Wish I Could Tell You

  DURJOY DUTTA

  WISH I COULD TELL YOU

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Ananth Khatri

  Anusha Sardana

  Ganesh Acharya

  Saraansh Gupta

  Ananth Khatri

  Rachita Somani

  Anusha Sardana

  Sunita Ji, Mohini’s Mother

  Ananth Khatri

  Anusha Sardana

  Amit Modi

  Ananth Khatri

  Anusha Sardana

  Ananth Khatri

  Anusha Sardana

  Ananth Khatri

  Neelima Ji

  Ananth Khatri

  Amit Modi

  Sarita Sharan

  Ananth Khatri

  Rachita Somani

  Arvind Mohan and Karishma Jaiswal

  Anusha Sardana

  Ananth Khatri

  Anusha Sardana

  Saraansh Gupta

  Anusha Sardana

  Ananth Khatri

  Anusha Sardana

  Neelima Ji

  Amit Modi

  Ananth Khatri

  Anusha’s Mother

  Ananth Khatri

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN METRO READS

  WISH I COULD TELL YOU

  Durjoy Datta was born in New Delhi, and completed a degree in engineering and business management before embarking on a writing career. His first book—Of Course I Love You . . .—was published when he was twenty-one years old and was an instant bestseller. His successive novels—Now That You’re Rich . . .; She Broke Up, I Didn’t! . . .; Oh Yes, I’m Single! . . .; You Were My Crush . . .; If It’s Not Forever . . .; Till the Last Breath . . .; Someone Like You; Hold My Hand; When Only Love Remains; World’s Best Boyfriend; The Girl of My Dreams; The Boy Who Loved; The Boy with the Broken Heart and The Perfect Us—have also found prominence on various bestseller lists, making him one of the highest-selling authors in India.

  Durjoy also has to his credit nine television shows and has written over a thousand episodes for television.

  He lives in Mumbai. For more updates, you can follow him on Facebook (www.facebook.com/durjoydatta1) or Twitter (@durjoydatta) or mail him at durjoydatta@gmail.com.

  To Avantika

  Ananth Khatri

  ‘Everyone dresses up for the first day of work, beta,’ says Papa.

  ‘You will look good, Ananth. At least wear it once and see for yourself. Just once? For us?’ says Maa, dangling a blazer in front of me.

  ‘You made me wear a frock, said I would look good and took me to Chachu’s wedding. I can’t trust your word now, can I?’ I grumble.

  ‘You were three,’ says Papa. ‘And you looked so cute, beta.’

  ‘He looked like a pretty girl,’ says Maa.

  Papa looks at Maa and both their eyes glaze over. They smile and get lost in the memories of me as a child. My growing up has been hard on them. If they could, they would choose the three-year-old in a white frock over the twenty-three-year-old they are struggling to get into a blazer.

  ‘We should get the album out,’ says Papa.

  ‘If I see that album once more, I will burn it!’ I tell Papa, who is a nostalgia addict, an obsessive recorder and revisit-er of the past, and he stays put. ‘Give me the receipt, I will return the blazer on the way back.’

  ‘I lost it,’ says Papa.

  ‘Your papa got it with so much love. Wear it once?’ says Maa.

  ‘It’s unnecessary. And who asked you get it from Zara?’

  Papa gives in and fishes out the receipt from the file he maintains of the quarterly expenses. I knew he hadn’t lost the receipt. There’s a file for every quarter of our lives. Despite certain sections of our house looking like a government office with tall stacks of files held together by strings gathering dust and cobwebs, sometimes it’s exciting to see receipts from grocers, cablewallahs, and other regular expenses from the eighties and the nineties. Every paisa we have spent over those decades has been recorded in those files. The ink is fading from most, so every weekend Papa and I click pictures and upload them to Google Photos.

  ‘Are you sure, beta, that you want to return it?’ asks Maa.

  ‘Papa’s not getting paid for the overtime he is putting in for the past three months and he’s behaving like a child,’ I say.

  ‘Fine, fine, I won’t spend,’ relents Papa.

