Stranger Than Fiction?

There was nothing special about that Sunday. I’ve never really liked Sundays anyway. They don’t seem as free as Saturdays, and they are never really as hectic as Mondays. And in the disaster that is Indian television, Sundays are usually reserved for events and shows that are a wee bit more pointless than the tripe that people are subjected to on other days.

Anyway, back to that particular Sunday - so ordinary was that day that I don’t even remember the year it was in. Nothing of note happened all day. No good movies were shown, no new story ideas popped into my head, no new brainwaves about policies that would help in the betterment of India in the future, nothing.

At about 8.30 PM, I managed to get my hands on the TV remote for some quick channel surfing while an ad was on during whatever silly event it was that they were playing that night. Nothing interesting was on, except for an episode of Barkha Dutt’s ‘We The People’ on NDTV. From the looks of it, they were discussing my favourite song – Jana Gana Mana. (Yes, I half stood up while even typing that.) My interest was suitably piqued, and I began looking forward to the midnight repeat of the show, which I could watch in complete peace.

Soon, as lights began to go off across the city, they went off in my house as well. It was a little past midnight as I (probably) settled in with a cup of Bru Cappuccino to watch ‘We The People’. (So unmemorable was that day that I don’t even remember if I actually sat with Bru Cappuccino. I’m just assuming I did it because in that phase of my life, that is what I normally did.)

But somehow, that day was just meant to be unmemorable. I don’t remember much of that episode, except for the fact that I felt spurts of sorrow at how indifferent and cynical people were towards our National Anthem. Now I am no longer the jingoistic patriot I was in my teens, but I just love Jana Gana Mana. Even today, over two decades since I first heard it, I feel goose bumps when I listen to it.

We have all seen numerous versions of the National Anthem courtesy the Maharashtra government’s law of playing it in cinemas. The shot of Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosale looking at each other as they sing the National Anthem is one of the most impactful shots I have ever seen. I don’t know a single person who isn’t at least a little moved by the silent National Anthem, even though it is an advertisement at the end of the day. I even love the one that has a host of Marathi film and TV actors in it.

Even the version of the National Anthem that I detest (only because it is obscenely long and pretends to be intensely cinematic) - the one shot in Kargil - made an impression on me the first few times I saw and heard it.

So yes, I wasn’t particularly thrilled when people didn’t seem to take it seriously that day, even though I understood that it is eventually a matter of choice and personal preference. Barkha Dutt’s cynicism in particular was a little more than disconcerting.

As that singularly un-impactful show came to an end, they decided that the show would be incomplete if they didn’t actually play the National Anthem. And so they played it. The entire studio rose in respect. Even Ms. Dutt, after some deliberation, stood up from her comfy Oprah-esque position, admitting later that she normally never felt it necessary to do so. Needless to say, I, in my living room, stood up as well (as I always do, irrespective of the time and the place.)

As the last notes of my favourite song died away, a girl in the audience asked for the mike. And she said something to the effect,

“It doesn’t matter that all of us in the studio stood up when it was played. What matters is how many people stood up in their homes, in their living rooms, while watching this show on TV…”

“I am standing, which means others must be standing as well,” I replied.

Though I am quite prone to external manifestations of insanity, it was the first time that I spoke to a TV. It also seemed like I was speaking for the first time that day. The girl’s comment drew a smattering of applause, and the show came to an end.

I, of course, had no idea then that the girl happened to be one Swetha Ramakrishnan from Delhi, who would go on to, about half a decade later, become one of my best friends ever.

P.S. – This is, of course, a true story.

Phantasmagoria

He ran his fingers gently over the rough grey wall while trying to soak in the beauty of the structure to which it belonged. Churches always fascinated him, but this one, for reasons he couldn’t explain, felt special. He looked around. The lawn was so green that it looked alive. The spire of the 17^th century fortress in the distance made him forget that he belonged to the age of the iPhone. The moat snaking its way around Churchill Park made him happy in a way that only a vast expanse of water could. He walked slowly around the periphery of the church, afraid to go in. He then decided that since he had all day, he could come back later if he so felt like it. He took one last peek inside before turning away.

