Reva felt a strong urge to laugh out since all her lies till now had been accepted as the truth, but for the only time when she was honest, she was tagged as a liar.
‘I’m pregnant, Shahraan,’ she spoke out loud and proud. She’d whispered it to him after their love-making session. She was disappointed when she realized he was already asleep, but then she thought there were other naughty ways to relay the best news of their life together. Perhaps in the morning she would write with ketchup on a bread piece: I am pregnant. But she never thought it would come out this way; as a defensive reflex.
The words made Shahraan miss his shot for the first time. He couldn’t care less. A sudden glimpse of happiness concocted his face into something that relieved Reva. He let go of his golf club and hugged her tight. She reciprocated. He loosened and held her face next and kissed all over it.
‘I am…I am so happy Reva. This is like…like the first achievement of my life…it’s like…’ Reva looked at him as his initial excitement slowly wore off.
‘Is it Kaash’s child?’
It sounded like a joke. She was even prepared to laugh if he joined her. But he didn’t.
‘What are you saying, Shahraan?’
‘Okay. So now I get it. You went to Kaash with this news last night. He disowned it, so I’m the obvious father now.’
‘What the—’ Reva wanted to scream, but she checked herself and said with her jaw clenched, ‘Have you gone mad? This is our baby I am talking about. I have been to the doctor. He has confirmed it.’
‘Confirmed what?’
‘That I am pregnant.’
‘But did he confirm I’m the father?’
A few silent seconds later, he answered, ‘No!’
Reva tried to hold Shahraan by his shoulder and link her eyes to his, ‘You are the father, Shahraan. Don’t accuse me of this at least. Please!’
He released himself from her grip and ambled to goldcourse projection. His face had all sorts of colours reflecting from the projection.
‘Didn’t you guys fuck on set?’
That was the cheapest he had ever sounded to her. He was talking like one of those imbecile husbands who never could understand his wife had a heart too like he did. The same heart which was capable of reserving a corner for him, come what may. A corner that, over the years, steadily formed the whole of her.
‘Yes, we did fuck on set.’ Now was the time to contradict her lie with the truth. Shahraan, in a flash, came to her and raised his hand to slap out what he just heard. He paused and controlled himself. Reva didn’t move an inch.
‘But this is your baby,’ she said softly.
Slapping his hands on his hips instead, Shahraan paced in front of her.
‘Okay. Let’s do a test. If it’s mine, I’ll never question you about anything ever.’
‘That would be an insult to the trust we have between us. A mother knows, Shahraan. I would have never asked you to father anyone else’s child.’
‘I have had enough of that trust bullshit. Let’s keep it simple and more scientific now.’
Reva’s tears had started to drench her cheeks. Not fighting her weak knees, she collapsed on the floor and sobbed copiously.
‘Either we are testing it out, or we are getting divorced. Your call.’ Shahraan went out of the room.
For several minutes, she only sobbed as if it was the only solution and option she had, and she was doing so with all her sincerity. She was finding it tumultuous to swim amid the vehement currents of purity present in the sea of her feelings. Reva felt like throwing up. She got up and scooted out of the room, climbed up the stairs quickly, and went to the attached toilet on the floor for guests. Standing in front of the basin, she felt like she had thrown her guts out. Nothing was left. She felt weak. One look at the mirror and she wondered how a youth icon could look like that? The image pushed her to wail again sitting on the bathroom floor itself. Almost an hour later, when she felt dead inside, she stood up and looked at herself in the mirror again.
‘Enough of lies and servility, Reva Gupta,’ she told herself. ‘You got only one bit of clothing left in your emotional self. Self esteem.’ The claws of shyness and embarrassment scratched her instantly. ‘If you agree for the test, you shall have to live stark naked henceforth. You shall be a lump with all the affluences of life, but none enough to buy you enough self esteem to cover up your bare emotional essentials. You know it’s Shahraan’s baby. You know it. And that’s your strength. Hold onto it. If you want to continue to live like the Reva Gupta people know, then just hold on to your residual strength.’ Usually mothers siphon nutrition to their babies in the womb, but she felt her newfound sense was borrowed from her foetus. Why else was it alien to her all these years? she asked herself.
