Buffering Love Read online

  ISSAC JOHN

  BUFFERING LOVE

  Stories from the App Store

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Launched

  Video Star

  Email à Trois

  Winner Takes All

  Smart Lass and Daft Watch

  Short and Tweet

  Shop Now

  Last Seen

  Welcome Home

  Lights, Camera, Cut

  Run, Zelda, Run

  Beyond Words

  An Offer to Remember

  Table for One

  Home Delivered

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN METRO READS

  BUFFERING LOVE

  Issac John is a consumer marketing professional who turned to writing when a childhood dream surfaced far too often and he landed in New York to study screenwriting. On his return, he wore multiple hats of a columnist, teacher, Uber driver and consultant on the side while trying to hustle his way through a few manuscripts and screenplays. He counts Woody Allen, Jeffrey Archer, O’Henry, Hergé, Rajat Kapoor, Sai Paranjpe, David Mamet and Aaron Sorkin among his primary influences.

  Prior to pursuing writing, Issac led the marketing team at PUMA India for four years. It was a job he loved dearly and his experiences there include sharing cookies with Roy Hodgson in the Directors’ Box at the Emirates Stadium—the home of Arsenal Football Club, catching a beer with Usain Bolt and discussing the Ashes with Sachin Tendulkar. Notwithstanding these distractions, in 2015, Pitch magazine named Issac one of the Top 10 Young Marketers in India.

  Issac currently heads marketing for HealthifyMe, one of India’s leading health and fitness apps. He stays in Bengaluru with his wife and they both yearn to adopt a golden retriever and name him Captain Haddock.

  For my father, John K. Mathew, and his benign smile

  ‘Philip Morris just wanted your lungs.

  The App Store wants your soul . . .’

  Bill Maher

  Launched

  Kabir loved stopping by Amy’s place before going home every weekday. It was an escape he looked forward to indulging in after navigating the lows of being a start-up entrepreneur through the day.

  They coordinated their rendezvous hours through a steady stream of messages on WhatsApp. Amy donned the hat of Principal at the hallowed venture capital firm of Lower Valley Capital that had recently set up operations in India. Meeting new entrepreneurs and assessing their business prospects was an everyday job for her. It was at the wedding of a common friend that she had first met Kabir—the young entrepreneur who was greying faster than most twenty-eight-year-olds.

  Kabir, who was looking for his next round of funding, behaved like the perfect gentleman when he got Amy a dinner plate before taking one himself. As she extended her hand to take the plate, she thanked him. ‘Let me wipe this for you with a napkin. The more extravagant a wedding appears, the worse the dinner plates,’ he said.

  Amy’s perfect cheekbones sparkled with a pleasant smile at the unexpected gesture. ‘And how many such wedding dinners have you been to?’

  ‘Just one. Mine. Hated the plates but only saw them last minute. Wish they were cleaner. I am Kabir, by the way.’ And that’s how they ended up conversing late into the night. It helped that they were both without their respective partners.

  Though Amy’s firm was looking for new start-ups to invest in, she nipped Kabir’s well-intentioned informal pitch over dinner with a curt response.

  ‘We aren’t looking to invest in media start-ups. The content boom was over two years ago. We are looking for cutting-edge innovations in education and health,’ she proffered. After this, Kabir didn’t say a word about his video content-based start-up called Play.

  From her experience of dealing with Indian entrepreneurs so far, Amy thought Kabir would’ve ended the conversation there and moved on to his larger group of friends. It was the nature of her position that inevitably attracted attention from entrepreneurs. But once she turned down their propositions of funding needs, Amy observed that most Indian entrepreneurs didn’t have the basic courtesy to even end the conversation on a friendly note.

  In contrast to her experience in Silicon Valley, she had found the approach of Indian entrepreneurs to be completely transactional in nature. Kabir was a welcome change. He seemed interested in Amy’s experiences of settling down in Mumbai. When she laughed at his silly observations of Mumbai’s entrepreneurial playground, Kabir found himself drawn to her even more.

