westland ltd

61, Silverline Building, Alapakkam Main Road, Maduravoyal, Chennai 600 095No. 38/10 (New No.5), Raghava Nagar, New Timber Yard Layout, Bangalore 56002693, 1st Floor, Sham Lal Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002

First published by westland ltd 2014

Copyright © Arnab Ray 2014

All rights reserved

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN: Typeset: PrePSol Enterprise Pvt. Ltd.Printed at

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and inci-dents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person living or dead, events and locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circu-lated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) may be made without written permission of the publishers.

To Anahita

Contents

Acknowledgements vi

the empty highway 1

the game 12

eighty-eight short 26

Sir 48

the maths paper 59

the dump 66

the hero 87

hotel lover’s bliss 102

the way back 119

more recollections 127

the dancing bunny 142

Poonam 154

politics 171

her father 196

the final decision 211

YoLo 219

the realization 229

the road 232

the letter 235

yatrik 249

Acknowledgements

I would like to express gratitude to my grand-parents and my parents, my wife without whom I would have neither the time nor the energy to write, and my daughter who makes every moment worth it. I would also like to thank the team at Westland and specially my editor, Meera Krishnan.

the empty highway

He pulled himself up from the ground and lurched forward unsteadily into the darkness.

Where am I?He looked around and up above to find

himself alone under a dark, moonless sky, stars sprinkled like diamond dust. A dense clump of trees stood to his left. To his right, about hundred yards away, a road lay still, like a black python in repose. Silent, empty and ominous.

Why the hell am I here, wherever this is?He had no idea. Absolutely none.So he asked himself an easier question.What’s my name?The answer snapped promptly back.My name is Anushtup Chatterjee. I am thirty-two

years old and I fold trousers for a living. He felt better already. Because the last time

he had a blackout, Anushtup had forgotten who he was.

He had then found himself hundreds of miles

2 Yatrik

away from home, lying on a bed of straw in a Santhal hut, with no recollection of how he got there. His vision blurred, hearing off, words choked and memory shot, he had tossed and turned for days, knees drawn up, curled into a fetal ball, burning with fever and damp with sweat, piss and fear.

Then it had come back to him slowly, in little sips.

His name, his address, his life. And the way back.

The only things that refused to return were those few days, in which he had somehow gone from Calcutta to that godforsaken village on the edge of nowhere. And so it had remained, a huge crater of discomfiting emptiness, widening the little cracks and fissures that had, over the years, opened up in his mind.

‘You don’t mix booze and the stuff man. You do, you get a bad trip. Baaaaddddd.’

That’s what Yannick had said when Anushtup had finally come home. Yannick was either from Cameroon or Nigeria, where exactly Anustup could never quite remember. He had come to Calcutta to play in one of its football clubs, but had never really made it big. Then at the end of his second season, a hard tackle had shattered his knee, ending his career for good. Instead of taking

the empty highway 3

the flight back home, Yannick cut off his dread-locks, learned a few words in Bengali and started dealing in powder and pills. He was a big man, with a big voice and a bigger laugh, complemented by a hearty appetite for Nepali women, Chicken 65 and thick gold chains. Anushtup considered him a friend, to the extent a dealer can be one, in that he promptly returned calls, delivered goods on time, and dispensed good advice in short, clean, rhythmic sentences.

And so Anushtup had listened to Yannick. No mixing drugs and drinks. That had been a year ago, and he had never had such an incident since then. Some minor blackouts here and there, mostly from drinking local liquor on an empty stomach. Nothing that those in the third decade of their lives cannot deal with.

But now this. Once again.Anushtup stopped. He had been following the

road, facing the same direction that he had gotten up in. ‘I won’t fall off the edge of the earth’, he voiced aloud to himself, ‘there will be something ahead.’

Only there wasn’t. But he kept pressing forward.He looked around once again. Nothing

stirred. No rumbling of a distant motor. No chirping of crickets. No whistle of the wind rus-tling through the leaves. Almost like someone

4 Yatrik

had reached forward from the couch and muted the audio.

He wondered now if he had lost his hearing.Anushtup screamed. Loudly. He heard himself

crystal clear. But just his voice. Nothing else.Where am I... he asked himself again. He wasn’t

anywhere near Calcutta, and of that he was sure. No traffic, no large lighted signs hawking televi-sions and washing machines, no overpowering smell of urban decay.

