Half Torn Hearts

by Novoneel Chakraborty

  ‘People don’t give a damn for hygiene! They are used to a certain way of life and that is the only thing that might work.’

  ‘Then should we follow the others?’

  ‘Considering our investment, if we lower our rates, we won’t be able to break even.’

  Raisa pondered over the matter. Nirmaan was right. Cash flow was short, but they simply had to try something new, anything, otherwise the business would perish.

  ‘Should we just pull out and revert to what we used to do?’ Nirmaan asked. ‘We can pay off our loan from our salaries then.’ There was no conviction in his voice and Raisa hated his loser’s tone and attitude.

  He couldn’t lose, she thought, not while she was by his side. ‘No, we’re not pulling out. There has to be a way. We have to think smart,’ Raisa paced the room.

  ‘What if nothing positive happens and we get stuck here for the rest of our lives?’ Nirmaan sat on the bed with his knees drawn up and burrowed into his arms. It reminded her of a younger Nirmaan weeping in the stairwell because he couldn’t cycle without the supporters. She remembered hauling him out of that crisis.

  ‘I’m losing faith, Raisa,’ his voice was choked.

  ‘In just six months?’

  Nirmaan slowly raised his head and eyed Raisa. He hadn’t expected her to look quite so tough.

  ‘It’s not just about these six months. It’s—’ he buried his face in his knees again.

  Raisa knew exactly what he meant and tried a different tack, ‘I know it’s been tough, but that’s business. It was you who always wanted to become an entrepreneur. What’s the fun when everything is served on a platter to us? Where’s the challenge in that? Crisis management is the foundation and not the end. And what’s passion if it doesn’t overcome repeated failure? Moreover, someone who rebelled against his father can’t possibly feel defeated within six months of doing what he always wanted to.’

  Nirmaan took a deep breath and said, ‘I need to sleep.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. She also wanted to ask him not to smoke, but she didn’t.

  Raisa switched off the light and fell asleep. An hour before dawn she sat up with sparkling eyes. She shook Nirmaan out of his sleep.

  ‘How about trying the empty lot outside a hospital? People who come to visit patients generally skip their meals. A hygienic vada corner outside a hospital’s premises would be ideal. We’ll only need to shift our stall there and that won’t cost us anything.’

  Raisa’s enthusiasm made Nirmaan wide awake.

  VOICE NOTE 40

  For the next couple of weeks, Nirmaan used his lunch breaks to make a survey of all the hospitals and nursing homes in the city. However, he couldn’t find that sweet spot that would be the ideal new location for their stall. Most places, he noticed, already had a lot of food stalls. One site, outside a government hospital, did seem like an opportunity, but Nirmaan was quick to understand that shifting their stall there would mean returning to ground zero because as a government facility, most of the patients belonged to the lower-income group who preferred eating at ultra-low prices and he wasn’t ready to price himself down to those levels. Moreover, another discovery that he had made during this survey was that people visiting hospitals usually needed a proper lunch or dinner, rather than snack food.

  He discussed his findings with Raisa over the weekend.

  ‘What about the ones that don’t have any food stalls nearby?’

  ‘If we are the only stall in the area, we’ll have to bribe the police and other authorities on a weekly basis. The only good thing when there are other stalls in the area is that this bribe payment is shared.’

  ‘Damn!’

  Both of them sat in silence. They had realized that they needed a place where they could cater to loyal customers on a daily basis otherwise the business would be tough to sustain.

  ‘How about shifting into the forecourt of a bank?’ Nirmaan asked.

  ‘I already thought of that. The customers will be limited even if we get loyal ones because both employees and their clients in banks generally prefer homemade food, barring a few,’ Raisa objected.

  ‘You know what, I think we’ll just have to stop being different and conform to the more traditional dahi vada stall. Maybe that’s how we too can rake in our share of the profits. Perhaps people here aren’t ready for anything that’s more . . . Western in its approach,’ Nirmaan said resignedly.

