Fuck.

  I left her cabin.

  Within minutes, Sarita sent me no less than fifty write-ups about sick parents, babies, husbands and fathers to edit and upload on the website.

  It was grief-porn.

  The sadness poured out from the laptop and wrapped itself around my neck.

  I started with a story of a seven-year-old child with a failing liver. There was a picture of him with tears streaming down his big, yellowed eyes, his mouth, half-open in mid scream, stared at me.

  Mummy, will I live? Please save me, mummy.

  Next.

  A father—a penniless, auto driver—sat on the ground, holding his crying daughter in his arms. The three-year-old lost both her eyes to retinoblastoma. She needed artificial eyes and two rounds of chemotherapy.

  Everyone around me was unhappy I had a girl, but I was the happiest. I wanted her to fly but now I just want her to live.

  Next.

  Three-year-old bald, wasting boy with a single parent needed money for his cancer treatment. He believed he got cancer because he drew on the wall. His mother loved his hair and now there was none.

  Maa, I promise I won’t be naughty. Please take me out of this hospital.

  The stories were endless. Each more terrible than the last. Why would anyone want to write and re-write these? Drown themselves in this brackish slime of sadness?

  *

  ‘We saved three children last week,’ Rachita Somani, the de-facto head of the medical team, told me during the coffee break.

  She unlocked her phone and showed me post-surgery pictures of the three young girls on her phone. She clutched at my hand like a madwoman and didn’t let go. Rachita Somani had been at WeDonate for three years. The job was leaving tell-tale signs on her face. The intricate crow’s feet at the corner of her eyes, the huge bags underneath, the despondent look on her face, it was unmissable. She was only two years older than I was but the stamp on her face was of a much older, weather-beaten woman.

  During lunch, the medical team sat together quietly and forced food into themselves. They mingled with no one. Their lunch break was the shortest, their faces most haggard, they spoke little, their eyes droopy despite getting in the most money for WeDonate.

  Rachita Somani and the others in the medical team feasted on the feeling of being holier than everyone, on their work being more important than anyone else’s.

  I had planned to eat alone but Nimesh and Nikhat came with bright smiles and sat next to me. Of course they didn’t ever leave office. They spent bucket loads of their time socializing with colleagues.

  ‘By the end of the day, you will watch at least one of them cry,’ said Nimesh when he caught me staring at the medical team.

  ‘They can’t take it. Too much work, too many deaths,’ said Nikhat.

  ‘The doctors work twenty-four hour shifts in hospitals as your teammates do here,’ said Nimesh.

  ‘I’m going to shift, they are not going to be my teammates for long,’ I said.

  To willingly be a part of this team is an act of masochism and extreme stupidity. Their jobs are more unrewarding than even the doctors’. Unlike doctors, the medical team doesn’t have the luxury of not knowing the patients and their families. The medical team knows everything about the person who’s on the death bed. The person, their family, their history, their desperation and their bleak future. It’s their job to know everything and then to glean out the most heartbreaking details.

  ‘We have a counsellor who comes every week and talks to the team. Sarita had made it compulsory after Karan killed himself,’ said Nimesh.

  ‘Karan refused to live in a world that couldn’t spare a few thousand to save a child,’ said Nikhat.

  How are people so naive? How can they not know that people are rotten?

  They finish the story I had no interest in listening to. It was two years ago. One of his cases were of twins, a three-year-old boy and girl, both needing bone-marrow transplants, a cruel trick of genetics. Despite all of WeDonate’s efforts, they couldn’t collect enough money for both. Karan, who got too close to the family, pumped in his savings, even took a small personal loan, and yet it could only cover one child. The parents chose the boy. The cancer metastasized and killed the girl. The girl spent the last few days watching her brother get better. The boy’s went into remission. But six months later, the cancer relapsed. Without his sister, the boy couldn’t muster up the strength to mount another fight against cancer and he too died. Karan ended his life the day the boy was buried.

