Chapter 12: Addiction, Part 2

“She was beautiful, man,” I said, “Best face, best hair, best eyes…”
“… Best ass, best tits…” Rakesh added.
“Shut the fuck up – I’m serious,” I stood up, “She was just perfect. And you should hear her voice… it was just… mesmerizing.”
I slammed my drink down and Rakesh filled it up again. “So, when are you meeting her again?”
I sighed and looked out into the Sunday afternoon through Rakesh’s barely-ever-opened-window, “I’m going to go see her tommorow. Oh, I wish she remembers me. Man, I’m sure she’ll remember me…”
Rakesh started to hum. It started off softly, but then his humming grew louder, and he swung his greasy long hair to the rest of the non-existent choir of singers in his head. Then, the humming became into a whistle, and I recognized the Kishore Kumar song. Rakesh stood up with the whiskey bottle and took a couple of large, unadulterated swigs.
“She’ll remember you man… she’ll remember you,” he said before returning to his whistle. A minute of swinging his whole body around later, his whistle turned into a soft ‘na-nan-na-naaan’.
Then he spoke to me again. “Who the fuck wants to be a dentist, anyways, man? Na-na-nan-na-naa-naaa! Oh, mere dil ke chain… Fuck that shit yaar, I’m going to find something else to do. Something that doesn’t require smelling the bad breath of strangers all day… Chain aaye mere dil ko dua dijiye…ten-ne-nen-ne-ne-nen”
Yes, his drinking had only gotten worse. But what did you expect from someone who had all their dreams shattered. I was too drunk to care, either.
I slammed my drink down. Rakesh filled it up again.

So here I was, minutes away from seeing her. Monty always used to say that, after you first meet a girl, you have to give it a minimum of six days before you get in touch with her again. This was, in Monty’s Man Rules, the right amount of time when any arbitrary girl is supposed to be at the peak of her curiosity towards you. If you give her any less time to think about you, then she is bound to be turned off by your forwardness.
On the flip side though, he also once mentioned that if you wait too long, the girl just gives up hope and somebody else turns up at her doorstep, or in my case, at her church.
It had been three days since I had last seen Anita. That was already three more days than what my self-control would let me handle. So here I was, breaking a Monty Man Rule, because I had spent my three days thoroughly believing that this one girl was so special that no rule could define her.
So here I was, outside the school in Nagwa where she said she taught. I had passed by here the last two days just to investigate the school’s opening and closing hours. Deepu Chachu had been generous to allow me an early leave again, and I didn’t want to ask him everyday.
My digital watch read 14:54. Although no school in the history of time had ended before its designated hour, I had come prepared in case both the kids and I were to be miraculously lucky today.
We weren’t. The school bell went off brutally efficiently at 15:00. But what a sound it was..! It rung jubilantly and constantly, loudly and longingly and chiming like victory. As it rang, I felt like I was eight years old again, just like the children, in love with the school peon and ready to jump out of my desk before the teacher reminded us that it was she who was supposed to excuse us and not the bell.
The children were excused a minute later, and they swarmed out in small and surprisingly obedient groups. Either kids have changed since my time or they were now sedated in the ninth period. Parents stood around me greeting child after child while I stood childless and suddenly I became conscious of the alcohol in my breath from last night and the tattered back of my trousers and the fact that I was staring at the children like a fucking abductor.
No, I tried silently explaining to the other parents, don’t worry – I’m here for their teacher.
I waited till all the children left. The laughing noises died down and so did the bouncing of water bottles too heavy for their little shoulders. There was no more dusty screeching of Bata shoes and the school became eerie like that day I was left alone outside when Papa beat up Mummy and neither came to pick me up and I cried and I cried and Munchy wasn’t there either…
Calm the fuck down, Azad. She’s in there. She has to be. All the teachers must be in there.
Five minutes later, the older people began to walk out. Staff members of all shapes, sizes and colours exited, all also in a jovial mood. They passed me by – a short bald spectacled one even asked me who I was looking for, and I smiled back meekly to try and look as unterrorizing as possible. “Waiting for a friend,” I told him. But there was still no Anita.
Silence and eeriness again. It was now 15:18. Ok, screw social propriety – I’m going in.
And just as I took my first steps inside the lush green campus of the primary school, seated in a sand pit in the playground alongside colourful cubes, hopscotch markings, and a plastic football with two little boy and another female teacher was the girl who was now probably destined to be the future love of my life.
