Read Part-Time Devdaas... for Free Online

make all the hurt disappear. After staring at it for don’t know how long, I zombie-walked myself to the wash basin. Devika had left a post-it on the mirror
    Good morning, chicken is on the menu today,
    you’ll have to microwave it, in case you need
    an after meal hit there is a joint in the soap case in
    the loo. I’ll be back by 6, stay alive till then.
    Love, Dev
    I found a beer in the fridge, so I skipped the chicken which had sacrificed its life for me. I planted myself on the couch and put on the TV. Each and every channel had the dumbest of characters wearing awfully gaudy costumes, psychotically talking to themselves, plotting lamest of conspiracies like adding extra namak to the daal made by Savita, Kavita or Babita and making orgasimic faces after screwing the daal. One of the channels showed a promo of a show which had completed three thousand episodes. Who the fuck cares, I wondered. The people watching it abuse it; the actors, the directors, the spot boys, even the writers who write it, abuse it. I know it because I had assisted on one such production.
    “Shooting a show after it loses its plot is like trying to have sex after losing erection,” the director had said to me. Then who the bloody fuck cares? Actually no one does, and that is how this country works, I concluded.
    I switched the TV off and got back to staring at things. Devika was terribly organised with her stuff. Her dad’s job kept posting him in different cities every year, so after the second year of college, against her parents’ wish, she chose to live in Mumbai with her grandparents. Since then, she hardly lived with them. It had been more than six years that she had been living alone, so the house hardly had anything that gave a familial feel to it. Right from the chillum with its holder to a two-feet-long, four-and a-half litre bottle of Chivas 12 in the showcase, everything was purely Devika.
    Back in our college days, Hrida and I had spent many afternoons at her place. Hrida. And she was back in my thoughts. I went through every single thing I had said to her. I felt an inexplicable level of rancidness inside me. I was through with the beer and its alcohol content wasn’t enough to daze my thoughts about her. I opened another bottle and gulped three hundred millilitres of the beer. One thing I had learnt about myself from my excessive college drinking days is that it took exactly ten minutes for the alcohol to kick in. So I pushed in another two hundred millilitres and caved in on the couch. One, two, three... I began counting numbers, trying hard not to let her thoughts kick in before the alcohol did. Would she be feeling the same pain? d id I actually mean nothing to her? f orty-eight, forty-nine, fifty... she’ll come back, don’t worry. n o she won’t; remember how you begged her not to? At seventy-four, I stopped counting.
    “Seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven…” Devika continued. I turned realising I had been so lost in counting out loud that I didn’t notice her standing beside me.
    “How long have you been standing here?” I asked.
    “Since thirty-five,” she said staring at me. “So it has come to this now?”
    She turned to leave, I caught her right hand and pulled her close and held her hand against my face. I hugged her and rested my face on her belly. She leaned and kissed my hair.

    “Give it a month, you’ll feel better,” she said as she stuffed the bowl of chicken in the microwave, “Trust me, the first month is the toughest.” She began to place the plates on the dining table.
    “Later it’s a cake walk.” She said as the microwave beeped.
    “Come, let’s eat.”
    I sat staring at the floor; she pulled me up by my arm.
    “You should have called mom,” she said as she stirred the chicken with the ladle.
    “You spoke to her?” I said.
    “Ya she called me in the afternoon.” She served me the chicken, “She said that Uncle found your bike in Greenwood Park in an abandoned