World’s Best Ex-Girlfriend

PART 1

Daksh Dey

‘Bhaiya, yaar,’ Gaurav protests. ‘Why are you not coming?’

I ignore the question just as I have for the last twenty times he has asked me.

‘Aanchal’s and your clothes are marked according to the functions—cocktail, wedding, reception,’ I remind him. ‘Give me a couple of picture options. And, of course, don’t tear them, drop anything on them or lose them. We have to give them all back.’

‘Bhaiya, please come, no. We will travel first class. My treat!’

Gaurav’s immaturity grows with each passing year. He’s becoming more like the thirteen-year-old mad superfans who idolize him. I ignore his wasteful offer, knowing that if I let him loose with his credit card, he’d quickly amass a debt larger than some small island nation’s.

‘Listen to me, Gaurav. You’re allowed to lose everything but your passport. There are a bunch of events lined up and you can’t afford to be stuck there. There’s team practice too. There are radical changes in the new Fortnite. I have made a list of pain points.’

He nods distractedly. Then, his face contorts into the pathetic, sad-puppy expression he has been making since the day Vanita, the crush of his life, announced her wedding.

‘I can’t believe I’m going to watch Vanita get married to someone so random.’

‘It’s absolutely believable because you’re an idiot. And don’t give me shit about closure. You guys had nothing. All this drama for nothing. You can still choose not to go.’

‘It’s not—’

There’s only so long you can argue with a wall. ‘Don’t get too drunk or kiss someone in public. It’s all illegal there and you can’t bribe your way out of jail,’ I warn him.

Gaurav has just started to drink occasionally, often without my permission, and it pisses me off majorly.

Alcohol and drugs are Kryptonite for gamers.

Elite gamers have a short shelf life. By twenty-four, reaction time dulls and renders them uncompetitive.

There’s always a sixteen-year-old with razor-sharp reflexes to take over the entire scene.

To counter what is one of the shortest professions, we crafted for Gaurav a social media persona so he could extend his career and didn’t have to rely on championship wins.

But even then, he needs to be sharp and game as if his life depended on it.

‘That’s why you should come with me, Bhaiya,’ he pleads. ‘Listen, Bhaiya, we will be at our hotel. You don’t have to meet Didi. I won’t even tell her you’re there. Please, Bhaiya.’

I ask the porter to start walking with Gaurav’s trolley.

‘I will miss you, Bhaiya.’

‘Get a haircut.’

His Instagram fans have convinced him that man buns are cool. One of these days I’m going to take garden shears to it.

Gaurav hugs me.

It’s still as weird and squirmy as it was the first time. It was right after our team, Phoenix Rising, won its first major gaming convention, which put us on the map as the rising stars in the Asian gaming scene, and positioned Gaurav as a legitimate genius.

‘I love you, Bhaiya.’

I love him, too, but of course, I’m not going to whisper that into his ear mid-hug at an airport.

‘Do you want me to say something to Aanchal Didi?’ he asks me with a wink.

And because he knows what I’m going to say, he slaps his big headphones over his ears.

‘Ask Aanchal to fuck off,’ I tell Gaurav. ‘Tell her that she’s the worst person in all of history. I hope every day of her existence is the pure definition of torture. Tell Aanchal she’s the worst ex-girlfriend of all time.’

He smiles, waves and follows his porter into Delhi International Airport.

A group of adoring fans, none of them older than twenty, spot him.

They flock around him, gush over him and whip out their phones for pictures.

He obliges everyone with a smile, a tip for Tekken and a hug.

Apart from his gaming skills—unmatched in Asia—it’s also his way with his fans that makes him as popular as he is.

Within minutes, his Discord group comes alive.

Gaurav Madan spotted at Delhi Airport!

My phone explodes with notifications from Gaurav’s social media accounts—1.

5 million on Instagram, a million on YouTube, and another million smattered across X and Discord.

The DMs pour in, begging for autographs, meet-ups and offers to give Gaurav blowjobs.

Gaurav remains oblivious, having been absent from Instagram for over a year.

He was addicted to it, spent hours doom-scrolling through transition videos, chatted up girl fans, tallied likes on his pictures and tracked how others were doing, and showed up at tournaments with bloodshot eyes, where he discussed videos more than strategies.

