by Issac M John
‘I don’t know what to say. You are going to win this whole damn thing, aren’t you?’
She laughed with a rhythm that swept Ravin off the carpet he was on.
‘No, silly. The winner is probably doing an hour and ten minutes or less. I haven’t even checked what the records are.’ With that accent, she didn’t even sound arrogant.
‘You are a modest woman, ma’am. That’s what I have learned tonight. Anyway, you are all set. Here’s your passport.’
‘Thank you, Ravin. It was nice chatting with you. Good luck with your run too. Honestly, timing doesn’t matter. I have run long enough in my life to tell you this.’
‘Oh, come on. Everyone runs for a better time. I wish I had a coach like you. I could’ve done something for a better time.’
A voice buzzed inside Ravin’s head: Stop it right there. This woman is a guest at the hotel.
‘You know what. We still have a week. How about you let me train you for the next five days? You rest on Saturday and go for the big run on Sunday.’
Ravin was a bit embarrassed that a hotel guest of all people should offer to help better his running time. But he thought of this as a good break. He could surely do with some help. If that help came in the form of someone as divine as Zelda, it couldn’t hurt.
But he couldn’t ask for help. Well-intentioned as Zelda’s plan might have been, Ravin had to maintain a level of distance from his guests. He had done that for ten years now. No matter how attractive the proposition of spending time with Zelda was, he was determined to resist the temptation.
‘I would’ve loved to, ma’am, but we keep such odd hours at the hotel,’ he declined with a smile on his face and a pinch in his heart.
Zelda, on the other hand, didn’t even pretend as if she heard him.
‘Come on, show me how you fared on your past runs,’ she extended her hand for his phone.
As luck would have it, the lobby was deserted and there was no one else around.
Without saying a word, Ravin took out his mobile phone, turned on the RunTracker app and handed it over to Zelda.
Zelda smiled as she went through his timings. ‘You mind if I keep this for the next couple of hours? I am going to look at your running patterns and then draw up a plan for the next five days.’
It wasn’t leaving the mobile phone with her that bothered him. ‘Well, I don’t know how to say this. But you are a professional coach. I don’t feel comfortable availing your services without a fee.’
‘Don’t worry about it. It’s just five days. It’s nothing,’ saying so Zelda smiled and turned back to head to her hotel room.
As she walked away, Ravin wondered if he had done the right thing, but his mind was racing with the list of possibilities the next five days might entail.
Later that night, she sent his phone back through a concierge. She also left a message for him on RunTracker. ‘Good night, Ravin. Will send you your plan tomorrow.’
‘Thanks, Zelda. You are an angel to do this,’ he replied.
‘I don’t do it for everyone. There’s something about you that I think I can work with,’ she wrote back. And followed it up with a ;-).
Ravin thought of Zelda all night long. For the short time he managed to grab a nap, he dreamt of her. That’s the problem when you are single, he surmised. Every half-decent conversation with a lady seems to throw open a world of fantasies. But Zelda was a tourist. There’s no good that can come off any attachment with a foreigner, he concluded.
He shut his eyes and mentally took stock of the stationary needs in the hotel to take his mind off her. It was of little help.
Zelda had asked him to be ready by 6 a.m. It was a foggy November morning, and like an eager school kid awaiting his favourite teacher, Ravin was ready with his best running apparel and gear at the assigned spot near the exit gate of the hotel. He waited for ten minutes and wasn’t sure if he should call her that early in the morning. He looked at the time once again on his mobile phone. That’s when he noticed a notification on the RunTracker app. He opened it and saw a message from Zelda.
‘Here’s your training plan for today,’ it said. Alongside the message there were a series of instructions of warm-up exercises to be done, the sprint plan to be followed and video links about the exact posture to be maintained while performing those exercises. He noticed she had added him as a friend on the app. Right then, he received a message from her, ‘Have you started?’
Ravin had assumed that Zelda would be there in person to help him train, but clearly she had her methods cut out. It was professional and outright serious. He typed ‘Yes’ in reply to her message and then he texted her. ‘Are you running as well?’
Pat came a reply. ‘I just got done. I was up at 4.30 a.m.’
It was such an impassionate reply that Ravin thought it best to get on with his training for the day. Over the next few days, the routine repeated itself. Zelda sent Ravin his set of exercises and running plan for each of the next four days. Ravin exhausted himself following the suggested plan. On the third day, he was barely able to cope up with the sprint plan. But he did it thinking of Zelda. Strangely, it meant something to Ravin to please her.
He sent a report back to Zelda after his workout every single day. And every time he messaged her, he received a short ‘Good!’ or ‘Well done!’ in reply. Apart from the two specific communication windows before and after his workout, Zelda never texted Ravin.
Ravin had the option to find her number from the hotel system and text her but that would’ve been an invasion of guest privacy. So, he texted her on RunTracker:
‘How are your preparations coming along?’
He once again received a terse ‘Good!’ as a reply.
Perhaps she was a woman of few words. Ravin was curious about Zelda’s whereabouts during the day but like a good student he thought it best to finish his plan before asking her. A day later, the desire to call her on her mobile phone reared its head. Once again, Ravin muffled it. It was not as if he was looking to date her, but maybe a single meeting before she left on Sunday evening would be good, he thought.
