10. Danish Roy

While my career plans had come to a screeching halt, Ankit, like a true supportive brother had asked me to join him for a celebratory party thrown in his honour by the rich, smug bastards who would fund and overwork him.

  Before we left for the party, I was suitably drunk on my father's twenty-year-old single malt—it was my revenge for his and my mother's lop-sided genetic transfer of intelligence and charm.

  'It's going to be a great party!' exclaimed my brother as we slipped into the BMW the organizers had sent for him. There was a little icebox with miniatures of Grey Goose and Black Label. Like a true unemployed person, I transferred them into my pocket before we left the car.

  The party was the fakest thing I had ever been to. Drunk and totally out of my wits, I stumbled from one conversation to another, being nasty with everyone who would talk to me.

  'So you work with your brother?' a girl asked me, clearly hoping to network.

  'Yes, I manage his whores. Do you want to sign up?'

  Another fledgling female entrepreneur walked up to me when she saw me and my brother together. 'So, your brother is quite the rage here, isn't he?'

  'Sure, he and his ten-inch big cock. Bet you can fit two of those in though, can't you?'

  I was an angry disappointing fucking loser who couldn't do one thing right in his life amongst these overachievers.

  Before I could be sued for sexual harassment and be an even bigger embarrassment to my brother and my family, I plonked myself on the bar stool, and decided to drink myself to nothingness.

  Three hours and four hundred drinks later, my brother was literally dragging me across the floor, trying to wake me up because it was time to go home. I know this because my head bumped into tables twice but I was too hammered to regain control of my limbs. I was a paralysed octopus. Too many limbs. Not enough head.

  Outside, he sat me down and turned my head towards a flower pot where I vomited for the next twenty minutes. He had ordered a cab. In my blurry, post-alcohol vision, I could see a girl in his arms, not the entire girl, just a pair of the longest, glittery legs I had ever seen.

  'Hey,' said Ankit, slapping my face gently, 'hey, I'm j 

ust going inside. She will be with you. Be okay, okay?' He thrust a plastic cup of lemonade in my hand. Seemed like a perfect waste of a good buzz but I sipped at it, and after fifteen minutes I was better enough to hear my brother's newest girl talk.

  'I run couponcode.com. I started it when I was nineteen,' she said.

  'I was still watching xnxx.com fifteen hours a day when I was nineteen,' I replied.

  'You're funny,' she said.

  That must have been the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to me in the longest time.

  'So you're planning to sleep with my brother tonight?' I asked, my social charm again failing me. She thought I was joking, again. I wasn't. Did I mention I couldn't talk to girls without insulting them?

  As we waited on, a Mahindra Scorpio came to a screeching halt a few yards away in front a cigarette stall, and two boys jumped out, raucous and more drunken than I was. Suddenly put into a protective role, I told the girl, 'Let's go inside. It's not safe.'

  'Why? Why should we go inside? They should get into their car and leave,' she said.

  'This is Delhi, not a feminism rally,' I slurred.

  The boys were now looking at us while dragging on their cigarettes. They weren't doing anything, just staring lecherously, licking their lips, blasting songs from their stereo, laughing rowdily, making their muscled pecs dance. But I was scared shit. They could rip me apart limb by limb and take this girl away. Nobody can say I didn't warn her.

  'Let's just go inside. Don't be foolish. I want to live.'

  'I'm not going anywhere,' said the girl. She refused to budge.

  'Don't be stupid. They are drunken men, they can do anything! If something happens, you will be to blame!' I almost screamed but I was too afraid to say out anything louder than a whisper.

  'What!'

  'Who is what?' asked my brother who appeared from behind.

  'Those men are staring at my legs and your brother here feels I should go inside and hide. He thinks if anything happens to me it would be my fault and not theirs. Because they are drunken men and they can do anything!' she exclaimed.

  'You don't have to put it like that. You make me sound like—'

  'What?' the girl snapped. 'A patriarchal, medieval boy who burns women for dowry? Yes, probably you're that.'

  And even as we were talking, my brother, the hero, had walked up to the men and asked, 'You can leave if you have bought your cigarettes.'

  The girl's eyes which were like embers were trying to burn through my soul, searing on my conscience that I was a regressive, scared piece of shit. Suddenly she turned dove-like and fluttered near my brother.

  'You should leave,' she said to the men who, I could tell, were counting the number of cricket bats they had hidden in the trunk.

  And before I could make sense of what was happening, as it often happens in Delhi, blows were being exchanged and my brother was getting pummelled left, right and centre.

  This was my spot in the limelight.

  It was one of those moments where a man's character is tested, one solitary moment which defines the good in a person, one selfless act of bravery that obscures everything else he might have done in his life.

  But . . .

  There wasn't even a shred of bravery in all 178 cm of me.

  Zilch. Nothing. Nada.

  My feet were bolted to the ground and I shrieked like a little kitten on seeing my brother getting smashed.

  The girl came running to me and pulled my arm and pushed me towards the battlefield. 'Fuck you, Danish. Go help your brother!'

  'Yes,' I murmured and said a little prayer. For someone whose facial beauty is comparable to a dead rat's, I didn't want them to break my nose.

  Finally, I gathered my senses and got into the thick of things, wildly throwing punches, cursing and shouting, missing everything and everybody while trying to pull my brother out of their way.

  The last thing I remember was following the last seconds of the trajectory of a head of a hockey stick coming in my direction.

  Blank.

  *

  I woke up later with a bitch of a headache in the backseat of a car the nice girl was driving.

  'Your brother really ditched you back there. Isn't he older than you? Shouldn't he be protecting you?'

  'He was just a little rattled, that's all,' Ankit said.

  'He's a coward, that's what he is. He asked me to go inside. Can you believe it? How do you stand him?'

  'He's my brother and I love him,' Ankit said.

  'He's a shit brother to have.'

  'He's still my brother,' Ankit said, grinding his teeth.

  'He's a disappointment and you know that,' she said.

  Ankit didn't reply to that. A little later, the car stopped in front of our house and Ankit pulled me out from the backseat. He dragged me through the front gate of our house.

  'Where are you going?' Ankit asked the girl as she started to get out of the car.

  'I thought . . .'

  'I'm not sleeping with someone who insults my brother.'

  And that was the end of the nice girl for that night, who was rather truthful I must add.

  *

  'What happened!' my mother shrieked the moment she saw blood coming out of both our faces.

  'I got into a fight and Ankit tried to save me,' I said before Ankit could utter a word. 'It was totally my fault. I'm sorry.'

  My father charged at me and it seemed like he would almost hit me before my mother came between us.

  'I told you not to take him!' my father shouted at Ankit.

  'But—'

  'He's a disgrace, Ankit. Disgrace!'

  He threw the newspaper he was carrying to the ground for dramatic effect and stormed off. My father wasn't finished though. A little later, he emerged from his room with an envelope in hand. He had that look on his face I have so clearly etched in my memory, that look which was an indication that he had found out about another one of my lies.

  He threw the envelope on my face. Inside, was an application for the registration for my second attempt at graduation. It had reached him that morning. He knew I had failed.

  'He failed his final year. He lied to us. He lied to you!' he shouted at my mother who looked at me as if I had committed genocide. 'He will amount to nothing in life.' He charged at me again, angry. 'What will we say to our relatives now?' He almost hit me again but stopped short and thrust a finger in my front of my face instead. Then probably seeing his spawn drunk and bleeding evoked pity in his cold heart. 'I will find you a job and you will do it regardless of what you think about it. I will not have you sitting at home being a burden on this family. Get it?' he shouted and worked himself up enough to finally slap me. He walked away and slammed the door behind him.