‘No one at WeDonate felt guilty,’ said Nikhat.

  Haha. I wanted to laugh at the faces of the WeDonate people. If you can sacrifice one person’s life because of your prejudices, you can let all of them die too. I always knew these guys at WeDonate were the garden variety disappointing people, and not saints. I was better than them, my hate didn’t discriminate on someone’s Twitter behaviour.

  I came back to my seat and logged on to Twitter.

  Of all the social media platforms, Twitter has the worst rep—it was a septic tank where people were at their worst behaviour. I differed from this weak, half-assed opinion. I thought they are at their best, or at least normal, behaviour on Twitter. Twitter allows people to be their real selves. Everywhere else, they are pretending. If someone is nice on Twitter, for me, that moron is putting up an act.

  Some fools say Internet lets people hide so that they can exhibit their worst selves. Nope. Internet lets people be who they really are. It lets people find their community, and their mob.

  And people are unkind, cruel, sexist, casteist, xenophobic, and they find others like themselves and form little ecosystems for themselves. That’s the norm, not the exception. Assume that and you will never be wrong about people on Twitter.

  Case in point, a few months ago I had defended the release of a Sanjay Leela Bhansali movie starring Deepika Padukone. A fringe outfit had threatened to chop off Padukone’s beautiful nose—what a gorgeous nose—and threw stones at a school bus. When I tweeted about it, an army of trolls descended on me like a swarm of locusts, which I completely expected of them:

  @Anusha_Sardana231: Are these men’s egos so fragile they can’t handle a fictional story of a queen, which may or may not have a dream sequence from the POV of a man?

 

  @Karaneer: Randi ki aulaad. Teri maa ka rape sequence daalu kya movie mein.

 

  @Ranjitkhann2: Tu bata kaha rehti hai. Bhen ki lodi, lund de dunga muh mein.

 

  @Rrtu455: pakistan ki sasti randi gashti saali.

 

  @ryti455: Tera gala kaat dunga teri maa ke saamne. Fir uski fuddi fad dunga tere baap ke saamne. End mein tum teeno ko jala dunga.

  Anyone who reacted to this with, oh, I’m ashamed of this behaviour / I’m shaking I didn’t know men in India . . . / I was shocked how men . . . probably lived under a rock or her private palace, shielded from civilization.

  These men were being themselves. Most men are like this, so are many women. They might choose better language, or just not say anything but it doesn’t change who they are. I wasn’t surprised. I did the usual thing of calling them small-dicked and moved on.

  I put the handle name @gautam_gabbar in the search bar. The account was blocked.

  I wondered what he had done to make me block his account.

  Sunita Ji, Mohini’s Mother

  Sunita ji, as everyone calls Mohini’s mother, is about to put some tea to boil when her phone rings. Her face falls. Her daughter’s boyfriend, Ananth, is coming home again. Never had she imagined such a time would come that she would have to think out those words in this particular order. But what don’t you do for your child, and for the changing times?

  She put the tea back. She will drink with Ananth when he gets here. She gets up and puts the house in a bit of order. There are stacks of books lying everywhere and she put them where they belong.

  That boy is always on time.

  She doesn’t like the boy.

  He’s too perfect, that’s what Sunita Sardana doesn’t like about him. He’s always too nice, too subservient. Time and again, Sunita has put him through the hoops and he jumps through them with a big smile on his face.

  No matter how sweet he is though, his presence always irritates and angers her. Mostly because he’s enjoying the fruits of her daughter’s brilliance, of her good heart, of her kind face, and of her love. It was her daughter’s video that gave Ananth a new lease of life.

  When Sunita ji had first seen the video made by her daughter, she had thought what Mohini’s father would think of it? Once that ebbed, a little embarrassment crept in, and that too didn’t last long. What stayed on was the jealousy. She was losing her daughter to a boy. But that ebbed too.

  What has remained is the irritation.

  The fallout of the video?

  As her colleagues in the college have pointed out to her time and again, her daughter’s boyfriend, Ananth, has gained hundreds of thousands of followers online since. He now shares medical campaigns of WeDonate from his profile and thinks he’s an angel.

