Chapter 18: The Dead Dog, Part 4

I have been God: that feeling is probably the most nauseating thing in the universe.
It is difficult to say precisely where we went and how the day ended. It is difficult to try and estimate how many hours or minutes or seconds or days or eons the experience lasted. It is especially difficult to differentiate fact from fiction and certainty from the imaginary and real from illusion and hallucination.
But who said that The Imaginary can’t be Real? While sitting on top of the guesthouse that day, the mild pain I had had in the back of my neck for the past month had suddenly begun to burn. It burned and it tortured me and it travelled down my spine and then to the front and oh shit it fucking hurt.
Was that real pain? Did I imagine it? Then what about the beeping sound in my ears at the café that evening? Was I really hearing something? Were my ears hearing it or was it simply transmitting within my mind?
If I imagined it, then why did my neck hurt like that? That sound was definitely not fiction. My ideas and all the myths and those all-knowing whispers and the cloudy white skies in the mind were really there!
Maybe we imagine all that we sense..! Maybe the mind is the only anaesthesia! I have heard about hypnotists that make you fearless and physically, factually, numb. Is that imaginary numbness?
What the FUCK is reality?
Every single book I had picked up on enlightenment and the aghorees and the tantrics and yoga and Shiva had one common underlying theme: the universe we sense is nothing more than mere illusion, put here in front of us ignorant barely-conscious beings who end up spending a million lifetimes as million different things in a unifying hypnotized, narcoleptic trance. Only those who are lucky enough to achieve moksh and release from this cycle go on to see the Real.
But I understand now that the very crux of the maya and the atman of the illusionary and the reality of the whole universe is in itself as illusionary as I want it to be. Real is whatever I imagine Real to be.

