When Hari Met His Saali (14 page)

‘You forgot to mention that this is the biggest contract ever for our firm,’ Tia smiled, wanting to scream. She wanted to hug Stephan. An innocent, genuine well-deserved hug, she told herself, but Stephan was already on the phone.

‘Clara babes, yeah, we just got done with the pitch and Tia was sensational. Yeah, we got it. Six million buckaroos. I know … I undervalued it … yeah she’s right here. Hold on.’

Stephan suddenly sounded like a father figure as he handed the phone to Tia. She spoke to Clara, who kept telling her ‘God bless, God bless’, and the Stephan hug never happened. Instead it brought Tia back to her reality in the narrative of her life. She had not called Hari even once since she had landed in New York, had completely forgotten to follow-up with him about the engagement work … and something, something else she had forgotten. Oh yeah, she still had to ask him about his visit to her house in Nagpur home! But when she got back to her room, she found a bottle of vintage wine that
Stephan had sent over for her. She polished it off without so much as a break, and had crashed out on the bed. Soon she was fast asleep. Unfortunately, Tia had switched off her phone before she started her pitch and had forgotten to switch it back on.

The previous night, when Tia was practicing her pitch in New York, Hari had been staring at the
Engagement Bible
file she had left with him. He was baffled by the number of articles, essays, business cards, ideas, drawings and doodles in it. It all looked very serious. After flipping through various articles he picked up one entitled ‘Why champagne pink is infinitely better than the garden variety, plain old pink’. He didn’t dare to read further and closed the file.

As if on cue, Chitthi arrived to rescue him. Hari immediately jumped up.

‘Chitthi, I need a drink. Like pronto!’

‘Of course you need a drink my man. Now that you are getting married, your journey towards alcoholism should begin. Let me take you out and help you with that,’ Chitthi was only happy to chime in.

‘Don’t be so smug, Chitthi. I have a valid reason to celebrate. We signed up with the Reddy brothers.’ Hari was already changing into his shorts.

‘That works for me!’ Chitthi was used to seeing Hari in his underwear. He didn’t even stare.

It used to be that Hari, Chitthi and the gang of boys would gather at Chitthi’s place for drinking parties. Those were the days. Chitthi was a foodie and enjoyed a
Fatal Attraction
type of relationship with liquor. More importantly, at that time he was single. Now he was married to the sweetest woman of all, a white girl from Texas, called Cindy Radford. She was not only a cowgirl type hottie with two blonde ponytails and a nice bust, but she was also the type of woman who could replace a toilet bowl in the bathroom on her own. Hari knew that because once she had actually done just that.

Last Thanksgiving Chitthi’s toilet had broken down and they couldn’t find a plumber to fix it. Cindy had swung her toolbelt onto her tiny waist and got down on her knees. Before long she had dismantled the toilet bowl from its base, carried it to her truck, hauled it to Home Depot, bought a new one and installed it herself — all in the span of an hour or so. All this while, Chitthi and Hari had pretended to be busy in the living room but were actually
terrified thinking that she would ask them for help. But, no sir, she had done more than OK without them. The toilet now flushed like nobody’s business.

An elaborate description of Cindy was needed in order to understand what Chitthi thought about women, and to understand that a little physical description of him was called for. You see, Chitthi was from a small town in Andhra Pradesh. He was the only son of an IAS officer, on a prestigious position, who was posted for most of his career in Himachal Pradesh. Chitthi was charcoal black in color, and had the most sparkling white set of teeth. If he closed his eyes and his mouth, it was impossible to tell where darkness ended and Chitthi began. And because everyone else in Himachal was fairly fair-skinned, he stood out like a sore thumb and was teased throughout his childhood and his youth.

When he arrived in America he had thick glasses and his hair was receding fast. He was twenty-two. But the man came with the singular goal of finding the whitest woman he could and marrying her. He had fallen in love with Cindy, had wooed her, and had won her heart over to the extent that she not only married him but took his last name as well. Cindy Radford was now Cindy Koothrappali.

Chitthi had taken Cindy to India, to his hometown, to sort of show her off, and his friends from his college days were genuinely jealous of him. Nobody had imagined that the blackest of charcoal would find the whitest of pearls. Nobody cared what he or Cindy did for living; their impressions were skin deep. That was Chitthi’s payback moment. Nobody, least of all Cindy, knew that he had given her a fictional last name. ‘Koothrappali’ was the last name of an Indian character from the classic nerd show
The Big Bang Theory.
It would be years before Cindy realized what Chitthi had done and her being blonde had nothing to do with her being the last to be in on the joke. She just didn’t watch TV. Chitthi had explained to her earnestly that this was his way of saying a big “Fuck You!” to everyone who had teased him because of his skin color. That was good enough of a reason for Cindy. Cindy was that type of a woman. She never got pissed at Chitthi. Chitthi knew he had a rare thing in her.

