‘You would just keep buying tinda (gourds) for Nani, and Piyush will marry this girl one day,’ Rohit said abruptly one day on our way to the vegetable market. Nani had asked us to get 1 kg of tinda (gourds). Rohit was not keen on impressing Adira, but he was still there whenever Nani called him. I wondered why but never dared to ask him as he had the tendency to get upset very quickly. That day, when he passed that uncalled-for comment, I felt like punching him hard, but deciding where to hit him to hurt him the most took me forever, and my anger cooled down. Just like witty responses, quick physical reactions are also not my thing.
Honestly, when I think of it, he was not entirely wrong when he made that comment. Piyush had seen Adira precisely a week after I had. He was visiting Nani the following Saturday when they bumped into each other on the stairs, and he did what he does best at the sight of a girl. He drooled over her just the way Samba drools over a boiled egg, and within minutes Piyush declared that he had fallen hopelessly in love with Adira. He confided in Rohit, and as expected, Rohit kept me informed about all the devilish plans Piyush was making to woo her. He was the closest to being anything related to the word ‘charming’ out of all the men in our family, and if anyone had a chance to woo her, it had to be him and no one else. I wanted to be him: easy and fun-loving, motivated no matter how the day was, but I failed miserably in all the good departments and was scared of losing Adira to him long before I even got a chance to know her last name. Her last name is Kapoor, by the way.
It was the second Sunday since the girl had invaded my dreams, and Piyush was already ahead of me. ‘Do you also have her number?’ I asked Rohit, sulking.
‘I can get it for you,’ he replied as clearly as is possible with an entire samosa stuffed into his mouth. We had come back from the market, and Nani had gone out to meet some relative. Nani was not at home, but samosas were, and Rohit did not want them to feel lonely. So, he gave them the company of chow mien which he had stuffed into his tummy while I decided which tinda looked and felt the freshest. That evening Adira was not home either. Her school friend was to arrive from Pune that morning and, surprisingly, Nani had given her permission to share her bedroom with her friend, provided this friend of hers paid some money for her share of household expenses like food and electricity, etc. Piyush had gone with her to the airport to pick her friend up—bastard!
At 4 p.m., a taxi stopped in front of the main door. I peeped through the curtains and saw Adira get down with her friend—a thin, dusky female with short, bouncy hair and way too many piercings to count all across her earlobe. She had a bright smile, and she appeared to be someone who could laugh easily and cried rarely. Following them, Piyush also stepped out of the taxi and paid the driver.
They did not take long to come into the house in the same order.
‘Come, Tamanna. Let me show you our room!’ excitedly, Adira took her friend into her room without even acknowledging mine or Rohit’s presence in the hallway. Once they left, both Rohit and I looked at Piyush to find him staring in a disgusting way at the girls with his mouth wide open.
‘Stop ogling!’ I scolded him angrily, as frustration was building up in me by the minute, and his lewd acts were not helping.
‘I am in love!’ he declared, still looking in the direction where the girls had stood, as if he were dreaming.
‘Shut up! Adira is way out of our league,’ I told him, stating the obvious, which both Rohit and I could see clearly, but Piyush was not willing to accept.
Surprising both of us, Piyush said, ‘I am talking about Tamanna.’
It took him just one week to ask her out and three to start dating her. If you ask me my opinion, even Tamanna was out of his league, but it seems that no one is ever interested in asking me anything.
Many years later, I asked him if he remembered the exact moment when he knew he was in love with Tamanna. I still remember what he said and knew instantly that it was for real. ‘Well, it was the first time when I gazed into her dark eyes. That was the moment when I knew that my soul had finally found the place it needed to rest in. Love penetrates the hardest of hearts in the blink of an eye.’ That was also the evening when Gulzar Sahab found a new fan.
RAJIV CHOWK METRO STATION
2017
Tamanna was Piyush’s fiancée by then, and they were to be married soon. Piyush was in the US for business studies, and Tamanna had recently started working full-time. Since she and I had met many times, she knew me too. Somehow, I had a feeling that she even knew about my crush on Adira, thanks to Piyush. But being the lovely girl she is, she never brought the topic up in our conversations. She was my family, and I did not want to be caught in an awkward moment in front of her or Adira. There was only one thing I could do—Mission Abort! I told the bouncy feeling in my heart, and it left me instantly. I quietly stepped into the next metro towards Gurgaon.
I got down at the metro station, which was close to my office, and took the office shuttle—a free bus service provided to all employees every half an hour. I dashed into the building as soon as the bus halted. Talking to Adira was not in my fate, but I hoped that saving my job was. Quite a few people were waiting for the elevator, so I took the stairs instead. Ten floors—it is not a big deal for a fit young man like me! or so I thought. The morale boost worked for the first three floors. By the time I reached the fifth floor, my tongue was hanging out of my mouth, and at the ninth floor it was sweeping the floor underneath. ‘Only one more floor to go—you can do this!’ I motivated myself loudly.
Just then, my phone buzzed. It was an unknown landline number from Gurgaon. ‘Hello,’ I answered, panting.
‘Raunak Dhodi?’ the male voice on the other end was stern.