My dire warnings fell on deaf ears. I waited for the obvious.

Something had to give. And then, in a moment of glaring oversight, in a small tournament in which he was a heavy favourite, he misjudged his smite on Baron Nashor, allowing a thirteen-year-old noob to steal it with a basic attack—a blunder.

‘Burn my phone, bro,’ he had begged me after the humiliation. ‘And don’t let me do anything on my own.’

‘I’m not going to argue with you. I will tell you what to do and you do it. Got it?’

‘Got it, bro.’

‘I’m not your bro. Call me Bhaiya.’

As team principal and part owner of Phoenix Rising Gaming, I manage his—and the team’s—online presence, brand deals and collaborations.

Other team managers tell me I have done a great job building a team of unmarketable weird nerds with bad haircuts into a recognizable brand.

Gaurav, too, likes to credit his success to me.

But it’s far from the truth. Gaurav’s a once-a-decade talent.

I just remind him not to throw it all away.

But there’s one person who thinks I’m a parasite, a bloodsucking leech sucking on Gaurav’s blood.

Aanchal.

Aanchal argues that Gaurav, the premier gaming prodigy, can throw a stone into a crowd and it will hit someone who can manage the team.

She tried to poison Gaurav’s mind and persuade him that he doesn’t need a selfish manager like me who, at the end of the day, will only look out for his own interests.

Gaurav doesn’t believe his sister. Not after what she did to me.

She’s the gold standard in being selfish.

2.

Daksh Dey

The office of Phoenix Rising Gaming—of which Gaurav and I are part owners—is situated in Netaji Subash Place, on the fourth floor of Mata Rani Building. On most days, the lift is out of order, and we’re forced to trudge up four flights of stairs to reach our damp, windowless office.

As a matter of shared principle, we overpay our people and cut costs everywhere else. If our company had a mission statement, the word stingy would be in it.

We have three exceptionally miserly people in accounts, two remarkably efficient editors in post-production, four team members of Phoenix Rising and me.

The centrepiece of our office is the gaming room.

This is where we have spared no expense.

This is where Gaurav and his team spend up to sixteen hours a day honing their skills on top-of-the-line gaming equipment and recording live streams for the online channels.

The rest of us sit at a long table facing the gaming room.

It’s a cramped, no-frills office that would never win the Best Workplace award.

But we make it work. Right next to the gaming room, we built a tiny podcast studio which we rent out to podcasters. It’s a small but steady revenue source.

As I arrive at the office, Amruta Thakur is already in the studio, hooking up podcast microphones to her laptop.

She’s in a zipped-up black Nike windcheater and black tights.

Inside the windcheater, I know she’s wearing a black sports bra.

She calls it her ‘uniform to tackle the day’.

She owns multiples of this uniform. Apart from these, she owns three black dresses: one dangerously small for an occasional wild night (hot!), one that’s business-like (intimidating!), and one that’s perfect for a red carpet (elegant!).

She insists that wearing black is the only defence against stains.

As a mother of two boys, she’s a bona fide expert on stains.

Her eight-year-old twin sons, Naman and Nishant, two of the most well-behaved, sincere, obedient boys I have ever come across, now copy her, refusing to wear anything but black Nike athleisure.

Amruta Thakur had recorded her first podcast on her phone, as a way to vent about life, about her husband—who ate and drank too much, thought full-body check-ups and cholesterol measurements were a scam, and died too soon—and about herself who had been stupid enough to get married at eighteen, did not use contraceptives, and got pregnant with twins immediately after.

‘I’m tired. I’m done. I’m exhausted. Motherhood is overrated.

Sometimes I think about how my life would have been without them.

I would be free. I could do anything, go anywhere.

And then I get sad. What would I do without them?

’ she said in her very first podcast. You could hear one of the infants crying in the background.

She ran the solo podcast for three years before she shut it down abruptly.

I would never have found her podcast if, on a particularly rough day, I hadn’t googled, ‘4 year old sister. No mother. Frustrated. Any parenting tips?’ On the third page, I found her podcast, ‘The Accidental, Reluctant Mother’. It was no longer active, but there were hundreds of episodes.

The rating was 3.2.