Escape

After they exited from the exam centre on the last day, they would slip away, in ones and twos, towards the back of the campus, where a crumbling wall serves as a boundary between the college and dirty undergrowth and sewerage. A short walk in the mud would get them to a near forgotten by-lane which winds through clusters of houses interspersed with nothingness for a kilometer before ending right in the middle of Dhule’s busiest market. There they would wait till the last of them arrived and then collect all their bags and suitcases from the stationary shop nearby, where they had deposited all of it the previous day. That was the plan.

It was all necessitated by love. With six months to go before they’d graduate and be gone, one of them fell for a girl in college. That in itself, however, was not reason enough for the matter to precipitate into the strife that it had, for there were several dozen others who were already in love with said girl. It was that the girl decided to reciprocate. The boy offered her a bar of chocolate and she smiled and accepted it. Then, she tore the wrapper and took a bite and then offered the remainder of the bar to him. The two had never spoken to each other before then.

That evening there was a knock at the door. Kaushik opened it. Two boys, friends of theirs, walked in. These two, everyone knew, were the messengers, the bottom rung, of the campus’s tough-guys gang. They explained to Kaushik and the rest of his friends that the leader of their gang was himself smitten by the girl and that he was not currently looking for competition. The lover-boy reiterated his unshakeable love. Kaushik pointed out, laughing half-heartedly and backslapping one of them with the intention of conveying that he meant it as a harmless wisecrack although he was fully aware that it would not be considered so, but unable to let pass the opportunity, that the gang leader’s only attempt at conversation with the girl had ended in her slapping him full on one cheek, and then the other. After a few moments of silence, which allowed everyone in the room to draw closer, one of the two messengers punched the lover boy in the stomach.

Now, the campus and its goons, over the years have developed a code of conduct and propriety, which they follow to every last detail. This explains why it was the lover boy who got punched instead of Kaushik. Over the course of four years, each student is rated by the then existing gang on a moving scale based on how many members of the gang are friends with the individual, if there have ever been ugly run-ins between him and them and how indiscrete he has been in foul-mouthing them. Whenever the opportunity arose to beat someone up, the gang referred to this scale and only when there were sufficient delinquencies and a sufficient number of them found him despicable, was he beaten up. Kaushik, by virtue of his near invisibility, had always been near the better end of the scale. If these messengers went back to their bosses and explained to them that they were involved in a brawl with Kaushik and that he had to be dealt with, there was absolutely no chance the case would be taken up. The lover boy, on the other hand, stood no chance. Thus, the punch in the wrong stomach.

The punch was returned with a punch to a face, which resulted in a nosebleed. The other messenger started to throw a kick but was surrounded by the half dozen inhabitants of the house by then. While they went to work on the poor boy, Kaushik wrapped his arms around the boy with the bleeding nose, ostensibly to keep him from entering the action, although with that nose it was unlikely he even attempt it. Later, when the two boys were gone, the rest cornered Kaushik and asked why he hadn’t involved himself in the action.

“I was making sure the other guy didn’t get into it! I held him so hard the air must’ve been squeezed out of his lungs!”

“Bullshit,” someone said, “it is just that you don’t have any balls. Not even tiny pea sized ones. You’re a fucking embarrassment!”

Kaushik looked at the group with steady eyes, which he narrowed, so the tears would be less visible, and thought it over. He knew what they said was right. He just didn’t see what was wrong with what he’d done. Yes, he’d avoided a fight. So?

“Oh, just fuck off, all of you,” he said, “now they’re going to come after all of us anyway.”

Strangely, they didn’t. Not immediately. They spent the night - all of them wide awake - plotting their defence when the inevitable knock on the door came. It did not. They did not attend classes for an entire week, staying confined to the house and venturing out only for food and always in groups. By the tenth day, everybody was fed up with the waiting. They’d resume classes, they decided, but all together. They’d spent the entire day in college and only when everybody’d finished their lectures would they return home, together. For the rest of the semester, their attendances were the best they’d ever managed.

Slowly life returned to normal. It had been decided, evidently, that retribution would wait till the last day of college. This, too, was a ritual. Every year, after the last exam was done, there was a massacre outside the campus gates. Dozens of students gathered, armed with hockey sticks and cricket bats, and scores were settled and resettled until the police siren was heard and everyone fled. And so, Kaushik and his friends spent the rest of the year leading regular lives and discussing details of the plan to escape through the walls on the other side of the campus. The lover boy never spoke to the girl again.

After they’d collected their bags and suitcases, they went to a restaurant on the outskirts of the city for dinner. They had never been there before; the usual hangouts were too risky. They spent two hours there, continually glancing at the entrance and the clock, and chatting absent-mindedly. Afterwards, they arrived at the bus station together; all of them had buses to catch to some place or the other. They waited in a dark corner keeping wary watch on the road for known faces. Kaushik’s bus was the first to leave. He embraced his friends and they all promised each other they’d be back in Dhule after a couple of months for a get-together.

He later learnt that all of them had escaped without incident. None of them ever returned to Dhule again.

Before I Sleep

Once every month, Kaushik visited his parents in Ahmedabad and spent a weekend with them. On the preceding Fridays, instead of his usual backpack, he carried a duffel bag to office, so he could go straight to the train station in the evening. This was such a Friday.

His colleagues nodded and smiled with their eyes on the bag and made the requisite observations.

“Going to Ahmedabad tonight?”

“Yes.”

“By air? Or train?”

“Train. I avoid flights to Ahmedabad. They reach after midnight and make a mess of my sleep and my parents’.”

“How long does the train take?”

“Seven hours, thereabouts.” Then he added, “Miles to go while I sleep, evidently,” and smiled benevolently in response to his colleagues’ blank expressions.

He left office earlier than usual, his bag swaying proudly from one shoulder. He knew he would reach the train station early, so early in fact, that he could make another trip to office and still be back in time. But he knew of a cozy little restaurant near the station and enjoyed spending a couple of hours there. It was a place he had discovered many years ago and had then forgotten and lost until recently when he had stumbled upon it once again. He had wondered how it could have so completely slipped his mind, for he had been a regular visitor there, in a time when he considered saving fifty rupees on a meal important. When this was not the city he lived in, but travelled frequently to, necessitated by work and B School admission interviews. And each time he came, it was here that he had his dinner before boarding the train back home. So when he found the restaurant again, he resumed the ritual.

