Buffering Love Page 9

  He shook Gopal’s hand and stood up to leave. Just then Pervez’s eyes darted towards the exit and settled on a familiar face. He rushed towards the door.

  Debbie, whose picture Dhara could identify from her exchanges on e-mail, was walking into Cress Bistro in an off-white loose dress that was nearly sweeping the floor. Nature had bestowed on Debbie that glow expectant mothers carry. She walked inside slowly even as Pervez reached out to give her a hand. She didn’t perhaps need it but lovingly accepted his hand.

  Gopal and Dhara both stood up as Pervez and Debbie made their way across to their table.

  ‘I had explicitly told her to not make the effort, but that’s Debbie for you. She will do anything for her guests.’ Pervez looked at Gopal and Dhara.

  Dhara gave Debbie a warm hug.

  ‘Guys, I wanted to reach out personally and thank you for being so kind and patient. But we are all set now,’ Debbie reassured them. ‘I have spoken to the deputy director of the Municipal Corporation and explained that I listed on Airbnb the day Akash passed away. It keeps a little saving going for the baby and they should consider my case differently. They have agreed to reopen the hearing next month. Everything is sorted now. The good news is you guys are welcome anytime and Pervez can help you with the luggage.’

  Gopal and Dhara were relieved to hear this.

  ‘Well, thank you for the offer. And we have heard your side of the story now. Big relief to know that it’s all set but we’ve already looked up another apartment, you know. I mean it’s our first trip to New Delhi together and just in case those officials come back again, Dhara and I don’t want to be stuck in a courthouse. Or to be honest with you, even indulge in a conversation with them,’ Gopal said.

  Debbie was a little taken aback with the decision but gathered herself admirably.

  ‘Oh well, okay. If that’s your decision it doesn’t matter. But, Dhara, tell me where you are staying, all right? I will still take you to the markets we spoke about. It’s going to be fun, let me tell you that,’ Debbie said with a hint of sadness.

  ‘Absolutely! I have your number and will call you once we settle in. Let’s see. Today is Monday, tomorrow we are at Connaught Place. How about Wednesday? I will pack off Gopal to Qutub Minar maybe and I can step out with you?’ Dhara said.

  ‘That’s perfect! Oh gosh, I think I need to go to the loo,’ Debbie excused herself.

  Pervez stood up to escort Debbie to the restroom.

  ‘See, I told you, it’s all going to be good,’ Dhara said.

  ‘Whatever. Not the finest experience, is all,’ a grumpy Gopal babbled.

  Pervez came back to the table. ‘I am glad it all got sorted out. Debbie might want to hang out here for some more time with you guys. I need to leave to deal with some of the legal stuff. Just one last thing, I know you guys have been very patient with us,’ he said. ‘I feel horrible saying this but Debbie doesn’t know about me not having a job, so if you could keep the bit about my offer of one night and the Rs 5000 to yourself . . . I mean if it’s not too much to ask.’

  ‘Oh, oh, sure Pervez, no problem,’ Gopal said. He was glad that this was all coming to an end.

  ‘Thanks so much, guys! Really appreciate it.’

  Suddenly, a loud cry was heard from the restroom. Pervez scurried towards it. He came out in less than thirty seconds without Debbie by his side.

  ‘Her water broke,’ Pervez was nervous. ‘We have to take her to the hospital. Could you please help and call a cab, Gopal?’ Pervez asked. ‘I am going to get her out of the restroom,’ he said in the same breath.

  The other waiting staff too sprang into action. A couple of them ran out with Gopal to flag an auto on the main road.

  Pervez, a face of desperation by now, turned towards Dhara. ‘This year has been really tough. I am sorry to ask you like this but we were really banking on the Rs 20,000 from you folks. Could you please at least lend me Rs 5000 to take her to the hospital?’

  ‘Of course,’ Dhara opened her purse and ruffled through her cash. She handed over ten crisp notes of Rs 500 each. ‘You sure this will be enough?’ she checked with Pervez.

  Pervez had tears in his eyes. No one had ever treated him with such generosity. ‘You are a godsend, Dhara. Thank you so very much.’ He rushed back towards the restroom and slowly walked out with Debbie completely hanging over him this time, her face red with agony.

