When Only Love Remains

by Durjoy Datta

  She walks dazedly to her iPod, connects it to her father’s speakers which starts to blast a medley of Devrat’s songs. She slurps in the cold Maggi with a fork. Surprisingly, it doesn’t taste all that bad.

  Four

  devrat

  It’s been two weeks since Devrat’s last gig and his fan page has seen a sudden spike of three hundred fans in this short while. Videos of his performance are being shared in the small community of English music lovers in Kolkata, and also beyond. Three girls are seen crying in the pictures Thatplace Else uploaded on their Facebook page. The people in the crowd look drunk and euphoric and sad and amazed and the crying girls look similar to the ones in any One Direction or Justin Bieber concert. Only that these people are grown-ups and not love-struck teenagers fixating on a cute smile and great hair.

  Devrat knows nothing of it. He has been lost in a haze of smoke and alcohol. Six of the ten thousand rupees he was paid that day is already smoke and alcohol-processed-piss. His phone has been switched off for a week and Sumit has made five trips to his apartment to make sure he is alive. Sumit has not tried counselling him though. He knows it’s better to stay away from young suicidal musicians. He loves Devrat and all, but he doesn’t want to have anything to do with him if he decides to end it? Who knows what the police might come up with?

  It is late afternoon when Devrat wakes up and is startled by how much his breath stinks—like a colony of rats procreated, multiplied and died. The room looks like a little grenade stuffed with clothes and newspapers instead of shrapnel exploded in it. He opens the window and stands by it and lights a cigarette. It’s his last and he will have to go out to get another one. It looks like it will rain and he feels good about it. For a few hours, the entire city will be as glum and heckled as he is. He flicks the cigarette onto the pavement and checks if the geyser is still on and it is. It’s out of compulsion that he takes a bath or he would have choked on his body odour.

  As he bathes he remembers the sweet scent of Arundhati’s body, the kind of smell that affluent girls reek off, the smell of flowers (Arundhati said it was a body mist by Victoria’s Secret), and feels like smoking again.

  He’s running out of money, he remembers. Just as he’s looking for his T-shirt, his phone rings. He had turned it on some time back. At first he ignores it, thinking it’s Sumit. But the phone keeps ringing incessantly. It’s his mom. Devrat takes the call.

  ‘Hello!’

  ‘Hello, Ma.’

  His mother rattles off in Bengali about how worried she was when she found his phone switched off for the last couple of days. Devrat gives her a few half-assed explanations for his absence. His mother asks him if everything is okay and he says that it is. Every time his mother calls, Devrat puts up a brave front and tells his parents that everything is going great, and though he might be living in a cramped flat, which they should never visit, he’s actually doing well for himself and there would be a day that they wouldn’t regret their son dropping out of engineering college to pursue something that he really likes to do. Her mother disconnects the call after she’s sure that Devrat’s happy and doing well. His father, too, rattles off a few instructions from behind (There are many road accidents happening in Kolkata, ask him to be safe. Ask him to not to keep the phone on charging all night. Ask him to keep the All Out on).

  He’s the only son of doting parents, after all. They were a little miffed when they first heard that Devrat wanted to quit engineering and try singing for a bit but had relented over time. Devrat’s constantly teary and puppy eyes (as his mother tells him) have always worked wonders for him.

  They know nothing of Devrat’s constant smoking, and of Arundhati. They are too nice for him to trouble them with his problems.

  After his mother disconnects the call, he changes into the last clean T-shirt he has. He wears a jacket over it. The road is empty and except for a few kids scurrying about, jumping over puddles, rescuing their little paper boats, there is no one around. He buys two packets. He’s smoking Four Square today. The cheaper, harder stuff. It starts to rain again.

  The kids leave their boats in the puddles and soon water fills in and sinks them. The cycle of envisioning, building up, nurturing and then abandoning it is prevalent everywhere. His is the boat Arundhati nurtured and sank.

