Now That You're Rich: Let's fall in Love!

by Datta, Durjoy

  ‘I have always been interested in this field, sir. I have done CFA level one and CA foundation level. I have also done my internship at Morgan Stanley and Barclays. It is in the file. Everything is in the file. The college certificates, too. I also won the business quiz at DCE. I won the Business Plan contest and the singing competition and the math quiz and the entrepreneurship seminar,’ she said and opened the file and thrust the certificates out in front of him. She was panicking.

  ‘I don’t need to see those. Why Silverman Finance?’

  ‘Sir, it is because it is the best financial institution in the world and I really want to work there,’ she said this and her mind drew a blank. She just sat there, rubbing her hands and looking down at them. The fear of failure choked her.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Sir, that is the reason. I really want to work at Silverman.’

  ‘Or is it the money?’

  She stared blankly at him. Her head spun like she was in a revolving chair.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Just the money?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. But I am ready to work hard,’ she said, her voice failing her and her head starting to spin again. ‘Sir, I have scored well here and I will do well there, too. I promise. Just give me a chance and I assure you, I will do well. Sir, I promise. I worked hard all my life and will continue doing so. You can check my results and my performance in academics are as good as my extracurricular activities,’ she was almost begging.

  ‘Calm down, Shruti.’

  She nodded furiously as she felt it slipping through her fingers.

  The kind interviewer gave her a few minutes to relax, and then asked her questions about balance sheets, accounting principles and taxes, and she breezed through them. The interviewer made sure that her exemplary performance in school and college were not a sustained fluke, and that she was truly the brilliant kid her marks suggested. Studies, exams, college rankings were the only things that she cared for in her god-forsaken life. She had made sure that that part of her life was perfect.

  She walked all the way home that day. The walk back to her place meant a lot to her. It had changed her life. Had her father not seen Sachin put his hand across her on the way back home one day, she wouldn’t be getting married this year. The walk didn’t really decide what would happen to her, but it brought her fate closer than it had been previously.

  ‘What took you so long?’ her mother asked, as soon as she stepped into her house.

  ‘The interview went on for very long,’ she said, as she made her way to her room.

  ‘It is eight. Do you think we are fools? Where were you?’ she asked as she grabbed hold of her hand.

  ‘I was in college.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you pick up your phone?’

  ‘I was in the interview.’

  ‘All the time?’ she asked. ‘I will not tell your father this time, but the next time you are late, I will tell him, and then you face him.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Shruti shrugged off the threat, stormed into her room and threw her bag on the bed. Her mother followed her into her room. Shruti did not have a room of her own till she was eighteen and had to share one with her brother. After a month of discussion, the storeroom was cleaned up and she was shifted there, despite earnest requests from her brother that he wanted to take that damp, dark, squalid minuscule room. Her brother had his tenth boards that year. Shruti was slapped for persuading her brother to ask for the storeroom.

  ‘Next time you talk to me like that, I will throw you out of this house. Then go into Sachin’s arms and do whatever you want to. Ever since you have met him you have forgotten all about us. That lowly bastard!’

  ‘Mom.’

  ‘Shut up, Shruti. And keep your tone down. You are such a selfish daughter. You have no responsibility towards the house. Look at your room. Don’t you have eyes? Have you ever bothered to clean it? We don’t have twenty servants here to do the job. I have to do it. You don’t realize how much you take us for granted. No matter how much freedom we give you, you still want more. And what do you give us? Your grandmother has been coughing for the last three days. Have you bothered to ask her how she’s feeling? All you want is your college, your job, your career, your friends. This is the last time I am telling you, Shruti, forget about the job and don’t you dare say a word about that in front of your father or Guptaji. It is your luck that you are getting such a big man to marry you.’

  ‘He is a divorcee.’

  She got slapped. Yet again. Her mother’s shrieks filled up the room.

  ‘So what? That girl was a witch. She didn’t know how to cook. Even took up a job. What do you expect? A wife of such a rich man to work? They have done a lot for your father and for whatever we have done for you, you have to keep him happy. It will be shameful if you do anything inappropriate there. But what do you care? All you think about is yourself. Even if we die, I don’t think you will shed a single tear. Why don’t you kill us yourself instead of putting us through all this?’

  Moms are quite brilliant at this. I do not know where they get it from, but they have this innate capability of pulling out everything from the closet. You spill milk today and you will be shouted at for not scoring well in a maths exam that you took five years ago, thereby spoiling the family name.

  ‘But I have done nothing to get him. I don’t deserve him.’

  ‘Shruti!’ her mother shouted and slapped her again. She started howling and crying. ‘How dare you answer back to me! They can take away this house. It is mortgaged to them. You know we are neck-deep in debt, don’t you? How can you be so insensitive? My own daughter? How can you? I wish you had died at birth. At least I wouldn’t have to see this day.’

  She kept sobbing, a little softly now. It always worked. Shruti felt a tinge of guilt in her heart.

  ‘I will do what you say,’ she mumbled.

