When only love remains

Two

Two

Devrat

It’s a dark room, filled with the stench of cigarettes and alcohol; the windows are closed. Devrat has changed five apartments in the last seven months and he doesn’t think he will last in this one for very long either. Sooner or later, the landlord will discover the filth, the drugs, and his sloth-like living standards and throw him out, with all of his six T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, his guitars and his harmonica. And again he would lose himself amongst the many others in the streets of Kolkata. The city is crumbling, like him, like the people walking with him; there is no hope. 

He thinks of ordering food but after the rent and the security, he is left with just over six hundred rupees. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that he is out of cigarettes and without a smoke, words don’t come to him and without his words, he’s incomplete. 

But what’s the difference? No one listens to his songs anyway. 

He lights the last cigarette, takes long drags, and keeps the smoke inside him till only a small sliver of smoke pours out of his nose. He crushes the butt and runs his finger on the strings idly. Melody has always come easy to him; it’s the words that are the problem.

It’s been five months since he has uploaded any videos of his songs on his YouTube channel, which has all of two hundred subscribers, most of them accidental. But some of them, and he remembers them by name, are regular followers and have asked time and again as to when they can expect his new song. They even converse between themselves if the singer, Devrat, has left the singing business and is working now as an engineer or worse, dead. A few of them mail Devrat regularly, thanking him for his music, but apart from that he doesn’t really command a huge following. He replies to them whenever he’s in a mood to do so.

He has not been busy for the last few months. He’s been depressed, drunk and defeated . . . in love. In love that was true and undying and defying and strange and senseless and passionate and stupid, like every love is. He thought Arundhati was the one he would flee this city with, but like all great love stories it wasn’t to be. Like many others, and like him, Arundhati was always confused, the confusion rising from insecurity about what the future might hold rather than acceptance of what he really was. Like in all Bollywood movies, she was too rich for him, or he was too poor for her. And it still mattered even though they were only twenty-one-year olds.

Three months back, Arundhati got engaged to a nice Bengali guy whom her parents chose for her and she gladly accepted him. The guy is diametrically opposed to what he is. He is an investment banker, belongs to a family of doctors, lives in a palatial house in Salt Lake and has never been in an apartment that has a washroom smaller than the entire flat Devrat has to himself.

Devrat contemplates if he should get himself another pack of cigarettes or if he should sleep but the phone rings and it takes him an eternity to find the damned instrument under the mess. He’s surprised how much he could dirty his room even with his limited belongings. It’s his manager on the other line. Actually, he is the manager of fifty other acts like him and it’s his responsibility to get them gigs, possibly paid gigs in Kolkata and around. But since music is something you do because you love to do it, quite like writing, or journalism, you don’t expect to get paid. And moreover, electronica is in. Female DJs are in. Real live music is out. David Guetta is in. Stereophonics is out. Despite the fading fortune of small-time musicians like Devrat, Sumit, his manager, works steadfastly to get these musicians an odd gig a month. After all, till the time he signs a big band or a label, which doesn’t seem like a possibility, his income is tied to theirs.

‘Hey! Where are you? Thatplace Else today, 8 p.m. I sent you ten reminders. Don’t you check your phone or what? They have put big posters and shit, man. They are looking forward to your performance! The crowd is going to be insane!’ Sumit shrieks. His energy is unbelievable and it’s hard to imagine that he is thirty-five. He makes money off it but there is no denying that he loves music and tries to promote good music in the best way he can. He never signs a bad musician. Never.