AMAR (Continued)

(A SHORT STORY)

(DISCLAIMER: This is pure fiction. The persons and incidents featured have no connection with real persons living or dead, or real life occurrences)

My embargo on transactions of all kinds with Amar lasted exactly three months. Diplomatic relations were restored—despite my strenuous efforts to the contrary—after he caught me napping by calling a direct number in my division of the bank. I answered the call as there was no one else around at the time. He was calling me from Vijayawada where he had been posted. He told me that he was coming to Hyderabad on long leave for health reasons. “Please come home next weekend. I would love to catch up with you,” he said. He just would not take no for an answer. He decided to play the sympathy card, and told me his wife had left him taking their son with her; and for once, he was speaking the truth. I don’t think they ever got back together again. “I have stopped drinking,” he continued, not so truthfully, as I was to discover soon afterwards.”Doctor’s orders. I will call you when I am back in Hyderabad. Please, please do come home.” He was pleading, begging by now. I wasn’t impressed and told him in no uncertain terms that his emotional blackmail tactics were not working with me.

On Saturday morning, he came to my office, looking reasonably healthy. He said he had quit both drinking and smoking; and it was, indeed, showing. He had lost some weight, and his eyes were clear, and cheeks less puffy than usual. His conversation too was kind of sober, pun intended, and he spent an hour chatting with me and my colleagues without offending anyone even once. He insisted before he left that I join him at home that evening for dinner. His sister, a neighbour, sent him meals every day, and he would ask her to cook enough to feed me as well. I grunted non-committally, but I was determined not to fall for his theatrics.

My wife was away in Bombay, now in the last trimester of her pregnancy. Those were pre-TV days, and I was enjoying a quiet cigarette in the evening book in hand, and Vivid Bharati on in my radio, when someone rang the doorbell. Standing there was a young Garhwali lad, the domestic help I had seen at Amar’s house during my last visit.   “Saab wants you to come home,” he said. “I have brought an autorickshaw to take you home.” I was annoyed, but reluctantly got ready and went down with Bahadur. The auto rickshaw ride was quiet and uneventful despite crazier than usual traffic all the way. Amar’s house was not too far, and we reached there in ten minutes.

Bahadur left Amar’s house as soon as we reached there. It was his weekend off.  I should have fled then and there, as being closeted alone with Amar wasn’t exactly the weekend entertainment I needed. I sat down waiting for Amar to emerge from his shower. He come out beaming, and gave me a warm welcome, strong handshake and all. “Sober as a judge,” he declared as untruthfully as only he could be. I could clearly see he had already been drinking.  Soon came out a rum bottle with about three quarters of it left. I sat there like a man possessed. Kundan Lal Saigal was playing out on his tape recorder. I earlier mentioned Amar’s pretence of hating classical music. It was a reaction to what he considered snobbery and affectation on the part of his large extended family. He liked old Hindi songs. He adored Saigal’s voice so much that he heard him every evening (and no other music), partly because his voice had that poignant quality that created a convivial atmosphere for someone brooding in self pity over drinks. The evening was long and wearying as my host decided to educate me on a wide variety of subjects including my off spin bowling, which he thought I needed to improve considerably, banking, at which I was useless, and music, in which I was a toddler. I had heard Girija Devi in a recent concert and told Amar how much I had enjoyed her jhoola song, her tappa and her Babul mora at the tailend of the concert.  “Nonsense!” Amar thundered. “Nobody can sing that song like Saigal!” His face was red, eyes were bloodshot and nostrils flaring. He went on to play Saigal’s Babul mora some five times in succession.

Amar then asked me to fetch a book from the bookshelf next to me. Even as I leaned over to pick it up, he exclaimed, “Don’t touch that envelope next to it.” As I turned to listen to him, I accidentally knocked the envelope down to the floor, spilling its contents. By now, Amar was supremely inebriated and his speech more and more slurred. I thought I heard him wrong when he said, “Don’t touch them, they are letters from Anjali Roy, the film star.” I laughed out loud, because this was surely the biggest fib I had yet heard from him. “Go ahead, read a few of them. You will know.”  He was for once speaking the truth. They were all letters from Anjali Roy, written in a schoolgirlish hand, on proper letterpads, pages torn from school note books, post cards, on one-side paper saved by her journalist mother, and so on. In them she declared her profound love for this superman Amar, and beseeching him to reciprocate, apparently to no avail. It was all so private and I felt like an awful peeping Tom, but it was all so riveting.