“Anita?” I called out, but she didn’t hear because I didn’t hear it either.
“Anita?” I said again, this time making sure that my vocal chords had responded. She turned and squinted back at me.
Yes – she was still pretty! My first fear about meeting her had vanquished, because now I can soberly say that her beauty wasn’t just an overexaggeration of my drunkenness.
But that made room for my second fear. There is no way she is going to pay attention to me now. I’m not pitifully in need of any help. I’m not lost or disorderly. I’m dressed in a dusty black jacked looking shady in front of a primary school. Oh, please don’t call the police.
“Azad?” she stood up, leaving behind the children around the sand pit, “Azad!”
“Yes… Hi Anita… I was just.”
“Oh my God how are you?” she rushed closer. I silently celebrated that she remembered me, but now also remembered how horrible her last memory of me must’ve been.
As I shuffled through my brain to form a coherent sentence, she had already come up with a few more, “You were in bad shape the other day. Did you get home safe? Were you sick?”
“I was fine…” I said, “I came to thank you for that day, Anita. You were very helpful.”
She looked at me and smiled. Things didn’t get immediately worse. As a matter of fact, her magnetic blue eyes didn’t scare me off, neither did her silky black hair, and I wasn’t threatened by how fair her skin was or the fact that she barely had any spots on her face. She was much shorter than I was, but I don’t think the height difference would matter too much in our happy holiday pictures of Shimla or Kerela which I had begun to imagine much too soon.

There is something called a ‘Self-Fulfilling Prophecy’. It is a term that Ackmann used often in his book, but I had never thought of it as being important outside of the business context. Ackmann had written that a self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true. It was as if, instead of outside influences, the believer of the prophecy himself makes the prophecy come true by making his thoughts and actions revolve around the prophecy so much.
The day I had seen Anita, I had concluded that it was finally time for me to fall in love again. In hindsight, I could’ve probably waited and been less eager about my feelings. But once I had decided that only she could push Kalpana off that pedestal of my ultimate affection, then my mind tried with its full power to make sure my own prophecy got proven right. I didn’t fall in love with Anita; I jumped in it.
I got to know her better over the next few weeks. We saw each other much less than we spoke on the phone, which was just as well, because I felt the need to introduce her to me in safe, small doses. She gave me her home phone number. “Call me at quarter to 11 because Mummy and Daddy go to sleep at half-past 10,” she said. I would imagine her sneaking into her bedroom with the cordless phone, staying up an extra 15 minutes only waiting to hear my voice. I would call at 22:48 – it was my way of sticking a little closer to Monty’s Rules by making her wait an extra three minutes. Then, I varied it every once in a while so she doesn’t get too comfortable with my three-minute variation either.
I used to always worry back then about what would happen if someone could actually hear into our conversations. If either one of us had the CBI on our back – well, it was most fucking likely to be me, right? – And the CBI was monitoring and recording our phone calls, I would have a lot of explaining to do. Not because I was revealing my involvement or interest in any criminal or terrorist activity, but just because I was going to be an embarrassment to my own future self.
“Hi Anita!” I said before I heard her say hello.
“Oh, hellooo,” she pretended to not have expected my call.
“How are you?”
“Um…” she thought.
“How was your day?”
“It was good – you know what happened today, Azad?”
My eyes lit up, as if whatever had happened had happened to me, “What, what?”
“I met my auntie – oh it’s been so long since I’ve last seen her – and she brought us loads of new movies from Delhi.”
“Nice… Which ones?”
So we talked about her favourite movies and her favourites songs. We talked about new restaurants and those exotic overpriced bangles sold to foreigners by the river. We talked about her stomach aches and her mother’s moods. Politics bored Anita, and so did the traffic, and so did the music I liked and so did my job. I tried to resurrect my philosophical insights to impress her, but she would always quickly change the subject.
It was hard for me to decide whether or not these conversations truly interested me. On one hand, I loved the sound of her voice, especially when it became high and giddy every time she spoke about some bullshit overhyped event (such as meeting an aunt) or her favourite movies. Of course, I loved the fact that someone as good looking and sweet sounding as her would take half an hour every night to discuss frivolous and sometimes disturbingly feminine matters with me. But whenever I went back and thought about the stuff she had to say, I realized that she was as intellectually as useful as her favourite movies – all excitement and glamour and laughing and singing on the surface but nothing truly worth noting or remembering.
