PART 2 #7
Four years later, I bumped into Aanchal in Mumbai.
She was no longer the nervous girl waiting for her board exam results, crouched in one corner of a hotel’s business centre, but an assured, beautiful woman with pinched shoulders and an unwavering look in her eye, a coffee mug in hand, rising steadily in her corporate job.
She told me that her brother had run away and come to Mumbai to pursue a career in gaming.
Gamers India also doesn’t know this. All they know is that I found Gaurav shacking up in a flat.
And offered to manage him. The rest, of course, is gaming history.
What Gamers India also doesn’t know, the more vital part of the story, is that when I found him, I also found love in Aanchal.
And she found love in me, albeit temporarily.
It was no longer a crush, but I felt love for her that burns you through and through.
But while Gaurav and I lasted, Aanchal ripped my heart to shreds.
And after that, I only met Aanchal once. Three years later, at Vanita’s wedding.
So Amruta’s right, we do share history. She was my crush at eighteen, my first love at twenty-two, the first person I truly hated at twenty-five, and she’s here at twenty-seven.
‘Yep, yep. The same flat.’
Amruta nods and points towards the bar. She knows that if I delve too much into it, I will want to control every aspect of Gaurav’s life again. I need to let go.
‘It’s an all-inclusive hotel rate. Everything’s on the house,’ she reminds me. ‘Hey? They are there.’
‘Who?’
‘Seems like Aanchal has made a friend.’
I look in the direction of the bar. With an arm around Aanchal, stands a man making Aanchal laugh. Tall, rugged, handsome.
I hate him immediately.
8.
Aanchal Madan
‘Vanita, I think we are done now.’
‘Let me check the pictures first,’ she says and takes her phone from me. She swipes through them with quick flicks and rejects them outright. ‘Look, just hold the phone straight. Don’t tilt it. These are basics, Aanchal.’
‘I can help you out,’ offers Saket.
‘I don’t trust you yet,’ remarks Vanita.
‘But I’m done, Vanita. All these pictures look the same to me,’ I protest. ‘Let him do it. He’s good at this kind of thing.’
I hand over my phone to Saket who refuses it.
‘I have my camera,’ he says and fetches a smallish black and silver Fujifilm camera with retro mechanical dials jutting from it from his backpack. ‘I dabble.’
Vanita throws him a murderous glare. ‘Saket, you better do better than dabbling. This is the last time I will be hot in a very, very long time. So either I come across as a centrefold model, or we keep taking stops for pictures before we get to Old Town Phuket.’
‘She’s going to be amazing through the pregnancy and right after,’ I tell Saket.
But Saket has already walked away, training the viewfinder of his camera everywhere. We’re at the edge of a field, but Saket’s not thrilled with the setting.
‘We need to go inside,’ he says. ‘Capture a little more. The frame has to open up a little more, got to get some perspective, too flat right now.’
He’s a bit of a perfectionist. For the last couple of years, he had been tinkering with what he calls the ‘most intuitive tennis trainer’, meant to be used by players to practise forehands and backhands and whatnot.
I never told him this—though he probably knows—it seemed a bit childish.
A small black machine spitting out balls.
Is that worth leaving your job for? I had wondered then but shut it down inside me.
Because I have been wrong about this kind of thing before.
The day Gaurav declared he was ditching engineering to dive into gaming full-time, I lost my mind.
We’d both fought our way out of poverty, clawing through on the merits of exams. His decision felt like a reckless step back towards our bleak past, that cramped single room with its leaky walls and crumbling plaster, shadowed by the constant fear of how we would make it to the month’s end.
If not for my acceptance into SRCC, we might never have escaped that life.
But he ran away and snapped all contact with us for a year till Daksh found him out.
Gaurav was right, and so was Saket. His toy got funded by a bunch of ATP players who called the machine ‘pure perfection’ and said that he ‘could transform the game’.
Vanita swipes through the pictures on Saket’s camera. With each swipe, I see Vanita fall more in love with herself, as if that were possible. She looks up at me. ‘I approve him. You’re allowed.’
‘Was that all it takes?’
‘You have a guy who’s invested in taking pictures,’ argues Vanita. ‘He’s going to document your life. What else could you possibly need in a guy? Also, I looked up his toy. Good stuff. Childish, but good.’
Saket lets out a chuckle. His eyes light up every time he does it.
There’s an optimism, a constant happiness in his eyes that’s borderline irritating because it’s so pure.
