Love on the Rocks , livre ebook

ISMITA TANDON DHANKHER
Love on the Rocks
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Prologue
PART I
Sancha
Journal Entry
Aaron
Harsh Castillo
Sancha
Journal Entry
Aaron
Baldy
Captain Popeye
Sancha
Journal Entry
Aaron
Sancha
Harsh Castillo
Sancha
Raghav
Sancha
PART II
Sancha
Harsh Castillo
Journal Entry
Sancha
Harsh Castillo
Aaron
Raghav
Sancha
Raghav
Captain Popeye
Sancha
Harsh Castillo
Journal Entry
Sancha
Harsh Castillo
Sancha
Journal Entry
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
LOVE ON THE ROCKS
Ismita Tandon Dhankher graduated from Sophia College and went on to pursue an MBA degree. After a brief but highly successful stint in the forex division of Thomas Cook, Mumbai, she decided writing was her true calling and gave up her management career to become a full-time author.
To an honest man, a brave soldier, a terrific guy-my dad-and his better half for thirty-two wonderful years, a woman of extreme intelligence and forbearance-my mom
Prologue
The dam broke on my eleventh birthday. But even my birth was a horrid cosmic joke, coinciding with Halloween. I did not wake up with a birthday kiss and there were no birthday wishes; she had simply forgotten all about it. Nothing surprising there, but I was hurt like never before.
God is kind and He must have felt some pity for a little boy named after the holy food manna, given to Moses and his followers in the desert. A miracle did take place as I entered the classroom; all the children stood up and began singing the familiar birthday song. My happiness knew no bounds at this unexpected sight. I felt important. Someone had remembered that Manna existed. I thanked everyone diffidently and took my seat. I shared my bench with Trevor Varghese, a smart boy from a well-to-do and respected family, unlike ours. The only reason we shared a bench was because we were the tallest and that decided the seating order in the class. We didn t talk much. Rather, he never initiated conversation with me and I was too wary of him to start one myself. So I was surprised when he wished me. Many, many happy returns of the day, Manna.
Thank you, Trevor.
What did your father give you as a birthday present? I got a new cycle and a chess set on my birthday. His words stung like poison; the whole town knew that my father had left us.
Why are you in uniform? Didn t your mother buy you any new clothes for your birthday? My cheeks burnt red, so I covered them with my hands to hide my shame.
Where are the toffees? I gave chocolates on my birthday.
I kept quiet, staring intently at the workbook open on my desk. I had solved the mystery behind the miracle a little too late; the class teacher knew about my birthday from her attendance register and had made all the students sing for me. It was time to feed the eager, greedy mouths waiting for me to distribute toffees. What could I do? I had nothing to give.
Does your mother even know that it s your birthday and that she has to buy toffees for us? You always eat the ones other children distribute.
Trevor addressed the class: He has come to school without toffees.
Instantly, the greedy faces turned hostile and began to chant, We want toffees, we want toffees, we want toffees!
It was humiliation of the worst kind. Too proud to cry, I ran out of the class and though I was young, it made such an impact on me that the incident plagued my dreams for many years. It was a historic day for me as I learnt a very important lesson: Life has a cruel streak beneath the smiling fa ade and though miracles happen, more often than not, they are a prelude to God s sinister plans for you.

The blueprint of God s sinister plans for my future was laid in Kahalia, a small fishermen s town situated 50 miles south of Panaji, the capital of Goa.
I wasn t born a psychopath, nor did I have a penchant for killing. Like all my victims, I too was a victim of fate. I did not choose to be born to a promiscuous woman, jilted in love, disillusioned with life. She found solace in men, and as the years passed, in expensive bottles of booze. It would not be fair to say that she did not love me. As for neglecting me, yes, when she was too drunk to remember that I existed.
Every mother wants the best for her child and so did she. Soon after I was conceived, she married a decent man out of sheer consideration for my future. Another mouth had to be fed, one more body to be clothed and, God willing, given a better hand than what fate had dealt her. But neither marriage nor motherhood could save her from selling her soul to explore the forbidden fruits that life offered.
