Vertigo

by Ashok Banker

  ‘ Okay,’ he starts, then the intercom buzzes. He talks for what seems like fifteen minutes to Jay. The mock-antique clock set in the belly of a replica of Venus de Milo on the sideboard ticks audibly in the tense smoke-filled room. Jay catches Milind looking quizzically at him, mouthing: ‘What’s up?’ He shrugs. A trickle of sweat rolls down his cheek. His hair is damp with sweat. He wipes the trickle away with the back of his hand. Dave finishes talking and turns back to them.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘You’ve all been here for how long?’

  ‘Ten minutes?’ Conrad says. Somebody laughs nervously. Dave grimaces: ‘At least three years I think?’ He looks at Jay. ‘Except for Jay.’ He looks away. Jay dies another death. ‘Now, I want whatever I say in the next few minutes to stay within this room.’

  Dave: ‘You’ve all heard of Pinch?’ He doesn’t wait for replies.

  Pinch is the code name for a new product that their multinational parent company has been planning to introduce in India for the last year or so, since before Jay’s time. He has heard about research and development work going on for much longer than that time. He has no idea what Pinch is; not even whether it’s a soap, a condom or a TV.

  Though, considering Synergetics s existing range of personal products, he can safely rule out the TV. But that still leaves a few dozen possibilities.

  Gentlemen, Pinch is being launched in India in six months. Less than six months.We’re aiming for a Diwali launch.’

  Everybody looks at each other. Milind, the seniormost executive present: ‘That’s impossible.’

  And guess who’s the team selected to handle it?’

  This time, Dave allows himself a faint smile, just a little parting of his thin lips and hint of a glint in his grey eyes. ‘And the product manager elected to launch it?’

  The tension collapses like a deflated balloon. Everybody starts shifting, speaking at once, grinning, exclaiming. Jay feels as if a noose has been taken off his neck. Dave holds up his hand. ‘Let me finish.’

  Dead silence. But a pleasant silence. Jay leans forward, shifting his stool closer to the table.

  Before we start backslapping and bringing out the champagne, I have one thing to say, and I don’t want to be told that it’s impossible.

  Ready?’

  Nods all around. Jay can feel the team coming alive.We have to combine our talents, skills and every last drop of blood, sweat and tears to prepare Pinch—we’ll continue to call it that for the moment—to prepare Pinch for a test market launch,’ he pauses, letting the drums roll silently, ‘in Bombay’—gasps, sighs, soft whistles from around the room—’by this October.’

  Conrad blurts out the words they’re all thinking: ‘But that’s—’ He chokes it back as Dave raises a finger. ‘One thing I don’t want to be told,’ Dave reminds him, then shows all of them the finger raised in warning. ‘If anybody here,’ he passes over Jay, comes back, smiles, goes on, ‘has the slightest shred of doubt that this feat can be achieved—

  and I believe it can, however incredible it may seem—then he is free to leave the room at once. I don’t want any pessimists on my team.

  And we don't have time to discuss a decision that's already been made by minds vastly superior to our own .'

  Dramatically, Dave goes over to the door and holds it open, gesturing with a flourish: ‘In or out?’ He looks around. Nobody budges.

  All in? Good.’ He smiles and shuts the door. ‘Very good. Now we can talk business.' He sits down on his swivel chair and does a complete turn, saying as he whirls: ‘Now, just to be one hundred per cent certain, I'd like all those who believe it’s possible—and I'm going to ask you to substantiate your claims—to nod.’

  They all nod in unison. He points to a folder on his side of the conference table. ‘Now, there’s one very serious matter to be considered here. This is a research-intensive product. An estimated twenty million American dollars have been spent on perfecting it to meet consumer requirements. Another five crore in Indian rupees have been spent in adapting it to meet Indian needs and conditions.

  Gentlemen, if any part of our work or discussions in the next six months leaks out to any of our competitors, every man in this room will hang by the neck until dead. And he will also be fired.’ Jay winces at the last word.

  Dave looks intently at each of them. Jay keeps his face straight, trying to subdue a sudden twitch in his right cheek. ‘Am I understood?

