The school bell rang every hour. There were two teachers and fifty-two students in the class, and sometimes it became so hot that Nandana wanted to pull her uniform off and sit in her underwear. Asha Miss was old and kind, and never tried to make Nandana say anything. But the other one, Neena Miss, would keep asking her questions and sighing loudly when she did not answer.
“But this is ridiculous,” she would exclaim, every single day. “This can’t go on for ever. I am finding it impossible to teach you anything, child!” Then she would ask Nandana to draw pictures and write whatever came into her mind.
And most of the time nothing came into her mind, or at least nothing that she wanted to draw. But this morning she remembered an exciting day long ago in Vancouver. Mrs. Lipsky had got some butterflies for the class. Their very own butterflies, she told them. There was a white one with dark brown circles on its wings and a pale green one that was Nandana’s favourite. She had wanted to take it home, but Mrs. Lipsky had said that the butterflies belonged to the class and would have to be let loose at the end of the day. The green butterfly sat on Nandana’s hand. It felt like a snowflake. And then it started to rain and, one by one, the butterflies flew away. How sad she had felt watching them go, but Mrs. Lipsky had said that it was not fair to keep them because they were free spirits. Nandana remembered those words. Free. Spirits. She tried to draw herself standing in front of her old school with the butterflies on her hand, but it didn’t come out the way she remembered, so she tore up the paper and put her head down on the desk, refusing to look up when Neena Miss asked if she was done.
12
AN ORDINARY MAN
BY THE TIME Sripathi reached his office that morning, it was already half past nine. He found a parking spot almost immediately, narrowly beating a red Maruti to the space. He hurried towards the building entrance that had recently been painted a bilious green. Assorted odours of frying—vadais, dosas, spices, and boiling milk—emerged from the small restaurant to the right of the stairwell. In the window was a sign saying, Café Exquisitt. Continental, Chinees, Indian availebbel—Burger, chowmeen, masala-dosa, vadai. And below the menu, in crisp black letters, Outside Eatables not Eatable inside plees.
He spotted his reflection in the mirrored wall of the café, a feature installed by the owner to make the place look bigger than it was. He patted his hair, which had frothed up with the static energy generated by his helmet, the wiry curls standing straight like the cartoonish pictures drawn by small children. Was he really that fat? When did he develop such a paunch? No wonder Nirmala kept on about heart attacks. I am a man with no air of dignity, he told himself, watching his face as if it belonged to somebody else. His father’s face swam into his mind. So lean and handsome he was, his thick hair always neatly parted on the left, his moustache clipped over his firm mouth. Narasimha Rao, the famous criminal lawyer. Nobody knows who I am, thought Sripathi. A deep gloom settled on him as he stared at himself, the crushed shirt, the pants that bagged at the knees, the moustache that he had grown in an attempt to look more like his father.
There came a shuffling sound, and Sripathi found another reflection beside his in the mirror. A man, middle-aged, with an expression of deep curiosity on his face. They were joined by two young women, giggling and chattering, flicking their sari pallus flirtatiously, their hair redolent with the aroma of oil and flowers. About to rush up the stairs to work, they paused to peer through the glass, their slim figures joining the growing crowd of reflections in the distant café mirror. I don’t look all that bad, thought Sripathi, comparing himself covertly to the fellow next to him. The crowd began to grow as people stopped to see what was happening in the restaurant—obviously something was going on to attract such a crowd.
“What happened?” demanded a smart young fellow in a suit. “Somebody is not well, or what?”
“I don’t know,” replied another fellow, jumping up and down to see over the heads of the two young women who were beginning to look perplexed.
“Someone is not well? Food poisoning? Heart attack? Did anyone call an ambulance?” demanded an officious man without any hair, whose dome head bobbed behind the others in the mirror. What on earth was he talking about? Sripathi thought as he swivelled away from the glass and edged to the rear of the crowd. He didn’t want to get mixed up in anything involving ambulances and policemen; it would take too much time, and he would have Kashyap after him with a hatchet.
