Till the Last Breath . . . (10 page)

‘It has to be like this.’

‘Why are you acting so difficult, Dushyant?’

‘I am acting difficult? You leave me and then don’t talk to me for two years and now that I am here, you come to me? Why? To make yourself feel better? I am not going to give you that pleasure. I had a hard time forgiving and forgetting you; please don’t make me go through that again. Go back to your rich, smart boyfriend you have always been in love with. I don’t care about you any more.’

‘We didn’t have to end up like this.’

‘You chose it to be like this. You walked out of my life and fucked your ex-boyfriend! It wasn’t me, it was your fault,’ he growled.

‘I didn’t … but I am sorry; after what happened, I couldn’t have stayed and you know that. After what happened between us …’

‘Had you loved me enough, you would have stayed. You definitely wouldn’t have gone running into his arms. I was begging for you to come back. I almost destroyed myself to get you back. What didn’t I do to catch your attention? For a little pity? Why didn’t you come when I was drinking myself to death? Why? Didn’t you think for once how I would feel?’

‘I did—’

‘Fuck off. Please. I don’t want you here. I would rather die than talk to you,’ she heard Dushyant shout.

‘But—’

‘Just
get out
.’

‘Dushyant—’

‘One last time, GET OUT.’

She heard the rustling of the bedsheet and saw the feet leave the room. She felt sorry for the girl with the hypnotic voice who had just been disparaged by Dushyant. Too bad, she couldn’t see her beyond the soft, beautiful ankles. For the first time, her judgement about Dushyant changed. Maybe it wasn’t the disease or the tumour, maybe Dushyant had always been a sick person.

The needles tugged at his skin as he rolled over and tried to get some sleep. He knew he wouldn’t get any that night. The pain had slowly become permanent. Painkillers were less effective now and the pain was now a part of him. He tossed and turned, thinking about Kajal and the argument from moments earlier. He wondered why she had bothered after all these years. Was it because she still loved him? Did she still think of him when in bed with Varun? Maybe it was because she felt guilty about what she had done.

It was ten. The curtain was still drawn between them. The girl on the other bed had been a constant source of irritation. His skin crawled every time he looked at her. Even on the verge of death, he wasn’t at peace. The last thing he wanted was to have the image of a chattering young girl gnawing at his eyes in his last moments. Instead, he needed a smoke.

There were still twenty rolled joints safely tucked into one of the books a friend of his had dropped at the hospital. He took three of them out and stuffed them into his robe. Slowly, he unscrewed the drips on his hand and pulled them off. He walked out gingerly, trying not to attract attention to
his tottering self. He had taken just five steps away from the room when someone called out his name. He turned around to see Zarah leaning against the wall, her eyebrows knitted and her lips curved into a sinister smirk.

‘Going for a smoke again?’ Her voice a measured mix of sternness and playful exuberance. He nodded. ‘What did I tell you about not vanishing again?’ she asked.

‘Come along? I have enough for both of us,’ he responded. Usually unmoved when challenged, his eyes were like a cowering dog who had pooped in the hallway.

Zarah smiled and motioned him to follow her. Together, they went to a rarely used balcony on the sixth floor. Usually, patients want to get out of the hospital as soon as they enter and don’t look for hang-out spots to smoke. But Dushyant was different. The lack of direction or purpose soothed him, made him feel unshackled. The need to get high and fucked up ruled him.

Zarah took one of the rolled joints from his hands and lit it up. As the pungent fumes snaked up from the smouldering joint and hid her face momentarily, Dushyant stood there, ogling. The irritating girl’s words hung uncomfortably in the air.
The hot female doctor.
With a lit joint in her hand, a careless strand of hair wandering aimlessly around her face, she leant dangerously close to the edge of the railing. An air of unabashed freedom surrounded her.

‘You shouldn’t be smoking, should you?’ he queried. Zarah didn’t answer; instead, she looked at the neon-lit city, her eyes already glassy from the weed. She closed her eyes, let open the bun and allowed the breeze to play with her hair. She took another long drag and let the smoke curl out from her slightly parted lips.
She is a regular smoker
, he thought. Long drags of a joint as potent as the one in her hand often made even old-timers wheeze and choke. Not her.

‘Neither should you,’ she said and turned towards him. The joint was working its way into her body. He could see it in her elegant and almost sexual turns and the deliberate flips of her hand while managing the unruly tufts of hair around her face. ‘You fought with her?’ she asked.

‘Her? Her, who?’

