Blowfish Page 3

  ‘Ok … Ok … forget it … show me your chart.’

  I handed over the sheet of paper on which Dhingra had my life mapped out till the 56th year, post which, as per him, it was still too dark to see—that I inferred meant I would be killed by my well-meaning mother before I got to 57.

  ‘Hmmm …’ he lowered his glasses after a while and looked up. I was trying to wipe my clammy hands against the upholstery. He caught me doing it and smiled. He studied my face for a while.

  ‘What?’ I asked impatiently.

  ‘First ask your question,’ he said.

  ‘My question …’ I muttered. I got cold feet. What the fuck was I doing sitting here with a 45-year-old soothsayer who had always predicted my doom and was invariably right? Had I come here to hear what I already knew—that I was a failure, that I would remain an unhappy loser till the very end?

  Dhingra had predicted my breakup with Nisha; his words were still stuck in my head: ‘That girl is made for bigger things. You’re a hurdle for her. Her charts indicate that she’ll move to a cold country and your charts show you sweating profusely and spouting pimples sitting in a dark room somewhere in Haryana.’

  Dhingra was known for his bluntness. I didn’t believe him at the time. I thought he was an ass. I was wrong. The man was as accurate as a fucking sundial. She broke up with me within three months of the prediction. We had been doing long distance for four years. I thought we were going strong. Soon she started being a little evasive on the phone—you know a bit unsure when she said, ‘I love you’; then one day she asked me to meet her parents—she said if they agree we’ll be fine.

  I met her parents. They nodded their heads in slow motion, the kind of nod you get in job interviews when they think you’re a freak who needs to be humoured for a few minutes to avoid a scene. I told them about my family. You should have seen them—it was as if I was born a juvenile delinquent. Shouldn’t I be the one in trauma over my supposedly wretched childhood? I wasn’t but they were. That sort of sealed it. He emitted an apologetic fart; she burped like an orphan who had had a full meal after a very long time. They didn’t say much after that.

  Nisha called me later that night. She said there was no hope; her mother had a bad “feeling” about me. Everything went steeply downhill after that. I became desperate. I surprised her with a weekend visit. The flight tickets were damn expensive but I did it. She was surprised but I don’t think she took it well—she pretended to be happy for a day and then just before I left for the airport she told me we should take a break—it might do us good. Our phone calls fizzled out within a fortnight. Two months later, she got an opportunity to move to Sweden. It seems it had been in the works for quite some time. She just forgot to mention it to me.

  She moved to a cold Scandinavian country; I spouted pimples and sweated bullets in my room. I don’t have her number anymore although I did buy an AC to prove at least some part of Dhingra’s prediction untrue. Unfortunately, the power cuts were long and unforgiving.

  I was a seeker and he was my guru, he was the only one who was willing to show me the light in exchange for a hefty fee. He had an abridged, illustrated children’s version of Treasure Island on his bookshelf—it was tucked between thick tomes on astrology, numerology and the occult.

  I found myself mumbling, ‘Well … you know how it is … identity crisis of sorts; I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.’

  ‘No, wait ... your chart clearly indicates that you have a problem articulating yourself. Take your time. Think about what you’re going to say.’

  I paused. He must have heard this before. It was the usual shit that happens to everyone. There is a time when I used to feel smug in the steadfast conviction that I was different, that I looked at things differently, that I wanted something else from life. Maybe this delusion helped me survive a job. With time, I realized I was like everybody else. I had come here to tell him the clichéd truth. I said, ‘You know stuff like—what am I doing with my life, what is my purpose? I think I don’t want to do what I’m doing anymore. I think working for any company sucks; it doesn’t matter what job it is, it just sucks! We are idiots … bloody, pathetic Indians, toiling away like cheap labour for an MNC whose shareholders are right now, as we speak, playing golf in some luxury resort in fucking California—we are slaves, that’s what we are. And what do we get at the end of it? We get stupid, stinking money in our shit bank accounts. We’ve been poor for so long (our grandfathers and our fathers) that we are pleased as hell with our bank balance. Pleased as hell. We live for the weekend, we live to eat at fancy dumb places and on weekdays we go home, grab a drink, masturbate and sleep and do the same thing again the next day, over-and-over-again like fucking pencil battery robots. Look at the Japanese—they were making movies in the 70s that Indians can’t make in the next hundred years!’

