In no
particular order, extracts from “An Affair to Remember!” are as follows… Read
at your own peril!
*
The evil red car weaved in and out like in the joystick
controlled video game from my childhood.
I never ever crossed Level One. I just realized that that was my
deepest regret.
“…And then I began to feel guilty. So I figured out which police
station they were from,” she continued.
Ira Sharma
had most definitely mastered the joystick video game with the little red car.
For her five rupees pocket money, she would have played ten levels in one go as
opposed to my one.
Ira Sharma most definitely had no deep seated videogame related
regrets.
The car weaved in and out still as it did towards the end of
Level One, the point where I always lost.
“There’s bribe money in the glove compartment… but as it turns
out, didn’t need it,” she went on.
I opened the glove compartment and saw there was a moderately
thick bundle of cash there.
And then she said bitterly, “You know you are an asshole, don’t
you?”
At this point, I believed in feng shui and dragons and
fairytales and the alignment of planets impacting our everyday lives and I was
henceforth, for the foreseeable future, immune to surprises. I felt inclined to
agree. I even nodded, perhaps.
The little red car from the videogame consumed Ira’s anger,
bopping from one lane to the other, forever a centimetre away from kissing
another vehicle and causing Level One to end.
And then suddenly, she stopped the car right in the middle of
the road. I heard brakes being applied suddenly and vehicles screeching to a
halt.
“You are an asshole and you deserve to die!” she suddenly
screamed at me angrily.
People horned
from behind us. Ira thrust her arm out and gave the guy in the car behind us
the finger.
She pulled the same hand back in put it on my left cheek. I saw
there was a teardrop in her right eye.
She then leaned in as a mechanic does to check a damaged tyre
rim.
The first moment I realized something was wrong was when her
face got too close to mine for comfort. And then she was no longer interested
in checking out the damaged rim. The second moment of shock hit me when her
eyes closed.
Much like most of the events in the past couple of hours, I had
not foreseen this either.
Her lips reached mine and she bit them instantly, like fangs
dipping into human skin. Her nails dug into my cheek drawing out blood. I felt
her breathe heavily as she kissed me fiercely, with immense venom.
She pulled away, her teeth and fingernails snatching away layers
of my skin, and blood with them.
“Goodbye… asshole,” she said bitterly.
I realized this was my cue to leave.
I opened her evil red door and got out, looking like a mauled
animal that belonged at the bottom of every foreseeable food chain.
And in my head played the metallic female voice that lived in
the video game machine.
End of Level One.
Insert
coin to continue.
*
When you are twenty-six (or somewhere in that age bracket) and
still working for a software firm in India – your first job after leaving your
engineering campus – you have very little choice but to do an MBA. You see
people around you – people three or four years younger to you, MBAs all of them
– earn thrice as much as you, get better sounding designations like a Junior
Deputy Assistant Vice President (which sounds good although it halves
“President” about four times) while you stay where you were four years ago,
when the madness called your career began. Or perhaps get promoted a grade or
two at best, with cosmetic increases in salary indexed to the inflation rate,
not in India but Japan.
It ceases to
matter that your firm is called ‘ABCDEF Corporation’ and that it is every
engineering student’s dream to land a job at ABCDEF Corp. That its share trades
on the stock markets and is considered a bluechip and an outperformer and a
heavyweight. That there is a grossly misleading advertisement doing the rounds
on TV showing an employee from ABCDEF Corp. (wearing a cap or a jacket or a tie
saying “ABCDEF Corporation” in font 120) solving the world’s problems with
software and technological innovations only ABCDEF Corp. is capable of.
It ceases to matter that if you do an MBA, your career would look like the zig
zag bowel movement of a fatally constipated creature – chemical engineer to
software firm employee to MBA to consult/ bank/ marketing/ random employee at
random company recruiting from random B-School paying big bucks and anointing
you with a big title. All that occupies your mind is “God! I have to get
out of here!”
But then
B-school admission season comes and goes every year. You fill all the forms,
dispatch all the demand drafts, pencil all those circles on answer sheets with
your HB Lead pencil you once used to do sketches with and then settle into a
wait. Trawl those chatrooms, google for answer keys from coaching institutes or
for rumoured cut offs. You subscribe to The Hindu and The Economic
Times and even religiously read them for a week or two before the results
are out. And then you hang your head in disappointment, terminate your
subscriptions of the boring newspapers (and go back to reading Bombay Times/
James Hadley Chase novels) and trudge back to the life you thought you were
leaving behind. To become a President halved four times.
*
Most people would think that all you need to create an explosion
is set a fuse to something inflammable and set it afire. You (being ‘most
people’) will thus perhaps be surprised to know that you could drop a lit
matchstick into a sea of oil and it will neither ignite nor explode.
Almost every explosive device will have a complex and precise
mix of an oxidizer, a stabilizer and (only then) the actual explosive chemical,
followed by a detonator circuit. The whole point of an explosive device is that
it should explode on demand and not at its own sweet mercy, which is where the
detonator comes in. Once activated, the detonator will send an electric shock
wave through the explosive material at a speed of up to eight kilometres per
second. The shock front, in turn, is what releases the immense amount of
potential energy stored in the explosive. In other words, boom!
Lord
Voldemort had no appreciation for the beauty of the complexity of an explosion.
All that majestic intricacy fitted into a split second before the big bang. He
just sat on his throne, pale and deathly silent, breathing heavily.
