The Homing Pigeons... (16 page)

Aditya

W
hen she said she wasn’t sure about eloping, I couldn’t help wondering if she loved me. She said she loved me two days ago. Why had the love evaporated, so suddenly, to not be able to take a step in the direction of us being together? My heart refused to believe that she could be materialistic, but my brain would continue to remind me that there was no other reason. Finally, after hours of waiting at the PCO, she called.

“Hi,” I whispered. There was no need to be as quiet as I
was but just the solemnity of the situation demanded it

“Let me go, Aditya. This is our destiny,” she said. Only the weak blame destiny.

“I can’t. How can you even think about it?” I felt cheated. I wish I knew why she was doing this to me.

“You’ve got a career to make. You’re too young to be married,” she said.

“Don’t worry about me. Don’t blame your failure to make the right decision on me,” I was livid. My frustration was manifesting itself in anger. A part of me knew that this could be the last time I was talking to her and so to be gentle, to leave happy memories of myself with her. Why wasn’t I breaking out of this goddamned nightmare?

“I am making the right decision; you’ll understand this in time. I just want you to know that I loved you like I’ve never loved anyone. But, not all lovers meet.”

There was a commotion behind her, voices that were getting louder. Suddenly and without warning, she hung up.

I punched my hand into the wall and small chunks of plaster dropped onto the floor. My hand was as numb as my mind.

The conversation left me a little confused when she said that marriage would ruin my career. Most successful people that I knew were married. I was convinced that she was misleading me.

In any case, it was unreal; this couldn’t be happening to me. This was not me. I couldn’t be hearing the love of my life telling me that she was getting married to someone else. The male ego was so seriously dented that it hurt much more than the self-inflicted bruises on the knuckles of my hand.

Alcohol was always my refuge. When I was happy, I drank and when I wasn’t, I drank a little more. I went back home and drank straight from the bottle that day, inspired by the story of a jilted lover. I drank until the last drop of alcohol was drained from the house and I slept in the balcony. I woke up the next morning when a fly entered my open mouth. Severely dehydrated, my head throbbed. Despite that, I still remembered the conversation from last night. I was tempted to jump off the balcony and leave behind a suicide note that would blame her for my death. I didn’t have the courage to do that either.

Somehow, I made my way into work. Deepika saw me and my droopy shoulders

What’s wrong?” she asked.

My eyes welled up with tears and I turned my head away
from her. I didn’t want her to know that the six-foot tall hunk, the best salesman in the team was crying like a wimp.

“Do you want to go out for coffee?” she asked.

I nodded my head and stepped into the pantry behind her. We went downstairs, into the compound below the branch, where most smokers would light up. I couldn’t hold myself back anymore. I cried like a child, inconsolably, grieving for my loss. She tried to console me and asked me what had happened. I told her every little detail of it. She heard me and finally said, “Let the bird free. If she’s yours, she’ll come back”.

Retrospect is such a wonderful thing
.  In hindsight, I would’ve never taken her advice seriously.

It took me three days to assimilate and understand myself.
A long time in the context of what was happening. After work on Friday, I travelled by night to Chandigarh. I intended to call in sick on Saturday morning. Although it would sound a little dubious since I had done the same thing last weekend, I was prepared to take some risks.

I got off at the bus station and took a rickshaw, the most popular means of public transport in Chandigarh, to the Sector
9 branch. It was still nine and I waited for her, chain smoking cigarette after cigarette to calm my nerves. The adrenaline was pumping despite the uncomfortable journey.

It was about five minutes before ten that I saw Roshni enter, the girl with us in training. Still, there was no sign of her. I waited another five minutes but she wasn’t there. The security guard had opened the doors; customers who wanted to make important transactions on the short working day thronged the bank. Working through the crowd, I reached Roshni. She gave me a smile, recognizing me instantly.

“Hi” she said and extended her hand.

“Hi! Where’s Radhika?” I asked, coming straight to the
point.

“She got married yesterday. Wednesday was her last working day.”

I knew it was going to happen but I didn’t know that it would happen in three days.

“Are you sure?” I asked her.

“Of course, that’s what she said.”

I had been looking for a faint glimmer of hope, a tiny thread of optimism that I could weave into a rope. And, it was all lost. I had lost.

Dejected and dismal, I returned back to Delhi on the next bus. I didn’t even bother to meet my parents. I would’ve been unable to hold back the tears and that would mean a lot of explaining. I just wanted to be alone. Alone to introspect, why I was being subjected to this agony? I tried to make sense of the situation, but in vain.

She loved me, I was sure of that. Why does someone get married to someone other than the one you love?
Money? Was it just because I wasn’t an NRI and didn’t earn in dollars? Looks? Was he Brad Pitt, a picture-perfect representation of the male form? What did he have that I so desperately lacked that she chose him over me? I did not know and now, there was no way of knowing.