He’s like a quiet, untouched beach. That’s what makes him more confusing to me.
At any given time I’m thinking about something and then thinking about thinking about that something, and I’m regretting thinking so much, and I’m fearing that I am overthinking things—and he’s just there, still, happy, smiling.
Vanita doesn’t ask the cab driver to make any other stop on our way to Old Town Phuket.
She’s obsessed with her pictures and is telling Saket how the pregnancy will progress, and planning when they should do a shoot.
Once we get there, without us asking, Saket explains to us where we are and insists we should get pictures.
‘Have you been here before?’ asks Vanita.
‘I watch a lot of YouTube videos. I take the fun out of discovery,’ he says with a broad smile.
As we meander through the colourful streets of Old Town Phuket, Saket keeps clicking pictures of the buildings that are painted in an array of pastel colours and have intricate facades.
Vanita leans into me and whispers, ‘Can’t he get those pictures from the Internet? Shouldn’t he get us in the pictures too?’
‘Why don’t you go and tell him?’
She grins and links her hand in mine. ‘It’s beautiful, though, isn’t it? Look at those shutters.’
I nod. My eyes keep flitting to Saket and his to mine. His coming here is the start of something. I can feel it. He loves me—if that’s what this is—more than I deserve to be loved. But that’s the fate of every love story. One’s always more in love. One always has more power.
But I don’t want the power to hurt, to reject. I want to be the one who’s more in love. There’s a joy in surrender. I want to feel that.
As the sun starts to dip a little below the horizon, painting Old Town Phuket in shades of twilight, Saket changes out of his T-shirt which is now drenched in sweat and into a sleeveless top.
He has the body of a pro tennis player, slender and muscular.
Unlike others, he doesn’t blame a knee injury for his short-lived tennis career.
He tells me he just wasn’t good enough. I let my eyes rove over him and try to assess what I feel.
Despite his blindingly handsome looks, the broad chin, the thick hair, the big eyes, I haven’t been able to do anything more than kiss him.
I hope to change that. If we are to be together, I need to want to do more with him.
‘You see that building over there?’ Saket says. ‘That was once the home of a wealthy tin baron. I have no idea why I remember that detail.’
‘You’re trying too hard,’ says Vanita, reaching out for my hand.
‘As I should, right?’
‘Guys, we need to talk about something else,’ I insist. ‘And shouldn’t we get something to eat?’
I follow my nose to a bustling street food stall where a woman deftly flips something on a sizzling wok.
It’s a squid, Saket tells me helpfully. And though it looks like my stomach acids could handle it, I’m a little sceptical and instead play it safe by ordering a plate of Pad Thai.
Saket orders prawns and Vanita’s distracted by a nearby shop.
‘I don’t want to put you under pressure of any kind,’ says Saket, stripping the tail off a prawn. ‘If you feel that way, just let me know, I will back off.’
I swirl a bunch of noodles around my fork.
‘This is my biggest problem with you, Saket. You’re too understanding, you’re too good. I’m scared you’re a serial killer on the side.’
‘I am, but I only hunt down paedophiles. Though I do have a penchant for violence. I like to kill them very slowly,’ he says with a glint in his eye. ‘I’m not in a hurry.’
‘I am,’ I say.
‘You are?’
‘We are getting too old to make relationship mistakes now,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t want to get into something that ends in heartbreak. For you and for me.’
Saket nods. ‘And we have seen what happens when we wait too long.’
Both Saket and I have spent enough time on matrimony sites to understand that the older you get, the harder it is for you to find someone.
You become too rigid, too unyielding, too uncompromising in a relationship.
Your checklist becomes longer, your scepticism sharper.
You’re not going to change yourself for a person or a relationship.
Young people getting married is like manipulating clay.
There’s scope for indentations, a little bit of moulding, finding a balance.
Saket and I are clay, but slowly drying.
Time’s running out before we both become stiff and set in our ways.
‘You’re scared,’ he says. ‘And to be honest, so am I. To be in love with you is a huge risk. Because you know, you’re you.’
‘Because I’m the world’s worst girlfriend?’
‘Far from it,’ he corrects me. ‘You’re you.’
‘You’re great, Saket. You have shown me more patience than I deserve.’
‘I’m not doing it for you, Aanchal. It’s not a favour, not a charity. I’m being selfish. I need you in my life. I’m totally doing this for myself.’