A rise in confidence and a touch of conviction made her stomp out of the bathroom. Within a minute, she located him on the terrace.
‘Shahraan Ali Bakshi.’ She knew what she would say could burn everything she had built till now in one instant, but it was important she did it. Finally, Reva Gupta had learnt that when it comes to your core, one has to surface, not succumb. One has to choose soul over stomach.
‘Either you accept what I’m telling you as the truth,’ she hollered out, ‘because it is indeed one, or…we divorce. Your call!’
Jagdish Dwivedi was an iconic theatre personality. Every major actor of today was a product of his tutelage in the past. Arunodaye himself was one of his students who’d personally requested him to help Kaash and Nishani with the scene in contention. Dwivedi happily obliged. He first gave them a few trust-building exercises, followed by some emotionalavailability exercises. After which he preferred to talk.
‘Sit in Padma asana. Take deep breaths. And each time you inhale, tell yourself you are dead, and as you exhale, remind yourself you are the characters—Simran and Siddharth—respectively.’
They did what they were told. When they opened their eyes, they saw Jagdish was done lighting the last love candle in the room.
‘While acting we are, at times, what our surrounding is. And for the scene we are going to rehearse today, it’s important to have the ambience just as written in the script. Love candles all over and right in the middle of the room, a thick mattress.’
As Kaash and Nishani stood up, Jagdish folded the mat they were all sitting on before and kept it at a corner.
‘Have you guys learnt the lines?’
‘Yes.’
Next, Jagdish dimmed the light and made himself comfortable in a corner.
‘Alright kids, if you two can, with your passion, make this sixty-four-year-old hag crave for his fifty-nine-year-old wife, only then I’ll okay the scene.’
Both laughed.
They were in casual attire, but the scene required them to be naked. So they thought they were. It was a dialogue-heavy scene. The discourse was supposed to happen post coitus.
Nishani’s character, Simran, was in love with Shahraan’s character, Aryan, but since he was married to Reva’s character, Manvi, she never confessed her feelings to him. This scene happens right after Manvi and Kaash’s character, Siddharth, have had an illicit night together. Simran being in an open relationship with Siddharth wonders if it’s the right time to approach Aryan.
Initially, they lie down side by side.
‘On his arm.’ Jagdish directed.
Kaash stretched his hand and Nishani made herself comfortable on his arm. As she kept her hand on his chest, she could feel his heart thumping. Was that too part of the script? she wondered.
‘Do you love Aryan?’ Siddharth asked gazing at the ceiling.
‘I do. And will do so forever.’
‘What about me?’
‘I think—’ Jagdish chipped in, ‘It’ll be better if you glance at Simran once while saying this. And Simran, you don’t look at him when he glances, but do so immediately when he again looks at the ceiling. It would be an interesting emotional hide-n-seek on screen.’
And so it went on t
ill Jagdish called it a tea break after an hour. By then, they hadn’t been able to do the scene right even once. As Jagdish excused himself out, Nishani quickly checked her mobile phone; no missed calls, no messages. Kaash lay still for some time as if he was still in the scene.
‘You are damn nervous, aren’t you?’ Nishani was still looking at her phone.
Kaash only nodded with a caught-red-handed smile.
‘Aren’t you nervous?’
‘A bit.’ Nishani kept her phone away. ‘My mind keep going back to our first kiss. Remember?’ She had amusement dabbed on her face now.
Remember? She doesn’t even know how many lives I have lived only thinking about it, Kaash wondered. ‘Yes, I remember, and also the way you bit my lips.’
Nishani giggled.
‘Who was in your mind that day, Nish?’
It was so sudden that Nishani didn’t have the time to even pretend.
‘Nobody, why?’
