Get Ready With Me

Kishan selected the edited video and pressed share. The number of followers on his Instagram account was stuck at 872. Maybe this post would help him cross a thousand. He watched it again. On the screen, his dark skin was glistening with moisturizer, just like the glass skin of the girls on Reels. ‘Get ready with me to go to my electrician job. First, I am going to wash my face with this soap, scrub scrub scrub honey…’ He was proud of getting the accent right. He watched hours of viral-influencer videos and made his own scripts. For some time, he forgot he was sitting in a dingy alcove, a small room off the hall in the 1BHK he shared with his parents and his sister. It was on the first floor of an illegal building on a small triangle of land between Blossom Apartments and Serene Villas. The room contained the overflow of the house, a trunk with his father’s name in black letters, four blankets, a tiny pooja corner on a shelf, a room heater with the front legs missing, and a pair of broken slippers to be repaired. The light blue paint was darkened in places by dirty hands; crayon scribbles covered the lower half of the wall behind him.

He checked to see if anyone had commented yet. Sometimes the comments on his videos were almost cruel. Why did they watch when they hated it so much? ‘Fair and Lovely – sponsor him’, ‘Ruined my feed with your face’. ‘stumbled onto the DARK corner of Instagram’. He told himself, ‘Haters gonna hate!’, a mantra his favourite influencer repeated often.

Outside in the hall, his mother was bent over a purple saree, attaching a cotton border at the bottom. She took in sewing jobs from the tailor in the market when he had too many orders. It wasn’t steady work but it gave them some extra money, especially during the festivals. She wanted to buy a second-hand sewing machine to get more work, maybe start taking tailoring jobs directly, but any money saved had a way of finding unavoidable expenses.

She looked up when he entered and said, ‘Go to the shop and get a half kg of tomatoes and a handful of green chillies. I have to start cooking dinner, I have to finish this urgent order.’

He ran into his friend Amit at the shop.

‘Kishan! Looking special today, your face has a glow,’ said Amit, rubbing his cheeks with his palms, mimicking Kishan’s video. ‘Nowadays you’ve started acting like girls or what? Were you playing with your sister?’ laughed Amit.

‘Ohh, just like that, timepass, ya with my sister, you know girls are like that,’ Kishan stammered and tried to smile. His sister didn’t know about the videos, no one did. He sensed the shopkeeper looking at him oddly. Had he overheard them talking? As Kishan collected his vegetables and walked back, he felt a smooth stone slip down to his gut and sit there, heavy. Would Amit tell someone? How did he find the video? Kishan never followed any of his friends or even anyone in the locality.

‘What was so wrong with making the videos? He liked getting ready, he liked looking good. He liked it when the number of views went up. He liked it when pretty girls commented on his videos ‘Slayyyy Queen!’

In the evening, he got ready to leave for his job. He picked up his tool kit, which was really a cloth pouch with a couple of screw drivers, a pair of pliers which was slightly rusted and bits of leftover wires. His uncle, Manohar, carried his tools in a black plastic box with compartments for every item. A previous employer had given Manohar the Black and Decker set which he lovingly maintained and took to every house visit. He got onto his bike and started driving to his uncle’s house to pick him up. Manohar wasn’t his own uncle but a distant relative on his mother’s side who lived nearby. When Kishan cleared his board exams in the first go, his mother convinced Manohar to hire Kishan as his assistant for a small salary, to help him learn the trade. In exchange Kishan ferried him from his house to the jobs and back.

Manohar’s jobs had been steadily declining. He would grumble about how these app companies only employed young people willing to do a shoddy job for less. The cost of the uniform and new tools which they mandated was exorbitant. His son Shankar had refused to join his father and was working in a restaurant.

They reached and parked near the tower. In the lobby they took the lift, not the one on the right, the one on the left. ‘Service lift for maids and delivery persons’ it said on the blue board above. A delivery boy got onto the lift with them just as the lift door was closing. Surf excelmatic, frozen momo, sugar-free ice cream, almond milk, Kishan read the labels as the lift went up. He couldn’t understand what kind of emergency would make people want these things in ten minutes. Sometimes there would be a Cadbury 5 star chocolate bar in the delivery bag and he would crave the sticky sugary treat.