Of course, she had a problem with how much I cursed, but I wouldn’t have expected any lesser from someone as seedha-saadha and decent as her
I used to see her once a week for the first two weeks, because I didn’t want to seem too eager. On the third week, she was in a good mood when I surprised her after work on Monday, so I visited her on Wednesday and Thursday too. She told her where she lived. Much to her embarrassment from the snickering white teeth of her teenage nieces, I showed up near her house on Sunday.
That Sunday, I took her out to the cinemas so we could watch her favourite movie. She had already seen ‘Dil To Paagal Hai’ six times, but insisted that seven was her lucky number. I didn’t mind because watching a romantic movie with one’s romantic interest counted as a date in my books. I revved my scooter and took her out, and then after the movie, we went on a long scooter ride to an isolated restaurant near the airport. Anita only once complained that her mother would be worried about how long she’d been out.
“But it’s our first date,” I said half-jokingly, in case she didn’t think so too, and so I could pretend it was all in humour.
“This isn’t a date, Azzu! We’re just hanging out.”
I didn’t speak to her on the way back.

The more I thought about her, the harder the job at the restaurant became. Deepu Chachu became less and less involved, and his managerial duties had to be shared between me and the head chef, Pallu. That of course, was a recipe for a disaster. Pallu was a lying scum and I was losing my sense of time – the wristwatch was still working, of course, but it was only accurate in Anita-related matters.
It became harder to go to sleep, and so I would be late to arrive in the morning, and would leave slightly early in the evening depending on the Anita-related plans. Pallu would snitch and exaggerate my time-mismanagement to Chachu, and it was the customers who suffered.
I didn’t know how to react with these new business challenges, because Ackmann had written no chapters about falling in love with something other than work.
Anita wasn’t a big fan of my job. Although the title of ‘Assistant Manager’ sounded cool, she thought it was disgusting that I spent so much time around dirty kitchens. Assistant Manager, translated in Banarasi, pretty much meant doing every single job that wasn’t being done at any particular time, and considering the laziness of our other staff, my job description included shaking hands, wiping plates, counting money, waiting tables, and arguing with Pallu.
Now what about the rest of my ‘social life’, you may ask? The rest of it survived in the company of Rakesh and Shubham, and I was beginning to lose my male-camaraderie time slots. I had allotted two hours a week when I first started to ‘hang out’ with Anita, but even that couldn’t be followed religiously. Rakesh was becoming more and more depressing by the day, and his quests of searching for an occupation didn’t enthral me, either. Soon, he began to do rounds with the journalists again.
A few weeks later, I choose to spend an entire Sunday at Rakesh’s to make up for my absence. Shubam and he were understandably pissed off.
“Sala, you think you’re too good for us now?” Rakesh was drunk even before I got there.
“No, no, man… You know how it is? With the restaurant and my new girlfriend…” Girlfriend. My new girlfriend. It felt strange to say it, because I hadn’t ever ever used that term for myself. Kalpana never let me be sure about our relationship, and I was regrettably too scared to refer it to as anything other than whatever she chose to refer it as. She would call us ‘best buddies’ during the day and, at the height of her proclaimed affection for me, we had a ‘special relationship’ at night. Anita hadn’t let me be sure about our relationship either, but I was much braver now and I was going to go around calling her my girlfriend or my mistress or my bitch or whatever the fuck I wished, just as long as she didn’t know it.
“Your girlfriend, huh?” Shubham nudged, “Our man is growing up, isn’t he?”
“Let’s have a toast to that,” Rakesh said. They gulped down a shot of Royal Stag each; I sipped on mine and placed it back down, feeling an unnerving queasiness that tightened up my entire body.
Rakesh, obviously, had the hawk-eye for stuttering drinkers, “What’s wrong, yaar?” he laughed, “Can’t down straight shots anymore?”
I couldn’t and I admitted it. I took their mockery and their drunken laughter. Then I sat and watched the two of them getting their brains and livers fucking obliterated all day. But not I. As Rakesh sipped on alcohol and slipped into the pits of alcoholic dependency, he seemed to be trying to drag the two of us down with him too. Shubham obliged him every once in a while – But not I. Not anymore.
I had a different addiction. One that smelt like fresh lemons and looked like half an angel. She spoke like a nightingale, and if I could ever touch her hair, it would probably feel like the softest of silk. They would never understand…
Shubham was too busy learning his father’s business down at the electronic shop. Soon, Rakesh had made something of his life too, and it was a job that didn’t interfere with his drinking habits. He was hired by a local Hindi newspaper as a photo-journalist, and was finally getting paid for something he was actually good at.
