When one comes to know that someone known to him/her has
committed suicide, is it a must that he/she should get surprised?
I somehow was not when I got to know of Neha’s.
It was our second conversation within a span of twenty
minutes, the first having failed due to weak signal. Having arrived in Patna
just a couple of hours back, I was rushing to Sanjiv da’s place and had jumped
in the first auto that I had found vacancy in. It was a bright, sunny, early
November morning. The morning fog that had delayed my train by two hours had
long been digested by the ever-hungry city.
Rajeev picked up the phone after it rang for about half a
minute.
“Are!! Neha Kumari ke bare mein pata chala kya?” – He asked.
“Nahi. Kya hua?”
“Suicide kar li. Mumbai mein.”
– He replied.
After we talked about it in some
detail, he asked me wasn’t I surprised at it, to which I replied I wasn’t.
Go to her FB page. Scroll past
the customary RIP messages and hollow talks of staying together for ever, and
there is she; screaming out loud at the top of her voice, giving a signal to
the world that something terrible is probably about to happen.
Within a span of 10 days, from
October 18th to October 27th, there are four posts from
her that talk of death and/or suicide. Each one of them has attracted its fair
share of likes, comments and lol(s). But none of us could sense the magnitude
of the agony she must have had been in.
Call it Friendship! FB style!! Diluted! Distorted!! Dehumanized!!!
LOL!!
My acquaintance with Neha was not
of long past. Although we had been together in the ‘Appreciation of Indian Film
Music’ open course at the University, we had never really interacted with each
other till the end of the second semester. Or should I say till the beginning
of the third?
My IRCTC records show that I had
boarded the 11th of July Danapur-Howrah Express in Patna for Howrah,
from where I was going to take another train to Bangalore. So, if my
calculation and/or memory is not failing me, it must have been the morning of 9th
when I received two missed calls from an unknown number. Out of sheer practice, I chose to
ignore it, deciding not to call back. After a couple of hours, the mobile
beeped again. There was a message that read something like this – “Hi. This is
Neha Kumari from APU Education. Call me ASAP.”
The Masters program that I am
pursuing at the University has entered its last phase, but there are still
people – quite a good number of them – who I still fail to recognize. Either I
know their names or I recognize their faces, but certainly even now I am not
able to correctly assign a name to each and every single face in the batch. Leave
the larger batch aside; some people from even my first year class have of late started
behaving strangely with me.
I dialed the number, still trying
to recollect the face whom I was making the call to.
Bihar elections were due in a few
months. I am not sure if the dates of the same had yet been announced, but the
state’s atmosphere had certainly started to thicken with the flavor of Janatantra
ka Kumbha Mela. Nitish Kumar, the incumbent Chief Minister, in an attempt
to showcase the achievements of his government (which to a great extent were also
BJP’s achievements) had launched a competition for University students called Jigyasa,
for which his government was inviting Research Proposals.
Neha wanted to participate in the
same and, as it was a group submission and as the last date was closing fast, she
needed to build a team quickly. It was in that context that she wanted to talk
to me. I told her that I would be more than happy to be a part of her team, but
at the same time warned her that I myself was unaware of not only the nitty-gritties
of the competition, but the probable research topics themselves. She said she had
all the required materials with her and that these were no issues at all.
Thus I was on Neha’s Jigyasa
bandwagon, still wondering how me and why me? After all, I was
from Development and she from Education and we had almost never interacted with
each other in the college.
We decided to meet in Café Coffee
Day in Prakash Jha’s mall in Kurji on 10th evening in order to sort
out the materials that needed to be read and to finalize our probable group
members. This plan, however, she cancelled at the last moment saying that since
both of us are by chance boarding the same train to Howrah, we can as well do
the reading in the train itself.
On the 11th late evening,
as the clock tower struck 9, we met at the Patna station, where it turned out
that although both of us were no doubt travelling to Howrah, our trains were
different. As she rushed towards the foot over-bridge to get to her train, she
said that she had already mailed me the PDFs that needed to be read and that we
would be meeting once we are in Bangalore. Not long after, my train crawled slowly onto the platform throwing the whole of it in a state of sudden pandemonium; its shrill, ear-piercing whistle drowning the competing, loudspeaker-empowered bhajans of Hanuman Mandir and azaans of Masjid just outside the junction.
