‘S-H-U-T U-P!’ she screamed into his wretched face in disgust.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she demanded angrily.
‘Because I am stoned,’ he answered meekly.
She took a deep breath. ‘That is why I am letting you go,’ she warned, pointing a finger at his face. ‘But next time, you better watch out!’ she warned and walked away.
This surreal episode was immediately named as Sunderkaand, and it continues to be known as that till today. Our timid voices wafted in a sequence one after another from a corner, ‘Excuse me, madam! I am also intoxicated . . .Yes, me too, madam! Can we also do this?’ Furiously, she turned around. ‘I’ll slap you, you motherfuckers. Get lost!’ she screamed and left. We vanished in fear. The girls too left their hiding spots and began to walk away.
We thought that was the end of Sunderkaand but we were mistaken. Twenty or thirty minutes later, half a dozen boys appeared. The girls had complained to the boys at Kathak Kendra. The boys at the dance school had that effeminate demeanour which has stereotypically been assigned to dancers. We did not assume they’d be physically strong or anything like that. But here they were, true to their feminine side and yet with the roaring wrath of a Sunny Deol. Their classmates had complained about a kaala guy and pointed in our direction. When they came, they saw that all of us were black. So they beat up the first guy standing in that small line, assuming him to be the culprit. This happened to be an innocent fellow called Ranjan who had just arrived. He had no clue what the hell was happening! And what he was being beaten up for. Poor chap! This is the unforgettable Sunderkaand episode.
* * *
Utterly frustrated at our gloomy prospects of getting girlfriends, the three of us decided to take matters into our own hands. We decided that we were going to be brave and take the plunge of finally losing our virginity. So we went to the ‘renowned’ red-light area near Paharganj. As soon as we reached there, a sex worker beckoned us towards her through typical lewd gestures. Such attention had never been bestowed upon us before. We were partly thrilled and partly petrified. Abhay, the friend whose idea this was and who had brought us here, went with her first, following her upstairs to her chamber.
Soon after, she called for the second guy. He went and I followed him. In the middle of this tiny trip, we stopped as we heard loud sobs. It sounded like the crying of somebody who was being beaten up badly. We got anxious. Each of us had given about Rs 35 and were preparing for our adventure. That’s when it struck us. The cry sounded so familiar because it was. It was Abhay’s voice. We ran upstairs and within seconds the mystery was revealed.
The prostitute had stripped him naked, leaving him only in his clumsy underwear. And she had beaten him up badly with wires she had folded for double the impact. It was his awful luck that he had found a weird one. She had asked for Rs 35 and he had given her 30. She was furious because this was already at a discount since the original rate was Rs 40. She checked his wallet and stripped him bare to see if he was hiding any money, all the while thrashing and screaming at him, leaving a maze of horrible scars all over his body. He was telling the truth. The two of us had Rs 15 or so extra in our wallets but Abhay did not have a single rupee more. We fled from the madness.
While running, somebody pickpocketed us. That’s the thing about such areas. No matter how street-smart you are, the inconspicuous thieves there will outsmart you and steal everything they can from you and you won’t even realize. After that, I gave up all hopes of losing my virginity.
But I did not give up on love. Not yet.
I tried to go out with the actor Tannishtha Chatterjee. A few years younger than me, Tannishtha was my junior at NSD and what we village types would call a shehri hi-fi girl because she had the appealing panache of a big-city girl: she was confident, she spoke English fluently, she smoked, and so on. I had harboured a crush on her for four months. To an outsider, a villager who had no idea about how these things worked, it seemed that Tannishtha was floating. Most of the NSD girls were in steady relationships. But she was dating someone and then a few months later she was with another boy, and so on. This gave me hope. Since I respected and liked her so much, I thought I should also try my luck.
One day at the campus when she was drinking chai, I took a deep breath and walked up to her.
‘Tannishtha, I have something to tell you,’ I said bravely. ‘May I?’
‘Yes, yes! Obviously. Tell na,’ she said.
‘Not here. Ummm . . . how about we go to the Bengali Market?’ I suggested.
‘All right, let’s go,’ she agreed and off we went.
In a tiny restaurant renowned for its chaat, we sat across each other sipping tea.
‘Tell na, Nawaz. Go on,’ she urged.
‘I want to be your friend,’ I said bravely.
‘Huh? But you already are my friend,’ she said, puzzled.
‘Not that friend. That type of friend,’ I said.
‘What type? You are my friend, Nawaz. I don’t know. What do you mean?’ she asked, confused.
That’s all the speech I had prepared. So I left it at that. We finished our cups of tea, I paid for them and we left.
Before we reached the campus, panic gripped me. I was extremely afraid.