When I went back to the office on Monday morning, I felt naked. I didn’t know why I felt that everyone knew my story. I felt that everyone was mocking me; they were calling me a loser. A failure, whose girlfriend got married to someone
else. I hunched and slipped further down in my seat to hide my nudity.

At that moment, I had no interest in being in that room. I had no interest in sales figures and sales targets. I had no
interest in being a star salesman. I had no interest in getting promoted. There was no motivation; she had left me without an objective to pursue.

My manager turned his attention towards me and gave me the sales targets that he expected me to achieve over the next week. The targets were stiff and I would’ve taken them on as a challenge. Only if that little voice in my head didn’t keep repeating, “There are no us”.

The meeting ended and my manager asked me to stay back and gave me a chiding for absenting myself for the last two weekends. He didn’t bother to find out that I had found love and lost love, a week apart. All he cared was for me to bring in the revenue, as reward for the small salary they gave me. The salary that was so small, that it didn’t even make me worthy of being seen as a suitor.

I had no business being in the office on Wednesday. There were scores of potential clients that needed to be convinced, yet, I was there. Fortunately, I was there when Radhika came out of the Human Resources room, accompanied by a man, who could pass off for a mouse. Looking at him, I knew that it had to be the money. She saw me and wasn’t sure how she should react. I saw her and was equally unsure.

She introduced her husband and the mouse shook my hand. He had a feeble grip, and yet, had been strong enough to defeat me.

She asked him to leave under the pretext of using the restroom.

“I’ll meet you downstairs,” she said and he was gone. There  was  just  enough  time  for  us  to  exchange  a  few words in the unlikely setting of the elevator lobby. She looked unhappy; her eyes said it all. They were redder than I had ever seen them.

“Why, Radhika. Why?” I implored.

“I wish I could explain…” she was looking at my shoes unable to meet my eyes. If ever there was an expression of guilt, this was it.

“Then tell me, what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t we have eloped?”

“What had to happen has happened. There’s no point in discussing it anymore. Just forget me. Hate me, if you must.” she said

Those were her last words as she entered the elevator and left, as she had on that last day of school. She went away.
Far far away.

“What time do we have to leave?” Bhatoliya asks me.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“Five-thirty,” he says.

I have spent an entire day remembering her.

Radhika

When I first met Colonel Raghav Khanna, I had compared him to Aditya. A few meetings later, I know that he can never be Aditya. He is more like my first husband Abhinav Chandra.

Abhinav was a gentleman. I had been able to ascertain that when he let me sleep on the first night of my marriage. I was visibly uncomfortable with him in the hotel room that we had retired to, after the marriage had been solemnized at the
registrar’s office. There were no sexual overtures until now, when his animal instincts took over and he had sex with me. It was only natural. I was his wife and it’s an unsaid law that a marriage needs to be consummated by physicality.

He had been patient for a while, waiting for me to open up. He realized that we were two strangers until a week ago and it would take a little time for me to get used to him. The problem was that he was nothing that I had ever imagined my husband to be. Ever since adolescence, I had a formed a mould of my husband and that mould fit just one man – Aditya. Despite Abhinav’s best qualities, he was the round peg trying to fit a square hole. He was failing miserably. And I was failing miserably in being able to break the mould.

We moved to New York, a couple of days ahead of his annual leave being over. A honeymoon would be out of question until the next year.

He worked at the Bank of America, the branch manager of the Wall Street branch. The apartment was a short walk away from his office. The studio apartment had been bought by him a year-and-a-half ago, without envisaging that he would ever be married. It was just too small, but then Manhattan was expensive.

“People work for forty years and can’t afford to buy an apartment in Manhattan. I’ve done it in four,” he had said when I had remarked about the size.

There was no falsity in that statement, although it sounded a little pompous. Whatever the apartment lacked in size, it made up for in the view. The large bay windows overlooked the Hudson River. At the peak of summer, the sail boats in the river were a magnificent sight. Over the first weekend, before he joined work, he took me out around the block to introduce me to my surroundings. He walked me into the
7-11 convenience stores and the grocery just off West Street, just in case I needed anything urgently. He wanted to take me sightseeing but instead I chose to clean up the apartment. It had been used as a bachelor pad for too long. The closets had never been cleaned and didn’t have space enough for my clothes. I hated living out of a suitcase.

New York overawed me – the skyscrapers, in some strange, inconceivable way reminded me of Solan. They were towering and humbling structures not unlike the Himalayas. It was man’s attempt to challenge nature, although they could only build it with concrete, steel and glass. The twin towers, the most mammoth manifestation of that challenge, still towered over the New York skyline.

On my first Monday in New York, Abhinav went to work and I stepped out of the house, alone. It was brave of me. Until a few months ago, I hadn’t even ventured out into New Delhi alone. I was attempting to explore a city that I had only seen in pictures and read about in novels. In the first few minutes, I was shouted at by at least two people and had been nearly run over once. I felt like that migrant labourer that had been employed last year to renovate our house – miserably out of place. I wished for the umpteenth time that a familiar rickshaw puller would come by and I could just hop on and see the city.

