A night to remember

It had stopped raining by the time Rahul Seth stepped out of the movie theatre. He felt a cool damp wind caress his face. These had been brutally warm summer days in New Delhi. It wasn’t the heat but the humidity that knifed through him. His clothes were perpetually drenched and clung to him like ghosts resting on Peepal trees in his grandmother’s tales.
The humidity that morning had crushed his clothes and his ego as he walked into work, wearing that silly blue tie, wiping his face with a handkerchief, creased and crusty with salt after numerous attempts at mopping his forehead and polishing the sides of his nose. His boss had called him over to his office. He told him he was fired. While Rahul was clearing his desk, someone called him ‘Mister Knuckles’ playfully and he punched his face, and the guards carried him out.
He could only grapple with one thing at a time; it was the way his mother had cried when he called to tell her he had lost his job.
The darkness of the night hung like a wet quivering blanket in the sky. Dark clouds shifted above. They rumbled like some stomach growls, and the city lights flung red copper dust at its bosom.
Rahul lit a cigarette and meditated unknowingly on three people sitting on the steps of a coffee house smoking cigarettes across from him. They were talking loudly about marriage and commitment.
A man in his mid-twenties with crew cut hair, sat between two girls. He seemed effeminate, for some reason, his stooped back lurching forward, his locked knees and the way he would throw up his hands up or meet his wrists at his chin and spread his hands against his cheeks. His laugh troubled Rahul.
The dusky girl, on the man’s left, wore thick-rimmed spectacles, sported a maroon kurta and was loudest among the three. She was overweight, dark and her arms were chubby. Her friend, who crossed her legs as she arched her back, was slim and awkward with short brown hair. She wore a sleeveless shirt, a pair of faded blue jeans, and smiled nervously.
It was eleven. Some shops were pulling their shutters down. The common folk, the uncles and aunties, the mummies and daddies, were slipping out with shopping bags and packaged foods. The entrances of nightclubs were filling in with unshaven men and scantily clad women. Noisy Bollywood numbers and catchy thumping beats were slowly lifting the veil of pretense of the night.
The entire market complex seemed as if it was undergoing a silent makeover. It was as though the moment was caught between two acts of a play with a swiftness and subtlety that even those who shifted the props had no idea of what they were preparing to see.
Three street urchins carried a wooden box, filled with shoe polish and brushes, and settled beneath a tree and began to sniff a dirty cloth and share a cigarette. A dog started to howl. Somewhere in the parking lot a car alarm went off. The parking attendants were laughing and drinking beer. A tall girl in a short dress with long legs stopped, peeked into her bag, pulled out a lipstick, and then walked on. Two men in coats and ties talked about morning meetings and a deal gone wrong.
Rahul felt stress accumulating in his forehead. One street urchin stood up with fire in his eyes and threw stones at his compatriots. The other two got up and started to chase him shrieking in a child-like frenzy with peals of laughter.
At eleven-thirty, Rahul wondered why he hadn’t gone home, to the flat, his parents owned, where he lived just a walk from the market. Why was he still sitting on the steps of the theatre hall? His mouth was dry, and he could feel a fresh coat of sweat precipitating on his forehead. The humidity in the air had stirred up again. Who was he waiting for, he asked himself.
‘No one,’ said the girl on the steps of the coffee house, the one with the thick rimmed spectacles. ‘No one understands me when I tell my parents I don’t want to get married. But they keep insisting. What’s more, every Sunday, I find some boy with his parents sitting in our living room for tea, waiting to see me. I can’t take it anymore.’
‘Don’t worry, silly, I’m sure you’ll find someone,’ the man said stroking her arm.
‘Oh, it’s killing me. What is it with guys and slim girls? My parents tell me that if I lost fifteen pounds I would get married in a month. My mother gets so carried away at times. Then she gets after my case to be on such-and-such a diet because it worked so well with so-and-so’s daughter that she got married last year…. ‘They want me to starve,’ she added quietly.
‘Maybe you should take it easy on those dark temptations,’ the other girl said, ‘the melted chocolate syrup on brownies with ice cream tend to get heavy you know…’
‘Chocolate helps me release stress,’ exclaimed the man. ‘Let’s go inside.’
Rahul got up and started to walk along the rain-drenched lane that looped in and around the market complex. He felt miserable.