  ‘If you do feel like spending, buy a new briefcase. Yours is tattered and torn,’ I tell him.

  ‘And throw away this lucky briefcase?’

  Papa has been a junior engineer in the municipality for the last thirty-three years. The briefcase is the opposite of lucky.

  For a second, I wonder what Mohini would think of me in a blazer. She would probably think it’s stupid too. I brush away the idea.

  Maa serves me a big helping of curd and sugar and doesn’t rest till I have scraped the bowl clean. We leave for the Vishnu Mandir after that.

  At the neighbourhood temple, Maa–Papa are the only ones chanting out aloud, making a spectacle of their devotion to Vishnu. Papa, 5’4” and Maa, 5’1”, take very little space in the world. They let people get ahead in the long queue to the water tank. They talk so softly that one can barely hear them. They sit through the extended lunch hours at the government bank without complaining. But here—in this little neighbourhood temple—they walk around with furrowed eyebrows, arched backs, angry grimaces, like titans, like the moody gods from the Vedas.

  Maa–Papa’s chants are louder, more fervent than the resident pundit’s, who looks around, embarrassed, as if caught in his subterfuge. He tries to match my parents’ shraddha, devotion, and falls short every time. The quieter devotees stare at my parents’ synchronized chanting, impressed. The bells toll urgently in the background, as if swung by the strength of their hymns.

  ‘You are named “Ananth” after the serpent Lord Vishnu rests on,’ Maa tells me like every time.

  And like every time I watch them here, I imagine an enormous serpent irritably stirred out of sleep, coiling and uncoiling around the earth, by the alarm-clock like hymns of my parents.

  Papa puts a tika on my head, closes his eyes and says, ‘May you be the best member the medical team at WeDonate has ever had.’

  ‘Did you thank Mohini in your prayers? She’s why you got this job,’ says Maa, thrusting prasad into my palms.

  ‘She’s the only reason?’ I ask, faking anger.

  ‘I . . .’

  I laugh. ‘I’m joking, Maa. Of course, I did. Did you think I wouldn’t?’

  When they leave the temple, Maa–Papa return to their natural, unintimidating selves, burdened with taxes and everyday struggles like potholes, spoilt milk and moulded bread. Papa pulls his trousers right up to his navel because that’s where he thinks they should rest. Maa pulls the saree over her head because the sun’s too bright. They both accompany me to the bus stop, struggling to keep up with me with their short steps. At 5’10”, I’m a giant to them; but they don’t forget to remind me how un-cuddle-able I’m now.

  ‘You don’t need to come,’ I tell them.

  They chide me, say I’m careless, that I will trip and come under the wheels of the bus. That shuts me up.

  There are other children with their parents at the bus stop too. None of them are over thirteen.

  The chartered bus turns around the corner. Maa slams her hand on the side of the bus till it comes to a complete stop.

  ‘I will call the police if you drive an inch before everyone boards,’ she uncharacteristically threatens the bus driver who had done nothing wrong.

  She makes sure I’m the first to get on.

  If there’s one thing she hates more than bus an
d truck drivers, all of them murderers in Maa’s eyes, it was Papa’s scooter. It was the only topic they argued about. For ten years, Maa had asked Papa to stop driving the scooter and take a bus instead. But he wouldn’t budge. He loved his two-stroke grey scooter.

  The day I turned eighteen and expressed the desire to drive it to college, Maa—who didn’t know how to drive a scooter—dragged it for miles and left it to rot under a flyover. We didn’t find the scooter for years after that. She threatened to leave the house if either Papa or I even talked about it. Later when we needed the money, she led Papa to the scooter. It was hidden but clean and well-maintained. She used to wash it twice every week. Maa–Papa still share a good relationship with the ones they sold the scooter to. They live two colonies away from us and Papa drives it sometimes on Sundays.

  ‘Sit behind the driver,’ she shouts. ‘That’s the safest seat in the bus.’

  Papa adds, ‘Don’t throw away the ticket.’

  ‘And don’t do tukur tukur on your phone too much. Concentrate or else you will miss your stop,’ says Maa.

