NAKED DINNER

The four of us sit- a- talking in our Cosmopolitan tones
Like an illustrated Enid Blyton novel
Melancholic Bernard Hermann
Spouts from an invisible jukebox
In between bouts of some proverbial popular remix,
Totally random, loud and unclear
I'm petrified of running into Winnie
What's happening to my characters?
Susan looks at me when I look at Reva looking at Aniruddha looking at-


Over-bored, self assured, annoying, women
Parsi Pearls, their make ups a veil
The abundance of nakedness
I can smell the infidelity in their hair
And the dead cows in their Guccis
Appalled by their bourgeoisie vivacity
Someone looks like someone famous
Someone else looks like someone I knew
I think eventually everyone is like that
Bloody actors


Reunion of the Class of 2003
Nonsense
It's as though a chasm separates me now from others
I’m here
But I'm not really here
I'd rather be writing poetry around people who think I'm clever
The party's almost over
People get sleepy
The balloons lie deflated
Susan asks me for another Bloody Mary


It is then that I hear
That familiar voice engaging others in stories around the fireplace
A voice I knew from
Before color television
Before math tuitions
Before competition
He was the first friend to whom I introduced Winnie
He was the second person I wrote to during my year in Paris
He was the only nine year old I knew who knew about Ibsen and Pinter
He was the star of our English Literature class
He was the one who would go far
He was the surrogate for all our childhood dreams


Even today
I cannot help but think of him
Whenever I see a Pinter play
Or a snow capped mountain

For Nakul Chowdhury had been my best friend in whatever I can recall of my childhood
But now, I realize that I make him uncomfortable
We pretend we don't know each other


In that split second, I could see many things:-
Monogrammed rejection letters in publisher envelopes
A talent more precocious than any I'd ever seen
A pair of haunted eyes that once brimmed with hope
The man who still told stories when he had nothing else to give
And that he'd never quite become the next Joyce
(I found later from the hostess that Nakul had joined his father's footwear business)


They had won
They had succeeded
In touching him, corrupting him
With their disease
Him, too
Weathered by their bitterness and apathy
Of the world, he had grown up to be
A compromising sell out
A materialist hypocrite
A disillusioned, inconsequential, ordinary middle aged man
A failure.
And now, to see him like that
Devastates me


I guess on most days, he could pretend to be happy
Around people who didn't know any better
But on nights like this, with voices from the past
He was compelled to dwell on what might have been
He was forced to think of all the unpublished pages in the aluminum trunk in the attic
He was made to ponder over every rejection and all those near misses
That he could no longer hide his pain in his cynicism
That he could no longer evade eye contact
That he could no longer avoid disappointing someone
That's why I pretended I didn't know him
I wanted to spare him the humiliation


But when he left the party tonight
I felt again the sort of numbness I had felt
The night my father told me that there was no Santa Claus
The night Magician Nandi revealed the vanishing thumb trick, only to me
Tonight too, I felt,
A part of me was lost
Forever