The catharsis of energy associated with even the crudest bombs
made at home by terrorists has been known to create temperatures of a thousand
degrees Celsius and their own shock-waves with pressures to the tune of a few
hundred atmospheres. That’s a few hundred times the pressure that your body can
take. Not surprisingly, explosive shock-waves kill more people and cause more
damage than the heat of the explosion itself. Imagine yourself getting crushed
under the boot of an almighty giant, that’s what a shock-wave will do to you.
The shock-wave is a beautiful and effective afterthought of the
explosion. The high temperature at the epicentre of the blast will cause gases
(generated in the blast) to move outward radially in a thin, dense shell that’s
called “the hydrodynamic front”. This front then acts like a piston that pushes
against and compresses the media of gases it encounters in the surrounding air,
to make a spherically expanding wave of superheated gases, i.e. a shock-wave.
And all this, everything, start to finish – detonation to explosion to shrapnel
dispensation and shock-wave – happens in the fraction of a second, blink of an
eye.
The Dark Lord
still did not look impressed although that had never been my intention. All I
had been trying to do was to make conversation with him. He just sat stiff and
still in his chair, apparently incapable of speech, thought and cognition. And
even though he was still the vile old Dark Lord, it was a little difficult not
to feel sorry for him.
RK did not
react as I got up and walked up to the cracked glass window of his cabin. Four
floors below, RK’s sedan was now a mangled post-explosion carcass, still
smoldering and smoking – its roof gone, its seats and tires afire. There were
three or four policemen scattered around the vehicle watching it burn, chatting
with the security guard, sipping tea from plastic cups.
*
In all my life, I had never and still have not seen a woman so
beautiful.
Even the sun stared at her wide-mouthed, a creation of God so
beautiful, so joyous that there was little else to do. The wind played merrily
with her, her hair, whispered secrets in her ears.
She was
beautiful in a way women have forgotten to be – a radiance, an expression of
joy, perfect and pristine, perhaps even prehistoric. She had the eyes of a
Basilisk, terribly potent and powerful; even while the rest of her stayed
staid, there was life in her eyes. They laughed, frolicked, danced, spun,
committed mischief. At times they spoke words, her eyes, in a language I did
not quite understand. These words, as real as everything else around me,
floated energetically to worlds far far away. Like birds of a beautiful
blissful blessed species. A species I did not quite know or understand but had
happy memories of.
*
Bombay is one of the cruellest, most miserable cities in India; a
city so laden with unfulfilled dreams on under-slept brows, with reality
conflicting with the ambitions of a million, with an evergreen silent brooding
painful struggle of the teeming have-nots versus a handful of ultra-wealthy
with people like me, neither have nor have-not, stuck watching the charade from
the middle.
Every one or
two years, Bombay sees a riot or a bomb blast. And then, once the blood has
been shed, tears have begun to dry, wounds have been bandaged and started their
transition to scars, once the carnage has paused, if only for a minute, people
return. Back to streets, back to work, back to the roads, as if nothing ever
happened; something the media never fails to call the indefatigable “Spirit
of Bombay”. What they fail to see is the desperation, the despondency of
the men and women who have no choice but to get out of the safety of their
homes to earn their daily bread. For if they do not work, be it bomb or flood
or riot or terror attack, they cannot feed their families that night.
Bombay is like its many men… zombie-like and brutal and
omniscient of the harsh truths of life. The only people who can tolerate Bombay
and even come to love it are those who have been born and/ or bred there and
maybe also those who have too much money to have ever seen its dark side, whose
walls are too thick for them to have ever heard its muted sobs in the night.
City of a million broken hearts, a million scars, a million crushed dreams. And
yet, a city of ceaseless and futile hope.
But then on one day every year, Bombay is unmindful of its
tragedies. As Ganesh Visarjan dawns on the metropolis, teeming armies of
otherwise morose and moribund men converge on Bombay’s streets, singing,
dancing, holding up traffic. The city is a canvas of colour with various
renditions of Ganesha idols being prayed to and paraded around. For one day,
Bombay is not the scarred marred animal it has come to be.
I walked in
one of the parades as it proceeded to immerse a rather fit looking Ganesha,
donning exaggerated six pack abs, in the sea. The procession danced and sang
along deliriously to outrageous prayer songs, most of which were rather
ridiculous do-overs of raunchy item numbers… for example, “Ganesha kee Diwaani”
(adapted rather crudely from “Sheila kee Jawaani”). Some of them threw colour
up in the air and on people; others distributed sweets. I watched from the
distance as they reached the sea and began to drown the six pack donning, gym
frequenting, weights-lifting Ganesha in the sea water. After the precarious
task of drowning the gigantic idol without getting drowned themselves, the men
turned back, still ecstatically buoyant over their achievement. They walked
back home, still singing the ridiculously inappropriate prayer songs, to have
feasts and sweets.
The next morning, there was the usual sadness in the air.
Humidity pricked at my neck as I stepped out. The air was shrill with
hopelessness and despondence. The same tired zombies greeted me as I started my
journey to the office on my bike.
Their hope
rested at the bottom of the sea bed, somewhere near Juhu beach.
*
“…apparently
an email from a junior employee dated the twentieth of this month began the end
of the company,” said the reporter, his subliminal joy at covering the story
bursting through him. “In his letter of which our news channel has an exclusive
copy, the CEO said it was like quote- riding a tiger not knowing how to
get off its back without being eaten. Unquote.”
And as they
dissected and autopsied the scam on screen, I realized that the ‘email from
a junior employee’ they were referring to was my email to RK containing the
CFO’s presentation.
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