by Ashok Banker
‘I’m sure all ofyou are curious to know exactly what role you will play in this momentous event,’ drones Balram Dasgupta. Jay suspects that he speaks slowly to conceal a strong Bengali accent; Jay detects a rounding of his a’s and, most telling of all, a v becoming a b: ‘bision of the future.’ He read in Business India recently that this man is ‘one of the highest paid professional managers in the country’ and he wonders exactly how much that means in cash terms. Twenty thousand a month?
Twenty-five thousand? And all the usual perks? Jay finds him needlessly onerous and pedantic: ‘You will be heartened by the knowledge that each and every one of. . .’ He sounds like the President, Zail Singh, making his Republic Day speech. Jay shifts restlessly in his seat, tired of sitting.
He aches to be with Tuli. After that first day when the dam burst, they now come to each other with all the passion and desire they’ve held back for years, scarcely able to believe the pleasure possible from the simple touch of skin on skin, the mysteries of flesh, the painfully sweet pleasure of a shared orgasm. Finding time to be together isn’t easy. After that first Saturday—Jay reaches office at 3
and gets some sharp comments from Dave they writhe in their separate beds for nearly two weeks. Then a public holiday provides them with an opportunity. Dave announces that since they’ve worked through the last two weekends, they deserve this day off. Tuli makes a half-hearted suggestion that they should go for a movie. She wants to see Rahul Rawail’s Arjun. She’s a Sunny Deol fan and everybody’s saying it’s a terrific movie. Jay makes a nervous joke about a certain movie he’d like to show her: a triple-X starring him and her! The night before the holiday, he tosses and turns, plagued with an unbearable erection but reluctant to relieve himself, worried it might affect his ‘performance’ the next day. He hardly sleeps that night, alternating between fitful snatches of sleep and wide-eyed erotic fantasies. Finally, he can't stand it any longer and in a half-dreaming state, he grips the stony rod of flesh and pounds himself to an almost instantaneous ejaculation without orgasm. After that, he falls into a deep slumber which is broken by the persistent ringing of the doorbell.
He staggers sleepily to the door and finds Tuli standing outside, irritated.
After a quick visit to the toilet, he returns to find her fully dressed, reading the Times. He undresses her, kneeling behind her on the floor, unfastening, unbuttoning, unzipping as she pretends to be absorbed in the paper, occasionally reading out reports of the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections.
Tuli reads accounts of chappal-throwing in Parliament as he removes her kurta and leaves a trail of wet kisses down her bare back; a news item on Bhagwan Rajneesh and his burgeoning community of believers in Oregon, USA, while he pulls off her churidar and slides his palms along every available inch of her lower limbs; a feature on the ad campaign for Congress(I) being handled by an ad agency called Rediffusion, while he removes her panties and then pauses to take off his own clothes. She falls silent when he parts her legs and immerses his tongue in the hot salty slickness of her vagina. The newspaper comes apart, large broadsheets falling over them, crumpling beneath their coupling bodies. Later, they both have entire columns of print imprinted on their buttocks, shoulders, thighs... they laugh happily as they wash the ink off each other in the bathroom, then make love for the second time under the hot shower.
That evening, after he has dropped Tuli home and returned to Lokhandwala, Jay is filled with two novel sensations: a deep but pleasant ache in his penis and testicles, and an unexpected post-coital depression.
The depression is enough to cast a shadow over everything he sees.
The Lokhandwala Complex is packed with people; the public holiday brings families out in force, eating chaat at the roadside stalls, pav bhaji at the snack cafe where Jay drinks Madrasi coffee, ice cream at the new parlour which displays more flavours than Jay knew existed; people strolling in the middle of the road unmindful of the blaring traffic; children sitting on parents’ laps in autorickshaws headed for Juhu Beach or wherever it is that middle-class families go to spend a holiday evening. Jay sits on the grass in the park, trying to read Iacocca, distracted by the memory of the morning's love-making.
