pixabay.com

The streets of Hyderabad were bathed in honeyed tones from the brightly lit sodium lights in its many suburban neighbourhoods. As I went deeper and deeper in, from the light-streaked, store-lined highway to the darker in-roads of the old residential colonies and, still, into other shadowed roads that seemed to lead nowhere, the night seemed to be stripped off of its many passing visitors. I was one of them: searching futilely for an old, two-star hotel tucked away in the annals of old-world splendour.

This didn’t seem right.

It didn’t seem like a place for any hotel to be found in, and certainly not a place where infrequent friends would meet for a large party. I looked at my watch and deliberated. The map on my phone was clearly wrong and I made a mental note to tell the hotel to change the location on the map in case any other girl who travelled alone should share the fear of being in an auto at 8 o’ clock in deserted corners. I stopped the auto and asked the turbaned owner of a small shack on the road for the right address.

The answer seemed to always be “Aage se right!”

We found the side gate to the hotel further ahead but I huffed and puffed in anger for not having taken the better populated main gate. I seemed to be dancing with danger more often than not these days. I walked into the venue smilingly. I had dressed well-- black, skinny trousers and a delicate red top. I was confident and I was excited. These were friends who were just as reckless as I: full of questions and abound in secrets.

I knew them all.

I was much younger when we met and so, perhaps, they didn’t recognize me. We were all part of an oratory club who loved chai-powered discussions on Saturday evenings. Most of us had used the word bourgeoisie in our speeches, though not all of us were communists, and we were, in a way, the intellectual bourgeoisie of this town. We loved calling each other out on our belief systems and it was, so often, a battle of the extremes. It had a certain charm to it-- these feverish discussions of like-minded individuals who split away later in the night with cigarettes between their fingers into neon-lit bars to wind up with the very person they argued with.

Sometimes we were the moth seeking the flame, other times we were undoubtedly the flame. 

At twenty-one, I was one of the youngest there and found myself searching for other twenty-year-olds in the crowd. But Ada and Rishi, the only two who were my age, were engaged in a conversation with the hotel staff over the dinner arrangement and, so, I found myself speaking to the lawyers and the entrepreneurs and the professors without really feeling like one of them. You see, they had known each other for much longer than I, and considered me a woman-child for all purposes. As I kept an eye out for a familiar face, I noticed a few visitors come in: Raga and Roshini walked onto the grassy courtyard where the party was organized. I went over to meet them only to find Roshini excuse herself to take on a few responsibilities at the dinner.

Raga was new to the club. She was invited to the party because she was one of us in spirit if not in fact. A quiet girl, to begin with, she seemed to be more out of place than I was. She stood stiffly. Her hands were drawn to her body as if all the space in the world that was over two centimetres away was too foreign to venture into. When I was with her, I felt gregarious. She was quiet, calm, and curious. She would draw out my experiences until I was exhausted. She was wise. Before I knew it, I was seeking her out for her judgment on my everyday travails. We took to each other like any two girls who knew each other to be curious but, even more so, to be flawed.

I grinned at her widely. We both acknowledged that there were too many people here whom we didn’t know well enough. I shared my sparse knowledge of the few I did. Soon, Roshini joined the mini party and this completed the circle of the clueless three. Roshini was younger than me by a year and yet, somehow seemed very profound. In those days, I cherished the company of ambitious girls greatly because I felt, somehow, like we were sisters on a mission. The club was fifty years old-- as long as the movement for a separate statehood which had, painfully, only recently become a reality-- and in all the many years that the club had hosted politically and philosophically-charged conversations, the number of women who had spoken out were only a handful. Yet, the women here stood ten-feet tall, carried a clear head on their shoulders, and clinked away with a chai full of hope.

Soon, Avinash and Shivam joined. Avinash was a lanky graduate who always looked like a boy who had grown up too quickly because of his tall, thin frame. Shivam was a fair, contemplative friend of mine whom I had known for many years. He never looked the same thanks to his frequent experiments with how he looked. We knew each other too well and masked the uneasiness of close friendships gone sour with short meetings and loud half-jokes. Beers changed hands-- once, twice, and again. Voices rose-- higher, higher and higher.

