The Party

He looked at the glass in his hand. The light brown liquid in it swirled as he gently twirled it this way and that. Vish had not sipped his drink in the last half-hour. He had returned to whisky after a long time, assuming that the tongue would lap it up with the thirst of years. Instead, it had tasted so bitter that he didn't want any more of it.

Outside him, the lively music swirled while the bodies twirled. Vish watched, amused that each had discovered its own rhythm to the same music, amused that no two seemed to be dancing to the same beat. Yet they all were; at least the background of noise was the same. Each set of hands and hips, limbs and torso seemed to be interpreting it in its own way. The heads tossed like sunflowers caught in the wind, throwing the streaming hair with gay abandon. The hips swung from side to side, the legs struggling to keep up with their frenzied movement.

Vish had never really understood the rapture of these mad dances. It had always seemed to him like a strange tribal ritual; he had been only on the fringes of the tribe, an outsider to whom the magical secrets are never revealed. He looked at the inner circle, trying to identify the few people he knew. He managed to spot a couple of chaps he used to know in the distant years of college but Chotu, no, he could not spot Chotu.

"Ah! Here you are, hiding in a corner. Drinking away as always, hmmm. Look at him, Nuttu! Already on his third peg." Chotu's voice boomed happily over the echoing din. "What, Vishky, no ice and all. You still drink neat!! Incredible, man. Just look at him. You won't believe it, Nuttu, the way Vishky can drink, it's amazing. We used to have parties all night and he'd be drinking right up to the morning!"

"And whisky, neat", he added with a dash of pride.

Vish smiled vaguely, as if in shy acceptance. Explanations were so tedious; the truth lay like a tangled ball of thread. Turning to Chotu, he said " Hi! I was looking for you." And then hesitantly, "I wanted to talk to you a bit."

Some of the enthusiasm in Chotu's eyes crept out. He leant towards his old friend, and spoke softly. "You don't have to get emotional. Every time you get high, you get senti."

The mildly accusing tone upset Vish. "I'm not high. Not at all. I wanted to discuss something, something personal." He eyed the crowd with distaste.

"Oh, come on, Vishky!" Chotu replied loftily,"You must learn to be discreet and reticent."

The words stung him; Vish sat quietly, his head bowed, shocked like the priest who found his favourite pupil preaching heresy to him. He had never chatted with Chotu in the Morse code of reticence. He had instead tried to rely on trust and sharing. They were to be his cables of communication at lightning speed; but of what use were the lines, the cables going from city to city - that network of the past built with care and pain -if there would only be meaningless messages to carry? Vish tried saying "trust" and "sharing" but the words sounded hollow and naive even to him. They used to remind him of times spent in college when they were as close as twins in a crib but the long months of isolation and discretion had stanched the flow of painful meaning. He could not bring himself to utter such words to draw the other's quiet ridicule.

"Sit", he mumbled unsteadily. "I won't say anything but you don't have to run away, my dear little Chotu!"

"Don't call me Chotu. I'm not a kid anymore." Irritation had crept in. "I was once a bit kiddish, I needed you then but that's all over. I don't need you now."

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Oh, Vishky, you don't have to take it like that." A layer of exasperation covered the apology he wished to make.

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Oh, come on! Why can't you enjoy yourself? After all, this party is for you."

"Yes, I suppose so", he repeated without thinking, looking out at the sea of faces he barely knew. Like a sailor who returns home after years at sea only to find that those he searches for have moved on and left no forwarding address, he was at a dead end. He had arrived in Bangalore a few hours ago. The first thing he had done was to call up Chotu. There had been an unfamiliar accent and the drawl, "Yes, this is Mr Ganesh speaking". Then a burst of sheer silence as each realised who was on the other side of the telephone. The cry of "you bastard Vishky, what are you doing here?" had broken the spell. "I just took the weekend off to meet you; it seemed ages since we had last met."

"Wonderful, you land up at my house, the guard will give you the key; I'll call him up. You know my house?"..."No, no, it's not on Rangesh Road; I've moved long ago. Write down the address."..."You got the directions, okay. I'll try to be back early, seven-ish. Damn good show, your landing up like this. Must have a get-together to celebrate. I'll call up Nuttu, Chris, Goon and the others. See you. Bye." He had not been able to say then that he did not want to meet Nuttu or Chris or Goon; he just wanted to spend some time with Chotu. I don't want a party, he wished he had said; if I had, I would have stayed put in Madras. Every week they had a party, only the place and the excuse differed. The faces were the same; the music and the drinks were the same - they mattered little to him anyway, and they would go out afterwards to the same kind of places.

He'd wanted it to be different, not this way at all. Not this crowd of faces from which he had to pick out Chotu with difficulty, not this crowd, acquaintances in college, friends of Chotu he'd never met before. Faces which meant nothing at all to him, or worse than nothing. He felt a resentment towards them, as if they were invading his privacy. He had put on his polite air, tolerating with what he thought was no outward indication of his disgust and disdain, the back-slapping camaraderie of those he barely knew, the knowing "Oh-so-you-are-Vishky"s from those he didn't know at all. Who were these people to know about him, and what did they know anyway?

How could they ever know how close Chotu and he were? All those days and nights, that "passion" - a smile involuntarily played on his lips. Their other friends would laugh at them, "How can you two tolerate each other all the time? True love, huh?" They had had so much to talk about: Chotu had to tell him every day the wild swings of his fears and dreams that mark an adolescent affair; he had enjoyed playing the role of an elder, perhaps wiser, brother. Even after the years at college, the letters had flowed thick and fast before drying to a trickle of New Year cards. Lines from that song they used to sing in college came back to Vishky: Silence like a cancer grows.

Vish looked across the room, and his eyes met Chotu's, big, bright eyes that had always looked at his with complete candour. But now they seemed to be clouded, and he felt he could no longer see through them. A fine layer of dust had fallen on the eyepiece of the periscope, and from his underwater world, he could see only a blurred and spotted landscape.

As Chotu looked back at him, he averted his eyes and looked down into his drink, his solitary companion throughout the party. He felt uncomfortable, as if a stranger had caught him in an act of privacy. To keep himself busy, he sipped at his whisky and soda. His tongue curled up in distaste, the bitterness splashed on his face for an instant before he swallowed with an effort which made his Adam's apple bob. He'd learnt to drink only in college, his memories of drinks were parties with friends, the sharing of dreams and fears made possible with the lowered barriers induced by the cheap whisky, the rampant music and the need to be part of the group. With his colleagues in work, he'd rarely had a drink. As with a priest who loses his belief in Catholicism, the habit had worn away; the body had found other drugs, the mind other illusions.

He shrugged and smiled at himself. How naive he'd been! He'd thought he could repair the deepening damage, that some things would stand as a rock, for ever and ever, but he'd not reckoned with the extent of erosion. Like the relentless sea, it had eaten away the rock bit by bit until all that remained was a pair of misshapen lumps; the cores were perhaps a little harder, a little more resistant to the wash of the sea: it would take a little more time. Even now, they were visible only in the quiet evenings when the tide withdrew, postponing its assault till the next morning. On those rare evenings, the pieces of rock were silhouettes etched against a colourful sky lit by the last rays of the dying sun, black shadows as mute as the broken pillars of an ancient rock temple.