Road Trip

When my cell phone rang that night, I lay sleeping. It took me a while to shed the deep slumber I had succumbed to at that odd hour. I got up, still encumbered by sleep, searching for the phone, slowly but frantically. I retrieved it from the nether folds of my third pillow.  

With light from the phone shrapnelling my eyes, I squinted, trying to work out the squiggles on its very bright screen. It was an unknown number.   

Was it, yet again, a drunk friend calling from another number with a deeply sentimental rant? To rebuke or flatter me or tell me something they may later regret? I recalled the time when my roommate, having got into a drunken brawl at midnight, called me later at 2 am from a hospital after dislocating his elbow.

That night, I reached hurriedly to find him lying on his back on a stretcher, punch-drunk and unattended, his red shirt caked in his own vomit, screaming and pleading to no one in particular, “doctor, it hurts.”

I picked the call. It was an unfamiliar voice. I tried to locate if I may have heard it before. The voice introduced herself, “Hello Arunava…this is Benoy’s mother. Can I speak to for 5 minutes?”

Just as I had first heard about her, she sounded kind and concerned.

Benoy had told me about his mother and how, after his dad had suffered a heart stroke, she had become progressively devout. His father, the pastor at the local church, according to Benoy, was a kind and gentle man whom the stroke had rendered infirm, his movements severely curtailed. His mother spent most of the day tending to his father’s needs, setting her schedule around his ailing self.

“She worries a lot,” he had told me. “My dad’s a very disciplined man. She also worries about me for no reason. Still thinks it’ll be better for me if I had a government job instead of working in an advertising agency. Job security,” he said.       

I had first met Benoy as he lumbered in with his burly frame, wearing a faded black t-shirt and a pair of jeans that must have been washed long ago. He was a copywriter at The Story Loft, the advertising agency I had then joined as a Senior Account Executive.

The first thing that struck you about Benoy was the amount of time he seemed to have. The clock hands moved slower for him. Like all good copywriters his movements were measured, as if the knack of cutting down words had instilled in him an instinct to pare down anything that was unneeded and superfluous.

The other thing about him was how he existed in two places at once. Listening to you, while also thinking about something else. Here but not quite there. Clutching at now and in the throes of something else. Between ether and nether. Like dawn and dusk.

This threadbare escapism made him interesting company. As I discovered later that escapism was not the only addiction he had.

Both of us worked on the same account. Our client was an international sunglass brand that, according to them, was trying to get a foothold into the Indian market. They said they wanted to penetrate it.

“How do we get Indians to wear sunglasses? You have sunshine all year round in this country, why don’t you wear them more often?” were some of the questions we thought he’d take to his grave.  

“Men want their sunglasses darkly tinted. They don’t want the world to see their roving eyes. Women, on the other hand,” he said with the glint of insight in his eyes, “want them lightly tinted. They want their eyes to be noticed.”

It was the day after Benoy, me and our art director Unni, had finished work on a new campaign called “Cannot Unsee”.

I went to the office backyard which also doubled up as the smoker’s area. The hub for all conversations and gossip. It had three large granite slabs to sit on, along with a few steel chairs and wooden tables. It had a jackfruit tree and a few potted plants inside flowerpots. Hanging from the potted plants were signs that read, “I am not an ashtray,” or “Who am I?”

As I walked in, I saw the usual suspects whiling away time looking into their phones and drinking the free office tea. Or the hassled looking account executive twirling his hair with his right index finger, his check-shirt untucked as he spoke beseechingly to his client. Or the office Casanova regaling a gaggle of female interns with tales of his cleverness and how he once fooled the client who tried to get too smart with him.

Benoy sat there. Alone but not aloof. Blowing his customary smoke rings. He seemed exhausted from the effort that comes from focussing hard and long. The kind of exhaustion you can’t shake off by sleeping. When the mind is a lot more tired than the body. The kind of tiredness that comes from enduring. The kind of exhaustion that makes you act with generosity.

 “So, what are you doing this weekend Benoy?” I asked him.

 “I don’t know. Maybe drinking. Why?” he said.

“Remember the time we were thinking of going to Thiruvananthapuram?” I said.

“We were not thinking. I said that Trivandrum might be your kind of place,” he said.   

“I thought it’s called Thiruvananthapuram?” I asked.

“But Trivandrum sounds better. More modern, less patronising. Welcoming. Sunny and indiscriminating,” he said.

“You know how people when they are going to Chennai or Mumbai or Kolkata, they don’t say they’re going to Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra or Bengal. Now, these places may be metros, but even if it were Kanpur or Jaipur, you don’t say you’re going to UP or Rajasthan,” I thought out loud.

“You seem to be up to something here,” he said.

“But when it comes to places in Kerala like Trivandrum or Wayanad or Alappuzha, they say they are going to Kerala. It’s as if the city doesn’t matter so much as the state. The only exception is Kochi. When people go to Kochi, they say they say going to Kochi,” I proffered.

“May be because Kochi is easy to pronounce for people outside Kerala,” he said.