On a hot monsoon Sunday afternoon which threatened of a stormy wet evening to follow, Shubham and I had hopped on Rakesh’s motorbike and transported deep into the old city and into the Gadaulia area. Rakesh stopped the bike outside a small electronic shop while I tried to keep my cool in the humidity and the ruckus of human traffic and the mosquitoes.
We set off on foot and followed Rakesh as he took a sharp turn into the thinnest of lanes. I dodged a reckless bicycler, side-stepped a bull, and hopped over a pile of shit that the bull had left behind. Rakesh took another unexpected left turn inside what looked like a small tea shop except it had no tables, chairs, or lights. The two of us crept behind him and had just enough space to stand flat with our backs against the wall and next to a marble shelf full of large mud jars and polythene bags. Another thin corridor next to Rakesh led deeper inside the shop.
We were greeted by a sweaty moustached man who sat on the only remaining space on the dusty floor next to us.
The moment I had a chance to exhale the stuffy air I nudged Rakesh’s shoulder. “Are you sure this is the place?”
He smiled, “Yes, yes, trust me, yaar.”
These were the last few days of Rakesh’s summer break, so he was especially excited to bring us out. On the other hand, Shubham, whom I had only met a few times before, was looking nervous as hell.
“Rakesh, yaar,” he whispered, “Where have you brought us? Is this legal?”
“Legal enough,” Rakesh quipped.
The man on the floor pointed at Rakesh and asked him to go in the corridor. The three of us took a few steps in and were suddenly greeted by a refreshing gift of relatively ample space and bright lights.
“Whoa!” I adjusted my eyes into the new room. It was the size of maybe three toilet cubicles, but at that moment felt larger than a cricket field. A bright yellowish light illuminated the room. It had three benches around three sides, and a long table in the middle. The only signs of decoration were a full-body mirror on the fourth side and a portrait of Shiva below the light.
“Take a seat,” Rakesh said, before taking one himself.
I was still in awe. “This looks like… this looks like someone’s hideout… or a mafia meeting point…”
Rakesh laughed, “It probably is!”
Shubham and I were not only relative strangers to each other, but were also quite foreign to the experience about to be unleashed upon us.
“So, neither of you has ever done this?” Rakesh asked.
Shubham shook his head nervously. I sat pokerfaced, responseless.
I realized over time that Shubham barely ever spoke, argued, or offered an opinion. He would question things every once in a while, but then always passively buckle himself in for the ride. He was slightly shorter than me and much chubbier, with his eyes constantly behind a set of large round spectacles and his ears constantly being fed English Rock music from a set of earphones attached to his walkman.
Rakesh slapped him behind his ear, “Put the music off now,” he said, “Your brain is going to become a fucking radio soon enough.”
Shubham complied, and seconds later, The Sweaty Moustached Man who seemed to own the place entered our little mafia den. Rakesh put up three fingers and gave him a confident nod; The Man disappeared in the corridor again.
“So, Azad…” Shubham asked, “How long are you back in town for?
I had been asked this before. “Oh, I don’t know… shit, it could be anything… days, months, years… Time has different rules in Varanasi, doesn’t it?”
He smiled, “Are you working? Studying?”
“No, no, nothing… just drifting along…”
No work, no Chachi, and nothing to do in this bloody city except wait to die.
An enthusiastic clap from Rakesh interrupted us – The Man had returned with three cold unhygienic-looking glasses of Thandai. I scrutinized my drink, which matched the colour of the light from the fluorescent bulb above us. We waited for Rakesh’s orders; although I had had this local beverage several times before, I knew that it was going to be enhanced by certain special flavours today.
The Man went back out and quickly returned with a muddy brown handful of what looked like someone’s constipated shit.
“Time to pounce!” Rakesh ordered again, before breaking off a small ball of the stuff from The Man’s hand and dropping it in his drink. I watched him curiously as he took the remaining bit of brown goo which was still stuck to his fingers and, standing up to face the Shiva portrait, marked it expertly on the image’s smiling blue face. He then sat down and swirled the Thandai with his finger to mix it.
He looked up at us, “This is tradition here. You cannot have bhang before offering some to Shiva first.”
“Are you serious?” I smirked.
“Yes, yaar! The only other thing that Shiva loves as much as Varanasi and his women is bhang… You can’t leave him out of the party!”
Shubham and I looked at each other. “How much do I take?” Shubham asked The Man.
“However much you see fit,” came the least helpful direction of the day.
Shubham broke off a piece slightly smaller than what Rakesh had taken. I dug my fingers into the goo and enthusiastically broke off the largest handful. Rakesh gave me a quizzing stare, to which I responded, “He said ‘however much’, right?”
“Ok – cheers!” Rakesh bellowed, “Drain it down as quick as you can – this isn’t fucking wine.”
And so down my throat the drink went. It wasn’t pleasant, but I fought against the taste. We slammed our glasses down at precisely the same time. Then I slurped off the remaining bit off my moustache.
“Yeah!” Rakesh said, “Now let’s get the fuck out of here!”
I paused and waited for something to happen – something, anything. I got up and sat back down and got up again. I threw clueless looks at both Rakesh and Shubham. I tried to think hard to test whether I could think hard. Nothing.
“Nothing’s happening,” I told Rakesh as we stepped out of the shop.
“Be patient,” he said.
“Nothing’s happening,” I told him 10 minutes later, as we dodged another wave of heavy human and vehicular traffic to get inside a thin stony lane crowded with vendors selling garlands and sweets and strange musical instruments and other prayer material.
“Be patient,” Rakesh replied.
“Nothing’s happening,” I said as we went deeper and deeper into that thin stony gullie, and had a cup of tea and were threatened by a curiously unhappy-looking bull and taken twists and turns into more and more gullies full of litter and dung and Godly things and more people.
“Relax, yaar, just be patient,” he repeated.
I kept on staring at the time on my wristwatch but soon lost track of when I had begun keeping track. Shubham had stayed quiet for the past half an hour. Or was it 45 minutes? I didn’t remember and then I didn’t care.
We walked deeper and deeper in… or was it further and further away? The buildings changed hue and shape and age. Rakesh led the way, unconscionably taking random turns and twirls as we followed. I wanted to know where we were going but wasn’t in the mood to ask.
We passed small temples, smaller shrines, and large old trees that had been converted into more shrines. We crossed little devotional music stores and jumped over more piles of scattered shit.
Then Rakesh started laughing and stopped to look back at us.
“That door,” he pointed to the entrance of a pint-sized house on his side, “Look at that door!”
We did; it was small, had a small image of Ganesha painted on it, and was mostly blue.
“What about it?” I asked.
Rakesh continued laughing. “Just look at it! He-he-he-he!” he pointed, “It’s so tiny – like a dwarf door! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”
I smirked. Rakesh shook his head and then started walking again, still giggling to himself.
A few minutes later, Shubham began to laugh, too. “Ha! That really was a small door, wasn’t it?”
We saw many more doors; wooden and not wooden, small and slightly larger, colourful and full of God. Until we reached a thin, steep row of steps that headed downwards, where we walked down and soon reached a sudden clearing. The steps got wider and the wind got pleasantly harsher and there was the Ganga river.
“That’s brilliant,” Shubham whispered.
It wasn’t a new sight – I had been down to this ghat dozens of times before – but each time I tended to see the landscape from a different eye. This time, the Ganga looked mightier than ever before.
We walked closer to the raging river and sat down on the steps just a few metres above it. Dozens of people walked ritually around us as the descending sun had set up their cue for another dip in the dirty holy water. More bulls wandered around and a few Caucasian tourists were stared at.
I fell deeper into myself. Every noise I heard echoed in my ears over and over before fading slowly, slowly away. I felt like I was alone in my own shell and disconnected with whatever that did connect everyone and everything else. An invisible force that caused the smile on Rakesh’s face resonated with the flow of the Ganga and in the gleeful shouting of a child that had just caught a cricket ball somewhere behind me. But when the force approached me and my shell it just moved on and into the cracks of the old riverside steps and into the meditative minds of the ascetics dipping in the water.
I lifted up my left hand to examine it. My best hand. At that point, it began to feel lighter than the air in which it floated and that lightness spread down to my arm and then all of me started to detach itself from the environment. And then, I wondered why I had decided to lift up the left hand instead of the right one. I wondered why I had even pondered on the different point of views of examination of each hand. I then wondered if I had begun to wonder because something caused me to or that I wondered because that’s what I did to be.
I remained silent and Shubham did too. Rakesh stoop up and asked us to follow him. We walked along the ghat for a few minutes, until I saw grey and black clouds of smoke refracting the orangish hue of the setting sun. The smoke stemmed from the burning pyres of the cremation ghat and hovered hauntingly over the river.
The book on Kashi had spoken about this. The souls of all cremated here would be assisted by Shiva across our realm and across our river and I’m sure I saw a few of them floating around between the smoke clouds. At the ghat itself, large crowds were gathered around a small pond where more Gods stood.
This is where it all began. And a discus held by Vishnu set off a gleaming beam of energy that made the water that birth the fishes which brought a lot of us and I was born on that trident itself while living a life bouncing around it and making my way back. All the other ways began to be when I looked into the pond to see their reflections.
We walked further on: through the hordes of more ascetics and protectors of the cremation fire and tourists and logs of wood and children trying to study the Vedas and children trying to sell us drugs and temples. Rakesh led us away from the river and into the gullies again, where the route got thinner and the sky dimmer.
Tea shop number two. Or three, maybe. We sat by the end of a long bench, which stretched to occupy half a dozen other people. A heated discussion was already in process.
“No no, that’s not what the solution is,” said one seemingly enlightened old soul, “What they need to do is put all the electrical wires underground. That will solve the power problems.”
“What rubbish are you talking?” said another, “You think the state really wants to solve our problems?” he looked around for affirmation, “That bloody Mulayam Singh only wants to confuse us.”
And so on and so on. “Raoji!” the table occupiers greeted a familiar old square face as he sat down with deep green eyes and his green half-sweater and his cup of tea. Raoji, I recalled instantaneously, was one of the old time professors at the university, and was in the same faculty as Papa.
“This city will never change,” Raoji soon spoke in his constantly irritated nasal voice, “Never change.”
And they spoke about the lazy neverchanging city which is also somehow kinetically everchanging. Rakesh threw in his opinion about the old temples. Raoji threw in an entire fucking essay about them.
“There are two kinds of enlightenments in Kashi,” he said, “The Yog and the Bhog. You all have seen the statue in the Karmadeshwar Temple, right?”
My ears began beeping and echoing with his words, each of which became harder and harder to store in my memory vaults. “… spiritual means and material means…” I heard him say, “… understanding the atman or destructing the mind… enlightenment and intoxication…”
I had two more of tea, but was still thirsty for more.
“That new commissioner?” I heard a new voice start a new topic, “He’s a fraud, sala.”
Rakesh coaxed us to move on, and so we did.
We arrived at a well-maintained, large building surrounded by many more fascinating little doors leading to other little worlds that I didn’t care about. “Let’s go upstairs,” Rakesh ordered and we listened and I got inside to discover that the place was some sort of a guesthouse or hotel or something. We walked up hundreds of flights of stairs and got higher and higher until we reached near the peak.
“What is this place?” I asked Rakesh.
He smiled, “Just look around.”
I did. We had to go up one more row of stairs and then I saw where we were. There was a restaurant on the rooftop, and it was so high that I could see the entire city from up here.
The wind slapped against my face as I looked around excitedly and was bubbling with energy again. The descending rays of the sun illuminated the Ganga which gleamed back confidently. On the other side, I saw an intricate maze of gullies stretching out its tentacles around me – the thin lanes spread like tributaries of the Ganga, making its way to the main road through the old homes and slums and colour. Monkeys jumped from building to building and the crescent shape of the city and Shiva’s forehead revealed itself.
There was a wall in my mind, with each brick firmly cemented to the other. There were bricks about the songs I like and the friends I had spoken to, and one brick reminded me of my age. The bricks on the top were looser and more prone to getting blowing away by the whirlwind in my head and there were bricks way down in the wall’s foundations which were supposed to stay firm for life.
But then the space between the bricks began to loosen and expand. The first few layers on the top got jettisoned off by the late afternoon breeze. I forgot about some of my college courses and couldn’t recall the colour of Rakesh’s motorbike.
“This place is beautiful, isn’t it?” I heard one of the others say.
I nodded. Then the bricks began to fly away some more. The back of my neck started to hurt but I couldn’t remember why.
“Now… Saley!” Rakesh began laughing again, “Fuckers! Now do you feel something?”
I smiled back an affirmation, because the only thing I could think about was the vibration on my neck. Shubham had slid away to the other side of the rooftop, humming along to the music from his walkman.
Rakesh was feeling talkative. “Crazy, right?” he asked, “This is a whole different zone…”
It was, I knew it. But something was wrong. “What did we really have?” I heard that my own voice sounded sore, “This doesn’t feel right. It really doesn’t feel right.”
I kept on saying “feel right” to myself as my voice trailed away. Rakesh laughed even louder. “Just enjoy it; you’ll be okay in a few hours.”
But it really didn’t feel right. This must be more… It just didn’t feel right.
When it began to get darker, we decided to walk down the infinite flight of steps to leave the guesthouse. Ages later, we found ourselves in the gullie again. “Let’s go out to the main road,” said Rakesh.
So we did. We saw many more of the same things in our attempt to be unlost as we did in our initial deliberation to get lost. More doors, more shit, more tourists, and more dancing drug addicts. The lanes got thinner as we walked in the direction opposite to that of the river. None of us knew the way, but we walked on and on, instinctively twisting and turning and dodging and guessing. There seemed to be no end to it, as each gullie seemed to resemble the last, but at the same time brought us into unfamiliar new worlds. By the time we escaped the maze, the sun had retired for the day. We came out to be greeted by the noise and bright glittering lights of the Chawk main road and market.
On the way there, I continued to lose more and more bits of myself with each step. The wall that defined each part of my personality, of who Azad Shanker was, of all of my me-ness, seemed to be disintegrating.
I laughed at jokes made that I couldn’t have laughed at otherwise. But when I was finished with my hysteria, I wondered if the Real Me laughs at everything? I saw a sallow-faced, infested-armed, maggoty-mouthed little boy and I didn’t stop to look twice. Is it in my nature to feel pity for the less fortunate or am I someone who just ignores them? Do I have a nature?
“Let’s walk till we find a rickshaw, okay?” I heard Rakesh say over the cacophony of motor sounds on the main road, “We’ll head down to that coffee shop in Asi.”
I agreed. Shubham probably did, too. We walked in a single file manner on the roadside between the electronic and silk shops on our left and the chaotic traffic of scooters, bullock-carts, motorbikes, small cars, people, and other animals on the right. I walked in the middle, with Rakesh in front and Shubham behind me. Rakesh sped up and Shubham slowed down, and I probably remained constant, and so I was left alone amongst hundreds of others.
The noises got louder but I calmed them down again. A car whooshed by with a deafening vroom. Another followed, but this time I chose to mute it away. A few more bricks fell apart; I couldn’t remember where I was going or who I was with.
Rakesh… Rakesh… I forced myself to recall… and Shubham… Who the fuck is Shubham? How well does he know me? How well must he know me?
I walked further down. A man on a scooter passed by while staring at me, and I was certain that he was my primary school Geography teacher. It’s a pity that he had to see me in this state. I looked inside a book shop on the right side of the road and I immediately knew that the balding store owner in his blue and white checked shirt recognized me from all the time I had spent in there rummaging through his ‘Spirituality’ section. I saw another man inside the shop throw me a look of contempt and disgust that matched the look on the shop owner’s face. Further ahead, two more people recognized me and stared at me; one was definitely an employee of Deepu Chachu and the other actually looked like one of my classmates from Lucknow. What’s his name..? Ravi? Ram? Ramana? Yes… Ramama… Rammy..! What the hell is he doing here?
They can all see me. They all know who I am and what I’m being. I swiftly walked on.
I struggled to remember what day of the week it was. Then, a few more bricks were blown off as I forgot about my favourite comic book hero (Super Commando Who?) and who my college roommates had been. How did I talk to them? How was it different to how I speak to people here in Varanasi? When a music store on the left side blasted a boisterous Punjabi tune, I began to wonder whether or not I liked it and what qualitative standards I had set for myself when it came to appreciating music.
The familiar faces continued, until out of paranoia I decided to not look at them and focus on each of my little steps on the road ahead. I was distracted, when, amongst the potpourri of obscure loud sounds, I now began to hear whispers.
“Look at him – look how he’s walking,” I heard a female voice. When I looked up, I spotted two girls, probably around my own age, standing far away and across the road. Across the car honks and the Hindi music and the loud shopkeepers. But all the other sounds died and I heard them.
The second girl replied, “Forget him – Let’s go back in. My mother-in-law is going to be angry.”
“Oh yes, mine too,” the first one said, “I overspent on the dinner budget.”
I walked on, but even as I left the women far behind, I could still make out titbits of their conversation. When their voices finally ended, another, deeper voice hit my ears.
“What’s wrong with you?” A man inside a clothing store asked the store’s owner.
The owner sighed and whispered back haplessly, “I don’t know where to go anymore.”
By then I had entered the Madanpura area, and the dome-shaped houses and mosques and the weaving and Urdu writing on the walls. “Looks like we’ve entered Kabul,” I’m sure I heard the friend Whateverhisnameis behind me say.
I nodded. The whispers had stopped now, but the cracks in the wall were only widening. I felt light-headed, suddenly freed from the presuppositions of memory and being. I walked unconsciously. I tried to remember that one other person whom I really loved or was interested in or was obsessed with or something but couldn’t recall what she looked like.
The whispers had stopped, yes, but the mute voices were just beginning to get themselves heard… I looked around the busy street, and each pair of eyes I focused on seemed to shout out their own stories.
A man in a white kurta and kufi hat stepped out of his shop. My turn to stay awake, he thought, Another long night…
Oh, I hope it doesn’t rain tonight, thought a raggedy old beggar who also silently told me that she was a widow as she dusted off her dirty sari. This is all that I have to wear.
I couldn’t take it anymore, so I closed my eyes and allowed the forces of nothingness to take me forward. It didn’t work, because I could still see everyone and everything, and feel everyone and be everyone. A thin white thread stretched out of my head and out to the young girl with a black veil covering her face who had been married off way too early to a violent older man and to the accountant on his scooter who hadn’t taken a holiday in four years and to Deepu Chachu who still cried for Chachi in his sleep every night.
Bricks flew off at alarmingly accelerating speeds from my vacuous memory. Whoosh! went my childhood and Bam! disappeared my parents. As this happened, I flew higher and higher until the dark clouds parted and a clear white sky was visible high above. I began to zoom closer towards it.
Closer and closer I went, until nothing was left between me and the white nothingness except for a stretchy transparent cloth which felt like the inside of a balloon. So this is where I’ve been for so long. When the last of the bricks began to fly away, the only thing holding me down were the foundation stones: And they were Chachu and Chachi and I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about them.
An infinite instant later, I was distracted and brought back down by the unexplainably familiar scent of death.
I looked around the chaos and saw what it was – I had walked all the way to Sonarpura, and in the middle of the road lay the corpse of a mustard-coloured mongrel. Its colour was still ripe with life, but the mouth-open, tongue-out pose and its awkwardly crossed legs which were flattened by skid marks that stretched out to its crushed rib cage confirmed otherwise.
I examined the dog and then I knew how it had happened. Don’t do this to yourself had been the animal’s final thought and I agreed with it. A few of the bricks fell tumbling back on the wall and I knew who and what I was.
I walked on, but the thoughts of The Others didn’t leave me. Neither did the dead dog.