  Sunita Sardana is hoping he doesn’t go on and on about his new job. The last three times they have met, it’s all he talks about.

  Just then, the bell rings. She reminds herself how much she hates him.

  Ananth Khatri

  For the past week, I haven’t been able to sleep or eat well. Sarita and Saraansh kept asking me when I’m going to seek Aunty’s permission and although I have met Aunty and Mohini every day in that time I haven’t managed to pose the question to them. It’s not that Aunty scares me—okay, she does a little—but I too needed to be convinced if this was a workable idea.

  He has insisted on it that we be friends if we have to go on this creative journey. Every day, he has turned up at the office in gleaming white sneakers and freshly shaved cheeks looking like the goddamn sunshine and has unleashed barrages of small talk at me.

  Yesterday, Saraansh landed up at work when I told him I thought making a movie about our love story might seem narcissistic. More so, it just seemed unnecessary. Nobody would want to watch it.

  ‘Let’s try something out, bro,’ he said in his trademark brash, irrational optimism.

  ‘Saraansh, you’re my contemporary and yet you use far too colloquial millennial terms. Do you think that’s appropriate?’ I said in a bid to make him stop calling me bro and make me feel like an old fossil.

  Saraansh laughed and said, ‘It’s appropriate if I do it. Anyway, for just today, post only Mohini and your pictures on your profile. A little sentence about your story here and there in the captions. Let’s see if it’s necessary, let’s see if people want to know more about you, bro.’

  ‘Not your bro.’

  ‘Always my bro.’ I was confident it would fail until I wasn’t.

  The five posts—all pictures of Mohini and me with captions of what I felt for her, edited by Saraansh—that we shared, shot the engagement rates on my social media through the roof.

  Countless people commented to tell me that it was content like this they were here for, not donation links. I usually lose followers every time I put up a donation link—it’s understandable, not everyone wants tragic stories on their timelines—but yesterday I gained a glut of new followers. People were feverishly commenting on the posts. On last count, 2300 people commented, many shared the post on their stories, some shared screenshots on Facebook and Twitter. As a fallout, the video was raking up thousands of new views every hour.

  Not only that, the links I uploaded after these posts about Mohini and me, saw more donations.

  ‘Shook, eh?’ Saraansh had asked when he had proved his point.

  ‘You need to stop saying that.’

  So here I am, outside Mohini’s house in Rohini. She lives on the ground floor.

  The house demands fresh plaster and a coat of paint. On the ground floor, there’s a living room, one bedroom and a small kitchen. The second floor—where tenants live—has an identical layout. It was on Mohini’s insistence that her father built the second floor. She wanted a room of her own, away from her parents. It was an audacious request for a family with their means—and a girl of her age. She was eight.

  ‘Don’t spoil her. It starts from here,’ Aunty had insisted.

  Mohini made up her mind that she will have her private space no matter what her parents decided. She made a little tent on the terrace and would spend hours up there under the glaring sun. Uncle gave in when she fell ill.

  The construction of Mohini’s floor took two years to complete. The cement, the bricks, the iron rods, the wood and the paint, all came from the material leftover at the other building sites Uncle worked at. A thekedar, contractor, by profession, Uncle oversaw the work of the labourers at building sites during the day; at night he worked at his own construction site. It was the first house in their colony to have a second floor. The others followed suit like they often do.

  When they’d first moved into this plot, Mohini was three. There were all but four walls and a corrugated roof. They had to walk around the block to the nearest restaurant and pay Rs 5 to use the washroom. The neighbours didn’t know, they still don’t know, that there was no washroom in the house. The first three years they lived there, they invited no one. Uncle had built this house brick by brick, day by day.

  ‘The house was for your mother, the floor’s for you,’ Uncle would tell Mohini.

  As Aunty now tells me, the scar tissues on Uncle reflected the timeline of the construction of the house and of Mohini’s floor. He could point at the healed wounds and tell you when the first brick was laid and how it had snapped his index finger, when the first door was put in place, how he nailed his finger instead, the first coat of paint applied and how his leg brushed against the iron grill.