  Dhara rushed to help. ‘Anyone have a wheelchair here? It will really help,’ she screamed in perfect Tamilian English in a restaurant full of Delhiites.

  In an instant, someone got hold of one and placed it in front of Debbie. She settled in the wheelchair with pain writ all over her being. In the meantime, a cab was ready at the entrance of Cress Bistro.

  It took some time for Debbie to settle in completely. She was writhing in pain.

  Pervez went over to Dhara and Gopal and held their hands. ‘Thank you so much. This will stay with us for a lifetime. If you guys are around, would love for you to come and see our baby. We will be at the Saket Maternity Ward. See you guys, and more importantly, happy holidays!’

  ‘Good luck, Debbie, Pervez,’ screamed Dhara. ‘It will be fine.’

  ‘Oh, I sure hope so,’ Debbie convulsed with pain in the cab.

  ‘Have you thought of enough boy and girl names? This is so exciting.’

  ‘I will message you or call you. I promise,’ Debbie’s eyes were nearly closing.

  The taxi sped off.

  ‘What a town, this Delhi!’ sighed Dhara. ‘So much drama in so little time.’

  ‘I know!’ a relieved Gopal said. ‘Time to get back to our tacos.’

  They went in, hand in hand, perhaps a little more in love with each other than from an hour before.

  A month later, Prof. Albert Costanza at the National School of Drama addressed the 2017 summer graduation batch in a room full of students and acclaimed professors.

  ‘Great performances demand meticulous preparation, which in itself impels a merciless dedication to our craft. And then comes the denouement which, if it is anything less than flawless, could make the whole thing fall apart like a stack of cards. As great a cradle for acting as the hallowed walls of this institution can be, it still requires real men and women to go out there and perform often without gratuity but just so that the human soul is shaken with empathy. And for doing that, the winner of this year’s Abraham Alkazi Scholarship for Outstanding Live Experimental Theatre goes to . . .’

  A deafening applause filled the National School of Drama auditorium as Vikramjeet, Basant, Pervez and Debbie stood up to head towards the stage.

  A week later, Dhara received a deposit of Rs 5000 in her bank account from an unknown sender. ‘This must be nice, sweet and prompt Debbie,’ she told Gopal. ‘I knew she would return the money, even though she never told me what they named their child.’

  While this story is fictionalized, it is based on a real-life incident that happened with me and my wife as we were checking into our Airbnb pad on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. We had just offloaded our luggage, when the municipal inspectors turned up requesting to take photographs of us entering the apartment so that those could be used against the landlady. She was eight months pregnant at the time.

  Airbnb was more than kind to refund the money when we wrote to them about the issue.

  Lights, Camera, Cut

  ‘How will I know whom to sell DVDs to?’ Budhia, the security guard at the hallowed National School of Drama vented his ire to Mohanty, the tea vendor. Budhia was particularly incensed because of the newly received missive from Prof. Albert Costanza of the Alternative Films and Theatre Division fame.

  He continued, ‘The normal scrap-metal guys here have no use for DVDs. And this professor has been after my life to create space for new journals in the library.’

  Mohanty, who was more interested in selling an extra cup of tea, pretended to empathize with a couple of nods. ‘Should I fill one more cup? This time with extra cardamom,’ he egged Bu
dhia.

  ‘No, bhai. One cup during the day only. Anyway, you please ask around if any of your guys can take some 500 DVDs from here. The professor will practically give them away for free.’

  ‘What does one do with these DVDs?’ Mohanty asked.

  ‘These are films, very good films, but not like the ones that you and I watch. These are international films. Old but very good. One can rent them and make some extra money on the side. Will help if you know your films,’ Budhia said, savouring the last gulp from his glass. Mohanty’s tea was a stellar brew.

  Mohanty bid goodbye to Budhia and went on his way towards the next road where his patrons from various government offices descended at 11 a.m. every day for mid-morning tea. This is where he made most of his money. The visit to Budhia was purely a ceremonial start to his day. There were no more than a handful of customers at the National School of Drama, but he liked talking to the whiny Budhia. There was always something wrong with his life that Budhia couldn’t wait to talk about.