Now, sitting with them and couple of other friends from college days at Chitthi’s respectable house in Topanga Canyon, Hari couldn’t help but admire the chemistry between Chitthi and Cindy. It was Cindy who had backed up Chitthi when he was considering working at Hari’s start-up.

‘Go for it, big
bowy.
You are in America to bring alive your dreams, not to slave away in a foo-foo job,’ were her exact words.

Chitthi and Cindy rocked because she was way too cool, way too chilled out, Hari thought to himself as Cindy fixed another round of drinks for them.

L
ook at her; she is hardly a girl! I mean she is. Oh, she definitely has all the right curves, but she doesn’t have any hang-ups like other women.

Cindy was one of the boys, or at least it felt that way. Chitthi noticed Hari eyeing Cindy. He leaned over.

‘Dude, I don’t mind you looking, but, God, don’t stare at least,’ he whispered.

Hari broke his stare.

‘No, Chitthi, I was actually thinking that I wish Tia was as chilled out as Cindy, that’s all.’

Chitthi grinned.

‘
Beta
, getting married is very much like going to a restaurant with friends. You order what you want, then when you see what the other person has, you wish you had ordered that.’

Hari looked at Chitthi as if he had spoken an eternal truth.

‘Don’t worry, the good news is that everyone feels like that so you’re not abnormal or anything.’ Chitthi patted Hari on the shoulder before swaying away to the loo.

‘So, have you selected the ring for Tia?’ Cindy asked Hari.

It was an eventuality that the conversation was going to turn to the Hari-Tia-engagement-wedding. Thank God that when it did turn that way everyone was three or four beers down.

‘You know Tia, right?’ Hari asked Cindy seriously. She nodded.

‘Then you should know that I cannot select the ring for Tia. Tia selects the ring for Tia. Hari pays,’ he said with the desired effect of giggles and ‘tch, tch, poor Hari’ from the men in the room.

‘She’s going to take you to the cleaners,
bowy.
She’s gonna get the biggest diamond she lays her eyes on,’ Cindy said dreamily so that all the boys stared her as if to say ‘whose side are you on?’

‘What? I am just saying. I mean, I would!’ Cindy shrugged her shoulders before letting out a big burp.

Nicholas, who was celebrating his recent divorce, suddenly came alive.

‘I got a good one on marriage!’

‘Naah, not your lame jokes, dude,’ Cindy snickered.

‘At a cocktail party, one woman said to another: “Aren’t you wearing your wedding ring on the wrong finger?” The other replied, “Yes, I am, I married
the wrong man.”‘ Nic said it with the enthusiasm of an empty beer bottle.

‘That one’s so old, and even back then it was lame!’ Cindy waved off Nic dismissively.

This only encouraged the drunk and sulky Nic.

‘OK, here’s another. Did you know that eighty percent of men cheat in America?’

He waited for the disbelief to settle. It didn’t, but he finished the joke anyway.

‘And the rest cheat in Europe!’ and he laughed a throaty laugh.

On and on it went, the jokes getting sillier, more juvenile, and borderline rude but as the consumption of liquor increased they even sounded funnier. Now they were laughing at anything and everything. It didn’t even have to be a joke, they just laughed. Soon Nic had passed out on the carpet with his T-shirt bunched up to reveal his post divorce belly. Hari, Chitthi, Cindy and Manny — another friend — were now all drunk and proceeded to set Nic up in some embarrassing Instagram pics. They bunched his T-shirt up just above his chest to reveal his man boobs and then smeared white toothpaste all over his mouth. The pictures they took with their mobiles made them laugh even more.

Gosh I love this! I hope I get to do this even after the marriage!

It was all Hari could think about as he posed behind Nic as if he was spooning him, laughing with his tongue sticking out. To an outsider this might have looked obnoxious and extremely juvenile — which in all honesty it was — but for the liquored up foursome, it was just nonsense fun. Hari loved nonsense fun. It required little thought, was very relaxing and even liberating. It was one of those things one was not required to remember the next morning, and most of all it made him feel younger. He was feeling all this while posing with his pants around his ankles beside a propped-up Nic at the very moment when Tia walked in on them.

No one really noticed that the party had somehow moved from Chitthi’s living room to his backyard. Nic was dressed up as a woman in Cindy’s clothes and the boys were at various stages of undress. Tia somehow managed to stifle her first reaction of
What the hell are you doing, Hari?
and instead she stayed cool and calm.