The marketplace in the past had been a refuge for him. Tonight it seemed to distract him more. Each year a new seedy nightclub would open and some young school kid would bunk a class and be wooed by peers and then prepare to be debauched; new fashion brands would set overrated and expensive trends; the McDonald’s that once seemed a treat now smelled of phenyl and offered tasteless food; young girls from smaller towns dabbed in cheap make-up would strut about releasing the sexual frustrations of the night for a handful of rupees – attracting the filth of the city to accumulate.
The film Rahul had watched sank him further in his mind. It was about a teenage boy who murders his girlfriend. The story unfolds in the wake of the murder, when the boy’s teacher in the prison tries to understand his senseless crime and the families of the victim and the boy cope with the aftermath.
Rahul had had a hectic week at work.
He slowly gulped the sadness in his throat. He wanted a release – maybe he got it now. He consoled himself and felt almost glad he had lost his job. How long did they expect him to make those countless calls and convince people to switch their bank accounts or consider their loans?
He felt his twenty-three-year-old weight double with each step he took. He shifted his gaze from one person to another in search of an answer, a cure, a meaning to yank him out of the misery of his mind.
He felt alone. He had 600 friends on Facebook, and yet had no one to call or exchange casual details of his life. He felt invariably awkward whenever he would speak to any of them. He felt that while some of them pretended to have caught some nuance of life that his sensibilities couldn’t reach, others around him seemed to speak in a rhythm of platitudes.
Why had he felt so ridiculous and odd all his life; why couldn’t he articulate those facile impressions of luxury cars, cell phone models, and actresses that others so easily could go on and about? It seemed so pointless. It wasn’t that he didn’t have an opinion. He most certainly did. He just felt misplaced and different to most people around him. Perhaps it was because he understood the absurd irony of life.
Rahul decided to step into the Shenanigans, a dimly-lit bar, for a drink.
At the entrance, he was stopped by a bouncer, who wasn’t really muscular but had bruises on his face and the build of a pot-bellied hulk.
‘No stag entry,’ he said and crossed his arms.
Two girls slipped in front of Rahul and smiled at the bouncer. The man returned the smile, exposing the scar on his upper lip, stamped their wrists, and let them enter.
‘What about them?’ Rahul asked.
‘They are girls. Now will you please step aside,’ the man growled.
‘Look I have friends upstairs,’ Rahul said.
By this time a motley crowd had gathered behind him and the bouncer, half with a whim and, perhaps, half a need to take a leak, signaled him to get inside. ‘If I catch you fooling around,’ he said, ‘I will throw you out.’ Rahul didn’t bother with a reply.
He walked up the narrow stairs and felt the ethereal flow of sweat fumes, booze, and cigarette smoke wrap around him. It sent him into a trance. He could hear the music grow louder with each step. He felt nauseated and yearned for a rum and coke as he drew closer to the floor. That would set him right.
He passed two girls smoking and overheard one of them talking about a pervert who was drunk and had wandered into the women’s loo several times in the course of the night. ‘Poor bastard,’ Rahul thought. Against the backdrop of yellow light, he saw their eyes, the sweat on the backs of their necks, the strings of beads around their necks and the thick solemn cloud of smoke suspended above them.
When he stepped inside, the band on stage was in the midst of a song. The vocalist wore yellow shades, had long straight hair and was grinding his groin against the mike and growling the word ‘hate’.
A pamphlet nailed on the red wall announced that Supersonic Sandman were in session. The band appeared to have a following from the sizeable crowd that stood in front of the stage, moving their heads jerkily but wearing mainly stoned expressions. The performance lacked the integrity of a gig. The drummer and the bass guitarist sounded off, the vocalist sounded shrill and the lead guitarist was constantly signaling to the console to increase the volume, while the acoustic guitarist played goofy.
Rahul reached the bar and ordered a large rum and coke.
‘Man, these guys suck tonight,’ he heard someone exclaim close to his ear.
He turned around to see it was a girl with black hair tied in a ponytail and a short skirt that exposed her thighs.
‘Are they supposed to be good?’ Rahul asked taking a large sip of his rum and watching the drink rise above the glass.
‘Oh totally,’ she said.
Rahul finished his rum in two large sips and asked for another.