  ‘No, do whatever you want. Kill us. That is what you want, so do it. I am ashamed to have a daughter like you. Don’t talk to me. Go and make rotis now,’ she said and left the room as the bell rang. It was Shruti’s father.

  Shruti started making rotis and overheard the conversation between her parents, which was deliberately loud so that she could overhear what they were saying.

  ‘I am sure she will blacken our faces some day. And that is after everything we have done for her. I always knew one day she would turn her back on us,’ her father bellowed. ‘I am sure she was with that bastard. She is so brainless to not think of Jagjit as an opportunity. He likes her so much and she is such a waste. Call her.’

  Her mother called out to her loudly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said tremblingly. She wished her brother was around. She wouldn’t get hit then. She stood in front of her father, who looked drunk and in a foul mood.

  ‘Shruti, this is going too far,’ her father said. ‘Just because we have given you freedom doesn’t mean you will exploit it. I don’t want to know why you were so late today but I have decided something and you will have to do it. No college from tomorrow. You will go to Jagjit’s place and talk to his mother. It has been three months since we promised to get the two of you married and they have not seen your face up till now. What impression do you think you are leaving on them? I do not want to hear any excuse. You have studied enough. Nothing will come out of it. Anyway, once you get married, you are going to sit at home and serve him.’

  ‘But Papa … the marriage is a year away.’

  ‘Don’t you dare answer back. You will do what I ask you to do. You get that? Go to your room.’

  ‘But I want to do this job till the time I get married.’

  ‘We are not discussing it,’ her father said, as he sipped his whisky. He was a big, fat, balding old man, who, in his youth, had stood tall as a light pole and strong as a boulder. His word was the rule. People feared him. But then, times change. A few business deals went awry, he lost his reputation and people lost confi
dence in him. That was when Jagjit’s father lent him money for a business that failed, spiralling him into debts worth crores, and he drowned himself in alcohol. For now, the only place he was still feared was in his daughter’s heart. His hand was heavy and she knew that.

  ‘Why not? I want to do the job. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’

  ‘Why? You are not going to do it all your life. Help your mother till the time you get married. Help her out. She is getting old and you still suck her blood. Look at her. Don’t you feel pity, growing fat and roaming around with boys while she works in the kitchen all day?’

  ‘I thought it would help in the dowry.’

  Her father looked at her in sheer disbelief. ‘What? A two-paisa job and you will pay for your dowry? Don’t act smart with me,’ he said mockingly.

  ‘It is thirty lakhs per annum.’

  ‘What?’ her parents echoed. Her father gulped down the whisky, and his pride.

  ‘Show me the offer letter,’ her mother said.

  ‘We will get it tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘Then we will talk about it tomorrow.’

  She walked to her room, closed the door behind her and pinned her ears to the door and listened to what her parents had to say.

  Their tongues had started wagging. They were now hatching plans of how they would not tell the Gupta family that she was working, and instead would tell them that she was at her maternal grandmother’s place, taking care of her. She closed her eyes and wished she could run away.

  Hyderabad.

  She prayed.

  The next day, with her hands lathered with detergent, she picked up the phone. It was from the placement cell. They told her that she could come to the college and collect her offer letter for the job at Silverman Finance. She wanted to jump and dance and run around and tell everybody; instead, she cried. It took a while for the news to sink in and when it did, she smiled as widely as she could.

  Everything seemed to change around her. Her eyes, always sunken, now had a twinkle in them. Her walk had a spring in it. The only thing that did not change was her brother’s love for her.

  ‘Run away,’ he said.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Run away,’ he said again, as he closed his book. It was his board exams that year. Cable connections had been cut. Computer wires had been taken apart. Shruti’s protests that these steps were not taken when she took her board exams were looked down upon with scorn. She was slapped and told how selfish she was.

  ‘I am serious, Didi. They will get you married here and you know that.’

  ‘Yes. But there is nothing I can do,’ she said as her mind raced with possibilities.

  ‘Yes, you can. I am sure they will let you go to Hyderabad. They want the money and you know that. You don’t have to take it any more. Once you settle there and have a few months behind you, stop sending them money and refuse to come back. That is it,’ he said. It was a brave thing for him to say at his age.

  ‘It is not possible. You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I understand everything, Didi. Dad will run into trouble with Guptaji, with loans to pay. But what has that got to do with you? You can’t push yourself into this because our alcoholic father and overspending mother led themselves into a horrible life. Didi, the day I get into an engineering college, I will forget I ever had parents.’

  ‘What are you saying, Archit? They love you.’

  ‘They do? I don’t think so. And even if they do, it is because I am their son. They know that I will sustain them once I get a job. After that, they will marry me off and torture the girl to death for money. I am not going to be a part of all that.’

  It was almost as if the two of them had switched ages.

  ‘Don’t say that. They have brought us up and … ’

  ‘So what, Didi? Every parent does that, and they have done nothing special. You were pushed inside the kitchen when you were six and Mother spent all her time watching television. Dad could spend on his whisky while I had to wait months for a new bag. I got it eventually, but had it been you, you wouldn’t have seen it ever. Just because they fed us for all these years doesn’t give them any right to govern us. I am tired of all this.’