As if in a trance, he began to make his way across Churchill Park; across fountains, monuments and even a museum dedicated to the Danish resistance. He stopped at a lonely spot, where stood a bronze statue called Valkyrie. Within seconds, flashes of a furious Fuhrer and a one-eyed man were replaced with a sense of hypnosis that even looking through a viewfinder never caused. He was mesmerized by the dull green hue of the century-old statue, the expression on the face of the Norse Goddess who was the subject of the statue and the sheer force of the composition of the sculpture.

He stood still, absorbing every tiny detail of the statue, for much longer than he realized. It was only when the blue of the sky began to change hue that he realized he needed to move on. He decided to make another visit to St Alban’s Church, to see if he could muster the will to enter it.

He looked towards the grey limestone-and-flint structure in the distance, overcome by its power. He walked towards it, excited and nervous at the same time. The tiled roof reminded him, strangely, of home. He couldn’t shake off the inexplicable feeling that nothing would be the same once he entered the church. He stopped, pondered over whether he wanted to enter or just leave the park for the day. In spite of a strong, almost cowardly urge to leave, he plodded along.

In the distance, the entrance to the church looked like a black hole. Human shapes began to materialize in the blackness as he neared. When he reached the entrance, he paused. Finally, he decided that he was going to go ahead with it, even though he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do once inside. He looked upwards and began walking. As he passed under the arch, the dull grey ceiling covering his field of vision felt like a strangely cinematic transition. He looked straight ahead. And then he saw her.

He stopped in his tracks, unable to believe it. It had been years since he had spoken to her, perhaps a decade since he had laid eyes upon her. It felt like reading a long-forgotten page from one of the earlier chapters of a monumental epic; a page gently dog-eared because of one beautiful, life-changing sentence contained within. A few moments later, she saw him. She stopped too, staring at him like how he was staring at her. No one knew who spoke first, but the first word said was,

“Hello…”

The other responded. After a pause, they walked closer to each other. He knew nothing of her life now, but he didn’t ask her why she was in Denmark, and more importantly, why she was alone.

“How have you been?”

She smiled and replied,

“I’ve been good, and you?”

“I’ve been great. Doing what I love doing, traveling and…”

He paused and chuckled.

“…and eating,” he finished.

She smiled again. They began walking together, without saying a word. They walked in complete silence for the longest time, each not knowing what to say, but neither willing to say goodbye just yet.

Eventually, they made their way out of Churchill Park and onto Esplanaden. They walked along the cobbled sidewalk, still silent. Suddenly, he spotted a quaint little bakery. The delicious smell of baking bread wafted its way gently over to them, making each of them smile a different smile. He looked into her eyes, opened another page in his mind, unfolded another dog-ear, and asked,

“Pastry?”

She stopped walking, smiled and nodded in the affirmative.

A few minutes later, they were seated on old, rickety, wooden chairs, with steaming hot coffee and delicious looking pastries in front of them. Still, no one spoke.

Finally, she said,

“He got busy with some work. Hopefully he’ll be done in time for dinner.”

He smiled.

“Where do you live now?”

“Perth. Australia,” she replied.

He sipped his coffee. He could sense that she wanted to say something. But he didn’t try to get her to say it. He had the feeling that, one way or another, he would get to know what was on her mind before they parted tonight. One’s eyes, after all, said far more.

Suddenly, without warning, she stood up. She hadn’t touched her coffee and pastry. She looked directly at him with a surprising lack of any emotion whatsoever. Gently, in the only manner she knew how to speak, she spoke.

“You know, I get the feeling that you have not changed one bit. I do hope you are really happy, no matter what. I know for a fact that you are with someone. I don’t know how she had it in her to trust you, but what I do know is that as long as it lasts, she will feel special.”

With that, she left money on the table and walked away into the dark. His eyes followed her, and he did not avert them even after she was long gone.

He opened his eyes, lying still for longer than he realized. Eventually he got up and walked over to his bathroom. He could hear birds beginning to chirp. He paused to hear all those familiar, morning sounds of his overcrowded city; ones that he had been hearing for the past seven years day after day, every single day. He looked into the mirror, paying special attention to the dark circles under his eyes. Then, he smiled, thinking of what had just happened.

“Brutally honest, even in a dream. What a woman.”

He smiled again and turned his back on the mirror.