  You aren't allowed to talk about it outside of this room unless you take prior permission. Not even to your families and closest friends.’ He glances at Jay and Yogesh, a supervisor, ‘That includes fiancees.' Jay and Yogesh nod, exchanging glances.

  Dave: ‘The last and most vital part of all is this: If anyone of you has applied to another company for a job, or if he has even been dreaming about it and I mean dreaming—please tell me now. There’s no point getting involved with a project of this magnitude and significance and wasting your time as well as ours.’ He shoots a brief but telling glance at Sunil, the executive who got transferred here from Delhi for some vague ‘personal’ reason. Sunil starts to say something but Dave shakes his head, looking down at the floor: ‘Later, please. No discussion, only decisions. Have I made myself clear on all these fronts? Absolute secrecy. Absolute confidence. And absolute loyalty. All those who cannot claim all three, please leave the room.’

  Nobody stirs. Everybody looks at each other. Conrad winks at Jay.

  Dave nods.

  Well, gentlemen, if we’re all aware of the terms and conditions and have agreed unconditionally to every one of them,’ he looks around quizzically, getting a series of enthusiastic nods, ‘then we can get down to work. For the next six months, forget you have families.

  Forget you have stomachs. Forget you have beds. Only think Pinch.

  Absolute concentration, that’s the fourth and most important prerequisite. Comprende?’ He frowns at Conrad whose finger is tentatively raised: ‘Yes, D’Silva?’

  Conrad stands up, grinning widely at all of them, while addressing his words to Dave. Jay knows one of his smart-alec quips is en route.

  He smiles in anticipation.

  ‘Can we go to the loo once in a while,’ Conrad asks Dave with a straight face. Chuckles from all around. Dave grins, nods. ‘Only when it’s absolutely/necessary,’ he says, and they all break up laughing.

  chapter twenty-seven

  ‘Pinch’ is a detergent powder. That isn't its real name, but it's very apt.

  The formula is so potent that just a pinch of the powder is enough to wash a bucketful of clothes. Hugely successful in the USA and UK, it's finally come to the subcontinent. Praised be the mighty Multinational.

  Give us this day our daily detergent! Dump your rejects here, Uncle Sam.

  The first weekend, everybody has to go through an intensive and exhaustive crash course on detergents: their history, composition, marketing records in various parts of the world, cultural preferences. ..

  had Jay not been in marketing, he would never have believed there could exist such a large body of information on such a minor subject.

  He learns that different parts of India get different kinds of water: soft to hard.

  Where the water is hard—which is in most of India—almost twice as much water is required to wash the same number of clothes; and nowhere is water easily available.

  Pinch seems an excellent solution. A combination of dark-brown granules in a light-yellow powder, it works on dirty fabric in two ways: the fine yellow powder dissolves instantly on contact with water, producing an enormous quantity of foam with very little agitation, while the granules dissolve slowly and release a potent secret ingredient which is guaranteed to dissolve the most stubborn dirt stains. And; best of all; the special Indian edition of Pinch has been formulated to work effectively with hard water too.

  These early sessions are conducted in Dave's room and; when essential, in the large conference room which has facilities for projecting 35mm; 16mm and 8mm movies;
U-matic; High-Band; Betacam and VHS Pal Secam videos; with a seating capacity of forty.

  Coffee and biscuits flow continually; immense computer-generated files of sales data; statistical analysis; advertising response research; and god-knows-what-else are consumed by the ton. It is like doing a college degree in a month; with some class or other being conducted round the clock. Dave is a co-student too; even his formidable M2

  rating within the company has excluded him from most of this information; Synergetics is a perfect example of the Need-to-Know principle at work; Edgar Hoover would have approved heartily.

  After the initial headaches from information overload; Jay learns how to extract the vital essence of the megabytes of data entering his system; he acquires a keen sense of selectivity; learning when to ask which question; gradually beginning to surprise himself as well as the others with his insightful questions about practical aspects of Pinch.

