by Vikram Bhatt
‘Your father puts you on the chair of the advertising company because he feels that is where you can do the least harm. You spent your schooldays smoking up and your college days coking up, then your business school years in rehab. You are one fine example of social filth. You really want to regale your gang by poking fun at a man trying to work for a living? Shame on you! If I were to ask you what the telephone number of your company auditor is, you wouldn’t even know that. So Mr Figurehead, try and figure that! As far as I am concerned, you can shove your advertising agency up your arse! Come on, Veer, let’s go somewhere else before we choke and die from cheap cologne.’
Mira held my hand and proudly walked towards the elevator doors. Dev Kapoor and gang stood flummoxed, speechless. As we walked out of the party I realized that it was totally possible to fall even more in love with a woman you already loved to bits.
Mira jabbed the elevator button like it was Dev Kapoor’s nose. The elevator doors hissed shut and we descended in silence. Halfway down she realized that she was still holding my hand; she let it go awkwardly.
‘For a man who brought an entire restaurant to a standstill just a few days ago with his intense tirade, you seemed pretty damn tongue-tied,’ she said finally.
‘Well, I thought . . . it’s all right, doesn’t matter . . .’ I decided it was best left alone.
‘I am not stupid, Veer, I know you took what that douchebag handed out to you because you did not want to embarrass me, but you need not take nonsense from anyone, not even for me.’ The elevator doors slid open before I could respond and we stepped out into the foyer. ‘The party is over before it started, huh?’ She looked at me and smiled. I shrugged. ‘I think you should take me out for coffee and tell me more about yourself, considering Dev Kapoor knows more about your work than I do.’
‘I would like that very much!’ I replied, grabbing the opportunity.
‘Let’s go!’ she exclaimed and then stopped abruptly, turned to me, and in the most affectionate tone I had ever heard she said, ‘A handful of sunshine is such a beautiful phrase—just so beautiful!’
‘How did you find me?’ she asked. We were on our third cup of coffee and did not need the help of Google Earth to kick-start a conversation any more. I had told her all about my work, my New Delhi roots, my rich parents, my revolt against the nuts and bolts family business, my need to do something different and creative. She was a good listener but I could see that she also wanted to know everything there was to know about me.
‘Ah, that!’ I answered, laughing. ‘That was not me; that was Prady.’
‘Come on, tell me! I am curious.’
‘So Prady and I went to Solenzo. We paid a waiter 2,000 bucks to get us the name and number of the man who fought with me. Once we had Rohit’s name we went on his Facebook page and saw that you were on his friends list.
On your page you have listed Akshay as your brother. So we Googled Akshay and Mira. Bingo! Indian Food Company showed up, and the rest is history!’ I grinned, feeling rather pleased with myself.
‘Very clever!’ she conceded. I smiled and she smiled back.
‘Since we are having the interrogation hour, let me ask you: what made you think of inviting me?’ I hoped she would answer by confessing her unconditional, undying love for me. I also knew that no such thing was happening.
‘There is an honest answer to that question and then there is the dishonest one,’ Mira said with a naughty smile. ‘The honest one is too honest for now and dishonest I don’t want to be, so you will just have to live with no answer.’ She laughed like an erring child and looked away for a moment.
‘I would then like to suppose that I do interest you, at least a little.’ I pressed on.
‘I don’t have coffee with random men. Though, on the other hand, everything in this case is random.’
She went quiet after saying that. Perhaps she was thinking of the arbitrary nature of things between us. Then she looked at me and smiled meaningfully; I held her gaze, feeling a strange kind of warmth spread through me. We did not look away in a hurry, but when we did it was with the same thought. We needed to meet again and the again had to be soon.
MIRA
Monday morning
I landed in Zurich at 7.30 a.m., Switzerland time. I had not slept a wink on the aeroplane. Veer was all I could think of for eight and a half hours without a commercial break!
