Chapter 11: BTV

I was born self-centred and that is how I was going to die. Falling in love with Anita wasn’t going to change that. It was an uncomfortable truth to accept, but I considered myself mature enough to realize that nobody and nothing was going to be more important to me than me and my time.
It was already four minutes past seven. I had the meeting with Ram Ram at eight, and since I hadn’t taken this route before, I could only frustratingly estimate that it would take between 15-20 minutes to get from Anita’s place to his office. That means now I had a pessimistic maximum of 36 – no, now a maximum of 35 minutes with her.
She probably doesn’t even remember. I should just leave and never come back here again. What’s the point of going to Ram Ram’s either if she wasn’t willing to spend time with me? I should just stay at the restaurant and hope to meet someone else the next time I get drunk.
But what if I never find anyone else? What if she really is the best and last hope for me? I let Kalpana go already; I can’t do the same with Anita.
19:06. What the hell is she doing?
More than anything, waiting for Anita had made me bond with my wristwatch – the one that Deepu Chachu had presented all those years ago. It was a digital and came complete with an entire fucking calculator.
Ask any owner of a digital watch and they will have a slightly different perspective of time. We get in the habit of counting time to the minute. Others will look at the two hands on their watch and approximate it to the nearest fifth minute, and that is if they were being painstaking. Not me – so if Anita says that she will be ready in ten minutes, I take it as literally 10 minutes instead of 5-15.
I had devised that it takes between 8-10 minutes to get from home to the restaurant, and another 13 to 15 minutes to get from the restaurant to Anita’s. The variation in time depended on the traffic, the time of the day, my speed on that particular day, whether or not it was a Sunday, and on the likelihood of on-road arguments with other commuters. Every journey was timed to its exact value on my digital watch, and an average of a few dozen or so was then taken for me to make up my final travel estimate for the route.
I never used the fucking useless calculator. What, did they I have little midget fingers?
19:08. Maximum of… I did a little calculation in my head… Maximum of 32 minutes.
A minute (or three?) later, she stepped out. Time stopped mattering, temporarily.
Anita closed the door behind her and walked down the steps. She did so slowly, using her hands to balance herself with each step. She looked at me and smiled briefly, before returning her attention back towards the steps.
When she finally came down, her fair face flashed even brighter under the street light and through another one of her blinding smiles.
Her long black hair was tied back today, just the way I preferred it. “How long have you been waiting?” she asked me.
“Oh,” I turned to the watch, “10 minutes, I think,”
She sighed and walked past me. I followed. “So have you finalized things with Mr. Ram yet?” she asked.
“Ram Ram.”
“Yes, have you finalized things with Mr. Ram Ram yet?”
“I have to go in half an hour actually,” my voice paced, “How was your day Anita?”
She paused and looked straight at me, tilting her waist to one side and turning her blue eyes to another. “It was fine,” she said, “Just had to help Mummy around the house – she has been very busy, you know? So many offers coming in these days…”
“Offers?”
“Oh, yes, didn’t I tell you?” her eyes briefly sparkled with uncharacteristic wickedness, “Mummy has been pushing me to get married, Azzu… There have already been three gentlemen over to see me in the past week.”
She paused; I quickly plotted three murders and then began to wonder about how I was going to make them look unrelated.
“No – four!” she verbally stabbed me, “I forgot the short one.”
Fine, make that four bodies to get rid off. If there is any time to finally unleash the gangsta rapper in me, this is probably it. Although I’m confident that Dr. Dre never committed this much to his ‘bitches’.
“And..?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“And nothing,” her smile grew wilier by the second, “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
Dejected, I faced away and turned back to the healing and distracting powers of Time to save me. 19:25.
Anita’s nudged me to turn and face her. “Mummy and Daddy are both worried though,” she suddenly sounded serious, “Mummy feels that I shouldn’t spend so much time with you…”
“What… Why?”