“Someone had a heart attack? I have some tablets in my bag. Doctor gave me three-two years ago for chest pain,” offered a plump woman whom Sripathi recognized from the lawyer’s office on the second floor. She always smiled at him in the lift, even though they had never spoken to each other in all these years.
“Enh? Why you all are standing here and staring?” demanded a rough voice. It was the café owner. He flapped the checked Erode towel that was always draped over his left shoulder at the crowd. “Is there a circus inside here, or what? Like monkeys everybody is staring. What is wrong, enh?”
“Ask him,” giggled the two perfumed women, pointing at the fellow who had joined Sripathi first. “We stopped because he was standing. So we thought, what is happening here? Why he is looking-looking?”
“How I should know?” demanded the man. “I stopped because that other fellow was staring like an owl at something. Maybe something happened here, maybe somebody needs help, I thought.”
“Which man?” asked the proprietor, whisking his towel over their heads, wiping his forehead and then the glass wall in one fluid motion. The man turned this way and that trying to locate Sripathi, feeling more and more absurd as the giggling and the shuffling and the grumbling grew louder. And then, mortified, he backed away from the café, tugging at his stiff, grey safari shirt. “He was standing here only,” he muttered. “I saw him.”
Sripathi hurried up the steps. He didn’t want to explain that he was simply checking to see who he was in relation to the world around him. He entered his office on the third floor and smiled at the receptionist Jalaja, neat in a green cotton sari, her pleasant face gleaming from the coat of Vaseline that she used instead of make-up.
“Oh, Mr. Rao,” she called softly, beckoning him over to her desk. “Iyer Sir is in a bad mood. Very angry. I think with you. So watch out, okay?”
Sripathi nodded gratefully at her for the warning. It helped to know what the weather was like in his boss’s office. Well, he would preempt any explosion by marching right in and giving Kashyap a copy of his latest effort. Sripathi always had at least two different campaigns waiting in the wings. He had learnt long ago not to submit everything at one shot and then sit around waiting for a response. The trick was to look busy all the time; appearances counted for everything in this office. Wasn’t that what advertising was all about?
There was a note on his desk that said, Re Govardhan account, Frigidaire and Tottle Bottles: Urgently required by the end of the day. Sripathi checked his watch. He had another hour before Kashyap—pale, petulant Kashyap, who truly believed that bitchiness was one of the attributes required by a creative director—followed the message delivered by his peon with a summons to his office.
He morosely scratched out the jingle he had waiting. Your day will be bright if you have a good night. Govardhan Mattresses: the height of comfort.
“Very busy, saar? Here, something to oil your thoughts.” Kumar, the office peon, slammed a cup of tea on Sripathi’s desk and wiped the splash quickly with a stained, odorous rag. He stuffed it into a fold of his dhoti and settled on the floor with a small sigh. This was the last cubicle in the row that stretched down the length of the narrow office, a series of beige and yellow boxes with little privacy. If you wanted to speak to someone without the entire staff eavesdropping, you would have to go down the stairs to Café Exquisitt and beg the proprietor for the phone that he kept hidden in a drawer of his desk. Everything in the café that could be stolen or misused was guarded zealously, chained to the wall or locked in the cupboard in a corner of the
tiny room.
In his cubicle, Sripathi felt furtive even about doodling in case Renuka Naidu, in the cubicle next door, decided to stand up and stretch at that moment. He could imagine her wrinkling her button nose at the sight of her fellow copywriter wasting time. People like her—with her convent-school accent, the ease with which she dealt with her superiors, her expensive clothes that looked uncrushed even at the end of a sweaty, miserable day—such people made Sripathi feel horribly aware of his own age and lack of social skills. He was a misfit in this world of make-believe that he had entered quite by accident when advertising was just a poorly paid job requiring no major qualifications. Somewhere along the way, in the past ten years, it had changed. Now only the crème de la crème of English departments and management schools could get a foot in the business.
