Recap: Aaduri discovers that Ronny and Pragya’s cat co-parenting story is making waves on social media. In Calcutta, Manjulika Ghosh learns of her diagnosis that she has Alzheimer’s.

The bird funeral video was posted on Aaduri’s website on Tuesday morning. It was a quiet, plain Jane, bhaat-daal-alu bhaja type of day, the sort of Tuesday when you decide you will clear out your desk at work because things are so utterly dull. No major politician or minor celebrity had said anything trendworthy and no wardrobe malfunction or sexist comment had stirred the opinionated into social media frenzy. Impossible though it sounds, it appeared as though the Internet had paused to catch its breath, stretch its arms, do the plank, while it languidly awaited the next flap of the proverbial butterfly wings to instigate a new round of churning in its empire. Only, in this case, it was not a butterfly but a parakeet, and, besides, the parakeet was dead.

At half-past eleven, @SimplyAaduri sent out a tweet tagging filmmaker @RonnyBanerjee, who had 300,000 followers on Twitter, sharing the #ARequiemForMax video, immediately after which their website’s handle — managed by Tiana — reposted the video with a whole range of relevant hashtags. A few minutes later, Bobby Bansal — who Aaduri had sounded out — also reposted the video from Ronny’s handle (which she was now managing since Ronny, highly disgruntled by the cat story, had gone offline himself and was unavailable for comment), with just the words: ‘A Requiem for Max’. Fortuitously, that very minute, somewhere in Mumbai, filmmaker Imran Shah, who had been on jury duty with Ronny in Sharjah and who enjoyed Ronny’s TL, picked up his phone to tweet. The first thing he saw was Ronny’s requiem and, having seen it thrice to analyse the deft composition, he tweeted it out with the caption, “The dark and the light come together in a beloved pet’s funeral #requiemformax”.

At 12.45, when Aaduri returned to her desk from a meeting with Sir, she found Tiana on her purple rug, hopping from one foot to the other. “Guess what guess what guess what?!” Tiana shrieked. Aaduri refused to indulge her and calmly picked up her purse. “I have to go out for a bit, Tiana. So if there’s something you have to tell me...”

“It’s going really and truly bacterial,” Tiana exclaimed. Aaduri flinched — she hated this ‘bacterial’ usage which now their entire office had adopted. “Malini Sharma shared it! Ma-li-ni Shar-ma! Any minute now, YouTube will put it in their #trending section. Pinky Kapoor-Kumar has posted it on Instagram with the caption ‘How to Talk to Children About Death’. So, naturally, all the mommy-blogger types who follow her are going nuts about it. Ronny’s fans are circulating it also, of course, so Tollywood is buzzing. That I knew anyway. But it’s possibly going pan-Indian. Which is BIG. And, you know, everyone is wild about your friend, Lata. People are going crazy asking ‘Who’s that woman?’, ‘Who is that woman?’, ‘Is she someone?’. Should I, like, tag her or something?, is she on Twitter, she must at least be on Facebook?”

“No, no, don’t do anything of the sort, Tiana. She’s going through a very difficult time personally.” A shadow crossed Tiana’s face. Aaduri continued, “She gave me permission to share the video only if we kept her out of the loop. Of course, she hadn’t the foggiest that it might go viral,” Aaduri allowed herself a smile. “She’s not a very plugged-in person. She’s a reader of books. You should see her house in London: it’s like a library, absolutely stashed to the brim with books. You remember the time Dhanush’s song went viral? I’d called her and she was complaining about something and I said ‘Why so Kolaveri, Di?’ She stayed silent for a full minute and said, ‘What the hell are you saying, Aadu, have you gone mad?’ She didn’t get the reference at all. Her mother, on the other hand, is super plugged-in.” Aaduri smiled as she thought of Manjulika’s Instagram account, where she posted pictures of typical North Calcutta buildings every day, or Manjulika’s Facebook messages, frequent and long, that were all written in Bangla, with proper salutations and sign-offs.

In a small voice Tiana asked, “Why did you say she’s going through a difficult time?”

Aaduri gave her a hard look. “Family stuff,” she said finally, “I am actually going to meet her for a bit. You can hold down the fort?”