18th of July, 2015 was Eid. Surprisingly, even Metropolis – the newly hired, intimidating and prison-like girls’ hostel – with huge, black iron rods as its boundary and a sinister-looking iron-staircase (that seemed to be directly borrowed from some United States prison) just in front – was in a festive mood. The girls had just been transferred from simply-too-good Noor Manzil and Aarusha and not-really-so-bad-either Basapura to this hell-of-a-place which, to add to the excitement, swayed – although (not to defame it too much) in a mild manner – whenever apparently a heavy lorry passed from the nearby expressway. It was as if to uplift the mood of the girls and to give them something to feel good about that the venue of Eid had been shifted entirely to Metropolis. By the time we met in the study hall located in the basement, the preparation for the evening extravaganza was in full swing.
Today was the last day of the
submission. Besides me and Neha, there were Sujeet and Bimlesh – both of them
from education – and Sameer – a passed-out senior who was conspicuous by his
absence. This was for the first time that I was meeting our Jigyasa
team, a team consisting entirely of Biharis and put-together single-handedly by
Neha. I had no-prior experience of working with any of its members and hence I decided
to simply flow with the current.
We started at around 11 in the
morning and by 5 in the evening we were ready with our proposal. And through
all this, we had taken out time for lunch, I had visited the nearby tea shop
with Vasu(ndhara) and Neha had made a professor go through our proposal and
recommend changes, if any, which needed to be made therein. By 6.30, our revised
and edited proposal was successfully uploaded on the Jigyasa portal. As evening
descended on it, and as stars began appearing in the sky one after another
struggling against the Bangalore air pollution for their survival, even Metropolis
started looking beautiful. Was it just the building that had grown beautiful
with the slow, soft onslaught of darkness or was there more to it?
We were quite satisfied by the manner
our document had shaped up in such a small duration of time and we cajoled Neha
in giving us a small tea/coffee and biscuits treat at the nearby tea-shop. As
she smoked a Gold Flake Lights and belched the smoke out of her lungs, she told
of her prior work-experiences. Although I am now unable to recollect it distinctly
what she had actually worked as earlier, it must have been something related to
the media, for I remember her saying that she had either worked with or
interviewed Jitan Ram Manjhi, the then Chief Minister of Bihar.
“When we are in a competition,
we must try to win it and do everything needed for it, even if it involves
pulling some extra-legal strings.” She said she knew someone sufficiently high
up in the bureaucracy who can make sure that our paper gets cleared-up for the
next stage and that she will ring-up the person today itself.
When the results came, however, we
had not made it to the next round.
At the time we had approached her
contact in Bihar, we were not aware that some other team from the University
was submitting a proposal to Jigyasa as well and hence we had told him
that only one team is participating from our University. This, as it turned out
later, was not the case. A different team was selected by Jigyasa, it
went to Bihar and even got itself clicked with Nitish Kumar. Whether it got
selected because our communication with Bihar was not full-proof or on its own
merit is something that we will never know for sure. This write-up, in any
case, is not to suggest one way or the other.
The way Neha had put that team
together, worked dedicatedly on the proposal, contacted the professor and
requested him to go through the document at such a short notice; and the way
she was determined to clear the first round, who could have thought that not
even four months down the line, she would end up freeing herself from
everything and everyone material in this universe?
Even after Jigyasa
results were out, we had managed to keep in touch in an irregular manner. It
was only later that I came to know that she was married and had a son studying
in VIIth standard in the famous Doon School. That was the happier
part. The sad part was that she was undergoing a painful divorce with her
husband and was depressed over the same to the extent that she had to take
sleeping pills in order to find her sleep in the night.
I remember she had tattoos at the
back of her neck and on her wrists, her face was round and her eyes were black
at their periphery. I thought she applied kajal to them as many Indian girls
like to do in order to look prettier. However, I have my doubts now. Was
that really kajal or had the cups of her eyes simply turned black due to
frequent lack of peaceful sleep .. a precursor to the impending disaster that
went unheard in the real world, just like its virtual-world counterparts that
went unheard on FB .. those four posts in ten days?
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