As a matter of fact, that was the other thing. There was no smell. Just like there was no sound.

No, I am definitely not in Calcutta, he thought. If he was, he figured, he would know what time of the year it was. Because it was not sweaty hot, like being in a defective sauna, which was the city in May. Nor was it muggy and ominous, which was Calcutta during the monsoons. Nor was there the nip in the air of a winter night, that makes the old boys reach for their thermos flasks full of coffee and their brown monkey caps.

As a matter of fact, the temperature and humidity was perfect, like being in a pricey movie theater with perfect climate control. When you neither felt the need to loosen your shirt buttons nor wished you had brought along a sweater.

So once again…Where am I? When am I? Why am I?

the empty highway 5

Many questions. No answers. It was then that he remembered that he had a

phone. Call Yannick. Why had he not thought of it before?

Anushtup reached for his belt where the Nokia could usually be found clipped. To find that the phone was gone. The belt clip was empty. He touched the chest pocket of his shirt. No, nothing there either. Instinctively, he patted his hip pocket. There was no wallet.

He was sure now. He had been robbed.He tried to remember what had been in the

wallet. A few crinkled fifty and hundred rupee notes, some old receipts, and random phone num-bers scribbled on frayed scraps of paper. Nothing there that he could not live without, except that black-and-white picture yellowed at the sides, which always stayed snug in the inside flap. A picture taken of him and his father, all those years ago on the beach, of Baba tossing him in the air and his arms outstretched, as if flying.

Anushtup loved pictures. For him, they were a soft lens into the past, smoothing down the bumps and the ridges, freezing time down to happy faces and nice places. Memories, he always told him-self, were different, they carried the bad as well as the good, though mostly the bad. But pictures, no one ever took pictures of themselves fighting

6 Yatrik

or weeping or throwing stuff or lying down in the dark, looking out through the window. They just didn’t.

But now that picture in his wallet had itself become a memory. And the realization made the nerve at the side of his forehead throb with pul-sating violence.

‘Hello.’Anushtup turned to his left, drawn towards the

source of the sound.There was a man standing there, a few feet away.Anushtup had seen him before. Well, not this

particular individual, but his type. The everyday man. Hanging off the footboards

of buses, standing at the pharmacy buying Crocin, sitting at his office desk, noisily sipping tea off a saucer, bargaining for fish at the market, a face in the crowd around store windows watching cricket on the display TVs.

The background noise of Calcutta life. There but not there. One’s mind is trained to tune them out, so as to concentrate on the more interesting notes.

As a matter of fact, Anushtup would have missed him totally had he not been the only per-son blotting the landscape.

‘Hello there.’ The man called out again and took a step towards Anushtup. And then another.

Anushtup replied, ‘Hey.’

the empty highway 7

Five feet and a few. Mostly bald, with a few apologetic tufts of white-and-black. A humble moustache. Beady eyes with little bags under them. Cotton checked shirt with fourth button undone. Brown grandpa trousers. Pigeon chest flaring out to a modest pot-belly, the kind you get from years of having rice for lunch at two in the afternoon.

‘Do you know where we are?’ asked Anushtup.The man kept looking at him, with an expres-

sion of mild bemusement. Anushtup realized that he needed to explain

himself. ‘You see, I have these memory…lapses. I wake up in strange places, and I can’t remember how I got there.’

The man said nothing, just pursed his lips. ‘I would have called someone but my cell

phone was stolen and…’‘Your cell phone won’t work here.’‘Exactly. What’s the here? That’s my question.’It was then that it hit him. This man had taken

his wallet. Because he knew something. He could see it in his eyes.

The only problem, Anushtup thought, was that this kindly-looking gentleman didn’t quite look like the blow-to-the-head-and-take-it-all gunda. Those types didn’t wear cotton shirts and office trousers. The most this man could ever do was

8 Yatrik

ask for a bribe if he was sitting behind a table and you needed a file moved. That, Anushtup figured, would be the limit of his malfeasance.

So he wondered if he was part of a highway gang.

But then again, gangs used pretty ladies to flag down cars. This man would be the most horrible bait. He would make people speed away.

