‘I call him, Mummy, but he doesn’t pick up.’
‘I will ask him to call you back,’ she says.
A few minutes later, I call Vicky a bunch of times. He doesn’t answer the calls. I hope he’s with Sanya. I hope he falls in love with Sanya. I hope he sleeps with her, and I can get proof of him cheating on me. But most of all, I hope he hates me enough one day to dump me. I hope I can get rid of him.
4.
Daksh Dey
I park the scooter a stone’s throw away from Rabbani’s school, Star International, and directly opposite the Marriott, whose parking lot is teeming with cabs today.
Satbir, who’s on a morning shift this month, salutes me as I approach him. He looks hassled today.
‘Good morning, Sirji. How’s it going?’ I ask and point to the waves of cars honking in the drop-off area.
‘Busy,’ he replies as he waves his metal detector half-heartedly, pretending to frisk me. ‘Some sales conference is happening. Full capacity. New floor manager. Don’t get caught.’
The ground floor is packed. There is a line outside the breakfast restaurant. Men in formal trousers and ties, women in skirts carrying laptops, talking urgently over phones.
I turn towards the mezzanine floor.
The washroom, as usual, is empty.
The Marriott, which also houses the offices of three firms on seven of its floors, installed showers in all the washrooms. It was for executives who cycle, take the local or just get sweaty during their daily commute to take a quick shower before starting work. After the initial enthusiasm, they lie unused.
But I use the shower.
Back home, the water never gets warm enough. And heating water on the gas takes too much time. And is a shower really a shower if the water’s not hot? Here, the pressure is great, the temperature is just right, and my office is just a ten-minute drive away.
Satbir, Kiran, Sameer—the guard, floor manager and housekeeping head—have all caught me doing it. They are now friends and turn a blind eye. ‘Just don’t get caught,’ they warn.
I shower, slip into my clothes, fix my hair and get ready for another day of defeat and disappointment.
I work at Cloud Inc., a cloud service provider company that is in direct competition with Amazon and Microsoft. When I say ‘competition’, I mean we are being pushed into extinction. The office is like a virus-infected wasteland where one person goes missing every day. There will come a day when I reach the office and find the shutters closed. But till then, it pays for sundry bills, Rabbani’s fees and Baba’s treatment.
I’m usually the first one in the office, but today I have decided to be late. I turn towards the Starbucks on the ground floor, which is spilling with people. I get into the line to get my free birthday-week drink. I take out my birthday gift to myself from my bag, a hardback,TheStalker, a 450-page dumb slasher thriller.
‘Daksh?’ I hear a voice from behind me.
I turn.
The woman is staring at me.
I know this face. But my mind doesn’t bother to sift through the faces to remind me who she is. I had read somewhere that the mind is an attention-focusing tool. Right now, it focuses on her and nothing else.Who’s she?This internal question gets no answer from my brain. Instead of where I have seen her before, it fixates on the shape of her nose, the glint of her eyes, the fruity smell of her shampoo. I keep staring stupidly. The woman’sbeautiful.Who’s she?The question echoes inside me again. No response. It’s like when a strong electromagnetic pulse fries all microprocessors.
‘Aanchal,’ the woman says.
‘Oh,’ I say. My mind whirrs back into the present. ‘Of course!’
It’s not obvious that it’s her. She haschanged. She was beautiful then, beautiful now, but . . . she haschanged. She’s taller, straighter. Her shoulders are pulled back. She looks stronger. She’s clutching a laptop bag, the taut muscles inside her shirt are unmistakable. My mind switches to portrait mode, everything blurs around her. She takes up a lot of space, like a beautiful giant. Like a warrior princess in formal clothes. No longer a girl but now a woman, not a princess but a queen, not a student secretary but a politician. People around me are buying their drinks unmindful of this most beautiful woman standing in their midst. Her cheeks are now higher and sunken. The white shirt’s tight against her breasts, her trousers are creaseless against her thighs, and I notice she has gained muscle tone. I may sound shallow, but screw morality. Is gasping at a waterfall, a verdant forest, a canyon, a mountain, shallow? Her beauty is an objective truth.
Now my mind starts to rev and stutter to life.
The beaches of the Andamans, the hotel pool, the history tours. I took her number and never called her. Her brother, Gaurav, stole my Nintendo.
‘Daksh! I can’t believe it’s you! Wow, oh my God, it is really you. Isn’t it?’ she says brightly. She’s smiling from ear to ear, her eyes wide.
Now, I’m smiling too. ‘This is insane, isn’t it? Aanchal Madan, never thought I will see you again.’
