Chapter 14: The Church, Part 2

Rakesh Singh, perhaps my closest friend in Varanasi, was a very different person Yesterday.
Yesterday, Rakesh was an exemplary model of discipline – his scheduling and organizational skills used to frequently put me to shame.
Yesterday, Rakesh had the brightest future amongst the three of us. Unlike him, I didn’t have the motivation to sway away from the guaranteed but limited comfort zone of my restaurant job; and Shubham had been cursed into a middle-class silk-trader’s family where no amount of ambition could ever see him escaping his eventual destiny of taking over his father’s business.
But Rakesh was going to be big. Rakesh was going to make us all proud. He was blessed with the charm and panache of the class clown as well as the potential of the quiet prodigious nerd in the front row. And Yesterday, he was close to becoming one of the best young dentists in the whole city.
Yesterday, Rakesh enjoyed partying and staying up till late every night, but still managed to wake up early enough to study the heavy cement blocks which he otherwise referred to as his textbooks. Yesterday, he liked to drink alcohol and smoke ample amounts of tobacco, but never enough to show any physical blemish on his shiny white teeth or his shiny bright future.
Yesterday happened before Today.
Today, Rakesh Singh received the result of the Finals.
“No!” he shouted.
“What did you get?” Shubham and I asked.
“No, no!” he screamed, “No, no no!!”
The ‘no-no-no-nos’ echoed in our ears, and we didn’t have to ask him to know what happened.
Rakesh had spent four years studying the insides of mouths, and was inches away from officially Bacheloring it.
“Just do the exam again next year,” Shubham offered.
“Fuck you, Shubham! Fuck you, Azad. Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck!”
You see, it was as simple as that. Rakesh, the enigma, the mystic, the riddle, had laid his life on the beautiful symmetry of the dental structure, only to miss the chances of success by the skin of his teeth.
“Do it again?” he foamed from his mouth, “Do it again? Who the fuck will pay for me? The exam is next year, you stupid fucks, next year!!! What the fuck am I going to do all year? I wanted to be a dentist, yaar. I won’t do anything else. I won’t do anything else…”
We couldn’t help him even when we wanted to. Rakesh was implacable tonight. Shubham offered him a job at the shop, and feeling left out, I offered him a job at the restaurant. But Rakesh was too smart and too proud and too much better than us to settle down for our occupations.
“You’ve studied it for four years, Rakesh,” I said, “Are you just going to throw it away?”
For the first time in months, Rakesh opened his living room window, ushering in a fresh wave of cold wind. He then picked up his heavy textbooks, one by one, and ruthlessly threw them out the window. “Are you happy, now?” he demanded.
Now before you raise an eyebrow, let me tell you a little more about this friend of mine. Rakesh was as crazy as he was intelligent. When he was in school, he used to be a great long distance runner, dominating every single junior school race he took part in. He was so great that, at 15, a girlfriend convinced him to try his luck against the senior boys. At the next sports meet, he ran amongst seven other boys who were all two or three years older than him, and he ended up coming in at second place. Rakesh was so mad that, right after the race, he raced up to his girlfriend and punched her in the face. It was later discovered that he had shifted her nasal cartilage on one side, forever destroying the symmetry of her nose. Needless to say the girl abandoned him.
His parents had long abandoned him too. Rakesh’s father was a successful carpet designer with multinational clients. Rakesh picked up the expert eye from a young age, and by the time he was 17, he had several design ideas of his own. Unfortunately, his father rejected everything Rakesh came up before a certain mega carpet fair, telling his son to “come back with more mature designs next year.”
Rakesh, in a fit of insanity, went ahead and destroyed all the other designs his father had chosen for the fair. He was kicked out of his home, and has since lived off borrowed money from a few journalist friends in this unkempt little apartment. He funded his education through freelance money he earned thanks to his knack of photography, and of course, carpet designs for various clients other than his old man.
Dentistry was his way out. Rakesh spent time, money, and sacrificed dozens of parties and melees with Shubham and me to stay in this flat and study. He finished the three year course and then interned at the hospital where he had a near-exemplary year, all apart for that one day he came hung-over to see an obnoxious patient, and then proceeded to unsuccessfully attempt a root canal surgery on that patient without the necessary permission from his seniors or anaesthesia.
And now here he was – the day after receiving his final exam scores. The one exam that held the key to everything. The one exam that would officially hand him a bachelor’s degree and make him Dr. Rakesh Singh and fulfil his dreams of further super specialization and setting up a private clinic.
And it was over. Khatam khallas. Rakesh wasn’t even returned his answer sheet from the examiners to be able to see where he went wrong. All he got was an identification number and an unflattering final score.
“It’s all fucked up now,” he added. We nodded.
Shubham waited a few long uncomfortable minutes before putting on his old rock music. I pretended that I had heard it before and began discussing the lyrics with Shubham.
“Let’s have a drink, yaar,” Rakesh suggested. We agreed. Rakesh opened his cupboard to pull out two large bottles of Royal Stag. He opened his refrigerator to pull out several large cold bottles of soda. We opened our mouths to waste away the rest of the night.
As I mentioned before, Rakesh was never a heavy drinker. Sure, he liked his whiskey and the occasional drunkard night, but he enjoyed it just as much as he enjoyed cricket, riding his bike, or sitting by the riverside. Alcohol calmed him down, and Rakesh would turn to it only when he desperately needed to feel comfortable.
Rakesh was extremely uncomfortable that day. The Royal Stag flowed down and enriched his system. It enriched ours, too, but Rakesh was on a very different level that evening.
