Pattern of Events

“You do not have to be modest and ashamed about your ambitions. Everyone is ambitious. If someone says he isn’t, he is just fucking around with you. The same holds for success.” – He tells me this, smiles, turns, walks to his bicycle, puts on his helmet and rides away. And I stand there smiling at myself contemplating how wrongly I used to think of him as the greatest douche-bag I have come across.

Today we had met after 15 years. He was there with me in high school. An average student at best, he was the kind of normal guy you could link with any generic person, except that he was not, thanks to his unorthodox social skills. Everyone hated him. I had topped the class for 3 consecutive years when he got admitted. He was openly jealous of me, and I am not saying this because of some self-conceived notion of being the object of everyone’s jealousy but because he had, on one of the result announcement days, come up to me and said

-Fuck You!
-What!?
-If you think you can score by being a teachers’ pet, you’re damn right. Because that’s what has happened.
-What on Earth is wrong with you? What the fuck is wrong with this guy?
-Yes. Everything’s wrong with me.

… and he left. I said to myself – Losers like these are ample in number.

His parents had died and he was living with his grandparents. He didn’t do really well in 12th Boards and just managed to get a seat in NIT Warangal. And then I never heard of him. To be true, I actually forgot him. He would have lived his utterly boring life enjoying the crammed up roads of Hanamkonda, would have got a kick out of visiting Nagarjunasagar Dam with his bunch of friends, if he would have had any, would have graduated with an average GPA and an average job. So when I was in New York working in the Fixed Income Division of Lehman Brothers, I was taken aback by his email in my official inbox. It took me some time to recall who this Ashish was (Even his name was generic to the core). And then at an instant of insight, I remembered the asshole. It was 17th July and the email read –

Pet,

Meet me at Sparks Steakhouse on September 20, 11 pm.

Fuck You.
Ashish

On September 15, Lehman filed for bankruptcy. Not that I became a pauper overnight – I had enough money to keep me comfortably going for another year without a job. But I had to answer another addition to the recurring set of questions from my perpetually worried parents and not-so-worried-but-excited-and-somewhat-sadist relatives -“What will you do now?”
Amidst all this chaos and joblessness and bloodbath on Wall Street, I surprisingly remembered Ashish and his planned meeting.

The day came and I went inside. There was only one Indian face in the crowd. So I thought for a while, went straight up to him and

-Hey! Ashish?
-Oh, Hi. I thought you would be late or, even worse, that you won’t be coming. You know after all the massacre.
-Yes. What happened is bad but then you know it is going to hurt if you keep promising people of more money when you yourself aren’t sure of its source.
-Actually.

I don’t remember everything we talked but I remember the following five things –

1. He worked at Skadden. He had left Warangal after 6 months of joining. Now I won’t go into the details of how he managed to get into Yale and grab a job in one of the topmost law firms of US but the matter of fact remained that I was jobless because of fooling idiots and he – the average and barely noticeable person – was working for Skadden facilitating transfer of huge sums of money from rich idiots’ pockets to his.

2. These words – “I envied you more than anyone. I worked my ass off to beat you but you won’t leave the top slot. I guess you were endowed with better genes. Some people are, without any effort of their own. In the minutest scheme of nature’s grand plan, you just got lucky. Now when I say this to you, I don’t mean to offend you fucker. I say this because I want you to make the most of it. If you hadn’t been lucky in your mental wiring, you would anyway have been a loser given your actions and dedication towards your responsibilities. But, unfortunately for the world, you are a genius. So, make the most of it.”

3. He loved randomness. Be it the way he took out his cellphone and generated a random number to place the corresponding order from the menu or the date he chose to meet me. When I asked him about why he chose this date 2 months in advance, he chuckled.

4. His son of 4 years had died in a car accident while chasing a Frisbee to the road. Ashish had thrown the Frisbee at him.

5.These words – “Everything that happens to you is mostly an independent event on its own. It is a human fallacy to look back and force a pattern on random events. My son’s death had nothing to do with my parent’s death, but still people mention the two facts together and feel sorry for me. I feel sorry for them. I didn’t kill him by throwing the Frisbee, I did not know that it would hit a bird and fly off to the road, nor did the driver who was taken aback by the sudden appearance of a kid. But the world dumps their unsaid judgments on us. I feel sorry for the world.”

He had followed my life story to the core. He told me that he respected me and was inspired by every achievement of mine. He left Warangal because he was not happy with it after knowing that I had made it to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. He wanted to beat me. I guess that’s what rivals do to you –They extract the best out of you.

So, today when I see him riding away on his bicycle, I wish I too had known him better, and throughout.