It is a place that revels in its incongruity. A tastefully tiled courtyard, open at the top, overseen by three resplendent sodium-vapour lamps. More than a dozen rickety steel tables, most of them unoccupied and visibly rusted at the edges, spread around the area, trapped between quartets of dust-coated finely carved bamboo chairs. Men in faded maroon shirts and khaki trousers, the ends of their shirts heavily crumpled from being tucked in earlier and now irrevocably stained with oil and grime from being repeatedly used as makeshift napkins, tending to the orders of the handful of customers.

It was a warm night and Kaushik chose a seat next to one of the standing fans. It blew his hair into frenzy and reminded him that he must have a haircut in Ahmedabad. The fan emitted a continuous creaking sound, evidently from a lack of maintenance and lubrication, and it tore into the sweet melodies of Belle & Sebastian that were presented to him through the IPod. He wondered if he should shift to Joy Division and turn up the volume so the fan would become inaudible or at least less conspicuous in the industrial clamour. He sighed and asked to be shown to another table instead. He ordered a Dosa and a Coke and settled down to reminisce about Ahmedabad.

Ahmedabad, he had always lamented, was a city without character. It just lay there in the heat and sand, a cluster of short plain buildings with wealthy, peaceful people in them whose principal pastime was eating vegetarian food in expensive restaurants. It was a city that, if lived in, offered all that was nice and comfortable but never any romance. One could live in Ahmedabad for decades and then simply get up and leave, inconvenienced only by the movement of one’s belongings. It was not a city one could write about. Kaushik was certain there would never be great literature produced for it in the way that there was and could be for Mumbai or Kolkata. It was like having to write about a bunch of regular people with regular jobs and good money instead of a struggling artist in Paris or even a cheerful farmer in the Italian countryside.

It was ten years ago that Kaushik had left for Dhule. He had, since, become a visitor to the city of his childhood. He had returned briefly after his graduation, for two years, and found all his friends either gone or no longer friends. He had spent those two years forging new friendships and had then moved to Lucknow. Now another four years had passed and all that remained of his life in Ahmedabad, were his Mom and Dad.

Kaushik reached the train station with a half hour still to spare. He found a bench on which an old bespectacled man sat clutching a walking stick and speaking to a middle aged man, ostensibly his son, who stood next to him. Kaushik sat down on the other edge of the bench and placed his bag in between. The two men turned briefly towards him and then resumed their conversation.

The platform bustled with purpose and emergency. Presently, a local train arrived and a mad rush ensued. At the end of it, most of the people on the platform had emptied out into the train and when the train left, the place settled itself into a different, calmer pace. Kaushik had often noticed how people waiting for long distance trains behave differently from those waiting for local short distance ones. When Kaushik’s train arrived, people moved with more composure, secure in their knowledge that their seats were reserved and there wasn’t the need to win them over the trampled bodies of fellow travelers and competitors. After he’d located his seat and rid his, now aching, shoulder of the bag, he exited the train again and peered over the reservation chart pasted on the compartment’s door. He scoured the sheet for his name and when he found it, looked at the names immediately above and below his. It was his Dad who had first suggested this to him as a method to find out if he could hope for the company of women on the train. He now religiously followed it.

He was pleased to note that there was a Nisha Chaturvedi, female 24, on the seat opposite his. Over the years, when he had found himself in similar circumstances - and there had been many - he had rarely ever even bothered to introduce himself. Most of the females had turned out to be unattractive and married and they usually carried a baby or a self help book in their arms. And yet, he waited expectantly each time, eager to catch the first glimpse of these unknown women, letting his mind create hopeless fantasies of one day finding a Julie Delpy on the train, reading Georges Bataille.

Kaushik often wondered what he would do if were actually to find a girl like that. Would he have the courage to propose what Ethan Hawke had proposed? Or even the courage to at least start a conversation? And if he did, how would the girl react? Wouldn’t she look at him incredulously and ask him to fuck off? And how would he feel if she were to do that?

When he was only beginning to watch foreign language films, he found it weird that in so many films, when a man proposed intimacy with a woman who was not similarly disposed, the woman, instead of reacting with shock and hysteria, tenderly pushed him away, with gentle apologies even, sometimes even allowing his lips to brush lightly with hers. Kaushik found it, at the time, a case of downright western callousness and immorality. And then he became interested in Ritika and spent those hours thinking about how he could approach her and what she would say. It was then that he realized how incredibly compassionate the reactions of the women in those films were. It is perhaps one of hardest things for a man to do – to profess his love and attraction to a woman and thereby willfully place himself in a situation where he and his ego are so thoroughly exposed, so pathetically defenseless. A situation where even the slightest hint of mockery and disgust in the woman’s reaction could bruise his self esteem so badly, so indelibly. And under those circumstances, to allow a man to salvage his pride, to offer him a graceful way out. So incredibly compassionate those women were indeed!

He felt the train shudder and then move slowly. He sighed. Nisha Chaturvedi hadn’t appeared. She would possibly aboard at the next station, still an hour away, by which time he would have almost certainly dozed off. He rummaged in his bag and found the novel he was carrying, opened it, read a few lines and then shut it again. His thoughts drifted back to Ahmedabad. His Dad would be waiting for him at the station the next morning. He would comment how Kaushik had put on even more weight, an observation that his Mom would echo when he reached home. He would just smile and mumble something about how he did not care. Tea would be ready and so would be breakfast and the three of them would spend a pleasant hour together, after which his Dad, whose weekly break occurred in the middle of the week, would leave for work.

It occurred to him suddenly, what would have happened if, instead of their marriage being arranged as it was by their respective families, his Mom and Dad had met on their own all those years ago. Would they have fallen in love with each other? If his Dad had proposed marriage to her, would she have reacted hysterically or tenderly pushed him away?

He tried to recall incidents from his past, the oldest that his memory would allow him to fetch, of the two. For a very long time, he knew, he was completely oblivious to the possibility of love between his Mom and Dad. For him, they existed in order to love him and that was all there was to it. That there could be a relationship between the two of them, that need not include him, did not even occur to him until he was into his teens. One day, he clearly remembered, his Dad asked his Mom if she wished to have a pair of Diamond earrings and Kaushik stared at the two of them uncomprehendingly for it had never crossed his mind that his Dad could care for his Mom enough to buy her gifts as, or even more, expensive than the ones he bought for his son. The next day they went shopping for the earrings; Kaushik was with them. This, he found, was his earliest definite memory of them as purely a man and a woman capable of finding joy and happiness in a world without him.

He picked up the novel and began reading again. By the time the train entered the next station, he was fast asleep.

