Pankaj Dubey is the bestselling author of —’What A Loser!’, ‘Ishqiyapa—To Hell with Love’. His latest book ‘Love Curry’ is about three flat mates in London who fall in love with the same girl. This make them arch-rivals but when things take a turn, they don’t find anyone else but eachother to turn to.
Here’s an excerpt from the book which introduces you to one of the flat mates.
He came from Agra—the city of the Taj Mahal, a monument that stood for a timeless love. A monument that simply kept standing when his love had wandered off. No wonder he had left the city and its Mahal. Choosing England instead with all its apparent coldness. He wanted to be away from all that had always been with him. No one knew him here or cared to. But there was a comfort in this anonymity. It was only months after he shifted to house number 104, George Street, that some of his neighbours began to recognize him, or what little they saw of him. For he would leave in the morning and return only after it got dark. He could have been the night watchman for all they knew. No words he exchanged with anyone. No twitch of a smile to a face that looked familiar. His socializing was restricted to giving someone way if they were in a rush.
His name was Rishi Mathur, the guy whose door was locked. The occupant of the third room in house number 104. A house that was almost a subcontinent, harbouring as it did three South Asian boys, flying the flags of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Besides the Indian—Rishi—docking in the house were Shehzad from Dhaka and Ali from Lahore.
Rishi in Agra had been quite a talkative fellow. This was a different version. No, the Queen wasn’t to blame for this sudden, sullen silence. At the heart of the matter was a breakup. One he was finding difficult to chew. So he went quiet and fled to England. He had seen people go to London to study or to get rich. But he came to recover. People arrived here with big dreams. He landed with promises—three promises that he’d made to himself. Three promises that were perhaps the opposite of what any other immigrant from India would have made
The first was to stay away from girls—especially the beautiful ones. He could not trust them now.
The second vow was to never return home. He would do all it took to make this island nation his new home. There was nothing waiting for him in India—and absolutely no one that mattered to his broken heart.
Thirdly, he would lie low. No soaring aspirations for him. No growth, no riches. He would not be the next British-Indian industrialist or Indian lord in Parliament. All he would be was a nobody.
It was easy to do the third thing. He simply didn’t need to do much. The limelight ignored him automatically. High denomination pounds stayed away. The few notes he earned kept hopping in and out of his wallet. The heartbroken hero strived for no comeback as a happy success story. All he wanted and got was a corner seat in life.
No one knew what Rishi did, not even his two housemates. Shehzad from Dhaka and Ali from Lahore lived in the same house with him, but in blissful ignorance. Each one had a story of his own that each wished to keep to himself. Though they shared a subcontinent and now a house, the three were reluctant to overlook the fact that they came from three different countries. This fourth country that they came to live in however threw them together in more ways than one. For starters, they got branded ‘Bloody Pakis’ the second they set foot here!
In their three-bedroom house, the room in the middle went to Rishi. Shehzad occupied the one to his left. The Bangladeshi was almost twenty-three, but still had a somewhat wild streak, which was announced by the sheer number of tattoos covering his five-foot-eight-inch frame. No, he didn’t need them to enhance his looks—he had plenty of those already. His angular face and curly fringe were a photographer’s dream. The decoupage tattoos advertised the person he was—a question mark. No one knew what he would say or do next, not even Shehzad. Only one thing was reasonably clear— rehab would figure somewhere in his future! For, the fellow smoked up relentlessly.
What made him so unpredictable was an even bigger mystery. No one knew the painful backstory. It featured a father who was an airline pilot in his home country. But that was before he lost one of his limbs in a ground accident. The tragedy, however, didn’t end there. His mother eloped soon after, forsaking his father for another pilot who was a friend of the family. The six-year-old boy was left behind with a handicapped father, a pit of a future and so many wagging tongues.