  Most of his questions are concerned with the Indian consumer and her needs. The consumer in question is of course the average middle-class Indian housewife: demographically defined as being in the age group twenty-five to thirty-four years; having a family income of Rs 900 to Rs 1,200 per month; and living in a household of typically six members. Jay gets really involved in this side of the project: The Consumer. Somehow; he feels a sense of empathy with this woman living in an MIG colony in a city or a mud house in a village; slaving over a charcoal stove; washing the family's laundry; bringing up the children; caring for her aged in-laws; coping with an uneducated; arrogant; often brutally aggressive husband. This woman supports companies like Synergetics; pays Jay's salary; funds multimillion dollar research into the comparative efficacy of detergents in hard and soft water, makes possible those unlimited entertainment allowances paunchy executives like his father have access to. This woman.Who is she? Jay tries desperately to find an image of her, but he keeps getting his mother’s face and of course that's not right.

  He is a walking compendium of marketing jargon; an encyclopaedia Of management theory and practice; a microchip carrying a map of corporate strategy... and a secret lover of the Indian housewife.

  When the other execs notice his excessive interest in consumer-related matters, his desperate desire to get ‘real insight’ into her mind, her heart, her soul, they start poking fun at him. They start referring to the target consumer as ‘Jay's wife’; as in‘ Hey, Conrad, what would Jay's wife say to a polypack?' or ‘We're going to have to figure out a way to simplify all this technical stuff or Jay's wife won't know what's happening, right?’ and even Dave on one occasion can't resist quipping: I think the most important thing to keep in mind when talking to Jay’s wife is economy, boys. She's a tight-fisted woman, up against a wall. And I can see where she gets her thrifty nature from!' This last being intended as a comment on Jay's well-known perpetual state of ‘broke-ness'. Jay flushes at this barb from an unexpected quarter, but since it helps to relieve everybody's bleary-eyed dullness at 9.30 on a Friday night, he takes it good-naturedly.

  The rep for being bankrupt is, of course, not a cover-up for an excessively miserly nature as the others think, but an inevitable result of managing two households. After the increment, he now gets a take-home of Rs 4,040, of which about a thousand needs to be invested in tax-exempt government instruments like NSC, NSS, premium for an LIC policy etc., but which he persuades Shiv, the accounts manager in charge of salaries, to release to him after signing various forms attesting that he will take full responsibility for making the necessary investments himself before the end of March next year.

  He has no idea how he’s going to find thirteen thousand rupees to invest in tax-exempt instruments by March but it’s the only way he can get some badly needed cash to pay for his own monthly outgoings of Rs 2 ,800—which includes Rs 1,500 as rent—and Rs 1,200 which he gives his mother every month. This last amount, which he puts aside in a brown envelope the moment he withdraws his salary and hands over to her on Sunday evening when he visits, always makes him feel ashamed.When he tells his mother about the increment and how well his new job is going, she silences him with the curt response:

  ‘What fucking difference does it make to me? I don’t want to hear about it.’The story of his life: nobody wants to hear about Jay Mehta’s problems. Even Tuli switches off the moment he starts talking to her about the difficulty of managing an executive existence on Rs 1,300

  a month.

  It’s crazy,’ he says one evening (this is before Pinch gets underway) when they’re sitting at Cafe Naaz at Hanging Gardens, gazing out at the panoramic view of south Bombay. The terrace is filled with couples huddling over milkshakes and samosas/cutlets, and the only thing that distracts Jay from the relaxing open-air atmosphere is a morbid fear of bird-droppings. ‘It’s crazy,’ Jay repeats, trying to get Tuli’s attention away from a new issue of Celebrity. ‘I’m earning more than five grand a month gross, and all I have to show for it is thirteen hundred measly bucks!’ He slurps the milkshake at the bottom of his glass, reflecting miserably that when he’s paid this bill, he’ll be left with less than two hundred rupees to see him through twelve whole days until pay day. He glances at the article Tuli’s so absorbed in: it’s an interview with the wife of some industrial scion; a colour picture of the woman sitting on a large throne—like antique chair with a dog on her lap and an unbelievable amount of jewellery on her person, including a tiara that looks too big to be real. ‘What’s that?’ he says, pointing to the tiara,That thing isn’t real, is it?’