  They wait at the bus stop till the bus drives away. A few children on the bus giggle as I take the seat Maa–Papa asked me to. The middle-aged woman sitting there shifts to make space for me.

  As the bus turns around the corner, Maa calls me and starts to sob. She tells me it was just yesterday that it was my first day at school. ‘How awfully you cried and how heartlessly we pushed you inside the gates of the school! And look at you now, you’re happy to leave us behind,’ says Maa.

  ‘I will be back by 6 p.m.,’ I say.

  ‘Go now, do your job,’ says Maa, angrily.

  ‘Dream job, my foot,’ says Papa.

  ‘Papa—’

  The call’s cut.

  ‘Parents, eh?’ says the woman sitting next to me. ‘I have a thirteen-year-old and he makes the same face you just did.’

  ‘I’m twenty-three. They need to learn to spend a little time without me,’ I say.

  ‘First day?’ she asks.

  I nod.

  When I’d told my parents about WeDonate’s joining date, their faces had fallen. In another family, that might have been a reason for celebration—not in mine.

  My restraint gives away after ten minutes and I send a group text ‘will miss you’. And like petulant teenagers, they read my message and don’t reply.

  Google Maps shows the office is another forty minutes away. I will have to eventually find the right combination of metro and chartered buses to minimize travel time.

  I type WeDonate.org in the address bar on my phone. I read up on all the medical campaigns they are running on their website. I take notes on how the stories can be told better. I share the stories on all my social media profiles, urging people to donate for the medical procedures of people who can’t afford it. When I’m done, I update my LinkedIn profile: Ananth Khatri, Campaign Manager, Medical Team, WeDonate. I met most of the team on the day of my interview, so I send them friend requests.

  Helmed by Sarita Sharan, WeDonate was one of the first crowdfunding platforms in India. The concept was too simple for it to not exist. People who need money—for medical purposes, for college projects, for creative enterprises—sourcing money from everyday people. An online version of chanda ikkhatha karna, collecting donations.

  The woman sitting next to me—she works in the HR department of a call centre—is intrigued when I tell her about the organization I’m joining and wants to know more.

  ‘Two weeks ago, they had a case, that of a twelve-year-old girl who needed 15 lakh for a kidney transplant. So someone from the medical team wrote her story and the campaign went live. People shared and re-shared it on social media, thousands of donors read the story, took note and contributed,’ I tell her. ‘There were young people in colleges and schools parting with pocket money for a girl they didn’t know and will never meet.’

  ‘Anyone can contribute?’

  ‘Yes, not only that. If you can’t contribute, just share the story with others on social media. It might reach someone who can. The girls’ parents got the money in ten days. Can you imagine? Everyone who gave a little was a

  hero!’

  ‘And you’re joining this team?’ she asks.

  ‘Absolutely, bang in the middle of all the action, like in a whirlpool of good karma. Matching people who need money the most to these heroes.’

  She takes my number before alighting at her stop and wishes me luck. I might have made my first office-commute friend.

  *

  WeDonate is on the fifth floor of an old building in Paschim Vihar. It’s an unlikely place for a start-up. Sarita Sharan, the pied piper of the crowdfunding industry, wanted to keep the costs down and pump every available resource into scaling the business.

  Vishwas ji, at the guard’s post, looks up from his cell phone and waves at me as I walk out of the elevator.

  ‘Stud lag rahe ho (you’re looking like a stud),’ he says.

  ‘Aap se kam (less than you),’ I answer.

  Vishwas ji smiles. He would have been quite a stud, middle-aged no doubt, with his bright smiling eyes and the dimpled cheeks had his teeth not rotted with gutkha. But I don’t tell him that.

  Last week, Vishwas ji chatted me up when I was waiting for my interview. He told me how WeDonate had crowdfunded 5 lakh for his daughter’s engineering studies when he had given all up as lost; she’s now in second year, mechanical engineering. We shared my lunch after the interview.

  ‘Did you get the books I couriered?’ I ask.

  ‘Haan ji. My daughter told me there are notes on the margin too—that’s really helpful.’

  ‘If she needs anything else, will you tell me?’