  ‘They were always a team after that. Unko ek doosre se alag karna impossible tha (it was impossible to separate the two),’ Aunty had once told me about Mohini and her father.

  Mohini’s room was painted a light pink, the little cupboards were white, and there was a study table custom-made for her. A small pooja was done and Mohini shifted into the room. The next morning, Mohini’s parents woke up in the morning to find Mohini curled on the floor next to their bed. By the time evening came, Mohini shifted back downstairs.

  A month later, the second floor was converted to a paying guest accommodation. The extra money was spent in Uncle’s frequent visits to the hospital. Over the years, the inhalation of paint fumes, the asbestos had clogged his lungs, sprouted cancerous cells in his airways and worsened his asthma. The houses he had built were threatening to kill him. It came as surprise to them because both Aunty and Mohini saw him as an indestructible demi-god before that and not without reason.

  ‘It’s a shame we never used that floor,’ Mohini’s mother often laments these days. More than once I have seen her mother eyeing her tenants as if she wanted them dead. Houseowners never really let go.

  Uncle had built a life from scratch for Aunty and Mohini, provided for them, taught them, built a house for them, protected them, loved them with all his heart. Aunty would have to make up stories and tell her friends in the neighbourhood when they shared their stories of spousal disappointment. Mohini used to love PTAs when the young and old alike would gawk at her handsome father. The teachers would make him sit for half an hour, their chins perched on their knuckles and hear him talk.

  Even after a decade into their marriage, Aunty would wash her face, apply sindoor and lipstick, and dress up twice a day. Once before Uncle woke up, and once before he came back home. Uncle would lock the bathroom door to keep his wife from waking up early in the morning and yet she would find a way. No matter how much he reiterated that he loved her, he couldn’t make her stop trying to go the extra mile for him. He gave up after a while.

  Mohini went a step further. Aunty would often joke that she and her father were twins. If her father fell sick so did Mohini and vice versa. She looked exactly like him. When she was little, and even now, she shared clothes with her father whenever she could. Aunty would often joke to her friends that they couldn’t have another child because Uncle didn’t want to disappoint Mohini. It wasn’t wholly untrue.

  ‘I will smother the baby if you make one. Mai maar dalungi use, papa kasam (I would kill it, father promise),’ she would tell her father, crying.

  Neither of the parents knew if she was serious or not. She must have been serious because every time someone would tell her that she would eventually get married and be off to her husband’s place, she would get furious and throw things at the person’s face. It used to be quite embarrassing for Aunty to take Mohini out to relative’s houses.

  When she was little her father’s arms would put her to sleep in an instant. For the first three years, she wouldn’t fall asleep on a bed; it was her father or nothing else. Aunty still recalls that time her father had to leave the city for three days. I’m not sure if it’s an exaggeration but she maintains that Mohini had cried non-stop for those three days. Things didn’t change a lot even as she grew up.

  I’m thinking about how so many things can fit into a short hour-long movie when I ring the bell.

  ‘Did you get everything?’ Mohini’s mother asks me irritably.

  I did.

  ‘The bhindi as well?’ she asks.

  ‘How can I forget?’

  ‘Paneer masala.’

  ‘The first thing I got.’

  ‘Dosa batter?’

  ‘I love your dosa, aunty.’

  ‘Chillies.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dhaniya?’

  ‘A lot and for free.’

  She nods and I hand over all the groceries to her. She checks the bill and hands me the exact change. As much I as I try to tell her, she insists on repaying me to the last rupee which invariably means my pockets jangle with one-rupee coins. I think she does it on purpose. But the joke’s on her. Where would she be if I didn’t get her her grocery? I have made her so dependent on me that she can’t make do without me. I played the long game; she will always need me.

  ‘Tea, Ananth?’

  ‘Haanji.’

  ‘Why don’t you ever say no?’ she says and stomps off to make tea.