Closely Watched Films

Kaushik grew up watching and revering Amitabh Bachchan. His father deified him for Kaushik, describing his films and acting in every superlative he knew. His mother did not care much either way, happy in the Bengalis’ indivisible love for Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen.

Every fortnight, his father would come home with a rented VCR and two tapes – one Bachchan and one Uttam – Suchitra. The films were watched huddled around a 14 inch colour television set. The first film was always Bachchan’s since Kaushik would have to be put to bed by ten. His mother would keep hurrying away to the kitchen whenever the pressure cooker whistled and sometimes his father would call out to her for a cup of tea and she would return with it. Kaushik would sit through all this, staring at the screen with rapt attention, waiting for the next action set piece to begin. When it would, Kaushik would scramble up to his feet and kick and punch the air with sounds of ‘Bhishoom Bhishoom’. Sometimes he would punch his Dad on the arms and he would grab a squealing Kaushik and pull him down to his lap and hold him tightly and tickle him and Kaushik would love it. In movies where Bachchan died in the end, and there were several of those, Kaushik would become glum and his Dad would promise to show him another film where Bachchan does not die. He would go to bed after that, his mother by his side, and when he was asleep, his Mom and Dad would watch the Uttam – Suchitra film.

In those days, the entire family visited Kolkata for a week or two every year. Kaushik loved going there, for they usually stayed at one of his Uncle’s house – his Dad’s elder brother – and he had a large television set and a VCR of his own. He did not see Bachchan films there, but instead he saw magic tricks his Uncle had recorded during TV programmes and Satyajit Ray’s ‘Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne’ and ‘Felu Da’ films.

It wasn’t until he was past fifteen that he started to realize that he was watching the same films over and over and they were starting to bore him a little. He asked his Uncle if there were other films he could watch and his Uncle would speak animatedly of the latest Magic show they’d shown on television. At first, he continued to sit through those but soon he learnt the art of wiggling his way out ot them. “I want to read a book now” he would say, waving an Enid Blyton and scampering off to another room.

His father realized what was going on and Kaushik noticed that now there were three tapes being brought with the VCR – a Chinese Martial Arts film in addition to the other two. “Enter the Dragon!” or “Fist of Fury!” or “36^th Chamber of Shaolin!” his Dad would announce when he returned from work and they would settle down to watch it soon after. His Mom would now sometimes make tea for him as well. Of course, he was now allowed to stay awake well after midnight since two films needed to be watched and slowly, Uttam Suchitra faded away into oblivion for there just wasn’t enough time for a third.

It was around that time that English films and Coca Cola came back to India. And Schwarzenegger rode into Kaushik’s life, shotgun in hand on a motorcycle, and wearing leather jackets and dark glasses and it was ‘Hasta la vista, baby’ to Bruce Lee and his ilk. These movies, of course, were somewhat more risky in that there was gore and scantily clad women involved, and Kaushik’s Dad went to the theatre alone first to check if Kaushik could be allowed to watch. Once in a while, he would take Kaushik on the condition that he would walk out of the theatre, when asked, for a few minutes in the middle of the movie like during Jamie Lee’s striptease in True Lies. He would do as asked. One time, his Dad allowed one of his friends to sample a film since he was busy and Kaushik got to sit through an entire James Bond film, while his mother muttered under her breath next to him.

Dhule brought with it porn. He learnt to revel in the terrible odour and creaky chairs that permeated shady video theatres. He learnt to not let his concentration flag even as those around him moaned and groaned in the darkness, although he never did that himself, choosing to wait until he got back to his hostel room. He began to read Sydney Sheldon and Harold Robbins too and for those years, all literature and film became for him means to a single purpose.

By the time he graduated and returned home, however, he had begun to tire of them. He still watched porn, of course, but it seemed to him it had become more a matter of need and continuity than actual excitement. He shifted to Maclean and Forsyth in the written word, but about films he did not know what else he could do and, therefore, he eventually stopped watching them altogether, except for the odd one that appeared on TV.

In Lucknow, while he walked around campus and into classrooms with novels in hand, Kafka and Hemingway and Conrad, he scoffed at those that displayed interest in films. “They’re just a waste of time”, Kaushik said to himself. What good would films do to him? He’d rather spend that time reading or playing cricket. One of the first times he spoke to Ritankar, they discussed literature, but when Ritankar brought up the subject of films, Kaushik made excuses and turned away.

And then one day, Ritankar forced him to watch ‘Apocalypse Now’. And he stared at the screen spellbound by the extraordinary translation of Conrad’s vision. Afterwards, while he mumbled on about the greatness of the film, Ritankar asked him if he’d seen ‘The Godfather’ films and he nodded his head even though he had not. The same day he returned to his room and spent the night watching all three. He then watched ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ and ‘Scent of a Woman’ and ‘Heat’ and Pacino replaced Bachchan, for whom his feelings by this time were less of reverence than of adoration in any case, in his head.

“Bergman, Godard and Truffaut, they are the real stuff,” another friend told him. He found their films unavailable on the campus LAN and therefore had to wait till he visited home during a term break. There, he convinced his Dad they needed an unlimited downloads broadband connection and when that arrived, he downloaded films by all three, and spent the rest of the break watching those. He found ‘Week End’ fascinating although he understood very little of it. When he returned to campus, he sought out the friend and asked him what else he would recommend. “If you liked ‘Week End’,” he said, “you will probably enjoy Last Year At Marienbad.” Kaushik was in a trance when he watched. A few months later, when he was beginning to discover hints of superiority in his behavior with other, less informed, people, he realized the only thing similar between ‘Week End’ and ‘Last Year At Marienbad’ was that he had understood neither. He watched them again.

The next windfall came when the Post Graduation program ended and Kaushik returned home for a three month break before he would move to Mumbai for work. He decided he’d had enough of the French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realism and that he would now devote himself to contemporary cinema. He discovered ‘Sex & Lucia’ and for a brief period, Paz Vega became more beautiful to him than Penelope Cruz, until he watched Volver. Sex & Lucia led him through Julio Medem to ‘Lovers of the Arctic Circle’. He spoke to Ritankar and Ashish about the film and found they had not watched it. He was thrilled that he finally had a film that he alone could recommend.

He began to detect hints of snobbishness creep into his conversations. “Oh! You haven’t seen Head On? Dude, you must absolutely see it!”. He warmed to the romance of Europe. He cursed himself for not going there when he had the chance, for the International Student Exchange program. Ashish did go and when he told them stories from his time there, Kaushik listened wide-eyed and jealous.