  He gave her a list of bars to frequent, the best quaint coffee shops to have informal meetings in and little-known French bakeries spread around Khar and Bandra that served exquisite bread. Most importantly, he told her the whereabouts of a secret film club that he loved visiting on weekends. ‘They have rare world cinema screenings on request. I’d be happy to take you there, if you want to go some time,’ he suggested.

  Amy loved only one thing more than her job, and that was discovering and rediscovering works of some of the world’s greatest film-makers.

  ‘I am going to take you up on that offer sooner than you know.’ Her eyes sparkled.

  When he walked Amy to her taxi that night, his hand grazed against her back that had bared itself rather invitingly with a little help from a black, sleeveless blouse. They both felt more than a flicker of raw inexplicable attraction, but there were too many common friends in sight who knew they were both married. They exchanged numbers with a promise to meet at the film club that weekend.

  The next morning, Kabir received another refusal from a VC firm that, with its overtures of a multitude of data requests and presentations over the past three months, had seemed particularly keen to invest in Play. Crushed to bits, the only thought that sprang to his mind was to get away from work that evening. He told his twenty-member team that he was taking time off to focus on his next presentation over the weekend. What he wanted to do was to go to Qwench, his favourite quiet hotspot in a tiny lane in Bandra, and drink himself silly.

  As he drove to Bandra from Juhu, he received a WhatsApp message from Amy. ‘Hey, had a terrible week. Need to get away. When do you think we can go for the next screening at that film club?’

  The message took him by surprise. So much so that while taking a turn near Juhu beach, he nearly ran over what looked like a pedigreed chocolate-brown Labrador. The poor thing scurried away as Kabir applied the brakes in the nick of time. He parked his car towards the side and wrote back. ‘It won’t happen until Saturday afternoon. But if you like, I can come over with a Wong Kar-wai gem and a Californian red.’

  ‘You are on. 7.30 p.m.,’ she replied, appending her address to the message.

  Her home, as luck would have it, was right next to Qwench. In ten minutes, with a Cabernet Sauvignon by his side, he was at her doorstep. She was wearing red overalls that reached her knees and sported a tinge of lipstick.

  ‘Hey, that was quick!’

  ‘I was just around the corner near Qwench, the bar, if you know it?’

  ‘I don’t. Do tell.’

  ‘First, let’s uncork this.’

  The uncorking nearly undid their evening as the stubborn cork refused to part amicably from the bottle. When it finally fell apart in crumbs on the table, Kabir gently wiped off the remnants with one hand and let the crushed pieces fall on his other hand.

  ‘Are you generally this particular, or is this a particular obsession?’

  ‘A mess is not my idea of a good evening,’ he replied. ‘Let’s sit outside in the balcony.’

  They carried their glasses to the balcony and settled themselves amid the din of a city that wouldn’t stop driving itself to its dreams. For the next few hours, Kabir and Amy bared their aspi
rations, fears and insecurities like two childhood friends meeting after a long time.

  He spoke of his deep-seated ambition to make Play the definitive platform for short-form content in India. She spoke of her drive to expand business in India for Lower Valley Capital over the next five years with her newly assigned portfolios of health and education.

  Amy saw in Kabir a spark that she had seen in many an entrepreneur in the Valley and in India. Except Kabir’s had more of a childlike zeal, like a six-year-old with dreams to row his giant paper boat on a lake.

  ‘In five years, long-form content as we know it in the form of two-hour films and hour-long television dramas will be wiped out. What will thrive is the genre of micro-stories, let’s say sub-ten-minute content—films, music videos, fan-generated fiction, micro-blogs and what-not,’ Kabir asserted.

  ‘What’s the maximum number of views you have had on any single video?’

  ‘Anywhere between 3,00,000 and 4,00,000.’