  I call out Mohini’s name and then make my way to her room. She’s looking at me when I enter.

  ‘Hi, you look beautiful,’ I say.

  I can imagine her rolling her eyes hard at my compliment, although she doesn’t. She just gives me one of those smiles that only if you’re looking very closely can you see. I hold her hand and look over my shoulder to see if Aunty’s coming.

  ‘Aunty makes very bakwas, tasteless, tea, Mohini,’ I say.

  She wants to tell me it’s intentional because she doesn’t like me but stays shut.

  Mohini doesn’t like it when I’m unkind to her mother. But she sees her mother’s unfairness to me all the same. It’s been days since Mohini and I have gone on a date. Aunty says she’s too recognizable and there are far too many dangerous boys who might say they only want a selfie but who knows . . .

  Aunty gets three steaming, underdone cups of tea. I want to taste hers to check if hers is sweeter.

  ‘Pretend I’m not here. You can say whatever you need to,’ she says.

  She stares into her book. She doesn’t flip the page. For the past month, she has been staring into the same book. For someone who buys second-hand books by the kilogram at Daryaganj she’s taking her time with this one. And how would she finish this book; she only picks this is up when I’m in the room and she’s watching us with her hawk-like eyes. Neither I, nor Mohini, is happy with this but this is what we have to make do with.

  I have seen Aunty’s younger pictures. Unlike Mohini’s childlike face, Aunty seemed like she always had somewhere important to go. An impatient, piercing gaze that judged you. She had the look of someone who had to interview candidates for a senior management position. A cold, hard look, pursed lips. You had to search for what she felt in her eyes, dig for the slightest of blinks. Worrying for her daughter had aged her swiftly; but in a TV show fashion. Her hair seemed it had been intentionally dyed grey to look more imposing.

  I begin, ‘Baby . . .’

  ‘Don’t call her that!’ Aunty interrupts.

  ‘I always call her that,’ I protest.

  Mohini stares both me and her mother down.

  I tell Mohini about Saraansh and what he plans to do, and although she maintains a poker face for her mother’s benefit, I can feel her excitement. Aunty wiggles restlessly in her chair. I’m only halfway through when her mother butts in.

  She slams the book on the table and grumbles, ‘How do you have the audacity to suggest something like that? I’m not allowing anything of this sort.’

  I try to explain to her that it won’t happen without her express approval. With every word that I say, her anger spikes. ‘I have given you enough leeway, Ananth. But if you do this, I won’t let the two of you meet.’

  ‘Aunty, just listen—’

  ‘You listen to me. I’m serious about this. I don’t want that kind of attention directed towards this house,’ she snaps.

  ‘That’s not your decision, Maa,’ I say.

  ‘I’m not your Maa. HOW MANY times have I asked you not to call me that?’

  ‘I felt it best to not keep a count,’ I say. This never fails to throw her off.

  ‘I make her decisions. It’s better you leave, Ananth.’

  She keeps the book on her side and gets up. Mohini’s racquet hangs behind the wall. It wouldn’t be a surprise if she plans to use it.

  I look at her and she stares blankly at me.

  ‘Baby? Mohini?’ I ask.

  She has no answer for me. I wish she would stand up to her mother occasionally. How long will she keep doing what her mother asks her to do? Was the video she made the only act of courage against her mother? Sometimes I wish she hadn’t used up all her rebelliousness in that single act and instead rationed it to spend little chunks of time with me.

  ‘I will ask you again tomorrow.’

  I blow a kiss at Mohini to piss Aunty off.

  ‘I love you, baby.’

  ‘Besharam, so shameless! Nikal yaha se (get out)!’ Aunty mutters angrily.

  I watch Mohini in the mirror of the living room. She’s smiling; she loves these little skirmishes between her mother and me. Aunty’s still grumbling and complaining to Mohini.

  When I get back home and tell Maa what happened, she says what she always does.

  ‘You don’t have to let her mother steamroll you just because she’s your girlfriend. Tomorrow if you get married, will she dictate terms to me? I won’t allow that in my house.’