Time sped up as the night grew riper. A rickshaw may or may not have been taken, food was eaten, senseless jokes were laughed at. We ate Kachauris and Samosas and Gulab Jamuns and lots more. Deep philosophical discussions took place and were duly forgotten the next morning. More food was eaten.
We sat inside a small café which was decorated with the right combination of colours and shapes and furniture to make it look cosy rather than cramped. I’d tried the savouries and the caffeinated, the sweet and the sweeter.
Rakesh and Shubham spoke to me, but it took intense concentration of all my senses to understand their words. Plus, there was a beeping sound that clouded my eardrums.
“Did you guys hear that?” I asked them.
“Hear what?” they answer-asked together.
“That… that beeping.” It grew louder.
“Nope,” said one. “What the fuck are you talking about?” asked the other.
The beeping grew louder.
Suddenly, we were at a different restaurant, having a different meal.
“Where did you leave the bike?” Shubham asked Rakesh.
“We brought bikes?” was Rakesh’s response.
Somehow, I got back to Chachu’s place that night, and by then had become much more aware of the environment. I still didn’t believe in it, though.

Change of Title: Everything Else Is Opinion

I've decided to change the title of my novel from Determinism to Everything Else Is Opinion. It makes more sense to the theme that I'm trying to convey in my story.

Chapter 17: The Job

For the longest time, I wasn’t certain when the dream ended and the day began. It seemed like I had already opened my eyes several times before I actually really did it. It seemed like I had been woken up again and again but dreamt my eventual awakening every single time.
And then I finally did open my eyes and wake up, and realized that I had already experienced this dream.
I got out of the bed and stretched my arms. Memories of yesterday began to take shape. It seemed like the bricks were being laid back down in my brain. I was still feeling light and airy, but I was at least certain of who and what and where I was.
I’m never, ever, doing that again. Fuck. Never ever.
My memory seemed to be blank when I tried to think back and remember why it had all been so horrible but so damn exciting. I remembered bright lights, loud auto-rickshaw horns, other people’s whispers, and that dead dog.
Oh yeah! That fucking dog again!
Okay, I have to get out of this trance, this life, this meaningless leading to nowhere road. People will come and live and die and nothing could change. Chachi… the dogs… me..?
Still feeling woozy, I made my way down to the living room. It was nearly noon but my uncle was surprisingly not at work.
“Good morning, Azad,” he said when he saw me drudge down the stairs, “How are you doing?”
“Fine,” I hoarsely replied, “Fine, Chachu.”
“Do you want some tea? Coffee?”
I shook my head, “No, no, I’m fine Chachu. Thanks.”
“Cold coffee?” he urged, “I know you loved your Chachi’s cold coffee!”
“No, no, Chachu, I’m fine, thanks.”
Damn. What else happened last night? More bricks fell into place. Kalpana’s face made a comeback after a temporary, refreshing exile from my memories. Today was just one of those mornings… I had so much to say, but no one would be able to understand me… no one but Her…
I sat down on the sofa and Chachu took a seat next to me. “What are your plans for the day, son?” he asked.
I yawned and started hunting for the remote control to the TV. “Nothing much, Chachu,” I answered him, “I think I will just be here for some time and then go to see Rakesh and that new guy, Shubham, in the evening.”
Deepu Chachu found the remote control for me and held it up. He didn’t hand it over, though. “Don’t you want to work, Azad?” he sighed, “Where are you going? This is no way to live… Sitting around watching television the whole day in that silly moustache of yours.”
Oh shit. Here we go: the inevitable has arrived. I had been ready for the question for some time now, but today was just the wrong morning to get into it.
“I have thought about it Chachu,” I said, eyeing the remote control, “I just need to find out what is right for me, you know?”
Chachu stood up and coughed. What is right for me? I wondered. I need to have some profitable interest… something… I hated the BBA course and wouldn’t want to study anymore. I wouldn’t want to get into any sort of business, but do I have any other real skills? I won’t do anything too degrading, obviously. And no, there are exactly zero chances of me following my father’s footsteps into teaching, especially after I’ve witnessed the brunt of local student behaviour first-hand. Should I give The Twins a call? Wonder what they have gotten themselves into..?
“Why don’t you work for me at the restaurant, Azad?” Chachu suddenly blurted out, “I need someone to sit permanently at the reception desk. Plus this way, we will get to spend more time together.”
“At the restaurant?” I yawned again, “Are you sure, Chachu?”
He was. And excitedly so. “Yes, yes! It will be good experience for you, son. I will pay you, of course.”
Of course. There was no mention of any change in living arrangements; I went on to assume that he was willing to keep letting me lodge freely at his place.
Deepu Chachu left for work, alone, while I spent the rest of the day contemplating his offer. Between the films of TV and my lack of mental composure carried over from last night, it was tough to focus my mind on the restaurant.
I came to the conclusion by that evening that Deepu Chachu was right. I need to do something. Days were passing by without any milestone, any significant memory. And any memorable event that did happen was probably watered down thanks to the drug indulgence.
Plus, I knew that my uncle probably needed me much more than I needed him. My head was still feeling like it was receiving signals from people around me, and although I wasn’t as omniscient or paranoid today as I was last night, I could still understand Chachu better than I’d ever understood him before. I didn’t know what it was in bhang that, in the process of blowing up my mind, opened it to see minds of other people, but it was a strange and exciting feeling.
Chachu is lonely; I understood that. It would be a magnificent gesture on my part if I listened to him and helped him out at work. Who knows; seeing him happier might even cheer me up a little.
So that was it. No more drugs. No more loitering around all day waiting for the evening to arrive. I would hate to look back at my life and realize that I had been worth nothing more than another random living thing that spends most of its living in dying.

My process of ‘making the most out of life’ didn’t begin the next day, because I was still recovering from the traumatizing bhang experience of two nights ago. It took even more time to get a good night’s sleep for the first few nights, too. But I made it clear to Rakesh that I wasn’t going to get high anymore, and he, too, cut himself off from his dealers. When my head finally settle down and the voices in it narrowed down to just my own, I was ready to sit at the reception desk of my uncle’s ‘City of Light’ restaurant.
I began that day fairly optimistically, and then proceeded to surprise myself further.
There was no plan, presupposition, or even a stray thought about it earlier. As I was shaving off the rest of my face, I looked at the moustache and for the first time in three years it began to look a little silly.
And so I felt like shaving it off.
Successful people must have style. They don’t have uncombed hair and unironed clothes and they don’t want to go nowhere.
I shaved the moustache off, quickly and unemotionally, and without valediction. And I didn’t even feel any different afterwards – a mark on your face yesterday and a gleaming smiling nothingness today. Just like that.
It didn’t even look odd. But then there was a new feeling that engulfed me on the way to work that day – that feeling was nothing short of a refreshing breeze of freedom. The rainfall last night had left an electricity in the wind that slapped against my fully shaven smooth skin and I realized what I had just done. And it felt good.
Everyone stared at me at work when I first stepped in. They were used to it by the second day and it was then all right. I was moustacheless and it was all right.
By the third day, everyone (including me) had forgotten that the moustache ever existed.
It was on my very first day at work that I met Hanisch. He was a young German tourist who had been in Varanasi for the past three months, and I was a brand new smooth-faced young receptionist flowing with positive energy ready to greet every customer with a hello and a handshake.
“Vat is gud to eat here?” he asked a timid waiter, who, unable to comprehend the German’s accented English, forwarded him to me.
“Vat is gud to eat here?” Hanisch asked me.
I flipped through the menu and wondered the same. “Everything, sir,” I unhelpfully answered, “We specialize in all types of food.”
Hanisch smiled and then snatched the menu from me, “But vat do you like?”
“Mattar Paneer,” I answered without hesitation, “Try out Matter Paneer.”
He did try it, and he liked it. Hanisch was so impressed by my recommendation that he came back for lunch at the restaurant the next day.
“Vat else shood I try,” he asked.
I recommended Pallu’s Butter Chicken, which was, of course, another big hit with the German’s taste buds. “I love curry,” he triumphantly added. The following week, Hanisch returned three more times, and each time, I got to know him a little better. He told me his name and that he was a student in Germany – he had suspended his college admission a whole year so that he could take time to travel around Asia. He told me that he was learning how to play the Sitar in Varanasi and was also taking yoga lessons. He told me how much he loved the Varanasi. He loved it so much that he had spent days extensively reading and researching the city’s history and mythology.
“That is impressive,” I said, “Except that, in Varanasi, there is no guarantee of history.”
Hanisch raised a quizzing eyebrow. “Vat do you mean, Asaad?”
“I mean that people can make anything history here. Everything in the city is a story, and they could all be bullshit or entirely true; and there would be no way of us knowing for sure.”
“But this city,” he paused a moment to breathe the sweet exalting air of my shitty city, “This city is like the heartbeat of the universe, Asaad, you know? It is full of culture, and tradition… I sometimes believe that everything started from here and vill end here too, you know?”
And on and on we went. Hanisch was convinced that the city really was the centre of the universe. He spoke about how Shiva will protect Varanasi from all afflictions; how it is the favourite of all the Gods; how it is fucking indestructible and enlightening and all that. I began to feel slightly embarrassed by how much more he knew about my own city than I did.
“Everyone important who haas ever lived haas at some point lived in Varanasi!” he said, “Just check up the history, you know… The Gods and heroes of Indian mythology all vanted to bee here. And people like Boodha, Paarshvanatha, Kabir Daas, Tulsi Daas, Prem Chaand…”
He was right – I guess the city did have a magnetic pull towards all the Greats. I began to think that, if the city does hold such a critical role in the shape of the world, then everyone who has ever been associated with it must be especially crucial to the world’s history.
Including me!
We became friends, Hanisch and I, until the day came when he told me that he only had one week left in Varanasi.
“I vill go to Agra now, Asaad,” he told me, “I shouldn’t miss the Taj Mahal, right?”
I agreed. But before he left, my first ever European friend left a few things behind.
“What’s this?” I rummaged through a pile of books he had been reading since his arrival here, most of which seemed to be about Indian history and Buddhism.
“Oh, Asaad, I don’t vant to carry these books with me, you know? Too heavy to be taken everywhere…”
My eye then fell on a book called ‘13 Steps to Fortune’. I turned it over to read the back cover. “Will you defend your honour against the odds, or will you scram away?” it challenged me, “Will you be unemotional while striking at your competition?”
“I will keep this one, okay my friend,” I had inexplicably picked up the habit of addressing each foreign tourist as ‘friend’, even when they were an actual friend of mine. I waved up the ‘13 Steps’ to him, “Is this a good book?”
He looked at the title and smirked. “I actually hated this one,” he said, “But I haad a friend who thought that it vas perfect.”
I kept the book aside, only to find myself referring back to it long after Hanisch had left.

