When Only Love Remains Read Online Free PDF Page A

who keep mailing Devrat. Some twenty-odd people who have never stopped mailing him since he shared his first video. Every time he uploads a video, these twenty people mail him praising the song and they tell him they are waiting for more. Surprisingly enough, all these mailers are from Dehradun and one or the other from those twenty fans keep asking him to come over to Dehradun.
    Then he types out Arundhati in the search bar, like someone types out the password to their most visited account: fast and without looking at the keyboard.
    There she is. Sweet and pretty with her arms around ‘him’. He tortures himself for a little more reading through her updates, looking at the pictures of the happy couple in clubs and restaurants, and in the Durga Puja pandals this year. It feels like his heart would sink to the bottom of his stomach. It’s an actual physical pain. He feels he would vomit.
    He goes to his own profile and is surprised by the number of friend requests. As a struggling musician he has to accept all the friend requests. He has to assume that they are fans, even though the profile pictures sometimes suggest that they are flowerpots and animals. Sometimes even Brad Pitt. By now, he thinks he has five girls in his list who look exactly like Angelina Jolie. Like. Exactly.
    He accepts what feels like about a thousand friend requests, and checks the pictures he has been tagged in. They are about a hundred pictures from his last gig and numerous grainy videos. He sends the links of a few videos to his parents, so they can feel proud about their son, so that his father can put the video on a loop and his mother can watch him over and over again.
    As he delves deeper into the messages, the wall posts and the comments on the pictures that people have posted, he is certainly happy. But the comments die down after the first week. Isn’t that what always happens? People follow you, adore you, like you till you there, and the moment you’re not, they forget you. If he is off the circuit for another six months, people are going to forget him and move on and he doesn’t have any right to expect anything different. He has to be there, in front of people, to remind them of his presence. That’s what he used to love, to sit amongst a group of school girls, and play his songs and bask in all the attention.
    He types a status message and within two minutes, fifteen people like it. ‘I am back. See you soon!J’ He leaves the sweetshop-cum-cyber café and finds the children on the street playing with new paper boats now.
    He enters his apartment and he finds his phone ringing. Ugh, he thinks. There are three missed calls. Two of them are from unknown numbers and one of them is from Sumit. He calls back to find an exuberant Sumit on the other side.
    ‘Finally! I am back!’ he says and echoes Devrat’s status message.
    ‘You’re such a stalker,’ he says.
    ‘Says the boy who only goes online to see what his ex-girlfriend is up to?’
    ‘Let’s not talk about it.’
    ‘Yes, let’s not. Let’s talk about how many calls I am getting for you. And not just from managers, but from proper fans. One of your YouTube videos has seventy thousand hits, you know. I think you should shift to Mumbai. Who knows? You might even get an opportunity to do playback singing!’
    ‘I can’t do that,’ he argues. It’s not the first time he is in this argument and he knows it is not going to be the last time.
    ‘Arre baba, why not? You have to be a little commercial. Devrat, you know me for a year now and you know I don’t give this advice to the other rock bands or acts that I manage. But you’re a versatile singer! You’re like Sonu Nigam, like badass-lost-in-love Sonu Nigam. You should give it a try. Oh and by the way, Sonu Nigam makes upwards of 10 crores a year,’ Sumit says fervently.
    ‘Hmmm.’
    Devrat knows Sumit’s enthusiasm emanates from love and not greed but Devrat doesn’t think of himself as that good and singing in