Hydrogen Chloride gas. And rushed through the final few steps.

  At the end of it, I filtered the solution though a residue cloth, which left behind dried Meth on the filter. Now the only step left was the crystallization of this residue. This was a slow and long process. So I set up everything and went and kept it in my car. Once I was back, I told Ashima that we were done.

  Ashima gave a smile which inevitably said that she wasn’t very comfortable staying back till late.

  I went to the car and took care of the crystals. I expected they would take two or three hours to settle completely. So I could finally take a bit of a breather after spending so many hours in deep concentration.

  Vandana ran her hand through my hair to comfort me. I looked at the dish on the backseat, with Meth on it. I felt a bit nervous. I really needed this to be alright. As far as I could see, the process hadn’t gone alright. I was way too under confident. And I had made many small mistakes which could eventually add up to be a big problem. In fact, I would be surprised if things fell in place after so many errors.

  So three hours later, when we finally saw the result, I wasn’t surprised at all. We had got a fine white powder instead of crystals. If I were to take these to Ronnie, he would shoot me in the head.

  I went to Vandana’s room to show her what was made. Just before knocking I noticed a sound coming from her room. It was the sound of sobbing.

  I waited for a little while. Behind those cheery eyes and vibrant personality, there was a lonely forty year old woman, whose body was fast decaying because she had no money for a treatment. She was in pain.

  As I finally entered, I caught her wiping her eyes. But I decided to act as if nothing was off. The more I would have talked about it, the more it would have depressed us. For now, we needed this distraction.

  ‘The crystals didn’t come,’ I told her and barged out of the room. She looked like someone who needed time by herself.

  I came back to my room and booted my laptop. The little traffic that I had managed to build on savevandana. com was now gone. The account had crawled over the one thousand mark. I had to come up with something bigger and better. And faster.

  Days can get frustrating and disappointing at times. But something came over me when I saw those numbers on my laptop just minutes after I had seen that my whole day at the lab was also a waste. I thought I was a calm and balanced person. But on that day, as I threw around stuff in my room, punched the wall, and did a few other crazy things to vent out, discovering a new side of me.

  At such a time, giving up seems so convenient. One is so easily tempted. I locked myself in the room and waited for the night to pass.

  Breath Of Fresh Air

  And then came the eighth of July, the day when all will be decided. I woke from the half sleep at five in the morning. I was jumpy and nervous. When I would go to bed again that night, life would have changed in so many ways. It was a do or die day.

  The fact that the morning didn’t look very different from a usual one was a bit weird. It was like, why do these people not know what is happening with me? It’s soMething so crucial. And yet, the world seemed so unconcerned.

  It was tough to wait till ten to reach the lab. We were there fifteen minutes before the opening time. We stood at some distance to make sure Ashima didn’t know that we were waiting for her even before she got here.

  ‘So how much stuff are you going to make?’ Vandana asked me.

  ‘I can’t risk making everything today itself. The more the quantity, the greater the chance of messing it up,’ I said. ‘Makes sense,’ Vandana replied.

  Once Ashima was inside, we waited for another three minutes and then went inside.

  We tried to act nonchalant, which was almost as difficult a task as making Meth was. One loophole, one suspicion and we would have been thrown out of the lab. I waited for Ashima to settle down in her little room and once she was gone, we started our business.

  I decided to be super careful today. I pledged to make sure that no contamination or foreign object goes into the experiment today. I closed the windows so that the wind won’t disturb the experiment. I switched the fans off, even though the July heat was killing. I wore my lab coat. And I gave my phone to Vandana to make sure I had no distractions.

  And I started the same process, which was now ingrained inside my head to the last detail. I did it slowly. It had taken me three hours to carry out the process on the previous day. Today, I had good six hours to carry it out. But the strain in my head was unsettling.

  I nudged Vandana gently from her slumber. Her head was down on the table and when I came closer to her, I realized there was a faint sound of snoring too.

  ‘Are we done?’ she asked, as she rubbed her eyes.

  ‘No. The crystals are settling down. It’s two thirty. Let’s go and grab some lunch,’ I proposed.

  ‘Yeah. How did it go?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. I was as careful as I could have been. But you can’t say until you see the crystals in three hours’ time.’

  We carried the dish back to our cab and headed back to the flat for food. Both of us were way too tensed to make any conversation. We needed a period of nothingness and boring-ness to recuperate.

  ‘By five thirty, the crystals would hopefully be ready. The junky party wasn’t supposed to begin till eight,’ I double checked in my head. We were free for the next three hours. It’s a bit weird when adventure becomes normal. When excitement keeps happening, you get used to it. You need to look at yourself from a third person’s perspective to appreciate the craziness of the events.

  At five thirty, I nervously walked to the kitchen, where we had left the residue to crystallize. The moment I saw it, I knew it hadn’t worked. If yesterday was bad, today was worse. The same powdered residue; more fine and hence, more useless. We were screwed. After years of making crystals in the lab, when I really needed to deliver, I could not.

  Vandana spotted a drop of tear in my eye. She didn’t know what to say to me. But she could see that my commendable resolve was beginning to give away.