Thank you

Anees Bazmee made a marvelous blockbuster this year with the same name as the title of this post. While some day I’d definitely like to thank him for showing us how not to make a film, thankfully this post is not to thank him. The greatest thanks, then, go to my parents. God simply doesn’t make them like that anymore. Every second of my existence is, in some way or the other, spent in thanking them. Especially after I realized what a pain it is to peel potatoes. (Ma, I can’t believe you did that for me all these years. I love you!) In any case, thanking them would be a task of a lifetime and I’m too small to attempt it yet. My grandmother deserves as much thanks as my parents. But she fills me with so much joy that if I attempted to thank her by writing, I’d cry buckets. Considering that the warranty for my MacBook expired ages ago, I won’t take that risk today. No. Today, I want to thank some other people.

Today, nearly a year since I last penned (typed, whatever) my thoughts, I feel like writing again. I feel like writing about a few people who played massive roles in shaping me. Before anyone thinks that I am shirking responsibility for the disaster that I am, let me clarify - everything bad about me is my own fault. But a large part of anything good, in any aspect of my life, is due to them. Mind you, I am too small to thank them as well, but there isn’t any harm in taking the first step.

Yes, they are teachers because they taught me. But they are much, much more than that. They are like a little speck of light that one sees far in the distance, when on a dark, windy night one attempts to navigate a treacherous road with thorns on either side. They are those who one thinks of when one is almost about to give up. They are beacons of everything right, when everything seems to be going wrong. While I often pretend to have answers, what I only truly have are questions. And what drives me is the quest for answers to them. While these wonderful people may or may not have given me those answers, what they have definitely given me is a tiny prod in a direction that might yield them, those elusive little answers. In short, me being me, these are the people I have enjoyed disobeying the most!

Undoubtedly the person to start with, chronologically and otherwise, would be Mr. Chandrakant Mahajan. To the world, he was my art teacher in school. (Art & craft, to be precise.) But what I will never be able to thank him enough for is teaching me how to think in three dimensions, for teaching me the importance of colour and composition, and for being the first truly creative influence on me. Later in life, engineering was a breeze in no uncertain measure because of him. But most importantly, today, when all I can think is cinema, his early influence is what helps me think in a language that is not English. (Spatio-temporal?) True, I have suffered my share of scolding and insults from him, but all of them contributed to the spellbinding experience that was Mahajan Sir.

At around the same time that my classmates and I were being influenced by Mahajan Sir, there was another adorable delight in our lives. Mrs. Cynthia Torcato. (English and History.) Yes, initially I was absolutely petrified of her. She has referred to me as, amongst other things, a dead duck. And once, when I proudly wore a class monitor badge on my chest, she looked at me and, in the most incredulous tone, said, ‘He is the monitor?’ But slowly, when one looked past the exterior, one realized what a warm heart she had. Observing her, I realized that perhaps being like the idiomatic coconut would hold me in good stead. It truly has, in ways that I can’t reveal here, for fear of defeating its very purpose! She made me smile because of how pure she was. In fact, thinking of her still makes me smile, as I’m sure it does to her other students. I don’t know where Mahajan Sir and Torcato ‘Miss’ are today, but I sincerely thank them for what they have been responsible for.

And then there was a drought. Not in terms of excitement, fun or learning because Fergusson College, All India Shri Shivaji Memorial Society’s College of Engineering and XL Dynamics India Pvt. Ltd. provided plenty of that. One fell in love and visualized breathtaking videos for romantic songs, in one’s head; one suffered heartbreak and walked alone through the Grand Canyon, again in one’s head; one thought of heart-thumping action situations, wove stories around them and reached new emotional and intellectual highs; one realized, through and through, that one wanted to be a filmmaker; most importantly, one learnt to let go. What one did not have is that tiny speck of light in the distance, that strong influence to guide one in the right direction. Perhaps this was possibly the deepest trough in the journey of my life.

