When Only Love Remains Read online

  He’s still thinking of what to make of all this when Karishma asks him, ‘I hope there’s nothing going on between the two of you.’

  ‘What? No! Obviously not!’

  ‘Okay, okay. Don’t be offended now. She’s hot though, for her age,’ says Karishma. ‘Oh! There’s something important I need to tell you. There’s this girl in my apartment who I knew from earlier. And only yesterday I saw her listen to your song for hours on end! She’s rather cute. If you want I can . . . you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t. And fun fact, by the way, do you know that Arundhati and her fiancé are putting after-sex pictures on their profiles?’ asks Devrat. He swipes and taps his phone and shows Karishma the picture.

  ‘You don’t know if it’s an after-sex picture. And even if it is, you should delete it,’ says Karishma.

  ‘He isn’t even that good-looking.’

  ‘And that should be none of your concern. You should delete it and move on.’

  ‘He even writes statuses in wrong English, Karishma,’ grumbles Devrat. He orders another pint.

  ‘I have no doubt that you were and are a better guy than whoever this fucker is,’ says Karishma. ‘But you have to move on. There’s no other option left.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Devrat takes a large gulp of his beer. And burps. He tells Karishma that he really needs to visit the washroom. By the time he reaches the washroom, all he had eaten and drunk in the past two hours was gurgling at the back of his throat and within a few nanoseconds he was flushing it down the toilet. Then he sits on the toilet seat and drifts off. It’s only when he hears faint knocking he wakes up. Karishma is banging on the outside door and Devrat can hear her talk to a few waiters about the need to knock the door down. He stands up with a start, tries opening his eyes wide, tells himself that he’s in control, walks out of the cubicle, splashes water all over his face and walks out with smile.

  Karishma sees through him though.

  ‘You need to take better care of yourself. Do you feel better now?’ she asks.

  ‘What do you mean better? I just pottied.’

  ‘First of all, pottied isn’t a word. And second, I know you puked and passed out. It’s not that we have met today. Oh! Also since I was getting bored, I checked your phone,’ says Karishma nonchalantly. Devrat snatches it from her. ‘And I deleted her pictures. But that’s not the point. The point is that I saw pictures that made me want to join you in the washroom and puke with you.’

  ‘What the . . . but. . .’ Devrat checks his phone and tries to remember what was on it. Other than a few pictures from the little shows he has done, the gallery is empty. All the pictures of Karthika are gone. The teasing selfies of Karthika in minimal or no clothing, the pictures she used to send him clicked early morning naked in bed, the pictures they took before, after or during sex, they are ALL GONE. It’s a sexless phone now and it hits Devrat.

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘Devrat? Are you OUT OF YOUR MIND? I don’t know where to start? First, you’re sleeping with her! She’s more than a decade older than you. She will screw with your head. You can’t afford that right now! One mistake and you will end up in the engineering college again. I hope you know that. And as if that’s not enough, you have naked pictures of her in your phone! Do you have any idea how much trouble you can find yourself in?’

  ‘Quit it.’

  ‘Shut up and listen, Devrat. What if someone came across this cell phone instead of me? You would be dead then. You wouldn’t be in engineering college, you would be in jail!’

  ‘You’re over-reacting!’ says Devrat.

  ‘I’m not. If you want to check, why don’t you upload a few of those “sexy” pictures of yours online and see if you can wriggle out of that,’ says Karishma, referring to Devrat’s and Karthika’s chats where Karthika used to call her half-naked pictures as ‘sexy’ pictures. Sounds rather odd, thinks Devrat.

  Karishma suddenly turns soft and holds Devrat’s hand and tells him that she’s always there for him, and if he needs anything he can just call her. They can talk, and that they can solve this and get through this. Devrat protests that he’s fine, and Karishma points to the cell phone and tells him that he’s not.

  ‘I just want you to get it together. If you ever need me, I’m here.’

  ‘What if I need “sexy” pictures?’ chuckles Devrat and Karishma hits him on his head.