  ‘What will we do now? It’s all come to an end. Navya is going to rot amongst those leeches now,’ I said, my voice shivering because of the tears. ‘I am good for nothing. All I do is kill people who love me truly. Firstly, I let go off Kanika. And now, it’s Navya,’ I said, almost sobbing rather than speaking, making efforts to deliver words and join sentences coherently.

  ‘Get a hang on yourself Samar. It’s just five thirty. And the real party won’t start before ten or even later. We have at least one more chance.’

  ‘You think we will cook Meth in our flat’s kitchen now? You are better than this Vandana, you shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know,’ I snapped at her.

  ‘Take a deep breath, Samar. We will have plenty of time to panic if things don’t work. Let’s spend this precious time in thinking of a way to make things work.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Let’s call the cab, sit and then talk,’ she said, as she started picking whatever stuff we had brought back into the flat.

  Once we were in the car, I looked at Vandana as to what was next.

  ‘We are going back to the lab,’ she said.

  ‘But why?’ I asked. Vandana didn’t bother to reply. Once the car was in the parking next to the lab, we sat in the car and stared at the lab for a while. There were no people now, except some guards at some distance.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Vandana said, getting off the car.

  ‘But where?’

  Vandana walked closer to the lab. But she wasn’t walking towards the lab door. It was of course shut now. She was walking to the other side — the back side. She stood close to the wind
ow at the back.

  ‘If you are planning to get inside through the window, I think you are not seeing that they aren’t just glass windows. There are iron windows inside those glasses,’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘I know. But look at this one. Seems like someone has deliberately left this one open this afternoon so that if someone wanted to sneak in after dark, all he would have to do is break some glass,’ she replied with a smile.

  She was right. One of the iron windows was actually half open.

  ‘Just go and grab a few bricks from somewhere!’ she said.

  I broke the glass down and hoped that none of the guards would hear the sound. In a few seconds, I was back inside the lab where I had spent last two days. And then I realized Vandana couldn’t climb inside all that easily. So I jumped outside again. And collected a few more bricks and helped her jump inside.

  Vandana helped me with the torch in her phone. We couldn’t turn on the lights because the guards would have definitely seen the light and stopped us. I quickly got down to business.

  As I was filtering out the red phosphorus, my phone started vibrating. It was Aradhya. She had a reason to be nervous herself.

  ‘Just one question Samar, is everything in place?’

  ‘Oh yes Aradhya, you don’t need to worry,’ I lied confidently.

  ‘Do you have the Meth with you?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah. I have a bagful kept right in front of my eyes. And the crystals look beautiful.’

  ‘The party will begin at ten.’

  ‘We could get a bit fashionably late. And I know people might not wait for us, but they will wait for the Meth,’ I said, cockily, to infuse even more confidence. Aradhya was satisfied with what she heard and hung up a lot more comfortable than when she had called.

  I got back to the process. I poured the final solution through a filter cloth and dried the Meth that was left behind on the filter. And then came my favourite part, the part of the final crystallization.

  ‘Do you think this will work?’ Vandana asked me.

  ‘Yes, it will,’ I fake assured her too.

  ‘How much Meth do you think we will manufacture today?’

  ‘Just enough to get inside,’ I said.

  ‘But then, why did you get ingredients in such huge quantities?’

  ‘I don’t know. You can say there was a calculation mistake,’ I lied. I didn’t want her to know the real reason.

  ‘You are one crazy fellow.’

  Just then, I heard a clicking sound on the door. There was somebody unlocking the Chemistry Lab at this hour, which could have only meant one thing. We were caught.

  We waited for the person to come in and decided to act nonchalant. We could have run but there was the dish in which the crystals were settling and you couldn’t run with it through a window without spilling it.

  A guard walked in. I quickly kept the dish with the crystals on a side, making sure they remained unaffected if something happened here.

  The guard looked at us with victorious eyes.

  ‘I have been working here for fifteen years,’ the old guard said. ‘All the other guards, especially the ones in the Admin Department, have caught people breaking in at night. But I never caught anyone because nobody comes to the Chemistry Lab in the day, forget about night. But today, after fifteen years I have caught two people,’ he said with immense joy.

  ‘Sir, it’s my project submission tomorrow for my summer internship. It was very important I did it today,’ I said.

  ‘Do you really think I would hear your story and let you go? You are going nowhere but to the Head of Department tomorrow.’

  ‘Hmm ok sir. Just let me wrap up this experiment and then we can go,’ I said.

  ‘Do you really think I care about your experiment?’

  Vandana walked up to him and struck a conversation. I saw her sneaking in a hundred rupee note in his hand, as they exchanged a faint smile.

  ‘Are we okay?’ I asked her as she came back.

  ‘No. But he would let us complete the experiment and then take us to the authorities.’

  The guard came and stood right next to me to inspect that I was doing. Vandana was standing at some distance.