Then, suddenly, came Symbiosis Institute of Media & Communication, Prof. Anupam Siddharth and a phase where the best of what Mahajan Sir taught me, that which lay dormant in the deepest recesses of my consciousness for over a decade, began to magically resurface, active like never before. If Mahajan Sir was a gym, Anupam Siddharth was undoubtedly a steroid supplement. Strangely, I hardly had a few hours of classes with him and I have had no personal interaction with him whatsoever. So it is quite hard to pinpoint how and why he has been such a huge influence. Perhaps it was because words like script, story, screenplay, colour, composition, lighting, music, sound, editing - words which have been around me since I can remember, began to make a little more sense. One of my favourite movies of all time, Apocalypse Now, was shown to me in a new light. Hitchcock’s genius was pointed out to me in places where I had not known to look. In fact, how to look, where to look from and what to look for, became painfully obvious, though not any easier. I could have either lamented over how little I interacted with him or I could have considered myself blessed for whatever little I eventually got. Predictably, I chose the latter and marched on.

I love trains. To me they symbolize the ultimate journey. A railway platform does no justice to them. Try standing on plain ground just a couple of feet away from the Deccan Queen when it is at top speed and you will know what I mean. (I did this during a location scouting exercise for a disaster that a tiny number of people now know as ‘Train of Thought’.) When running, a train seems unstoppable, destined to reach wherever it wants to go. And then there is Superman, who can pick up a train, mid-run, and place it on another track, pointing in the opposite direction. While this paragraph so far has aptly demonstrated just how creatively deficient the writer *cough* is, what it has done is speak a little bit of the last person I want to talk about - Mr. Ravi Deshpande. If my dream of being a filmmaker is akin to a train (Scooty, whatever), Ravi Deshpande is Superman. Be it the 20 minutes spent listening to him tell me, in his deep baritone, what was lacking in my short films or the hours spent with him discussing character briefs; every second with him has contributed to me respecting and loving cinema more with every passing moment. I know for a fact that I will never forget what he said in the first five minutes of the first proper shoot that I was a part of, when he assembled the entire unit for a bit before the start. Having said all this, me being me, I still don’t write character briefs. But I do think a little bit more about my characters than I used to. More importantly, I invest emotionally in them. He has played a monumental role in shaping how I perceive cinema and for that, amongst other things, I shall forever be indebted to him.

Job 38:11. Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further. I feel painfully inadequate, as does this post. There is so much more to say about these people. Indeed, there are so many more people to thank! Not having bothered to read what has been written so far, I have a feeling that all of it is inconsistent, probably incoherent. But then, feelings are the ultimate fodder for hearts and minds like mine. (If you haven’t guessed yet, I’m sleepy.) Some day, I’ll do more. Till then, all I can say to them is thank you…

November

...and so, he decided to kill her. McDonalds was an odd place to make this decision. But then, so much had happened over the last year and a half that, in retrospect, his mind had always been Vesuvius, simmering below the surface, waiting to erupt. He looked around. It appeared that ‘McD’ was now truly Indian. Youth, eager to rebel and conform at the same time; lower-middle class uncles and aunties who wouldn’t know the difference between a McAloo Tikki and a vada pav; the foreigner who seemed quite confused on seeing the disparity between the menu here and the one at the McDonalds back home; the woman gorging on her wedges, pausing only to give a loud burp of gluttonous ecstasy, the buttons of her blouse straining to conceal her bosom; the man with bulging biceps in a t-shirt that was easily three sizes too small, walking with a swagger that could convince the meek that he owned the city; he realized that at any given point of time during the day, a McDonalds outlet in this city would be like a microscopic snapshot of India.

Mopping up the last drops of ketchup on his tray with a fry, he popped it into his mouth, savouring the tangy, oily delight of the golden brown fried potato finger coated with tomato sauce. He decided to leave his tray on the table, justifying it by all the times he deposited the trash and the tray at their designated spots. For him, today was a day unlike any other, and he intended to treat it that way. After all, today he was going to kill her.