Rakesh had come by to visit the restaurant during one of the quieter afternoons at work.
“So, you’re too busy for your friends now?” he said while munching on the complementary plate of French Fries that I had ordered for him, “Every time now, yaar – work work work!”
I agreed. “It’s been nice working here… I barely have time to worry about anything else.”
And what did I have to worry about anyways? Nothing at all. Apart from worrying about Deepu Chachu’s emotional stability, and that fish dish which gave three customers stomach aches last night, and finding a more concrete reason for my existence, and discovering who makes the decisions for me, and Kalpana. Apart from that – nothing at all.
Let’s pause at the Kalpana point, shall we? Earlier, I used to wake up every morning with her excited little face plastered inside my eyelids. She would be enthusiastically explaining something drastically boring like the American Great Depression or something but making it sound like the greatest circus show in history. Well anyways, I would wake up every morning with an image like that in my mind, and since I wouldn’t be doing anything useful all day anyways, I would end up spending my time imagining highly improbably situations in which she and I would get back together. Maybe we were to bump into each other at an arbitrary train station and she would rediscover how much she liked me. Maybe she planned a trip to Varanasi to surprise me, and tell me that she had been lying about her engagement all along (due to some solid excuse, of course), but was now back to see me because she couldn’t bare the pain of missing me anymore.
It was all extremely depressing, really.
And then the job began… That was when, slowly, the image of Kalpana began to fade away and my mind began to be instead bombarded by scrolls of food items written in neat English with a corresponding price of each one next to it. Encouraged, I began to work even harder, until I barely had the time or the effort to fantasize about Kalpana.
Rakesh was also one of the few people to whom I had admitted by only ‘real’ professional ambition.
“Yaar, I think it’s time to say goodbye to your comic shop, isn’t it?” he laughed.
I burst out laughing too. “For now, yes,” I said, “But you never know – when I retire from the restaurant, I might go ahead and construct the comic book heaven of India!”
It wasn’t to be, of course. I got busier (and better) at my job. Like always, though, there was another problem – the same day that Deepu Chachu first complimented me on my improved work, I realized that I was still wasting my life away.

And this is what it was – while watching my horoscope being read out by a wide-eyed old woman on TV that night, I had, as usual, begun to curse my fate. I cursed the day Chachi died and cursed the fact that I didn’t stay in New Delhi and cursed that fucking dead dog.
But then I began to ponder… Why am I angry at my fate? Fate is not a punishment; it is just the reality. It is I who has instead chosen to punish myself by negatively welcoming this reality. My life is at it is, and if I can’t change what the horoscope had laid in front of me then I could at least change myself so that I could cope with whatever does lie in front. I was free to do so. I was definitely free to change. To be better. Happier.
“Just follow me,” Deepu Chachu said one day, “I’ll tell you what to do!”
That made sense – I was a willing student in need of a willing teacher; and my uncle, with all his pros and all his cons, would have to do. I followed his every move at work and outside of work for the next week. I saw how he spoke to people of a higher social standing and I saw how he had some respect reserved even for his lower-level employees and the lower-caste cleaning staff. He was organized with his money and his other belongings at work, but he seemed to forget the same sense of organization at home because he habitually believed that Chachi would somehow take care of things. I also had to face the brunt of his annoying habit of dropping unnecessary emollient lessons to life at every given opportunity.
For instance, we once saw a customer barge in with his copiously large and loud family, all of whom cursed the waiter at their table at different times during the evening. The father of the family led this rampage of ‘why is our food so late you little pig?’ and ‘did you bitch mother teach you how to make the soup this cold?’ all through, and at the end of the meal, the father obviously didn’t tip.
On their way out, one of the young children of this large brigade pointed at the waiter’s chubby, pimply, untipped face, and laughed with his brothers.
“It’s not the child’s fault,” Chachu took a deep breath and exhaled philosophically, “You must learn, Azad, a man becomes whoever he chooses to follow. If the father of the family treats our employees like dirt, then the children will grow up to do the same. Set a good example, Azad, and more importantly, follow good examples.”
I agreed with him; I must follow a good example. By the end of the week, I also knew that that example would have to be someone other than my uncle.
“Let’s go, Azad! Let’s go!” he knocked on my door early in the morning, “How much do you need to sleep?”
“I’ll be there later…” was my drudging reply. So he left to work without me and I stopped following.

I wish I could meet Dr. Scholar again. If there is any one person whose advice I have listened to and not eventually disregarded over time, it’s him. Dr. Scholar’s smile had been a rare constant in my life, because that motherfucker could feel beatific at every damn thing while we go around frowning at relative laxes of luxury.
But I never saw him again. I didn’t even know whether or not he was still alive. Hell, I didn’t even know his name. Nevertheless, I attempted to find joy in retarded shit like he used to, but I spectacularly failed following a fit of impatience that same evening when Shubham took too long to close the shop and pick me up for the party.
Dr. Scholar had a unique vision of living the right way, but I didn’t believe that his methods could relate to me. At least not right now. I had to find some other way.

That is when my eye fell on the ‘13 Steps’ again.
The first time I shuffled through the book properly was during another quiet day at the reception desk. There was no one in the restaurant at that hour, and even the cooks and waiters had stepped away somewhere. I found the book stashed below my desk from the day Hanisch first left it for me.
I noticed the charts first – there were charts and graphs all over the book. In the introduction itself the writer, someone called Laurence T. Ackmann, made it clear that “an illustration was the best way of an explanation”.
I read on. And on and on and on. Until I realized that I had already arrived at the third chapter. Only the entry of a shy young couple in the restaurant dissevered me from the book, but I vowed to return to it the next time I got free.

Chapter 16: Self-help, Part 2

If you’re confident, you’re right.
With one painless, succinct, and above all, confident statement, Laurence T. Ackmann proposed to close the chapter on any ethical debate I had ever had with myself. There was no escaping it – this was his first and most important step. The line repeated in my head day and night and afternoon and evening and before and after work and alone and with other people in the strong royal English accent which I had imagined his voice to sound like.
I repeated it to myself in front of the mirror every morning, just like Ackmann suggested.
“I’m Azad Shanker and I’m confident,” I told myself, “If I’m confident about something, then I’m right about it.”
“Did you say something, Azad?” Deepu Chachu asked from downstairs.
“N-No,” I shouted back.
“Are you sure?” Chachu asked again, “I thought I heard you say something.”
“No, Chachu, nothing. See you at the restaurant, Chachu.”
When I heard him go out the main door, I turned to the mirror again. “I’m Azad Shanker and I’m confident,” This time I whispered it, “If I’m confident about something, then I’m right about it.”
If you’re confident, you’re right.
Ackmann was right too; he was a hundred percent accurate. There is no gospel but the one you make for yourself, he had written. I thought long and hard about it and came round and round to the same conclusion that he was absolutely one hundred percent accurate.
I thought of those winter mornings, waiting for any rejuvenating warm rays of sunlight to creep in through the large open-air veranda of our old house. I would sit on the cot bed next to one of the pillars, and every once in a while the sun would shine down mightily in a certain part of the room, making that section temporarily much warmer than the rest of the cold square. And then I would hear the arguments as Mummy and Papa went off at each other.
“You’re no father!” she shouted, “You can barely remember his name!”
“You’re no mother!” Papa shouted back, “You don’t want to remember his name!”
Mummy screamed; and then she turned quiet. Clang! I recognized the sound of the frying pan thrashing against a hard surface. Another thrash followed, and I closed my eyes as the sun light passed over me.
Then they began to argue about Uncle TT again. Mummy started howling and crying and then I got up and changed positions, moving to the other side of the square. I didn’t mind the cold as long as it was quieter on the other side.
And I used to always sit and wonder which one of them was right. Which one should I listen to? My father was angry all the time and my mother wasn’t like the neighbour Shivam’s mother who combed both our hair and cut both our nails and recited stories from the Arabian Nights for the both of us. Mummy was just… not memorable.
But now it didn’t matter. Neither of them needed to be ‘right’. Kalpana didn’t need to be right to leave me and Monty didn’t need to be right whenever he teased me. Because if you’re confident, you’re right.
I quickly got changed and walked out of the house. The sun beamed mightily in the summer morning as I mounted my scooter and drove up to the restaurant. I checked my watch to see that it was only 08:50 in morning – and I was content when I realized that this was the earliest time in which I had ever left home for work in the past six months.