  As the guard looked on, I picked my bag on my shoulder. On the gas, I had water which was being heated. In my hand, I had a fistful of red phosphorus. I looked at Vandana and she thankfully read my eyes and got the signal that it was time to run. I threw the red phosphorus into the warm water and there was a small blast on the gas. With my bag on my back, Vandana ran like there was no tomorrow, while I walked swiftly, making sure that the crystals wouldn’t get disturbed too much.

  The guard tried to fathom what had happened. The smoke stung his eyes, as he was blinded for a few minutes. He had left the laboratory door open behind him and Vandana and I stopped only after we had reached the car.

  Once in the safety of the car, Vandana and I looked at each other. And then, we broke into laughter. As I said, I was feeling weird that evening and the gush of tension and then its release with the run, was just the trigger I needed to lift up my spirits.

  ‘Come,’ Vandana said, and extended her arms. That was when it struck me for the first time. She had that motherly warmth which made her so comforting. Just as we hugged, she started coughing, which once again brought back to my memory the fact which one can so easily forget on looking at her. ‘But what did you do there?’ she asked, trying to get her breath normal.

  ‘There was water and heat in the container. I threw in red phosphorus which releases Phosphine gas, which caused the explosion.’

  ‘But was it safe?’

  ‘Yes, it is. All he needs is a breath of fresh air. So he’ll be okay if he came out of the lab in next ten minutes. I noticed that he came out immediately after us. So yes, he is safe.’

  ‘You little genius,’ Vandana smiled.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, inevitably flashing the broadest smile at her. And after a few minutes of laughter, the same old question hung between us. What next? Will we get the final crystals this time? Will we be able to pull this off?

  ‘Where to?’ I asked

  ‘To your flat,’ she replied.

  Like A Building

  Needing Resurrection

  I left the dish with Meth in the car itself. It was important that it is disturbed as little as possible. Instead, Vandana and I went in, and kept all the stuff. And then I took a breather, as Vandana made tea. And then we took a nap, to be woken up by the alarm clock two hours later.

  I changed into my best clothes and so did Vandana. By around eleven, it was time for us to go to the car and check the crystals.

  This was our final chance. If this didn’t work, I would have to give up on Navya. I didn’t know whether I had it in me to take that shock. As we slowly walked towards the car, I noticed that my leg was shivering, my heart was beating and my palms were sweating more than ever.

  The dish was kept on the backseat. I went and opened the car gate and looked inside. Finally, the dish had crystals instead of white powder.

  ‘Seems like we have done it,’ I said to Vandana.

  Vandana took the dish from my hand and picked a solid piece from it. She kept it against a street light and looked at it.

  ‘Is this a good crystal?’

  ‘It’s one of the better ones I’ve made.’

  ‘How good?’

  ‘It’s good enough for me to double the usual price if I was a real dealer,’ I said.

  ‘We have no time for compliments. Sit in the cab and drive to Civil Lines without wasting any more time,’ she said, opening the back door of the car.

  I saw Vandana observing me. On asking why, she fetched a small mirror from her bag and handed over to me. I had wrinkles on my forehead. The dark circles were extremely prominent now. The hair would have been all over the place but I had put in some effort to put them in order. But I did look a mess. I told myself this is the last night of strife. In a few hours, I would either have Navya nex
t to me, or I would have to find a brand new way to move on in life. It seemed like an impossible task, the thought itself made me shiver.

  I wondered how I would react on seeing Navya this time. And what that moment would be like. Civil Lines was just a thirty minute drive at that hour. Aradhya was waiting for us a kilometre away from the venue. She wanted to see what we had before she would let us meet Ronnie. She didn’t want to risk her neck for us. If the product was bad, it was much safer to not show up.

  We saw Aradhya, as she was nervously waiting for the two lunatics (that’s what she probably thought of us). On seeing us, there was no hand shake or any greeting. She straight away asked me for what I was carrying. She took a small pinch of Meth and smelt it. I knew that she couldn’t judge how good or bad it was like that.

  ‘You’re sure this stuff is good? Because the guy at the gate is going to check and he’s an expert.’

  ‘Vandana says it’s the best stuff she has ever seen,’ I said.

  Aradhya looked at Vandana. Somehow she didn’t look like someone whose opinion Aradhya could trust.

  ‘I’d love to know how you got this but not today. Let’s go for now,’ she said, as she sat on the backseat. ‘Why does your car smell funny?’ she asked.

  Vandana and I exchanged a goofy smile.

  And then we reached the place which had been hyped to death in our heads. It was a standalone house on a rather nondescript street. You could have missed it easily but for a weird looking man outside.

  That seven foot tall man at the gate looked at us and I wondered how hard he was suppressing the urge of saying what his facial expressions said, that he wanted to eat us up.

  ‘Where are you kids headed?’ he said. He couldn’t have been more condescending. Thankfully, Aradhya offered to take control.

  ‘Hi, Ronnie. I am Aradhya, Navya’s friend? This is Samar. He talked to you about getting Meth for the party today.’

  Ronnie asked me for a sample. He lit a pipe and smoked a part of the sample. It took him just a few seconds to judge the quality of Meth. Vandana, Aradhya and I held our breaths for those odd 30 seconds.