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  There’s silence. Neel keeps looking at Titiksha who has her eyes closed. Something tells him that it’s the lull-before-the-storm kind of silence. A storm may happen anytime now, Neel wonders with a dry throat. In a second or two she would say it’s over—their relationship—their five-year-old relationship, which they were confident about till four days ago is now over. As if a relationship is one of those computer softwares which you install, enjoy, and then uninstall once you get bored to make space for another one. Why is Neel even thinking all this without crosschecking?

  ‘How was Jaipur?’ Titiksha says, her eyes still closed.

  For a moment Neel feels maybe this sudden suspicion on Titiksha is because it’s he who has cheated on his girlfriend and thus whatever she does now will be questionable to him, for he will see her actions through the lens of his choice. His own deficiency will make her strength look like her weakness. That’s how the mind works. If you know you are dirty, the world around you smells dirty.

  ‘Why?’ Neel says.

  ‘What do you mean why?’ Titiksha gets up, switches off the light, and starts changing. ‘You are my boyfriend. I have the right to know.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Though it is dark, his eyes are on her. The way she changes her dress has always aroused him. It’s no different now. She always changes her lower first and then the upper. She wears Jockey shorts and a yellow spaghetti top.

  She switches on the light and says, ‘It’s been a minute and you still haven’t answered me. What’s wrong?’ ‘She walks to the kitchen. He knows her ordeal after returning home from office rather well: change, drink a glass of warm water with a pinch of lemon, wash her face, apply a moisturizer, switch on the television, and watch some stupid saas-bahu serial till it’s time to prepare dinner.

  As he follows her into the kitchen, he answers, ‘Nothing. Jaipur was nice. Thanks for the hotel booking.’

  ‘You knew I would do that, didn’t you? Even after you fought with me before leaving.’

  Neel has barely smiled when he notices her open the refrigerator wide and take out a bottle of cold water. As she gulps down the water, a stream of it trickles down her throat and onto her top wetting it in the process and making the top stick to her bosom.

  ‘You always have warm water,’ Neel says moving his eyes to her face.

  ‘I have realized when you start using words like “always”, “forever”, or “never” for a person, then that person is sure living a boring life.’

  This is not the Titiksha he knows. Four days back when he was adamant about leaving for Jaipur to get inspiration and kick-start his writing career, she was the one who gave him an hour long lecture on how important it was for them to settle down, to continue doing what they were doing in their careers without any change, and now she suddenly sounds like a nomad of sorts, shunning away emotional domesticity. How is it possible?

  She goes to her room. He follows. Standing by the room’s entrance, he watches her sit down with her laptop. So she has stopped watching television as well? Neel wonders trying to sit beside her. Immediately she shoots, ‘Why don’t you sit there? It makes me feel awkward with you staring at the laptop screen.’

  Neel doesn’t like her tone but he doesn’t say anything. Once he is seated opposite her he asks, ‘Why didn’t you tell my parents I’d gone to Jaipur? They went ahead and filed a missing person report. It’s unacceptable.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. Your parents are way too possessive of you. Look at my parents. They don’t even care what I’m doing in life. My life is my life, after all.’

  ‘That’s because your parents live abroad. Here in India, your life is everybody’s, specially your parents’ life.’

  Titiksha doesn’t respond but he notices her smiling looking at her laptop screen.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then answer me first, why didn’t you tell them I was in Jaipur. You didn’t even pick up their calls.’

  With the last query Neel hopes she would talk about what he assumes is the reason for the subtle changes in her: that she has another man in her life.

  ‘Work pressure. I was not even in Kolkata.’

  ‘What? Where were you? You didn’t even care to tell me!’

  ‘Did you care to call me from Jaipur? Only messages, huh!’

  The most humiliating thing for Neel at this time is that she isn’t looking him in the eye while talking. Earlier whenever she would get angry, she would look directly at him but not tonight.

  ‘At least I cared to book the hotel for you.’