He feels the indignation and hurt harboured towards Tuli escaping him, diminished by each spurt of semen into her recipient body, slowly giving way to a deep affection and desire to be with her now, at this moment, here in this park and for the rest of his life. As the weeks pass, as they make love again and again—each time with the Pinch clock ticking relentlessly over Jay—this affection and desire swell, replacing the years of confusion and angst with an awareness of his own desperate need for companionship, for a person to share his smallest moments: The dimple-cheeked laughter of a chubby two-year-old sliding down a slide in the park, a strikingly beautiful light-and-cloud display in the western sky at sunset, the smell of the first rain on a patch of red earth...
A vivid remembrance of the exquisite sensation he experienced when he penetrated Tuli for the first time, actually entered a vagina, his foreskin sliding back, the tip of his penis tingling with pleasure, and in that moment, the purpose of his existence, the misery of his years with Mama, the shame of his father's rejection of him, the truth of his own hatred of Synergetics, Dave—Conrad—Balram, corporate politics, the inherent absurdity of sitting in an air-conditioned conference room and discussing the purchasing habits of lower-middle-class rural housewives, his overwhelming determination to marry Tuli at any and every cost and his own desire to succeed, to be someone, do something—all shine before his eyes with the power of a religious epiphany and he snatches up a jam bottle label fluttering on the grass between his Keds, turns it over and writes the words ‘I will’ on it in clear printed ball-penned alphabets.
I WILL.
chapter thirty-one
At the end of that month he gets a shock when Rosalyn comes around with her wooden tray heaped high with white envelopes containing pay cheques and long slips showing details of deductions. Conrad cracks his usual pay day joke: ‘Looking chequesy, Rose!’ as Jay opens his envelope and stares at the amount typed on the cheque.
‘There must be some mistake,’ he says, getting up so quickly, his hip strikes the desk and causes a little coffee to slop over on to the wood-finish formica. ‘Rose, they’ve given me the wrong cheque or something.’ But Rose is already down the corridor, attracting executives like sugar does flies. Conrad jerks his head questioningly:
‘What’s up, yaar? Huh?’ He peers over Jay’s shoulder: ‘What’s your hassle?’
‘Look. They’ve given me eleven hundred less.’
Conrad exclaims and jabs a thick finger at a left-hand column:
‘Tax, yaar.’
‘They’ve already deducted tax. Look. This one.’
‘Arrey, man. You’ve taken some loan or something?’
‘An advance.Why?’
‘How much?’
‘Thirty thousand.Why?’
‘Simple, man. They’ve deducted IT for thirty thousand.’
‘Income tax? But it’s an advance on salary, and I’m already paying it back in instalments. See? Here's the deduction. Rs 834. So how can they deduct IT twice?'
‘Arrey, yaar. They 've treated the thirty thousand as extra income.
They'll probably deduct your instalments until next March, and deduct IT on the balance. Then, next year you'll pay less because you'll have only the instalments to pay and no advance coming in. Get it?'And Conrad smacks Jay affectionately on his right shoulder and strides off, calling out to Sunder who's pushing the pastry tray towards the MD's cabin where some firangs have been coming and going all morning. Jay stares at his cheque in disbelief: Rs 2,166 is the amount it's made out for, and from this impossible sum he has to pay Rs 1,500
rent before he can get a rupee for his own expenses, let alone Mama's allowance. He calls Shiv on the intercom but he's ‘busy with the computer, call you back'. He punches buttons frantically on his calculator, trying to convince himself that
it's all a terrible mistake, that all he has to do is get them to issue him another cheque for Rs 3 ,240 and that's it. But when he finally speaks to Shiv later that afternoon, his heart grows leaden in his chest as he hears a repetition of Conrad's explanation about income tax being deducted for the advance. ‘But why didn't you tell me this before I took the advance?'
he asks Shiv, but of course that's not Shiv’s responsibility; Jay should have checked all his facts before applying for the advance. As it is, Shiv reminds him, he's not deducting all the income tax that's applicable to Jay ‘because you've promised to purchase those savings certificates by the end of the year' . ‘I will, I will,' Jay says miserably and fumbles with the intercom thrice before he gets it correctly on its cradle. He is sweating in the air-conditioned office.
