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and browse through it from end to end, taking the number
of hits up by a hundred.
    I had all the
posts saved on my phone anyway, so I stopped checking the blog long
ago, and it was hardly ever on my mind. I never spoke to Adil about
it, but I didn’t know that he had found a new plot in it.
    ***
    Adil didn’t
tell me about Zeba, I am not surprised. He had found Sameer Sir,
our high school English teacher, on Facebook and become his friend.
That was unthinkable back when we were in school. Students used to
be in awe of teachers. They respected teachers. Forget being
friends, the slightest display of familiarity with teachers was
frowned upon. But on Facebook, you can’t be ‘student’ or ‘teacher’,
just ‘friend’. Adil had been Sameer Sir’s favourite, and he was
good at English, no doubt. But I guess the fact that Adil aspired
to be a writer, and was struggling towards his goal must have
warmed Sameer Sir’s heart. And then there was also the glowing
piece that Adil had posted about Sir on his blog. He had declared
Sameer Sir his hero, and how can a retired teacher nearing 70
resist being flattered by such praise? Sameer Sir posted a poem in
praise of Adil and his writing on the blog, and after that the two
were always bouncing praise off each other.
    Sameer Sir invited
Adil home for coffee one day. And Adil, who avoids society like the
plague, surprised me by going at the height of summer although it
is a long ride. I had to lend him 1,500 rupees for the cab fare.
Lend! Adil never returns my money, where’s the ‘lend’ in that?
    But I was wrong
about his hero worship and all. Sure, he meant no harm, and if
Sameer Sir tripped on a street Adil would surely help him up, but
all that praise he was showering on the old teacher was not
heartfelt, I realised a few months later. And I was to blame for
it, because once the hits on his blog dipped, Adil discovered
another use for the tracker. He started tracking the IP addresses
of his followers: the ones who continued visiting the blog
regularly.
    Sameer Sir was one
of them. Adil knew where he lived even before his coffee visit. Sir
was near the age of superannuation when he taught us, and soon
after retiring he had left the city to live with his son who has a
business here. I didn’t have a clue or I would have surely met him
after joining college here. Maybe not, because I am not so hung up
on old times. Anyway, when Sameer Sir accepted Adil’s friend
request, they exchanged phone numbers and spoke to each other. So,
Adil had Sir’s address almost from the time when his blog was
getting hits all day. But I had no idea about the sneaky game he
was up to.
    It was after a few
months that Adil showed me a graphic of his remaining steady
followers. He had mapped them out slowly, patiently by matching the
time of comments to the hits on his blog posts. Say, if Rita
commented on a post about Surabhi at 4.15pm, and the tracker showed
only one hit on ‘Surabhi’ at that time, Adil labelled the visitor’s
IP address ‘Rita’. He would then wait for Rita’s next comment to
confirm his deduction. If he got the same result thrice, there was
no room for doubt. With two matches, he was 90 percent certain. And
so, bit by bit, he had built up a map of our acquaintances across
the world. He could have been a spy, or anything he wanted to be
had he not got stuck on the idea of writing for a living.
    Poor Sameer Sir,
he had no idea what a creep Adil could be. All the time he thought
his dear student was worshipping him, Adil was sitting on the other
side laughing at his expense. Well, it was funny indeed because
Sameer Sir kept returning to read about himself. Sometimes he read
the post three or four times in a day. He was obviously a man in
love with himself although he always taught and seemed to practise
humility, and had much to say about the vice of vanity. And besides
this strong self-love Sameer Sir also gave away one of his secrets
unknowingly to his favourite