Children of a Divorce

Narayanan and I are getting divorced.

I would be moving out this Saturday. Moving out from Narayanan and moving in with Palash, my lovely little elf.

Narayanan and I have spent the last month like a long-married couple. We slept in the same bed without sex crossing our minds once. We fought for bathroom rights every morning, before work. I would often stay up late reading a book while he dozed off. We wrote down all the expenditures of the day before going to sleep. And I snored.

We are not gay.
We are worse.
We are bachelors working in the corporate city of Mumbai.
Gays are brought together by love – in varying degrees.
Bachelors in Mumbai are brought together by cold necessity.

When you are an MBA working in Mumbai, you feel the smell of puke hitting your insides everytime you read those business magazines shrieking about the exorbitant salaries that companies are paying at the “top institutes”. For all those “exorbitant” salaries, no MBA in Mumbai can afford not to share his room and life with a guy he hardly knows. It is a lot like arranged marriage. You allow a complete stranger to become a part of your life and intrude all corners of it. And like arranged marriage, it works great most of the times.

Narayanan is one of those genuinely good people who are neither naïve nor harmless. Most “good” fellas are essentially confrontation-avoiders. They are nice because they don’t want to pick fights. Narayanan doesn’t shy away from slang-fests. He calls a spade a spade, and will also tell it how dirty, old and bent it is. He can be angry, harsh, make you feel like an idiot, scold you like you are an idiot, and worse, prove it that you are an idiot. But I have never once seen him lose the respect for an individual’s dignity even in the smallest of ways. He genuinely cares for you, but won’t spoon feed you. He will help you out and expects you to appreciate his help, but doesn’t like you to express your gratitude.

I know him from my engineering days. We were together at Delhi College of Engineering, studying to be Mechanical Engineers. He is one of the twin reasons – the other one being Shantanu, that philosophical bean bag – for making me finish my engineering in 4 years. We were a group of 5 friends in D.C.E. And it was a funny group. There was me - a fraud gult, born in Andhra and brought up in Delhi; Narayanan – as core and orthodox an Iyengar Tam Brahmin as you could find; Shantanu – the Baniya of Baniyas; Navjeet Singh Soni – the ever excitable Sardar and Rishabh Sinha – the psuedest Bihari I have ever known (and being an engg. Grad I have know quite a few).
If it had not been for Narayanan and Shantanu I would have become a Studying Super Senior at D.C.E. (It’s a rare species in engineering – the Studying Super Seniors, but let me briefly say here that it describes all those people who keep coming to college for more than 4 years because they couldn’t finish their degrees in time. I shall elaborate on this later in another post. Just remember to remind me).

The lives and times of Swami (aka Narayanan) at D.C.E. are chronicled in “Swami and Friends”.

After engineering he went on to work at Tata Motors, and I joined IIMB. 2 years later he joined IIFT and I went off to Africa. 2 months back he post-graduated and was offered a position with SBI Caps, and I left Zimbabwe to join Asian Paints.

We joined our jobs within a space of 10 days. Both in Mumbai. And both wanted to stay together. I wanted to stay with him because I knew he would do the worrying and organizing while I could focus on the freaking. And he, probably because he has this strong desire to reform hardened freaks.

Well, both of us did succeed, to a certain extent, in our motives for staying together. He does the accounts every night. He bought the iron-box and the ear-buds, and the shoe polish and the brush. And I keep rushing him to movies in all parts of Mumbai straight from the office. There is the organizing and freaking part I wanted.

I brush my teeth every night (also) now, and cut my nasal hair every week.
I move to a distant seat, if available, whenever I fart during the movies.
There is the reform part that Narayanan wanted.

He sits down after his bath every morning, says his prayers, changes into his office wear and then leaves for work.
Rushing from my bath, stuffing my shirt into the hungry open mouth of my trousers, I say the first half of my prayers which essentially mean “God, please help me”. The other half I say in the local, and they mostly consist of “God, please forgive me”.

At office, we pretend to work.

Around 180 degrees past six, I give him a call asking him what time he shall be leaving office, and cook up dinner plans. Then we meet at home, or some restaurant, stuff ourselves and then head for home in the sweaty clothes of corporate toil – he a project financier and me a purchase manager.

Once home,
he does the accounts.
Then watches the night’s half-hour quota of his current movie, and dozes off.
I read while he is sleeping.
Then I switch off the light, lie down next to him. And I snore.

Now it is to be all over.
Both of us have to move out.
No we didn’t have a fight.
The Mumbai that brought us together is now doing us part. I am moving to Vashi and he to Andheri.
I shall be moving out this Saturday and he a couple of days after that.

Starting day before yesterday, we have 6 days together.
And in these 6 days I have decided that I will take him to as many movies as possible. And I shall review those movies, for him.
I have never written reviews before. I hate doing that.
But these reviews I know I shall cherish for long.
They are the children conceived in our divorce.

So far we have done Shivaji, Cheeni Kum and Life in a Metro.

Just a few thoughts on them here. Detailed reviews to follow later, hopefully.

Cheeni Kum
When I first heard about Cheenie Cum I thought it was one of those cheap, Chinese porn flicks.

Life in a Metro
Konkana Sen has very quickly carved a niche for herself in the industry – as the leading lady opposite gay men. She did it in page 3, she does it here again.

Shivaji
When you spend 200 bucks on a movie you feel like you own a part of it. You come out, and criticize or critique the story, the cast’s performances, the stunts, the comedy (in most Indian movies it is still comedy, only a few like Cheeni Kum and Pyaar ke Side Effects have achieved humor). You can say, with no hesitation, that the heroine has gone fat, she looks wooden, or just as easily declare “paisa vasool” for the smooch-shots.
Shivaji doesn’t let you feel like that.

You don’t own this movie – not any small part of it.
You can’t critique this movie; you can’t call it good or bad – it is beyond that, it is above you.

P.S. I am not a Rajni fan. This is the first Rajni movie I have seen for more than 5 minutes.