‘Have you taken my phone?’ Anushtup asked, almost politely. He walked slowly towards the man, careful not to appear threatening. He was confident that if the need arose, he could take him on. After all he was six feet tall, weighed ninety kilos and was still in decent shape. And this man was not much.

The stranger’s voice was very clear, almost as if coming from a high-end sound system.

‘No, I haven’t taken your phone. And before you ask, I haven’t taken your wallet either.’

‘Give them back. I know you took them,’ Anushtup yelled, for emphasis and for menace, ‘Now’.

The man did not seem the least bit perturbed.‘Since I didn’t take them, I also can’t give them

back to you.’‘Then how do you know my wallet is missing?’‘Because that’s just the way things are here.

You keep the things you need. Nothing more.

the empty highway 9

Nothing less.’Suddenly remembering, Anushtup’s eyes fell

to his wrist. The stainless steel HMT watch, heavy and ancient, which used to be his father’s and his grandfather’s before that, was gone.

‘What place is this?’The gentleman pointed to a spot right next to

Anushtup. ‘Why don’t we sit down? I have always found it to be better than standing. For the knees.’

Anushtup followed his finger. There was a wooden bench there. Now this was very odd because he could swear it had not been there a second ago.

‘I asked you a simple question. To which I ex-pect a simple answer.’ Anushtup raised his voice again and asked, ‘What place is this?’

The gentleman calmly sat down on the bench. ‘Of course, I will give you the answer. But sit down first, please. It might help.’

Anushtup remained standing.‘Screw the sitting down. Tell me what you have

to say,’ Anushtup, now standing right in front of the man, held his shoulder firmly. ‘And I want my stuff back.’

The only thing that was holding Anushtup back from pinning the man to the ground and go-ing through his pockets was how non-threaten-ing, almost to the point of being empathetic, this

10 Yatrik

gentleman looked.‘Just hear me out, please,’ he said.Anushtup was silent for a while, thinking

furiously. Who, he wondered, but the criminal, the drunk or the insane would walk down a deserted highway at this hour of the night. And since this man neither smelled of drink, nor particularly looked like what the Calcutta police would describe as a gunda, there was only one option left.

He was not totally there. Mentally. Anushtup stepped back.

The best way to deal with people who have lost their mind, Anushtup knew, was to humor them. As a child, he had seen his grandfather at close quarters, and towards the end, he would have to address him as ‘Colonel’ and do a salute with a click of the heels before he would take his medication.

Anushtup sat down next to the stranger, keeping a certain distance.

‘Yes. You were saying…’Silence again. Now that they had both spoken,

the absolute absence of all sound seemed to weigh on Anushtup even more, in the same way that darkness feels darker when you come in from the light.

The stranger seemed to be struggling with something. He moved his lips in an attempt to

the empty highway 11

speak. Then he shook his head and was quiet again.

Anushtup felt sure now. There was something not entirely right with this man.

The stranger made uneasy eye contact. His Adam’s apple throbbed from the effort of articu-lating the exact words. He took a deep breath and then said it.

‘Anushtup Chatterjee, I am really sorry to have to tell you this. But you have died.’

the game

‘Excuse me?!’ The words spluttered out of Anushtup’s mouth in a froth of absolute surprise.

‘You died. You are dead. You are no longer living. I really do not know how to make this any clear-er,’ said the man, in that gentle exasperated tone perfected by customer service managers for dealing with recalcitrant customers.

Anushtup was sure that he was not going to get anywhere at this rate, because this man in front of him didn’t have a clue either.

He wondered about the possibilities. Maybe the man had run away from a mental asylum. Maybe he had been driven out by his family. Out at night, lost and disoriented, he had stumbled upon Anushtup who had passed out on the grass by the side of the road. He had then rifled through his pockets. Maybe he was even trying to help, trying to find any bit of identifying information.

It made sense. In this day and age, who but

the game 13

the certifiably insane would stop for a stranger in need?

But of course, there had been nothing that gave away anything. No phone. No wallet. No watch. He had been robbed a while earlier. Simple.

But wait, he thought, it was not that simple. The man had just called Anushtup by his name. Now how did he know that?