‘They say you can’t lie well to the one with whom you have shared your first kiss.’
Nishani smiled compulsively. She could have said any name; Tom, Dick, or Harry. But she knew even though Kaash said it in a lighter vein, he would anyway castrate her lies. There are people in this world with whom even if you don’t talk regularly, or probably have had years of separation, the moment they come in front of you, nothing seems to have changed. Kaash was one such man in Nishani’s life. Perhaps the only one.
‘Shahraan. But don’t tell me you didn’t already know.’
‘I do. I knew it then, I know it now. You love Shahraan like you love nobody else.’
For a moment, Nishani thought it was someone else who said it. She’d never attached such stupidity with the Kaash Sehgal she met after an era of a gap. I love Shahraan? That could qualify as the joke of the century.
‘No, I don’t love him.’
‘I have seen your madness for him. The sketches of the eye, his interviews, newspaper cut-outs, the incident in the school where you wanted to spray water on him to get his attention. You always wanted him to notice you amid the crowd of his admirers.’
For a moment, she kept staring at Kaash as a gun does toward its target waiting for its owner to pull the trigger. He was right. She then asked herself if she’d actually decided to spray the acid, not water, not to kill him as she thought previously, but to announce her existence? Could it be she didn’t kill Shahraan just then because she never wanted to do so? Did she only want to draw attention to herself and to all those mental and emotional sufferings she went through because of him? For what? Did she want him to sympathize with her? Nishani hated herself in that moment more than she’d ever hated Shahraan. She heard Kaash next.
‘And to this day, you do everything to gain his attention. Subtly, but surely. All your actions—be it calling me last night to exactly where you asked Reva to turn up or prior to it, leaking the Shahraan slapping Reva video on the internet and now the leaking of Reva and my pictures in the newspaper—every act of yours has been to create a painful corner in Shahraan, whereby you would introduce yourself to him and take it from there probably by being beside him.’ It was said in a casual tone; no hint of any confrontation or accusation. As if he was saying yeah-I-know-you-tried-to-screw-me-but-I-don’t-have-a-problem-because-I-appreciate-your-reason-for-it.
‘I hate Shahraan. I hate him from the time I learnt he snatched my father from me. That day I swore to snatch from him what he craved for the most—a companionship.’
‘And what do you think, Nishani? Will you really be able to bereave yourself of him after you destroy him?’
‘Yes!’
‘No!’
‘Okay guys, let’s nail it now.’ Jagdish entered the room rubbing his palms together and looking excited.
The attempt fell short of Jagdish’s expectation. He gave them another date before the shoot and gave certain pointers to work on. It was when Nishani rode Neev’s Ninja bike and Kaash his i20 that she asked him riding parallel, ‘Why did you say I won’t be able to get over him even if I destroy him?’
‘It’s a paradox,’ Kaash had to raise his voice since a mini school bus had come in between them. When it passed, they were driving parallel again.
‘Have you heard the ones we love the most, we hurt the most? Likewise, your hatred is potent with a similar paradox. Your obsession for Shahraan isn’t actually hatred as you make yourself believe.’
Nishani was still not getting it. What he was telling her was that we hurt the people we love the most because the proximity makes us blind towards their limitations, and hence the expectation increases manifold which the other, being human in the end, isn’t able to fullfil, thus churning out erratic behaviour from us. But falling for the one you have hated all your life, desired so doggedly to punish…loving him? Nishani could not understand that part at all.
‘Then what is my obsession with Shahraan all about?’
‘You are actually not interested in snatching from him what you have lost. That’s what you have been forcing yourself to believe. Trust me, you really want him to give you what you have lost. I am sure even you would agree that the ultimate punishment for him would not be begging you for mercy, but giving you the love the way your father would have loved you. You know it because that’s what you really want—someone to love you like your father, but you haven’t yet acknowledged it because the paradox comes with an unfathomable realization—how can the one person supposedly responsible for your father’s decline love you like him? I personally think if there’s someone who can connect to those unrealized emotional pleasures you missed out as a kid, it has to be Shahraan.’