“She… Mummy feels…” Anita bit her nail, “Mummy says you give us a bad impression.”
“And what do you feel?”
She lowered her eyes. “I feel whatever she feels.”
“Ha,” I smirked and looked away, “That’s fucking perfect.”
“Language!” she scolded.
“I know…”

Ram Ram was becoming more and more pathetic by the day. My exposure to ultra senior citizens like him had generally been limited – I remembered Dadaji, my grandfather, although not very well because he seemed to be a bigger asshole than my father, and I remember Dr. Scholar, who should’ve been a lab rat for geriatrics studying neuro-deterioration instead of being allowed to roam amongst normal human beings.
I felt very differently about the three. My memories of Dadaji were limited to avoiding him and his brash honesty at all costs to prevent any potential embarrassment. I really liked Dr. Scholar, although I wasn’t sure he was safe enough to be considered a friend. And I just felt sorry for Ram Ram, and his random quirks did nothing to deter me from my conclusions about the insanities of the elderly.
“No two things are alike Azad,” he announced as I walked into the elevator-sized enclosement that he otherwise referred to as his living room. “No two things…” he repeated before closing his eyes.
Ram Ram was lying down on a single bed that covered half the room. He wore a white vest and a white towel around his waist, which was stained with heaps of questionable orange and red stains. His dry and crumbly skin silently begged for help. Standing next to him was his daughter, concealed artfully behind a translucent green dupatta, motioned me to sit on a stool opposite to the old man. I obliged as she left the room.
Ram Ram opened his eyes and looked around the room again. His eyes focused on a small rusty window behind me. He spoke to the window.
“We think we have figured it out,” he said, “We think that now everything will make sense. Not true, not true. Nothing makes sense. Nothing is predictable. No two things are alike.”
Then, in an act of excruciating discomfort that made even me cringe in my seat, he used his thin hands to hoist himself up. “Aaaaarrghyurrrrh,” he moaned, and halfway through his tribal belch, the moan became into a burp and then trailed away into silence.
“No two events are alike,” he added when he was finished sitting.
By now you must be wondering – what was I doing here talking to a man with the skin of an alligator and the scent of a corpse? Well, by now, I’m not so sure either, but like everything else that rotated by life these days, it had to do with Anita.
See, the job at the restaurant was fun and relaxing, but it wasn’t exactly making Anita hot for me. She worried too much about waiting at home for a penniless young man who came back smelling like onions and cheap mouth-freshener. She was from a family that hadn’t yet tarnished its reputation and because of her fair skin and melodic voice she was gathering suitors faster than Sita.
So I needed a better job, and ever since meeting Ram Ram last month, I had decided it wasn’t going to be an entirely bad life choice to work in the television industry. What I had never expected, though, was that Ram Ram would be waving ram-ram bye-bye to his life so soon, but here he was, surely inches away from the afterlife. And he had turned fucking retarded.
“I’ll sell you BTV Azad, I’ll sell you BTV,” he clapped his hand on his knee, “How old are you Azad? You want to marry my youngest daughter also?”
No, I didn’t, but when she walked back in with some namkeen, I couldn’t help glancing at her shy features behind her dupatta. Nah, I thought, I’ve already told myself that I love Anita.
I had some namkeen. And after I refused his daughter’s hand again, I was officially offered Ram Ram’s business. He valued it at a shocking bargain of five lakh rupees, but I told myself that I could probably influence the old man to hand it to me for three.
Ram Ram suddenly got up on his feet, a feat he accomplished in surprising agility. “The pebbles, oh the little pebbles,” he moaned and ran out into another room.
I tried to avoid the offending look of surprise in my eyes when his daughter looked at me. I’m sure I failed because she had already started explaining. “He is really sick, bhai-saab,” she announced unabashedly, “Sometimes, we even see blood in the toilet.”
I left the namkeen alone. Before he could get back from his disturbing bowel adventures, I was out the house, leaving his daughter with a get-well-soon message and my final bargain offer.