Ackmann had a rare skill in his teaching – he could be babbling about the most fathomless topic in the world, like the struggle of certain breeds of electric eels or the art of tuning a violin to perfection, but still be able to communicate his message and relate it to me.
“Next time you get a chance, pluck the strings of a perfectly tuned violin’, said the first line of the second chapter in the ‘13 Steps to Fortune’, “For they are not only in tune with each other, but also resonate perfectly with the balance of sounds in nature when the instrument is expertly played.”
“This is how we must be – in tune with each other and in resonance with the universe.”
Amazing. I would have thanked Hanisch for leaving this gem of a book behind, but typically, I hadn’t bothered to keep any contact details to follow him up.
I did try to correspond with the book’s author though. When I told Rakesh about it, my idea was met with a scathing laugh.
“You’re going to write a love letter to this English Writer, Azad?” he laughed, “Sure, he will reply with hugs and kisses and self-improvement plans next month!”
“You don’t understand the power of the 13 steps, Rakesh – really, try reading them, they could help you, you know…”
Rakesh scoffed. “Help me? I’m the one who decides what steps are right for me. I don’t need some bullshit faker’s advice to tell me how to live my life.”
Rule number seven: If your friend comes between you and victory, then your friend is the enemy.
So I sat down and began to compose my letter. The book jacket of the ‘13 Steps’ didn’t give Ackmann’s postal address, but it did say that he could be contacted via his British publisher.
‘Dear Mr. Ackmann,’ I started, ‘I’m a huge fan of your book,’ I wrote, but then scratched a line through it to not sound like every single crazed fan of the book, ‘I’m writing to tell you about the impact the 13 steps have had in my life,’ that was a better start, I thought, less adoring, more professional, ‘I used to have confidence problems before in my life,’ I wrote and took a deep breath. Rakesh was busy in his dental books.
‘I still have confidence problems!’ I scratched and wrote, ‘Sometimes I don’t speak out when I should. But now I know that to find myself, to know exactly what I’m doing, to get exactly where I want to go, and to be sure of myself I just need to do a lot of…’
I stopped and read the letter back to myself. Rakesh looked up and waved a stupid smile. This is fucking dumb, I thought. What’s the point of writing to him? It’s not like I have something new to teach him.
So I crumbled the letter up and threw it away. My lunch break had stretched a few minutes long already anyways – it was time to get back to the restaurant.

I’m sure Ackmann would have scoffed at my position in life. I was stuck working the counter at a B-grade restaurant while he speaks about multinational business deals and risky million-dollar investments. But it was all relative, it really was. As long as the philosophy was the same, the 13 steps could change anyone’s life.
For example, I had begun to wake up much earlier now. Ackmann said that any type of head start over the other humans competing with you in life is a good start. No, I wasn’t up with the dawn of the day to greet the morning sun or anything, but it was still better than waking up in the afternoon and drudging my way through work. Take small, manageable steps, he said, but keep the big picture in mind.
Another thing which I had started to do was to improve my low standards for things. It took heavy persuasion worth dozens of pages before Ackmann was able to convince me that I wasn’t being far-sighted and high-hoping enough.
“I can’t be in a restaurant all my life, Chachu,” I told my uncle after work one day.
“Sure, so what else do you want to do with your life?”
I said I didn’t know, but I knew that to be far-sighted, you sometimes have to glaze over what is sitting right in front of you. So I didn’t know what greener pastures lay in front of me ahead of the restaurant, but the only way I was going to find out was if I looked over and beyond it.
So I had been to college and got a degree in something. I was born in a family of supposed intellectuals. So I’m supposed to do more with my life than sit in a restaurant and blah blah whatever. It was time to change.
Deepu Chachu realized it too, so from the following Monday, he named me ‘Assistant Manager’. It didn’t change things much, because I neither got a pay rise nor a more respectable place to sit and display my newfound Assistant Managerness. What I did get was more persuasion to remain in the restaurant for longer now that I was the prime candidate for Managerial duties whenever my uncle did decide to retire.
I finished the 366 page book and then I began to read it once again. The more I read Ackmann, the more I realized my shortcomings, and the more I wanted to improve and keep reading.
For one, he re-confirmed to me that appearance is nearly everything. True, the moustache was long gone, and so was the weight, but I still didn’t feel like it was enough. The lost weight hadn’t left without a permanent parting gift either, and no matter how hard I tried, the tiny bulges on my chest refused to leave me alone. I checked myself in the mirror – the scar below my right eye couldn’t be erased, and I couldn’t do anything about my oversized ears. But I could look sharp – yes it was only a fucking restaurant, but still, I could look sharp.
My new wardrobe now had many more white shirts and I used more shoe-polish in a week than I had used over an entire lifetime. I cleared out my cupboard and found my ‘Why drink and drive…’ T-shirt, which I dumped into my pile of throwaway clothing without a sentimental last look.
Sharp. I began to shave more often and began brushing my teeth before bedtime, too. Rakesh laughed through it all, but I didn’t care. Appearance is nearly everything.
“And make sure that you always appear strong,” Ackmann wrote, “Never show your weakness, because the more weaknesses you show to the world, the more weaknesses you will have. If you don’t show your weakness, then you don’t have a weakness.”
So, from one fine morning onwards, I stopped complaining. I stopped talking to Deepu Chachu about how ambitionless I felt and I stopped talking to Rakesh and Shubham about women. When I came to work (earlier than the day before) that one fine morning, I made sure that Pallu the rascal head chef was to never again see me hesitate. I smiled at all the customers with a confidence and strength of James Bond, Hercules, and Hanuman all rolled in one.
Now, there were a number of qualities about me that I could potentially change or improve on to better myself in Ackmann’s eyes, but what of the curse that I’d been born with? I never asked to be left-handed, and while most of the world around me conspired and mocked me with their right-handedness (“The right hand is the right hand,” Papa had said), I was constantly left feeling a little inadequate.
So for the first time, I practiced using my right. I had never thought that this day would’ve actually arrived – although I had planned this step a long time ago, I had never gone through with it. Chachi, the super devout Hindu that she was, used to joke that she was more likely to eat an entire holy cow before she woke up to see the day when I finally began my conversation towards the right. Not that she wanted me to change, of course – I think she had just grown tired of my empty threats.
But I did start converting… Or at least I tried, because let me tell you, honestly, it was one of the most difficult things ever. How the fuck do right-handers ever get anything done? I tried using a spoon with my right hand, but it kept on shaking and the rice fell all over the table every single time. I began to write bills at the restaurant counter with my right, but the result came out looking more like a termite infestation. And let me not even go into the more confidential difficulties of hand conversation – it was simply impossible.
It was never going to work. “Left is best,” I sang out loud in semi-doubt. The right change would have to wait for some other time.
The next week, I re-read another chapter in the book – the fourth step was about business rivals, and while Ackmann wrote about the challenges faced by everyone from Genghis Khan to J.D. Rockefeller, I had a rival significantly less mighty than whoever they would’ve ever come across. Although I was also fairly confident that none of those mighty successful heroes mentioned by Ackmann ever faced a bigger rascal than Pallu.
“Your enemy, your threat, is nothing but an opportunity waiting to be exploited,” Ackmann wrote, “Don’t hate your enemy: instead you should learn to control your indignation and stress and examine what it is about him that you despise. Learn to not follow his faltering qualities, but exploit the ones with which he has been successful, and use them for your own success.” Then, Ackmann followed by stating many more examples of great winners who had exploited their rivals to achieve a victory.
Pallu was a lying thief – I and a couple of waiters and even Deepu Chachu suspected this, but he never got caught and would always either pin the blame on me or on the stray dogs.
“It’s your useless nephew, Deepu ji,” he hissed to my uncle when the daily count came several hundred rupees short, “He is only interested in your money.”
“It’s that stray dog, Deepu ji,” he fumed when meat went mysteriously missing from the kitchen, “It is only interested in your food.”
A hoodwinking rascal, I know. But his Butter Chicken was so damn good that he kept on getting away with it.
So I had to find a way to match up to him. I decided to learn how to cook, because apart of buttering toast I didn’t know of a single other way of making myself useful in the kitchen. Brij, one of the young, new cooks in the restaurant, offered to help me.
I started with learning how to make parathas and rotis, and learning how their respective preparations were different from each other (I learnt the very first day that they are, indeed, immensely different). It took me around half an hour to ignite the hob, and I quit for the day when it was my turn to start flipping the rotis on the pan.
Still, Brij was patient and I managed to learn a little. I learned how to make parathas and rotis well and how to fry and egg and how to make bhujia. I learnt how to bake things the correct way and how to clean the dishes and the cooking surface with the right towels and soaps.
Then one day, just as I had graduated to the tomato soup, Deepu Chachu called me out of the kitchen.
“You’re spending way too much time in there, Azad,” he said, “Come out and do some other work.”
Well, apparently, Pallu had complained that the kitchen wasn’t being kept hygienic enough for his oh so angelic fucking standards; and apparently, it was my fault.
I never stepped in that kitchen again – even my toast was now buttered by Brij.

I woke up really early the next morning – well, early as per my standards. It was only 7:02 when I checked my digital watch and I was wide awake and it felt good. I hadn’t woken up this early since my first year in college.
Frustratingly thought, no matter how hard I tried, my discipline could never match Rakesh’s. He had different goals and motivations, of course, but we were both striving to improve ourselves.
“Hey Rakesh, guess what time I woke up this morning,” I called him.
“What?”
“7’o clock SHARP!” I bragged, “Beat that!”
“So what? I was up at 6:45.”
He always beat me – the difference was that I at least admitted that I was on a self-improvement drive – Rakesh, the creative genius with his I-can-do-whatever-the-fuck-I-want confidence, always claimed that he was just born ready to do what he was doing. He was born ready to become a dentist – the exam which was going to take place in a few weeks time was a mere formality on his way to achieve his destiny.
Rakesh woke up earlier, slept lesser, worked and studied harder, attended fewer of our parties, but still managed to have more fun than both Shubham and I combined. The partying… Well that was one thing that Ackmann failed to sway me away from. We were at it every second or third day; Shubham and I and sometimes other randoms that Shubham introduced me to, bottle of whiskey, loud rock music, followed by a night-out adventuring through the old lanes of the city. Rakesh would join us every once in a while, swinging his long hair and humming away into nothingness, but even then I was sure that the human dental anatomy never left his mind.
We sat in a low lit, sticky bar one such night – the type where exotic disco music was played but no one ever stepped past the gimcrack bar decorations and on to the dance-floor and where huddles of gambling drunk cursing men were given the pleasure of not being able to look beyond their own table to the huddle at the next table because of the dark. It was the type where no table was ever found without a residue of the last group’s spilled alcohol and no self-respecting woman ever entered except for the owner’s teenage daughter with her horrifically broad masculine shoulders. She wasn’t there that night, but Shubham, Rakesh and I were, and we were joined by a fat talkative journalist whom Rakesh knew from his photography sessions.
“You wore that nice a shirt to this bar?” the journalist pinched Shubham’s silky shiny new midnight blue shirt, “Hey Rakesh, look at this fool – what girls does he think he’s going to impress in here? Girls won’t ever be seen in a place like this, Mr…”
“Shubham,” Shubham helped him finish, “My name is Shubham.”
The fat journalist, he said his name was Grover something, was one of the those characters in life you met for the first time but who spoke to you like they have been your long lost but omniscient uncle for the last 30 fucking years. Tonight was the first time we had met Grover, and the way he spoke to Shubham… Well, I knew I was next.
“There is one type of girl that could walk in here,” Rakesh smiled.
And then both Rakesh and Grover burst into laughter.
“What about you, Azad?” Grover did remember my name, “What kind of lady are you hoping to see walk in?”
I flinched, like I always did when someone asked me any sort of query about the opposite sex. It didn’t even have to be asked in seriousness – I always found a way to flinch, attempt a lie, and then probably tell the awful truth.
“I want a girl to come dancing in,” I said because I remembered Monica. Yeah, she’s probably the type that would dance in here. “She’ll come dancing in a black dress to some seductive song, and then wait for me to go and join her!”
The others chuckled.
Monica..! That girl always reminded me of that song and that song always reminded me of that girl. I even began to inadvertently hum it.
Tu ru ru, tu ru ru.
And then I felt like shit, because I remembered Monica some more, and I remembered what we did and I very clearly remembered the next morning.
I didn’t drink anymore that night and no girl came into that bar.