  ‘But what if I lose the job some day? Where will I go then?’

  ‘You will not, Didi. You know you are good. And even if you do, you will find another one. And in any case, I will start earning in a few years. There is nothing that can go wrong here.’ He smiled at this.

  ‘What? Why are you smiling?’

  ‘Didi, you are beautiful. Even if you don’t find a job, you will find someone worthy enough of you, someone rich, very rich. Grab him, and he will shower you with everything you might need. Things will be just fine. I can’t wait to see you with a big diamond on your ring finger,’ he said and started laughing.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said, even as she was crying.

  ‘Why? You still love Sachin?’ he asked.

  Sachin was the son of the stationery shop owner at her college. He used to photocopy the books Shruti couldn’t afford to buy, and slowly, they came close and fell in love. After her father saw them and Sachin saw the bruise marks on Shruti’s face the next day, he stopped coming to the shop, and Shruti never saw him again.

  ‘I don’t,’ she said, as she wiped away her tears. Some relationships are strange. Sachin and Shruti hardly ever talked or met, but they knew they could spend a lifetime looking at each other and smiling shyly.

  Just then, their parents entered the room and the conversation stalled.

  Ever since her dad had brutalized Shruti after spotting him with Sachin and Sachin had vowed that he would never see her again, Shruti made no efforts to trace Sachin and neither had he.

  Three months passed since the call from the placement cell, and that day she found herself standing at the airport, her parents struggling to find words to bid her goodbye. While she was issued warnings about staying away from boys and what would happen if she didn’t, she was also hugged and they said that they really cared for her. Her parents knew this was a gamble, sending her to a different city, with no supervision and lots of money. But they had taken months to decide that they would let her go. They had made their calculations and it fit right with their plans. It was worth the risk. And the money.

  She disappeared behind the clearance gates, looking back once at her brother, who smiled and winked at her.

  Run, her mind said. And she ran.

  So, while Shruti had been counting the days right up to the day she would finally leave that place, and time hardly seemed to pass, for Saurav, time was running out … quick.

  Still a virgin, his school friends studying engineering abroad were doing it as frequently as he changed clothes and he wasn’t feeling any good about it. Although I think he was a lucky son of a bitch, he didn’t think so.

  One of the few things that you lose, or you don’t, when you are in IIT: your virginity.

  3

  How many times has it happened that you looked at a rich kid getting down from a big car and wished you were him or her? What would you do if you were him or her?

  One thing you would NOT do is—study. Study till you feel your eyes would pop out.

  But what if no matter what Saurav did, be it staring down at his teacher’s cleavage as she bent or staring up his classmate’s skirt, he used to retain everything that was taught in class, and no matter how hard he tried, he ended up doing very well in his exams. Even by IIT, Delhi standards, he was insanely intelligent.

  To cut it short, Saurav was unwittingly brainy and enviably rich. Saurav had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was the new generation—educated rich. Life was an extended dream for him.

  It was unfair to the world when he got through Silverman Finance without even breaking into a sweat. But he wasn’t too concerned about his career, for he had bigger issues at hand to take care of.

  Freud once said, if you don’t lose your virginity before twenty-four
, you will always be a loser. Or someone said something like that. His friends from school had warned him about it when he cleared the entrance examination for IIT, but he didn’t pay heed.

  Samrat. Kapoor. Kiran. All his guy friends were neck-deep in women within the first few months that they landed in Holland, the US and the UK respectively. He was still a virgin.

  They took out time to send him pictures of themselves in parties with beer glasses in hand and half-naked women in their arms. While all he did was send them scanned copies of his nine-point something IIT mark-sheets. They all had almost the same future ahead of them. Just that while they fucked, he got fucked!

  ‘I am just waiting for the right time. I can’t sleep with just anybody,’ Saurav said unconvincingly.

  ‘You are a guy! We can sleep with anybody with long hair and breasts. Just go find a girl!’

  ‘But it would be the first time. I want it to be special. I can’t just …’

  ‘Don’t give me that crap, man. Every time that dick of yours goes into something wet, you will feel special, trust me! Just go ahead and stop fooling yourself with the virginity bullshit. It is not the 1800s.’

  ‘It is not so easy here. And I am not the smartest around here and you know that.’

  ‘I do, man, but there must be one girl, at least one in the whole of Delhi who can think about sleeping with you, dude! You just have to find her; she won’t come to you. And you are a rich guy, man! You drive your own Audi, you’re an IITian and stuff! Girls love all that, trust me.’

  ‘But where do I find these girls, man. All my friends are even bigger nerds than I am. It’s not that I can ask them to set me up.’

  ‘Anywhere! Join cooking classes if you have to and lay an aunty. I don’t fucking care, but do something about this.’

  ‘I will try.’

  They hung up. His inferiority complex touched new heights every time he talked to his friends.

  Saurav was five-ten and looked shorter. He was girlishly fair and weighed a staggering 120 kilos and looked more. It had been years since he had seen his toes. He wasn’t cute and plump; he was fat.