Strike@36 by Aparna Pednekar

Author:Aparna Pednekar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

13

Slumdog Slayer

‘Is he backward class?’

Sagar and AK had got off to an ominous start.

It was fifteen months since Sho and Uday had parted ways in acrimony. Uday’s exit from her life had brought Sho face-to-face with the nastiest of her inner demons. After two decades of dating hamster-slashing weirdos and intensely creative egomaniacs, she’d met the man of her dreams and successfully managed to screw it up.

Benji called it The Curse of the American Sitcom – a defence mechanism ingrained in single urban Indians past partying age, regardless of gender. ‘We’ve lost the plot, baby,’ he’d wail. ‘Dysfunctionality is so last season. Europe has returned to romance, but we’re still trailing the Yankees, scared of settling for love.’ Benji could be cruelly ironical, considering that he himself was in a steady relationship with an American lawyer. But Sho saw his point.

Like mathematicians, writers live in very dangerous places inside their heads.

When Uday left Zenith for the movie business, Sho was scared shitless. Struggling to get her script to see the light of day was emotionally draining to begin with, to have her lover and soon-to-be husband as a potential producer, or yet another rejecter, was gut-wrenching. To add terror to fear, for once in her life, it seemed love was overshadowing work. So she did what any self-respecting woman in love would have done – she threw love out with the cup of coffee.

Post-Uday, the script assumed gigantic proportions, scorning, rebuking her. She abhorred the peddling, the pitching, the egos, the psychos. The more she got embroiled in that circus, the more she craved a stable life with Uday, Roja and a lovely journalism career. Then, promptly, she hated herself for being an unstable, indecisive prick. Six months after Udayan left Mumbai, she met a funny, good-looking banker. They had two memorable dates and a romantic night at her place. The sex was fantastic and the momentum just right. In the intervening period between Udayan’s departure and Arindam’s entry, she had been vigorously courted by a rakish art house director, which didn’t work out because in the throes of a sexting avalanche, she realized that his texts ate the vowels. Arindam, on the other hand, was perfect, linguistically and otherwise. Everything went great for two months. But on their fourth night home, Roja had a change of heart and went straight for Arindam’s groin – in a very vicious fashion – chasing him from living room to bedroom, until he got rather vexed. Their fifth to seventh dates were spent at his pet-free Bandra pad. On the eighth date, just after dinner, Sho felt the first stirrings of something she’d never felt – maternal guilt at having abandoned Roja. The brief and passionate love story died a natural death.

One day, Sho was in the RAA toilet, where she had taken to attending the ranting sessions of the chain-smoking marketing head, Priyanka. They were sitting on the sparkly red platform, pumping the moisturiser dispensers and discussing Priyanka’s perilous BP, when one of the peons banged on the door.

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