Once they were all settled in Mumbai, Kaushik sought out film appreciation groups and special screenings, better placed as he was in a film production company than Ritankar or Ashish. They enrolled to every club they could find and each Sunday morning at ten they began to go to a movie screening, red eyed and disheveled from the previous night’s drinking. In the afternoons, there was another club that exhibited films in a pub and they went there too. Occasionally, an obscure film released in theatres and they bought tickets for it, incredulous that such films could release in theatres – ‘Edge of Heaven’, ‘Turtles can Fly’, ‘Secret of the grain’. Kaushik became friends with Kartik and found himself being invited to special screenings of independent film directors he was in awe of. He contemplated becoming a filmmaker himself. He spent hours in office conceptualizing stories and camera angles. He looked forward to returning home each evening so he could watch a film and to weekends when he could discuss those and watch more.

He often reflected on how much films had affected his life. His world view expanded. He realized he couldn’t be very happy living the rest of his life in clusters of five day weeks. And he drifted apart from his friends of Dhule and to an extent, his parents, for he couldn’t bring himself to find conversations with them engaging anymore.

Stone Wall, Stone Fence

It was on a cold winter night when Raakesh told Kaushik he would not take up a job. “I’ll do something, maybe try and be a journalist”, he said. Afterwards they strolled around the campus, covered in a thick veil of radiant fog. The vapour from their coffee rose and mingled with the fog, as did their own breaths.

Ever since they’d become friends, Raakesh often hinted at not wanting to carry on with the mistake he’d made. “This MBA stuff, it repels me,” he would say, “I can’t see myself doing this, being surrounded by people such as these. I just can’t.” Kaushik, unsure of what his own feelings in the matter were, remained silent on these occasions. He knew that he too was not thrilled at the prospect of spending years in an elaborate office in formalwear, but in the apparent absence of immediate alternatives, he was loathe to make a choice. He felt curiously envious and, at the same time, relieved each time Raakesh renewed his vow – relieved that it was Raakesh and not he. Raakesh, in the meanwhile, continued to take his exams and prepare sufficiently before them to get by, forever threatening that the next time he would not.

Somewhere in the most isolated corner of the campus when the thuds of the woofers in the Community Centre no longer bothered them, they stopped walking. They sweated lightly inside their jackets. Raakesh still carried ‘The remembrance of things past’, tattered and yellowed with its years in the library, in one hand. For some reason, he had taken it with him to the Insti party. “I came straight from the library,” he’d said by way of explanation.

Two years from then, when Ritankar and Kaushik stood before the grave of Proust in Paris, Kaushik would recount the episode to Ritankar. “Oh, that library version had about twenty pages torn off it. I had to stop reading it because of that.”, Ritankar would say in response.

They stood there for a while, silent, for they could think of nothing to discuss in particular, but unwilling to return to the din or to their rooms. Kaushik leaned against a tree trunk.

“So then, journalism, son?” Kaushik said.

“Yes son, that seems to be the idea.”

“But how do you plan to get in? An MBA degree, even one from the IIMs, does not help much in these matters, I gather.”

“I don’t know son, honestly,” Raakesh flushed, “but there must be a way. I’ll get into a separate course on journalism if need be.”

“A separate course? That is an extra year son, yes?”

Raakesh nodded, a little exasperated. Why must he think of all this now?

“What about the enormous loan you’ve run up here? How do you pay that back?”

“Maybe I will not, son.”

They started to walk again.

“So son, any new efforts coming up?” Raakesh asked.

“I think so son, yes. A short piece about a prisoner and his life. Will probably write it at some point tomorrow. You, of course, will be informed when it goes up on the blog.”

“Of course.”

“You? Anything in the offing? Besides the love poems to be pushed under the door?”

“Yes son, rubbing it in, it seems!” Raakesh paused, “No, nothing really. I am afraid the Booker will have to wait for a while.”

“Listen, lets go to the canteen. I would like some tea, a bowl of noodles too, perhaps.” Kaushik said.

“Sure son, lets. What time is it?”

“Ten minutes to two. Early days yet. We’ve plans for Counter Strike at three. Another hour to pass.’

The canteen was largely deserted; occasionally people appeared in ones and twos, and carried their tea cups, once those arrived, outside. Nobody sat at a table. Outside the canteen, there was a clearing, that looked like it had been commissioned as an ampitheatre but construction was abandoned halfway, and this is where most people sat with their teas. Raakesh and Kaushik chose to sit inside, happy with the warmth and the isolation.

“These computer games you play son, I never understand what is so interesting about them.”

“Perhaps not as interesting as a course in journalism son, yes. But whatever little there is, it is more immediate one feels.” Kaushik chuckled, pleased to have constructed, verbally, a somewhat more convoluted sentence than he usually did. Conversations in English were something he’d never had before he came to Lucknow, and he still found himself fumbling with the spoken word once in a while.

“Really son, that is just a ridiculous comment. What has one got to do with the other?”

“I know son,” Kaushik conceded, “just popped up in my head and I said it. Nothing to get so peeved about.”

Raakesh would indeed take up a course in journalism a few months later and then find himself employed with a well-known English daily, as a Sports Correspondent. In the first few months, he would cover minor Snooker and Table Tennis tournaments and fill his reports with references from The Dante, Homer and the Bible. He would then show those to Kaushik and they would have a good laugh.

On this night, the two would separate after an hour at the canteen. Kaushik would go back to his room and play Counter Strike under the alias of Che Guevara on the campus LAN with a bunch of friends. Raakesh would go back to weed.

Montefioralle

It was the first time they were both together in front of the camera. The camera, placed on the parapet that separated Montefioralle from the lush Tuscan landscape, stared at them motionlessly, while they sat on a wooden bench and gazed at the unending countryside that the camera couldn’t see. There was nobody else in sight.

They remained silent for a long time. The camera heard the peaceful sound of birds and occasionally, the church bells toll. A light rain fell and the cobbled streets and ancient stone walls glistened. Tiny droplets fell on their shirts, darkening the colour where they fell and then spread, lightened and became undetectable. The glow of their cigarettes reddened when they drew in smoke.

“I wonder how they capture that sound of paper and tobacco burning when people smoke in films.” Kaushik said aloud.

“I don’t know. I think they use unfiltered cigarettes.” Ritankar said.

Kaushik nodded and stole a glance at the camera, then looked away again. The church bells chimed again.

“How about we describe what we see in front of us, the magnificence that lies there unseen to those watching through the camera?” Kaushik said.

Ritankar did not respond and continued to stare into the distance. They heard the fleeting sound of a car passing by on the highway behind them, hidden by the walls of the church.

