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.