  ‘Of course,’ says Vishwas ji. ‘Aur bhabhiji kaisi hai (how is the sister-in-law)?’

  I tell him she’s fine. Mohini and I aren’t married but I don’t correct him. Girlfriend kaisi hai wouldn’t have the same ring to it.

  Twenty pairs of eyes look up from the laptops and phone screens, flash the briefest of smiles, synchronized more tightly than the Olympic swimming teams, and get back to work. The medical team sits in a far corner of the room. That’s where I will be sitting from today. My hands are clammy from nervousness.

  Nimesh Arora from IT is scratching his head, making dandruff flecks rain on his keyboard when I find him.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ says Nikhat Shaikh.

  ‘Been there, done that,’ I say and Nimesh flashes me a thumbs-up.

  I had mistaken Nimesh and Nikhat for siblings. They are dating—I found out when Karunesh had made me meet the team after my interview. Nikhat and Nimesh are older than I am, but with their small round faces, big, surprised eyes, turtle shell eye glasses perched a centimetre too low on their tiny noses, and big ears jutting out from their faces, they look childlike. The only difference between the two is that Nimesh towers over Nikhat. At 6’4” he’s the tallest boy I have ever met, while Nikhat is diminutive at 5’1”.

  These two—graduates from NIT Surathkal—are amongst the dozens of employees who had responded to Sarita Sharan’s call for applications to join WeDonate, and make a real difference.

  Nikhat makes me sign a form and hands me my work laptop. Nimesh and Nikhat handle the back-end of the website. Legend has it that they haven’t left the office in two years.

  I feel the weight of the ThinkPad in my hands.

  ‘Always wanted to have one of these. This one has a great keyboard,’ I say.

  ‘Finally, someone recognizes that!’ says Nimesh and looks up. Both their specky eyes light up.

  ‘They do, Ananth, they do,’ says Nikhat.

  ‘I have to tell you guys this. You two look great together. You guys are custom built for each other—just revoltingly, unbelievably cute,’ I say.

  They smile and retreat shyly into their shells. I want to keep them in a little glass box in my house.

  ‘Go see Sarita first. She’s expecting you. It’s regarding your department. There has be
en some change,’ says Nimesh.

  ‘You and Mohini look great too,’ says Nikhat as I’m leaving.

  It is my turn to smile shyly.

  *

  Sarita Sharan’s laughably small cabin is a mess. There are papers and boxes of her protein supplement, Glutamine, BCAAs strewn all over, and there’s a strong stench of cheap perfume. She doesn’t look up when I enter her cabin.

  ‘I’m glad to be here. Thank you for giving—’

  Sarita cuts me with a smile. ‘I’m assuming Nimesh and Nikhat have already set you up with the laptop. I know you wanted to be a part of the medical team but as it turns out, the management feels it’s best if you start off with something lighter.’

  ‘Lighter?’ I ask.

  ‘I am putting you under someone from the entertainment division. You will be trying to get music albums and movies funded . . . that sort of thing. Karunesh will tell you more. It’s our fastest growing vertical.’

  The words don’t register; this is unacceptable.

  ‘It will be a good start for you,’ she says.

  ‘But Sarita, I was told—’

  ‘It’s what the company has decided,’ she says.

  ‘Can you please put me in medical? There’s nothing more I have wanted—’

  ‘The decision is final. You can talk to HR but I don’t think that will help,’ she says and gets up.

  She thrusts her hand out and I see no option but to shake it. As my hand disappears into hers, my metacarpal bones crumble to dust.

  ‘Best of luck,’ she says.

  ‘Thanks.’

  The finality and the tenor in her voice, the broadness of her shoulders, keep me from saying anything more. By the time I reach my desk, my new mail ID already has a bunch of Excel sheets with the list of all the entertainment-related, successful and unsuccessful, crowdfunding projects. I feel nauseous; this is a mistake.

  When I find Karunesh who heads my team, he has industrial strength headphones covering his ears and is bobbing his head to someone’s demo. Some say he rejected an offer from Google to work here.

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘Hey! Welcome to the team,’ Karunesh says brightly.