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.