It was then that Anushtup remembered that he had been carrying a letter with him, something important that had his name on it. The man might have read that.

Anushtup raised his hands to his forehead and massaged gently, his fingertips tracing small precise circles, willing himself to recall what that letter might have been. Retrieving that memory would possibly provide a clue to how he got here.

His mind stayed stubbornly silent though, the dark void within refusing to whisper the answer he sought.

‘Was I carrying a letter?’ Anushtup asked hopefully.

‘I did not take your letter.’‘I did not ask you whether you took my letter.

I asked you “Was I carrying a letter?”’ Anushtup had by now gotten up from the bench and was standing in front of the stranger, his hands on his waist.

14 Yatrik

The man remained most matter-of-fact. ‘I really think we should move beyond wallets, phones and letters. None of them are particu-larly important, nor for that matter would they work, in the way you know them to work, now that you are dead.’

Anushtup had come to a conclusion. There was nothing to be gained from going around in conversational circles with a madman. He started walking, hoping it would all come back to him gradually. He concentrated on the letter, trying to recall why it was important and why suddenly he had remembered he was carrying it in the first place.

‘We really need to talk.’Anushtup turned back. The man was standing

just a foot away. Which he felt was strange, consid-ering he had neither heard his footsteps nor sensed him approaching, in the way you instinctively know when you are being followed. And Anushtup had been walking briskly, determined as he was to put as much distance as possible between him and the man. No way that little man could have walked this fast, this silent.

‘Why are you following me? And don’t deny that you are.’

‘They say that the first stage of grief is denial. Maybe denial is also the first stage of death.’

the game 15

‘Look here, sir. Can you please leave me alone? We have nothing more to talk about.’

‘I can’t. I can’t leave you alone. This is my job. This is what I have to do,’ he said, a definite tone of desperation creeping into his voice.

‘Your job?’‘Yes. What I have to do. I know I owe you an

explanation. That’s why I have been asking you to sit with me.’

The stillness in his voice. The calm placidity of his gaze. The stealth in his movement. The annoy-ing need to hover around. This wasn’t your garden variety madman out on the streets, wearing warm clothes in summer and barking at passers-by. No, this man was different. Anushtup wondered now if this man was not positively dangerous, a serial killer perhaps. The thing about them is that they all appear so very normal, so very unthreatening. That’s how they ensnare their prey.

My job. What I have to do.Many mass murderers believe they are or-

dained by a higher being to carry out his design on earth. He had once read that somewhere.

Anushtup was now more than a little worried. Something else he had read in that same book… yes he remembered the name now, The Devil Lives With Us… was that serial killers had deep reser-voirs of strength which they drew on, when in the

16 Yatrik

grip of their madness. This meant that the physi-cal advantage he thought he had might not really turn out to be an advantage after all.

What if this man was Stone Man, thought Anushtup with a shudder. Stone Man, as the dai-ly rags had luridly called him in ’89, Calcutta’s most notorious serial killer, a shadowy specter of malevolence whose modus operandi had been to bash in the heads of sleeping pavement dwellers with stones.

They never caught him. And there Anushtup had been, lying on the side of the road, senseless.

The man had taken a few measured paces forward.

Anushtup cried out, ‘Don’t get any closer…’ and started scanning the ground in front of him. He needed a weapon, anything that he could use to make the killer back off. And there it was. A small rock lying near his right foot.

‘Don’t get closer… I mean it… or I will bash your head in…’

Anushtup bent down to pick up the rock. As his fingers closed over its jagged edges and he straightened up, something happened.

‘What the fuck…’Anushtup exclaimed, his eyes frozen.

The rock he had picked up remained exactly where it had been. On the ground. Clutched in

the game 17

Anushtup’s fingers was an identical copy, almost as if the act of holding and lifting it had led to the rock cloning itself.

The man did not seem too worried by this development. ‘That happens when you take an object from that world and try to bring it here. The form remains, that too only sometimes, but not really the matter.’

Anushtup let the rock drop. It vanished before it hit the ground.

The man followed the path of the rock with his eyes. ‘It’s difficult to understand. The way things work here.’