  The rumour around the office was that Karan and Rachita were dating at the time. It’s said she blamed herself for not having worked hard enough on the story. But as more people told the rumour it shifted. By the time it was evening, the story had changed to Rachita was manic about the cases because she had lost a patient she was trying to source money for and had nothing to do with Karan.

  In every scenario, Rachita came out at the bottom; and every person in medical had a story like hers.

  Fuck the medical team. I didn’t want to be a hero.

  Later that evening, when I got home, Mumma was pretending to be busy. I could see how much she missed me.

  Apart from the minor inconveniences of having a gaping hole in the heart, Baba’s absence had also put a considerable dent in our social life. Mumma wanted me to be around her, to save her from the loneliness that consumed her. It took me time to understand that. I was fifteen when I lost my father.

  Baba left Mumma utterly and embarrassingly alone. How long can you hold on to his smell in the bedsheets, his half-used shaving cream, his shoes with mud still stuck to the soles, the four hundred rupees in his drawer, the spare spectacles, the inhaler he left behind. What do you do of that four hundred rupees Baba hadn’t spent? Where would he have spent those? They tell you that after marriage your husband and your family is everything, neglecting to tell you what to do if one of them is not there one day.

  After the aggressive mourning turned into a dull pain, Mumma’s attempts at forging friendships around the locality were met with hostility. ‘Look at her visiting neighbours; look at her smiling; look at her in the mall; look at her ordering food; look at her eating food’, everything that she did was open to discussion and condescension. She was expected to walk with a bent head, talk little to none, never smile, live every day as a burden. She was supposed to hide.

  The Sharmas, the Guptas, the Mandals, our friendly neighbours kept us at an arm’s distance. We were harbingers of bad luck. It might have been five years, but the stench of being unfortunate women hadn’t worn off. The women of our locality clutched at their suhaag, their married status, with a sense of pride because what else could they be proud of? Not their husbands, of course! All of them, walking bags of heart disease, disappointment and erectile dysfunction. I had legit reasons to be proud. They were still having sex days before it all ended, and not the married, tranquilized, once-a-month kind of sex, but sex that woke me up in the other room, the kind of sex that made them shy and look away from each other the next morning. None of the women who shunned her like a bad omen could claim that.

  Now Surinder chachu and Poonam chachi waited for me to get married so they could make Mumma shift to a tiny flat and sell the house.

  Baba’s side of the family never once looked back. All the time Baba, Mumma and I, as a family, had stressed about what they would think about my clothes, my marks, my career choices, our investments, our car, our house was a waste. Even both of Mumma’s brothers who would travel across the city to get rakhis tied would sparingly answer our calls, fearful that we would ask them for money.

  That was our breaking point. We knew that niceness in people was an illusion. Deep inside, everyone is a raging asshole. No one cared.

  Being the oldest in my generation, all my cousins—all unsmart and talentless—were still in school. I had decided that I would introduce them to methamphetamines and cocaine the day they turned eighteen. That would be some revenge.

  For the longest time, Mumma had tried to hide our ostracism by her friends from me. Every two weeks, she would dress up for her kitty party and leave the house. She would then read newspapers on her own at a Chinese restaurant close to our house and then come back. Once she knew I knew she stopped the charade and we never once discussed it.

  ‘It was bad?’ asked Mumma about my day.

  ‘It was very bad.’

  ‘What are they asking you to do?’

  ‘Say I get cancer and you don’t have the money—’

  ‘I will slap you right now,’ snapped Mumma.

  ‘Say a girl has cancer and her mother doesn’t have the money. She can come crying to WeDonate, tell them her sob story, and they will reach out to donors to help the mother out,’ I explained.

  ‘That sounds like a good thing to do. Why are you being so condescending about it?’ she asked.

  ‘Mumma, I don’t want to save anyone.’

  ‘Beta, did you tell your boss that your heart is made out of stone?’ said Mumma. ‘Did you ask to change your department?’

  ‘I tried but she was scary,’ I protested.