  He steps into a sweetshop where other people have huddled up, waiting for the rain to stop. The sweetshop doubles up as a cyber café and he takes up a computer and logs into his various accounts. He doesn’t think he can handle it but running away from his memories hasn’t served him well either.

  It took him a lot of alcohol, willpower and tears to stop accessing the Internet. He used to find himself on Arundhati’s profile even though he knew how tough it would be to see Arundhati with someone else. It didn’t make it any easier to see that his pictures with Arundhati had been deleted or hidden. Deleted, he was sure. Hidden, he wished. She had ‘UnLiked’ his Facebook page as well. He wondered if her fiancé made her do it. He thought of them talking about him in a coffee shop. The boy would pretend that he didn’t remember Devrat’s name and Arundhati would remind him, and the boy would go on to say that Devrat’s music is pretty average and Arundhati would stay quiet and not defend Devrat.

  For the first five minutes, he just deletes junk mails from Nigerian princes asking for money, companies selling penis enlargement pills and Viagra, Facebook and LinkedIn. This is all what we are about now, he thinks.

  Then he checks the old mails in his account. There are a few people who keep mailing Devrat. Some twenty-odd people who have never stopped mailing him since he shared his first video. Every time he uploads a video, these twenty people mail him praising the song and they tell him they are waiting for more. Surprisingly enough, all these mailers are from Dehradun and one or the other from those twenty fans keep asking him to come over to Dehradun.

  Then he types out Arundhati in the search bar, like someone types out the password to their most visited account: fast and without looking at the keyboard.

  There she is. Sweet and pretty with her arms around ‘him’. He tortures himself for a little more reading through her updates, looking at the pictures of the happy couple in clubs and restaurants, and in the Durga Puja pandals this year. It feels like his heart would sink to the bottom of his stomach. It’s an actual physical pain. He feels he would vomit.

  He goes to his own profile and is surprised by the number of friend requests. As a struggling musician he has to accept all the friend requests. He has to assume that they are fans, even though the profile pictures sometimes suggest that they are flowerpots and animals. Sometimes even Brad Pitt. By now, he thinks he has five girls in his list who look exactly like Angelina Jolie. Like. Exactly.

  He accepts what feels like about a thousand friend requests, and checks the pictures he has been tagged in. They are about a hundred pictures from his last gig and numerous grainy videos. He sends the links of a few videos to his parents, so they can feel proud about their son, so that his father can put the video on a loop and his mother can watch him over and over again.

  As he delves deeper into the messages, the wall posts and the comments on the pictures that people have posted, he is certainly happy. But the comments die down after the first week. Isn’t that what always happens? People follow you, adore you, like you till you there, and the moment you’re not, they forget you. If he is off the circuit for another six months, people are going to forget him and move on and he doesn’t have any right to expect anything different. He has to be there, in front of people, to remind them of his presence. That’s what he used to love, to sit amongst a group of school girls, and play his songs and bask in all the attention.

  He types a status message and within two minutes, fifteen people like it. ‘I am back. See you soon!J’ He leaves the sweetshop-cum-cyber café and finds the children on the street playing with new paper boats now.

  He enters his apartment and
he finds his phone ringing. Ugh, he thinks. There are three missed calls. Two of them are from unknown numbers and one of them is from Sumit. He calls back to find an exuberant Sumit on the other side.

  ‘Finally! I am back!’ he says and echoes Devrat’s status message.

  ‘You’re such a stalker,’ he says.

  ‘Says the boy who only goes online to see what his ex-girlfriend is up to?’

  ‘Let’s not talk about it.’

  ‘Yes, let’s not. Let’s talk about how many calls I am getting for you. And not just from managers, but from proper fans. One of your YouTube videos has seventy thousand hits, you know. I think you should shift to Mumbai. Who knows? You might even get an opportunity to do playback singing!’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ he argues. It’s not the first time he is in this argument and he knows it is not going to be the last time.