  ‘I agree with you. I think it’s a great concept. What you probably also need right now is a tipping point, a video that helps you hit a million-plus views in a day. I have seen this in the US. The likes of BuzzFeed and Vice grew overnight because something went viral and then, of course, they got their formula right consistently.’

  ‘What I need right now is for the desktop and mobile versions of Play to move to an app on iOS and Android Play Store. That’s what I need the money for. If only someone in the VC community could see what I see.’

  He stared into the blank night that lay before him and downed the last bit from his glass before asking her without a segue, ‘Do you miss being alone here?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I have a wife here and yet this feels like such a lonely battle. This city subsumes you. I was wondering where that leaves you with your husband away in San Francisco.’

  ‘Well, I do at times. But Rohan and I are very clear about what we want to do with our lives. He is running a cybersecurity firm out of the Valley right now, and I had this excellent opportunity to set up Lower Valley Capital here. We both needed to do this for our careers, and if a little distance was the price to pay, so be it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call the distance between San Francisco and Mumbai “little”, but I get it,’ he said with a smile.

  Their eyes met for the first time after a relentless rush of conversation. Since he had stepped into her house, their inquisitiveness for each other had got the better of time. Her dark eyes now bore a hint of a drunkenness that excited him.

  Without notice, he leaned over and held her by the waist. She moved forward and sunk her lips into his. They didn’t speak much for the next few hours.

  Kabir left at 4 a.m. and bid her goodbye with a promise to meet again the next day.

  For the next three months, whenever time permitted, they would go back to her balcony. Their meetings had no schedule. A no-fuss text of ‘Free tonight?’ would decide the course of their rendezvous.

  They always texted each other back instantly. There was an unerring rhythm to their exchanges. ‘You know what I like about you the best?’ she asked him one night.

  ‘My gruff voice,’ he played along.

  ‘No, the fact that when we text each other, I know we are thinking of each other. I hate transactional messages. There’s always more to our messages than what meets the eye. I don’t look at you as a transaction.’

  ‘But isn’t every conversation a transaction? I mean not ours, but most of the day, that’s what I deal in and yours isn’t any different.’

  ‘It isn’t different, but it’s worse for us. People keep coming to us for funds. Every conversation has a follow-up and when we lose interest, they don’t strive to make any connection beyond the funds we bring to the table. It’s like without our money, we are not people enough to be friends with. That’s why I liked you that night.’

  ‘What did I do?’

  ‘You didn’t go away with your friends even after I said that Lower Valley Capital won’t have any funds for Play. You continued the conversation.’

  ‘Anyone would’ve been a fool to go away from that conversation about films.’

  ‘And yet you will be surprised how many people do.’

  ‘That’s because they are idiots.’

  ‘Oh, I know they are,’ she said and opened her mouth to plunge her tongue between his wide lips once again.

  Just then, Amy’s phone vibrated. It was a call from Rohan.

  ‘I have to take this,’ she said.

  ‘When have I stopped you?’ Kabir said without batting an eyelid as he caressed her neck.

  Rohan had called to check if Amy’s trip to San Francisco the following month was confirmed. Amy was having a difficult time focusing on the call, with Kabir’s hands sliding inside her red top and tracing a curvy line all the way up to the hooks of her bra.

  She could’ve used her hands to indicate Kabir to stop. Instead, she put on her earphones and clutched Kabir’s wavy hair with her hands. She continued to kiss him while Rohan quickly gave her a set of dates that he would prefer for her to come to San Francisco. She threw her phone on the vacant cane chair the moment the call ended and started unbuttoning Kabir.

  The number of wine bottles consumed every night increased gradually. Sometimes, they simply watched a Netflix film and went off to sleep. He would leave post-midnight or thereabouts. The fact that both of them had a working spouse went in their favour. Neither was emotionally invested enough yet to worry about larger consequences. This was a getaway, a vacation of an evening, each time. But in each other, they found a partner who could listen endlessly without prejudice and that’s all that mattered.