So this is what it's like to be a corporate executive, a yuppie; your name on the elegant visiting card of a major multinational firm, an employer whose name raises people's eyebrows: ‘Oh, you work for Synergetics? Really?'; where the tea is served in unchipped china and the cost of interior decorating came to a staggering Rs 25 lakh last year; where one can dream of some day being sent to the USA. Yes, sir, this is what it means to earn a gross salary of Rs 5,450 a month, plus an LTA equivalent to twice your basic salary, a medical allowance of Rs 1,500 a year for yourself and your dependants, and a special inflation recompensation allowance’ amounting to the munificent sum of Rs 400 a year.
Finally, all that corporate reputation, those raised eyebrows, the impressive red and grey visiting cards, the ‘pride at being a member of the foremost team in the Indian marketing decathlon', all that doubletalk in the Americanized Bengali accent, those jargon-sprinkled discussions about product propositions and altering the consumer mindset, all those fourteen-hour-a-day working weekends, actually amount to waiting in a two-hundred-person bus queue to be transported to Lokhandwala—ten minutes’ walk from your flat, the flat itself naked of furniture, dusty from lack of sweeping or swabbing, the bucket of travel-stained clothes waiting to be washed before you can tumble on to the thin cotton mattress on the floor, the acidic sting of Nirma powder on your hands, the infuriating tup-tup-tup of a leaking faucet all night long because you don't have the time or money to get a plumber in to fix it, the acid indigestion suffered from too much lemon tea, coffee and too many cheap meals.
Yes, you've come a long way from those old DM days, from vadapao and nimbu pani on the roadside—but not all that much farther after all, it seems. Here we are, executive material, potential fabric of MD
suits, or product manager at the very least, company car, flat, EA, the works, but right now all I have to show for it is this cheque payable to Jayesh Mehta for Rs 2,166 and a rent to be paid, a mother to be supported, and a body and soul to be kept together, if loosely.
He seethes with indignation at the injustice of it all. He wants to walk out of office, down to the sunshine and fresh air, away from these artificially lit, artificially ventilated corridors. The ceiling presses down on him like a chamber in a horror film, his eyes ache with the strain of sifting through tens of thousands of computer-generated brand names for a digestive candy which another product manager, Ravi Shivdasani, has ‘borrowed him’ to scan for a day.
At lunchtime, he walks the streets crowded with fast food stalls dispensing ready-made meals to standing customers, too depressed and frustrated to eat. A sleek limousine floats past, its dark windows concealing the identity of its wealthy occupant. He wants to pick up a jagged piece of tile from the dug-up footpath and fling it through the rear window of the vehicle. The covers of second-hand paperbacks flicker past him as he walks down Veer Nariman Road towards Churchgate. He walks past the restaurants beyond the station: Gaylord’s, Berry’s, Purohit, Kamling, Chopsticks. His stomach churns with bilious acids. He has only fifteen rupees in his pocket, maybe a hundred at home.
He calls Tuli from a phone booth manned by a blind man. She is in the middle of her lunch when he calls, but she says it’s okay, no problem, what’s the matter? as she hears the petulant note in his voice. This is the new improved Tuli, theTuli who doesn’t admonish him for calling her at odd hours, who actually senses his moods and tries to placate him. He asks her if she can ask her brother to return the thirty thousand. She says, ‘He’s already started the project. Why?’
‘Never mind why. Can you get it or can’t you? Yes or no?’
‘I don’t think so, Jay. But why do you want it?’
‘I want to give it back.’
‘Why? Youjust took it.’
He tells her about the additional deductions, the diminished pay cheque, irritated at having to explain such a disgusting situation. She listens quietly, then says, ‘That’s terrible, Jay.What are you going to do?’
‘I told you, I’m going to return the money. Today. Can you call your brother now, tell him I have to have it back at once. By this evening latest.’
‘Jay, I can’t do that. I told you that once I gave it to him we would have to give him a month’s notice if we want it back.’
