Losing My Religion: Chapter 6 - Behind every man, there is a love story.

I always say 'Behind every man, there is a love story.' Some love stories are happy and some not so much, but that's what makes us who we are. In this week's article of #LosingMyReligion series, I am posting snippets of Chapter 6, where Rishi & Alex remember the love stories of their past and how it had shaped them.

CHAPTER 6

Rishi was losing himself. He was in this whirlpool from which extrication seemed impossible. He just kept going down and down into the water. There was loud, thunderous noise surrounding him, but he couldn’t find its source. At one point, he felt it was coming from deep within him. Weird, turgid waters surrounded him. The more he tried to move his hands and feet, the faster he sank. It was as if he couldn’t do anything. He felt something clamp on his arm. Looking up, he figured out a bird-like object. Bird in water? And it was talking to him! It seemed to be saying ‘saap’ or something like that! What is this?

Saap, saap, bake, bake.

Bake a snake? What is happening?

‘Saab, wake. Night falling.’

‘Huh?’ Rishi got up with a jolt. It wasn’t a bird. It was Ram Singh—on his bed, in the guesthouse. Holding his arm in a vice-like grip.

‘Dammit, Ram Singh. Loosen your hold!’

Removing his hand from Rishi’s arm, Ram Singh said, ‘Saab, night fall. Eat food.’

As if on cue, Rishi’s stomach growled—a deep rumble, straight from his nightmare. It hit him that the sound he had heard had come from his stomach. Good God!

He looked around for Alex, and found him sleeping at the foot of the bed. He considered shaking him awake, but then thought better of it. Kicking him off the bed, he said, ‘Wet dream’s over, Blondie.’

***

They had slept for sixteen hours straight and woken up now, the next evening. Ram Singh had arranged for their food since afternoon and had been impatiently waiting for them to wake up. Not finding a likelihood of that, he had woken up Rishi once dusk had begun to set in.

Rishi and Alex had a meal fit for an army; they were that hungry. The Cream had definitely had a role to play in this. Once they were done gorging on the simple but finger-licking delicious meal of rice, dal, and radish curry, they decided to smoke the charas again. It was tough to not get tantalised.

Alex cued up an eccentric playlist on his iPod. The Doors headlined the list and were actually perfect to listen to as the joints started to kick in.

The dark mother had embraced them once again.

The album changed in a while and U2’s ‘With Or Without You’ started playing. Alex began humming and before long Rishi joined him, singing along to his off-tune humming.

‘You’re a terrible singer,’ said Alex, after a while.

‘Wrong, I’m a good croaker,’ chuckled Rishi, and continued croaking.

With or without you

I can’t live

With or without you

And you give yourself away

And you give yourself away

And you give

And you give

And you give yourself away

‘You ever loved a woman?’ asked Alex, interrupting his passionate rendering.

‘Y-yes. And I lost her.’ There was a sense of loss in Rishi’s voice that made Alex not ask more. ‘She dumped me,’ he added. There was a brief silence that nobody broke. Seeing Alex lost in thought, he asked, ‘What about you?’

‘Think so. It was very close to love. She dumped me too.’

‘So that’s how it usually ends!’ said Rishi, blowing out a ring of smoke.

‘Temme your story,’ Alex simply stated after a while.

‘My story . . .’ An amused smile took over Rishi’s face. Up until now, he had not shared much about his personal life with Alex. Come to think of it, he had shared nothing. He had been content with just bumming around the country together—only sharing cigarettes, alcohol, and funny observations on the people they met on the road. He hadn’t been able to make himself come out of the self-created cocoon. But the charas seemed to be doing things to him. It was loosening his tongue and lowering his mental reservations. ‘Where do I begin?’ he heard himself ask.

‘Right from the beginnin’. Everythin’! We have a lotta time,’ urged Alex.

‘All right. Here it goes . . .’ said Rishi, falling deep in thought.

‘I met her while in college during this event called the Fresher’s meet or something. I think it was called the IceBreaker . . . Everyone looked forward to it; it was practically the event of the year. There was music, dance, shit loads of fun, and this devil of a game called paper dance.’ He smiled a slow smile at that, recollecting those moments from his memory. ‘I got paired with her . . . Koyel Singh was her name. A petite, beautiful girl from Chandigarh.’

Alex smiled.

‘We met, danced, got out, and that’s when I asked her out. She agreed and we started dating. It was idyllic in the beginning. We were inseparable. Always together. We partied hard, went out for trips, bunked classes, and studied a bit before the exams. Lot of fun. College days are magical, I tell you . . .’ he sighed. ‘We were together for good five years or so. Even till the end of the relationship, we were doing fine. But she didn’t think so. I had started my own venture after we graduated, so was always busy working on that. Building my own company was my sole passion. She thought I had no time in my life for her . . . Maybe she was right. I had no time for anyone or anything those days. We started fighting. It turned ugly. Then one day she just came to me and told me point-blank that we were over. “You will burn out if you continue getting obsessed with things. Learn to balance before it’s too late,” she said as a parting note, and left. Still remember those words . . .