  Raisa didn’t reply. She was reluctant about giving up on their unique selling idea. Nirmaan went off to watch TV in the living room and Raisa drifted into the kitchen to fix dinner. When she heard her favourite Sonu Nigam song being played on TV, she wandered back into the living room. It was then that her eyes fell on something. Nirmaan was engrossed in a newspaper, holding it up with both his hands. On the last page of the newspaper was an advertisement of an engineering college.

  ‘Nirmaan!’ Raisa shrieked out.

  Nirmaan looked at her and then followed her gaze to the back of the newspaper in his hands. He looked up at Raisa and realized that he understood what had caught her attention.

  They could open an exclusive dahi vada stall in a college. How could they have missed that? Like some of the south Indian cities, the city of Bhubaneswar was also steadily turning into a Mecca for college education in India. Private universities, engineering and management colleges had mushroomed everywhere, offering quality education to students across India. As Nirmaan didn’t have a formal qualification in business administration, he began frequenting a cyber cafe nearby and together with Raisa, spent hours surfing the net for clues to make the perfect business plan. They made notes, went home, worked at night on the pointers and within a month, had the first rough draft of the proposal. While Nirmaan spent time to increase the number of unique selling points in their enterprise, Raisa experimented with recipes to diversify their range. According to the Internet, foreign junk food brands were a rage with the youngsters in India. They had two crucial things going for them: a key product and their brand promotion. So if they wished to make dahi vada popular among the college kids, instead of expanding their menu, they would need to diversify their key product. It only meant that they would have to build their menu with variations of dahi vadas that, as a business venture, would be the first of its kind. Raisa had already discovered seven varieties of the vadas, working with permutations and combinations of the ingredients. She christened her productions as: First Love Dahi Vada, Heartbreak Dahi Vada, Virgin Dahi Vada with Kashmiri Alu Dum, Hi-five Dahi Vada, Friends Special Dahi Vada, Cupid Dahi Vada and Raisa’s Special Dahi Vada.

  The names impressed Nirmaan. He felt they were very identifiable with college students, and as youngsters are invariably curious about novelties, that was what their stall would provide. Although neither of them had any formal training in management, Nirmaan’s instinct and tips from the Internet were their guiding stars. Their outlet beside the Shree Jagannath Sarees barely did any business but Nirmaan kept his counsel and didn’t tell anyone about his plans. Nor did he mention it in his business proposal. He wanted to sell a vision to the authorities as a fresh entrepreneur rather than peddle a repackaged once-ran business.

  For the next couple of months, both Raisa and Nirmaan scouted the various colleges listed in their plans and approached the students with pamphlets that explained their idea of hygienic food rather than the unhealthy items that were abundantly available in the campuses. It seemed to have struck the right chord with the students. Raisa was a crowd-puller with her chic appearance, especially the young male section. The two were brain dead by the end-of-play every evening, but were up bright and early the next morning, their passion unimpeded.

  At long last they were ready with their business model. Their target market was a shortlist of engineering and management colleges from the ones they had surveyed. Nirmaan was deeply reluctant to approach the proprietors of the saree shop for a second loan towards capital for his project, but it seemed to be the only option. This time, however, his em
ployers insisted on a signed legal document stating that if the profits mentioned on the contract weren’t forthcoming he would be liable for legal action. He knew it was a huge risk, but then no dream was worth a chase without risk.

  Three months later, the authorities of a famous engineering college, Samrat Group of Colleges, agreed to meet with them to discuss their offer. Nirmaan and Raisa were understandably nervous because this was their first business presentation. According to their researches on the net, image was everything. Nirmaan and Raisa dressed up formally, transformed their plan on paper into a PowerPoint presentation and left no stone unturned to convince the organization about their earnestness to make a success of their enterprise.

  The presentation went well. However, during the post-presentation question–answer session with the panel representing the college, Nirmaan noticed the dean of the college eyeing Raisa lecherously. The sixty-year-old pervert touched his groin every time Raisa spoke to him directly and Nirmaan gradually lost his focus on the negotiation.

  When the dean said he’d like to talk to each of them individually, he was on tenterhooks as he waited outside in the corridor. Raisa emerged half an hour later looking elated.