  ‘More than you?’ she asked.

  Just because she was the first woman in her family to get an MA, only one to teach in a polytechnic while her sisters bore petulant boys and insufferable girls, she thought she could act cute with me.

  ‘I’m talking to Ganesh from HR tomorrow. Maybe he can help,’ I said.

  I was hoping he would have decision-making capabilities and wouldn’t just parrot sentences Sarita Sharan asked him to, though my understanding was that he was nothing more than Sarita Sharan’s sock puppet.

  Ganesh Acharya

  Ganesh Acharya had taken a massive pay-cut to join WeDonate. Sarita Sharan was the only reason Ganesh had joined the organization, but on days like this, he hated his job.

  Ananth Khatri is sitting in front of him, pissed, and Ganesh knows he can’t do anything for him.

  Ananth says, ‘Ganesh, there are two things. First, I want to be in medical. I thought it was clear during the interview. And second, why are we wasting so many resources at entertainment? We don’t make anything good.’

  ‘We understand where you’re coming from,’ says Ganesh. ‘Did you tell Karunesh about what you feel about entertainment?’

  ‘I can’t. He works hard at it; he’s quite passionate about it.’

  ‘Look, Ananth, today someone donates Rs 200 to a music band with a cute boy singer. Who knows, tomorrow she might pay for someone else’s heart surgery. We need to throw a wider net, make people interested in helping other people out,’ says Ganesh.

  Ganesh knows Ananth doesn’t buy it but he nods his head. Ganesh didn’t entirely buy it as well.

  ‘But can an exception be made and I be shifted to medical?’

  Ganesh wishes he had taken those dramatics classes in school to really pull this off.

  ‘Ananth, I will tell you the best we can do. You stay here at entertainment for a month or two, wrap up a couple of projects, and then we will look for a swap?’ says Ganesh.

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’m sorry that’s the best we can do right now,’ says Ganesh with a sternness he has learned from Sarita.

  He sees Ananth’s face fall. If his opinion counted, he would have put Ananth in medical. He thought of Ananth as someone with endless empathy, the chief requirement for the team. He was a nice boy who sought and saw niceness in everyone. He remembered Ananth being so polite to everyone in the office on the day of the interview one would think he was a fake. But it was him—sincere and loving. You could see that in his eyes. The girls at WeDonate had been whispering about him for days after the interview. Of course, they knew he was dating someone, and yet they talked about his jawline, his eyes that had inhuman percentage of pupil—large black pools of water, his short cropped but lush hair, and his slimness, like they were entities of their own. Only this morning, a girl from the college project vertical wanted to know about Ananth’s skin care routine.

  The team could do with people who would give it their all. And who better than Ananth? He was prepared for this and yet Sarita thought different.

  Ananth thanks Ganesh, gets up and leaves.

  Not long after, Sarita calls Ganesh to ask him if it went well.

  ‘Thank you, Ganesh,’ says Sarita. ‘We have a plan for him or I wouldn’t have asked you to do this.’

  Saraansh Gupta

  Saraansh orders a skinny latte and sits in the far corner of Starbucks. He’s nervous but pumped. This meeting is going to be his big break, he can feel it in his bones. He’s smiling thinking of the future as he waits for Sarita and Ananth.

  A few months ago, fresh out of movie school, Saraansh knocked the doors of WeDonate offering to make a bootstrapped advertisement video for the organization. He had been desperate and was knocking every door, trying out everything. He had gone with the script, the storyboard, the budget, everything one could ask for.

  Sarita Sharan had turned Saraansh down despite liking his work, citing budget issues.

  ‘Let me know if something comes up,’ he had told Sarita.

  Saraansh’s parents hadn’t wanted him to pursue filmmaking. They had a thriving button business, and they wanted him to follow in the footsteps of his father and elder brother. Maybe rename Gupta Buttons and Buttons to something catchier, call himself an entrepreneur, shift the office from Chawri Bazaar to Connaught Place, but still be in the business.