He stepped from the air-conditioned comfort inside to the sweltering heat and humidity outside. Andheri station was just a stone’s throw away, but he turned in the opposite direction. He had no intention of traveling by local today. Even though he had the privilege of relative comfort by virtue of his quarterly First Class pass, he hated local train travel. It signified everything that was Mumbai, and he hated Mumbai from the deepest recesses of his soul, detesting everything about the city – the humid weather, the stink of garbage along the streets, the jostle for the space and the right to stand straight, the vomit-inducing taste of the water, the deteriorating infrastructure, the eternal sons-of-the-soil versus migrants conflict. But even more than these external signs of a crumbling metropolis, he hated what Mumbai had come to stand for – the stench of human aspiration being content with mediocrity, the largest congregation of incomplete dreams in the world, the hard truth that the inconsequentiality of one’s existence was ignored only because of the sheer pace of life in this damned place. Nothing in the world evoked more anger in him than the fact that he had spent two years of his life in what he believed to be the manifestation of hell on earth – and all for her. His blood boiled further. He thought of his last days in Delhi. The intensity of the Jessica Lal murder case was at its peak then. Ram Jethmalani was twisting the case further, rejecting eyewitness evidence and inventing fictional characters. The capital’s political class was abuzz with talks of the US Senate approving the Indo-US nuclear deal. Amidst all of this, the all-guns-blazing, glamour-on-Prozac feel of the city was in tact. And he was leaving it behind, he felt, for love and greener pastures in India’s financial capital, the city of dreams. Now, just a little over two years to the day, he was going to erase all that had transpired in the last two years permanently. He told himself that it would all end tonight.

He decided to take a cab. Even though taking one all the way to Colaba would cost him more than he was willing to pay for a commute on a normal day, he did not mind it today. He decided that he would do everything in style – or at least, in as much style as he could afford. As he walked on, however, he noticed that the traffic was excessive, even by Mumbai’s standards. He couldn’t spot a cab, and even if he managed to find one, it appeared that he would be stuck for hours. Reluctantly, he trudged back towards Andheri station. He wanted to be done quickly, so that he could make a quick getaway to what he guessed would be oblivion.

He boarded a local to CST from the Harbour Line platform, staying silent throughout the journey. He was contemplating his course of action. His mind was a raging maelstrom, his thoughts not letting him be for one solitary moment, so much so that he did not even realize when he reached CST. As he got off, he let himself smile once. CST was the only place in Mumbai that he liked. He believed from the bottom of his heart that Mumbai did not deserve a structure of such magnificence. Functionally elegant on the inside, gargantuan in scale and architecture on the outside, the building always sent shivers up his spine.

As he slowly began walking towards the exit, he tried to shut off the voices inside his head. They were loud, screaming out conflicting thoughts to him in such rapid succession, that eventually all he could hear was chaos. And the chaos kept getting louder until it reached such a point where he felt that the whole world could hear it. It seemed to come from outside of him now, from all around him. Suddenly, he stopped and looked around. The chaos was all around him. People were running in all possible directions. He couldn’t, for the life of him, understand what was going on, until he heard loud, rapid booms coming from different directions. It couldn’t be what he thought they were. He searched for the source of the sound, but he couldn’t tell. Then, time froze. He saw a young boy dressed in cargos and a t-shirt, surely in just his teens, raising that unmistakable machine of death, pointing it somewhere in his direction. Suddenly, all the sounds were shut out. The last thing that he saw was a flash, which was followed a second and a half later by the last sound that he heard – a boom.

The Wall

Metropolitan Level Two. The only one in the country. Amit stared three hundred and sixty degrees - around him, above him and below him - soaking in the civil engineering marvel that the city around and underneath him was. He pressed a button on the side of his WristCGM, then looked at the display. The GPS system said he was ‘112.3 metres south of the S. Ganguly Megatower’. He couldn’t contain a smile. Even in this day and age, technology just couldn’t explain some things the way the human mind could. From where he was standing, SGM was the first thing that anyone with eyes could see. It wasn’t the tallest structure in the country for nothing. Today, however, it wasn’t the heights of this city he was interested in. It was its depths. Far in the distance, about a kilometer in front of him and two hundred metres below him, he could spot what his GPS system referred to as ‘Vidyasagar Setu’. He imagined how it would have looked at eye level, back in the days when his great-grandfather was alive. Though not from this city, Amit was sure that his great-grandfather had visited it a number of times. He felt a surge of emotion. His quest was coming to an end. All those months of traveling the country – starting from his home city, to Gulbarga, Madurai, Jabalpur, Delhi, Majuli and Berhampur – had led him, inexorably, here. He could feel it. The century-old object of his exhausting quest was nearby.

Vijay waited patiently. He did not once look up to see his mother and brother. He couldn’t, for the life of him, fathom why they climbed those same steps day after day, before starting every day. But he wasn’t one to interfere with someone else’s life. He just knew what he wanted to do with his own. It seemed a long way away, but he knew he could do it. He knew that one day this city would be his. His thoughts were interrupted by his brother. As the two of them took their mother’s blessings and walked away, Vijay wished his brother luck with his job search, and then began to take a detour off the road. His brother asked him where he was headed. Vijay told him that he knew a shorter route to his workplace. Then, as Vijay embarked upon the shortcut, the two brothers parted ways for the rest of the day.