But I was starting to feel better about myself. I mean, I’m supposed to, am I not? That is what the 13 steps predicted, didn’t they? I wasn’t sure what the magic trick was to suddenly turn a person more confident overnight, so I decided to compensate by falling a little more in love with myself, because that was sure to raise my self-esteem a little.
Everything I touch must become gold... I wasn’t allowed to cook? No problem – I was probably making the restaurant more money by my reception-table charm anyways. Didn’t have a woman in my life? That one was easy – no woman I met was ever good enough for me. And whenever the likes of Pallu or dissatisfied customers or the bloody Grover-types did try to insult me, I decided to forgive them because they were simply insulting their own intelligence.
I confided this new found outlook to Deepu Chachu.
“So you love yourself a whole lot,” Chachu opened the drawer to count the day’s returns, “Who in the world doesn’t?”
“No you don’t understand Chachu,” I plead, “This is different. I really feel more gifted and blessed than others now. Hey, haven’t you noticed how early I’ve been coming in these days? And I learnt how to cook a little, and have been working harder and following most of the 13 steps…”
Deepu Chachu put the money back in the drawer and slammed it shut. “You know what your problem is, son?” I hated when he said son because it probably meant that something hypersensitive was going to follow, “The problem is that it’s always about you. Don’t you ever think about the happiness of other people?”
“What kind of question is that, Chachu?” I said, “Of course I do!”
But then I thought about it a little more. Honestly, I consider myself to being the type of person that wants to see a smile on everyone’s face. Everyone, really. My uncle, my close friends, my work mates, war widows, starving children in Africa, my ex-girlfriend and her husband, too, probably… everyone... I wanted to see everyone happy.
But Deepu Chachu found this hard to believe. “No you don’t,” he said, “It is just something idealistic to say so you feel good about yourself.”
My uncle knew me well, but I’m sure I knew me better.
“I’m serious, Chachu,” I said it again, “Sometimes I really wish I had the power to make everyone’s life happier.”
“Heh, heh, heh, heh,” Chachu began to laugh in short breaths, and then he coughed out loud. “Sure, sure, we all do…” he said, “But do you really believe that? Because maybe you do wish that I didn’t struggle and didn’t miss your Chachi so much, and that your friends all had successful jobs and successful families, and that all the pain in the world was over… But I’m telling you son, I’ve seen you, and you get jealous every time there is someone else happier than you are.”
I didn’t reply to him. The next morning, I woke up even earlier.

Then one morning, I woke up before the fucking sun.
I had already convinced Shubham to join me for a boat trip on the river that morning – Now I had to wake Rakesh up. My guess was that he had probably stayed up all night buried in his books anyways.
I dialled his number, but there was no reply after the first few rings. I hung up, waited a few minutes, and pressed redial.
This time Rakesh picked up.
“Yeess,” said a yawn from the other side, “… Hello?”
It didn’t sound like Rakesh; I paused, and then asked, “Dude, what the fuck are you doing, man?”
“Huh? Hello?”
“Dude… Rakesh… put your books down and come – we’re taking a boat across the river.”
“Who is this?” the voice shouted. That definitely didn’t sound like Rakesh.
I paused again, “It’s Azad, man,” I said, and then realized what I’d done, “Oh, shit… what number have I called… Rakesh?”
“No, no, this is no Rakesh – this is Dr. Natarajan Swaminatha Gunasekaran. You stupid fool, do you know what time it is? I don’t want to go on any foolish boat ride.”
I put the phone receiver on a side and tried to remember Rakesh’s number again, “What number have I called?” I asked the voice on the other end.
“The wrong bloody number” and then phone was slammed down.
Wrong number? Well, fuck it – I decided that Shubham and I would simply have to land up unannounced at Rakesh’s flat to pick him up. This was going to be a great day.

Chapter 15: A Bad Day

The sleeping pill had worked. Dr. Natarajan Swaminatha Gunasekaran was having the best sleep of his life. The dreams were adventurous and white and rosy, too.
Rinnnnnng went the phone.
Rinnnnnng it went again.
“Unnnnnh,” Gunasekaran groaned, but didn’t open his eyes.
But it rinnnnnng-ed again. “Thevadiya mavan…” Gunasekaran mumbled to himself.
The phone had a one long ring, instead of many other phones which have two short ones. So, instead of a slightly less painful and chirpier ‘ring-ring’, there were many more drones of long torturous rinnnnnng-s.
Gunasekaran kept his eyes closed and counted seven more rings. Seven. “Naarggh,” he snarled out loud.
And then the ringing stopped. Minutes later, Gunasekaran fell back into his dream exactly where he had left it – chasing roses on white hills.
He had barely begun enjoying it when another long ring shattered the peace.
Rinnnnnng!
“NAAARRGGGHH!!” he jumped up from his bed and rubbed his eyes open. He looked up at the clock to see it was quarter to five.
Rinnnnnng!
Dr. Natarajan Swaminatha Gunasekaran’s head felt groggy as he finally decided to answer his phone.
“Yeess,” he yawned, “… Hello?”
There was a short silence, but then an unpleasantly excited voice male voice asked, “Dude, what the fuck are you doing, man?”
“Huh? Hello?”
“Dude… Rakesh… put your books down and come – we’re taking a boat across the river.”
“Who is this?” Gunasekaran shouted.
“It’s Azad, man,” said the voice on the other end, before another pause, “Oh, shit… what number have I called… Rakesh?”
“No, no, this is no Rakesh – this is Dr. Natarajan Swaminatha Gunasekaran. You stupid fool, do you know what time it is? I don’t want to go on any foolish boat ride.”
Gunasekaran heard some shuffling from the other end, before Azad asked, “What number have I called?”
“The wrong bloody number” and the phone was slammed down on its receiver. “Bloody hooligan boys bloody middle of the night…” he shouted to himself.
Nostrils fuming, heartbeat sprinting, lungs panting, Gunasekaran lay back into bed. But now it was over. He knew it from 49 years of experience that it was over. An interrupted sleep is a spoilt sleep.
Dr. Natarajan Swaminatha Gunasekaran, the eminent dental surgeon, now had three choices. The first was to take another sleeping pill and go back to bed and hope to wake up at the time he had previously designated to himself today. He had spent too many sleepless nights stressing over the recent All India Dental Sciences conference, which was followed by many more sleepless nights stressing over correcting the pile of final examination papers. After toiling for many such insomniac days, he had chosen today as the day he would sleep in. He didn’t have to go to the hospital today, but had many more appointments.
Today was the day before tommorow, when the marked exam papers were due. He only had a few more to go, and he believed that the only way he could give the last ones fair justice was if he finally enjoyed a good night’s sleep.
Today was also the day of the ultra-important VDC annual meet, and it was Gunasekaran’s chance to finally move up the ladder of respectability amongst the dentist and nominate himself as the committee’s treasurer.
So, last night, he turned to the sleeping pill for the very first time, and the pill had worked. Unfortunately, the other forces in the universe weren’t his side.
Should I take another one? the dentist thought. No, no way, there would be no way he would be able to wake up by 9 am if he took another pill. After all, the VDC meet was at 10:30 today and he had to make sure to be there on time or else that backstabber Yogesh would surely become the treasurer.
Choice number two: Should I just wake up now and get to work? Can I manage that? he asked himself. Gunasekaran was tired, but not sleepy. He had no energy to get out of bed, but way too much anxiety to stay in it.
So he told himself to calm down and think about choice number three – try going back to sleep without another pill. It seemed improbable at the moment, but improbable was infinitely times better than impossible.
Unfortunately, Gunasekaran ended up spending the next two hours performing the secret choice number four; which was shifting and turning in bed categorically breaking down the pros and cons of his first three choices.
By 7 am, Gunasekaran fell asleep. He didn’t wake up until 10:45.

“Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no,” he muttered as the sheets were thrown out the bed. Skip the teeth-brushing, skip the shower, skip the shave, skip the breakfast; he ran down the three storeys of stairs into the parking lot and up to his car.
“Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no,” he muttered as he realized that he had forgotten his keys and forgotten to lock the front door and forgotten to comb his hair. It was bad enough that he was going to contest as the treasurer unshaven and bad breathed and stinky-bodied and hungry, but he can not, he repeated, NOT, ever forget combing his hair. What if Dr. Aarti saw him like this? he wondered – she might forgive the body odour but no way could he let her see him unkempt.
He ran back up, picked up the keys, greased and combed his hair, locked the door, ran down again. “Ok, ok, ok, I still have time, I still have time.”
“Teeth Doctor!” he heard his neighbour’s eight-year-old brat shout, “Teeth Doctor my Papa is calling you.”
Gunasekaran didn’t turn around. “Tell your Papa I’m busy.”
“Where are you running away?” the child called from the top of the steps.
“I don’t have time, kid.”
And he truly didn’t. Gunasekaran rushed down the stairs, and in a rush of anger and worry, he forgot yet another daily ritual. Every day, Gunasekaran left his flat keys with the building guard downstairs, because every day, a trusted maid came in to take his keys from the guard and clean his apartment.
But today he didn’t have time.
The faster Gunasekaran drove, the faster time drove away. He decided to ignore his watch and deal with the consequences later. This was already stressful enough. And he had also begun to sweat profusely, adding to the stinky-bodied-bad-breathedness he was carrying to the most important dental committee meeting of the year.
And then he arrived to That Crossing.