‘Closure is important in life. In relationships and at work,’ the disciplined Kunal Tarapore’s wisdom rang in his ears. It’s something Kunal said often while giving advice to young management trainees on how to deal with external vendors.
Ravin felt great on Friday evening. He had done every single exercise in the exact intended manner that Zelda sent his way over the past few days. While Zelda’s plan didn’t include any long-distance run in these five days, Ravin felt good about the Sunday run. It was perhaps also a good time to thank Zelda for the time she had put in.
But he had no way to reach out to Zelda. Besides, Indian men could come across as stalkers and Ravin didn’t want to join that dubious club by looking up her number from the customer database. He was doing well so far, he told himself.
He concluded that Friday would be a good day to ask her if she was free for the evening. He could buy Zelda a nice dinner to thank her for her intervention. Finally, after waiting all day, hoping she would send him a message, he turned to RunTracker to pop the question.
‘Hey Zelda, are you around? I was wondering if you’re free for dinner or a coffee. It would be great to thank you in person for the training. I have never felt better than in this one week.’
He didn’t hear back from her. That night he tossed and turned in his bed a million times and checked his phone another million times. He couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the best lead-up to his run. He shouldn’t have got carried away. This had to be kept extremely professional from the very start. But, by now, his colleagues had seen him put in the effort the past five days. No one knew it was Zelda for whom Ravin had been putting in those hours.
‘You seem to be gunning for the Boston Marathon next year itself,’ Kunal had joked with him on Friday.
It was a comment that he waved off nonchalantly. His only motivation now was to run the damn thing and be done with it once and
for all. After this, he was going to get back to being Ravin Chatterjee, the upright and professional duty manager of the Le Meridien, New Delhi. He cursed himself for not being able to get Zelda out of his mind.
The next morning, a bleary-eyed Ravin reached out for his phone on the side of his bed. There was a new notification from RunTracker. The notification popped: You have one unread message from Zelda.
‘Finally,’ he mumbled and straightened himself to read the message. She might have been busy with her preparations of her run; he gave her the benefit of doubt and excitedly went to the Unread Messages section on the app.
The message from Zelda read: ‘Congratulations, you have finished Zelda Boskovic’s free elite trial plan. To upgrade, click here and see fantastic results with your running. Special offer price only Rs 12,000 for 3 months!’
The last line stung him the most. It read, ‘Exclusively personalized for Ravin Chatterjee by Zelda Boskovic.’
He knew it was anything but.
Beyond Words
One evening, spent ruminating over Old Monk about what he should do for his career, Pervez Dastur came across an advertisement for an International Film Festival at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi.
Little did he know that spending those five days shuttling between different auditoriums and listening to eminent writers like Terry Rossio, Bob Peterson and John August would have such an impact on his life that he would apply for the Writing Programme at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, in less than a month. He drew on his savings for the past ten years and paid his fees after an intense round of screening that ended with him winning a seat at the holy grail of film-making education in India.
Pervez left his plush hospitality job in Gurgaon and moved to Pune with dreams of making it big in Bollywood someday. Most people thought it was a crazy decision to leave a well-established corporate career and give it all up to gain entry into the notoriously fickle world of film-making, but that’s the kind of epoch-making year 2016 was in Pervez’s life.
To say that Pervez struggled during his initial days at FTII was an understatement. While coming up with topics for potential screenplays during workshops, he could never think on the lines of the more adventurous genres of science fiction or fantasy or animation. His story suggestions were pretty run-of-the-mill that never enthused any instructor in his writing workshops.
Upon seeing Pervez struggle, his favourite instructor, Shekhar Apte, a middle-aged scraggy-haired film guru, met him over coffee.
‘I can’t think of any out-of-the-world experience to put in my writing, like you keep saying. When the other instructors ask me to think out of the box, all I can think of are stories around Gurgaon,’ Pervez explained his dilemma to Shekhar.
Shekhar had been an instructor at FTII for eight years and by now had seen every kind of student and tackled every kind of question that a student in distress could come up with.
‘Why do you want to be a writer?’ Shekhar asked.
‘To create something that lives after me.’
Shekhar mulled over this statement. It seemed genuine. The best students always gave a genuine answer. After a couple of minutes of silence, he said, ‘Do you know what makes great stories?’
It was too open-ended a question for Pervez. Lots of things made for great stories, the plot points, the characters, the surprise twists, the works. He didn’t know what to begin with. Hesitantly, Pervez replied, ‘Great characters?’
‘I know you are going to list a bunch of things, but here’s what I think makes for great stories.’
‘What?’
‘Your experiences.’
‘I have had my share of experiences,’ Pervez said.
‘Everyone has. But what’s unique about yours? Do you have an experience that’s so different that you can put it in your writing? About how that experience moved you or devastated you? It could be the love for a woman that you could wage a war for, or even a pain in your heart that is so searing that you wished you weren’t breathing?’
Pervez tried to process everything Shekhar said. He had nothing to say in reply.