As Amit took the Capsule down, he crossed Metropolitan Level One. This too had been the first in the country when it was built. Today Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and, of course, his home city, all of them had a ‘Metropolitan Level One’. This one though, was still the largest in the country. He still could not believe how man had even conceived of a city above a city. And two cities above a city? All of this was possible because of what, in his opinion, was at the pinnacle of man’s technological prowess – Obduronium. Nothing in the world was stronger, and once Dr. Yogesh Joshi had developed a method of mass-producing it, life for mankind had seen a super-cerebral shift, the kind never witnessed before. Then as he descended to the lowest level, all that he was thinking was driven out of his mind. The Capsule’s voice system said out loud “Level Zero Touch Point 19 – Mother Teresa Sarani”, but it didn’t register at all. As the glass barrier hissed and opened, he pushed on it, even though he knew he couldn’t get out until it opened fully. As soon as he could, he rushed out, nearly missing the Exit Retina Check. But he didn’t care. He broke into a run, bursting out of the Capsule Station and into the old city. Finally, he was here. As he walked ahead, he saw a pair of metallic lines right in the middle of the road. They were covered with dust, unused for more than half a century, but they were there, stretching serpentine into the distance. Though he knew they wouldn’t, Amit hoped against hope that they would lead straight to what he so determinedly sought.

Vijay looked at the scratches on his body. They were minor, compared to the damage he had inflicted. He knew that what he had done today would put him on the radar. He would be a marked man now, with people looking to either reward him or kill him. He welcomed both. He had reached the end of his tether. No more would he and his family live in poverty. Today he had taken the first step towards the obtaining wealth that he knew his family, his mother, deserved. He promised himself that he would repay every single drop of sweat and blood that she shed for them during her days of manual labour. He promised himself that his brother would not have to face the ignominy of being turned away from a job at every door that knocked. He promised himself that one day, every single human being who had ever caused him or his family any trouble at all would pay for it. He looked at his hand. He stared at it, willing it to be clean, unblemished and un-inscribed again. If only he could find the man who did it. If only. And then, a car stopped before him and a door opened, beckoning him in.

With the sense of history washing all over him, came the sinking realisation that he was now alone. Apart from a few famous landmarks and the twenty Capsule Touch Points, Amit’s GPS System appeared to have precious little information to offer about the old city. He couldn’t blame it, since very few people still lived here. Unimaginable, considering it used to be one of India’s densest cities. The population density had increased further, except that most of it had shifted to the levels above. Signboards now called this ‘KOL Metropolitan Level Zero’, a name that he suddenly realized he detested; a pointless corruption of such a beautiful name. It was the first time he was visiting this city, but he felt a connection that he could not explain. But then, how could he not feel a connection to something that was connected to Satyajit Ray and R. D. Burman? His thoughts were interrupted by a vibration on his wrist. He looked at his WristCGM. The display read “GeospatioMeter Battery Low. Switching To ChronoMeter Mode.” Suddenly, his WristCGM was just a, rather large, digital wristwatch. He looked at the time. 17:23, 31/12/74. He smiled. He had waited this long, he could wait another few hours. He decided to get some sleep. If he completed his quest the next day, and he was sure he would, the date would be highly symbolic. He stopped and looked around. He could see Fairlawn Hotel up ahead. It seemed good enough, and was one of the few that seemed open. Slowly, he trudged towards it.

Vijay was livid. Today, he had everything in the world. What he did not have, he could buy if he wanted. He looked out at the sea. The waves were calm. He was not; because he was angrier than he had ever been in his life. He looked at his suit. He looked at the porcelain vase Anita had gifted him. He thought of how everything in this magnificent city could be his at the snap of a finger. And the thought of all that he had angered him more and more. Because today his lowly, upright brother, had told him what he did not have. And it hurt, because no amount of money could buy the only thing in the world that he did not have.

