E-Paper
The hangover
It’s a wonderful, crisp New Year’s Day for all of us. But for Karamdev Nath Mehta a.k.a. Karan, today was supposed to have been a very different January 1, 2010 indeed. A twisted tale from D.N. Fogget.
Karamdev Nath Mehta wasn’t much of a pessimist. But when he kept reading about the impending end of the world in the newspapers which he believed, and followed the television news updates, he started to first tidy up his house and then his office cubicle.
Karamdev, known to his friends, colleagues and adversaries as Karan for some reason, was not a fastidious man. But the papers are papers and television news is something that nobody except sad men still keen to do something startling in this world tend to disbelieve. And Karan was not a sad man at all.
“Hey Karan, your desk looks bloody clean!” said Anurag at the office.
Being a collector of ordinary junk that included diseased-pink or cadaver-green parking tickets with the most unreadable print, flyer-menus from takeaways within a five kilometre radius, visiting cards of astrologers and sexologists dropped through his car window or pinned against the windscreen, and bills from restaurants, Karan’s new-found fetish of being tidy struck Anurag and many others as odd.
“Just. Things were piling up.”
That wasn’t a good explanation.
“Oh my god! You’re having a scene, aren’t you? You are having a scene!”
For a minute, Karan contemplated the idea of an untidy man turning into a tidy man simply by being hit by the sheer force of love for a girl. But even a minute has its limits and he mentally shook himself like a slo-mo dog after a bath and gave Anurag a smile and said, “No.”
Days passed, with weeks and months following like children behind a Missionaries of Charity nun. The fact that the world would end on December 31, 2009, became more palpable in everybody’s minds. More and more people started to worry about how they would conduct themselves on New Year’s Eve. Would friends somberly huddle and clench their eyes shut till the damn thing happened? Or would they, in the spirit of Punjabi weddings that understand the inevitability of doom — and therefore the need to ignore it — better than all other cultural rituals in the world, dance their limbs out, drink to their Gills and Sodhis, and go out with all their joyous guns firing? There was a TV panel discussion in early October that had experts sinking their teeth into the issue. The anchor even read out an sms poll in which 60 per cent of the viewers said that India will become a global superpower by 2020, 32 per cent said that it wouldn’t, and the TV man never did get around to explain where the other 8 per cent fitted.
Then there was the phenomenon of false calendars. Depending on which day of the year in 2010 people were specially attached to, people could buy these calendars tailor-made to suit the days remaining. So, if someone’s birthday was on April 16 and he bought the calendar on November 16, 2009, he would buy a calendar that would start 45 days before April 16, 2010 i.e. on March 2, 2010 regardless of what the real date was. This was a big hit and on, as it happened, November 16 (a beautiful, crisp Monday Delhi morning) Karan bought such a calendar to start the countdown that began on March 2, 2010 and would end on, as it happened again, his birthday, April 16, 2010 — which, of course, was really going to be January 1, 2010.
One would have thought that crime would go up. Or at least crimes of a sexual nature. But nothing seemed to change much here. Farmer suicides across the length and breadth of a land — whose representative 60 per cent believed in the trickle-down process but out of which 60 per cent thought it wasn’t happening fast enough — was down to almost nil. One farmer in Telangana (or was it Warangal?) had killed himself. But the jury was still out whether his motive was the shame of penury or the horror of a vague rumour about his daughter sleeping with someone from an even lower caste than him turning out to be true.
It was well after people had started preparing for the end of the world that Karan found himself face to face with Anurag, Anurag's fiancee and Anurag’s trying-to-contained-plump mother.
“Hello Auntie,” Karan said in the evening chill of Connaught Circus’ B Block a mere 15 days from D-Day.
“Hello beta,” she responded cheerfully, but not without showing some signs of subterfuge.
“Evening shopping?” continued Karan who suddenly wished his mother was alive and roaming about town with him and his never-to-be wife-to-be. Her face suddenly changed and nervously she looked at Anurag, but not before craning her head slightly in front to get the girl in the middle's head out of her line of vision.
“Um, eh, beta, Anurag, Swapna, um...”
It was the girl who finally blurted out that Anurag and she had got married earlier that week and it had to be a bit
rushed.
“Only a small gathering of family people, you know, nothing big,” Anurag’s mother blubbered as if caught doing something unspeakable to a girl-child.
Throwing a piercing look that could have pinned down a stronger man, Swapna addressed Karan with a short monotone while dipping her eyes briefly at her belly region that was covered by a warm pink furry fabric, “And no, it’s not what you think. Let’s go na Mammiji, it’s the last week of that clearance sale...” And they went off towards C Block to continue their adventures in pre-apocalyptic retail therapy.