He had grown up in a protected family of an educated middle-class household in the heartland of affluent north India. He had everything he needed in his childhood. Did he ever have to struggle for anything? Perhaps not, up until this point when he was struggling to come up with new ideas for stories. Neither had he ever experienced any loss of love that he couldn’t gather himself back from. Pervez merely gazed at the table mat in front of him.
Shekhar continued. ‘Some students have a tireless imagination and they leverage that to conjure up worlds of fantasy. The others rely deeply on their experiences to make them better writers. You must find those experiences here in Pune if you didn’t get them in Gurgaon.’
‘Nobody likes stories based in Pune. You don’t either,’ Pervez said.
‘I don’t because it’s easy. And I would like to push my students into territories that they haven’t yet gone into,’ explained Shekhar.
Pervez loved Shekhar Apte for this very reason. Shekhar was already working on a couple of writing projects for Disney India. Time was a scarce resource for him. And yet he took out time to sit across the table from a newbie like Pervez and advise him. Shekhar did it of his own volition because that’s how much educating his students about the craft of screenwriting meant to him. And Pervez hated letting down Shekhar with his script ideas.
‘I will give it a think. Though I don’t know what I can do to gain this experience.’
‘Don’t think so hard. Hurl yourself at unfamiliar things. Channelize those experiences of fear, disgust or delight into your writing. There is an interesting Experimental Theatre elective that’s coming up in two weeks’ time at the National School of Drama in New Delhi. Those students do the craziest things. I suggest you sign up for that course. It’ll do you good.’
‘Thanks, Shekhar. I really appreciate it. I have one last question for you.’
‘Shoot.’
‘You are obviously a sought-after writer and I have reason to believe that you are not much into fantasy either. What did you do to gain these experiences, as you call them?’
‘I travelled with whatever money I had at my disposal. I put myself in uncomfortable scenarios. I went to Vietnam, lived and cooked there. I slept on floors when I had to. I waited at restaurants in the US when I had to make ends meet. And I still fell short, but yeah, that’s what I did.’
‘So, did you ever feel this pain you mention or the love that you spoke about?’
Shekhar hesitated for a moment. ‘When my wife passed away last year, I think I felt it.’
Pervez knew this was a good time to stop.
Being in Shekhar’s class was always an education. Meeting him one-on-one and listening to him was a pilgrimage. Pervez thanked Shekhar for his time once again. He was filled with inspiration. He had a month-long break coming up and the thought of travelling to an unknown city filled his senses with an unforeseen tinge of excitement.
His plan of having Rs 2,00,000 in the bank as a buffer for one year after FTII would get a definite jolt with any new plans, but he was ready to take a crack at it. First, he immediately signed up for the Experimental Theatre Course in New Delhi.
Second, he opened up a world map on his phone and charted out the nearest cities from India that he had never been to.
Three weeks later, Pervez was in downtown Shanghai without a clue in the world of how to navigate the busy metropolis. He had intentionally not crafted any itinerary except a visit to the Shanghai World Circus show, a ticket to which had been booked and was now lodged safely in his wallet.
Apart from a Google Translate app that came recommended from Ravin, one of his former hospitality-sector colleagues when he used to work with the Le Meridien and who had travelled to China before, Pervez chose to read nothing else about the city. Partly because before the summer break there were assignments to be completed and also because Pervez wante
d to throw himself out in Shanghai and hopefully immerse himself in those uncomfortable experiences that Shekhar spoke to him about.
He was particularly looking forward to the World Circus show. Ravin had raved about it since the day Pervez mentioned his well-intentioned, but haphazard, trip to Shanghai. Ravin also gave a few handy suggestions about budget accommodations and street food delights. But most of all, he emphasized the Google Translate app.
‘Shanghai is a modern metropolis but don’t expect anyone there to know a word of English,’ he cautioned Pervez. Ravin got Pervez to download a language pack that would work offline without Internet connectivity. Pervez realized the benefits of this as soon as he got into a cab at the Shanghai airport.
When the buck-toothed guy in a yellow cab asked him, ‘Ni xiang qu nali?’, not only was Pervez able to decipher that the driver wanted a destination, but in less than a minute he was able to read out from the language pack, ‘Wo xiang qu Jin Jiang kezhan.’ (I want to go to Jin Jiang Inn.)
The hotel reception at Jin Jiang Inn had a similar experience in store for him, where once again his app came in handy. After settling into his budget hotel room, Pervez set out to do what any tourist would on a Shanghai evening—take a walk down the Bund.
The sight of the glittering buildings and their reflection in the calm waters soothed his eyes. His head, a little fuzzy after that rather long trip, needed this. He tried asking a few people for directions to Shanghai World Circus and realized Ravin’s gift for this trip was invaluable. Without Google Translate, Pervez wouldn’t be able to perhaps even feed himself.
His modest hotel had provided him with a map with the World Circus venue clearly circled on it. The balding receptionist indicated with his hands after much persuasion that it was a nine-kilometre walk from the Bund. Pervez, having budgeted two hours for the walk, started from the Bund at 7 p.m. towards Gonghe Xin Lu—the venue of the much-celebrated Shanghai World Circus.