It’s my money, isn’t it? Are you telling me I can’t get my own money back when I want it?’
‘Jay, don’t act stubborn. Why don’t you talk to the accountant, explain your problem?’
‘Tuli, this is a multinational mega-corporation. They don’t give a damn about the cash flow problems of one fucking product executive.’
‘Mind your tongue.’
‘I’ll say any fucking thing I fucking want to fucking say fuck fuck fuck fuck.’
The blind man swivels his head around, startled at the sound of such vehement profanity. The growing line of people waiting to use the phone glower at Jay. He starts to ask Tuli if she can ask her brother to return part of the money at least—even two thousand—just so he can manage his expenses for the next six months. Maybe even give the interest in advance, at a lower percentage or something, but before he can finish explaining this confused alternative, the timer on the public phone starts beeping over the conversation, making it impossible for Jay to continue. A man waiting angrily for his turn reaches forward and clicks the disconnect button. Jay almost gets into a fight with the man, but this isn’t some paan-chewing low life at Lower Parel station. This man is carrying a briefcase, dressed in a safari suit, and in response to Jay’s furious challenges, he simply waves him away with a ‘ Chal,chal,go go go’, and starts dialling his number.
The blind man takes Jay’s one-rupee coin and feels it with thumb and forefinger carefully before dropping it into an aluminium box which he then clutches with both hands, staring cloudy-eyed at a spot above Jay's head.
He marches along the broken pavements, ignoring beggars who tug at his clothes, walking with deliberate slowness before an approaching green Maruti whose occupant leans out and launches a tirade of choice Hindi abuses at his back. He spends Rs 2.50 on abottle of chilled Energee, coffee flavour, stares with disgust at the flies clinging to the exposed sandwiches and vegetable rolls on the counter of the snack stall, walks back to office unfed, his brain burning with a fever of righteous rage at the unfairness, the pettiness, the indignity of his existence.
From the very next day he starts coming late to work. A few minutes at first, then half an hour, and by the following week he has taken to arriving an hour late. This would certainly have been noted in a company as obsessed with efficiency, decorum and discipline as Synergetics , but in Jay's case it attracts even more attention because he is considered one of the brightest product executives, the smartest of the Pinch group, Dave's blue-eyed boy. So when he arrives an hour and twenty minutes late on a Monday morning, going straight to his desk and sitting there until the door of the large conference room opens and the entire marketing department pours out, he is scrutinized by Dave, Ravi and Yogesh. Conrad and Milind, passing by, say sotte voce without stopping: ‘Sinking ship sinking ship sinking ship.’ Jay keeps his head down, pretending to be absorbed in a folder on competitive advertising platforms and creative strategies which he should have finishe
d lastThursday. He doesn't look up when a shadow falls across the typewritten page, and is shaken when Dave's soft baritone speaks from less than a foot away: ‘Jay?'
He looks up guiltily, meeting Dave's frown, glancing past him to the ceiling, the wall, the Renoir print spotlit above the potted plant.
‘Yes, Dave?’
In my office. In ten minutes.’
Jay starts to rise. ‘Now, sir?’
‘Ten minutes. If you’re having difficulty keeping track of the time,’
Dave says, deliberately stressing the word‘time’, ‘sit in front of the reception clock and start walking towards my cabin at precisely 10.29.
Clear?’ And he walks away without another word or even a backward glance. Jay’s thighs quiver as he sits down. He finishes his tea and finds himself trembling.
Dave is sitting at the mini conference table, smoking his pipe, when Jay comes in nervously; he doesn’t ask Jay to sit down. Although this is just a formality, Jay can’t help feeling Dave has forsaken it intentionally. He stands uncomfortably for a minute, then mistakes a downward motion of Dave’s pipe for a sit-down gesture and lowers himself to a chair before he realizes his mistake. He remains seated, sweating with embarrassment. Dave takes all of ten minutes to smoke his pipe, reading through some computer-printed sheets, marking words and phrases with two different highlighter pens, yellow and magenta. Still looking down at the paper, he says, ‘I’m waiting, Jay.’