“No, I feel the Kerala identity is too strong. Over the years it has subsumed the identities of the cities within it. Which other state has a tagline that has become its byword, ‘God’s own country,’” I asked.

“Well, you’ll have to applaud the craft of the copywriter,” he said. “It’s a hard-working line. Like our people,” he said.  

“That could be it,” I said as if an epiphany had presented itself, “you Mallus think of Kerala as a separate country ordained by God. It’s all the fault of the copywriter and the line that’s been flattering Mallus across ages,” I said.

“But you’ll see, Kerala does seem like another country. It’s cleaner and greener and exceptionally warm to visitors, unlike what can be said about other parts of the country. The minute you cross Tamil Nadu and enter Kerala, the greenery is so much more perceptible,” he said.

“The truth is,” he continued, “the rest of the country is jealous of Kerala. And I am not grudging you that. You have every right to be; the jealousy is not unwarranted,” he said.  

“Excuse me,” I said mildly offended at this bald narcissism. “Have you been to Jharkhand? If you guys are God’s own country, we are Nature’s…” I fumbled for the right word.

“Basket case?” he said. 

“You guys have just marketed it well. We have all the resources. Mica, coal, aluminium. It’s just that we have had bad politicians in the past. And Kerala has had the good fortune of some good politicians, including Shashi Tharoor of late. I can bet that you don’t know the capital of Jharkhand,” I said.

“To be honest before this conversation I didn’t know if Jharkhand was a state or one of those cities whose name was changed by the government,” he said.   

“Is Trivandrum the capital of Kerala?” I asked.

“No, it’s Kochi. But Kochi is just the front dude,” he said. “The real capital of Kerala is Trivandrum. You’ll see when you get there.” He said

“So I would be staying at your place?” I asked.

“At my parents’ place,” he said, blowing smoke rings.

We left Bangalore on a Friday night in one of those Volvo buses with recliner seats. It played a Tamil movie called Ek Love Ya, which, despite me not following a word, grew more and more interesting as the plot unfolded. The lead actor was in a double role, playing both the hero and the villain. Twins separated at birth. Throughout the movie, the villain, made conspicuous by his bushy eyebrows and protruding front teeth, is prone to exaggerated bursts of rage, and is in the pursuit of an age-defying capsule that could only be unlocked by the hero’s right thumbprint. In the final act, the hero, having realised that his childhood sweetheart, who is held captive by the villain’s henchmen, could only be rescued after he surrenders his thumb, makes the ultimate sacrifice for love. He severs his right thumb and submits it at the feet of his evil twin, who laughs menacingly, his bushy eyebrows trembling. The movie ended optimistically, with a To-be-continued sign flashing on the screen, reminding us that in the fight between good and evil, sequels often win.

As the lights were dimmed, I crouched uncomfortably on the reclining seat, unsure whether to sit of sleep. Around midnight the bus slowed down next to a highway eating joint. As we got down, the air redolent with the warm aroma of sambhar. Benoy lit a cigarette, his smoke rings rising and disappearing. We went into the eatery which seemed to be popular with bus drivers. It was clean and noisy. Orders were being repeated loudly. The waiters flitted around with swagger, carrying plates of masala dosa, idly, pooris and steel tumblers with water or filter coffee. I washed my face, sweeping the grime clean.  We settled and ordered a masala dosa each and washed it down with filter coffee. It was 12 am and buses kept arriving in its premises, disgorging passengers in various stages of sleep. A sweeper mopped the entrance, and songs from Aashiqui emanated from the crowded pan shop where men huddled for cigarettes or pan.

We waited for the remaining passengers to finish and stood at a distance from the bus where it was less crowded.

“When I first moved to Bangalore last year,” he said, “I lived with my cousin. His name is Bobby. We had rented a 2-BHK on Central Jail road. Bobby was a lot more straitlaced. I found out later that he didn’t approve of my ways. I got girls home and we partied. We had a good time.”

“One day I get a call from my mother. She asked me to return home to Kerala. She said Bobby had told them everything about me and my addictions and that I should join rehab. I have not seen Bobby’s face since that day. I am also wary of going home,” he said.

By this time some of our co-passengers were making their way back into the bus. The driver honked furiously. We stepped in the bus and beckoned by sleep, soon slipped into its deep embrace.             

We arrived at Trivandrum the next morning, my body taut and aching due to the bus ride.

When I woke up that morning, while still in the bus, I thought of Benoy’s mother and her brother. His uncle, who was the mastermind behind this entire trip. After talking to Benoy’s mother that night, his uncle also spoke to me. He said that Benoy has a problem and asked me if I would help them to put him in rehab. It might put my friendship with him in jeopardy, but he needed treatment more than friends.

“All you need to do is to bring him to Trivandrum. Rest we will take care of,” he told me.

So now I am waiting at the Trivandrum bus stand. From what his uncle has told me it will seem like an ambush. Any moment now the rehab member will arrive and push him into a van. As instructed, I had intimated them when we went past Resurrection Church. 

It’s all for his own good.