“Yes, of course,” said Tiana. “Legally, we are all clear, right? Now that it’s going everywhere...”

“Oh yes, the video was shot using my phone camera, the people whose garden it is, the parents of the kids, all agreed to the video being shared on the website. And Ronny is missing; but his assistant cleared it. Not that I expect him to care. He is quite generous with his art, that way. Like Dayanita Singh. You know, the photographer? She will take a photograph of you on your phone if you ask. I was totally bowled over by that. Anyway, I am chattering too much. I shall forward the consent emails to you in case Legal asks for them. But, basically, it was shot on my equipment — so we needn’t worry.”

“Okay, great,” said Tiana. She waited around uncertainly for a few more seconds as though she wanted to say something more. But since Aaduri — who had a faint idea what it might be about — did not offer any helpful prompts, she melted away.

***

When Aaduri walked into Flurys, Lata was already seated in the far corner, sipping a cup of tea. They’d left home together this morning — Aaduri had gone straight to Ghosh Mansion from the airport upon her return from Ranchi and had stayed over for a couple of days to be with Manjulika, who was astonishingly chipper, and Lata, who was crying in the bathroom every couple of hours — and Aaduri had gone to the office, to publish the video, while Lata had trekked down to the hospital for a detailed discussion with the neurologist. They’d decided to meet for lunch.

“And?” Aaduri raised her eyebrows, walking up to Lata who was looking out of the window.

“I ordered us lunch,” Lata said, motioning at the waiter for another cup. The dark circles beneath her eyes were now baggy. “The usual, tuna melt.”

Aaduri pulled out a chair, divested herself of her bags and shawl, and settled in.

“Did the test results come in?” she probed, even though she knew that had the news been good, Lata would have got straight to that.

“They did,” Lata replied, pouring out tea for Aaduri in the tiny spare cup. “There is definite degradation in the bi-parietal lobes. Though there are apparently different ways to interpret that.”

Aaduri sighed. Lata continued, “I have spoken to my boss. I mean, I haven’t given him the full picture. Nimki’s passport should come in soon. Then, of course, there’s that annoying wait for the visa. But as soon as the paperwork is done, I want them to come to London. Someone I know — one of Ari’s friends actually — is a consultant at Maudsley Hospital. I have spoken to him already. He is going to do a thorough examination once Ma is there. Not that I doubt Dr Basu’s assessment, and he is not jumping the gun anyway.”

“Hmm,” Aaduri nodded. Dr Basu, Boro Jethi’s cousin and Aaduri’s father’s bridge friend at the club, was a great doctor, if a little cut-and-dried.

“But what I am going to do over the next few days is speak to everyone close to her, her book club friends, the other teachers in her school, and Nimki, and try and capture details about Ma’s lapses so the doctors can have a fuller picture. Did you notice anything, Aadu?”

“Well,” said Aaduri thoughtfully, “You know how she sends these letter-type missives to me on Messenger. Sometimes she’d send me the same thing three or four times. “Aaduri watch this play”; “Oh, Aadu, there’s this play in Academy of Fine Arts on Sunday”; “Oh, Aaduri, I think there is this play that I think you might like”. I did note it in passing. But then, you know how my mother says the same thing a hundred times. Wash your hair, wash your hair, wash your hair, until I do it. Mothers repeat things. But of course there was something off.

It was almost as though she was sending each message as the first. Should I have told you?”

“Aadu, I stayed with her for a whole month and realised nothing. She had forgotten where she’d kept the locker keys after the last wedding and I thought it was perfectly normal. I forget these things all the time! Anyway, I have to assemble all this data before I go.”

“Sounds like a wise plan,” Aaduri said, “And I am sure there are effective new drugs?”

Their tuna melts arrived.

“So, if you go now to set all this up, do you want me to accompany M and N to London? It wouldn’t be right for them to go on their own, you know.”

“That’s what I’d been thinking,” Lata said, looking relieved, “Can you get away for a few days?”

“You think I haven’t heard about the champagne tea plans?”