That Crossing… Oooh That Crossing… The Crossing from Hell, The Crossing to Hell, The Crossing that is Hell.
The dreaded Rathyatra crossing. This is why I leave home early, Gunasekaran grinded his brain.
The Rathyatra four-way crossing, like most civilized four-ways around the world, had at least four ways coming into in. At least, because the local rickshaw-pullers had made a few of their own diagonal dimensions. At least half the width of all roads involved in the crossing were encroached by either tobacco shops or cattle. An electricity pole, probably still feeling the effects of the storm in 1982, hung at a 60 degree angle. Any being without wings had to estimate a delay of at least 20 minutes during the peak hours. At least.
So Gunasekaran waited. He took his foot off the accelerator and drove with the clutch. A beggar came up to the window who he shooed away. A buffalo started sniffing his head lights and he ignored it. Time ticked away. Horns blared at perilously unhealthy decibel levels. Gunasekaran swore and he waited. Time ticked away.
That hooligan, he thought, that whatisname wrong caller. If it wasn’t for him…
The car inched forward. The dentist got more and more frustrated. He winded his car window up to avoid the noise. There was no air-conditioner in the car, so Gunasekaran had to pull the windows down again when he started feeling hotter.
25 minutes later, he finally made it through the jam and then sped down the relatively less crowded road. “I’m late I’m late,” he said out loud, “But it will be fine it will be fine,” he assured himself.

But it wasn’t. Gunasekaran arrived just in time to see the new Varanasi Dentists Committee (VDC) executive members lined up on stage. Standing two places right from the chairman in the centre was Yogesh the backstabber, now better known as Yogesh the treasurer.
“You missed the programme, Dr. Gunasekaran,” Yogesh came down and said, “Dr. Pandey made a very informative presentation.”
“Oh, really? What about?”
“The future, Dr. Gunasekaran,” Yogesh smiled, “The future of Dental Surgery. By the way, did you hear – I’m the new treasurer…”
“Yes, Yogesh, I heard…”
“It’s nice.”
“Very.”
During lunch, the charismatic new VDC chairman Dr. Ravi Pandey walked over to Gunasekaran and reminded him that he had been assigned a post in the committee, too. “We were considering you for treasurer – but the nominations were done before you arrived,” he dropped another brutal reminder, “But don’t worry, you are the VDC’s new public relations officer.”
That wasn’t too bad, Gunasekaran thought. Worth the sweating and the hair combing.
“That means now, you must make a press release for today’s function,” the new chairman ordered, “Please.”
“What?”
“It’s your job now, Dr. Gunase,” Pandey never bothered with his whole name, “I’ll give you some details about everyone that was present today, about my speech, and about the new committee. But you’re now responsible for sending the write-up to each press house in town. I want to see this in all the papers tomorrow!”
“Hmpf.”
“What?”
“I have to do corrections today, Dr. Pandey,” Gunasekaran said, “The corrected exam papers are due tomorrow.”
“You still haven’t finished them?” the new chairman inquired, “Typical Gunase, huh? Leaving everything to the last minute.” He then laughed with devious confidence, “I’m sorry Dr. Gunase, but you’ll have to squeeze everything in today.”
Typical of me, Gunasekaran agreed. And then even more typically he succumbed, “Okay, give me the details.”
“And make sure you get the English newspaper as well,” Pandey added, “All the dentists read the English newspaper.”

Dr. Natarajan Swaminatha Gunasekaran, the new PRO of the Varanasi Dentists Committee, did not have time for lunch, either.
After spending the next three hours writing a six-page press release in English and in Hindi, checking and re-checking it, and making sure that every one worth mentioning was mentioned (including backstabber treasurer Yogesh), he had to move on to the second step of his task.
“Make some photocopies!” came the order.
So he did. Gunasekaran joined the slow-moving traffic again to drive down to the photocopier’s shop. When he got there half an hour later, his head spinning from stress and hunger and anger, he was told to produce change for his 50 rupee note. So he hunted down the rickshaw-pullers and the paan-sellers on foot and then got in a tussle with the traffic police for parking his car in the wrong place.
“Okay, sorry sir,” he said, “I’ll just move it away.”
He didn’t have time anymore, but like he had done earlier, Gunasekaran decided to switch off the ‘Worry Voice’ of his brain.
The Worry Voice, although clearly his own, had a much stronger Tamil accent reminiscent of his mother. This was the voice that told him that he was in trouble, that provided feed to each paranoid cell in his body and that had never seen a glass half full.
But he switched it off and moved into Zombie Mode. Don’t think. Just do. But you don’t have time! Just do, he told himself.
So Gunasekaran moved his car away obediently, and five minutes later, found an uncontroversial parking spot. Then he finally found a place to get change for his 50, although the refreshments shop owner did not let him go without a rude word or two. And then, finally, he got the press release photocopied to produce a dozen more.
Now before delivering the releases the major press offices in the city, Gunasekaran first had to visit the home of last year’s PRO, Dr. Aarti to pick up a copy of all the needed office addresses.
Gunasekaran had long had his eye on Dr. (Mrs.) Aarti, the only female dentist in the VDC. Most of the time he saw her, he chose to miss the ‘Mrs.’ in her name, and he could afford to do that because her husband was an ENT specialist who never got respect or invitation in the dental community.
“Good afternoon, Dr. Aarti,” he said at her front door. He had obviously remembered to comb his hair again from the car rear view mirror before knocking on her front door.
“Oh, Natarajan,” she graciously opened the door and smoothly tied back her gracefully greying hair, “Was just expecting you.”
Gunasekaran smiled and didn’t say anything. I’ve had a bad day, he thought, I need this.
“Do you want to come in?” she asked, “I will get you the press list.”
Dr. Aarti was wearing a long orange kurta, which was loose, but not loose enough to disguise the delicious shape of her body. Gunasekaran slurped. Don’t go in, said the Worry Voice, You don’t have time. Plus, there is THE OTHER REASON!
Gunasekaran turned the Voice off and walked in. Dr. Aarti flashed a wonderful smile and then ceremoniously led him inside her living room.
She walked inside the kitchen and came back out swiftly with a refreshing glass of water. Gunasekaran thanked her and she went inside again.
“Where is your husband?” Gunasekaran called out.
“Work!” she boisterously shouted back, “Hold on Natarajan, I’ll just be there with you.”
Gunasekaran thought about his new choices. He could either do the sensible thing, take the piece of paper, thank her and her beautiful body, and get out of the house. Or he could try his luck – he didn’t know with what – but all the tragedy of the day had him feeling a little whattheheck. She was obviously giving him the signals (Obviously the Worry Voice sarcastically echoed). Why the heck not?
Dr. Aarti jiggled back with a piece of paper. She was so active for her age, Gunasekaran thought. He took the address list and pretended to examine it.
“I have most of them here,” she crossed her hands together, “But you may have to update some phone numbers if you go and visit them.”
“Sure, sure, good,” the dentist said. This is my chance, he thought. “So, what else are you doing today? No work?” he sniggered.
“No,” she smiled, “Juuuust housework...”
Gunasekaran thought for a few seconds, and then took a bold step closer to her. “Are you in the mood for any other type of work?” he extended his arm in the direction of her waist.

Approximately 20 minutes later, Dr. Natarajan Swaminatha Gunasekaran walked out of Dr. Aarti’s house.
It happened to be the most humiliating, terrifying, and not to mention time wasting 20 minutes of his life (so far).
“How dare you touch me like that,” she had snapped. “Oh, but I thought…” he had mumbled back. “Chhee! You bastard men!” she screamed. And he stayed quiet. And then she lectured him. And then she called her husband. And then she lectured him some more.
Gunasekaran was out before the ENT doctor could reach home to punch him. That would have to wait until tomorrow. Today, he was already much too late for his other appointments.
Gunasekaran walked into each press office with his head hung low. This was the first time in two decades that he had allowed his genitals to think before his brain, and he had nothing to show for it but a memo for a beat down by the ENT man tomorrow. The ENT doctor! And he would be obliged to sit there and take it like a good near-adulterer. Could it possibly get any more humiliating?
A near-adulterer. That’s what I’m always going to be. He drove from office to office with his head feeling so heavy that it tired his neck and shoulders and his brain felt as if it was pressing down on his cerebrum. The drums in his ears tucked themselves further in to hear a little lesser and his eyes squinted a little more to not perceive the world so much. Gunasekaran felt a sorry tear roll down his cheek, which he wiped off immediately.
So whose fault is it now? He felt furious at himself but even more furious at his fate. Stupid decisions come from stupid choices, he thought, and stupid choices are presented by other stupid people.
It was now evening and Gunasekaran hadn’t had anything to eat all day and his subconscious began to again creep up and remind him of all the examination marking yet to do. I might have to stay up all night, he thought. He blinked and looked out the car window through his blurry wet eyes to see that night had already befallen.
In a trance, he had travelled to 11 of the Hindi newspapers in the city, handing them the release one by one, shaking their hands, folding his hands together, trying not to cry some more. There was only one left to go – the only English newspaper in the city, and the one closest to his home.
“You’re late,” said the sarcastic voice of a fat young journalist lounging on a sofa inside the office, “We can’t send your dentist news now.”
“What?” Gunasekaran looked at his watch, “But it’s only seven! I thought you press-wallahs worked till midnight?”
“Not here, sir,” he smiled, “We’re an English daily… We finish early.”
This was it. All the non-sleeping and non-eating and adulterous disgrace and lateness had blown up and expanded all day. This was it. Gunasekaran felt like he was going to burst.
“But, how can you do this!” he raised his voice, “This has to be published in tomorrow’s paper! How can you do this?”
Suddenly, the one fat journalist became three, the other two of which were giants compared to Gunasekaran’s own timid stance, “Listen Doctor Sahib,” one of the tall ones commanded, “We’re not doing you any favours.”
Gunasekaran didn’t need to be told twice. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t even told once – but he knew that he had to get out. He quietly left the office; this time he didn’t even try to fight the tears.