‘No it’s not. Actually it’s quite easy.’It was. Easy. Perfectly easy. Everything made

perfect sense. There was nothing to be afraid of. With an “Elementary, my dear Watson” smile

of superiority, Anushtup continued. ‘I am dreaming. You. The road. The night. The silence. The rock that photocopies itself. It’s a bit too…and I don’t know what word to use… I guess…coherent of course, to be a normal dream. So my guess is Yannick sold me some real strong shit. Which means I have gone under. Hoo boy. I have gone under proper. Like Alice down the rabbit hole.’

The man seemed to be rather amused, but in that quietly passive-aggressive way.

18 Yatrik

‘As I said, the first reaction to death, like grief, is…’‘Yes, you told me. Denial. That’s some deep

bullshit. I’ve heard that before.’ Anushtup took a step forward towards the man. ‘Stuff you read, people you meet, they stick to your mind like lint on wool. A face from somewhere, words from another place, and then they appear as characters in dreams.’

‘Most interesting.’‘Though I haven’t figured out why you would

be in my dream. I guess we must have met, per-haps for a fleeting second. Maybe you came into the store to buy trousers. Or you sat next to me on a bus. Maybe you are the guy who charged the calling plan on my cell phone. I have no idea.’

‘Can I ask you a question, Anushtup?’‘Shoot.’‘If this is a dream, why don’t you try waking up

from it?’‘I suppose I could try. You normally have to do

something really crazy to get out of a dream. Like jump off a building.’ Anushtup took a good clean look around. ‘Don’t see any buildings to jump off or trucks to stand in front of. But, to be honest, I quite like this dream. Not like being stuck on a Pacific Island with Maryln Monroe of course, but still beats the hell out of falling into a pit full of snakes, being attacked by nail guns, walking over

the game 19

a bed of glass with stumps for legs or having an army of ants chewing your insides. I am afraid if I jump out of this dream, I’d jump right into one of those.’

‘Are all dreams that bad?’ asked the man.‘Yes. When you take a trip, it happens sometimes.

That’s why they don’t prescribe the powder as part of a balanced diet. It turns your head into cold noo-dles, all lumped together in one yucky mass.’

‘You seem to have some experience of this kind of trip?’

‘Oh yeah, you are talking to the best.’‘Well since you have convinced yourself that

you are in a dream that you can live with, you wouldn’t mind if we sat down here on the bench, would you?’

And the wooden bench had materialized once again. Not that Anushtup was surprised anymore.

‘No, I wouldn’t mind at all.’They sat down. ‘Now that I think of it, it is strange how every-

thing seems to be lit up here. Uniformly, like we are in a movie set. Not quite real life.’

‘I guess yes. Not quite real life.’‘See, now even you agree about the dream

thing.’ Anushtup reached out and patted the man’s shoulder in a friendly way.

‘No, not really. It’s not life. That’s all I am

20 Yatrik

saying. But it’s real.’ He thought for a second and said, ‘Well, maybe not real in the way you understand it.’

‘Okay. Let’s do this your way. So tell me, how did I die?’

‘The question you should be asking is, how did I live?’

Anushtup leant forward and snapped his fin-gers. ‘Aha. You lifted that line from one of Baba’s books. The Broken Road.’

The man seemed to take this accusation to heart. He immediately protested, ‘No I did not. I…’

‘But of course you did. You have no other choice. Being a figment of my imagination, your words will of course be mine. And I have read The Broken Road like a gazillion times.’

‘And I haven’t. Not to make this personal, I have neither heard of The Broken Road nor of your father.’

‘Let me guess. You like romantic pulp fiction.’‘No need to get personal.’‘Aww come on. Why be defensive?’‘I seem to have touched a nerve.’‘Nothing like that.’‘But please, do tell me more about your father.’

‘Baba was a Superman in a world of pygmies. Pity so few knew him. Outside. And at home.’ Anushtup spoke with passion.

the game 21

‘At home?’‘None of your business.’‘I am sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked.’ The

man looked nervously apologetic, leaning forward slightly, half turned towards Anushtup.

‘You know what? I think I have had it with this dream. Time for the snake pit. Time for something else.’ Anushtup stood up to leave. He thought of setting off on a fast run and then doing a dive, head-first, onto the ground. The sheer impact would work. Perhaps.