  ‘They’ve agreed,’ Raisa hugged Nirmaan excitedly. She broke off the hug sensing his coolness and looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘We aren’t going ahead with this one, Raisa,’ Nirmaan said abruptly and walked away.

  VOICE NOTE 41

  They waited for over a fortnight to get an appointment with their next client. In the meantime, Raisa and Nirmaan got into heated arguments about the offer that Nirmaan had turned down. When their second fight snowballed into an impasse, Nirmaan blurted out his objection to the old dean’s salacity towards her.

  ‘How was he eyeing me?’ Raisa asked.

  ‘Oh, you don’t want me to say it.’

  ‘Tell me, Nirmaan, how was the dean eyeing me?’

  ‘It was like you were a toy that he wanted to play with. I loathed that look.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What “so”?’

  ‘That’s your interpretation of his look. Why are you so judgemental?’

  ‘I’m judgemental? Why do you assume that I don’t know how a man’s eyes rove over a woman when he thinks of her as a sex object? Give me a break.’

  ‘Even if you’re right, he didn’t actually do anything! He didn’t say anything suggestive or leap out of his seat to “play” with me.’

  ‘He will! If we accept his offer, he most definitely will someday. I won’t let that happen.’

  ‘You won’t let that happen?’

  ‘Yes, I won’t let that happen because . . .’

  ‘Keep it down!’ bellowed their landlord. Nirmaan lowered his voice.

  ‘Because . . . ?’ Raisa urged him to complete his sentence.

  Nirmaan sighed and said, ‘We’re not going to Samrat Engineering College again. That’s that.’ He walked out of the house.

  Later, Raisa perched on the low brick wall outside the house that evening pondering over Nirmaan’s incomplete statement. She knew that the rest of that sentence would have swept the cobwebs of pretension off what they had become with time. The past seemed so simple in hindsight, and so much more attractive, almost surreal. She missed Affu ever since she came to Bhubaneswar. She had tried looking for her on Orkut and Facebook but she seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Old friends, old ties, old times, old self . . . when did they all become old? she wondered, her eyes welling up with tears.

  Sensing what could have followed Nirmaan’s ‘because’, Raisa was now thankful that the landlord had interrupted their altercation. There were times when she gazed at Nirmaan when he was too busy to notice her glances. Those were the moments when she wanted to kiss him—as a friend, not a lover. Not to possess him, but to free herself; to time-travel and become the person she had been in Guwahati so that she could grow up the way she wanted to and not the way she had to.

  Their next presentation was at a management institute in a sprawling campus. Raisa made Nirmaan swear that he would focus on the presentation and not try to read the minds of the men in the room.

  In the sophisticated boardroom of the institute, the panel consisted of two men and five women. This time Raisa felt a knot in her stomach every time the women smiled at Nirmaan.

  VOICE NOTE 42

  It took them four months to set themselves up in the management institute after their presentation. In another three months, they not only impressed the authorities but also found admirers amongst the students. With a letter of recommendation from the student council as well its dean, they managed to convince another engineering college of their worth. The following year, Nirmaan and Raisa were running two outlets and had employed five people. Raisa converted the drawing room of their rented house into a makeshift kitchen and produced the variety of vadas herself. Her assistants and errand boys delivered these, fresh off the oven, to their outlets every morning.

  To be honest, there were six employees. I was the sixth. I helped Raisa in the kitchen. It was during our work together every morning that we bonded as only two women can. She haltingly opened her heart to me and I’ve pieced together their epic that I’m now narrating to you, Shanay, one voice note at a time.

  The annual gross turnover for the first year from the two dahi vada joints was Rs 25,00,000. Nirmaan had already set up goals for the following year. He wanted to escalate their dahi vada brand to a Rs 50,00,000 business within the next couple of years. But before implementing his expansion goals, he repaid their loans along with interest as promised to the saree shop proprietors.

