by Sid Bahri
Radhika
“Just try it once. This guy is just great; you’ll love him,” Divya says.
“I am not sure,” I say. I am shaking my head in disbelief that I’m having this conversation with her.
“If you’re not comfortable there, I can send this guy over. You must try him. Trust me,” she says. She’s been trying her best to convince me.
At home, it will leave Laxman scandalized and I don’t want the neighbours to see a strange man come in. I can’t risk it and so, I decide to visit the place. She gives me an address in Greater Kailash. I look down at the address that she has scribbled down on a yellow post-it.
HappyEndingz Massage Parlor
M-201 Ground floor
Greater Kailash -1
New Delhi.
I am wondering why the name sounds so familiar. On the trip back from Ranikhet, Divya brought up the topic and I hadn’t replied. I thought about it and for the same reason that I have chopped off my tresses, I agree. I think that a little promiscuity will do no harm to a bored widow. I am only thirty-three. How wrong can I go?
I don’t ask Laxman to drive me that day. I just step out casually, as if I am going out for a stroll, but instead take an auto-rickshaw to reach the place. I recognize it immediately. I remember that it is the same place that we crossed when we came back from Chandigarh. I was so judgmental about the people who ran the place, not knowing that my new best friend had a stake in it.
I enter through the heavy wooden door into a neatly done up reception. A solitary thin man sits behind the desk. Somehow, he looks very familiar. I am not sure if I have met him before.
He ushers me in and politely asks me to wait while he checks on Aditya. I sigh. I am still wondering why this name is so popular when he comes back. He sends me in to one of the rooms. I am still unsure. One part of me wants to bolt out of the door and never come back. I have steeled my nerves in coming here and I don’t want to act like a coward now. I enter the door, to see the naked back of a man. The gash on the back, over which I loved to run my finger, tells me that this is him.
Aditya
That we will meet was a certainty. Our destinies are too intertwined to be away from each other for long. We had never imagined that it will ever be in this setting. She, my client, in want of lust and I, the gigolo, short on love but willing to accede. We just stand there, looking at each other, not saying a word, even while the clock ticks on. If she were just another client, it would’ve cost her a huge fortune, for doing nothing, for saying nothing. We don’t make love, we don’t even have sex – we just hug each other for the void that time and we have created.
She finally breaks the silence, “You don’t have to do this”. The recession has ended and I have been offered a job, but I haven’t taken it. This is my life – a life of penance that I will have to lead for all the sins that I have committed. Now, maybe this penance is over.
“Let’s go somewhere else, just not here”. I don’t realize that she means a different city and not just the raunchy setting of the HappyEndingz Massage Parlour.
There is nothing the city hasn’t given me – love, lust, a career, money, greed, corruption, hurt and pain. I nod my head in concurrence for I have nothing to give to the city anymore. We finally do what we have been threatening to do for nearly a decade – marry. Our parents are estranged and nobody can blackmail us emotionally. There are no prejudices of religion or money to make us stop.
It takes us less than a month to move beyond the cantonment town of Ranikhet, where we run a school today, attempting to imbibe in the next generation, the virtues that we had so severely lacked in our lifetimes at those critical junctures – the strength of the soul and the courage to follow our convictions. It isn’t commercially viable but it is our only hope of redeeming ourselves.
She says she can help get the funding from a Non- Government Organization to put a roof on the second wing. I want to come along, but she thinks it will be better if I stay.
She leaves on a Sunday, taking the driver along with her that she has brought along from Delhi, promising to return by Tuesday. She doesn’t.
Her cell phone says that she is not reachable. I should be panicking, making phone calls to ascertain where she is; maybe, even make the drive to find out if she has abandoned me. I don’t. I know she will come back - for what are we but homing pigeons that have that innate, uncanny ability to find their mate, no matter where you leave them on the face of this earth. She will come back.
Radhika
When I wake up on Wednesday morning, my first thoughts are of him. I check the phone to see, if miraculously, the network outage has been resolved. I haven’t even been able to inform Aditya that I will need to wait another day before I can bring home a cheque from the NGO. The meeting has been a breeze and they have agreed to help us. Our cause is mired in nobility – imparting education to rural children. Little do they know that the education that we were imparting isn’t bookish. It doesn’t deal with debit and credit entries that no one will really use in real life. It is more meaningful than that – A strong backbone differentiates humans from jellyfish.