  Karishma’s phone starts to ring. The name Karan flashes on it. Karishma takes the call. Apparently, Karan is waiting outside. Karishma asks Devrat if he wants to hang out with them and Devrat waves her off. He has never met Karan and doesn’t intend to so when Karishma asks him to come out and say hi, he ignores it. Karishma leaves.

  Devrat knows where he stands but sometimes he just loses sight of it. He knows he’s on the perfect path of losing it all and ending up penniless. He’s practically illiterate, he’s unambitious, careless about money, and he spends an ungodly amount of time trying to be depressed because he thinks it helps his music. But now that he’s sitting in the bar and getting depressed, he thinks it’s not because it helps his music but because it helps him being lazy. Most depressed people are like that, isn’t it? Someone who doesn’t have the time to be depressed might not be happy but he’s too busy to think about how sad he is.

  Given his new-found fame, he should be doing a whirlwind of shows but he doesn’t. He has categorically told Sumit that he would not do more than one show a week. It hadn’t gone down well with Sumit but sometimes there’s no arguing with Devrat. He stubs his cigarette and calls up Sumit.

  ‘Get me as many shows as you can get,’ says Devrat.

  ‘What? Oh! Are you sure?’ asks Sumit.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘I have one lined up in five days. They wanted you but since you didn’t want to do it, I was pushing for someone else.’

  Devrat weighs the scale on this. Lying in bed with Karthika the entire day or doing a small gig for fifty people who may or may not know him.

  ‘I’m sure. Push me for it.’

  ‘It’s at Insomnia Café. Update your pages and your profile,’ says Sumit.

  Devrat does just that. He deletes the picture of Karthika and him from his page. When he’s deleting it, he remembers the mails he got from his fans in Dehradun telling him that they weren’t too happy seeing him with her. As soon as he deletes the picture, a host of his recent pictures are liked by a girl. He remembers the name somewhere. Avanti(?). Where has he heard the name? He visits the profile of the girl. He gets a sense of déjà vu when he visits the girl’s profile. It’s like all this is familiar and that he’s done it before, in exactly the same way.

  He thinks of liking her pictures but refrains from it. After all, he’s the singer and she’s the fan and he should let the equation remain that way.

  Eleven

  avanti

  Avanti is ecstatic. She’s over the moon really. This can’t be happening! No, it’s not because Shekhar hasn’t called for two weeks now and his contact has dwindled to a few text messages and the like where he calls her an ungrateful slut, a fucking whore and other synonyms. It’s because she’s flying to Kolkata tomorrow and Devrat’s gig is scheduled on the exact same night. And the cherry on the cake is that he has deleted the picture of him with that God-awful-looking singer, Karthika. She has already sent a mail thanking him for that.

  She checks her roster and she checks Devrat’s updates again. This is divine intervention. But just as the news sinks in it’s more distressing than it’s gladdening. Firstly there’s this entire thing about what she’s going to wear, and God willing she does find something to wear which she knows she wouldn’t, she has to go up and talk to him, and she doesn’t know how she’s going to gather the courage for that.

  She’s sitting in room making plans to shop when her father knocks at her door. She gets up, opens the door, and walks back
to bed and sits there. Her father keeps standing on the door. He’s in his work clothes, which means an ill-fitting shirt, a pair of brown trousers and a chunky set of sports shoes.

  ‘I’m sorry I c . . . hecked your roster,’ he stammers. ‘I saw you’re flying to Kolkata.’

  ‘And?’ asks Avanti. Conversation is still scant between Avanti and her father. She doesn’t know what to talk to him about. And he only has one question to ask her, if Shekhar is still troubling her. Beyond that they really don’t talk.

  ‘I’m flying on the same day to Nagpur. From what I can see we will need to reach the airport roughly about the same time. I was wondering if you were thinking of sharing the cab?’ asks the father.

  ‘Sure,’ says Avanti.

  Her father nods. He’s still standing there. Avanti tells him that she has stuff to do and her father slinks away. Avanti’s not angry with her father, just awkward, and she will always be awkward.

  She shuts these thoughts off and thinks of what she’s going to wear and she’s clearly at a loss. She doesn’t want to look like a groupie, or a one-night stand, but she does want to stand out as well.