“Look at them hills yonder,” Kaushik began, “green, wonderful. Oh bliss.” He sighed. “Those clouds brooding over them, perhaps drawn to their beauty as much as we. Those tiny houses with red roofs down in Greve clustered together like in a dream. Oh, that smoke rising from the chimney over there, snow white against the green grey.” He paused, shook his head thoughtfully and looked straight at the camera. “I wish you could see what I can see.” He clucked his tongue, “Oh nature, why art thou so cruel!”

Ritankar smiled but did not comment.

“This must be right up there with the best of our trip”, he said after long minutes had passed.

“Yes. With Cinque Terre and the Père Lachaise.”

“I hope the Aeolian Islands turn out alright. That should cap everything off nicely. And Rome, obviously.”

“I think this is going to be the best scene of our travelogue,” Kaushik mused, “if we do manage to compile one.” He added.

Ritankar stood up and strolled around for a bit, moving out of sight of the camera. Kaushik took a sip of water from the bottle he’d carried and settled back into the bench again.

“Must be twenty minutes since the camera started rolling,” Ritankar called out from where he stood, a few metres away, staring up at a streetlamp.

“Yes, must be. Why?”

“No. I guess we beat Hunger. That was seventeen minutes, wasn’t it?”

Kaushik laughed. “Yes, thereabouts. We weren’t that intense though, were we?”

Two years hence, Kaushik’s hard drive would crash and take with it everything they’d shot. In that time, they would’ve watched the videos once and never have worked on them.

“What time is it?” Ritankar asked.

“One. You want to leave? We’ve got to get back to Greve by three.”

“Lets walk through the village one more time. Then we can leave.”

Kaushik walked away from the line of sight of the camera and then detoured to it from its blind side. He switched it off and picked it up. “This should be fun to watch.” He said.

On their way down to Greve, they walked by the cemetery compound again – a small space enclosed by a thick wall that rose up to their chests. On the other side, over the wall, Tuscany rose and fell in all its glory. Stone plaques, some with faded photographs on them, stood in a four uniform columns. They read out some of the names under their breath, fearful that a raised voice might disturb the exquisite equilibrium of the place. They mulled over the paradox of what they felt – extreme calm and a warm melancholia.

It was only when they’d descended to Greve and sat in what appeared to be the only café in town, sipping warm steaming cups of cappuccino, that Kaushik finally spoke aloud.

“Not a bad place to die.”He said.

Amores, indeed, Perros

They were seated on the stone parapet that separated the tube-lit street from the sand. Around them, hawkers were preparing to shut shop for the day. It was a weekend and they had perhaps sold off everything earlier than usual. Pieces of old vernacular newspapers, folded into cones with hollow bottoms, lay about; a stray peanut or two peeked from a few. The smell of roasted maize hung in the air. On the street, the occasional group of tourists passed, hurrying to their hotel rooms, oblivious to the brooding hum of the invisible ocean to their side.

“What time is it?” Ashish asked.

Kaushik peered at his watch, twisted his wrist in search of a stray column of light from the streetlamps, for the dial not immediately visible in the darkness.

“About half past nine.” He answered.

“Early days yet, although by the looks of it, sufficiently late for everyone else.” Ashish said.

“Anyone wants more tea?” said Ritankar and waited for the other two to nod. “ Lets order before the fellow leaves.”

They called out for three more cups from where they were seated.

“I wouldn’t mind an omelet either.” Said Ashish.

“You go ahead. I am stuffed.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Oh well, then I guess I’ll skip it too.”

They had reached Murud that afternoon with growling bellies and aching backsides, a five hour bus ride behind them. Apart from the quaint thatched houses with sloping roofs and the faint, agreeable odour of cow dung that hung perennially in the air, the first thing they had noticed was the street names. Every street, even the narrowest by-lane, was named after a popular figure of the Indian freedom struggle – Gandhi, Nehru, Bose, Patel, Ambedkar, Tilak. Evidently, Murud thought itself important enough for this to be construed as bestowal of honour. They had found themselves a cozy little room on the first floor in a makeshift two storey hotel; the owners themselves lived on the lower floor. The stairs opened straight into a grassy courtyard with a palm tree in the centre, which overlooked the ocean. They had found the place enchanting although the bathroom door wouldn’t lock and the ceiling fan screeched and shuddered every once in a while.

A handful of tourists hung around the beach. They were surprised to note that some of them were foreigners. They couldn’t imagine how anyone outside India could’ve heard of this place, tucked away as it was in the long and largely inaccessible Konkan coastline. The nearest train station was two hours away. Three buses, state owned, plied to and from Mumbai each day on roads, narrow and bumpy, that weaved in and out of the lush Western Ghats. Whenever two buses crossed each other, they came so close one could smell the passengers’ breath in the other bus through the window.

The tea arrived in plastic cups. Kaushik blew into it and the vapour settled thinly on his glasses, then gradually faded away. The breeze had picked up and now ruffled his hair. He passed his hand through them and it came away with particles of sand sticking to it. He remembered he’d forgotten to bring the shampoo. He grimaced.

“I will be travelling to the Philippines next month.” Ritankar announced.

“To Philippines? What for?” Kaushik asked.

“It’s the annual conference for our company,” Ritankar said. He stood up and stretched his legs before continuing, “they’d eventually told us it would be in Beijing but it appears they’ve now chosen Manila.”

“Perhaps they need to send out a lot of letters during the conference,” offered Ashish, “Envelopes must be cheap in Manila, no?”

They laughed.

“So, how many days?” Kaushik asked.

“About two weeks I think.”

“Two weeks! I’ve never heard of an annual conference lasting that long!”

Ritankar sat down again. “No, the conference in only 4 days.” He said.

“So what about the other ten days?”

Ritankar stood up again and lit a cigarette, with difficulty since the breeze was strong and he wasn’t very good at cupping his hands around the matchstick. In fact, none of them were. He sat down again.

“I have something to tell you guys,” he said.

Ashish and Kaushik looked at each other. Kaushik raised an eyebrow.

“Go on.”

“You remember that girl from China I told you about? The one that works in our Beijing office?”

“Ah yes. She was here a few months ago for some training, right? Told you she didn’t like shopping for clothes, I think.” Kaushik said, glancing once again at Ashish.

Ritankar nodded. “Yes, she wanted to go to a bookstore, instead.”

“And you took here there. Yes, so, what about her?”

“Well, you see, I’ve been chatting with her since then,” Ritankar’s tone was almost apologetic, “off and on.”

“Off and on, I see.”

“Drop the sarcasm for once, Kaushik” Ashish said.