The girls — though, of course, the passersby who saw them through the window or the waiters who brought them their glasses of water or the people who brushed past their chairs as they walked to the patisserie area saw them as women, not girls, mature women who were in charge of things — the girls smiled sadly at each other. Disease was no longer the thing that ate up other people’s parents.

“I think we should tell Ronny,” Aaduri said, “He loves Manjulika Ghosh, Luts.”

“Aadu,” Lata said, softly, “We are never going to have this conversation again.”

Epilogue

Three Months Later

London in early April; the spirit of spring in the air.

Tourists, who were arriving in droves and cluttering up the tube stations with their eager faces and bald enthusiasm and altogether getting on the nerves of the regular commuters, were still muffled up. But the Londoners themselves had begun to strip down. The spring colours — the pinks and peaches and robin-breast blues and the returning cyan this season — were out in full force, and hemlines were rising dramatically, now that the sunlight had begun to give the illusion of being all toasty in the afternoons (if you stood at one spot for five uninterrupted minutes, that is).

Lata Ghosh hurried out of the cab — the cabbie had in fact jumped down and run across to open her door, something, by the way, cabbies never did — though, by then, she was halfway to the church already.

Lata was in a hurry and despite her shoes, she clattered down the stairs to the basement.

It was a cosy space downstairs. Buttery walls, mismatched chairs, a table laden with tea things and coffee, chocolate chip cookies set out in chipped plates, wildflowers in large jars. Lata had met Lauren, the South Korean lady who led the program, at an outreach session at Maudsley Hospital, and Lauren had convinced her to come here. Manjulika’s reaction to her disease, her plan to do all the things on her bucket list, was quite the exception — denial and depression were the more regular responses. And Lauren had invited Manjulika to come in and speak one day too.

Lata waved at her now, as she stood at the head of the circle. She was tiny, with jet black hair that she wore to her waist. Lata quietly made her way to one of the empty chairs.

“Hey Lata,” Lauren called out.

“Hey, Lata,” everyone else said.

There were about nine people gathered this afternoon — sometimes there were two or three and once Lata had counted 21 heads — and these were all people who had relatives suffering from Alzheimer’s. A middle-aged lady in hijab who Lata had never seen before was wiping her eyes and a young man, presumably her son, was patting her shoulder gently. “Hi,” Lata said, shyly, “I am Lata. My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s three months ago and I am her chief caregiver. We spent the last few months doing all the things she had ever wanted to do with me but had deemed too expensive or too frivolous — or too unhealthy! It’s as though we gave ourselves a holiday to escape from the disease. But there is no escape, and now we both realise that we have to eventually go home, to the place she is most familiar with, our city Calcutta — she has always lived in Calcutta — for her to grow old. Not immediately. But by the end of the year maybe. And that means I have no option but to face all my own...” Lata’s voice became heavy.

“Fears?” the man sitting next to her supplied.

“Exactly,” Lata said, “Thank you. My own fears. You know, I might be 39, but in my head I still think — thought — of myself as the young person, the one with the rights. The right to fly high and discover strange things and go live in Barcelona for a year if I want to and...” — and she said the words that were the hardest possible for her to utter aloud, but here, in the anonymity of this group, she found she could — “And think about myself. Love. Children. Holidays. Beautiful things. And yet, now I cannot be that person any more. I must be the one in charge. I must be stoic about it. But it’s so hard. I keep thinking ‘Why me?’, ‘Why me?’.”

Everyone nodded. Everyone assembled there — much like everyone else walking the streets outside, everyone in all the streets of all the world — had felt that at some point, maybe earlier that same day.

“I can’t sleep at night. These thoughts keep me up and my GP doesn’t want to prescribe sleeping pills. She wants me to meditate. And that just makes me angrier!”

Once again, everyone nodded. Their vigorous assent worked like an instant stress buster. Feeling lighter, Lata sat down.

Later, after everyone had spoken and the meeting got over formally, people milled around drinking coffee. The man who had sat next to her, a South Asian by all accounts, introduced himself, “Lata, I am Pankaj,” he said, “You know, you look really familiar.”

“I get that a lot,” Lata said, trying to brush the words away.

“Weren’t you in that bird funeral video?” Pankaj asked.