They reached a signal from which she had to make a diversion.
‘I’ll call you tonight,’ said Nishani and took a right turn.
It was ten at night when she called Kaash.
‘How do you know so much about me, Balloo?’
There was no reply. Nishani rephrased the question.
‘How do you claim to know so much? I mean, we haven’t been in touch for ages. We rarely talked even after we met at that party, except for those my-life’s-great and your-life’s-cool kind of pretentious things.’
‘Who has said that to know so much about someone, one has to be in touch, one has to talk a lot, or exchange pretentious obscenities like we did that night?’
Nishani was waiting for Neev to come back from his new reality show shoot which he was hosting, while Kaash was awaiting Aravali’s return from Pune where she had some film analysis program to attend in FTII. Nishani was sitting beside her French window with her ear piece tugged in and looking aimlessly at a part of the city which had gone to sleep already.
‘Do you love me, Balloo?’ She said next.
Kaash was lying above the water tank atop the terrace of his apartment which he frequented with Aravali. He’d messaged her to meet him there after she was back. Nishani’s query didn’t affect him. Ten years ago, the same query would have made him chew all his nails out. Now, he was so used to the impossibility of their togetherness that he wasn’t susceptible anymore to his reaction to her questions and to her reaction to his answers.
‘No.’ He managed a compulsive laughter. ‘Of course not!’ The last thing he wanted was to tell the truth and drop her an unwanted quandary. So what if he indeed loved her? Why is it always necessary to tell the person you love him or her? Why can’t we simply focus on our love for that person?
‘Funny,’ he heard her say, ‘I’m twenty-three now. And for my age, I have achieved a lot. Just like my dad. But while coming home today, I was thinking how many people have I really touched? My mother has no clue what I do or have ever done. My grandparents are too old to matter to me. I have no friends as such. I stay with Neev, we make love, but I don’t love him. He doesn’t love me. What’s this stupid arrangement that I have landed myself in? I don’t know how many years I’ll live, perhaps many, but right now I have lost so much time already going after someone because I thought by destroying him, I�
��ll get back what I lost. I think you were right, Kaash. Hating someone in order to secure some amount of love for oneself is, in the end, love only. Though I am still not sure, neither convinced, if I really love Shahraan the way a normal woman loves a man.’ A pause later, she added, ‘How is it going with Aravali?’
‘She is a great woman. I mean, any woman who has the wicked sense of loving a man forever has to be a great woman.’
Nishani smiled, though she would have laughed had it been some other day. Today she was feeling sapped of happiness.
‘Will you forgive me if I say I’m feeling jealous of you right now?’
‘Me? Why?’
‘I too want to say there’s someone in my life and he’s great because he chose me.’
‘You may, Nish. You very well may if you accept things. I feel you never accepted anything till now.’
The ruining process starts with the acceptance of someone in your life for separation foreshadows acceptance. Like you said you hate someone. That’s an acceptance as well. And one day, you will be separated from that hatred too. Nishani recollected Vishwas’s words. Where would he be right now? Happy once again? He must have kept an eye on my success. She felt pushed to look over her window if any autorickshaw was standing near her apartment. A silly smile escaped her as she realized that life had finally made her consider a U-turn. Go back to where she started and begin a new journey, accepting things in her heart and finally come back to where she was right now…and life would seem different. Her priorities would seem different. She sighed. It all sounded too magical to be true.
‘You know by accepting things, who will you do a big favour to?’
‘Myself.’
‘Just my Nish.’
For a moment, those words sounded so nice. She wouldn’t have minded if Kaash were single. They understood each other the way an indefinite article understands a vowel sound before a word. Nishani felt like asking if he was game about her, but then he said he was happy with Aravali. Happy with someone… she knew how rare a phenomenon that was. Why upset it.
‘So?’ asked Kaash.
How About a Sin Tonight? Page 24