  One evening, an uncharacteristically chirpy Kabir called Amy. ‘You won’t believe what happened today.’

  ‘Did you close a funding round?’ She had never heard him so elated.

  ‘I will tell you in person. Do you have time before your San Francisco flight?’

  ‘We can meet at the airport.’

  ‘Done. Starbucks, 11 p.m. Will see you there.’

  Amy was already soothing herself with a cappuccino when Kabir walked in with a spring in his step. They hugged each other as they normally did. Even before they could sit, Kabir took his mobile phone out to show Amy a video.

  ‘See the number of views?’

  Amy looked at the number and, despite her strong background with numbers, took another look at the digits below a dog video posted on the Play website.

  ‘Am I reading it right? Twelve million views!’

  ‘That’s correct. And it’s not even been twenty-four hours. This is some girl in Mumbai and her chocolate-brown Labrador whom she clearly trained to use the flush. A fan-generated two-minute clip, and it’s rocking our numbers today. Our organic registrations went through the roof!’ Kabir couldn’t stop gushing.

  ‘That’s quite something.’

  ‘It’s the tipping point. Your words. Remember? The one thing that tips the scales. I had been thinking about it and had recently added a section where fans could upload videos with their pets. The initial days saw no traction and suddenly the thing zoomed off. Last month we did 5,00,000-plus views on two cat videos. But this is a different beast altogether.’

  Amy had never seen Kabir this enthused even about a Wong Kar-wai film. She was happy for him. She wanted to tell him that she was going to make a case for a funding for Play in any case, knowing so much about Kabir’s business now.

  She hadn’t told him yet as it was a long shot. If anything, this new fan-generated section would only help make her case stronger with her boss, Marc Grazer. There was something in Kabir’s happiness that made her happy. She almost wanted to lead his funding round, but she kept a calm demeanour. For the next hour, she continued to ask more questions about Play’s specific financial models.

  Before she left, she had a work request for him for the first time. ‘Why don’t you send me your latest pitch presentation along with your business plan for
the next three years. I will bounce it off a few people in the Valley and see if anyone wants to talk business with you.’

  This was an unexpected bounty for Kabir, the cherry on the cake on a day like this. They kissed each other goodbye like two lovers who weren’t meant to be.

  Over the next two weeks, Amy accompanied Marc, a flamboyant Valley entrepreneur, on a bunch of meetings he had lined up for her. She also spent time taking him through some of her initial groundwork on the health and education sectors in India. Marc was thoroughly impressed. Towards the end, she mentioned Play’s recent tryst with content videos.

  Marc, who had seen everything in the US, wasn’t in the least bit impressed with yet another video content player. But he knew this was India and the price was likely to be cheap, very cheap.

  ‘What do you think their closing ask is?’

  ‘Play’s pitch deck says 3 million USD, but I think they’d close for 2 million USD.’

  That amount was peanuts for Marc. He only had one more question, ‘And you like the entrepreneur’s drive and vision?’

  ‘I haven’t seen anyone with so much zeal. Not even in the Valley. I can set up a meeting if this is of interest.’

  ‘Are you nuts, Amy? I am not allocating any time for a two-million deal. But if you are convinced, go ahead and close it. India’s bandwidth speeds will only increase and more and more people are going to consume video. I can take that bet on the market.’

  Amy was thrilled for Kabir. What she had said about Kabir was true and he deserved the investment.

  She wanted to tell Marc that she knew the entrepreneur only too well, and that she wouldn’t want to lead the round for reasons of conflict of interest. But she thought it best to save it for later. She also had her hands full with a few education and health tech start-ups and would’ve anyway needed to transfer Play’s deal to a colleague.

  Amy was also able to spend a good amount of time with Rohan. Knowing that she was going to be in town, he had taken time off work and prepared breakfast every day for her. Most days, as she munched the organic muesli and wolfed down the eggs, her thoughts continued to veer towards Kabir.