Screwed , livre ebook

MANOJ BHAVNANI
Screwed!
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN METRO READS
SCREWED!
Born and brought up in Mumbai, Manoj Bhavnani passed out from St. Xavier s College with a degree in Statistics. But numbers are his second love. His passion for telling stories drove him to join advertising, where he has spent over a decade. He has worked on some of the biggest brands in the country, and is currently a creative director at Bates Asia. This is his first novel.
To my Gomti
Woman was God s second mistake.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Prologue
Knock, knock.
Who s there? I asked.
Adam, came the reply.
Adam who? I asked again.
Adam, the first man ever to walk
Bam!
This is just a fantasy I have had in my head for a few weeks now. I wish that sonofabitch would walk into my life, so I could actually do that to him. Smack him right in the face, and keep kicking till he screams and begs for mercy.
But I m getting ahead of myself. Let me first explain why.
I was just nine years old when I first heard the story of Adam and Eve from my devoutly Catholic friend Odin. Apparently, God had spent five days very productively indeed. He had created the universe, and gone about filling it with stars and planets. He had chosen a special one called Earth to be his pet. And set about filling it with oceans and seas, trees and animals, mountains and deserts.
Finally, on the sixth day, he created this dude called Adam. God told him that he had been created in God s own image. You d think the man would have been happy, blessed even, to be the most special being in the entire universe.
Nah, this motherfucker was a typical man, just like you (pardon me, my female readers) and me. He looked at all the wonders around him and calmly informed his Creator, You can do better, dude. Give me a woman.
And God created Eve.
Thus began the source of all my troubles. Don t get me wrong. One, I am an atheist-I believe the Adam and Eve story as much as I believe the moon is made of cheese. Two, I love women. I think they are all that is good and beautiful about the human race. But this time, I had loved two too many.
My name is Karan Last Word Advani. That s what most of my friends call me, all because of my irritating habit (to them) of always getting the final word in any conversation. My viewpoint is-if I am going to be right all the time, it s only natural to get in the last word.
But today, two women have conspired to put me at a complete loss for words. I know what you re thinking. Two women is not a lot, dude, get over it and pick one . Making a choice is very simple, right?
Not always.
Suppose you offer a vegetarian a serving of mutton rogan josh. Delicious though it is, it s an easy choice for the vegetarian to refuse.
Should I wear blue shoes or red shoes with my jeans? A guy would take about ten seconds to make up his mind. A woman could be pondering the question till the end of the world.
What about if I offered a morbidly obese man a large pack of french fries just out of the frying pan? Tough, tough, tough. And now we are down to sheer willpower.
And finally, there is the choice which sounds like one, but really isn t. Someone pointing a gun in your direction, looking you in the eye, and calmly saying, Do you want it in the head or the heart?
My friends, I find myself in a similar predicament. No matter which way I turn, I will be the one catching the bullet squarely between my eyes. Neither God nor Google can help me out right now.
To make you fully understand what I am going through, I need to take you to the beginning. To 16 December 2005, the day I met Sonia
1
I feel bad for people who don t drink. They wake up in the morning and that s the best they are going to feel all day.
-Dean Martin
Twenty-five.
It s a great age to be at, isn t it? You ve taken a few steps out into the world, no longer the fresh out-of-college boy. You have a little money of your own, but not a care in the world. Your bosses look at you when they want an opinion, but never burden you with any responsibility. And most importantly, the scope of hooking up with a woman is a lot more, since the ones in college are still not too young, and your immediate seniors are not too old.
You could say I am a normal twenty-five-year-old in every respect. A routine day consists of listening to my parents moan and groan about how I am not doing justice to my abilities; I surf the net for more than ten hours a day; I always look out for the latest gadgets, whether I can afford them or not; I hang out at pubs and clubs and get drunk every weekend; and I am always desperately trying to get laid.
Only in one aspect did I feel that I was different from my peers, and that was in my choice of profession. While most of my classmates went on to do MBAs or post-graduations, I landed a trainee copywriter position in Aria Communications, one of the top advertising agencies in the country. It was a career move that confounded most people, since I had just graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in statistics.
There are two viewpoints on what an advertising professional s life is like. The first is from an outsider s perspective-in which all we do is hang around with hot models, attend the best parties and make pot-loads of money.
Let me give you the inside (and real) perspective. Advertising life is pretty much like a grown-up s version of college life. People dress the same way as they did in college, even if their age (and their waist size) is on the wrong side of forty. Getting drunk and wasted happens exactly the way it did in junior college. And everyone-single, married, straight or otherwise-is looking to get laid.
There are a lot of other perks too, and primary amongst them are shoots. Whether print or television, shoots are a funny business. You could very well build a set in Mumbai and shoot a film, but people love to go abroad, and charge the client for it. South Africa, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore are some of the most popular locations. I haven t had the luck to go abroad yet, Munnar being the only place I have visited. But since most production houses quote a hundred per cent profit margin, my designation within the agency didn t matter-I was very, very well taken care of.
Life is not always a bed of roses, though. If one day you are working on a detergent brand, the very next day you could be working on a luxury sedan commercial. You could be asked to do a print campaign only, and when it gets approved, they ask you to think the same concept in radio and TV. This constant switching between strategies and media and brand personalities certainly takes its toll.
Then there are the long hours, which sometimes extend into days, all without overtime. You also have to deal with people whose egos extend beyond the power of their performance, and who are living off the glory of work they had produced ten or fifteen years ago.
But good or bad, I loved it. I may not know why they had hired me, but over the past three years, I had proved them right. My designation went from trainee to senior copywriter. I now drew a salary of 22,000 rupees, up from a measly 8000. It didn t compare too favourably (as my father constantly reminded me) with most of my friends salaries, who had done MBAs and probably earned five times as much as I did. But I lived for myself, and I was quite happy with my life.
Until the day of the party.
The best part of working in advertising is attending the parties which take place at the end of the year. It s like the agency s way of saying thanks to you for working eighteen hours every day. Now, having gate-crashed quite a few of the other agencies parties, I could say with full authority that my agency threw the best one, by miles.
For one, the women were way hotter. This could be put down to the fact that the heads of the various teams had a clear and simple hiring policy. If you were a good-looking woman, you were hired. If you weren t good-looking, then they wondered why you had bothered to apply in the first place.
The other reason was the liquor. Most agencies serve just beer, with the expensive hard alcohol being reserved only for top management. That differentiation didn t take place out here. The bar was stocked and the liquor flowed as freely as water.
Which explains my current condition.
Our annual party was held at an outdoor venue in Bandra, close to the office. Normally, you would find me on the dance floor trying to burn it up with some chick. Or sitting with my friends cracking jokes and making fun of others. That night, I was doing neither. Instead, I was about twenty feet from the dance floor, unloading the entire contents of my stomach all over the grass. I was feeling like an actor performing a scene on stage, seeing as how I had completely captivated my audience consisting of the entire senior management of my agency.
Okay, I need to get a grip. This is no way to behave.
I tried with all my might, but ten rum and Cokes and no food won the battle. I bent over again and continued puking. I couldn t believe how much I was puking. Or even what I was puking.
I counted at least thirteen to fourteen pieces of what looked like mutton in there. How was that still in my stomach? The last time I ate mutton was when Mom cooked it three days ago. And what in God s name were carrots doing in my stomach? Then there were some little round white things which I just couldn t identify.
But even stranger than that was the ground upon which it lay. It was black a deep black, the moonligh