Stories Of Young Love (4 page)

Raju lurched from
step to step, curve after curve, like an ox in a yoke. A white,
soft and scented yoke. When she noticed sunlight on the walls below
the fourth landing, Eileen told Raju to stop. She slid off his back
carefully, took her shoes from his hands and lightly skipped up the
rest of the steps. In the balcony she put them on again and went
and leaned on the railing. Two young English surveyors had arrived
in the grounds and saw her. She waved to them gaily.

Raju lay on the
steps panting for many minutes. His legs hurt and his chest was on
fire. He lay quietly with his eyes shut, waiting for life or death,
whichever one it was to be, to snatch him from this intermediate
state. And slowly, life triumphed. Desire returned and throbbed for
the promised reward. He ran his tongue over dry lips to relive the
kiss Eileen had planted upon them two storeys below.

Raju raised
himself and climbed the last few steps to the balcony. Eileen
showed no fear of heights as she leaned on the stone railing,
looking at something or someone far below. Raju stood in the
doorway admiring her figure from behind. Its form was impressed
upon him, he was convinced, after the climb. He felt one with it,
and moved easily and confidently to stand beside Eileen. He brushed
his hand against hers, certain that she would entwine their fingers
again. But she turned upon him fiercely, eyes blazing contempt. One
of the English surveyors was watching her and Raju realized this
too late.

He staggered
backwards and once again felt tears welling into his eyes. But this
time, they weren’t the tears of a helpless, confused boy. They were
hot with anger and shame. Raju descended rapidly. He wanted to
leave the hamper behind but remembered his father, and for his sake
picked it up. He reached the car, started the engine and waited.
Eileen came down slowly, grandly, but this time she couldn’t bring
herself to meet his flashing eyes. She wore her jacket and took the
backseat. Raju never missed a gear on the drive home, nor did he
move to the shoulder to let other cars pass. He had finally learned
to drive.

***~~~***

What’s instant
about instant coffee? It takes two minutes to boil a cup of milk,
longer if it’s been sitting in the fridge. You need half a minute
to stir sugar and coffee too. That’s two-and-a-half minutes. Not
instant enough for me when I have been up all night listening to a
man who is almost 30 but suddenly starts talking like a boy going
on 13. What a night this has been!

I got home later
than usual because a woman colleague had to be dropped home first.
I hate escorting other people’s wives and girlfriends and sisters
and daughters and mothers home at night. It’s not my job. If we got
waylaid, I wouldn’t so much as raise my finger to stop harm from
being done. Take her by all means, I would say. Don’t expect me to
be martyred for a woman colleague. That’s not what I have slogged
for all these years.

They aren’t doing
me a favour by working, are they? It’s more money in their family
purse to buy fancy clothes, phones, cars and houses way out of town
so that I have to spend an extra hour in the night cab seeing them
home. As for me, I am still stuck in this damp flat with Adil, who
is as moody as he was when we were at school, but then his dad was
rich and being his friend had its perks. Now, the old silver spoon
is gone and Adil lives off me practically, unless he gets one of
his cheques for a story that’s cost him much more to write than
what it brings home.

I should have
thrown him out long ago. What is he to me? I pay his bills, and
he’s not exactly an undemanding wife. I had a nice, new desk,
modular and all, with smooth pine veneer but he made me sell it off
for a scratched and flaking wooden table that he thinks is antique
and puts him in the mood to write. The smooth veneer of my table
was too crass, too middle-class for his refined literary taste. An
‘abomination’, he called it and I couldn’t say anything because I
wasn’t sure what the word meant. It’s not a word you find in
medical journals.

I must be in awe
of his dad still, for he was a towering figure in his day. There
was always a row of people waiting in their house lawn to curry
favour with him. And although we boys were very welcome to the
house, we knew our place there. We were always on our best
behaviour, no shouting or laughing aloud. Hell, we weren’t so well
behaved even in class. But when Adil came to my house or went to
another friend’s there were no such unwritten rules of decorum. We
just had to be careful not to break anything but otherwise we could
be boys.