‘I hope these guys don’t play another set,’ she said as she swigged her beer and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. ‘I want to dance. Interested?’
‘Sure. I’ll join you in a moment,’ Rahul said.
At that precise moment, the band called for a break. The crowd didn’t seem to care and moved towards the bar. Someone helped a drunk who had fallen. He got up, attempted to find support and took a chair with him as he fell again.
Rahul released his grasp on the drink and staggered towards the toilet. There was a fight taking place. A man had been spotted in the women’s toilet and had made a pass at a girl. Some guy, possibly the boyfriend, took offence. But, by the time, Rahul had closed the door behind him, a scuffle had broken loose.
Inside, when he switched on the light, he saw a cockroach scamper from underneath the washbasin and hide behind the pot. He lifted the toilet seat and saw the most jaundiced-looking piss, and on the seat-lid it read: ‘fuck you’.
He turned around to the washbasin and began to wash his face. Outside he could hear abuse being hurled at one’s mother, sister and, and possibly the entire ancestry. He heard thumps of someone being pounded against the door could. A girl screamed a few seconds later, and angry shouts started to erupt.
The Old Monk rum inside of him began to settle. The cold water splashed on his face was helping him recover his composure. He looked into the mirror and saw his eyes had turned blood red. He saw two heavy bags under them that contained at least three months’ worth of unsettled sleep and a lack of character.
When he stepped outside, the bar had resumed its business and the scuffle had been cleared. The bouncer was around and looked at him straight in the eye to measure some guilt. The band seemed to have cleared away their instruments and equipment, and the DJ had taken over the console. ‘Mustang Sally,’ screamed Buddy Guy from the Ahuja speakers. Rahul felt an impulse to scream the lyrics but decided against it. He felt an odd chill in the draft of an air conditioner.
He saw the girl grinding her bum against a wooden pillar that stood in the middle of the dance floor. There were four men dancing ludicrously around her but she seemed to take no notice of him.
He headed to the bar instead, downed another drink and ordered another. After he had consumed three in a flash, he found and downed vodka that sat unattended on the bar. The strange delight of alcohol and its subsequent effects quelled his mind. He floated in the moment like a rubber dinghy in a swimming pool. His mind flickered light into his eyes. He smiled an odd grin.
By the time he reached the dance floor, George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone was booming from a hammering wooden box a few inches above his head from where he stood. He jauntily approached the girl.
‘What took you so long,’ she hissed in his ears.
‘Rum and tired bones,’ he said not looking into her eyes.
They danced sluggishly close each other; his awkward steps didn’t compare to her graceful movements. When he moved closer he felt the warmth of her body. She was definitely three steps a better dancer than him, but nothing seemed to slow him down either. The room spun with each turn he took, and he stepped closer to her.
There were not only people on the floor. A large group of men danced in a corner, the stench of their armpits conspired against the cologne fumes of the crowd, as they slowly inched towards a stray group of coquettish girls who danced with closed eyes and pouted lips and didn’t seem to mind company.
The song switched to This Town by Frank Sinatra, shifting the tone of the night. Rahul felt an odd sensation of excitement heighten the seductiveness in his mind as he thrust his pelvis into hers, which she accepted and turned around and wiggled for more. He was not dancing in any coherent manner but was merely following every whim of his body, jerking all moveable components, with a look that could’ve frightened him if it was being recorded.
He brought his mouth closer to be met by hers. She had the wildest eyes and a look that weakened his feet and wobbled his knees. He bit her lower lip lightly, as he looked into her glazed morning eyes.
She bit his lower lip. He felt better, he noted. Happiness of the vaguest sort ran through his veins and short circuited in his mind.
‘You don’t understand’ she said.
‘I don’t understand what,’ he whispered.
‘I’m not that kind of a girl,’ she softly said.
She spun around and walked briskly across the floor and lost among the crowd. He waited for her to return. In a matter of a few stretched out seconds he knew she wouldn’t. He couldn’t justify why she had left or what had set her off. He felt a blow to his stomach that began to swell in pain. His eyes started to water. A feverish heat of mortification took him over and the bar began to spin. Every light danced around him. Somewhere inside of him, he could hear a moan.
When he dragged himself out of the building, later that night, falling from one set of steps to another, he remembered his job. Outside it had begun to rain.