  ‘The Japanese?’

  ‘Yes, and the British: the BBC, look at their bands—what do we have to show—ROCK fucking ON! Sick, it makes me sick!’

  ‘You mean Rock On?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Nice film that,’ Dhingra smiled.

  This was going nowhere. I stood up, ‘Manish, I’m here to seek your guidance. Tell me, should I quit and do something else? What should I do?’

  He stood up and went to his book shelf to pick a red binder; he opened it, leafed through it, and compared something in it with my chart. He looked up, ‘I can see misery—you’ll be insulted at work, most probably fired in the next three months. You can save yourself. You can if you change your name to MukLund. Believe me, that’s the only way.’

  ‘I’ll be fired because I don’t want a horrific nickname?’

  ‘Yes … that and one more thing … you don’t mind if I talk from my heart …’

  Dhingra had a granite-heart.

  ‘No, I don’t mind … say it,’ I said. I hoped he didn’t notice the slight tremor in my voice.

  ‘I can sense a bit of arrogance in you Mukund. I can understand if it is someone who has achieved something in his life but what have you done? You have just been copy-pasting PowerPoint presentations. You can look down upon Indian cinema and middle-class Indians but what makes you think you are any different? You are just like any other guy: an average and ordinary man cribbing about the world. Do you have the balls to do something? That is the real question you should ask yourself.’

  Man, was he right? That was exactly the way I felt. I nodded in agreement but he didn’t seem to notice. He continued, ‘you are lucky to have a good job in these difficult times and to top it all, you’re living in Gurgaon: THE fastest growing, most exciting city in the world after Shanghai …’

  This was unfathomable. Why would Dhingra mix his profound analysis of my hypocritical, armchair thinker act with such stupid praise for a fucked-up city? I hated this city. It used to be farmland, with crops and trees and goats and cows, a shabby bus-stand and a few mom-and-pop shops; and then, somewhere in the 90s something new started happening every second. The accident-prone national highway split the city into half. The farmland gave way to the “new Gurgaon”, the land sprouted its new harvest: neon lit malls, boring monolithic office buildings and walled-in twenty-floor residential complexes. This is what Dhingra referred to as India’s Shanghai, a land where a dimly lit microbrewery pops out every week spewing freshly brewed beer that’ll make a fucking gentleman out of you; where a shiny, new mall is being built in every nook and cranny – each one promising to be a bigger monstrosity than the ones that came before. Here, buy this ten-thousand-rupee shoe, gobble a three-hundred buck bubblegum gelato, and don’t you forget your credit cards, make your dreams come true, you can always pay later. And the people, oh yes, people like you and me—like a heap of ants on a sugarcube—they come from nowhere and make this city their own. People standing, waiting at every corner with their nondescript shoulder-slung laptop bags and Tupperware lunches, people trying to escape the evening traffic even before they hit the road—right from where thei
r cars are parked in damp and unfriendly underground basements, people getting murdered, run over, having babies, getting molested, raped, people smiling, melancholic people, people hopeful that the next day would be better. And to think about a time when this city had nothing!

  Did you hear about that new hip place that serves the best herb chicken calzones ever? No, you didn’t? Would you happen to know the prevailing square feet rate at Golf Course Road? The 3BHK vs 4BHK debate rages on, and Wal-Mart plans to open their first hyper-store here or have they already opened it?

  Could this city be called the second-most exciting in the world? No man is perfect, not even Dhingra.

  He was still talking, ‘... I’m saying this again, you are a very lucky guy to be in the right place at the right time. All this talk about working for a company for money, that’s not entirely true, is it? There are people who work because they love it. Why don’t you work for something that you like doing then? If you don’t like your job, change it!’