  That June 2008 night, while Mohanty counted his savings for the year, he thought it was time to invest in a new business. The conversation around DVDs and starting a rental shop wasn’t a bad one, he deduced. For months now, Mohanty’s friend Jagannath had been persuading him to start a cigarette stall near Regal in Connaught Place.

  ‘Customers keep floating all through the day. Not like your tea business, where you must drag your cycle along,’ Jagannath reasoned with Mohanty.

  Since he was familiar with Regal, Mohanty knew many people who would come and watch English films in Connaught Place. The thought that he could rent a corner shop near Regal and run his tea business alongside was worth considering. Besides, his fifteen-year-old Atlas cycle was getting creakier by the day and Jagannath had promised to find a corner shop for under Rs 15,000 per month.

  ‘Imagine how much time you will save if you don’t have to travel from office to office,’ Jagannath said.

  ‘But right now, I don’t have any rent expense, Jaggan. If I take the spot, I can’t do only the tea business from there. For the new extra rent, I will have to find a new business to add to my tea vending,’ Mohanty declared.

  The next morning, he went to see Jagannath in Connaught Place with the proposition of starting a DVD-renting business. ‘Sounds like a great idea. I know how many DVDs sell in Palika Bazaar every month. It’s a superb business. Don’t lose a moment on this and get them all.’

  That’s all the encouragement Mohanty needed to land up at the National School of Drama the next morning to see his friend Budhia.

  ‘Hand me the DVDs. I will take them,’ Mohanty said to a perplexed Budhia.

  Budhia was happy that his problem of clearing the DVDs was out of his way. He had been asking people around for over a week and Mohanty was the only one who had come back to take away the DVDs.

  Budhia led him from the entrance of the imposing building towards a third-floor room that was uncomfortably muggy. Like an old library, long rows of bookshelves ran from one end of the room to the other. Columns of dusty DVDs that looked like they hadn’t been touched in ages stood in wait for a redeemer and here was Mohanty.

  Budhia took Mohanty through the various sections that were segregated per language. English, French, Hindi, Bengali. Overall, Budhia pegged the number at 474 DVDs. Mohanty ran his fingers against some of those and tried recollecting some of those films. But except a handful of Amitabh Bachchan titles, Mohanty recognized none of the others.

  ‘Are these any good? I see no Dharmendra or Vinod Khanna in here,’ he was reconsidering his decision now.

  ‘What the hell you talking about? People would kill for this collection. Look at this,’ Budhia pulled out a tape from the French section. ‘This is Godard’s entire collection and this is Breathless, his most famous film. Your customers would go crazy. What more can you ask for?’

  Mohanty had never heard the name Godard before.

  ‘If these are so good, why do you need to get rid of them?’

  ‘I told you, the new professor wants to bring some new journals. He is also getting some new format called Blu-Ray for these films. Better looking for students, he says.’

  ‘How much do you want for the whole thing?’

  ‘I don’t know. Whatever you think is the right price.’

  Jagannath had told Mohanty not to give anything more than thousand rupees for the collection.

  ‘Five hundred rupees. That’s it. I don’t have more than that and I will have to do two rounds in an auto. That’s extra expense for me. Besides, my friend tells me it will be expensive to find a place to sell these DVDs,’ Mohanty meandered.

  ‘All yours!’ Budhia gleamed with a victorious smile.

  Mohanty dragged the DVDs in six different gunny sacks to his modest dwelling near Mandi House. He laid these on his bed and on the floor and arranged the titles in alphabetical order. Next, he and Jagannath found a place for displaying these titles right next to Regal.

  At a rent of Rs 15,000, and well within a week of his first conversation with Budhia about the DVD’s, Mohanty was all set with his DVD store, which he named ‘Stories’, with a large poster of Jean-Luc Godard on the adjoining pillar. It was a throwaway handed by Budhia from the archives. ‘This poster toh people will go mad for, take it from me,’ said a boastful Budhia.