  ‘Arre baba, why not? You have to be a little commercial. Devrat, you know me for a year now and you know I don’t give this advice to the other rock bands or acts that I manage. But you’re a versatile singer! You’re like Sonu Nigam, like badass-lost-in-love Sonu Nigam. You should give it a try. Oh and by the way, Sonu Nigam makes upwards of 10 crores a year,’ Sumit says fervently.

  ‘Hmmm.’

  Devrat knows Sumit’s enthusiasm emanates from love and not greed but Devrat doesn’t think of himself as that good and singing in Hindi isn’t one of his strong points. To date, he messes his gender a few times. He knows he won’t succeed and he can only handle so much rejection. Arundhati used to tell him that he’s scared to step out of his comfort zone, that he’s insecure, and damn right he is (though he never told her that) and why shouldn’t he be? He’s not as good as everyone around him makes him out to be. He doesn’t want to have a dream in his eyes that will be abruptly snuffed out. It hurts and he knows this from experience.

  ‘Get me another gig,’ he says to Sumit.

  ‘Fine. Keep your phone on. If only you would have contacted me earlier I would have got you something for fifteen thousand. I will still try,’ Sumit says and disconnects the line.

  He lights a cigarette and absent-mindedly hums a tune. It’s his version of a Bengali song his father loves. It reminds him of the last conversation he had with his father when he had come down to Kolkata unannounced. Luckily, he was lost looking for Devrat’s flat and had to call Devrat. Devrat threw him off for a good twenty minutes and cleared the flat of empty beer bottles, cigarette butts and the like.

  ‘Is it going anywhere?’ his father had asked Devrat.

  Devrat told him that everything was under control and his career was going in the right direction. His father had nodded and told him, ‘I talked to your dean at Durgapur Engineering College. They are keeping your admission on hold until next year. If you ever want to go back you can, you know.’

  Devrat had nodded. His father had continued. ‘It will be okay with us.’

  ‘Let’s wait for a year.’

  And since then the time has started to tick.

  It helps that he hasn’t asked them for money in the past one year. They still call him and ask if he is okay or if he needs money and he assures them that he is fine and he will go back to the college if nothing becomes of him. Deep inside, he has already given up a little. He’s miserable at times just thinking that he would have lost two years and a girl, and would have to go back to a college he left, doing something he loathes, having left something he loves.

  The worst part is that he never even tried hard enough.

  But for now, Devrat is wondering how those twenty people in Dehradun would react when they see his update. Would they mail him back? A part of him wants to go and check his mail box to see if they are still interested in his music.

  A part of him says they must be.

  Five

  avanti

  It was supposed to be a long weekend, the weekend she should have ideally spent in nervous jitters about her new job but instead she keeps reading Devrat’s status over and over again. He has announced, ‘I am back. See you soon! J’, and that can only mean more videos, more gigs, and maybe in a city that she’s in! She has just sent twenty mails to Devrat from her twenty fake accounts to boost his morale and to egg him to do more shows. She knows of Devrat’s limited reach and she thinks she’s doing her bit to encourage him. Who would disappoint twenty enthusiastic fans after all?

  And Devrat did reply to some of her mails. She has maintained an account for quite some time now. She has often mailed him and asked him to come to Dehradun for a performance, at least once from each of those twenty accounts, but hasn’t yet got an answer to that.

  Her train of thought is broken when her phone beeps.

  Have a good first day at work. Papa

  She texts back saying thank you. As she dresses up in crisp formals, looking the best she thinks she possibly can, she is suddenly thinking about her father.

  The more time she spends in the house, the more she finds herself thinking about the sequence of events that must have happened fifteen years ago. Over a period of a few years, her father would have slowly started slipping down the slope of fixating with a mathematical problem he would never solve, her mother would have fought him and his preoccupation, there would be fights and silence and a crying child, and one day she would have just left. Their conversations are yet to move out from virtual space. She has given her father the benefit of the doubt. After all, he must still feel guilty about what happened to Avanti’s mother, who died in a freak accident while returning from work. It was a year after she ran from his house with their three-year-old daughter in tow. All this wouldn’t have happened if her father had a normal job. Like if he was an engineer. Or a bank manager. She wonders if her father had a stammer since childhood or if he developed it later.

