E4:- Ananth Khatri

Sarita and I are in the back of a cab, going to a meeting she’s too important to

attend. Sarita hand-holding me is a little embarrassing. She’s too much of a

big shot to be in a meeting with a young director and yet she’s here.

‘The words are at the back of your throat. Spit them out,’ says Sarita when

she notices my sullen face.

‘With no offence to the entertainment team, the world won’t miss anything

if there weren’t any movies or short films or brilliant directors or

screenwriters,’ I complain.

‘We should save sick people, instead? Is that what you’re saying?’ she asks

me.

I nod.

‘People will still go ahead and watch the Salman Khan movie even if you

wave pictures of dead, rotting Dalit children at the ticketing counter,’ she

says with a deadpan expression, like she has said this before to many people

who have suggested the same. ‘The world doesn’t run on moral logic. Hear

this guy out. It’s a love story. And given your own love story, I think you will

be a great judge of it.’

No matter what Sarita says, it still doesn’t make it right. The rookie writer–

director is sitting in one corner of Starbucks. He gets up as we enter.

‘Saraansh,’ he says and thrusts his hand out. ‘Nice to meet you, bro!’

He shouldn’t call me bro.

We shake hands. His boyish eyes twinkle. He asks if we want to order

something.

‘Their blueberry parfait is mad! You should try it,’ he says. ‘I would offer

you some but I finished mine.’

The fact that he orders an expensive blueberry parfait is worrying.

Neither of us wants to but since we are in a coffee shop we order a coffee

each. He has the jumpy energy of a teenager on cocaine.

‘Thank you for the opportunity,’ he says excitedly.

Saraansh to the best my knowledge, a recent graduate from National

School of Filmmaking, is a rich boy. There’s something inherently wrong in

rich people turning to WeDonate for help. The laptop in front of him is a

worn-out MacBook Air. There is an Air Pod’s case lying about carelessly on

the table. He’s about my age, twenty-two according to his LinkedIn profile,

but he looks more boyish, smacks of privilege, and smells good.

His last Instagram post was a picture of him in the pool of Leela

Kempinski captioned, ‘Self-care’. There are other pictures too—pictures of

him in a club captioned ‘I’m too old for this’, a picture of his new Onitsuka

Tiger shoes captioned ‘Sneakerhead for life’.

He’s too thin for his height—at 6 feet, he’s tall—yet looks okay in a way

that only rich people can.

He has made a few documentaries. I watched all of them yesterday. I will

admit his student films are better than the ones Karunesh has helped make.

His Instagram-rich-kid-feel notwithstanding, there’s an unmistakable

intensity he exudes in the videos where he’s talking about his movies. Which

is sharp in contrast with his Instagram profile that looks like it belongs to a

brat.

‘So let’s start?’ says Sarita once our coffee reaches our table.

‘Bro?’ he looks at me.

‘Of course.’

‘So yeah, since it’s going to be a short YouTube-only movie, we will need

to find different ways to push it out. I have crazy plans on how we can

promote it. It’s going to be mad fun!’ he starts out, seriously but still smiling.

His lazy hair flops over his forehead and he keeps moving it out of his eyes.

‘That comes later, Saraansh. The only consideration is the story. We would

like a narration, or if you could send it to us in writing, even that works for

us,’ I tell him sternly.

Why do I feel so much older than him?

His eyes light up and he says, ‘It’s a great story, bro.’

I have a fundamental problem with him calling me ‘bro’ repeatedly.

‘Can we hear it? Or read it? Whatever suits you,’ I tell him.

‘I haven’t written it down yet. I just have a thought but it’s a cracker of a

story, it’s so complete. To proceed, I would need your help,’ says Saraansh.

He’s looking at me and not Sarita. There was an unnecessary stress on the

word your.

‘I’m sorry? My help?’ I ask.

His eyes twinkle. ‘It’s your story, your love story,’ he says, leaning

towards me.