  Neel is quiet now. Whatever she said is true. What about him? He even fucked a girl; a school friend of his in Jaipur. Does he even have the right to ask Titiksha if she is having an affair?

  ‘One litre Pepsi. Please send it upstairs right now,’ she orders on the phone. Neel guesses she must have called Ma Tara Stores—the local grocery store—downstairs.

  ‘Since when did you start drinking Pepsi? Weren’t you a Fanta lover?’

  ‘I was, yes. Not anymore. I’ve realized you can’t be too much into the “everything lasts forever” shit, or you’ll miss out on various other tastes.’

  What does that mean? That she is bored with him and wants someone else? Is she giving him hints so that he understands himself, and calls it quits without her having to explain much?

  ‘Are you saying you are bored of me, Titiksha?’

  ‘I’m saying I am bored of Fanta.’

  ‘That’s my favourite drink. Does that mean you are bored of whatever interests me?’

  ‘Now you are talking like someone who has only been in one relationship all his life.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  Just when Neel demands a clarification, the doorbell rings. He reluctantly goes to open the door, collects the Pepsi, pays the money, and brings it to Titiksha in the bedroom.

  ‘What if…’ Neel takes his time to phrase it in his mind, and make sure if he really wants to say it.

  ‘What if’ he repeats and continues, ‘I tell you that I had a fling in Jaipur?’

  There is no answer from her for few seconds. Then she looks at him. Eye to eye.

  ‘I’ll pluck one of your eyes with my own fingers.’

  ‘What if I tell you that I suspect you are having an affair?’

  Titiksha laughs out in an eerie manner as if Neel has just cracked a joke after a long time. Then she suddenly turns serious.

  ‘I’ll pluck both your eyes out in that case.’

  Neel is waiting for Nivrita inside Flury’s in Park Street. He has kept his laptop bag on the adjacent chair. It’s a popular place but Neel is visiting it for the first time. He read Nivrita’s late night message on his phone in the morning which stated she wanted to meet him here, for her office is nearby, and start narrating him the story. Neel too wants to start with the novel immediately—enough of inspiration.

  He wonders if he should talk about Titiksha to her. The abrupt change in her has affected Neel so much that he couldn’t sleep well last night. His eyes have dark circles around them and his hair—though he applied a lot of water—have funny curls, now that they have dried considerably. He has a faint stubble too. A waiter comes over and says, ‘Can I take your order, sir?’

  ‘Gimme a moment. I’m waiting for someone.’

  ‘Right. And welcome back, sir. You have come here after a long time,’ the waiter beams at him in a way as if he means what he said. He goes to another table.

  After a long time? He must be saying this to every customer. Neel is pretty sure he has come here for the first time.

  He looks at the entrance because Nivrita has just entered Flury’s. She looks enraged. She sits down with a thud opposite Neel and holds her face as if she is trying to come to terms with something disturbingly important.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘That bugger is having an affair.’

  ‘Which bugger?’

  ‘My
boy-mate.’

  What a coincidence! Neel wonders. Even Nivrita doubts her… wait, what did she say?

  ‘What’s a boy-mate?’

  ‘He is the boy with whom I mate when I feel the need. He used to be my boyfriend initially, but with time we stopped being friends. Now we turn to each other only when one of us is horny.’

  Neel tries to digest what Nivrita has just said. She makes sexual acts sound so casual. How can anyone be so casual about their sexual escapades? It’s such a private thing. Neel has problems seeing himself naked in a mirror, so how can he not have a problem with the casual confessional tone of Nivrita?

  ‘Are you sure?’ he says.

  ‘I was at home yesterday. He didn’t know. And he came home with a girl. Damn, I’m sure about it.’

  Neel’s face flinches. He has a problem accepting the absurd similarity of the events he had had at his place last night. Even he was waiting for Titiksha and she came in with a guy. Or so he guessed.

  ‘But didn’t we share private moments in Jaipur too?’

  By probing on her guilt, Neel is actually trying to calm his own guilt down.