  She locks the door behind her as she leaves and makes sure the keys go under the mat and not in her handbag. She is not a big keys person and loses them at an astonishing rate. The road outside her apartment is like an F1 track with cars whizzing past her, leaving behind billowing smoke. There goes my make-up, she thinks. After much haggling she gets into an auto which will take her to the headquarters of the building of Indiago Airlines.

  The auto ride is long and tiring. There are a million cars travelling in the same direction and none of them has more than a single passenger. ‘People should be forced to car pool or this city will burst pretty soon!’ she mutters.

  ‘Bas yahin—here,’ she says to the auto driver as she gets off at Nehru Place, where in the huge glass building adjacent to the sprawling five star hotel, Vasant Intercontinental, is the office of Indiago Airlines. The only airlines that flies to New York. Twice a day. Also Dubai. And Phuket. And Rio. ‘This will be awesome!’ she tells herself.

  Then she takes a deep breath and a smile breaks out on her face. ‘It’s going to be good. You’re pretty and you’re smart. You don’t have to be tense,’ she tells herself. But just to spoil it all, it’s Shekhar calling on her cell phone. She takes the battery out of the cell and keeps it in the bag. She closes her eyes and hums a song by Devrat, her drug, and pastes a smile on her face.

  An hour later, she is sitting in a huge hall filling up an employment form with around a hundred other new flight attendants, all pretty and young. Everyone around her is decked up like they are in a club with a James Bond theme. No one has a hair out of place. Avanti, even though she was dead sure she looked gorgeous in the morning, is not so sure anymore. Even the guys have clear, flawless skin and bright pink lips. ‘Kill them,’ Avanti thinks. She’s all for metrosexuality but this is just gay. She looks at a boy with a charming smile and slippery smooth skin. SO GAY. Not even legal now. Section 377 or something.

  The hall was the target segment for fairness creams, body lotion, bleaching agents and every cosmetic aimed to help people become fairer and more Caucasian. From the brief conversations she has had with a few
girls, she gets to know that the majority of them were aspiring models and soap opera actors but couldn’t manage the struggle it entailed. Names of big television personas, fashion choreographers and photographers are dropped like they are old friends and soon, they are showing each other their portfolio pictures in shimmery dresses and dark lipsticks.

  Flight attendants don’t really need to be attractive but it helps if they are. When you’re caged in a steel box thirty-five thousand feet above the ground with no escape routes, a pretty face can be the only calming factor.

  Landing this job wasn’t easy by any means. For the hundred-odd seats open for fresh applicants, there were a hundred thousand applications, making it tougher than getting into the IITs or the IIMs! Go figure.

  ‘Hi, do you have an extra pen?’ the guy sitting in the front row asks. She had noticed him stealing glances at her ever since they took their places. Or maybe he was just looking at everyone.

  ‘Yes,’ she says and hands over a ball pen. He turns around and faces her, throwing her a little off balance.

  ‘It’s a tough form to fill, isn’t it?’ he says and thrusts his hand forward. ‘Ashutosh. Are you from Delhi?’

  ‘Dehradun,’ she answers and adds after a pause, ‘Avanti’ and shakes his hand. His grip is firm and strong as if trying to grind her bones to dust.

  ‘Oh. So where do you stay here? Alone?’

  That’s a shady question to ask a girl. Alone? Why? She is already put off by his intrusive eye contact and how he leans into her while he speaks. The excessive gel in his hair, the perfect smile with gleaming teeth and pink lips, and the bulging muscles inside the white shirt are a put off. He’s not real. He’s a walking advertisement. He reminds her of Shekhar. Sweet early on, but abusive later.