‘What do you mean it’s my story?’

And then it strikes me.

‘That’s a very bad idea. There’s no story there,’ I tell him.

‘Hear him out, Ananth,’ commands Sarita.

‘Bro, let’s give it some thought. Your story has all the elements for it to

make a great web-series. It’s so extra, and it’s so real. And not to forget, that

video Mohini made is #goals. I don’t know a teenager who hasn’t watched it.

We trip over it every time someone around has a heartbreak. It’s our guiding

light, bro, our pole star,’ he says.

‘I don’t think this is going to work for us. I think you’re wasting your time

and ours,’ I say.

‘Why don’t you take some time to think about it?’ asks Sarita.

What on earth was happening here?

‘This is a bad idea,’ I say with as much unpleasantness as I can gather.

Saraansh is relentless. With the smile still on his face, he continues and for

the first time I see the intensity, the seriousness I have seen in the

documentaries about bully-culture and teenager-on-dark-web that he has shot,

‘I really want to make this, man. Your story is simple and that’s what works.

Hear me out, Ananth. We start from both your childhoods, two parallel narratives, till the two of you meet and everything changes. It ends with you

joining WeDonate and using your influence to help thousands of others.

There will be a nice subtext of how one girl’s simple, selfless love ended up

helping so many people. That’s what you do with the following that you

have, don’t you bro?’

‘I think we are done here.’

I get up. Sarita’s face softens and it’s weird to watch her trying to smile.

Sarita gets up after me and tells Saraansh, ‘If he’s not on board, we can’t

proceed.’

For the first time in the meeting, I sense a doubt in Saraansh. He had put

his bets on waltzing in with this god-awful idea and getting me on board with

a snap of his fingers. Sarita and I walk towards the exit.

‘You set this up, didn’t you? You knew what he was going to propose,’ I

say to Sarita once we are outside.

‘Ananth, don’t tell me you can’t see how making this movie can help

WeDonate? I’m surprised honestly at your naivety,’ says Sarita rudely as if it

was I who had conspired to make a short movie on her story and not the other

way around.

‘Honestly, I don’t see how,’ I snap.

‘You want to save people? This is your best chance! Going viral online is a

major component of our business. You know the movie will get traction with

the story you have—the virality of Mohini’s video, and that you’re now

working at WeDonate. I will give you complete creative control over the

process. Get this made and I will shift you to medical.’

‘Are you dangling a carrot?’

‘There’s a girl who wants to swap too. We can look into it. Please tell me

you didn’t think we would hire you and not use the following you have built

online? That would be very unwise of us. That’s wasting an audience of over

a million people,’ she grumbles.

‘But I already share all the campaigns,’ I protest.

‘Just sharing the medical campaigns on your profiles is not going to cut it.

We need to make deeper inroads,’ she says.

I reassess why my first reaction was to walk out of there. Was I being

possessive about making what we have with each other accessible to all?

Peddle a private emotion, sell out? But Sarita’s right, a movie like this, does

hold promise. If a video reached out to 123 million people, how far and wide

will a movie reach? How many more could we end up helping?

Saraansh and Sarita must have known this sequence of events because

Saraansh was still sitting there with his laptop open when we re-enter

Starbucks. We take our seats again.

‘It’s not my permission to give, it’s Mohini’s,’ I say.

‘So we talk to Mohini?’ asks Saraansh brightly.

‘And her mother,’ I add.

‘Her father? He’s going to be a part of the story too,’ says Sarita.

‘If the mother agrees, other things won’t be a problem,’ I say.

‘You’re not going to regret this, bro,’ says Saraansh and reaches out for my

hand. He holds it like he’s an old friend. ‘We will do nothing to insult what

you guys have. It’s brilliant and it needs to be out there. More people need to

know. It’s going to be cray.’

I catch his gaze and in that moment, I believe in him.

Back home, I watch the video again. It has a million more views than the

last time I checked. This is a good idea.

________«»__________

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***