“The Roys were my neighbours in Defence Colony, where I was staying in a PG accommodation during my newspaper days,” Amar explained suddenly shocked out of his drunken stupor. “My family knew them, and the Roys welcomed me with open arms when they knew I was Lalaji’s son. And this girl took a shine to me because I must have reminded her of some star. She was crazy about acting and did plenty of it at school plays. I think she went to NSD, later becoming a star in Bombay’s Hindi film industry after her debut film became a huge box office success.”

“How come you didn’t encourage her?” I asked, incredulous that Amar could have resisted the overtures of a beautiful, talented young girl.

“She was too young, still in her pigtails. Moreover, I was going steady with a Punjabi girl then.”

“What happened to that immortal love affair?”

“It came to an abrupt end, even forcing me to leave Delhi in a hurry.”

By now, Amar was almost sober and I was all agog.

“Her father was a tough Sardar who came after me with a loaded shotgun when I was in her bedroom, thinking her parents were out of town. I panicked and leapt out through a French window, forgetting we were on the first floor. I managed to limp to my scooter and escaped in the nick of time even as Mr Singh was taking aim. Hanging around in Delhi wasn’t safe, and as soon as the cast came off my fractured leg, I came here and joined Osmania University to do my MA.”

It was time for me to leave, and I got up to go. “You must eat,” Amar said, and opened a small tiffin box, in which there was some rice with dal and curd. “This is your dinner,” I protested. “I have some food at home. I’ll be fine.”

‘No way, Ram.” Amar was by now almost belligerent. He insisted on my finishing the food his sister had sent him; he had obviously forgotten to inform her about my joining him for dinner. “As soon as you finish eating we’ll go to Garden Restaurant. I want to eat tandoori chicken,” he said, dropping a new bombshell, for I had known him to be a strict vegetarian who did not eat onion and garlic even. So off we went to Garden Restaurant—or so, I thought. We actually made a pit stop at Moti Bar next to the restaurant, where Amar ordered more drinks, having polished off the bottle of rum he had opened at home. He became quite unmanageable soon, even puking all over a waiter. I was all along a mute spectator, my strongest drink a stiff mango juice. After getting abused and very nearly kicked out, I found a taxi—Amar was too far gone for me to manage his giant frame in an autorickshaw—dropped him at his bungalow, and went home in the same taxi, with not enough money to pay the fare, having spent all my money at Moti Bar. It was close to 2 am, but I had no option but to wake up my neighbour, luckily my batchmate at the bank and a close friend, and borrow from him at that unearthly hour. End of saga, no more Amar Sharma in my life.

Was I wrong, and how! For quite a while it seemed Amar was well and truly out of my life. I completely lost touch with him, but two years later, he turned up again at my doorstep like a bad coin. It was past midnight. He was accompanied by an auto driver intent on ensuring that he was not exiting through some backdoor without paying him. I asked the driver to wait downstairs as I knew we might not get another vehicle at that hour.

Did I mention Amar’s perfect manners with women? He was genuinely chivalrous, full of old world courtesies, getting up to greet women, opening car doors for them, exuding charm when sober, not at all the truculent bastard he could be with men. He was profusely apologetic to my wife for having disturbed us at such a late hour, but he was going away to Bombay on transfer the next day, and he could not forgive himself if he didn’t see our daughter, for it could be a long time before he returned. I had not been in touch with him, and he must have known about our daughter through our bank colleagues. He then insisted on going into the bedroom to see the baby. He stood there looking at her adoringly, though he was tottering. Was he capable of such love? Did I see tears welling up in his eyes?

Amar then bent and patted my daughter’s cheeks, put his hand in his pocket, took out a sheaf of currency notes, and tried to thrust them into my sleeping daughter’s hands. “Bye, darling. God bless you, “ he said, and tottered out. I escorted him downstairs, put him in the auto, and gave the driver directions and enough money to cover the fare home.

That was the last time I saw Amar Sharma. In the years that followed, I heard rumours floating around that he was leading a life of sheer debauchery. He was said to have been forced to leave the bank job as a consequence of some misdemeanour, and also lose the house he had inherited from his late parents to repay gambling debts. It was a horror story.

I completely lost touch with him, and none of my friends seemed to know his whereabouts. Two years later, I learnt of his death through a brief news item in a daily. He had been found dead in a train compartment, like Devdas in the movie. They found on him a pocket diary with his name and address and the phone numbers of some friends. Next to him was a small cassette recorder with a Saigal album. Amar was 33.