  ‘But he wasn’t there in the hotel room while we were fucking each other.’

  The way she puts it—blatantly straight—makes him feel uncomfortable. He would have liked it if she had put it the way he did—‘private moments’ instead of the crude F-word. The first thing Neel does after hearing the word is see if anyone is looking at them. Nobody is.

  ‘Anyway, that’s my shit. How is it going with your girlfriend? And yeah, please order something for me,’ she says and snaps her fingers.

  ‘Two cups of tea and a brownie,’ Neel tells the waiter.

  Titiksha is having an affair too. Should he tell Nivrita about his suspicion?

  ‘Titiksha is good.’ He chooses not to, but realizes, for the first time that he has shared his girlfriend’s name with Nivrita. He notices her sharp glance suggesting she did register the name. It seems like she doesn’t quite like it.

  ‘You know, I think it’s better to have an affair with a willing and committed person rather than an unwilling single one.’

  ‘How do you know who is willing and who is not?’

  A sly smile appears on Nivrita’s face, ‘Whoever comes to a girl’s hotel room at night is willing.’ The smile takes a caught-you-there form.

  The waiter comes half a minute later and places the order on her side of the table.

  ‘Have you ever been snatched, Neel?’ she says looking at him obliquely while mixing the sugar-free in her tea.

  ‘Snatched?’

  ‘Yeah snatched. What if I snatch you from Titiksha?’

  The sound of her statement has something deeply and dominantly sexual about it that he has to adjust his legs a bit in order to hide the instant erection. He blushes and ends up looking stupid in a cute way.

  ‘Forget it,’ she says judging his dilemma. ‘Instead tell me what is sex according to you? And what is love?’

  Neel sips his tea and thinks, Why does she ask so many questions? Especially the ones whose answers are a far cry for him.

  ‘Sex is…you know what sex is. Love is…love is…’

  ‘Love is…?’ She licks the chocolate sauce from her lips which a brownie piece has left while she shifted it from the plate to her mouth. Neel can’t help but think that now he knows her tongue is tastier than both the chocolate and brownie. He sucked it well that night.

  ‘I can’t articulate it well. Why don’t you tell me about it?’ Neel surrenders.

  ‘Sex is when two bodies worship each other’s hearts. Love is following the rituals leading to that worship and thereafter.’

  Neel loses his erection. He gapes at Nivrita. She is one of those gifts wraps which, when opened, gives way to another gift wrap and another and so on, surprising you as well as arousing your curiosity to the hilt as to what exactly is it that is wrapped in the end.

  ‘I’ll have to scoot. But I’m free after lunch. I want to take you somewhere.’ Nivrita is quick to gobble up the rest of the brownie.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Many authors have told me that when you go to a place where the story actually begins in your novel, you write better.’

  ‘Logical! So where does your story begin?’

  ‘Our story. From today it’s your story as well, Neel.’

  Neel senses a longing in her voice which wasn’t there before.

  ‘Right!’ he says.

  ‘It’s a school.’

  ‘A school?’ He remembers she did tell him that the protagonists are teenagers in the first half and then she didn’t answer his query about the second half. ‘Is it some fluffy high school romance?’ he asks.

  ‘Neel Chatterjee’ the words slip out of her mouth in an overtly seductive manner as she leans towards him.

  ‘Never’ she now whispers, ‘judge a story by its setting.’

  He gives her a forced smile of acknowledgement.

  For the next four hours, Neel kills time by browsing books inside the Oxford Bookstore in Park Street. He is amazed to see so many Indian authors’ books. Eighty percent of them look and read the same. Replicating anything that is successful is a disease with Indians in every sphere. Twenty percent of the books are marginally better. He hopes to make it to the 20 percent soon. As he peruses the books, he overhears two youngsters talk.

  ‘You don’t see many foreign authors in the Indian bestseller lists these days. That’s an amazing thing,’ says one.