‘Yes, sir, who is this?’
‘I am your manager, Rajbir. We are all in meeting room number five. Whenever you come to work, come in here,’ he told me authoritatively.
‘Yes, sir, I am almost . . .’ he disconnected the call before I could make up an excuse.
‘Holy shit!’ I mustered all the courage and moved towards meeting room number five.
The New Manager
Five well-groomed girls and four formally dressed men sat with their heads bowed, around a wooden table in the room. The glass door was closed. A tall, lean man wearing a light-blue shirt and a pair of black trousers stood in one corner of the room. With a red marker, he was carefully writing on a whiteboard with his back towards the rest of the group as well as the door where I stood looking at them. I waited at the door, peeping in, trying to analyse the situation; he stopped writing and turned around, looking straight in the direction where I stood peeking in at the group. With his right hand, he signalled me to step into the room.
‘Hello, sir, I am . . .’ before I could say more, he hushed me with the look in his eyes and a finger on his lips. The group sitting at the table turned to look at me; most of them were trying to suppress their smiles.
‘Hello, do we have an addition to the group?’ I heard a beautiful foreign voice ask. Looking in the direction of the sound, I figured out that the team was in the middle of a call with someone.
The company I worked for had clients in the US, the UK and Australia. My new team looked after the Australian clients. ‘Our team benchmarks the salaries for its employees in Australia and looks after their employee satisfaction surveys as well as data analytics,’ I was told later by a colleague. When I think of it, I cannot understand how a person of average intelligence like me ended up in a niche job like this. Rather than being happy about getting into the new team, I was always scared that I was not cut out for it, and that I might not be able to perform as well as expected.
‘Yes, Cathy,’ the guy in the blue shirt walked up to the table and addressed the voice on the other end. ‘The newest team member has joined us late, very late,’ he looked at me with penetrating eyes, and I immediately felt intimidated by him.
Cathy asked me to introduce myself to her. I was not prepared for this. I am never ready for introductions
. ‘Hi, my name is Ronnie . . .’ I began reluctantly.
‘Isn’t your name Raunak?’ the man interjected yet again.
‘Yes . . . yes, madam, My name is Raunak Dhodi, and I am new to the team,’ I said sulkily and as quickly as I could. All the girls giggled but calmed down instantly as soon as the guy with the marker gave them a cold stare. I felt my ears become hot again. The unnecessary interruption from the stranger during my intro had irked me. I kept my eyes down and stared at the carpet to calm myself down. I knew my anger would do me more harm than good, and I had never harmed anyone with my anger, so it was basically a useless emotion for me.
‘Do not call me madam, please. Rau . . . Raunak, is it?’ Cathy asked politely.
‘Yes, it is, Cathy. So, we were discussing the requirements . . .’ the man was getting on my nerves by answering all the questions in my place. He signalled me to take the lone empty seat. I walked towards it slowly and sank into the chair as low as I could, wishing to be invisible to the world.
‘Why do you not change your name to Ronnie officially?’ Rohit had once again suggested a week ago. Damn it! If only I would’ve acted on his advice for once, and done something about this name.
Fifteen minutes later, Cathy and most of my new team members were still discussing the requirements for some project.
‘Cathy, I have a suggestion to make here . . .’ the man in the blue shirt continued his conversation with Cathy, and my mind drifted into a sea of memories.
‘. . . Raunak should try it. What do you say? It will help him to understand the process and get absorbed into the system.’ These words brought me back to the meeting room, and the transition was not as smooth as I would have wanted it to be.
What? What should Raunak try? Why is he saying my name? Shit!
I looked at the man saying this with a questioning expression. I had no clue what was happening at the meeting. Frantically, I looked at the whiteboard. Some words were scribbled on it—charts, comparative analysis, data by Thursday—a better plan. What has this bugger signed me up for?
‘Yes, of course, Rajbir, we can do that. What do you think, Raunak? Will you be able to manage it?’ Cathy asked me.
So this is Rajbir? His interjections suddenly made sense, and I inspected the devil of a person who stood in front of me with his hands resting on his waist. I’d expected someone more mature, older maybe—like our college professor—to be my manager. He looked so young, and I wondered how I would manage to take orders from him.
‘Yes, madam . . . oh, Cathy . . . sorry,’ the group laughed again.
‘He says he will be happy to do it, Cathy!’ for the first time since I had stepped into the room, Rajbir’s interjection sounded like music to my ears. I listened to the rest of the call very attentively and pretended to take notes, not that it helped as I understood nothing. It had already been too late.
The meeting ended at 1.15 p.m. One after the other, the entire team left the room. It was only Rajbir and me who stayed back.
He said he wanted to talk to me since I had already defaulted on punctuality earlier in that morning and my performance at the meeting made my case worse. I was a bit scared, but there was nothing I could do. For the first time, he asked me something about me—my expectations from him—to be specific. Since I had nothing specific in my mind, I let him take the lead. Rajbir listed his expectations of me as a team member—the first being punctuality.