They took off their shoes outside. Kishan was embarrassed by his uncle’s dusty feet and hoped they wouldn’t leave dirt behind on the white marble floors. He always made sure to wear clean socks without holes for the jobs. They had been here last Diwali to put up lights in all three balconies. From one of the balconies Kishan could see his building in the distance, an uneven triangle between neatly partitioned rectangles.

They were here to fix a faulty hanging lamp. The maid came with two steel glasses of water on a steel plate. Manohar took the glass with both hands, drank the water. Kishan shook his head. When they finished, the customer handed over the cash, three hundred rupees, out of which Uncle would give him one hundred-rupee note later.

Walking to the bike, they saw the on-call society electrician, sitting in the park, chatting on the phone. ‘These fellows have it easy. Fixed salary every month, don’t have to go from colony to colony in the heat. This job has become too hard. Once you have learnt the basics, apply to the app company or get a job at one of the shops. After Guddu’s wedding is done, I will go back to the village. We have a small house with some land there,’ said Manohar.

Kishan nodded without saying anything. He had seen Manohar’s daughter Guddu roaming around with a man who worked at the barber shop. She was riding behind him on his bike, arms around his waist.

After dinner, he took the bike and left, telling his mother he was going out to meet his friends. He reached the park entrance at 11 pm. Sonia was waiting for him, head covered in a chunni, one edge across her nose, tucked behind her ear. They went to the bench under the large Amaltas tree, the ground was lower here, making it hard to see people sitting there.

He gave her a 5 star chocolate bar he had bought earlier. She told him about the house where she worked. ‘They had guests today, so Didi asked me to stay back late and help out in the kitchen. There were so many plates and glasses, it took me two extra hours to wash everything and clean the kitchen before coming here. She gave me 100 rupees like she was giving me a gold necklace. ‘Here, buy yourself something nice.’ What can you buy with a hundred rupees nowadays? Chocolate?’ she rolled her eyes and shook her head.

Sonia worked as a day time house-help in a 3BHK flat in one of the apartment buildings. She often complained about her work, but it was a stable job. In the summers, they kept the air conditioner on in all rooms. The children were ten and twelve and hardly bothered her. The sir was away at work all day, didn’t try to touch her, didn’t even speak to her. The lady was nice; she let Sonia watch sewing videos in her free time. She was saving up to open her own boutique for suits and lehengas.

‘Sunny sent me a video today. From your Instagram. Why are you putting make-up on and acting like those models? Why do you post such embarrassing videos?’ she said.

Sunny was his classmate from school. He had recently failed his board exams for the second time and had taken to hanging out at the cigarette shop doing odd jobs.

Kishan felt the stone in his gut sliding down, spinning out of control. ‘Why is he sending you videos on Instagram? Do you follow him? He is getting into bad business nowadays, hanging out with the wrong people,’ he said.

‘He followed me, and I followed back. Let that be. My brother doesn’t even let my mother put oil in his hair. And here you are doing all this. Are you….’ she stopped. He looked sideways at her. Her head was lowered and she was shaking her leg. He saw their feet side by side on the ground. His toe nails were clean and cut short. The nail polish was chipped on her toes creating uneven red shapes.

‘Sunny was calling you a … chhakka, eunuch.’ her voice was low. There it was again. That’s what they called him in the comments.

Kishan reached out and put his hand on her knee to stop her shaking. ‘You will listen to people like Sunny abuse me now? Those videos are for fun, just to get followers.’

She reached down and pulled his hand up her thigh, moving it into the gap between her legs. ‘Show me then. We can also have fun.’ she said. Kishan tried to take his hand away, but Sonia was holding it tight. He struggled gently against her grip. He didn’t want to hurt her. She let go after a few seconds. Kishan got up and started walking away.

‘Where are you going? Got scared? All boyfriends and girlfriends do this, you know,’ she said.

Kishan reached the gate, got onto his bike and sped away. He could still feel the pressure of her squeeze on his hand, the warmth of her thigh under her jeans.

She blocked him on Instagram, WhatsApp, everywhere. He tried hanging about outside her house but saw her mother eyeing him from behind the curtain. He went to the building where she worked. As soon as he stopped his bike, the security guard came over. He mumbled a wrong house number and left. He didn’t want to talk to her. But he needed to know, did she tell anyone?