  Tuli looks up reluctantly. ‘Did you say something?’

  ‘Who’s she? What did she do? Win a lottery?’ She’s an ex-model, don’t you recognize her?’

  ‘She? Let me see... yeah, yeah. I think I remember her face..

  Some jewellery campaign, wasn’t it?’

  Tuli names a famous Delhi jeweller. Jay remembers a colour press ad with a big picture of this woman lying nude on a beach, dressed only in jewellery. ‘ So she made good, did she? What did she do, exactly?’

  She got married, what do you think? To the second son of Kamaldas—’ she names a big-time Bombay industrialist, the type that news items refer to as a ‘tycoon’ . Jay shrugs; he can never find it in himself to muster up interest in anybody who inherits wealth. Tuli, on the other hand, has the attitude that money is money, however you get it. She buys lottery tickets religiously, even though her father earns enough to see her through life without a day’s work.

  Jay’s idols are people who’ve taken sand and created electronic chips; her stars are people whose wealth is numbered in crores. She talks enthusiastically about the ex-model turned tycoon-wife: ‘She was just a simple middle-class girl, you see, and when she started modelling all that jewellery, she went crazy. She used to wear lakhs worth of jewellery for the shooting, and after the shooting was over, she had to take it all off...’

  I hope they had a bathrobe handy,’ Jay interjects, but Tuli only waits two beats, then goes on without smiling.’so she made up her mind that some day she was going to own all that jewellery.And then she met this guy, and they got married, and when she told him what her dream was, you know what he did?’

  ‘Told her to take off the bathrobe?’

  ‘He took a cutting of the ad and went to the showroom and bought every last item in the ad. The bill came to nearly one crore. Can you imagine that? One crore!’

  ‘If you’re not having that cutlet, can I?’

  ‘Why don’t you ever buy me jewellery? You never buy me jewellery.’

  ‘Maybe I should ask the waiter to take the cutlet away and get a pearl necklace instead!’

  ‘Oh, Jay. You don’t have any ambition.’

  ‘I don’t?’

  ‘You should start your own business. You’ ll never get rich in service.

  ‘I wasn’t aware that I wanted to “ get rich”. Of course, I wouldn’t mind another thousand bucks a month so I can afford a few luxuries like a first-class train pass, and slightly squarer meals every day. Oh, and mayb
e a new shirt.’

  She frowns at him. The twilight gathers dark furrows in her forehead. Her little square Gujarati chin juts out stubbornly. ‘Jay, how much do you pay her every month?’

  Are you referring to my mistress or my cleaning woman?’ She doesn’t respond. He sighs, forks a piece of cutlet: ‘You know, twelve hundred.Why?’

  Her eyes turn dreamy, thoughtful, gazing out at the last crescent slice of sun visible above the surging red ocean. This last slice slips in like a wedge of lemon; a forest of lights ripple on across the studio-set cityscape. Jay finishes the cutlet, spearing a bit of bread to wipe up the tomato sauce. The waiter waits patiently for him to finish, then swishes away the plates. A group of teenagers appears at the top of the staircase, faces falling as they see the occupied tables. One of them, obviously the‘ discoverer’ of this spot, points out the view to the others. Tuli turns to Jay, brushing a lock of hair out of her eyes: ‘

  Bhaiya’s building a building.’ Good for him.’

  ‘He might be willing to take money on interest.’

  ‘The banks must be queueing up.’

  ‘Jay, why don’t you take an advance and invest it with him?’

  ‘Me? An advance?’

  ‘You were telling me about that guy in your office, that Christian guy"'

  ‘Conrad.’

  ‘He took an advance of twenty thousand, didn’t he?’

  ‘He needed it because he had some emergency. His sister needed an operation of some sort.’

  ‘You could say you need it for your mother. Any thing. What does it matter?’

  ‘It matters. I don’t like lying for no good reason. Besides,Tuli, that’s an advance against salary. They deduct it every month. I can barely manage on what I’m getting right now. And I still have to buy those damn National Savings Certificates by next March. How can I afford to take an advance?’