When he wasn’t drinking (and even when he was), Rakesh spent most of his days cruising around the streets and the gullies and the ghats and near the river, photographing everything and anything. Once, he even brought me back a photo of Anita, sitting at the Asi ghat with her family.
Anita Lawrence. The name began to randomly ring in my ears from time to time. I knew I hadn’t felt this way ever since Kalpana, but unlike my ex-maybe-girlfriend, I was in much less awe of Anita. It was easier for me to see her faults, whereas in Kalpana’s case, I mostly lived in a cloudy dream believing that she was by far the most perfect human being that had ever walked the planet.
Anita was Christian – that was the second thing I realized about her. The first thing I realized was that she was good looking. I also realized that she was a daughter of overprotective parents whom I couldn’t stop criticizing, and that she really had no ambition in her life except being a wife and a mother and however nauseated I felt about that notion, I never brought it up with her.
Soon, our phone calls turned from regular to habitual to addictive. One day, there was a private party at the restaurant, and Deepu Chachu asked me to stay on until late. I left work much after 11 and was in so much of a rush to get home and to the phone that I didn’t even check my watch. Seconds after I got in, Anita called, annoyed that I hadn’t called her yet. It was 23:34 and I had the giddiest sleep of my life ever since the night I first kissed Kalpana.
Ahh… Kalpana! She began to finally disappear from my thoughts. Anita was nothing like her. Kalpana would’ve never worried about me being late to a phone appointment. Kalpana would’ve never sounded so excited about petty little things. No – they were completely different...
Except for the similarities – not in the girls, but in my reactions to the girls. I spoke to Anita the same way I spoke to Kalpana – hurriedly and anxiously and genuinely interested in every little detail of Anita’s life including the age of her fucking nephews or the last time she had a haircut. I had never shown this interest to anyone else before, except of course, for Kalpana.

During this time, my emotional stability oscillated between sheer exhilaration and paranoia of her sniffing out my unattractive corners. But the exhilaration would win out every time – there was no better way to end the day than by having a phone conversation with Anita. It became such a compulsion that, one day, I found it impossible to go to sleep when she wasn’t home to pick up her phone.
“Where were you yesterday?” I found her outside the school the next day.
“Hi Azzu,” she answered.
“Where were you last night, Anita?”
“Oh, nothing, it was my cousin’s birthday so we were out late,” she gave a perfectly reasonable but completely unsatisfying excuse.
And that was when my insecurities started to get out of hand. Two days later, I was waiting for her outside the school after the children left, only to discover 45 minutes later that she had left much earlier. After further inquiries that evening, she told me that her father was a little ill and so she had to tend to him. I deciphered her explanation as an excuse to not see me that evening, because obviously, anyone would get bored after too much Azad Shanker.
I called her that same evening.
“Oh, hi,” she sighed.
“Hi Anita,” I tried to sound relaxed, “How was your day,” I said too quickly.
“Fine, fine. Work was really tiring. I’m really tired.”
Silence.
Anita coughed.
Some more silence.
“And… what else?” I spoke, only to end the stifling air of muteness.
“Nothing much,” she did sound tired, “I have to prepare a quiz for the kids tomorrow.”
“Oh, that’s nice…”
She yawned. Fuck.
“Ok, I’m feeling really sleepy Azad – I’ll talk to you tomorrow ok?”
“What the fuck? No, hold on Anita – is something wrong?”
“Stop using that language Azad! I’m just tired, ok?” in her sudden agitation, she actually didn’t sound tired anymore, “Why does everything have to be f-word f-word f-word?”
“Because that’s how I fucking talk.”
“Goodnight!” she hung up.
The next few conversations followed a similar pattern. I would call kindly and passionately to try and exorcise away the negative emotions from the previous conversations. She would reply laconically and eventually get bored of my kindness. I would curse and raise my voice. And then I would hear the depressing monotone of the dead telephone line.
Soon, I began to realize that she didn’t seem excited to see me anymore. It wasn’t that she was angry with me. It was worse – she just became ambivalent. The more I cared about what she thought and what she did and which of her favourite movies she saw again, the less she bothered about my concerns or my life.
Then, I realized that, for a whole week, never once had she initiated any conversation between us. I called her every day. I began to wait outside the school every day. I was there at her parents’ place on Saturday and Sunday. She was losing interest fast, but I was in too deep to be able to crawl out now.