  The first morning, as he was setting up the DVDs with this poster outside his makeshift shop, a granny walking with her twin granchildren waved out to him. He waved back. He couldn’t hear what she was saying from the other end of the road so one of the twins crossed the road to speak to Mohanty.

  ‘Nana is asking if you have a Godard film called Breathless,’ the child asked.

  Without blinking an eyelid, Mohanty replied, ‘I most definitely do.’

  Over the next month, with a little word here and there, and especially with the walk-in crowd around Regal, Mohanty rented out over 300 films. Every morning between 10–11 a.m., old people from the neighbourhood thronged outside his shop and discussed films to rent out from Stories. He charged a full Rs 100 for each DVD. He thought he could always reduce the price if customers didn’t buy, but this was Central Delhi. Customers came in droves.

  The next month the local edition of Mid-Day listed his store as a DVD library for great old classics. Suddenly, Stories became the cynosure of Connaught Place. Mohanty hired an assistant to keep track of all the deliveries. While his old Atlas cycle still came in handy, he bought a new one for his assistant.

  One of his customers, a Mrs Roy, whose teenage grandchild Akash loved all sorts of obscure films, offered to find him a slightly bigger place as the pedestrian traffic wasn’t conducive to good discussions around films. In exchange, Akash asked that Mrs Roy be allowed to borrow any DVD anytime for free. Mohanty agreed. He began to spend more time now in his newly instituted DVD business than tea-making. A month later, a new store was inaugurated across the road from Regal with an even bigger signage of Stories.

  Mohanty bought a DVD player for himself and started enjoying some of the recommended classics by his customers. Films by renowned film-makers both from India and abroad, Sai Paranjpe, Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock were raging hits among his customers. Next, he wanted to understand Hollywood films better, so Mohanty started English lessons with a nearby coaching institute in the evenings.

  It helped that all the English DVDs came with subtitles. In less than three months, he had exhausted all the English films from his collection. Thereafter, he started with the French films of the masters from the 1950s and 1960s. Melville, Godard, Truffaut, he saw them all. More importantly, he spent time understanding the various techniques of cinema by investing in books around film-making.

  In less than a year since having bought the archival collection from the National School of Drama, Mohanty had a thriving business. Soon DVD agents of production houses like Sony and Reliance got in touch with Mohanty and requested them to carry their new Hindi films. Mohanty expanded his DV
D library over the next few years and started carrying all the latest films now. It wasn’t just about old classics any more.

  Mohanty bought a mobile phone for the first time in his life in 2009 and realized the benefits that technology had bestowed on the modern man. Confident of the business, Mohanty committed to a ten-year lock-in lease for the store with a minimum guaranteed rent for the landlord till 2020.

  By now, Mohanty was well-versed with the language of cinema. Whether it was talking about the different eras, genres or auteurs of world cinema—Mohanty could outwit anyone in a conversation about films. Spending time at the store meant that Mohanty would often watch two to three films a day. And then came the more interesting part of talking about these films with his customers, which he enjoyed thoroughly.

  The more films Mohanty watched, the more he cared to read about them. He developed a keen eye for the craft of cinema. He considered the French thrillers of the ’50s and the ’60s the Bible among all things cinema, and a certain Jean-Luc Godard became his much-revered idol. He had seen Breathless countless times and the likes of Alphaville, Pierret Le Fou and Vivre Sa Vie were his staple films to fall back on whenever a day proved too cumbersome.

  He even thought about renting a crew and shooting a film based on a script he would write himself, but Jagannath thankfully talked him out of it. He challenged Jagannath by saying, ‘Maybe a film is what we can leave this world with our names on it. Let’s think of something to make.’ But gradually Jagannath’s sane arguments won Mohanty over.

  However, that didn’t stop Mohanty from reading and watching more cinema. In and around Connaught Place, he would be invited for local film premieres by people who were at the fringes of the entertainment industry. With his measured manner of speaking and his newly gained knowledge of films, Mohanty charmed whoever he met. There was always that element of surprise about how a simpleton like Mohanty could talk about French crime thrillers and German Noir with elan. He would always leave a note with the people he met from the industry that if they ever were thinking of shooting a film, he would be glad to help them.