I guess accepting a new religion shouldn’t be a big deal for someone who wasn’t a big fan of their old one, but in my case, the problem was that I disliked religion altogether. Its controlled and rigid nature made my breaths gasp, especially because the faith it offered was mostly unstructured and the promises it made were mostly malleable.
But try as I might, I simply didn’t feel the same atheistic passion anymore. Five years ago, I could have organized a jihad against religion – now, I felt that there was no harm in religion hanging around just as long as it stayed in a corner and didn’t interfere with my life.
Maybe then it was only bitter irony that I had to fall for a woman that revolved her life around religion. If there was one thing in common between all those fuckers who had been coming with proposals to marry her, it was that they were all descendants of the Christians who protested and now that squeaky clean pasts and came offering promises of squeakier and cleaner futures to Anita’s parents. How could I compete with that, when Anita’s family herself was so orthodox in their own Protestentness that they damn near put the Catholics to shame? There was nothing religious I had to offer except assuring people that regardless of my Muslim-sounding name I was supposedly a Hindu – not because I had chosen to be one but because my ancestors never chose to be anything else.
Still though, if I had to choose a religion, I would probably just stick with Hinduism. I liked Hindu deities – they are all slightly fucked up and unapologetically so.
Mummy was probably the only one mildly interested in idol worship, and even then she ended up revealing more atrocities about the idols she worshipped than their actual positives. Krishna may be the God of love, but he was also a proud butter glutton, thief, liar, and a cheat in battle. And above all, he was horny.
So was Shiv, who was probably the most schizophrenic one of them all. Sure he is meant to love and protect Varanasi, but his own nature is the same reason why people here are still so damn useless like they were four thousand years ago. He is the caretaker and at the same time he was a ruthless destroyer and for some reason, drugged-up voodoo priests in the city remember him as a stoned horny necrophiliac.
Then we have Gods like Hanuman and Ganesh who decided to reflect themselves in the image of animals more than those of sinful men. And then there is Kali, whose physical features are appalling enough to scare-off any devotee more than garner their true affections. Then there are stories of Prahlad and Holika and Queens plotting against their sons and brother killing brother and God I could go on forever…
But as I said, these are exactly the reason why I relate to Hinduism. The swept-below-the-carpet fuckedupness of the Gods – they reminded me of me.
And my see-sawing emotions towards religion that kept me repulsed and attracted to it at the same time. So as I sat one day with my Muslim name and brief flirtation with Buddhist philosophy and generations of Hindu blood, I bravely ventured into the drunken amnesias of my neural system and retrieved Moses’ tablet of the Ten Commandments and decided to become a Christian. It’s the least I could do for love.

I went back to the church where I met Anita to pretend to the world that Christ had actually somehow saved me. Deepu Chachu accompanied me in my holy transformation with grim disappointment. I was baptised by Father Andrew and silently chastised by my uncle. Anita handed me a Bible and watched on as the priest-man encouraged me to splurge out my newfound interest and faith in his God. “It is just a verbal diarrhoea of spirituality!” Anita watched on as I lied my way into spiritual acceptance. Unlike her with her honest goodness, I didn’t have much to say, and a vastly different case of diarrhoea across the city was bound to have a bigger impact in my life’s proceedings.
“It’s going around,” said Ram Ram’s daughter as the old man’s skeletal structure now only seemed to be as thin and as useful as a clothesline drying his crumpled droopy old skin.
She, Arora, and I were in the hospital soon after my church time with the Bible and Father Andrew. The Father’s official announcement had finally given me the credit for seeing the light and for the Crusades. Hopefully my slightly Islamic name wouldn’t mislead the Muslims into thinking that I was one of them and had turned into a Judas. I don’t mind the Hindus feeling so, because they were probably less likely to kick my ass.