  Her anxiousness gets worse as the time of the flight approaches and she starts to feel sick in the stomach. Like really sick. She wants to call in sick and not go to Kolkata, not now, not ever. She has gone over and over the words she would say to him but every time it sounds more stupid and she doesn’t know a way around it. The little black dress she bought a couple of days back, a dress that she thought made her look like a total style diva, now seems to have become tight and loose simultaneously from all the wrong places. Frankly, she looks like a skinny elephant in it now. She has spent the entire night talking to Namita who asked Avanti to take it easy but it’s easier said than done.

  Her alarm rings and she has hardly slept—she looks like an old troll, absolutely hideous. She wants to bury herself inside her blanket, if possible, below the top soil, the lithosphere, the asthenosphere, right down to the core. She’s surprised she remembers the break-up of the earth’s crust or whatever, right down to its very centre. She’s still wallowing in self-pity and anger when her door is knocked. It’s her father and she shouts that she will be ready in just a minute.

  Avanti jumps out of her bed, changes into her clothes, checks if she has packed everything, wonders if she’s looking like a housemaid and is convinced that she is, and runs out of her bedroom. Her father is waiting at the breakfast table and there are two bowls of cereal, he’s eating out of one of them. Avanti quietly goes and sits there. She pours milk into the muesli, a kind she hasn’t tasted before, and starts to eat. ‘Not bad,’ she thinks. Better than the cornflakes. Her father’s phone rings and it’s the cab driver. They both get up. Her father locks the door behind her. He’s just carrying a small hand baggage while today, Avanti is travelling heavy.

  The cab driver zips through the Ring Road and there are no words exchanged between them. Avanti is busy checking and rechecking her Twitter account. There’s nothing new on her Timeline but it’s better than just staring at the road and being more aware of the silence that hangs in the air.

  ‘Which hotel are you going to stay in?’ her father asks.

  ‘I haven’t checked yet,’ says Avanti and keeps the phone on her lap.

  ‘Do you like flying?’

  The question is innocent but Avanti still feels offended. ‘Yes, I do. It’s fun.’

  ‘I’m sure it is. So do you also go into the cockpit? What’s that like?’ her father asks, rather excitedly, and for a moment, Avanti looks at him strangely. He’s fifty, no less, but his face is one of an excited poodle, eyes wide open, like he’s talking about Narnia behind the cupboard.

  ‘It’s quite confusing if you ask me. There are little lights everywhere and beeping stuff and it’s a little claustrophobic.’

  ‘Have you been inside it when the plane is taking off?’

  ‘Not really but shortly afterwards, yes,’ says Avanti.

  ‘Have you t . . . ouched the lever that makes it go up?’

  ‘No. I think I will be in jail if I do that,’ answers Avanti.

  ‘Oh.’

  Her father almost looks disappointed as if being told Santa isn’t real. The cab reaches the airport and both of them get off. Her father helps her to load up her suitcases on a trolley and they make for the entrances of the airport. She walks towards a different gate, meant for airline employees only. She looks back once to see her father gingerly move towards his gate with his eyes still on her. She looks away and walks inside, trying hard not to look back again.

  Once inside the airport she starts to panic again. She tells herself to calm down. At the counter where she enters her attendance, she checks the flight timing again. She’s on time. And just like that, she checks the flights to Nagpur from Delhi, to see which flight her father is on. There are thirteen flights to Nagpur today from Delhi but none of them are until late afternoon. She walks to the gate again, she peers out and her father is still standing where she last saw him. He’s still scanning the crowds. She wants to wave at him but she doesn’t. She watches him walk away, get into a cab, and leave the airport. Avanti smiles. She thinks of dialling her father’s number and calling his bluff. She wants to tell him that she knows that he’s trying to reconnect with her but she doesn’t. Her flight is announced and she walks towards the security check.

  The flight is uneventful, though she’s slowly losing her mind. She didn’t want to work at all today, so she faked a painful break-up and her empathetic colleagues didn’t let her lift a finger. There’s nothing stronger than a break-up for two women to bond over.