“Ah, yes,” Lata said, deciding not to lie to someone at the support group meeting — after all everyone operated on trust here — “Guilty as charged!”

“It was very charming, very wise,” Pankaj smiled, “My father had just been diagnosed and I was very depressed. A friend sent it to me, and I really liked it. May we get together for coffee sometime? Outside of this?”

Pankaj was nice-looking enough, wavy hair, clean brown eyes, a good physique.

“Oh, but there are rules about these things,” Lata said evasively, “It’s not done apparently. This is where we must meet. Sorry!”

“Ah, no problem,” nodded Pankaj, “It was nice to meet you, Lata.”

After the support group meeting, Lata went to the shops to get the things she had been ordered to get. After dithering for a while by the aisle, she finally allowed herself a pack of mint chocolate digestives — her absolute favourite kind — even though she was on a diet. And then she called a cab.

At home, she rang the bell — what a joy it was to have someone open the door for her, to not have to let herself in to a cold and empty house — but it was a while before the door opened.

“Hello,” said the man who opened the door.

Lata took one look at his face — that familiar, intimately-known face — and felt her blood rise thunderously to her brain. Her cheeks were aflame. How dare he?

She pushed past him and carried her bags down the hall and entered the parlour to the right. “Where’s Ma?” she asked, crossly. “Upstairs. I got them some of the latest Bangla films on a hard drive,” Ronny replied.

“Oh please, our Bengali film needs are well met by the OTTs. What are you doing here? Isn’t it cruel to have left that cute cat behind in Calcutta? What sort of a co-parent are you?”

Lata crash-banged her way into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. When she returned, she found Ronny sitting calmly on her favourite sofa.

“I never agreed to co-parent that cat. You should take this up with Aaduri. What can I do if her website maintains no journalistic standards whatsoever?”

“Please. Her website got the whole world and their cousin interested in you, okay, it even got your producer interested again!” Lata said, in Aaduri’s defence, “That damn bird funeral video. I can’t go to an Alzheimer’s caregiver support group without someone bringing it up!”

At the A-word, both paused.

“You should have told me,” Ronny said.

“Why? So you could swoop back into my life to save me, with your legendary reliability and your excessive fame, leaving your cat and co-parent behind?” Lata flopped down on the sofa, not exactly next to him.

“Oh god, will you stop with that already. You know Pragya and I parted ways almost immediately after our return from Jamshedpur. She read the truth in our bird funeral video, Charu. She claimed the way I had captured your face on camera said everything about my feelings for you. Etc. Etc. And even though Nikhil was interested, I told him I needed a break to rework the script from scratch. I told him I needed to spend some months in England to research J.C. Bose’s Cambridge days. I sorted through all the paperwork and found a home for the cat and decided to take you up on your offer.”

“What offer?” Lata said, now stretching her legs out and turning her back to Ronny, sort of.

“You said you’d like to take in an artistic stray? Didn’t you have some elaborate point about charity to prove?”

Lata rolled her eyes.

“I could let you stay on as a charity case, I suppose,” she said, eventually.

“And in lieu of your generosity I shall take Manjulika Ghosh to her doctor’s appointments, to swimming lessons, to the park. I can do the grocery, too. Run other errands. Dry-clean your clothes? Carry your lunch to office in a dabba?”

Now stretched out on the sofa, Lata closed her eyes. She felt his soft, fragrant breath upon her forehead. His smell was citrussy, like an old-fashioned aftershave, and smoky, like home. And as a single tear errantly rolled down the side of her cheek, past her earlobe, she felt him gently wipe it away.

“Where’s the cat?” she asked him afterwards, not opening her eyes, but turning on her side, so his hand became her pillow.

“With my parents, in Calcutta,” Ronny replied, “They’ve named her Nandini and call her Nini.”

“Do you think Nini will like me?” Lata asked.

“More than anyone else in the world,” he replied.

Later, when Nimki came down the stairs, she found them asleep on the sofa, curled up against each other. She soundlessly crept back upstairs.

This is the concluding chapter of The Romantics of College Street, a serial novel by Devapriya Roy for The Telegraph. Find her on Instagram @roydevapriya or email her at theromanticsofcollegestreet@gmail.com