I don’t remember
being under any obligation to Adil’s father. He didn’t write my
exam to get a seat at the best medical college, did he? He didn’t
get me a job either. What did he do for me? And yet, if his ghost
walked up to me now, I would smooth out this sheet, slick my hair
back, click my heels at attention before saying ‘hello, uncle’. I
hate being in awe of anyone, especially if I am not beholden to
that person for anything, which quite clearly is the case with
Adil’s father. Or maybe I am. Perhaps, it was an honour for us to
be allowed to be Adil’s friends.

Or am I in awe of
Adil? See, I can write a prescription and I have cleared exams he
couldn’t, or didn’t, but I can’t write. Not write-write, you know
what I mean? It’s not about words and grammar, but about spinning a
yarn. When I tell a story, I want to get to the end of it. Be done
with it. But that’s not what writers do. Can you imagine Dickens
wrapping up Pride and Prejudice in two pages? Not Dickens, I know,
I mean that other person, what’s the name?

And Adil must be
some good, for off and on a story he has written comes out
somewhere and then he isn’t very happy about it because, he says,
the fool of an editor has clipped this or that meaty part, or
twisted and shortened something so much that it’s a shame he left
his, Adil’s, title on top of it. I can never understand it. If a
paper I wrote got published somewhere big, like The Lancet, I would
be thrilled, never mind if they rewrote the whole thing themselves.
But that’s me.

The problem is
that Adil does get published sometimes. If he didn’t, I would show
him the light, set him to do some hard, honest work, or show him
the door. I could certainly try to get him a job in my hospital’s
public relations department, but there’s no chance of his agreeing
till some editor somewhere thinks he is good enough to publish.

And so, I have a
Mac on the antique table because real writers don’t use a PC.
There’s a coffee grinder and an old fashioned percolator on a
sideboard, although instant coffee will do just fine for me. In
fact, I prefer the cheap, green Bru that’s blended with chicory to
pure-coffee Bru Gold. All that I can say for his coffee arrangement
is that it makes the house smell nice, like a Cafe Coffee Day.

***

Adil writes a
lot, and all sorts of things. He’s written 10 or 11 novels in the
two years he has been staying with me. How, you are wondering?
Well, he writes 3,000 words a day, 60,000 a month, 120,000 in two
months. And he says that’s the right length for a novel. He won’t
sit down to breakfast until he’s written his first 1,000. Then he
reads the newspaper until I wake up (I am always on the late shift,
didn’t I tell you?), and that’s usually after 11am. He folds the
paper neatly, as if it’s not been opened, brews his fancy coffee
and gives me the paper along with a steaming mug. I make my own
toast and I wash both mugs. In his mind, the coffee settles his
debt towards me, I am sure.

The other 2,000
words are written after I leave in the afternoon. He listens to me
with paper and pen in hand. I found it disconcerting in the
beginning but now I don’t notice it. He says his fiction feeds on
life, and since he goes out but rarely, and meets people seldom, he
depends on my work-life gossip to colour his stories and
characters. When I first read a draft of a story set in my hospital
I was aghast. I hadn’t expected him to paint such a lifelike
picture of my circle. I was horrified because I thought the book
would have serious social consequences for me.

I need not have
bothered. The gulf between writing and being published is seldom
bridged. At least, Adil’s novels haven’t covered the distance so
far. They are roosting on my Mac, and on his email but they seem to
be in no hurry to appear on bookshelves yet.

What gets
published is his essays and historical articles for newspapers, and
occasionally, limericks and short stories for magazines. There’s no
money in the creative pieces, he says, but he takes some pride in
writing those. The newspaper work pays but the money is so little
that you can’t buy a week’s living with a whole month’s
cheques.

He won’t admit it
but Adil is mostly my dependent. On Eid, his mother sends him a
generous gift and he accepts it without fuss, but the remaining 364
days he is a self-righteous, struggling writer whose conscience
does not permit him to accept anything from anyone. I am a nobody,
of course, so it is all right to live off me.