Karan was stunned. What hollowed out the pit of his stomach in one Baskin Robbins scoop was that somehow he was mistaken for a shifty, anti-social who, despite having the good things in life like a good job, a nice car, a dependable behaviour and a sunken bathtub, was not worthy enough to be invited at a close colleague’s wedding or even told about it. His moment with Anurag and his two women had triggered a mini-avalanche of feelings mixed with incidents that he had forgotten about altogether.
There were only three variations of the same genre of feelings, all dealing with his failure to achieve three things he had been so sure of achieving as a youth so keen on reaching manhood: one, to retire by the age of 40 and live in a internet-equipped shack in Goa not facing the sea but next to a river with a Slovakian or Hungarian woman; two, to have a collection of poems published under the alluring pseudonym of D.N. Fogget by one of the big British poetry publishing houses he had heard about on Facebook from his now-filmmaker college friend Bhaskar Chatterjee; and three, go to the grounds and watch the greatest batsman who ever roamed the Earth, Sachin Tendulkar, play.
That night he sat down in front of the TV to watch the highlights of the abandoned India-Sri Lanka One-Dayer in Delhi. The next day, he stopped going to work. By the night of Wednesday, December 30, 2009 — Wednesday, April 14, 2010, in Karan’s head — Karamdev Nath Mehta scratched his forest-like stubble and realised that killing himself would be the perfect way by which to make a judgement about his place in the world. But it would be too mawkish, too sentimental a gesture. Thus, the end of the world would be the perfect solution — the desire to kill oneself taken care of by the world being destroyed.
The next morning, Thursday, December 31, 2009 (or Thursday, April 15, 2010) Karan sprung from his seat, turned the TV off, lathered his face, took out a new triple-blade Gilette, and proceeded to look his best so as to spend his final day in the world with gusto and uncharacteristic energy. He could feel the surge of the life-force returning to him as he pulled out and put on his favourite corduroy jacket and picked up the car keys from the bowl beside his tidy-since-November pile of magazines. He even ensured that he had daubed enough aftershave on his face (Bulgari Aqua pour Homme that he had bought from a Duty Free shop at Amsterdam’s Schiffol Airport on a rare trip abroad) so as to smell like a different man with a different set of priorities.
He took a long drive, picking roads according to his sense of aesthetics rather than according to any utilitarian purpose of time. Even the blue metal barriers that had been up since roadworks were on in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games seemed like installation art works. Now that they were just that, stripped of a more patriotic, face-saving purpose, they looked kind of impressive.
He spent a while toying with the idea of buying a bottle of wine and then finally picked up a Rs 560 red from an outlet behind Khan Market where, unexpectedly, there was no rush at all. He then drove to Nehru Park, that undulating grassy knoll where the winter sun slants in at the perfect angle, parked his car next to the Sulabh public toilet building just in case...
Lying down on the grass, he stared at the blue-as-a-blue-sky sky and smiled. He was happy it would all end tonight.
Evenings come early in Delhi on the last day of December. So Karan proceeded to go home, make the dramatic gesture of sending out very undramatic emails to his colleagues at work wishing them all the best, turned the lights off and sat in one of his comfortable drawing room sofas. The bottle of wine and he occasionally looked at each other in a nervous friendship from across the room. Nothing happened.
He had dozed off around 10.30 pm and woke up to what he thought was his apartment floor shaking. He briskly crossed the distance between his sofa and the balcony to see if people had all come out of their houses. Instead, he heard music, in various timbres and amplitudes coming from homes in the neighbourhood. Perhaps it was an overhead aeroplane flying lower than usual hoping to escape what would happen down below on earth.
Karan turned on the television, the crucible of all beliefs, and found all channels running special programmes on the year that was. Minutes crawled the way they tend to when there is no one nearby to measure them with. But Karan was also legendary for his patience. So when his mobile phone jumped into life delivering one text message at a time, he didn’t jump or fumble. He simply half-opened each new message, reading the first couple of words without opening it further and deleted. (One message was: ‘Pranayam: Faridabad's Finest Luxury Apartments. Spacious 3-Bed 1,857-2,257 sq. ft. Rs 45 lakh all inclusive. Possession Next Year’ with the contact numbers attached. But Karan didn’t go beyond ‘Pranayam Farid’ and killed it.) This load, fire, reload mechanism gave him a brief purpose in life.
But when his mobile did break into a cacophanous ring, he instinctively picked it up and put it next to his ear.
“Happy New Year, yaar! Where are you?” It was Anurag surrounded by a wave of boom and bass both sounding high and loud.
Karan mumbled into the phone something that Anurag never really heard. It was one minute past midnight when Karan clicked his phone off. It was January 1, 2010 — or April 16, 2010 — and he had tomorrow and many other days in store.