I would go to sleep every night feeling like a forlorn piece of shit. And then I would laugh about it. I would joke to Rakesh that if I had also been nailed on a cross then she would have show me a little more affection. I would joke with Deepu Chachu that even though I’d practically quit drinking, Anita was still revolted by the three month old mephitic odour of pungent whiskey from the burp of the first time we met. I joked with Anita that, it was actually I, who on purpose was the one changing in our little relationship, just because such rifts entertained me. The thin line between humour and insanity was vanishing by the day.

I couldn’t sleep without talking to her. Lying in bed, I would stage our ‘what-if’ conversations in my mind. “I know you don’t like my job, Anita, but I have to stick with my uncle okay?” “Ok, Azzu, I understand.” “And I wanna be happy, Anita, I can’t get any sleep. You know you’re the only one I think of.” “Oh, Azzu, me too, I just don’t know what to say anymore. My parents, you know, they don’t understand.” “Fuck the rest of the world okay, fuck religion and jobs and fucking parents, it’s just about you and I.” “Hey, I can’t wait to see you waiting outside my school tomorrow…” And so on and so forth till my brain switched into auto-pilot.
I jumped out of bed to see that it was still only midnight. Still in the haze between dreams and reality, I floated downstairs to the TV room and found my favourite sofa opposite the television.
Golf. Old cricket game. Old cricket game. South Indian channel. Many more South Indian channels. Shit music videos. Cyclone in Orissa. Some debate about religion. Y2K. Y2K. Pack your things and go. TV is dead.
Then I switched to the local channels. Kashi Now and City Buzz were the ones gathering all the buzz. Rakesh, now that he had a leg in journalism, couldn’t stop sharing his newfound knowledge. But I didn’t see what all the hoopla about – all these channels did were show old movies. Throw in a Y2K warning here and there, and tell some local news. That’s about it.
Then I found another local channel called BTV. Banaras TeleVision. An old sage sat on stage singing some passages from the Ramayana. Off.
Anita had left my mind when I went back to bed again.

The date was December 21, 1999. Ten days left before the so-called Apocalypse. God was finally supposed to unleash his wrath. Computers were supposed to start menstruating. There was a havan around every other corner I looked where ascetics sat reciting random verses to help save certain persons/places/things. Even I couldn’t help showing a little emotion about my own theories of natural disasters just waiting to hit our part of the world.
And yet, not even the potential of seeing the world go awry and thus enjoying our final days as lovers was enough for Anita to show me the same attention like she used to.
No… It was never enough. I was always chasing her around. There was no other way around it – I had discovered that my happiness now depended simply on her smiles and frowns. Whereas hers depended on… well, I’m not even sure what made her happy. But I was sure that it was certainly not me anymore.
Adding insult to injury, on December 21, she had the nerve to send me a Christmas invitation. The exact same one that her family sent to every acquaintance they had. Acquaintance. Bitch.
On December 22, my mood had changed a little and I had a vision of our perfect Christmas together. She would forgive me for whatever it was she was unsatisfied with me about, and we would have our first kiss under the Christmas star or mistletoe or whatever.
On December 23, I decided to go and buy her a present. I was at one of the tourist-laden handicraft shops near the ghats when I met Ram Ram for the first time in my life and my life changed forever.

So let me introduce you to the old man. Ram Ram was 60 when I first met him, but he walked and talked more like he was 90. I was to discover later that he was the man behind the boring Ramayana passage-singing on BTV. As a matter of fact, he was behind everything on BTV. When local channels first gained popularity in Varanasi, Ram Ram started one with a noble and idealistic vision to balance out the crime and the sexiness on the idiot box with some wholesome lessons from our oh-so-fucking-pure Indian religion and mythology.
The plan, unsurprisingly, failed spectacularly. BTV flopped, and Ram Ram had been losing money and advertisers faster than he was losing the colour of his slippery skin.
But before I knew all this, I met him in that handicrafts shop. I was choosing a shawl for Anita and he came and stood next to me.
“Everything here looks the same, son,” he coughed.
“Huh?” I looked behind me to see there was no one else he could be addressing. Unless, of course, he was crazy enough to speak to himself in public and address himself as ‘son’. But then I reminded myself that he was probably old enough to do some crazy shit like that.
“Huuunnnn,” he let out a long, philosophical sigh, “Different designs. Same base. Everything is the same.”