  His family had thought Saraansh’s fascination with filmmaking was temporary. But when they got to know it wasn’t, they stopped talking to him, cut a huge chunk off his finances and they were now threatening to take away his car and the driver.

  It’s been months since they have talked to him with a straight face. He had disappointed them by rejecting his family’s legacy.

  However, a couple of weeks ago, Sarita Sharan reconnected with Saraansh and mailed him a link to a YouTube video. She wrote in the mail that she had a better idea to push WeDonate’s name out amongst the people than do a straight advertisement.

  He had seen the video Sarita Sharan has sent before. Everyone he knew had seen the video. It had gone majorly viral and all aggregator platforms had done pieces on it. Unlike viral cat videos and embarrassing people videos, this one had more legs on it. People were talking about it fervently, sharing it, making rehashed versions of it till the second month of its release.

  It was the video of a girl named Mohini, who was confessing her love for a guy named Ananth, in a self-shot video. The video held the country in a thrall, and everyone cried.

  The guy, Ananth, had raked up hundreds of thousands of followers overnight. Across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, more than a million people followed him in the next few months. He became a micro-celebrity overnight. But unlike other micro-celebrities, he didn’t pivot towards becoming an influencer, peddle shampoos and sunglasses and watches.

  Last week, Ananth had joined WeDonate. Despite the massive following, stupidly enough, Ananth only shares medical campaigns from WeDonate. It is a waste of influence.

  Sarita Sharan now wants to leverage the following he had amassed.

  Ananth Khatri is Saraansh’s break and he’s going to kill it. There’s no alternative. Saraansh promised his boyfriend he will move in with him before the end of this year. How is he supposed to do that when his career is in shambles?

  As he waits at Starbucks for Sarita and Ananth, he watches the video again. The girl’s cute, the things she says are heartfelt, simple, relatable. Saraansh sees why it connected with so many people.

  It deserved to go viral.

  Ananth Khatri

  Sarita and I are in the back of a cab, going to a meeting she’s too important to attend. Sarita hand-holding me is a little embarrassing. She’s too much of a big shot to be in a meeting with a young director and yet she’s here.

  ‘The words are at the back of your throat. Spit them out,’ says Sarita when she notices my sullen face.

  ‘With no offence to the entertainment team, the world won’t miss anything if there weren’t any movies or short films or brilliant directors or screenwriters,’ I complain.

  ‘We should save sick people, instead? Is that what you’re saying?’ she asks me.

  I nod.

  ‘People will still go ahead and watch the Salman Khan movie even if you wave pictures of dead, rotting Dalit children at the ticketing counter,’ she says with a deadpan expression, like she has said this before to many people who have suggested the same. ‘The world doesn’t run on moral logic. Hear this guy out. It’s a love story. And given your own love story, I think you will be a great judge of it.’

  No matter what Sarita says, it still doesn’t make it right. The rookie writer–director is sitting in one corner of Starbucks. He gets up as we enter.

  ‘Saraansh,’ he says and thrusts his hand out. ‘Nice to meet you, bro!’

  He shouldn’t call me bro.

  We shake hands. His boyish eyes twinkle. He asks if we want to order something.

  ‘Their blueberry parfait is mad! You should try it,’ he says. ‘I would offer you some but I finished mine.’

  The fact that he orders an expensive blueberry parfait is worrying.

  Neither of us wants to but since we are in a coffee shop we order a coffee each. He has the jumpy energy of a teenager on cocaine.

  ‘Thank you for the opportunity,’ he says excitedly.

  Saraansh to the best my knowledge, a recent graduate from National School of Filmmaking, is a rich boy. There’s something inherently wrong in rich people turning to WeDonate for help. The laptop in front of him is a worn-out MacBook Air. There is an Air Pod’s case lying about carelessly on the table. He’s about my age, twenty-two according to his LinkedIn profile, but he looks more boyish, smacks of privilege, and smells good.