‘There is nowhere to go, Anushtup. We are stuck here, unless you let me help.’

‘That a threat?’‘No, just the truth.’‘So if I try to escape, I will only be wasting my

time. Right?’ The man said, ‘You cannot really waste time

because time here is not the kind of time you are used to. Here, there is no past, no future, no present. There is only action and consequence.’

Not copied from The Broken Road. This one Anushtup had heard in real life, many years ago, that special day with Baba.

Anushtup had loved being with his father.Because he was never the face-contorted-into-a-grimace reluctant adult, making no secret of how he felt being dragged along to a place he

22 Yatrik

would rather not be. Baba was a partner-in-crime, child-like in his enthusiasm for silly childish things. That winter afternoon, the sun had signed the office register and gone home early, leaving its light in Baba’s eyes. They were at the fair, and after one too many cotton candies and rides on the bright red-and-yellow Ferris wheel that creaked ominously as it spun, bothering him more than it did his father, Baba had dragged him to the freak show tent. The picture of the bearded lady and the boy with five heads had been too much for Baba to resist.

Anushtup could not remember how old he had been then, probably eight or nine, but even as a little boy, he had found the idea too tacky. Baba had been insistent though. The paper mâché heads of the boy had been ridiculous and the bearded lady had not been a lady. Then they had come to the kiosk of the ‘Wisest Man in the World’ who, if one were to believe the impresario, had travelled the universe from Borneo to Botswana, and yet spoke Bangla with a Burdwan accent. For the princely sum of ten rupees, he would answer ‘any question in the world’. Baba had put a note in his hand and asked, ‘What is time?’

And this had been his answer.‘No past, no future, no present. There is only

action and consequence.’

the game 23

‘I guess I will stay. You made me remember something I had forgotten, something nice.’

He made a mental note to thank Yannick once he got home from this place, wherever he was. Whatever he had sold him was good, he mused, shaking out these long lost moments that had been shoved in the dark dusty gap between the bed and the wall.

‘I am glad you changed your mind.’Anushtup leaned back onto the bench. ‘Okay.

Now tell me. Who are you? And what do you want to help me with?’

The stranger suddenly seemed to stumble with the words, almost as if he were rolling marbles around in his mouth. ‘I…I am just here to explain the process. Go through with you on what you need to do to move on from death to… Just a…’

‘So you are death’s orientation officer, the one who checks for compliance with HR-defined pro-cesses?’Anushtup could not help but laugh out aloud.

‘Well, if that helps you, feel free to believe it.’ The man ignored Anushtup’s sarcastic laugh. ‘The thing is that before you walk down that road, we have to play a little…game.’

Anushtup rubbed his palms in mock delight. ‘Oooh I love games. Especially when the HR process expert calls it a game. ’Cause his games aren’t really

24 Yatrik

games. If they were, they wouldn’t make you play them on company time. So what’s the real deal?’

‘Well, it’s not really a game…game. It’s more like you have to watch something.’

‘Instructional videos? Now that’s a bait-and- switch, Uncle.’

‘It’s a game, as in you have a choice of what you want to see.’

‘If it doesn’t involve winning or losing, it’s not a game. That is the definition.’

‘Oh in this game… Finishing is winning. In a way.’

‘Does it have a prize? I don’t play unless I can win something.’ Anushtup was enjoying this chance to act like a five year old. That was why he liked dreams. You could act silly. You could go crazy. There would not be any consequences.

‘The prize would be that you get to move along on your journey.’

‘So I wake up only if I win?’ asked Anushtup, with studied incredulity.

‘No. You get to move on, once you finish. You don’t wake up…not in the sense you are expecting to.’

‘Aaah. So if I don’t wake up, what happens after it’s done?’

‘You get to become a Yatrik.’‘Yatrik? That’s Sanskrit for traveller, isn’t it?’

the game 25

The man nodded. Anushtup was going to make another wise-crack about HR but thought the better of it. Mostly because he had already done it a while ago. But it did sound romantic to him.

Yatrik. The traveller.He wondered where he had heard that word

before. He must have. Else why would it have come into this dream?

The man looked lost, deep in thought. Silence settled on them like light snowflakes.

And then he spoke again.‘Have you ever wanted to know what happens

to your life when you are not looking?’