Amit could see the flyover only in silhouette, because the sun was shining bright behind it. He was looking for a person named Ghoshmaulik, who lived somewhere on Camac Street. If what he had learnt was true, then Ghoshmaulik would have what Amit had dreamt of owning for the past eleven years, and had pursued ardently across India for the past seven months. If he had not been where he was, then he would have assumed that this would either be another dead end, or it would just yield another clue to yet another place. But somehow, considering where his search had led him, he was sure that this would be it. He spotted an old man in the distance. He asked him where Camac Street was. The old man muttered directions, which Amit dutifully followed. Once on Camac Street, Amit double checked to see if he still had the money he was carrying. He was sure he would be shelling out quite a lot of it for the treasure that he sought. For a moment, Amit felt like Indiana Jones. He suddenly realised how fast time flew. The last Indiana Jones film, The Treasure of Melujah, had released over two decades ago. Ethan Ford had done a good job, but when Amit saw ‘Raiders of the Last Ark’, he felt that Ethan wasn’t a patch on Grandpa Ford. He shook himself out of his thoughts. Now all he had to do was find Ghoshmaulik. Since he could hardly see anyone on the streets, he just decided to walk around. From what he had heard, Ghoshmaulik would be nearing a hundred. So he wasn’t likely to be taking a stroll right now. He decided that he would check every building, knock on every door on Camac Street if he had to. He checked his WristCGM. Surprisingly, he was getting quite a lot of data for Camac Street, now that he was here. He continued walking, and his WristCGM kept throwing back a lot of data at him. The GPS System on it was accurate to a centimetre, and every building, every lane that he saw was reflected on his GPS. Perhaps this was the last portion of the old city which was to be de-loaded from the Genavo GPS Server, the service provider for his system. And then, Amit suddenly stopped in his tracks.

He looked up at her eyes. He wanted them to be the last thing that he would see. He did not want to go. He wanted to lie where he was forever. It had been years since he lay like that in her lap, and he did not want that moment to end. There, on the very last leg of his great journey, Vijay realised what true wealth was. He had missed her for so long, and now she was with him. There was physical pain, yes, but it didn’t matter. If only he could go all the way back in time, and erase the portion where he took the shortcut, she could have been with him forever. But the moment had passed. He had made his choice. And he knew that he could take the consequences of his actions. Still, he just wished he could really tell her what he wanted to. Words, however, failed him. In the end, it really didn’t matter. There in his mother’s arms, at least Vijay knew that he couldn’t have died a better way. As her transparent tears mixed with his red blood, Vijay breathed his last.

The dusty lane that he was walking on did not show up on the GPS. Again, Amit did not know why. The buildings on either side showed up, and so did a large building that he spotted behind. But this lane was missing, which was what prompted him to take it. Right at the end of the lane, he came up to a brown door. It looked like it truly was out of an Indiana Jones movie. Amit felt a prickle up his spine. This was it. Inexplicably, after months of hard work, the end had come easily. He did not know what was going on, but he knew that behind this door was what he sought, the treasure, the object of his quest. As he pushed the door open, a ray of light went in before him. Amit didn’t mind, because from the look of it, it was clear that the ray had been trying to get in for many days now. In front of him sat a man who looked as old as time. He might have been Ghoshmaulik. Amit didn’t know, and he didn’t need to ask, because as soon as the old man saw Amit, he slowly pointed to his right. Amit followed his hand, and saw that it was pointed at a large chest. His pulse raced even faster than it already was. Amit knew that the moment was finally here. Everything he had done for the last seven months had brought him to this point. Amit walked up to the chest. It was unlocked. He opened it slowly. As it creaked, layer upon layer of dust which had finally been disturbed began to protest. Amit waited for the dust to clear. He couldn’t see the contents yet, and the suspense was now getting to him. Slowly but surely, as the dust cleared, Amit saw what was inside. The shine of the aluminum had long faded to a dull gray. But it was unmistakable. Finally, it was his. He knew that he could take it without a word. Because deep down, he knew that it belonged to him. As he took it into his hands, he saw something that made him smile a smile that could define smiles. On the aluminum canister was stuck a small photo of his great-grandfather, dressed in a coolie outfit. The sight brought a tear to Amit’s eye, because he had not expected it. Though it was true, he just couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe that exactly a hundred years since its release, he had in his hand the last surviving film reel of Yash Chopra’s Deewaar.