“Yes, of course. And I did not detect any in what you just said.” Kaushik countered.

Ritankar grew visibly impatient.

“Ok, Ok. Let’s get back to what his story now. Yes, so you were,” Kaushik paused, “chatting off and on.”

“Yes. And it, sort of, clicked.”

“Clicked?”

“Lets get more tea” Ritankar suggested.

Kaushik yelled for more tea again.

Ritankar went on to tell them how it was that they had clicked. He provided excerpts from their conversations, which turned out to revolve mostly around love and life and their meanings. “If you were divided into equal halves,” she had asked him once, “would one half love the other?” “Oh, really?” Kaushik remarked, “She asked you that? Very novel. Very subtle.” Ritankar waved Kaushik’s comment away with his arms and continued on. They had grown used to each other over time and spent an increasing number of hours chatting in office. They had exchanged novels and later, text messages, with each other. The girl, Ritankar told them, had majored in French literature. Kaushik and Ashish nodded approvingly. At some point, Ritankar had mentioned his interest in her was beginning to evolve beyond the confines of their chat window. Kaushik was certain Ritankar could never have said that if the two had been face to face, but did not mention it. The two had then agreed to find a way to meet again.

“So anyway, where do matters stand now? In all of this, that point has remains unclear.” Ashish said, when Ritankar finished.

“I don’t know. We’ll meet in Manila, spend a few days together and see how it works out. I am not sure.”

Back in office after the weekend in Murud, refreshed and bored, Kaushik and Ashish discussed this new development and sipped coffee pensively. “What the fuck man! What wrong have we done?” they said to each other. They determined they must get Ritankar to share a picture of her and based on what they saw become a little relieved or more depressed. The weekend before Ritankar was to leave for Manila they met again and wished him luck.

When Ritankar returned from Manila, he was convinced he had a future with her. So was she, he told Kaushik and Ashish. They had spent a fabulous week together, travelling through Philippines and its many islands. They had discussed their future together and a way out of, as Ritankar put it, all this.

“Does she have any lady friends she can introduce your friends to?” Ashish quipped.

Once

Kaushik’s interest in Ritika, as much a product of incessant suggestion as of actual attraction, was firmly established, in his mind and of others’, by the time the second month in Lucknow had begun. She, with her aquiline nose, high cheeks and terrible voice, was one of the most sought after, although not overwhelmingly so, for that year the campus had witnessed a markedly increased influx of attractive women. The presence of competition – stiff is not the appropriate word to use in this context – meant Kaushik did not even try seriously, although it was unlikely he would have succeeded even if he did. For a long time, he wasn’t even sure if she knew his name.

It was still that phase when Kaushik was only feeling his way into the company of the Illustrious and therefore, his poise, never assured amongst womenfolk in the best of times, wasn’t what could be considered self-confident. Indeed, he fell back, more strongly than ever, on his time-honed defense of sarcasm and feigned indifference.

He never really had been a ladies’ man. In school, as a kid only dimly aware of man woman relationships beyond that of playing Snakes & Ladders together, he, along with his friends, had enjoyed the company of women often. By the time his dim notions had developed into more coherent physical urges – he woke up to these much later than most of his peers since at the time his naïve faith in his parents was unshakeable and they had begun to drop frequent, subtle hints, that he shouldn’t be getting carried away with himself at this precarious age -, he was almost through school.

He went to college in Ahmedabad for a couple of months to pass time, while he waited for the letter, from Dhule as it turned out, to arrive. There, he noticed how the women wore dresses very different from the full sleeved shirts and ankle length skirts that had been their school uniform. He registered the clearly defined curves, accentuated by the tighter tees and jeans, and the occasional, bewitching, sight of an exposed knee. At this stage, he himself was barely above five feet and in the nascent stages of obesity, and this meant, his advances, friendly and unsure, were met with only mild, somewhat sisterly, reactions. The subject of his height, a matter of great concern to his Mom & Dad for the past few years, suddenly became important to himself. He hunted around for girls his own height but found himself hopelessly distracted by those that weren’t. He went into a shell, eating sandwiches at the canteen alone, and taking the bus back home as soon as lectures ended. Sometimes, when he bunked class, he went to the neighbourhood bookshop and read.

The problem of his height alleviated significantly by the end of his first semester in Dhule. He never became an imposing presence, other than horizontally, but he grew enough to have a physical vantage point with respect to most women. But the Lord that gaveth also, snidely, taketh. Dhule proved barren in more ways than one. The one female worthy of, at best, passing attention garnered so much, she abandoned college, two weeks into the first session, and returned to her hometown. There were a handful others who were alright, not unworthy of mankind saving liaison after a nuclear attack by machines wrecks the planet leaving only two survivors, and these were quickly picked up by the locals boys, who, armed with a bunch of hockey stick wielding sidekicks, wrestled their way through the cluster of less connected aspirants and into the women’s hearts. Kaushik, of course, stood no chance.

And thus, by the time Ritika turned up, his wooing and conversational skills were still only marginally better than at infancy.

She was interested in literature and in western music. She maintained a blog which sounded profound and vague. She had a sense of humour, it appeared. Kaushik mentioned his interest casually to his friends and they latched onto it at once. They cajoled and goaded on his desire for her.

He constructed conversations with her in his head, fretting over each detail, going back and changing his own words, wherever he felt he had gone wrong, but never hers since what she said was of her own volition. They all turned out to be conversations worthy of the best noir and that he couldn’t actually have them with her depressed Kaushik further. He passed her by several times each day, at the coffee shop, at the student mess, in classrooms, but never said hello, choosing instead, to steal sidelong glances at her. Once in a while, when his glance would be caught by hers, he offered a frail smile and quickly looked away, not waiting to check if she’d smiled back. At this point, everyone was adding everyone else to their Social Network friend lists and Chat lists, but Kaushik desisted from sending her an invite, afraid he’d be turned down. It wasn’t until they were grouped together, along with a couple of other fellows, for a project, that he eventually sent her an invite, making up his mind to clarify it was to discuss about the project lest she harbor suspicions.

It was around this time that he met Raakesh, who was then struggling with romantic demons of his own. Since his gift for the written word was universally acknowledged by this time, Raakesh had figured he could use it to his advantage to make headway with the object of his desire. And so, he composed sonnets in her name and slipped them under her door in the early hours of the morning. After weeks of expectant waiting, when nothing happened, he and Kaushik figured the girl was probably too airheaded to appreciate the magic of his words. And they returned to their novels and their alcohol.

