My Birthday Promise (Editing)

Intervention

Dinesh

I couldn't contain my happiness since Malvika accepted my proposal. She accepted the ring and had been spending more time admiring the diamond ring than me. But I was okay. I didn't have a problem with it. My only worry was paying Aman back for the ring. Since Alisha said no to her proposal, Aman changed. He had gone back to his old habits of picking up girls for one night stands. He reinitiated his faith in the line- there is no love. He never approached a girl with an intention of knowing her or loving her; he didn't care about how beautiful she was. All he wanted in her was him. Whereas Mohit choose to submerse his pain in alcohol and he was on the brink of becoming the so-called Devdas. I had not seen him clean shaved for weeks now. He rarely came to office and usually worked from home as he had the option of drinking golden liquid while working from home. We tried to stop him on many occasions but he never listened. Aman took out all the bottles from his apartment once so that he won't drink but the next day his room was redecorated with the bottles. This was when we planned of an intervention.

I kind of knew Alisha will reject Aman's proposal and he will be left heartbroken because Alisha loved someone else. But that day we were high; we were high on alcohol-courage. You know what alcohol does. It supports you false hopes. It gives you much needed impetus; it pushes you to do what seems impossible otherwise. And it is not like it doesn't work, it worked for me when my proposed Malvika.

Aman's case was different. Alisha loved someone else. And that someone was Mohit. After her birthday party I managed to hack her accounts and operate her laptop from my place after I installed keylogger and patches in her laptop. I could tell she knew Mohit from school days and since they both were hiding this fact raised a doubt in my mind. Rutt might be having the same doubt that's why she asked me to find about Alisha. My doubt turned right when I saw them kissing in her bedroom on her birthday. I didn't tell anyone about it, not even Malvika, as I didn't want my favorite couple to break-up. Next day when Rutt came back from US she asked me to stop my assignment as she had realized that it was a mistake on her part to doubt on her boyfriend and best friend Alisha. Rutt had the client privileges and I would have easily told her about Mohit and Alisha if she would have asked. She sounded apologetic and asked me to scrap all the data. I obeyed and stopped peeping into Alisha's laptop and her life. What I couldn't understand was why she wanted me to stop when clearly Alisha and Mohit had something going on in between them.

Now, if she didn't know anything about Mohit and Alisha then why did they break-up? I still couldn't figure it out. There was surely more to it than meets the eyes.

****

Mohit's place looked like a museum of alcohol bottles. There was every kind of drink lying in his house. Some empty beer bottles artistically were lying on the floor, some half-filled scotch bottles were placed on the coffee table waiting for their turn, and one vodka bottle was kept over the laptop which was overseeing him sleeping next to it on the bed. One turn to the left and the vodka would have easily spilled all over his bed. But he did not seem to care. Or in other words he was not in the position to care. He was high.

I gingerly tried to wake him up but he was sleeping like a log. After few failed attempts Aman came to my rescue and kicked his sleeping ass. He stood up at once holding his ass; it took him full two minutes to figure out where he was and what just happened.

"This is not the way to wake someone up," he said, rubbing his eyes with one hand and rubbing his butt with other.

"This is exactly how we wake drunkards up," Aman quickly replied.

Mohit didn't say anything after that. He silently observed us, as if trying to figure out why we were here. "Why are you guys here? You should be in office?"