  With time, Raisa noticed a growing enthusiasm in Nirmaan, the kind that had been in him before they left Kolkata. She understood that he was finally getting a grip on life. In the last few years, Raisa had surrendered her centre of happiness to Nirmaan without him realizing it. Each night, she only had to see the passion in his eyes as he recounted their customer feedback from that day; his aggressive expansion plans kept Raisa in full bloom. Nirmaan had finally come into his own.

  The relentless kitchen-work however took its toll on Raisa’s health, giving her dark circles and making her lose weight. The more outlets they opened, the greater was the pressure on Raisa. But as long as Nirmaan seemed happy, she never complained.

  Time passed by until one day Nirmaan abruptly stopped talking to her about the business or, for that matter, any other matter. Raisa did ask Nirmaan whether something was amiss, but all he said was that things were better than they had anticipated. And yet he seemed to deliberately avoid making eye contact with her.

  Finally, one night, he broached a topic that made Raisa’s heart skip a beat.

  ‘Do you miss Affu?’ he asked. This was the first time in many years that he had consciously uttered the

  name.

  Did she? Could she miss Affu? Raisa asked herself. Could years of once-upon-a-time closeness dissolve into nothingness? Nirmaan took her silence as an affirmation and said, ‘I too miss her.’

  ‘Why do you ask this all of a sudden?’ Raisa asked.

  ‘Do you think Affu and I could have had a life together if all those shitty things hadn’t happened? What if Affu had never been hijacked to Europe by her parents? What if I had reached the examination centre on time?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Raisa whispered, her throat inexplicably dry. Lying on her bed, with her eyes closed, she could distinctly see the world she had lived in years ago and Afsana’s face hove into view. She opened her eyes with a jolt.

  ‘Are you regretting moving out of Kolkata?’ Raisa asked. Not once had he ever mentioned his parents after leaving them.

  ‘I regret nothing. Perhaps this is how it was always meant to be. But yes, sometimes I wonder,’ Nirmaan paused before continuing, ‘is it possible to have multiple realities? There is only one me, I know, but can’t I have a lot of realities? And perhaps in one of those realities, Affu and I are married. Isn’t that possible, Raisa?’

  ‘Just
like in this reality you and I are together?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want it to be possible?’ she asked.

  ‘We always have a thing for the incomplete, don’t we? What-we-want-but-can’t-happen is always an emotional turn on.’

  Especially when we know what should have happened but didn’t, Raisa thought to herself.

  ‘I think this multiple reality thing is possible although it’s a far stretch. Each time we make a choice, we create two realities. One we exist in and the other is a fantasy in our hearts,’ Raisa said and thought, but that fantasy is our ultimate desire.

  There was silence.

  ‘You didn’t answer my question, Nirmaan. Do you want it to be possible?’ Raisa asked.

  ‘I want to confess something,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I looked for Affu a few years ago on Orkut. I couldn’t find her there. Nor on Facebook.’

  Raisa didn’t respond. She was guilty of doing the same thing.

  ‘And then, a few weeks ago I looked for her on Facebook using a friend’s profile. I found her.’

  Raisa fell silent.

  ‘I almost added her to my list of contacts, but then I saw her picture with a guy. Some Shanay Bansal. I read some of the comments on the picture and realized that they are engaged to be married soon.’

  After a prolonged silence, Nirmaan said, ‘This wasn’t what I wanted to confess though.’

  ‘What then?’ Raisa asked softly.

  ‘The day you and I left Kolkata, I promised myself that I would work hard and make something of myself. And then I would reconnect with Affu so that we could . . .’ Nirmaan’s voice choked at that point. He excused himself and went out. Raisa bit into her pillow to mute her sobs. Sobs that had a haunting story to tell but no listener.

  VOICE NOTE 43

  Hi Shanay,

  There are many who keep ranting ‘I love you’ all the time, some who will even shower numerous gifts on you and pamper you silly and perhaps take you on exotic holidays but there’s only one person who will actually go ahead and sacrifice everything he or she has to be a part of ‘your’ dream and to make it happen. The latter is Raisa’s kind of love for Nirmaan. The kind of love where someone with wings decides to stay with you.