Ritika, it emerged one day, had succumbed to the charms of another man, a senior. Kaushik took the news with great equanimity and immediately set about finding all he could about this man. He was a hopeless alcoholic, Kaushik found, and evidently had a knack for growling absurd Death Metal songs. Nobody on campus, even those of his own batch, liked him. When the news of his conquest spread, they liked him even less. It won’t last, was the general opinion. In three years’ time, the two would marry each other.

With time, Kaushik grew out of her and a strange thing happened. He found he could now speak to her. They spoke a few times during the final months in Lucknow, sometimes face to face and sometimes in a chat window, and Kaushik found he enjoyed these occasions with a faint hint of wistfulness, even as they were underway. He recognized the transient nature of these conversations and that they would probably die away slowly once they left Lucknow. He still liked the sight of her.

They did chat once or twice after Kaushik, and she too, had settled in Mumbai. They did not have occasion to meet. She remained on his Gtalk list and he looked for her name each time he logged in, for no purpose other than to simply register her presence, until he grew out of that too and she became just another name.

The Earning of Respect

The summonses from the Director’s office weren’t ever entirely unexpected and yet, when they did arrive, those summoned put up shocked countenances nonetheless. One or two burst into tears even, genuine, for although they were aware exactly how it would all play out in the end, there was always the lurking fear that this could be that occasion when Neo chooses the other door. They would then spend the rest of the evening plotting how best forgiveness could be asked for when they were presented before the Director next morning. Those that had cried earlier were usually chosen as the spokespersons; sympathy was most likely to be won by the soft and the unmanly.

It happened every year. The sophomores, basking in their newfound seniority, sat atop the hostel wall, their legs wafting cockily below them, and watched the stream of new arrivals enter the hostel, a parent or two in tow. Some of the parents, usually fathers, greeted them cheerily and asked after the amenities their progeny would have at their disposal in the hostel. These fathers were then duly offered lengthy insights that eventually ended at the tea & snack joint round the corner. ‘We’ll take good care of your son, uncle, you don’t worry at all’, they were told. The new students continued to trickle in for a while and by the time the last of the parents abandoned their child to the vagaries of Dhule, more than a month had passed by. That was when the clarion call was sounded and the newbies were asked to gather on the hostel’s roof for a round of introductions.

The rules were simple and scant. The seniors, sophomores and beyond, would need to be addressed as Sir. Only formals could be worn. At all times, including in bed. Formals would include socks and boots too, except in bed, where the boots could be taken off. In a senior’s presence, their gazes could not meander above the third button of their own shirts. They would complete the seniors’ projects and assignments for them and do whatever else was asked of them at any point. The rest of the night was spent in various festivities; the newly inducted kids, generally unclothed, catered to their Sirs many requests, most of which were of a distinctly, although only mildly, homoerotic nature. One of the favourites over the years was getting one of the kids to pick up a pen or pencil from the floor with his buttocks, exposed of course, without using his limbs. Nobody had ever actually found success in doing so, which was the point, since nonperformance led to more severe punishment.

This continued for a couple of months, each night. On weekends, when everybody was more drunk than usual, several groups convened in one or the other seniors’ private apartments, outside the hostel and therefore, outside the immediate reaches of the warden. Kaushik too, not drunk but eager to pay it forward, having earned his badge the previous year, was among them. And pay it forward, he certainly did. He hadn’t read The Marquis De Sade then, but when he did, he was confident that the great man would have approved.

In time, the inevitable happened. One of the kids wept and whimpered into a phone and the voice carried through miles of metal and fiber to his shocked parents, who, in turn, wept and whimpered into the ears of the college authorities. The boy, one of Kaushik and his group’s victims, was called to the Director’s office. He named as many people as he knew the names of. And thus, the Director’s summonses. Kaushik’s name, it was found, had not been announced. He grinned from ear to ear and explained to the others that it would all be fine.

It began as it always did. The Director raged and fumed and spoke to their parents. He informed them that their sons were being rusticated, a somewhat inappropriate term to use since it could hardly get more rustic than Dhule. Some of the accused, a markedly larger number than the previous day’s, began to weep openly. ‘Won’t happen again, won’t happen again’, they sobbed. The Director remained firm, for he was supposed to on the first day, and asked them to leave his office and pack their suitcases. They needn’t attend lectures, he added.

That evening, the mood in the hostel was sombre. A first year kid even whistled his way to the toilet. Towards midnight, the hostel warden asked the beleaguered gentlemen to his office. There, he informed them that he was ashamed of them and such a thing had been unheard of in his regime before this. A little later, he asked the accuser to be brought to him and when he did, he asked the rest to apologize. They did as they were told. The warden’s voice softened. He told them he would talk to the Director the next morning and see if something could be done to save their careers. They thanked him profusely.

The Director acceded on the third day. They were all called to his office again. He too did not wish to see such bright careers brought to premature ends, he said, but they could not completely escape punishment. And so, the best way, he continued, would be for them to be paid back in the same vein. They were all made to stand just inside the entrance to the college for the entire day, in the heat, without shirts and with their arms raised above them.

What embarrassed them was how filthy their undershirts were. The girls passed by them, wrinkling their noses and giggling to each other. A few, with commendable oversight, had omitted wearing an undershirt and shaved their underarms and were, therefore, decidedly less embarrassed. Their friends, on their way to the lecture halls and back, waved to them and cracked jokes. Kaushik cracked a joke or two too and they glared at him so hard, he asked them if they wanted something to drink. They said yes. A few minutes later, Kaushik and a few others, returned with packets of wafers, aerated soft drinks and mineral water. The professors and other staff allowed them to finish most of it before asking them to stop the nonsense and take the punishment seriously.

In a couple of hours, when they couldn’t keep their arms aloft any longer and the heat wet their pants with sweat, the Director called them again. They fell at his feet, exhausted, and asked for mercy. The Director launched into another half hour monologue, which they all nodded thoughtfully through. By evening, all was well again.

Later that night, the first year students were summoned to the hostel roof again and the essential concepts of solidarity and unity were explained to them. They wouldn’t be ragged anymore, they were promised, but in return, they would have to continue to wear formals and address the seniors as Sir.

By the end of the semester, the only rule that remained, and would remain through the next three years, was the form of address.

