PART 3 #3
I make my own money, live on my own terms, and I have never felt healthier.
Eighteen months ago, Namit insisted I join a gym.
He waved his hands and emphatically declared it would change my life.
He succeeded. In the last year or so, I have shed my fat, my biceps have peaked, my lateral back muscles have spread and my jawline has sharpened—all things I thought I didn’t care about.
If I was earlier a follower of the cult, now I’m a missionary asking others to join the gym.
So how can I be most free, most fit and yet feel age closing in on me?
While I have been grappling with my own ageing, Vanita and Rajat’s kids are nearing two years.
Both of them have gained weight—even Rajat—during the pregnancy, which they haven’t lost. They don’t even care.
They have settled into their new bodies with love.
While every morning I take off my T-shirt and turn and analyse my own.
A body that I have painstakingly sculpted.
The last time someone touched my body was a year ago. Saket. The man of my dreams, the guy I chose to spend the rest of my life with. But when he touched me, I felt an overwhelming emptiness. My body revolted. My heart ached with a sharp pain.
I don’t get to see Rajat and Vanita that often.
It’s not just the distance that’s the problem.
Even when I’m in India, they are busy with their children’s playdates, their tantrums, and their hospital visits and the creche pick-ups and drops.
I lost both my friends to their children.
Even when the stars somehow aligned and we did meet, I happened to like their children more than I liked their parents.
And every time I see Rajat with Nandini, and Vanita with Aditya, my own loneliness overwhelms me.
It’s 3 a.m. when we get home. Maa–Papa, who get tired easily these days, go to bed. Having slept on the flight, I’m wide awake. Both Rajat and Vanita offer to stay but I request them to go home. They understand.
As I wander from one room to another, my own home feels alien to me.
Between six months ago when I last visited and now, there have been a bunch of changes.
The mandir of the room has been expanded.
More idols have been added. A new dining table has come in.
The doors of the room have been unscrewed in anticipation of Gaurav moving in.
I slump on the sofa, cradling a cup of tea I have made for myself.
Dread pools in my stomach at the thought of seeing Gaurav.
I open the latest report from the clinic to prepare myself for what’s about to come.
As I read, my mind drifts back to the day we moved into this flat.
Gaurav was coughing and wheezing as the pandit performed the havan.
‘How do people even smoke?’ he had wondered.
To think that one day, Maa–Papa and I would have to pick him up from a rehab centre was unimaginable. And yet, here I am, living in the same house, with the doors taken off so that when Gaurav comes here, he can’t hide and snort a few lines of cocaine.
I wonder what would have happened if we had never let him live alone in his bachelor’s pad away from this house, away from us.
Or what if Daksh had never stopped managing him, or if Tejal had kept a keener eye on him?
I have circled over these countless times.
The truth is, it’s entirely Gaurav’s fault.
He made us suffer.
3.
Aanchal Madan
Tejal is in the parking lot twenty minutes before time. I see her park from the balcony. She doesn’t call, doesn’t come up, just stays in the car, just sits and waits there. When the clock strikes 7 a.m., that’s when Maa’s phone rings and Tejal announces that she has reached.
I have never liked Tejal.
Not when I saw her at Vanita’s wedding. Not when Daksh first talked to her in Dubai and set her up with Gaurav.
Not when she slept with Gaurav and then held his hand during the wedding as if they had been dating for years.
Definitely not when Gaurav brought her to the airport when I was leaving for New York.
She had no business being there. My last visual before taking the flight to another country was Maa putting her arm around Tejal as if she were a replacement for me.
As if the family was complete again, this time without me.
All the while I was in New York, she would come home all the time to be with my parents, eat their food, cook for them and take them shopping.
While I was alone in a new city—my choice, of course—she was with them, giving them gifts on birthdays, taking them out to dinners on anniversaries and spending special holidays with them.
When I went back for Diwali the first time, it seemed as though she knew how they wanted to celebrate it more than I did.
I didn’t come back for Holi and Maa and she made the most incredible-looking gujias.
She was stealing my family from me.
I waited patiently for Tejal’s mask to slip, her real character to reveal itself.
She couldn’t have been as nice as she was leading people to believe.
She saw someone as na?ve as Gaurav and then dug her claws into his back.
Dating and managing Gaurav came with perks—there were sponsored holidays, free lunches at the best of restaurants, top-of-the-line clothes and skincare products.
I couldn’t take it any more. I told Gaurav what I felt about her: that she was a lying, conniving gold-digger who would break his heart.
My words were laughed at. Nothing changed.
Every day I would call and create a scene and they would be absolutely nonchalant about the looming threat.
Worse, they told Tejal what I thought about her.
Tejal called me and told me she loved my brother.
‘You’re not right for him,’ I said to Tejal one day.
And I said that without any justification. She insisted that time would prove me wrong.
I wish I hadn’t asked god to test her, because he did.
Gaurav’s descent began with alcohol—a couple of beers after every gaming convention.
But he kept this habit a secret from Daksh, who had explicitly forbidden him from drinking and kept stringent tabs on him.
Despite Daksh having stopped managing him, he would drop in to check if Gaurav was drinking.
Soon, Daksh started carrying a breath analyser with him.
Gaurav promised to quit drinking. Gaurav quit drinking.
But right at that time, he was introduced to cocaine and amphetamines by a tournament organizer.
He told us later that the drug made him feel invincible, and happiness coursed within him of the kind he hadn’t experienced since the early days of gaming, where he would lose himself in his solo sessions for hours on end.
A line every weekend became two, then two lines became four and soon he started doing it every day.
Soon he was on to ecstasy, MDMA and crack cocaine. His performance dipped.
That’s when he got hooked on focus-enhancing drugs used to help people with mental diseases.
A cocktail of drugs was all that Gaurav needed.
Now, he was consuming a gram of cocaine, countless pills of Xanax and Adderall crushed together every day.
It gave him immense confidence and intense focus for hours on end.
No one tested him because of his clout. Tejal and Daksh didn’t notice it.
For them, he had become a sixteen-year-old gamer who could stay up nights without an issue.
He became even better at gaming, but no one around him saw the price he was paying for it—his addiction, and the long, debilitating crashes that left him bedridden.
Daksh, who was in the dark, thought Gaurav was pushing too hard and his body was pushing back.
To Daksh, it seemed that all the hard work was finally taking its toll on Gaurav’s well-being.
When Tejal questioned Gaurav about the frequent cash withdrawals, Gaurav would lie through his teeth about buying some new equipment. She even started to ask Gaurav to step away from gaming for a few months, maybe a year, till he got some rest. Gaurav flatly refused all her requests.
By the time Daksh and Tejal figured it out, it was too late.
When Gaurav’s gaming career imploded, gone in a matter of seconds, his team, his fans, everyone deserted him.
Only two people were standing with him, Daksh and Tejal.
Since then and now, Tejal has stood steadfast, despite Gaurav’s drug-fuelled rants at her, the drug abuse, the neglect.
She has handled Gaurav with a grace that he didn’t deserve.
‘Shall we leave?’ asks Tejal when we settle in her car. She puts the car into gear. ‘There’s water and some namkeen on the back seat. We can pick up some more on the way.’
Google Maps shows that Anantara Rehab Facility, Dehradun, is eight hours away. I know that none of us wants to stop. We just want to see Gaurav.
Tejal drives with the aggressiveness of an angry Gurgaon boy.
Then I recall that she’s the younger sister of two older brothers.
Both of them and her parents had warned her that they would stop talking to her if she didn’t leave Gaurav.
She stopped talking to them in response and later bullied them into accepting her decision.