When I stepped out of the airport, I found a well-suited chauffeur named Philippe holding a placard with my name on it. I walked up to him and pointed myself out. He smiled and asked me to wait right there for him to bring the car around. The Swiss air smelled different, clean—it filled my senses and made me feel heady. I wondered if it was the air or the fact that I was really in Switzerland. It was two and a half hours to Interlaken, two and a half hours before I could be with Veer.
The travel agent had done a good job of reserving a limousine. I sat back as Philippe eased the car out of the airport car park and into the autobahn towards Interlaken. It was nearing autumn and I could see the leaves on the trees already burning in various flaming hues. I wondered if the trees felt any anguish letting the leaves go. I also wondered why I was thinking of angst when these were the happiest days of my life.
As the scene outside blurred into patches of green and fog, my mind went back to the last few weeks.
My telling Dev Kapoor off at Natasha’s party soon became the fodder for a lot of gossip, and interest in Veer Rai was at an all-time high. Who was this outsider that Mira had taken up for? And did she really walk away holding his hand? Was she dating him? Delhi boy, huh?
Akshay found out about it soon enough and quizzed me at breakfast one morning.
‘You dating someone, Mira?’ Akshay was between scrambled eggs and a protein shake; I was between half-asleep and wide awake. Veer and I talked on the phone every night, all night, after the disastrous party and the great coffee shop conversation. There was a whole life to catch up on.
‘Well, not dating exactly,’ I mumbled.
‘What is dating exactly?’ Akshay stopped eating.
‘I have just met him a couple of times.’ I did my best to sound disinterested.
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Who is the guy, Mira?’
‘He is from Delhi, copywriter for Pearl and Grey.’ The sleep state had vanished under the harsh glare of Akshay’s interrogation.
‘Oh my God, Mira! You are in love!’ Akshay exclaimed and I instantly turned a deep crimson.
‘What nonsense, Akshay!’ I said that louder than was necessary.
Akshay burst out laughing. I decided that attack was the only option. ‘Just because I meet a guy twice does not mean I am in love! And besides, what makes you say that I am in love?’
Akshay looked at me like I was his pet poodle. ‘Mira, I love you. You are my baby sister, so when you are really happy your happiness just transmits to me. So I know.’ He smiled a genuinely warm smile. It was a very nice thing to say and this was really the problem with Akshay. He had a way of disarming me with his affection. But love? I had not even thought of that myself! Surely, it could not be love . . .
‘Two meetings does not love make! Haven’t you heard that saying?’ I put on my best poker face.
‘No, I haven’t heard of any such saying. Seems freshly baked from Mira’s oven of nonsense.’
‘It is a saying and I don’t think we should talk about this any more.’ I managed to say that with a fair amount of finality.
Akshay did keep quiet after that but he could not stop smirking. He had managed to introduce the dreaded ‘L’ word into my mind. What if I was really in love? A slow panic began to set in.
‘Perhaps we should slow down,’ I suggested to Veer over the phone on my way to work.
‘Slow what down?’ I was leading a perplexed Veer into my ‘confused woman’ zone without a life jacket. I pitied him.
‘I think we are overdoing this meeting and talking on the phone th
ing.’ I was trying to sound very mature, but the ‘L’ word was doing the monkey dance in my head.
‘But we’ve only met twice! Yes, we have spoken on the phone three nights in a row. If you wish we could talk for just a bit, no need to chat for hours.’
‘If we don’t talk, how the hell are we supposed to get to know each other?’ I scolded him, now completely confused.
‘By slowing down you don’t mean I should slow down my speed and talk slower, do you?’
I burst out laughing. He was the most adorable man. The ‘L’ word sprang up again.
‘Do you want to watch Mozart’s Requiem Mass being performed at the NCPA this evening?’ I threw him another bolt from the blue. I did realize that Mozart was not the young person’s thing of the day but my dad had instilled in both Akshay and me deep appreciation for Western classical music since we were little.
‘Mira, we will have to do both, meet and talk, should we decide to go. Unless you want to sit at opposite ends of the concert hall,’ he posed with all sincerity. What the hell was I going to do with him? I just couldn’t stop smiling when I spoke to him.