Rishikesh

Kaushik’s eyes opened and saw darkness. The eyelids opened and shut with trepidation several times since, when they opened, the retina they housed weren’t used to capturing a somewhat similar image to what they’d been seeing with the shutters down. Still dark. From somewhere close, came the sound of snoring. He felt damp and realized he was still wearing his jacket, which combined with two blankets and alcohol, had made him sweat. He also realized he needed, urgently, to relieve his bowels. He sighed, sat up and fumbled under the bed, first for the glasses and then for the mobile phone. The phone’s screen, once it lit up, informed him it was three in the morning and cast a ghostly halo around the tent. Kaushik spotted two bodies on the other two beds – Ashish and Raakesh – although he couldn’t be sure which was who. He stepped out of the tent and immediately a chill breeze blew into his face and he stepped back inside.

His backpack lay by his bedside, upon which a woolen cap and gloves had been carelessly tossed. He put them on and stepped out again.

It was a brilliant moonlit night and Kaushik was staggered to find how clearly he could see. The white sand stretched out ahead of him and he could see exactly where it met the water. The Ganges, blusterous and white foamed, hurtled down towards Haridwar, eager to complete the remaining distance to the plains, barely twenty kilometers, as soon as it could. On the other side of the river, the Himalayas loomed dramatically, the summits hidden by a luminescent sheet of white clouds that, miraculously, seemed immobile in the gusty breeze. Overhead however, unguarded by the mountains, the clouds scurried off, also in the direction of Haridwar, and Kaushik glimpsed a sky filled with stars. Looking directly up made him sway a little. The effects of the alcohol had evidently not worn off completely. He didn’t detect a headache though, a good sign.

The makeshift toilets were about fifty meters from the tents. He walked lazily in that direction; his slippers sunk into the soft sand and threw up miniature volcanoes each time they came back up again. He passed by the bonfire they’d lit earlier that evening; the embers were dull grey with patches of simmering deep red. Thin tendrils of smoke still rose from them and hung a few feet above. Kaushik stopped for a moment and flapped his arms through the smoke. He chuckled.

When he’d reached the first of the toilet doors, he looked back at the line of tents, about a dozen of them, milky white against the thick dark cluster of trees in the background. Apart from them, he had spotted only one other group that evening. He decided he would return with his camera after he’d relieved himself. The toilets had no roofs and no taps. One plastic mug, half broken, was placed inside each. Outside, a solitary cistern stood; its dark wet surface glistened in the moonlight. He picked up two mugs from adjacent toilets and fetched water, freezing, from the cistern, although, going by the smell inside the toilets, he was convinced that carrying the extra mug, which he intended to flush the toilet with, was a futile exercise. Squatting inside the toilet, he stared up, partly to savour the view he was afforded and party to escape the stench. He inhaled in short sharp bursts and exhaled deeply. The sheet of clouds above and the walls of the toilet below hid from view most of actual peaks.

He returned to his tent a quarter of an hour later, his buttocks and palms numb from being exposed to the water. He thought of the camera and then abandoned the idea. He slid back under the blankets and did not budge until the morning after.

Two years later, when he was reading of the Dharma Bums’ climb up the Matterhorn Peak, his mind threw up that image of the barely visible mountains from inside the toilet. It made him reminisce, fondly, of the bonfire of that night and the white water rafting of next morning and of Raakesh and Ashish and Lucknow. It was the three’s only trip together. And yet, for Kaushik, the defining image of it was of the mountains at three in the morning, and he suspected it would endure through his life, entwined as it was now, with The Dharma Bums.

Lunchmen

At one every afternoon, Kaushik picked his phone up and began calling his fellow lunchmen – about half a dozen of them - located variously around the office campus. Once this was done, he took the elevator down to ground level where the Food Court was and found himself an unoccupied table, where he and his friends would congregate for the day. Kaushik enjoyed lunchtimes, happy for the break and the conversation after the monotony of reading, for three straight hours, Roger Ebert reviews and essays from The Economist.

The Food Court was a huge open space with round black wooden tables spread around it. There were five counters, each run by a different caterer, that served the same food, except one which served sandwiches and pasta that smelled of unventilated cellars. Over time, Kaushik had picked his favourite amongst the other four and stuck to it ever since. By the time the food he ordered was ready, Ashish usually arrived. Ashish, since he lived with his parents, brought home-cooked food in a black oblong Tiffin box. The rest – some of them friends from IIM Lucknow, the others colleagues whom they minded least – trickled in, in ones and twos; by half past one the congregation was complete.

The conversation usually revolved around neutral subjects. Cricket, the weather, politics, work. Most preferred cricket, since they followed it closely, with the exception of Ashish who, therefore, did his best to turn the conversation to politics. When they spoke of work, it was usually about one of the bosses; their favourite was a stocky old man with a permanently bemused expression, who addressed everyone, including in emails, as ‘Guys’. The expression wasn’t without reason; it was widely believed that he indeed had absolutely no clue what happened around him. Stories of him abound – of how, even as he signed proposals, he recommended that they not be taken forward, how he contended that their reporting systems should somehow capture and track competition data and how he, the bloody nincompoop, had a wife of the MILF variety. Sometimes, they spotted him approach their table and immediately made as if they were done and were about to leave.

Discussions on films and literature were usually avoided; Ashish and Kaushik were aware their fellow lunchmen weren’t terribly interested. They did utter the occasional wisecrack though, like when the only female amongst them, a pretty little girl with a shrill voice, had informed that she would be migrating to Ho Chi Minh City in a month’s time, for her husband had been transferred there, and Kaushik had said how she would love the smell of napalm in the mornings. Or when one of them had had his overtures turned down by a girl, a co-worker, and Ashish had declared he could smell bitter almonds. On these occasions, while the two of them laughed uncontrollably, the rest looked at them with expressions that resembled that favourite boss of theirs. They spent close to an hour at the table, continuing to occupy it long after their plates were empty and other groups began to circle around like eagles. Eventually, when someone mustered the courage to ask them if they were done, they shrugged and got up.

Afterwards, while most of them returned to their desks, Ashish and Kaushik did not. Instead, they made their way to the Visitors’ waiting area, empty at that hour, and lounged there for another half an hour. They exchanged notes – interesting articles they’d come across during the course of the day on issues that they would like to further delve into. Invariably, the conversation degenerated, at some point, into a cribbing session on what the fuck they were doing in this place and how they would happily relieve themselves of an upper and lower limb each to get out of there. There were long periods of silences in these conversations, during which neither of them could think of anything worthwhile to talk about but found simply sitting there more worthwhile than going back to their desks. It would be past three by the time they would wearily make their way back, promising each other to read more on that interesting issue and discuss it when they met in the evening. Once in a while, Kaushik would have a meeting he’d have to attend and he’d go straight to it, unprepared but convinced he’d breeze through it without the least trouble.