Later, he opened a big Excel sheet with lots and lots of data on it. I was sitting across from him, so he kept rotating the laptop every once in a while for me to be able to see the screen. Whatever he said for the next many minutes, went straight over my head, and I could not catch a thing. ‘Move over and sit next to me so that you can see the screen. I will help you get your laptop as soon as we are done with this,’ he told me, as if he were reading my mind.
‘Of course!’ I said enthusiastically, and pulled the chair next to him.
Meeting room number five was located at the centre of the tenth floor. All around the room were workstations. Next to the meeting room, was a pantry area with a couple of table and chairs.
Both of us were sitting facing the pantry door. I looked towards the bright laptop screen. Before he could begin again, there was a sudden commotion outside the pantry gate, and I looked in that direction to see what it was.
It was someone’s birthday. A group of people was walking into the pantry with a big box of what appeared to be a cake and a few colourful birthday caps—a newly hired training batch. It was not difficult to guess; their mood was carefree, their body language relaxed—they appeared to be the complete opposite of the kind of people who worked on the production floor.
While Rajbir crazily clicked on the folders, scanning them, I checked out the room which had nothing unusual in it—a table, a few chairs, a dustbin, some markers. ‘Here, got it!’ my manager exclaimed, and my dull observation ended. He rubbed his hands together in excitement, as if a genie would appear out of them, and clicked on a file named Gordon & Son’s Deck.
From the corner of my eye, I could still see the unusually happy bunch going in and out of the pantry creating a ruckus. ‘Okay,’ he said. As soon as the Deck flashed open on the screen, precisely at that moment, I saw someone familiar at the pantry door. My gaze darted in that direction—it was her. She was standing at the door, with a little cake in her hair. She was giggling like a child; her face lit up like a thousand candles, and when she laughed, her eyes sparkled brighter than stars. She was the same as I’d remembered her to be—I felt the meeting room vanish into thin air, and the warmth of her smile and laughter filled my lungs. I inhaled deeply. Her laughter had the same effect on me that the sunlight has on trees. I felt alive when she smiled. Just like that, my day was brighter than any other day at work because the unexpected had happened—Adira Kapoor was at my office.
‘The laptop has not walked out of the room yet!’ Rajbir made a sarcastic remark to bring me back, and I apologetically looked at the boring screen. He started explaining something, but in my mind, I had lost track. I was now concentrating on what Adira was doing. I sneakily glanced at the door again. She was not there. Instead, some other girl stood in the same spot. But I could see her dupatta. It was the same dupatta I’d seen in the morning. It was her! I could not have been mistaken in identifying Adira. Maybe she works here too—my heart swelled with hopes and dreams.
Is it her birthday? No, it can’t be. Her birthday is in December—14 December to be precise.
14 DECEMBER 2015
My days at the Hindu college were not going great. I only attended college for the minimum number of days that were strictly required to sit my exams. I had not made many friends, just two. We were more like weekend friends, actually, as we never met during the week at the college. In fact, that was the main reason we had become friends in the first place. As neither of us felt inclined to attend college every day, we had made a pact. I went to college on Mondays; Sanjay, the second guy in the group, went to college on Wednesdays; and Ankit, the third, did the same on Fridays. We proxied each other’s attendance and made three copies of the notes for the days we attended college. On weekends, we met at a famous sweet shop for a breakfast of chole bhature, and exchanged notes. On the days when I was free, which were many of course, I preferred to go to Noida and hang out with my other friends. They too had no interest in attending their classes at their college, which made things very easy.
My Saturday afternoons, as well as Sundays, were spent at Nani’s house, helping the old lady with the household chores. Adira was a student at Miranda House and was very regular at college. For the first few days after making an arrangement with my bhature friends, I strolled around Miranda House hoping to get a glimpse of her. Yes, I know this sounds very filmy and stereotyped, but when you are in love, you do not care about anything—especially if the desire is still one-sided and you only get to see the girl as you would watch a weekly soap opera star. But she never stepped out during her college
hours, which is why I soon gave up that practice and went back to enjoying my days in Noida instead.
While I was at Nani’s house on the weekends, I had so far exchanged only a few hellos with Adira. She had my number, and I had hers. I used to take a screenshot of each of her new DPs (display pictures) she uploaded on her WhatsApp. Then I had created a Facebook account too, just for her. I made it with a fake name and put up Justin Bieber’s picture as my profile pic. I had no friends because I had not made this account to make friends with anyone new on Facebook. I just wanted to know more about Adira. I learnt a life lesson though—beautiful girls do not accept random friend requests from people claiming to be Bieber. When I sent Adira a Facebook friend request, she not only declined it but blocked the fake me as well. That was the end of my tryst with Facebook, at least for the time being.
Even though I considered FB an utter waste of time, I could not thank it enough for providing me with one useful piece of information about Adira—her birthday. It was on 14 December.
‘It is today,’ I told Rohit excitedly as we headed towards Nani’s house.
‘Why are you getting so excited then? Has she invited you to her party?’ he asked sarcastically. I chose to ignore his comment.
‘I did not even know that there is a party until you told me,’ I responded in an indifferent tone.
‘Then why are you so excited?’ he poked my arm.
Something I Never Told You Page 3