Adil is not a bad
writer, although I am not the best judge in this matter. I like his
turn of phrase and his storylines, but I won’t say they are
remarkable. And then, so many people are writing these days. So I
don’t know whether he will ever make money from his writing but
there’s one little world where he is quite a star. About a year
ago, he started writing a novel about our adolescent years.
Everything about school and our city and the things we did and life
in the good old days. Pure nostalgia, and he was doing a good job
of it. Every time he finished a chapter, he mailed it to me, and
for once I looked forward to reading him. Unless I was seeing
patients I would read it at once on my phone. And I usually had
something nice to say to him about it.

But one day he
just stopped writing it. I asked him why, and he said there was no
point. It would never be published. Neither have your other books
found a publisher, I felt like telling him, but refrained wisely. I
was really sorry to see that book stop midway.

A few days later I
was talking to a childhood friend back home and we got talking
about a school teacher. I mentioned Adil’s book and promised to
send him the chapter about her. Adil and he hadn’t been friends
ever but minutes after I mailed him, he called up all excited.
Could I send him the other chapters too? I told Adil about it, and
he was happy, but he still wouldn’t resume writing the book. Then,
without telling him, I posted all his chapters on a blog and shared
the link with all my home contacts, making it clear that it was
Adil’s work and giving his email ID for feedback.

Adil never had
many friends in school. Few students liked him because his father’s
clout got him VIP treatment everywhere. But after all these years,
his blog won him many friends. All day, his phone pinged with
effusive emails, and Adil was a happy man. Word spread and he soon
had more friends than me. Uncles and aunties read him, old
forgotten neighbours flashed back, school teachers mailed him their
blessings. And Adil, his memory jogged by all these online
encounters, started writing new chapters. I had embedded a web
tracker in the blog to give him a true picture of his audience. The
numbers were rising by the day, the first 1,000 came up in a month,
the next in three weeks, and after that the flow became a flood.
Some days, he had more than 200 hits. I advised him to tap the blog
for an income by accepting advertisements. But his artist’s soul
was horrified at the suggestion. “You want me to sully my sweetest
memories with advertisements?” he rebuked me. “What will it be,
Jockey undies next to a piece about Uma Ma’am, or Shaina
Aunty?”

I agreed it
wouldn’t look nice but that’s the way the world moves now. Anyway,
I left it at that, and it was just as well because after a couple
of months, as Adil’s writing tapered down, the number of hits
dipped till it became sporadic. Some days there were just two or
three hits, and some days, usually over the weekend, had 20 or 30.
Only once in a long while did a long-lost acquaintance chance upon
the blog and browse through it from end to end, taking the number
of hits up by a hundred.

I had all the
posts saved on my phone anyway, so I stopped checking the blog long
ago, and it was hardly ever on my mind. I never spoke to Adil about
it, but I didn’t know that he had found a new plot in it.

***

Adil didn’t
tell me about Zeba, I am not surprised. He had found Sameer Sir,
our high school English teacher, on Facebook and become his friend.
That was unthinkable back when we were in school. Students used to
be in awe of teachers. They respected teachers. Forget being
friends, the slightest display of familiarity with teachers was
frowned upon. But on Facebook, you can’t be ‘student’ or ‘teacher’,
just ‘friend’. Adil had been Sameer Sir’s favourite, and he was
good at English, no doubt. But I guess the fact that Adil aspired
to be a writer, and was struggling towards his goal must have
warmed Sameer Sir’s heart. And then there was also the glowing
piece that Adil had posted about Sir on his blog. He had declared
Sameer Sir his hero, and how can a retired teacher nearing 70
resist being flattered by such praise? Sameer Sir posted a poem in
praise of Adil and his writing on the blog, and after that the two
were always bouncing praise off each other.

Sameer Sir invited
Adil home for coffee one day. And Adil, who avoids society like the
plague, surprised me by going at the height of summer although it
is a long ride. I had to lend him 1,500 rupees for the cab fare.
Lend! Adil never returns my money, where’s the ‘lend’ in that?

But I was wrong
about his hero worship and all. Sure, he meant no harm, and if
Sameer Sir tripped on a street Adil would surely help him up, but
all that praise he was showering on the old teacher was not
heartfelt, I realised a few months later. And I was to blame for
it, because once the hits on his blog dipped, Adil discovered
another use for the tracker. He started tracking the IP addresses
of his followers: the ones who continued visiting the blog
regularly.