“What’s the most amount of whiskey you can drink – in one gulp?” he challenged me, removing all the soda from sight.
“Hmm… three…” I mused, “No… four large shots, probably.”
Rakesh poured five shots in a glass, filling it up to the brim. “Watch me,” he said, before the whiskey disappeared down his throats in a matter of seconds. My throat flinched.
After a long period of his signature muteness, Shubham quietly told Rakesh to calm down.
“Shut the fuck up,” was Rakesh’s response, “Now, whose next?”
I was. And then Rakesh again. And then Shubham. And then Rakesh again. The more I watched him, the worse my digestive system felt. My stomach gargled and I knew that all those roasted peanuts were ready to splurge out the same way they came in.
Shubham sang softly. Rakesh swung his hair and sang loudly. My head started to spin out of control. Oh, shit, I’m going to puke.
But I didn’t. “Let’s get out of here,” Rakesh suggested, “Shubham’s got his dad’s car. Let’s go for a drive.”
I don’t think I had ever been this drunk before. And if I had, I definitely didn’t remember it. Gaanja can do awful, irreversible things to a guy’s memory, and even though I hadn’t touched it since college, my brain cells would probably be damaged forever. I was contemplating whether or not I regretted this fact, but I didn’t remember much of those high times to decide whether or not they had been worth a lifetime of faulty memory.
Well, back to now. I don’t remember ever being this drunk before. Plus, Rakesh was there to make sure that the alcohol kept pouring.
“You’re going to drink in the car?” I exclaimed when he pulled out another bottle of Royal Stag. We were in the back seat while Shubham was driving in the slowest, most paranoid manner in the history of human driving.
Rakesh took a large swig straight out of the bottle. “Fuck yeah!” he shouted.
He forced me to drink some too. Then Shubham had a drink, and Rakesh celebrated some more.
“Who the hell wants to be a Dr. Someone anyways?” he shouted, “Doctor Rakesh Singh – it doesn’t sound right, does it?”
I nodded my head in probable agreement.
“There is no point to it, is it Azad?” he rambled, mostly incoherently, “We should simply leave it all… even if I did graduate, I would want to do a Master’s degree… and then I would still want more… even the most successful doctor finds some reason to feel inadequate… ask the happiest man in the world, and he would tell you that he wishes to have more sorrow in his life, just to feel alive…”
Just to feel ‘alive’? For the next four or five minutes, I think I wasn’t drunk anymore. I can’t explain how it happened. I was sober. And I was depressed. I was jealous of Rakesh’s failure. I was jealous that he had a down in his life so he could be up again. I was depressed because I wasn’t going anywhere and I was no one and there was nothing for me to ever be.
What does being ‘alive’ feel like anyways? Is it the searing pain on my ears every time Papa slapped me, or is it the examination of my reddened ears in the bathroom mirror afterwards and crying in self-pity? Is it falling in love or is it diverting my attention completely towards a girl just because I didn’t want to deal with the torture of my memories?
If I didn’t have my memories, I wouldn’t be me. Memory is my history, and memory is the history of the universe around me. And yet, I go about finding every way possible to delete that memory and get rid of everything I am. Is being alive chasing after every temporary answer to life, whether it is Kalpana, hanging with my college buddies, listening to an old song, or drug indulgence? Or is it that the most lively thing that can happen to life is the forgettable monotony of dispassionate social schedules that we indulge ourselves into.
Does my life consist of my reactions to all the chaos the universe throws in front of me? But did I cause the universe to behave a certain way? And if so, what did the universe throw in front of me to cause the universe’s future behaviour?
I need a way out.
“I need a piss,” Rakesh said.
I was still drunk when Shubham stopped the car near Gadaulia crossing. Rakesh stepped out to find a dirty corner to relieve himself, and I stepped out to take a walk the other way.
“Where are you going?” Shubham asked.
I was still drunk when I answered back to him, “Around.” I was drunk when I saw a church which reminded me of the day I learned the Ten Commandments.
“Are you coming?” I heard Shubham’s voice, but I don’t remember answering it. I was drunk when I wandered inside the church, and still drunk when Rakesh and Shubham disappeared.
I was welcomed by dim lights and euphonious piano music. What the fuck am I expecting to find in here? God? Because if I did see him, we would be more likely to get in a scuffle rather than indulge in any civilized form of enlightenment.
There were dozens sitting in here. I looked around at their faces, until my eyes became fixated on a group of girls sitting in the front row.
There were four of them. I spent a minute staring at each one individually to decide which one I liked best, and then gave up realizing that they were all equally stunning. If I had known before that Christianity offered such good looking devotees then I would have never wasted all those years insulting God. Or have I just become so desperate that I was willing to gawk at every sign of supple femaleness? I wondered if they would still be good looking if I was sober.
I sat down by a row of seats in the back which offered a semi-decent angle from me to stare at. If God did exist, then this was pretty much the worst fucking thing I could do. I have walked into his house, uninvited, intoxicated, and it didn’t take me long to get lustful either. It also didn’t take long before my stomach began to rumble again.
Fuck Rakesh and his fucking drink persuasions. Fuck his failure too, because I wouldn’t be drunk and wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t decided to drown his sorrows together. My stomach tightened and warned me of worse things to come. Dear God, your uninvited, intoxicated, lustful guest, who doesn’t even believe you exist and thus is not sure why he’s even addressing an imaginary being, is now not far away from desecrating your home with some unfortunately unimaginary vomit.