‘Oh, well. The girl who shares your room and the girl who came to see you today,’ she answered. Another long drag. She wasn’t an amateur, even by Dushyant’s standards.

‘I had my reasons,’ he said. ‘The girl in the next bed irritates me. She behaves like a life coach. She fiddles with things, gets excited as if she has just checked into a spanking new hotel suite and not a hospital ward. I can’t stand her.’

‘And what happened with Kajal? The other girl?’

‘How do you know I fought with her?’

Another drag. Her responses were getting slower. So were his. It wasn’t the weed clouding his senses that drew him to her. It wasn’t her overpowering scent, her piercing brown eyes, the olive skin or the supple body that he wanted to feel in his rough hands and leave savage bite marks on. What drew him to her was her nonchalance, the hidden anger, the restlessness in her eyes, the tiny slit marks on her wrists and the belief that she belonged to the same tribe as his. One of dejection, longing and crushing loneliness. ‘I was standing outside when I heard your voice. I couldn’t help but eavesdrop. I told you I would see you in the night, didn’t I?’

‘Could you hear us talking?’

‘You were shouting.’

‘Shit.’

‘Ex-girlfriend?’ she asked, even though she knew the answer to her question, her eyes firmly on him.

Dushyant didn’t answer for a bit. At a distance, he could see the bunch of lights he recognized as his college hostel.
He wondered if Kajal was back in her hostel room … or with Varun. Was she still thinking of him? Was she crying? Did she tell Varun where she’d been?

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We broke up two years back. I did something stupid and she left me. I tried to win her back, but she was gone. I hadn’t seen her since then,’ he mumbled and wondered if he should tell her what had happened that night.

‘She wants to come back?’

‘I don’t know what she wants,’ he said and climbed on to the ledge. Unlike Zarah, who was at ease with her legs dangling on the other side of the ledge, he was petrified. The hundred-foot drop made his heart pump fiercely.

‘Careful,’ Zarah said and laughed boisterously. Unhindered and unpretentious. He looked admiringly at the sharpness of her nose, the cheekbones and the perfectly fitting trousers.
Too stunning to be a doctor
, he thought. With the mild hallucinogen in his bloodstream, he could see images of a bikini-clad Zarah turning heads on an exotic beach in Brazil.

‘Why haven’t you told your parents yet?’ she asked. ‘And how long do you think you can keep up with the medical expenses?’

‘I have more money than it looks like,’ he said.

‘Rich parents, eh?’

‘My father is a clerk and my mother is a housewife. They haven’t sent me a single buck since my second year,’ he answered.

‘Then how?’ she asked. He searched for signs of shock on her face but found none. She was too high to care.

‘I am a face that people forget. But I am also a brain that forgets little.’

‘So you do little brain-trick shows for people?’ she chuckled.

‘Not really, but close. You remember those multiple-choice questions we had to answer to get through entrance examinations?’ She nodded and he continued, ‘I was brilliant at that. In eleventh grade, my coaching-institute teacher had
noticed that and made me take an exam for a rich kid in the senior batch. I cracked three exams for the kid. All we needed was to click a picture of his which looked like me, and it was done. It was five thousand for each exam. My teacher had a new car the very next week.’

‘So?’ Zarah looked disturbed.
Finally!

‘Business slowly grew. I started taking every type of exam. BBA, MAT, CAT, engineering and even medical entrances. I have taken the board exams, tenth and twelfth, every year since then. I know all the textbooks by heart. I make more money in those four months of examinations than people make in years. I am a safer bet than a leaked paper or two years of expensive coaching classes. If I am not caught, I have a zero rate of failure. And I come cheap.’

Last season, Dushyant had taken thirteen board examinations, nine engineering entrances, four BBA entrances and a few MBA entrances. He took the GRE five times and a whole host of other exams which now he couldn’t even remember. None of the surrogate examinations went cheaper than twenty thousand rupees. He made 8 lakh that year. What with his failure rate of zero, people clamoured at his doorstep, even paying the entire sum upfront.

‘How long have you been doing this for?’ Zarah asked and lit up the last joint.

‘It’s been five years now,’ he said. ‘And I have been saving up. I don’t go out on expensive dates or have any indulgences. I have a lot of it with me.’

‘All you spend is on alcohol and drugs,’ she murmured.

‘A lot of that comes free for me. I took an exam for an army officer’s kid one time. My alcohol comes cheaper than you can imagine. For other things, I have my sources. I am a loyal customer and I never get into trouble with the police or anything.’

