2.d

Plan:

I go to Piyush. I will find him giving some emotional discourse on life and the involved sadness. I meet him. And I tell him that Shamita has an affair with a married man. His views about her are tainted. He withdraws. The subject comes to a full stop. Pretty cool.

Execution:

I reach my room. Piyush is sitting delivering a discourse to Samrat. Samrat is listening religiously to him. I have never seen a much gullible guy than him. He is naïve, Idiotic and at the same time innocent. Dickhead is elder than us by a year. Yet he seems five years younger to us. And if anybody within the walls of these two rooms needs an audience. Samrat is the man. He would listen to your story. Coincide his feelings with you and make you feel better. He knows every soul’s secret within these two rooms. But not a single one has leaked out of it till date. Because it’s Samrat. Piyush is giving him some emotional discourse on life.

I go and sit before Piyush. He turns to me.

“Welcome…welcome…”
“Yeah…I am in…”
“I need to talk to you…”
“Me too…” I say somewhat seriously. Being casual in such moments could be dangerous. It could distort the overall effect of your words later and give wrong outcomes, which would collaterally be against you on a whole. So, I build up a preface to my plan. I act serious.

Piyush finishes his discourse for Samrat. I feel like standing up and applauding. I avoid it in this delicate situation.

Piyush moves towards me. He looks grave. Grave enough to topple me over. I have a baseless fear gripping me. I fear he knows my plan. I fear he knows about Shamita’s indulgence already. If you are in the ring to kill the tiger, you always feel that the Tiger knows that you are here to kill him. I’ve never killed a tiger personally. But I have heard a lot about it. From Jim Corbett and my paternal relatives who like killing tigers. Who never killed tigers somehow. And I also know that this is the exact time to feel this. “Let’s go to our room…” he says with the same intensity.

I follow him to the room as if hynotised by his words. Zombified by him. Following my master. I do master. Let’s go to the room. Samrat feels left out. Who cares? Zombies don’t care. Zombies in fact don't do anything. They just be themselves. Zombies that is.

He sits on his bed. I sit on the empty chair opposite to it. There’s Dilip’s towel on it. I whirl it away on his bed carelessly.

Piyush drinks water from his bottle, rinses his mouth and swallows it. He then clears his throat and speaks.

“Mera pehla pyaar….adhoora reh jaayega…” and his eyes turn moist. How pansy. This is how films seen while attaining puberty effect a person's psyche in the years to come. One starts crying because the only love story in his life would remain incomplete. That too in a contemplative state of affairs. It sucks. Effeminate arse.

“Kyun?....kya hua?” That’s called concern. More for my arse than for his.

He starts weeping silently.

“What happened Piyush?” I ask him the same thing second time.

“I will loose her…” He says.

“Why?” Every time he makes a statement, It scares me more about the next one.

“Harshad is in love with her…”

Goddamnit! Who told him this? Barkha has been with me since the secret was leaked out to her. Neither did I tell anybody else except myself about it. Then how did this child of god come to know about it? What is happening? Does he read minds? Or did I blurt it out when I was drunk. Least chances. I am always in check of myself when I am drunk. Samrat? But I didn’t tell him anything of this yet. Did he see them together, as an outcome of my previous plan? What the hell on the earth made him realize this? I see my plan descending rapidly towards crash site. An unreasonable hope keeps me hung to it. If I knew the source of comprehension, I could still tackle it easily, keeping it afloat. Source. It was the solution for my solution.

I keep wondering. At a point I give up and as the man himself.

“Harshad??”

“Yes” he wipes his eyes with an impervious look on face. What an act of personal strength.

“Who told you?”

(Contd.)