What The Eyes Don't See

3 | Another Encounter

There was something odd in the air around him; Anay could not deny that. Apart from the nightmares and the visions, he could feel its material presence. At times it was as subtle as a shadowy mist trying to manifest out of thin air, while at other times it was as overwhelming as the incessant buzzing of a bee. Often, especially when alone, he could feel that sudden chill passing through the entirety of his body, making him shiver with a jerk. He could sense it around him, but whenever he turned to look, he would be met with nothingness.

He put it down to a stressful time at work—the only logical explanation he could see. The cat-food project had been bagged, but the client turned out to be, as his boss put it, 'a finicky bastard.' "It is usually the case with people who pay promptly," Salil told him. "They pay quickly so that they can control the strings. Remember this life-lesson, kid!" Anay knew that life-lesson already, and to make it worth the investment that Sen had made for his cat-food marketing, Anay burned the midnight lamp. Right from closing the script for the final version of the ad to auditioning the cats, he was hands-on. He also knew that Salil was watching every step; he was under a microscope and what he showed of himself under that magnification could make or break his career in the industry.

Anay's upbringing had been in an interior town in central India. Indore could hardly be called as a small town, but it definitely wasn't Mumbai. At his school in Indore—the Holy Heart Convent—he had shone through. But the admiration of his accolades in school did not extend to his home. He was the middle of three brothers, which led to an inevitable lack of parental attention. When the third brother was born, his father, Gopal Chandra Ghosh, decided that he had enough heirs to run his huge textile business. That was what had been drummed into the boys' heads from their youngest days, which was why things like academic marks and grades did not matter.

But Anay was different. He did not want what his family offered him. He had dreams of a big city life. Even as a child, he would run behind express trains on the open tracks, imagining that he was going to either Mumbai or Bangalore or Delhi, the big cities that he had heard of, especially Mumbai because that was where the business of glamor was, where he could rub shoulders with the movie stars.

When his father passed away suddenly soon after his schooling years, he saw his dream taking a more concrete shape. He focused on making a life one day in the big city. He studied hard and the degrees followed. Soon after his graduation in media marketing, he made the bold move of applying for a job in Mumbai. It was the catharsis to his childhood ailment of being stuck in a town that wasn't a metropolis.

But it came at a cost—his older brother threatened to obliterate him from the flourishing family business. Anay could not care less.

Now, at an annual package of fifteen lakh rupees which was slated to increase soon, he was one of the most contented men of his age in Mumbai. Still in his twenties, he had the world to conquer.

But good things have a way of not lasting forever. Their ultimate cruelty lies in the fact that they create an illusion of permanence, which makes it all the more difficult when they sneak away without a goodbye.

Somewhere around him, Anay could feel that cloud too; a mist of despair that something was amiss, that this veneer of happiness would dissipate soon and he would be left behind with nothing but the bare bones of his loneliness, and it was this insecurity that besmirched his joys of satisfaction.

***

A few days after that night at The Bandana, a curious incident happened that boosted this notion in his mind.

It was mid-morning, around eleven. Anay had stepped out for the dubbing studio, which was a half-hour's ride from the office of Changemakers. His task was to check the final cut of the cat-food ad. It was early morning yet according to media industry timings. When he reached the studio, an assistant was still cleaning up the place. Looking at Anay, the thin reedy boy in a shirt with open buttons and jeans folded up to his knees, went into a tizzy. He profusely apologized for having forgotten the appointment and led Anay right away into the dubbing room.