Zarah threw the burnt joint away. She turned silent.

‘What happened?’

‘Umm … Nothing.’

‘Something is wrong. I thought we were discussing stuff,’ he said.

‘I am an army kid, too,’ she conceded.

‘You don’t come across as an abrasive brat.’

Zarah shot an icy stare at him. Dushyant had always thought of army kids as extrovert bullies. The constant variation in environment and the change in schools made them competent to handle any social exchange with ease. They grew up a lot faster, matured faster and came across as extra-smart brats.

‘Is that what you think about army kids?’ she asked.

‘I am not putting them down or anything. In fact, as a kid I wished I was as cool as them. So, are you like that?’

‘Not really. I don’t think so,’ she answered and added with a pause, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘What? Did they beat you or something? Because that’s okay. Mine did. You wouldn’t believe how much my father beat me when I couldn’t clear the IIT entrance examination. Before the exam, I was more scared about what he would do to me if I didn’t clear the exam rather than the exam itself. It’s ironic—since that year, I have cleared it thrice for other people,’ he said. ‘See this,’ he pointed out to a few circular scars on his left forearm.

‘Are these cigarette butts? He burnt you?’

‘More times than I can remember. Every time I didn’t score well in a coaching-class examination, he would thrash me mercilessly,’ he said. ‘And this one is a belt-buckle wound.’

‘Didn’t your mother say anything?’

‘I think sometimes she wanted to. But she was used to it. I think she thought I deserved it,’ he explained. ‘Plus, I used to get beaten up once a month. Or less. The frequency wasn’t
any higher. Sometimes, it was just a few slaps. Everyone gets those. But he constantly kept me in fear. It was a nightmare,’ he said. For a moment, he wondered what made him blabber so much that night. Was it the joint? What was it about this girl that gave him verbal diarrhoea all of a sudden? He hadn’t shared the agonizing details of his troubled teenage years with anyone other than Kajal. Everyone who knew him was aware that Dushyant hated his monstrous parents with all his heart, but no one knew where it came from.

‘What happened after that?’

‘Nothing. I put up with their bullshit till the first semester. They stopped sending me money after I finished third in class. So, I started earning on my own. Then, I didn’t need them,’ he claimed.

‘How did they react?’

‘They struggled to understand what was happening for the first few months. I didn’t call them. I didn’t ask for money. They came to my college a few times to check what had gone wrong. Eventually they found out that I had started smoking and drinking. Dad whipped out his belt again, but I fought back. I was much stronger …’ His voice trailed off. He felt Zarah lean into him. Suddenly, he became conscious of her physical proximity.

‘And?’

‘They have softened up a little. I didn’t talk to them for six months. Sometimes, they had to come to the hospital after my episodes of drunken madness. They still try to tell me that I am a failure and how they wished they had brought up a dog, not a son. But I have a choice now of not listening to them. I exercise that. They are dead to me.’

‘Is that why you do this to yourself? Torture yourself to torture them? Like you did when Kajal left you.’

‘Are you a psychiatrist now?’ he asked, and then moved on.
‘I don’t know. Maybe. I just want them to feel sorry for what they did. Make them feel that they lost me because of their behaviour. And yes, I do want them to feel miserable.’

‘You’re destroying yourself to do that?’

‘I am not destroying myself … Well, maybe, I am. But I like my life. I like doing what I do. It might have started out like that, but it’s no longer that. I used to be bothered at first. Now, I don’t care that I don’t have a family to go back to.’

Zarah was quiet. Dushyant knew his story forced people to consider their previous judgments about him. He never had any illusions about his failures in life or his detestable nature, but he knew he wasn’t the worst either. No matter what he did, he knew he would always be better than his father. With his eyes stuck firmly on her, he waited for Zarah to respond. People usually did, expressing sympathy for him, and then moving on with their lives. At the end of the day, he was a raging alcoholic and an addict who was meant to be hated, not understood.

‘We should go back,’ Zarah said.

‘So soon? After all this, don’t you think I should know about you a little too?’ he asked as he jumped down the ledge. Every bit of his body hurt. His heart eased a bit now that he wasn’t gazing at a hundred-foot drop.

‘Maybe later.’

‘A little bit?’ he asked.

The inquisitive tone in Zarah’s voice had changed to a cold, professional pitch. ‘Let’s get you into bed,’ Zarah said and led the way back to his room. He followed soundlessly. She put him in bed, reattached the tubes and screwed them back on.