‘You know what? We don’t need to slow anything down. I am just being silly.’ I finally gave in. The ‘L’ word did a final happy jig that I ignored. ‘I have two tickets for the performance. So, do you want to go or not?’
‘Mozart and NCPA would mean a lot of men in tuxedos performing to the baton of the conductor, right?’
‘Yes, that is right.’
‘Do you really want to sit and watch violins playing in unison for three hours, Mira?’
‘Veer! It is Mozart! His music is to die for!’ I screamed.
There was a short silence. I could sense that Veer’s mind was computing between the perils of watching suited violinists and the fatality of a slowdown.
‘So what time is the concert?’ he conceded.
I smiled. I might have been confused but I’d got him exactly where I wanted him to be!
I wore my most elegant fitted black dress with my favourite black heels and then added the touch of Chance. I wanted to look beautiful for him. Why? I didn’t want to rationalize. Not yet.
Veer had decided to put all his effort behind the evening too. The evidence lay in his freshly cut and styled hair and shave, the neat jacket over a light pink shirt and black formal trousers. I wanted to send him a psychic message to hold me like Rhett Butler and kiss me like Rhett would kiss Scarlett. The kiss, I noticed, had slipped into my mind very slyly.
The music was just beautiful—Mozart bidding adieu to the world in the most amazing way, the Requiem Mass. I thought I would cry with the pain of those notes. Veer, on the other hand, looked like he was waiting for the bell to ring on the most boring lecture he had attended. Poor chap, it was clearly not his kind of evening. I saw him looking at the audience as much as the orchestra, and I was certain I caught him studying the architecture of the auditorium on more than one occasion.
‘What language do these guys sing in?’ Veer asked me as we drove back.
‘Which guys?’ I asked him.
‘This choir of Mozart’s music, what is that language?’ he specified.
‘It’s Latin.’
‘That’s cool. So Mozart knew Latin?’
I laughed out loud, ‘Veer, I know you hated every bit of it and you don’t have to pretend to like it. It’s fine.’
Veer smiled at me and nodded. He looked relieved.
‘I caught you looking at the audience every now and again. What was that about?’
‘Just looking around to see why I could not enjoy what everybody else seemed to enjoy.’
‘You liar, I saw you grinning. Come on, out with it! Tell me!’ I jabbed his side with my finger.
‘I told you!’
‘Tell me!’
The sheepish grin was back, ‘All right, I was very bored and so I indulged in my favourite pastime. Well not my favourite, but something I do when I am bored.’
‘Which is?’
He began to laugh out loud, ‘You are going to judge me if I tell you.’
‘You don’t understand Mozart, so I am already judging you. You are kind of past that point now.’
‘So, you know, when I am bored,’ he said shyly, ‘I look at the people around me and imagine how they would look if they were at the place they were and doing the things they were doing but without any clothes on.’
‘You imagine people naked for a pastime?’ I was clearly mortified.
‘Well, it can be funny, you know,’ he argued.
I looked away and out of the window to find a fat man riding a scooter. The power of autosuggestion shot at me with a vengeance and to my horror I imagined the man naked on the scooter. It was horrific and hilarious at the same time. I couldn’t stop laughing.
‘I see you get my point,’ Veer said, with a charm that made me want to make him mine for ever and more.
‘Is the selection of people to imagine their nakedness a randomized process or is there a method?’ I inquired.
‘There has to be something funny about it. There is a difference between vulgarity and humour, you see?’
‘Did you imagine me as well?’ The words were out before I could stop them and now they were there between us like an ocean of awkwardness. I wanted to dig myself into the car seat and hide in the folds of the dirty greasy sponge within, my big mouth and me!
‘Do you want me to answer that?’ Veer decided not to look at me when he said that.
‘Nope!’ my monosyllabic answer attempted to hide my multisyllabic embarrassment. ‘Forget I asked.’