Anyways, back to the hospital. Ram Ram had been shitting and coughing blood (often at the same time) for too long now, so his exodus out of his little house was more for sanitary reasons that any other. I wasn’t totally sure of how many different afflictions he had, and I was too scared to ask his daughter.
Arora obviously wasn’t. “Your father has many problems, no?” he turned to the daughter, “Is he going to die?”
The girl shrugged, “Yes, Many. Probably.”
The Channel was my first venture with Arora. Shubham had introduced me to him, saying that it was probably time I paid someone else money to worry about my money. What I failed to mention to Shubham though was that even if I was going to have an accountant, I would’ve much rather have preferred one of my own species instead of this rat-faced little freak.
I dragged Arora outside the room – this being the early days since I met him, his nature was fairly new to me. “He hasn’t signed the papers,” I said, “You are supposed to help me strike this deal, not annoy his family members.”
“No, Azad, sir, don’t you worry sir,” he squeaked, “Just breaking the ice sir, you know.”
He then broke some more ice. “You must go to this new chai shop they have opened outside the hospital,” he said to the stone-faced near-orphan, “The chai is a bit too sweet, but it’s still very nice.”

I tossed and turned in my bed. Every time I decided to calm myself and count, I was soon distracted. My digital watch told me that it was 01:07. I decided to put all my concentration into counting, but it could barely distract me from my obsession. I could think of nothing but BTV.
I counted up to 153, slowly, in what seemed to be an hour. My eyes opened to see 01:11.
Ram Ram’s failure with the channel wasn’t surprising, but it didn’t deter me from seeing the potential in his line of work. What did he expect when he only broadcasted devotional singers and photos of missing children on your channel all day? People had obviously tuned out, and soon enough, BTV’s target audience were either ascetics who couldn’t afford a television to watch the devotional music, or the parents of missing children who cried for a few hours before switching the channel to watch Amitabh Bachan hosting Kaun Banega Krorepati.
I knew that a change was possible. I had it all mapped out even before I ever stepped into the office. In India, any big business had to start slightly illegally, which in my case, meant starting off by showing as many popular movies as possible and showing a big fat middle finger to the license to do so. I had also decided to follow Kashi Now’s footsteps and show local news in the channel. Plus I knew enough quacks and astrologers around the city to include some bullshit tarot card readings and stories of miracle snake charmers every night.
Because I was working at the restaurant, I could save all of my salary that I would otherwise spend on food. Because of Deepu Chachu, I didn’t have to pay rent, and because of Kalpana’s shopping spree in 1991, I didn’t have to buy any new clothes. Papa’s will and the university’s compensation would probably help to pay for most of the channel’s asking price.
I needed staff. Arora, unfortunately had enough skills to be kept on board. One of them was negotiation, which he performed successfully with Ram Ram’s daughter to bring the channel’s value even lower. Arora also doubled as my secretary. He sometimes tripled as my lawyer too, and at a later time in my life would quadruple as my transport.
I decided that I would hire myself a couple of cameraman who would double as reporters for the news. I needed an operator-person to change the video tapes for the movies, and I would probably need a good-looking receptionist to make visitors in the office feel slightly more excited to be there.
Of course, a later discovery was to be my gross miscalculation of staff requirements which would then lead me deeper into the shithole of further financial crises.
Another matter, of course, was my dirty mouth. My fucking dirty old bullshit mouth. That cunt-creamed asshole on my face that my dickheaded little brain called a mouth. It was fucking dirty and Anita never failed to remind me of it. When she was not trying to purposefully make me jealous of all the other decent men that she could get married to, she kept on dropping her obvious hints.
“Azzu, have you met Nitin Gideon – he came to see me the other day?” she asked.
“No, why?”
“Nothing, I just thought about him,” she paused, “He had a very nice voice. Spoke very beautifully.”
“He can go and fuck his beautiful voice then.”
“Language!”