“Is there going to be a speech or something?”

“Nah, I think this is it. There’s liquor and there’s food, that’s all that matters anyway.”

“Should we be going around and introducing ourselves?”

The waiter came over with starters and everyone swung in for a piece. “Nah, I think we’re good.”

In a little over fifteen minutes, the party became the first adult cocktail party that I had ever attended-- an advantage which only a few of us with liberal parents had previously experienced. Some of the older members had brought their children and they didn’t bat an eye-lid when their children raided the liquor counter in front of them. The crowd broke up into groups of roughly the same age-- Married men and women, unmarried older men, and undergraduates. The groups became amoeboid and raised eyebrows when they broke up.

“Oh! Rajeev’s ex-wife is here. Looks like they aren’t talking to each other. I guess that’s how we’re going to be twenty years from now, Avinash,” I joked. He laughed, “Close call!”

The uneasiness dissolved momentarily and we hung out again as friends. Another group caught eyeballs as Ada took long drags from a cigarette in one hand, and held a drink in the other. She was talking away with a much older man and grew louder and leaned closer with every drink.

“Do you think she’s ok?” I asked Raga in a whisper as I saw Ada drunkenly laugh at some joke which the man had made.

“I can’t say. I haven’t spoken to her much since I came here,” Raga proclaimed quietly.

“You don’t drink?” I asked her.

She guffawed. “You know me.”

The crowd had died down and the only ones left were gawking over beer. Nishant drunkenly asked Raga how she would be going home.

“I have my parents picking me up soon,” Raga responded.

“I see. Will we see you more often at the club then?” he chanced.

She evaded an answer, “Oh, I don’t know. You know how late it gets and I stay so far away.”

Rishi chimed in, “Oh, you can tell Nishant that your parents won’t let you come.”

Nishant’s face changed completely. He launched a tirade at Raga. “Of course you can come! You’re a grown woman now. It’s your decision. This is outrageous! I can guess how your parents are like. Controlling and old-fashioned, aren’t they? You said they’re coming, didn’t you? You know what, I’m gonna talk to them. I’m gonna tell them what I think. I’m gonna give them a piece of my mind.” He took another chug from his glass of beer as Raga looked at him ashen-faced. Rishi gave us an apologetic smile. 

“When are they coming?” the drunken Nishant pushed on.

Raga couldn’t utter a single word. The blood had run out of her face and she looked from Nishant to Rishi, wondering if this was serious.

I looked at her, “Do you want to take a walk?”

“Yeah, I think that’s not a bad idea.”

She got up slowly and I gave Rishi a look that suggested that he better watch over Nishant. I ask her, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she says quietly. I wait for her and she says, “... I was just so afraid.” She mutters under her breath, “... so afraid.”

“Everything okay at home?”

She was still in shock as she spoke in a daze, “They don’t know. They don’t know how hard it is to make things go our way.”

I could see that she was shaken and upset. She continued, “I can’t even introduce my friends to my parents right now because they’re so bloody drunk and stinking of cigarettes. It doesn’t matter that I don’t do it, no. One whiff of alcohol and they go berserk. They take away all my privileges, they bar me from meeting my friends. It’s so suffocating.”

She looks at me almost pleadingly, “So suffocating, you know?”

I nod my head understandingly.

We made our way to the marble steps at the entry of the courtyard. Then, we sat there. We just sat there in a dark pool of our mistakes, our almost ever after, our almost new beginnings. We sat there feeling dirty about our silly dreams. We wondered if it was so wrong to be curious. We wondered if it was so wrong to make mistakes. Was it so wrong to breathe the air of novelty, of freedom, of catharsis?

Everything was too much, too bright, too loud, too vast. Too much of skin, too bright a smile, too loud a person, too vast a hope. And so we looked on silently at the parking lot as the cars left us behind and we were the solitary beings of the night. Again, the night seemed to be stripped off of its many passing visitors and we were left behind. We sat there hoping, fervently, that our quiet presence was finally not too big a burden for this loud, distraught city.