Goa was the hub of the sexual revolution in the seventies with its nude beaches, marijuana, white men and women clad in skimpy beachwear. They attacked the moral fabric of the very society that catered to their needs. Tourism was beginning to emerge as a big industry and even a hick town like Kahalia, where livelihoods depended on fish and feni, could certainly do with dollars and pounds. The village folk welcomed this intrusion into their culture with little reluctance and in time even began to find the foreigners lack of inhibition rather fascinating. So much so, that a few nubile locals harbouring dreams of a firang Prince Charming, ended up with a protruding belly and little else. The town elders dismissed them as stray incidents, labelling them as the downside of development. The children born of these cross-continental liaisons grew up flaunting their firang lineage by assuming exotic surnames left behind by the men who had sired them. The town folk continued to welcome tourists into their lives with bed-and-breakfast signs outside their homes.
Kahalia also boasted of a series of waterfront hotels and resorts for the not so stingy and Sea Rock was the most exclusive of them all. This was where my mother was employed; she was smart, worked hard and rose quickly from a chambermaid to a floor supervisor.
In those days, my dreary existence revolved around Papa, my world, my hero, because Mamma was never around. An ambitious woman, my mother knew success demands sacrifice and she was more than willing to sacrifice our needs to satisfy a few of her own. She kept unusually late hours which left Papa with the task of cooking our dinner, attending to my homework and arranging a neatly pressed uniform for me to wear to school the next day. Those were happy, carefree days when he would teach me to play basketball and we d go swimming before dinner. I was shy as a child, given the circumstances; I showed none of the exuberance the other children did. I was left alone, and no one was inclined to be friends with me or make fun of me, not yet anyway.
Then came the day when Mamma discarded Papa like a bottle of expired marmalade; she no longer needed a man to run her house. I was ten years old when she drove away the only man who cared for me. The man I knew to be my father left me for he was no longer sure that I was his son. A great guy, a selfless bastard who did not wish to reap the rewards of the seeds he had not sown. I begged him to stay or to take me with him. Mamma was practically a stranger to me. I was terrified of what the future held; Papa was the only security I knew and now he had walked out on me. Nothing much happened though. He moved out never to come back and Mamma said I shouldn t cry. Manna, sweetheart, don t cry. Mamma will take good care of you.
I was like a puppy with a limited attention span and the promise of freshly baked cupcakes from Uncle Tony s bakery was hard to ignore. Slight changes in our routine and we were back on track. A middle-aged woman now greeted me when I returned home; a yummy snack on the kitchen counter with a tall glass of flavoured milk, new toys-Mamma had arranged it all. I still didn t have any friends and Mrs Kotian didn t play with me. Just like cooking, and washing the dishes and the clothes, I was a task for her.
She had no children of her own and did not wish to do more than what was necessary. As soon as the clock struck 7 p.m. I would watch her ample rear exit from the front door, all alone in the big house with the nearest neighbours at least half a mile away. It was an old house in a shambles, which looked all the more menacing in the dark; the pungent smell of seaweed clinging to the rocky beach invaded the house, monsters rose out of the shadows. I would stay buried in my bed for as long as I could brave it and then make a dash for the makeshift bus stop, 600 yards from the house. There was always someone there waiting for a bus and that s all I needed. I would sit there quietly waiting for her bus to come and that s how she would find me each night-curled up on the wooden bench. The ritual was always the same. She would scold me for being out there, knowing that I was scared of being alone in the house.
This melancholic existence continued for a while till it became too much for me to bear. One night, I did not go to the bus stop. My mother found nothing odd about it on her return and so never bothered to check on me.
I waited, my ears strained to hear some sound, imaginary or otherwise. I could not sleep for lack of love, a pair of strong arms to hug me, my mother kiss me and tell me that I was wanted. I found her sprawled on the couch in the living room, singing. Apparently she was celebrating her newfound freedom with a bottle of feni and Pink Floyd. It was too much for my young mind to take.
I charged like a mad bull screaming, hurling objects at her and threw the bottle of feni on the floor with such force that it broke into a hundred sparkling pieces. Party over, the message finally got through to her and she shoved me with all her might. I fell sideways on the broken glass. Too stunned to scream, I just lay there in the liquid warmth of blood, feeling nothing. Oh, she did show some emotion then, kneeling beside me, drunk and wondering what