  In the cab back to the hotel, Avanti feels rather nervous and pukish. Avanti checks Devrat’s update and is disappointed that his gig at Insomnia hasn’t been cancelled yet. If only it were cancelled she would have the pretext to not meet him. But now, she will have to go. She will have to talk to him. And she will have to come back, disappointed, with the information that Devrat, though only twenty-one, is hitched and is never going to be hers.

  Three very nervous hours later, she finds herself in Insomnia, an hour before time. There are still people there, milling about, sitting without a care in the world, and she’s shivering. She clearly remembers the first time she heard Devrat sing. It was from a time Devrat’s fan page had less than ten followers and she had stumbled on it by pure mistake. There was just one video on it, a grainy video of a skinny guy with a guitar, whose voice had more static than the video itself. She was listening to the song, crouched in the corner of her room, crying. Seven hours later, she was still listening to the song on a loop, smiling. The puppy-faced boy had won over her heart.

  She nursed the obsession she had on him, an obsession she could truly calls hers since no one shared it with her. But now she feels nervous seeing the posters with Devrat’s picture on it. He has grown rather handsome in the past few years, irritatingly so, and girls have started fawning over him for that. Avanti wants to slap them and claim her right. He was hers before he became this edible, sexy-looking hot singer.

  Slowly and steadily, the bar starts to fill up, and much to her dismay, a few people are talking about Devrat as well. They know he’s playing and they know he’s good, and Avanti wants to bang her head against the wall and die. Why did he get known or popular or 10 per cent of popular, whatever it is!

  He’s already fifteen minutes late. Avanti had ordered a beer to calm her nerves and is already a little tipsy; but it’s only made her more anxious.

  ‘WHAT’S UP!’ a voice booms from behind Avanti. Avanti jerks back to see Namita standing with her arms wide open.

  ‘What!’ Avanti shrieks and they hug, and as they hug Avanti feels like someone’s lifted a boulder off her chest. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘What am I doing here? I just wanted to see what’s the big deal with this Devrat,’ says Namita. She pulls up a chair and sits n
ext to Avanti.

  ‘You came all the way to see how I embarrass myself in front of Devrat?’ asks Avanti.

  ‘That’s what friends do, right?’ says Namita.

  Avanti really likes how they have seamlessly taken up the role of being best friends for each other. There was no awkwardness, no pulled back words, and no pretences.

  ‘I’m so nervous. Just look at him. So cute!’ says Avanti. ‘And I didn’t mean to say cute. I meant to say something more meaningful, deep and profound. But he’s so cute, too.’

  ‘I will have to agree to that,’ concurs Namita. ‘So have you thought what you would say to him?’

  ‘I have waited five years to see him. So I think I’m going to pass out in front of him. That sounds like a perfectly plausible plan right now.’

  ‘Oh shut up, that’s not going to happen.’

  ‘You have no idea.’

  ‘Just get it together, Avanti.’

  ‘This is the best I can do.’

  ‘Then drink more.’

  ‘I’m already a couple of drinks down, Namita, and you know I don’t handle it well.’

  ‘Two more wouldn’t hurt,’ says Namita and waves to the waiter to repeat their drink and he does. She makes Avanti gulp them down.

  By the time Devrat welcomes everyone to Insomnia, Avanti has a silly smile pasted on her face. Devrat’s voice envelops her like a hammock and she feels she can just sleep off wrapped around in his words.

  ‘I’m glad you guys came here,’ says Devrat. ‘I don’t know how to indulge you in small talk and make you laugh before I sing my first set of songs, so I will just dive in. The song is . . .’

  Devrat strums his guitar and is yet to start singing, but Avanti is already digging her nails deep into Namita’s forearm.

  ‘Chill.’

  ‘He’s about to sing! He’s about to sing!’ murmurs Avanti excitedly.

  ‘That’s what he’s here for, isn’t he?’

  And then Avanti loses it. Devrat’s voice fills her up, sexually and spiritually, in ways she didn’t know she could be filled up. Devrat sings one song after another, and slowly, people who were at the pub just to have nice evening have their eyes stuck on him. So are Avanti’s. She can stay here, stuck in this moment, forever . . . listening to him . . . watching him sing while the neon lights make him sweat a bit . . .