“I know…”

The so called good times, which were much easier to identify from the ‘bad times’ before, became greyer and greyer the more I indulged into BTV – not because the BTV times were bad, but because they were good enough to make me question whether hanging out with Anita was really that great or was I simply looking for some obsession to divert my mind.
Arora had negotiated the asking price at 2.4 lakhs, and then the deal was settled at 2.1. Ram Ram was anxious to see the channel go before leaving for good himself, and his soon-to-be-lonely daughter had nothing to look forward to except a lot of money.
I had the energy of a horny little rabbit on the first day of the job – the responsibility of which lay completely with the coffee made by the vendor in the building nearby and Anita’s stern morality against any sort of physical contact, which in turn got me aroused every time the back of my hand mistakenly brushed against hers. My days would be spent bottling up all that stored horny energy lying static which I then decided to change into kinetic work energy.
On Day 2, I realized that I was already better than Ram Ram at the channel-managing business. The devotional singers were replaced by ghazal singers, who were replaced by live ballads, who were replaced by Hindi movie pop songs. The faces of the missing children were replaced by the faces of actors dramatizing their stories which soon gave way for the faces of Al Pacino and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Days went by and the channel soon became unrecognizable from what it used to be. Deepu Chachu lent me a little more money from the restaurant, and I decided to finally start looking for my own place. A flat in Mehmoorganj caught my eye, which was equidistant from Anita’s place and the office.
The restaurant was going to be okay without me, but I knew that Deepu Chachu wasn’t too interested in keeping it anymore, either. One morning, he woke up shivering in his bed, his face swelled up like a fucking tomato. The fever was bad enough that, for the first time in my life, I paid attention to Deepu Chachu’s mortality.
I decide to tend to him that morning, but because I had to spend 15 extra minutes with him, I decide to skip my morning bath to make up for the lost time. My eyes stayed fixated on the wrist watch as he moaned.
“Are you enjoying your work?” he asked me.
I nodded. I was always in the office by 08:55, and for that I had to leave him exactly 20 minutes earlier. It was 08:23.
Deepu Chachu moved his shoulders up and looked straight at me, “I worry about you sometimes, son. You might be stressing yourself too much.”
I tutted. “No Chachu, I’m fine, I’m fine,” I assured him, “This is important to me okay? This is going to be my life.”
He looked away and sighed, still shivering melodramatically. “Yes I know, but sometimes I wonder what will happen to the restaurant if I become even sicker now. Pallu is a rascal who I can never trust, and the rest of them are just youngsters,” he looked back at me, “What do I do Azad?”
I didn’t know, and honestly I didn’t care about the restaurant anymore. The channel was faster, richer, and crazier. Plus Anita had said that I looked much better in a business shirt than a fucking apron.
“The restaurant will be fine, Chachu,” I said, “There are enough people who will come back for Pallu’s Butter Chicken, and I don’t think that he is as bad as you say he is.”
In the later days, when the restaurant was actually handed over to him, Pallu did turn out to be a cuntfaced rascal and only paid Deepu Chachu a smaller percentage of the monthly earnings. But his Butter Chicken became better and more popular, and he eventually made enough to still keep Chachu satisfied.
Back to the present now: My watch said 08:33. I decided to wrap it up.
“Well, I have to be at work Chachu, call me if you need anything.”
Chachu reached out his hand to grab mine. We sat on the bed in silence, except for his breathing: it seemed that he was struggling to cough out each puff of air from his lungs. Chachu’s hand was scorching hot, and I began to feel dizzy with potential contagion.
Exactly two minutes of the awkward silence later, I disengaged myself and left the room. Chachu shivered once more and rolled over.

I had to seriously start watching my language now. And it wasn’t just the cursing – Anita had a problem with many of the other words in my vocabulary. ‘Whatever’, ‘really’ ‘totally’. “You don’t sound nearly-thirty enough,” she once said.