‘Oh, what did I miss? This, this looks like fun!’

But the moment Tia walked in, she killed the party. It had died … withered … imploded. Tia had the reputation of a school teacher amongst the boys. Although Tia insisted on having a beer with Hari’s boys — as she called the
bunch — the mood had simmered down to defeat and surrender. The Hitler Lady was in the room! To Tia’s credit she had tried really hard to be cool, but even a drunk Nic could tell that she was seething inside and was going to take it out on Hari as soon as they left the party.

‘Hari, honey, you forgot you had to come to LAX to pick me up! Did you not remember that I was flying back from New York?’ Tia spit the words through her teeth, clenched to maintain a supposed smile.

‘I forgot, honey!’ Hari admitted before having a shot of Jägermeister. And then another.

‘How, how did you know I was here?’ he asked Tia. The question, because of the way it was framed, hung in the air. Hari burped and if this was a scene in a TV cartoon there would be hic-hic soapy air bubbles coming out of Hari’s mouth.

Tia had to dig deep — very deep — down to find all the might to not thrash each and every person in the room.

‘I’ll tell you something, Mr. Hariprasad,’ she said casually to Hari. ‘After waiting at the airport for an hour, after refusing a ride from Stephan, and calling you, like, one hundred times — which of course you did not answer because of what I see now that you were so busy with — I called your mom. Of course she didn’t know where you were, and so I tracked you by the GPS on your phone.’

‘You are so fucked,’ Nic said to Hari emphasising each word before passing out again.

‘It is so typical of you, Hari. You had one responsibility — to pick me up at the airport. And if you couldn’t, you could’ve dropped me a message before getting so pissed drunk. I’ll tell you one more thing, Cindy …’

Cindy had no idea why she was being referred to in the tirade, but she nodded because she was genuinely scared of Tia.

‘I had asked him,’ Tia continued, ‘requested him to get some work done for our engagement ceremony. I had done the hard part, all he had to do was make a few phone calls, hand over some advance money, but let me tell you, I haven’t even asked him yet but I know … I guarantee you that he has not done a single thing from the list I had given him,’ Tia said in one breath.

Hari felt hurt and embarrassed. He picked up the bottle of Jager (pronounced
Yay-gur
) and read the label to Tia.

‘Alcohol by volume thirty-five percent, seventy percent proof, made in Wolfenbüttel, Germany.’

Hari felt just like the advertisement for their liquor. The advertisement
showed the bottle of Jagermeister in chains trying to break free. Their tag line — Release the beast!

He also felt like Tia was undressing him until he was naked in front of his friends. He felt humiliated, but he was too drunk to really act upon his anger. To piss her off even more he took two big shots of Jagerand then chased them with a beer, all as he was looking into Tia’s eyes. He probably didn’t see them, but Chitthi, Cindy and Manny could see that Tia’s eyes were glowing red, like the devil. Still Hari continued to release the beast within.

‘In other words, this bottle says fuck you, you narcissist bitch!’ Hari said to Tia in a way that in his head sounded like the way a tough hero of a male-targeted movie would speak. He would not remember the silence that would fall over the room, but he would later recall that the time it took for those words to leave his mouth and land on Tia’s ears was long enough to cause flood of tears to run down her cheeks.

He did not see the two trivia facts that arrived in his inbox that night.

Hari’s Trivia # 101: A blackout is an amnesia-like period that is often associated with drinking. A person may be functioning normally but later has no memory of what happened.

Hari’s Trivia # 102: During an alcohol-induced blackout an individual can participate in a significant, emotionally charged event but have no recollection of what occurred.

The next morning — The Malhotra house

The last incident with Tia was the only thing Hari remembered of the night before when he woke up rather late. He had a massive hangover.

‘Shit, shit, shit,’ were the first words out of his mouth.

He paced back and forth and back and forth trying to piece together the sequence of events from the evening, but nothing was clear.

‘Damage control, damage control,’ was the only logical thing to do, he decided.

He tiptoed down to the dining room and, sure enough, Tia was sitting there with the whole Malhotra family except, thankfully, his father. Mary was trying to pacify Tia.

Holy shit. She has spilled the beans on last night.

Hari went back upstairs to his room. But downstairs at the dining table Tia was inconsolable as she poured her heart out to his mother.

‘You know, Mary, my relationship with my mother is not … I don’t mean
it as an obligation on you but, I had always thought of you as my mother …’ Tia broke down before she could finish her sentence.