I returned home and waited for Abhinav to return. I flipped through channels on TV that couldn’t hold my attention. There was hardly anything else to do in the apartment. I wished I hadn’t gone overboard in cleaning it over the weekend; it would’ve left me with a few chores for the weekdays. Bored and lonely, I wondered if this was the life that destiny had forsaken me to. And why even blame destiny when it was my own decision. I sat beside the bay window, admiring the New Yorkers in frolic, the quintessential grasshoppers, the ones who sang the summer away. Very often and inevitably, my thoughts veered towards the past, the thoughts of Aditya and all that had happened between us. Suddenly, the future would start looking as dark as the clouds on the horizon.

Aditya

We ride up to the farmhouse on a motorbike that
Birendra has borrowed from his neighbours. It is a 100cc Hero Honda, which buckles under our combined weight, notwithstanding that one of us only weighs fifty-five kilos. We must be a funny sight – two men, dressed in dark business suits and neckties, riding on a flimsy bike. We are wearing helmets lest we be caught breaking the law on a lesser offence.

When I had spoken to Divya and confirmed that I did have a reference, I had chosen to hide Birendra’s sexual status and his weight, lest she object.

“Thank God! I knew I could count on you,” she said, as if I was a recruitment specialist who had just filled a long open position.

We reach Chhatarpur and take directions from the security guards that perch on chairs, outside each mammoth gate. It is difficult to find the address in the maze of narrow streets that lead through rows of similar farmhouses. One of the security guards confirms that we are at the right place.

The farmhouse is a two acre sprawling expanse of green with a diminutive five bedroom house in the middle. I make a  call  to  Divya,  who  confirms that  she  is  at  the  venue  to coordinate the event. She meets us at the gate minutes after we have parked the motorcycle. The security guard is interested in us and continues to hover about.

She  walks  out  alone  and  hugs  me,  a  warm  hug  that means that I have saved her skin. In the dark recesses of this profession, the pimp has to be reliable. If I didn’t have the courage to speak to Birendra, she may have been deemed unreliable. She turns her attention towards Birendra, and gazes at him from toe to head. It is an uncomfortably slow scrutiny that mentally undresses him. She stops momentarily at the unmentionables. He is blushing; he isn’t used to being treated like a potato.

“Thin, very thin,” she surmises the two-minute gaze.

I choose to ignore her comments; this is the best I can manage in the circumstances. If she doesn’t like him, she can let him go back on his borrowed motorcycle. I can take a ride on the Metro to get back home tomorrow morning.

“But, he’ll do. Does he have any experience?” she asks me. She doesn’t direct her question at Birendra. Am I his pimp?

“No, but neither did I when I started,” I say. In saying so, I
put to rest any further interrogation on the subject.

She looks at the time on her Rolex. I am certain that it is the commissions that she is making that have made her afford this watch. It is eight o’clock, still too early for a party that will run all night.

“You might have to striptease, are you ready for that?” she asks both of us. Her eyes move from Birendra to me and back to him.

I have a sudden sense of revulsion. I want to tell her to fuck off. I want to slap her across her face. I want to tell her where she belongs. I then think about a conversation with my wife when I was jobless and I choose the lesser of the two evils.

“Yes,” I reply instinctively.

She construes that as a collective agreement and doesn’t wait for Birendra to respond.

“Well, just go in there naturally, as you would be attending a normal party. Let the drinks be served and we’ll take the entire thing impromptu. My guess is that you won’t need to strip, the ladies get wild after a few drinks,” she says and walks away.

Birendra looks at me. He is baffled and excited. “Is this real?”

“Yes, my friend, this is as real as it can be,” I say.

We smoke on the porch and wait for the ladies to arrive. When they do arrive, they arrive in droves. They step out of
their shiny black, chauffeur-driven cars.  They are dressed in Gucci dresses and Jimmy Choo shoes. Each one is trying to outdo the other with the make-up on their faces. They’ve become replicas of each other in wearing the most fashionable clothes. They are unshelled eggs of the same size and shape; you can’t tell one from the other. I wonder why the recession hasn’t impacted them when it has turned us into objects of lust.

The party starts. We drink and make conversation with the ladies. It is all small talk which starts with the weather and progressively gets dirtier as the drinks flow.

Birendra’s shirt is ripped off and he looks at me helplessly. Another woman, whose name I don’t care to remember smooches me.

It is about six in the morning, when the early morning joggers are just venturing out of their homes. Two men, with crumpled and torn three piece suits, reeking of alcohol, make their way back home on a delicate motorcycle. The motorcycle buckles a little more, for there is the additional weight of the wads of currency notes in our pockets.