I pretended to ignore him, but he kept on whispering the word ‘designs’.
“Sorry sir,” I said, “Did you say something?”
“What’s your name, son?” he didn’t look at me.
“Azad,” I couldn’t keep my eyes off him.
“AZAD!” he exclaimed and turned to stare into my eyes for the first time, “What a great name you have – Azad! Free! It must be a great feeling to always be addressed to as a free man!”
The old man moved a little further away from me and spotted a green dupatta. “Aah, this will do, won’t it Azad?” he said to me, “You seem like the type of young man that knows what young women will like. You think my daughter will like this, Azad?” he showed it to me, “She’s very pretty. Must be around your age. Are you married, Azad?”
“No,” I said. Then he coughed. And then coughed and coughed. His choked lungs spoke in their own form of protest, which I interpreted as curses against years of cigarette smoke clouds. “Ayaarghagh,” they said.
I chose a plain black shawl and quickly stepped away. Buying fabric for a woman was already nauseating enough without the privilege of having to do it around a disturbed old man. He was in the queue to pay right behind me, and followed me out with that dupatta.
Outside the shop’s tiny door, he raised his hands to place on my shoulders, “Take care, son,” he said, and then he fell.
With a thump, he was down on the stone-paved street. The dupatta fell over his face. He didn’t complain.
“Sir?” I tried not to panic. “SIR!!” I panicked.
No response.
When he woke up at the hospital three hours later, I was obliged to listen to him talk. And thus, thanks to my eagerness to please Anita, her Christmas present had delivered me right into the audience of Ram Ram Singh.

Ram Ram was the owner of BTV. He was also extremely sick with something, although I didn’t pay much attention when the doctor told me exactly what he was suffering from.
“I have a daughter,” he told me as soon as he regained perspective, “And a TV channel.”
“Is she going to come now?” I was eager to get the fuck out of there, “Should I call her?”
“No, no, she’ll be here, she’ll be here,” he sighed, “I also have a TV channel.”
Perhaps I should thank Ram Ram, because at least for that one afternoon, he diverted my attention away from Anita. I wanted to tell him that I was in pain too – a much different type of pain – but then I felt embarrassed at the ridiculousness of suffering over a woman and didn’t mention it.
I left the hospital that evening learning a fair bit about TV channels. Two days later, I mentioned it to Anita during her parents’ Christmas party, but she was too busy not liking the shawl I’d bought for her and talking to every other well-mannered Christian boy in the room. Her mother, whom I was introduced to for the first time, spent the evening making snide remarks about me behind my back, but making sure that she was loud enough for me to hear them.
I was inching towards insanity. I knew it. It was either that or I was finally losing control of all those years of bottled-up sexual frustration. It had been a long, long time since Monica, and even that barely qualified as fucking. It’s amusing to see now how the potential for sex is so much more torturous than complete abstinence. Actually, the potential for any sort of physical connection with Anita was so bleak that even imagining it would be an insult to the responsible use of human imagination.
I know I have no right to complain, but obsession is the worst of all addictions. I discovered that I had an unexpected fascination for the media broadcasting industry, so I stayed in touch with Ram Ram. But even that fascination couldn’t kill my obsession. I could go on for a few days thinking about how I would improve BTV given a chance, but then one reminder of Anita would have me whispering her name in my sleep again.
Every once in a while Anita and I would have dapples of the ‘perfect’ moment together. But in hindsight, the definition of perfection had become much more abstract, and those moments were only relatively better than the previous shit times. All that these non-shit times did, apart from providing me with a day or two of useless exhilaration, was balloon up my hopes before they were predictably burst apart again.
No, my problems weren’t as bad as those of Ram Ram. They were nothing compared to those of Dr. Scholar’s – and look how jolly he turned out to be.
Y2K came and went. Nobody worth mentioning died and my refrigerator didn’t try to poison me. Deepu Chachu rented out the restaurant for a huge private party, and I stayed up welcoming the new millennium making coffee for bored children of drunken parents.
The year 2000 was more depressing than the year 1999, because I didn’t have the thrill of meeting someone new to replace Anita, and was instead laden with the further depression of not being ready to meet someone like that ever again. Work was shit and I had purposely alienated my closest friends. My only hope was a skeletal old man and his flop TV channel.
“I’ll sell you BTV, Mr. Free,” said Ram Ram, “But you’ll have to meet my daughter.”