It was another hour before the dentist beat the traffic and arrived back home. For the first time in his life, he wished he hadn’t.
“WHAT BLOODY SHIT TAKE THING HAPPEN HERE!?!?” he screamed out loud. Neighbours left right top and bottom assembled in front of his door. Children laughed and elders shook their heads.
Gunasekaran had walked into hell. He looked across his wet, inexplicably flooded apartment, and his heart was stretched apart. The floor of his living room was under at least a centimetre of water. But Gunasekaran was looking beyond that. His brand new carpet was soaking wet. But Gunasekaran looked passed that. His eyes fixated somewhere between his wet working table and the drenched ceiling from where multiple drains of water dripped with shameless abundance. He saw that his stereo system was wet too, but he was looking beside that.
And there they were – the examination papers he had left for marking today. The ones which were due tomorrow. The ones which would determine the future of a dozen students – students he didn’t even know but they existed nevertheless. The papers which were directly under a shower from the leaking ceiling.
The ones which were now wetter than Gunasekaran’s eyes.
“There has been a leak in Raju’s apartment all day, Doctor Sahib,” said one of assembled residents, “Didn’t he tell you?”
“I was calling you in the morning, Dr. Gunasekaran!” Raju out-shouted Gunasekaran when he and his family were summoned down the stairs, “My son came and called you but you were in a rush. The plumber couldn’t come in today,” then Raju turned to console his wife, “Our bathroom is flooded, too.”
“I did call him, Papa,” the eight-year-old hid said from behind his mother, “I called the Teeth Doctor but he was running out.”
“Didn’t the maid come in today?” Gunasekaran next interrogated the building guard, who had joined the throng outside his door.
The guard had an answer ready, “Of course she did sir – but you didn’t leave me your keys today, did you?”
“WHAT TAKE HERE THEVADIYYA SHIT HAPPEN!?!” Gunaserakaran cried out loud again.
He didn’t want to step in. This was simply way too much humiliation to happen on one day. This was the wrong day for him to start corrections. The wrong day for the leak. The wrong day to not listen to that little brat. The wrong day to not be the treasurer…
He stood outside and looked and watched. He looked around the whole apartment, scanning every other thing that could potentially depress him, but nothing could depress him more than the papers. Nothing, perhaps, except for the fact that his depression was being witnessed by half the population of his five-storey flat.
The torturous waiting and watching and watching some more finally ended when Gunasekaran’s bedroom phone began to ring
Rinnnnnng it went.
Gunasekaran hesitated.
Rinnnnnng it demanded his attention again.
Gunasekaran took his shoes and socks off, folding each sock into a ball and tucking it inside its corresponding shoe. He stepped inside the apartment and closed the door, leaving the dozens of pairs of eyes that witnessed his rare loss of composure behind. Still carrying both his shoes in one hand, he walked on the wet floor and through into the bedroom.
Rinnnnnng!
It was still dry in here. Gunasekaran closed the bedroom door behind him, put his shoes away, took a deep, calming, breath, and picked the phone up.
“Hello?” he sighed.
“Oye, Gunasekaran?” a familiar voice asked.
“Yes?”
“Sahni here.”
“Oh, yes, big brother?”
Vinay Sahni to be exact. And no, he wasn’t Dr. Natarajan Swaminatha Gunasekaran’s big brother. He was actually his older sister’s husband.
“How was your dentist’s meeting?” Sahni asked.
“Oh, no, nothing, Sahni ji, leave it, leave it,” Gunasekaran said.
But Gunasekaran knew that his brother-in-law had a way of bullying information out. “What? You always talked about your chances this year, na? What happened?”
“Nothing, nothing…”
“Oye, Gunasekaran, why are you scared to talk about it?”
“I’m not scared, big brother, I just don’t…”
“Then tell me!” he brusquely interrupted.
Gunasekaran sighed again. “No I didn’t become the treasurer,” he said, “I haven’t had any food to eat today, and my house is flooded because my maid didn’t come inside to check the leak. And now, many of the examination papers I have to mark by tomorrow morning are soaked. And I’m hungry.”
There was some silence on the other end of the line.
“I’m tired and I’m hungry and I need to do something about the papers…” Gunasekaran continued his rant, “This has been, a bad, bad day, Sahni ji.”
There was no need to mention Dr. Aarti. Gunasekaran knew that the world would be a pleasanter place if Dr. Aarti wasn’t mentioned ever again.
After a long period of silence between them, Sahni finally spoke, “You need to get married, Gunasekaran,” he said, “Find some nice old lady for yourself, huh? Someone who will make you food and check the leaks! What about that Aarti-Aarti you keep talking about?”

Dr. Natarajan Swaminatha Gunasekaran stepped out to the flooded living room again, carrying a bucket, which he placed under the trickling streams of water. He shifted his table to a side and then took a seat on the wet chair.
Still barefoot, he wriggled his feet around in the water. A lot of it had spilled out into the corridor and into the other rooms. He placed his head next to the stack of wet papers and closed his eyes.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the bucket was nearly full to the brim. How long did I sleep? he wondered. How much time do I have? he asked himself.
The worst thing about a bad day is if it laid the foundation for a potentially worse day ahead. Gunasekaran knew that he would have to do something, something, about the flooded apartment. He dreaded thinking about it. He dreaded the mouldy stench that would hover around his home and his clothes all week. He also knew that he was going to have to face the ENT doctor, and face the shame of his deeds and the rumours it would spread. He dreaded seeing Yogesh and his happy treasurer smile tomorrow.
And the papers. Oh, the exam papers. He still hadn’t done a full autopsy of the damage.
Not for the first time in his life, but definitely the worst time, he wished that he could die for a few days. Not permanently, no – Dr. Gunasekaran was far from suicidal – just go into a coma for 50-60 hours so that when he wakes up, the immediate future of tomorrow would become past and he could bury himself into other matters.
The papers. He opened his eyes and willed himself to face the present reality. Must do something about the papers.
Many years ago, being an experienced and occasionally respected dentist, Dr. Gunasekaran was obliged with the post of senior professor in the university. He didn’t have to do much teaching, and could spend most of his time in research, interacting only with other seniors and a few junior doctors.
And best of all, Gunasekaran could avoid students. The junior doctors helped them out and the lecturers taught them, while Gunaskeran, Yogesh, Pandey, and the others could sit back and avoid all the hooligan talk and secret drinking and hair gel of those noisy youngsters.
Mostly avoid them, that is – because it so happened that the senior professors had the responsibility of designing and correcting the final exams. This year, Gunasekaran had marked 18 out of the 30 he was allotted, which he had stacked neatly in his office. The other 12 now floated on the study table in front of him.
The dentist examined them one by one. I can still do this, he thought. As per regulation, the marked papers didn’t need to be seen by anyone again – except in the case of a special probe. The wetness could remain a secret, because all that was required in the end was a number and a one-line comment.
Pages and pages of long answers lay in front of him. Many of the lines were partly smudged while several more had completely disappeared. But he could still see many parts of the smudgy ink. I can still do this!
So he went through all of them. He went through the well written papers and the bad ones. He went through the smart students whom he didn’t know and the stupid ones whom he didn’t want to know. He went through creative answers and through blank answers. And in different levels, they were all smudged.
Some papers he guessed the answers. The ones which were written in clearer handwriting were given the obvious benefits of the doubt. He balanced his generosity by punishing those who had messily scribbled in their answers. Scribblers can’t be dentists, he believed, unless of course, they had to scribble in a prescription.
It was torture. Gunasekaran was scared with every word, every smudged line, every page, every final score. These were the lives of young dentists. After finishing the first eight he saw that most of them had been marked too generously, and Gunasekaran felt like he was trying to compensate for all of his own mistakes all day…
My mistakes? he thought. I didn’t know anything wrong! It was Raju’s fault, and Sahni ji’s for mentioning marriage to further dampening Gunasekaran’s spirits. And the maid and the guard for not reminding him and even Raju’s bratty son who never ever had anything worthwhile to say except for today. And that bloody English newspaper that don’t take press releases after seven and the traffic… oooooh the traffic! He was mad at Dr. Aarti and mad at her husband who was definitely mad at him. He hated Pandey and he hated Yogesh and he hated the sleeping pill and oh God he hated that wrong caller.
He didn’t make any mistakes. Mistakes made him. Gunasekaran knew that traffic problems could happen every day, and house leaks weren’t uncommon, and he could always be the treasurer next year, and he was going to make a pass at Dr. Aarti at some point anyways… it was just today… The same sequence of events on a different mood might have been more manageable… but today was just wrong… and tomorrow will be worse… oh it’ll be far worse…
He picked up another paper. The first line on the top was a question about hypersensitivity.
Gunasekaran looked down at the answer, which was only barely visible behind the blurred blue ink. ‘There is no risk to dental practitioners’, it said.
Thevadiya mavan! ‘No risk’? Gunasekaran thought, is that what the student really wrote? Is this what I’m struggling and beating myself up for? What kind of hooligans do they allow in the faculty now anyways?
He slashed the page with a big red cross, and it felt good.
Gunasekaran smiled, and tried the same thing on the next page.
BIG RED CROSS!
This was much easier. Less reading, more red.
Half way into the paper, the dentist felt slightly guilty for losing his mind over one silly mistake. So he read another answer carefully, which turned out to be completely correct.
Better, Gunasekaran thought, and he gave it full marks. But it was admittedly not even half as cathartic as a cross.
More BIG RED CROSSES!!
Dr. Natarajan Swaminatha Gunasekaran smiled, then he laughed, and then muttered to himself. By the time he was finished with the paper, Rakesh Singh had undeservedly failed his final examination.
Gunasekaran was hungry, but did not have the energy to eat. So he drudged into his bedroom, found another sleeping pill, and fell on his bed. For the first time in years, Gunasekaran didn’t comb his hair before sleep.
Soon, he returned to the white and rosy hills.