I had never before thought that there was an assigned speaking style that was to be regularly updated with a person’s age. I had an explanation for my language though, not that it mattered to Anita: In my teenage years, I used to spend all my time sounding differently every day depending on who was listening to me. But, by around the time I was old enough to buy my own drugs, I had decided put a full stop on my linguistic evolution. Or more like a three full stops… which made it sound like I was probably still learning but not enough to consciously give a fuck about it… That is why, till the day I died, I was probably still going to sound a lot like a 19-year-old.
I had taken Anita out for a late night roadside ice-cream at Nice Food’s once when she said, “No one will take you seriously if you talk like that.”
I slurped on my Strawberry Cornetto. “I only need to be taken seriously by myself,” I bravely replied, and I remembered how she broke into a rare giggle following that particular line.
But I had to seriously start watching my language now. Talk slower, make a system of learning, sell my soul, whatever.
Two months had passed since I had taken over the channel, and I had already begun doubting myself. I mean, it was definitely a better course of work than the restaurant, but it seemed to me as if every day spent in that office was clipping off bits of my sanity… little by little… day by day…
I could probably now officially wave goodbye to the comic book shop dream too. It was pleasant while the hope lasted, but I had always had the seeping acceptance that it was only ever going to be hope and nothing more.

The big day had arrived. I had known Anita for nearly a year now, but I had swayed away from any big decision-making conversations to avoid myself any trauma. Everything had come together, and a date had to be fixed and then the set schedule religiously followed. Today was the day. As my digital watch struck from 14:47 to 14:48 and then to 14:49, I knew that I only had a certain number of hours before the rush of the evening news gets me back in the office again.
I kicked my scooter and revved it up as stylishly as I possibly could – but riding through the streets of Sonarpura and Gadaulia with all their memories and all their eyes and all that pressure were the perfect anecdote for confidence. I hadn’t felt this nervous since sitting on the same dinner table as Monty and his friends with their eyes closely x-raying and examining each fold of fat on my stomach.
I should’ve taken the traffic as a sign – it it’s taking you such a long and arduous time to get where you’re going, then maybe going there wasn’t worth going at all. I asked myself the question I was going to ask her, and then I put myself in her mind and tried to react to Azad asking Anita that question. I saw her see everything that was wrong with me in one flash, and then slow down and study each of these things in great detail – my thinning hair, my thick chin, my thicker stomach, my larger-than-average ears, my probably adequate sexuality not being adequate enough, my Hindu-ness, my job, my language, and my selfishness.
By the time I got to her colony, I was surprised that I had managed to live with myself for 27 years.
Anita was waiting outside on her balcony, looking fair and pretty and hair tied back and innocent and not mine. It took me two and a half traffic-jammed minutes to cross the road and park below her house. When she walked down, it took us another 15 seconds to see each other in the eye. I had given myself a good 13 minutes time to get her comfortable enough before popping the big question.
But 11 minutes into our meeting, as the blinking eye of the digital watch flashed 15:35, in a cruel twist of probably-Shiv-influenced fate, even the holy water for baptism couldn’t flush down the diarrhoea epidemic. And Prabhu the office electrician who had been following me behind my scooter since work finally caught up with me in the climax of my infatuation.
“Ram Ram passed away,” he said as the gentle ringing of his bicycle suddenly drove me crazy, “I wanted to catch you at work sir, but you left, so I just followed.”
I nodded and didn’t ask him any further questions. Prabhu stared at Anita and I for a moment, and then headed back riding his ringy bicycle.
It was 15:38 when I turned my attention to Anita again, knowing that thanks to Ram Ram’s death the moment may have already potentially passed. I unstrapped my watch and flung it away behind Anita’s house.
I dared to hold her hand. “Anita, my Princess,” I hastily asked, hoping that the quicker I did it the quicker the pain will be over, “Will you marry me?”
She didn’t get as offended as I expected, keeping her hand fastened with mine. She looked behind me, back at her house, and across at the other houses in the neighbourhood, but avoided my eyes.
“Okay,” she finally said.