At night, he started watching a video on repairing a mixer grinder his uncle had sent. He soon lost interest and switched to a YouTube tutorial on how to edit video transitions when he got a notification. He opened his DMs to see messages from Sagar19. ‘Hi’ ‘You there’. He clicked on the profile to see a plump man with a moustache, dressed in a khaki-coloured uniform. He immediately got another couple of messages ‘Pretty boy’ ‘Want kiss?’

Scared he locked the screen and dropped the phone on the bed. There were all kinds of people on the app. He had seen comments on his videos from men. ‘Chikne’ ‘lady boy’. Kiss Emoji, Eggplant Emoji, Tongue Emoji. He was not exactly sure what they meant but whenever he saw them, he felt another smooth stone tumbling down his chest into his gut and sitting there, the pile getting larger.

He uploaded his new video. It was a ‘get ready with me to go for a day out’ video. Face wash, scrub, pack, serum, sunscreen, lip balm – one layer after another, he felt his skin get clean and smooth. He kept up a bright chatter throughout, explaining the steps, just the way the beauty influencers did it.

Later that day, he came home to get something to eat before a repair job. As he started to go up to his house, he saw that the steps were littered with remains of his products – the moisturizer bottle cracked open, white liquid splashed in an arc, a broken piece of cherry lip gloss glinting in the light of the setting sun. He parted the curtain and went inside. His mother started screaming at him. ‘Here he is, we saw the videos. Manohar Bhai Saab and Bhabhi had come over. Shankar showed them the videos. This is what you are doing with your money, buying lotion-potion, pretending to be a girl? This is what we have taught you? I couldn’t even look at Manohar. He doesn’t want you as his assistant anymore, you are a bad influence on Shankar, and Guddu’s wedding is coming up, what if the groom’s family finds out.’

She tucked her pallu around her waist and moved towards him, hitting his head, his back. His father sat on the diwan, wearing only his baniyan and shorts, his security guard uniform draped on the chair next to him. The bucket of warm water for soaking his feet lay unused, getting cold. His mother continued hitting him, crying and yelling. His father looked away, his sister was watching from behind the kitchen wall.

‘They are just some videos I make for timepass. Why are you hitting me? It is my money; I work all day in the heat to earn it. So, what if I spent it, I give you most of my salary every month.’ said Kishan, trying to block her blows.

‘Why are you making these dirty videos? You know what people are saying? Doing all this lady’s makeup and dance. Chi! Is this how boys act? You only tell him now’ she said, shoving him towards his father.

‘Give me your phone,’ his father said. Kishan looked up to see the dark bags under his father’s eyes quivering. He knew that one wrong move could make his father get the belt with the metal buckle and there would be no stopping him till he drew blood. ‘I won’t ask twice,’ he said. Kishan held his phone out. As his father started to take it, Kishan held fast, not letting go.

Kishan looked up and saw his fathers’ eyes widen in surprise. ‘I said give your phone to me now!’ he roared. Kishan knew what would come next but he didn’t care. He pulled trying to snatch away the phone. In their tussle, it flew out of their hands and fell face first on the floor with a sickening sound.

Kishan yelled out and ran to pick it up. There was now a small hole on the screen with wavy lines radiating outwards like a spider’s web. ‘You broke it, you broke it, you broke it,’ he screamed, tears now flowing down his face. He flew down the stairs. His parents’ voices fading into the whirr of the bike.

He drove for a while, past the apartments and the villas. He reached the park. He sat down on the bench under the Amaltas tree. The park was noisy this time of the day. Kids winding up a cricket match, debating the score. A group playing hide and seek. Nannies chatting with each other. Dog walkers sitting around, watching videos on their phones, while the dogs barked and strained against their leashes.

He unlocked his phone, at least it was still working. The crack distorted the screen, making the colours dance. He saw that a popular influencer had commented on his latest video, it had crossed ten thousand views, he had hundreds of new followers, many DMs. Sagar19 had messaged him. ‘Bj?’ ‘rs 500’ followed by a google maps link. ‘Rs 1000’ he wrote back. ‘Ok’ came the reply. The screen repair would take at least two thousand rupees. Another thousand to replace the spoilt products.

It was dark now. He started driving towards the pin on the map. Cars passed on the other side of the divider, blinding him with their headlights, leaving a red circle he couldn’t unsee even when he closed his eyes.