  ‘Not really,’ says the other. ‘I think in five years’ time, only those Indian authors will feature in the bestseller’s list who have a dedicated PR team promoting the book on a monthly basis.’

  ‘So you are saying if one wants to earn crores from a book as an author, he or she has to put in lakhs?’

  ‘That’s right. In fact I believe the term “bestseller author” will soon be extinct and it will be substituted by a more suitable and more practiced term like “best-branded” author.’

  ‘Don’t the publishers help?’

  ‘They are the God. And God helps those who help themselves, if you know what I mean!’

  The two youngsters break into mild laughter and move on to another book rack away from Neel.

  Neel has absorbed every word they just said. He has money but doesn’t have as much as they said one should to turn one’s book into a hot property. His father has loads of cash, but he doesn’t want to take it from him. It’s now that he realizes how important Nivrita is for his dream to come true. She had said she would personally see that the book gets marketed properly. How many debut authors are given that kind of offer? For that if he needs to compromise only a bit and play on with Nivrita without upsetting her then he has nothing to lose but a lot to gain.

  At precisely 1.45 pm he moves out of the bookstore and reaches the nearby Trinca’s Bar and Restaurant. Nivrita eventually joins him. They cross the road and hail a taxi.

  ‘Salt Lake, CA Block,’ she tells the driver.

  ‘Here.’ She takes out two paper boxes and two plastic forks. She gives one box to Neel.

  He opens the box and beams, ‘I love Chinese.’

  ‘I know.’

  Neel’s face stones up. ‘You know? How?’

  ‘I had a crush on you during school days. The first thing one does when one has a crush on someone is collect as much information about the person as possible.’

  ‘But how do you know so much about me? I mean I rarely came to school.’

  Nivrita takes a bite of the noodles and says, ‘Tell me, lust is lust till it falls in love. But what’s love when it falls in lust?’

  Neel’s mouth is stuffed but he doesn’t swallow it. Instead he blabbers in a funny manner.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Nivrita laughs. ‘I was only playing with words. Don’t look this serious.’

  Neel relaxes. He swallows and asks, ‘So what’s the name of the school?’

  They both are standing in front of a p
rivate school now. On the big rusty iron gate of the school entrance is written: Salt Lake International School.

  ‘Just wait inside,’ Nivrita says and walks towards a wretched looking shanty-shop on the far right corner outside the school. Neel doesn’t mind entering the campus.

  As he waits inside the campus by the main gate, someone taps his shoulder from behind. He turns to see an old man in a khaki uniform. He is clean shaven with heavily oiled but neatly combed hair.

  ‘I couldn’t believe but I was sure from the distance it was you. You haven’t changed much Neel baba.’

  Neel frowns. He is seeing the man for the first time in his life.

  ‘I didn’t get you.’

  For a few seconds the man stands as if Neel has slapped him.

  ‘Have you forgotten me?’

  ‘You are probably mistaken. I never studied in this school.’

  ‘I used to call you Neel baba and you used called me Abdul chacha.’

  Neel shrugs saying, ‘As I said it wasn’t me.’

  The old man is still not convinced. He also has a pronounced disappointment on his face as if he believes Neel does not recognize him intentionally.

  ‘Baba, I have been working here for forty years now. By now may be forty thousand students, at least, have passed out but never before have I mistaken to recognize any student.’ A pause later he continues, ‘I used to like you a lot and I still remember how I was suspended for a week, my only suspension till date, when you requested me for a smoke. I denied but you kept insisting, and I allowed you one puff from my bidi and the smoke choked your vocal cord, and you were hospitalized for a day. From then on you never smoked. Well, though I was suspended but I was happy at least the fear would never let you take up something as self-destructive as smoking.’

  Neel recollects his freaky reaction to Lappan’s cigarette. But how is it possible that this man knows him when he has never even been to this school before? He hears the old guard say, ‘I understand. Maybe you are a big man now and don’t want to recognize an old security guard like me. It’s okay Neel baba.’