‘I shouldn’t have let her go. I really loved her. I was such a fool, I didn’t know what I was about to lose. It didn’t strike me in the initial days what I had let slip from my hands. But as time progressed, I realized I really wanted her to be in my life. By the time sense dawned, it was too late. She had left for US . . . And that’s how it ended.’

From the haze of Malana Cream surrounding him, Alex looked at Rishi. When did this reticent, irritable, quiet guy open up so much? he wondered.

‘It’s good to be ambitious if you know how to balance your life,’ he said after a while.

‘Precisely, I think I lost that balance. Life became all about winning. That’s when I screwed up.’

‘Success is overrated. I’ve always done what made me happy. Look, I’m no expert in life and stuff. I’m just tellin’ you how I lead my life. I mean . . . I don’t even think about life.’

‘You’re right. But it’s easier said than done,’ said Rishi, puffing his joint. ‘Things get serious. Like my company . . . my baby . . . it’s gone. I had to shut it down. It was the saddest day of my life.’ The sense of defeat, of shame, even, stayed so strong in his mind even now.

‘What went wrong?’             

‘Many things. We wanted to create computer games that would be the most intelligent games ever. We had a cool team . . . had experts working from America and Russia. In the first year we launched two products. They did well and then we needed more money, as our plans got bigger. We invested a lot in R&D.

‘Sadly, we couldn’t raise the kind of money we wanted because of the goddamn recession and, moreover, our business model was unproven, rather disruptive. Not many wanted to bet on it at that time.’

‘Must’ve been a bitch,’ said Alex compassionately.

‘Yeah. And a few partners quit the company. The team lost all morale. But I didn’t give up. Three of us were left. We worked hard to bring out a new game on Xbox. But it bombed. It was a flop.’

‘Why? Wasn’t it good enough?’

‘It was too complicated! Hardly anyone could reach the third level in any of our games. Our philosophy of gaming was revolutionary. There were a section of gamers who loved us but we didn’t get mass following, so we failed. All of us went bankrupt. I had no choice but to close the company.’

Not knowing what to say, Alex merely nodded. Over the last few weeks of their travels, he had never heard Rishi share as much as he had tonight. He had on his own found out a couple of things. Like that the Indian press had written him off as a “one-hit wonder” and that he had recently gone bankrupt. His life had been a rollercoaster ride and it had taken its toll on him. It was so apparent. He was a beaten soul, a man who had lost belief in his philosophy. Lost his religion, that’s what he had said one day to him, out of the blue, and that seemed just about right, right now.

‘I fought hard, you know. I fought real hard. I moved heaven and earth to not let my company shut down, to not let go of my employees, to deliver the best I could to the industry. I did all that I could and then some. By the end of it I even sold off office chairs, tables, laptops etcetera to get some money into the company . . . My belief in my belief was astounding. But in the end it was all for naught.

‘I am not the first person to go bankrupt . . . and I am sure I won’t be the last one. But at times reconciliation becomes so difficult. Your own struggle . . . your own failure becomes so huge in your mind that you cannot overcome it . . . But I will because I want to.’

***

‘That was intense,’ said Alex, after listening to Rishi’s story.

‘Not really. I have had my ups and downs like everyone else.’ Walking to the door, he said, ‘Let’s go outside.’

They stepped out of the guesthouse. It was completely dark; none of the houses had any lamps glowing. They sat on the staircase puffing their joints.

‘Tell me your story,’ said Rishi after a while.

‘You already know it.’

‘The real story. You never mentioned this girl who stole your heart or, for that matter, even your parents . . .’

Alex was silent. He then obliged and recounted fragments of his life.

Alex was born to Andrew Long, a factory worker and a self-proclaimed hippie, and Helen Stewart, a waitress, in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, USA. From the time he remembered, he never saw his parents live peacefully under one roof. He was eight when they divorced.

Andrew Long, who was already a drug addict, became a nomad, and young Alex never saw his father again. This event was so traumatic for him that he became a recluse after that. He hated the fact that his parents had separated, and always longed for a normal family with happy parents. He soon lost interest in studies and took to drugs in his junior high school.

“I don’t wanna go to school,” he would say to his mother constantly.

“You have to live with the fact that your father was a loser and that he abandoned us. But you have to go to school and learn, so that you can make a few bucks for yourself when you grow up,” she would reply.

His mother found another partner during this time, but it ended badly as he physically abused her. Her financial condition deteriorated. Alex’s miseries increased further and scarred his mind deeper. He was sent to live with his grandmother who had a stable living. He got addicted to drugs and started enjoying rock music and going to local rock concerts.

‘That’s when I started etchin’ these tattoos on my body. Weed and rock liberated me from my miserable life. They became my saviours,’ he told Rishi. During that time, cops caught him twice for possessing illegal drugs. He could never concentrate on his studies and decided not to pursue high school beyond tenth grade.

Both his mother and grandmother were upset with this decision and asked him to either find a job or leave the house. He was tempted to leave the house but in the end decided to find a job. He started as an apprentice for a local photographer with his mother’s reference, and quickly found himself to be in love with the art of photography.

‘For the first time in my life I found somethin’ at which I was actually good. Plus I was passionate about it,’ he told Rishi about photography.

