Chapter 17: The Job

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

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

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

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

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

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