There was a really crappy song playing in the car at the time, but I tapped my fingers to the rhythm pretending not to be bothered, like I asked men if they imagined me without clothes on a daily basis. I am sure Veer did not miss that, but he was kind enough to understand my embarrassment and decided to look directly ahead, like he was driving through fog.
‘I wanted to hold your hand. That is all I wanted to do,’ he said in a gentle whisper. My heart jumped up and out of my skin, the ‘L’ word exploded like a supernova, and somewhere Mozart began to play once again in my head.
Confutatis . . . maledictis . . .
‘Why didn’t you?’ The words came out all choked and garbled.
‘I thought it would disturb you. You seemed so entranced by the music.’
I nodded. In my head the jury was still out on whether this guy was for real or whether he was just a player. What kind of guy did not hold a girl’s hand for fear of coming in the way of her listening pleasure?
Fortunately, we were home. This had to go down in the history of most awkward post-date drives back home. The one with Rohit after the Solenzo dinner still topped the list though.
‘Thank you for taking me to this . . .’ I could not finish the words. He pulled me towards himself and kissed me, deeply. My entire world coalesced to that one sensation. It seemed like the most natural thing to do! He was gentle and he was sure as he grazed his lips gently over my lips to part them, and in that moment it was as if he was asking me if I was his. I leaned forward towards him. In response he pulled me more towards himself. He held me in his arms but would not let go of my mouth. I did not want him to move away.
We were lost, entwined, like we had waited aeons for this to happen. Veer was right about everything he had said in the restaurant. He knew me, I knew him, and the universe had conspired to bring us together. There was no awkwardness, no first-kiss clumsiness, just a deep, real connection. I allowed him to lead me into a world of sheer bliss. I let his tongue explore the depth of my desire. We were breathless, but we wouldn’t . . . couldn’t . . . let go.
It was I who eventually pulled away. I didn’t want to, but I had to. My heart was beating so fast that I thought I would just collapse. I’d never felt this way before. I’d not known it was ever possible to feel this way. He didn’t protest, but allowed me my space.
We looked into each other’s eyes. Then he put a finger on my lip
s and whispered, ‘What happened does not need words; they will just spoil it.’ I nodded; I could not agree more.
‘Kiss me again,’ I whispered. He did.
Veer and I had crossed the Rubicon and now there was no looking back, there was no going slow, there was no fearing the ‘L’ word, and most of all there was going to be a lot of throwing caution to the wind.
Late-night chats turned to impromptu dates that lasted till the wee hours of the morning in a coffee shop tucked away somewhere in the heart of the city.
We watched movies that we did not fully understand or remember because we spent most of the time looking at each other in the light that danced on our faces reflected from the silver screen or we gave in to the urge to melt into each other, which we did with alarming ease as the days passed.
‘I have to go to Switzerland; it is an advertisement shoot,’ Veer had waited for the midnight conversation to run its course before giving me that bit of news. He was getting clever. He knew I was going to make his life hell for being a working guy trying to make a living.
‘I hate you,’ I hollered.
‘I have to work, Mira,’ he said. ‘What would you have done if we were, you know . . .’ He did not dare talk about the ‘M’ word.
‘I would have come with you then,’ I told him in my most matter-of-fact way.
‘Then why don’t you?’ he asked with heartbreaking sincerity.
And then I thought to myself, why don’t I?
My taxi came out through the pass and I was stunned by a godly view of Lake Brienz. Here I was heading towards Interlaken, to Veer! It all seemed so beautiful, so wonderful, and I was happy beyond measure. I couldn’t believe that it was even possible to feel this kind of connection, this kind of happiness! God, please don’t take this happiness away from us, please!
VEER
Monday morning
Getting Mira to finally agree to come to Switzerland required the diplomatic skill that put the Paris climate accord in place—just a ticket and visa wouldn’t do it. A lot of questions had to be answered, and the first among them was to ‘answer honestly’ if I thought she was high-maintenance. There was no honest answer to that question. At least, not one that would still keep me in her life.