  ‘What if I don’t like jobs in general? What if I’m disillusioned by what they expect of me? I’ve been doing this for quite some time now and I can’t find a single redeeming thing about this. Not one.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘You know who they are.’

  ‘No, I don’t’

  ‘They, I mean everyone. What if I don’t want to do what others expect me to do? I don’t want to be a zombie Manish, I don’t want to seek happiness in my new Audi A4’s gaudy LED lights, or out of running the half marathon and my kids getting admitted to the best school in the city.’

  I noticed I was standing—my five-feet-seven-inches frame cast an imaginary shadow over Dhingra’s desk. His table was laden with glass paperweights and charts and a framed picture of his happy family—my imaginary shadow got smaller with every sentence I blurted out.

  ‘Then find something worthwhile to do, like I did,’ he said.

  ‘Exactly! What is it that I can do? You’ve got to tell me, can you?’

  ‘Well … you’re in for a bad time this year. The only thing that can change that to some extent is a change of name, I’m telling you …’

  I cut him short, ‘So you’re saying that I don’t have an option but to subject myself to misery.’

  ‘Yes, more or less … you can of course use this time to explore where your talents lie. To become more self-aware, to meditate and pray … it will help. Also, perform Surya Namaskar every day, begin with two rounds and see where it takes you. Ah, and yes, you can put some fool’s gold on your bedside—it may work. I can order it for you.’

  ‘How much will it cost?’

  ‘I know someone who can get you a lump for seven thousand.’

  ‘Seven thousand?’

  ‘Yes, luck is not cheap,’ he sighed. His phone beeped, he pounced on it and typed in a response. He looked up and said, ‘Routji. He runs a coal mafia in Orissa. He was in a bit of a mess a few months back, I got him out of it. His next few years are fantastic. He’s going to be the next Ambani.’

  I paid Dhingra his two thousand-an-hour fee and walked out.

  Selling Socks

  Dhingra was right. I had done nothing in my life but complain like a hypochondriac granny with an itchy ankle who thinks she’s got elephantitis. It was time to do something real. Dhingra’s prediction had an upside. If I was anyway going to get fired, then why shouldn’t I quit and embark on an eventful journey of self-discovery? If things didn’t work out, I could always look for another job. I had just enough money to last me three months and with the help of some leave encashment I could even stretch it to four.

  I needed to discuss this with a pragmatist. I barged into my flatmate Chaddha’s room. He was busy chatting up another one of his Shaadi.com prospects online.

  ‘I’m quitting man! I quit!’ I declared.

  He ignored me. His fat fingers kept banging on the keyboard. Chaddha was a big, hairy monster with large, soft eyes and a bulging tummy that he tried to hide behind XXL sweatshirts. He grew a beard every weekend and he thought he looked dapper with his cropped hair and bristly stubble. The truth was far from that but who would tell him without running the risk of being punched in the face?

  ‘Chaddha, what the fuck man!’ I said.

  He said without looking up, ‘I have heard that one before, haven’t I? Can I come back in sometime? There’s a 0.65 probability that I might get some sex chat here …’

  ‘No, this can’t wait. Who are you talking to?’

  Chaddha sighed and turned towards me, ‘26, fair complexioned, Chandigarh Punju family, dad was in the Foreign Service, brother is an investment banker, one former relationship, sexy, big boobs. Anything else you would like to know?’

  Chaddha had studied in a boys’ school; he went to a “boys only” Commerce college; he moved to a B-school which had a male-female ratio of 15 to 1—that gave him a hook up probability of zero; in office he had repeatedly flaunted his ability to network with female colleagues—a spliced cabbage about to be made into chowmein could do better than him; mind you, a practical chap like Chaddha always finds a way—he discovered Shaadi.com.

  ‘Hmmm … ok … I’ll come back later then,’ I said.

  ‘No, no, you’ve fucked it up. This one is high maintenance—she has a thirty-second turn around window and I’ve exceeded it by a minute. No sex chat for sure now. I better brb her now ... maybe I’ll get lucky sometime later. Now tell me, what is it?’

  ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m quitting.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you must be nuts! Why the hell do you want to quit man?’

  ‘Well … I can’t explain it … it’s something inside that says—QUIT BHANDARI, QUIT.’

  ‘I think you need to go to Dhingra,’ Chaddha suggested. He was the one who had introduced me to Dhingra. He had gone to Dhingra to find out if he would ever get hitched—and Dhingra had directed him to Shaadi.com. He started out with all earnestness, (he wanted to find his soulmate), but the girls he liked ignored him; that left him with the girls he didn’t like too much but who found in him a possible husband. It was a win-win for Chaddha. He could talk to them and enhance his female interaction skills and there were times when he could get away with a little “extra”. He made it a point never to meet them; he just chatted. He could be someone else on chat and a lot can happen when Chaddha was not Chaddha

  ‘I did go to Dhingra,’ I said.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He told me I’m getting fucked this year no matter what. He said most probably I’ll get fired. My ass rubbing against a large slab of ice for warmth—that’s how this year will be.’

  ‘Then he must be right.’

  ‘Yep, so I thought why don’t I avoid the charade of a fucking day job? Why shouldn’t I do something that I want to do?’

  ‘First of all, you’re already doing really well in avoiding this “charade of a fucking day job”. You are avoiding it better than anyone else while getting paid for it. Don’t ruin it man!’

  ‘I feel trapped in that pigeon hole office.’

  ‘... where you Google your day away.’

  ‘Not always,’ I protested, ‘I am forced to work too.’

  ‘Who can force his lordship?’

  ‘I want out Chaddha. I’m done.’

  ‘And what do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t resign man. I’m telling you, you’ll end up selling socks on a traffic signal.’

  ‘Socks? Why the fuck will I sell socks?’

  ‘You will. These are times of recession. Someone like you having a job is a miracle, don’t fuck it up!’

  ‘What do you mean? I’m not that bad,’ I said.

  ‘No, you’re not bad but you’re not really trying, are you? Rangoo and you have formed this tag-team and you don’t give a rat’s ass about whatever is happening around you. You’re happy in your cocoon. Stay there and stay happy man. What is this shi
t about quitting? What are you going to do anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you listen to me?’ I was getting irritated with all this back and forth.

  ‘Hmmm …’

  ‘I intend to find out what I want to do and then do it,’ I added.

  ‘Don’t you think you should first figure out what you want to do?’

  ‘How would I do that with a job that takes up half my day?’

  ‘Half! Don’t make me laugh man … you leave office at 5:30 pm, I haven’t ever seen you work on a weekend, you watch your stupid Korean and Japanese films. You get wasted and listen to pot music every other day—AND YOU DON’T HAVE TIME? Come on bastard, grow up! And let me also tell you this: You’ll have to come back, how long can you sustain this? You’ll be in deep shit, I’m telling you, this is sounding nice and comfy now but you will regret it.’

  There it was: the truth. Exaggerated for effect, yes, but the truth. Why can’t I fantasize? Why can’t someone just play along and let me be happy for a while?

  I think Sampu is the only one who would “get” what I wanted to do.

  A Moss-covered Pond

  I was not able to meet Sampu. He messaged saying he had taken up baking fruit cakes and apple pie for Shweta to prevent another expulsion. I asked him if he was planning to make hash brownies. ‘Don’t even joke about it,’ he replied.

  I contemplated, rationalized, defended and rejected the quitting idea a million times. I could sense a kind of truth that I’d never felt before. But I didn’t do anything. I was a stagnant, moss-covered pond waiting for a kid to throw a pebble in. I swayed gently. I got back to life as it was. I stopped thinking for a while.

  The pebble plopped on the fifth day of September. I got a mail from Anandi, the HR head, asking me to come to her office at noon. I didn’t tell anyone. In the past few weeks, there had been a few downsizing rumours. Were they firing me? Oh hell, were they? That would be bad—and why me? There were so many other nincompoops in office. I nervously tiptoed to her office and knocked. Anandi waved me in and pointed to a chair—she was on a call.