The Homing Pigeons... (27 page)

Radhika

I
go  back  to  the  porch  of  the  Gulmohar  Park  house.  The children don’t come here very often. It’s the middle of their Diwali vacation and they’ve gone back to their native. This setting is familiar. The weeds over grew in the monsoons and they still remain. They make me think about the weeds that grew in my brain when I decided to marry Vimal. The only reason that I got married a second time was to spite Aditya. There was no other reason that would justify my marrying a forty-three-year-old man. It had been a season of self-discovery. The ego that I never knew existed in me raised its ugly head. I had been scorned, demeaned and hurt. Aditya had left me for his career, for money and for everything materialistic. I was an impediment and a liability. I had played out every reason why he had left me and reached this conclusion. I wanted to show him that I could be richer than he ever would be and so, when I found Vimal Ahuja, an affluent businessman and a client of Citibank, I manipulated him to marry me.

It had been sudden and notwithstanding that he had a daughter Meera, who was just eight years younger than me, it was my chance to prove to Aditya that if money had ever been my motivation to love him, he was inferior. Stupidly, I
had never been able to do that either. I had made a trip to Delhi three months after the wedding, about six months after I had moved to Lucknow to come face to face with him and enact the scene that I had played out in my mind, every day of those six months. He wasn’t there. From my colleagues, I learnt that he had moved abroad on a foreign posting. I think he went to the Philippines. So, I was now caught in a loveless marriage that had ended with Vimal’s death, leaving me an heiress of a large bungalow in Delhi – in love at various points in time with one man, twice married to men I didn’t love, once divorced, once widowed.

It had happened so long ago, nearly eight years ago and yet, the memories are so fresh, as if it has happened only yesterday. Strangely, what I had thought of as improbable and impossible has happened. I have forgiven him. In the years that went by, time has done what it does best – heal.

In many ways, I have relived our relationship in my mind and even though the end was so bitter and disappointing, our moments of love always overshadow the bitterness. So many times, I am tempted to go back to him. I want to find him and tell him that he has been forgiven just like he forgave me. I looked for him on the Internet. There is only a LinkedIn profile that says that he used to work at Citibank. It’s almost like he has disappeared. I wonder where he is and what he is doing.

Aditya

“W
here are you from?” she asked me.

“India,” I replied.

“India, big country?”  she asked me, rolling the R in the country like Filipinos do.

“Yes! Very big country” I replied.

“Bigger than Luzon?” she asked.

For God’s sake, give me a break. Luzon was the largest island in the Philippines, a veritable speck on the world map, possibly smaller than India’s smallest state and here I was lying in bed with this cheap whore who was asking me this question.

I pushed her away in disgust, even more disgusted with myself that I was in bed with this filthy woman, who under the influence of alcohol and the dim light of the shady bar had looked worth picking up.

In some strange way, hardly patriotic, I was compelled to come back from the Philippines. The country had provided me with employment and the refuge from her memories. Alcohol was cheap, tobacco cheaper and there was an endless supply of women who would pretend to love you for your money. I
couldn’t even pretend. A dark, deep hole still existed within my soul, the corner where love used to exist.

I came back to India and I was coerced into marrying Jasleen, a Sikh girl that my parents had found for me. I had resisted and they had coerced. I had said that I didn’t want to be married to anyone I didn’t love, but they had insisted. I was indifferent and we were married. I eventually became the good son, at the cost of being a poor husband. As if to confirm my derangement, I had estranged my parents soon after I married.

The bank had a position open – as head of cards sales for north India and I gladly came back to India. I was doing very well professionally, being lauded as the best thing that happened to Citibank in India. My sales figures were the best: I was selling more cards than all the other regions combined. That was until the recession hit. The delinquencies that hit were in the same ratio as the sales. Overnight, I turned from a hero to being a villain. I was the cause why the bank was losing money.

The recession also brought with it an exodus of NRIs
who had left India for greener pastures.  The brain drain that had been plaguing India through the eighties and early nineties, was being corrected. A fresh slew of Non Resident Indians were claiming jobs in India that they hadn’t thought were worth their while. Amongst them, was one man who resembled a mouse – Mr Abhinav Chandra. He joined as the head of the cards business in India and was my immediate boss.

It was an instant recognition for both of us, and the fallout was the same as it would’ve been if I had been in his shoes: Restructured.

Now, here I am, as cheap as the cheapest whore that I had slept with, once married, once divorced and still in love with only one woman, whose ex-husband, by a wicked quirk of fate, has rendered me into a gigolo.

I turn around to see Bhatoliya standing behind me, “Where are you lost stud?” he asks me.

“Nah, nothing. Tell me,” I say.

“You’ve got to speak to this Divya woman. She wants a thirty-five
per cent cut on this client that she’s sending you. Our overheads are high, we can’t afford it,” he says.

Overheads.
Wow! I haven’t realized when my best friend turned into a businessman.

“I will,” I promise.

Divya’s greed is never-ending. While she is a damn good pimp, providing an endless supply of clients, her commission structure goes up every time there is a new client introduced. I will need to speak to her the next time we met. She is being greedy.

“And who is this new client? Is she coming over or is it a house call?” I ask Bhatoliya.

“She’s coming over. Divya just said her name is… I don’t even remember, some Ahuja. She is expected in at 3 this afternoon. First timer. Wants you to be gentle.”

The business was doing well. Bhatoliya’s dream of not selling toothpaste to make a living seemed on track. He was happy and I was sad. I was now in the trade for over a year and the ignominy of serving as a sex slave to the many women was beginning to take a toll. There are times in one’s life that what you have is not enough and I was feeling like it too. Think about it, I was an out of job banker, who had become a male prostitute, making more money than I would have done
at the job. I had craved for freedom from my wife, and I had gotten it. I wanted to be in a big city and I was, and yet, there was sadness. A deep melancholic sadness, that arose out of loneliness. Ironically, I would meet at least two women a day and yet, there was loneliness.

Ra
dhika

“J
ust 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.