He slowly became an independent photographer and took up odd jobs for local newspapers. During this time, he started taking a keen interest in Hinduism and Buddhism, just because his fellow potheads were doing the same. He became fascinated with India and started learning more about the Hindu philosophy. “I wanna settle in India,” he told his friends back then. “Smoke pot and become a monk in Varanasi. A monk who doesn’t renounce sex”—it was his dream.

His passion for rock music continued and he travelled the length and breadth of the country following rock bands. He left his house and told his grandmother he would not be back soon. He began to enjoy his nomadic lifestyle—staying in a constant haze, smoking grass, and travelling the country for years.

His journey came to a halt when he met an attractive bartender called Amanda Cooper in Seattle, Washington.

‘Boy, she was a fox! And she had a thing for men like me, who live on the edge,’ he said. Amanda was an aspiring actress and Alex had done her photo-shoot. They started dating and living together. When she moved to Los Angeles to become an actress, he followed her. She struggled to get anything meaningful in Hollywood and ended up becoming a waitress to support herself and him. Alex slept during the days and smoked up during the nights. She forced him to take up work whenever they were short of cash but he became very comfortable with making her work for his living. Though things changed one day and Amanda asked him to leave.

“You bloody parasite; it’s over between us. Get out. Get out of my house,” she yelled at the top of her voice. “Look what you have done to my house, my life. I am living in a pigsty. You have ruined me, I have become your slave who lives to feed you and fund your weed supply,” she said, crying holding her pillow.

“Relax, babe. Take it easy. Here, have a cigarette,” said Alex, completely ignoring her concerns.

She literally pushed him out and threw his things outside. Alex couldn’t believe what she had done to him.

‘I actually loved her and could have changed for her,’ he owned up to Rishi.

‘Really? You would have changed?’ asked Rishi.

Alex thought for a while. ‘No, not really . . .’ he said, and laughed.

He had cursed her back then and vowed never to return. While he searched for a job, he happened to meet a journalist who told him about a job in Iraq. He took it up and went to capture the Iraq war through his lense. He wanted to witness death and probably die himself. “What difference would it make if you take a bullet when you’re in the grip of marijuana? It’ll only tickle a bit,” he joked with soldiers in Baghdad. Fortunately or unfortunately, he never got hit by a bullet in spite of going to the most dangerous of places in post-war Iraq.

He returned to the US few months later, only to attend his mother’s funeral; she had passed away due to cardiac arrest.

‘And that was it. The last straw. I didn’t wanna stay in my country any longer. I’d had it. So the next thing I knew, I had packed my bags and taken the first flight out to India. Haven’t been disappointed ever since I touched ground here, by the way. There is somethin’ about your country, man.’

Rishi smiled, amazed at Alex’s story.

Who would have thought this man who was high on dope, alcohol, and life would have such a tale to tell. Alex’s ability and willingness to not be a victim of his past was impressive. Rishi was drawn back to the day he had first met him. He still didn’t know what had made him reconsider his decision of dropping Alex to Bangalore from Srirangapatna or, for that matter, later, even accepting his proposal of having a drink with him at Bangalore that night.

When one drink had become two drinks and two drinks had become four, he didn’t remember, but, yes, he and Alex had ended up chatting and drinking pretty late into the night. At some point his cigarettes had finished and he had begun smoking Alex’s, without realising that they were marijuana joints.

When he had woken up the next day, he had found Alex sleeping next to him on his bed, in his apartment with his bags lying all around. He had immediately woken him up to ask him what he was doing there.

A shocked Alex had reminded him that he had decided to join him on his travel and they were leaving the city the next evening to go to the Himalayas. He, Rishi, had been so shocked listening to that that he hadn’t been able to believe it. But when he got a call from someone telling him that his car had been sold, he had realized it was for real. He had instantly been furious with himself for behaving so recklessly. But then his bankruptcy, his state of indecision, the feeling of being siloed, the desire to break free . . . all of it had come back to him and he realized that this turn of events was actually good. Very, very good.

Suddenly, he had felt that the stars had heard him, given him a sign. The sign was Alex.

Something changed in him and he let himself go. He didn’t want to look back. The money had now been arranged. And, just like that, life had taken a turn he hadn’t thought was possible.

And thus, two different people, from two different continents, with two different perspectives of life, yet two people who shared a common hollow of loneliness buried deep inside them had come together in this journey of a lifetime.

*** [End of Chapter 6]

Read the previous parts of this series here:

• Prologue of 'Losing My Religion.'
• Losing My Religion: Chapter 1 - Broken Entrepreneur
• Losing My Religion: Chapter 2 - Show me a way forward
• Losing My Religion: Chapter 3 - Enter Alex
• Losing My Religion: Chapter 4 - Adventure Begins in the Himalayas
• Losing My Religion: Chapter 5 - Oh, the mysterious Malana Valley!

If you want to get a copy of the book, here are some quick links

• Amazon - Buy paperback in India
• Flipkart - Buy paperback in India
• Amazon eBook - Global

 You can also learn more about the book on my website - VishwasMudagal.com