Sripathi sipped the scalding tea, allowed it to cool in his mouth before letting it slide in a soothing stream down his throat.
“Sugar and milk okay, saar?” asked Kumar, his eyes fixed anxiously on Sripathi’s face. He had made the same tea as far back as Sripathi could remember, but he needed to be assured that his efforts were worthwhile. He was an artist, a tea-making artist, and like all artists had a fragile ego.
“Perfect,” replied Sripathi. He leaned back in his chair and felt his muscles unknot one by one. “And what is happening in your life these days, Kumar?”
“My wife has gone to her mother’s house,” said the peon coyly.
“Pregnant again! You goat. How many children do you already have?”
“Eight, saar, and two grandchildren.” Kumar grinned at Sripathi, his long, sharp face cracking open to show large teeth, orange with paan stains and tobacco juice. “My oldest son is a school teacher, very smart. He is angry that I have filled his mother’s belly. He says it is not good at her age. I think he is embarrassed, that is all.”
Renuka Naidu poked her elegant head, with its smartly bobbed hair gleaming with health and henna, around the cubicle wall and said, “Your son is right, Kumar. It is dangerous for your wife to have a baby at her age. How old is she anyway?”
Kumar shifted on the floor with embarrassment and slapped his knee with his cloth. “I don’t know how old my one-at-home is, madam,” he mumbled, smiling at his knee and slapping it again a couple of times. “Forty-five, fifty, maybe.”
“Oh my goodness!” exclaimed Renuka. “You should have had more sense, Kumar. Tchah, tchah! You people are so brainless. What do you think, Sripathi?”
Sripathi shrugged his shoulders. He hated getting involved in discussions like this. Kumar’s life was his own, to be led the way he wanted; why spoil his mood by giving him a lecture? Besides, his own mother had allowed his father to impregnate her late in life. And he remembered how, in his anger and shame, he had started a small campaign against his father’s mistress—leaving cow-dung patties on her doorstep, cutting school to spy on her and follow her around, stealing things that she had left outside on her verandah or in her backyard.
“It’s not really my business,” he said finally. Nothing was his business any more, he decided. Nothing.
“What do you mean? Not your business? Don’t you care about the poor woman’s life?” She had the same crusading zeal as Arun, the same desire to set the world right, to go out and raise awareness among the masses of their rights and obligations and duties.
Sripathi said, “Oh, I suppose you could call me a non-aligned person, like our country itself. Don’t like to take sides or get into arguments.”
“You are a coward, Sripathi Rao,” laughed Renuka. “You don’t like getting involved because you are afraid of what you might find out about yourself and the world around you.” She wandered off down the office, stopping at various cubicles to say hello. Sripathi and Kumar watched her undulating behind for a few moments, and then glanced guiltily at each other.
“Pah-pah-pah, what a woman!” said Kumar. “These days girls are ruling the world, eh, saar?”
“You know she is right,” said Sripathi sternly, not sure that it was the peon’s place to comment about a senior copywriter in the agency. “Brainless fellow!”
“What to do, saar,” laughed Kumar, unrepentant. “My Shanti is so beautiful, and that day she was wearing a pink sari. She looked like a bride and I was lost.”
A pang of envy twined with regret travelled through Sripathi like an arrow. How is it that I don’t see any beauty in Nirmala any more? he thought. When was the last time I noticed what she was wearing? She is the one person in the world I know more intimately than anybody else, and I sometimes forget what she looks like. When was the last time I bought her a string of flowers or her favourite magazine? Flowers had been a part of his daily ritual of loving her when they were newly married. Sripathi remembered how carefully he used to pick the plumpest buds from the flower-seller’s basket, a sprig of fresh chamrani to intrigue the senses and underline the tender scent of the jasmine. The flower-seller used to tease him for the time he took over the simple task.
“Oho, someone sooper-special,” she would chuckle, leaning forward to chuck him under the chin, even though she couldn’t have been much older than he was. She still sold flowers in the same street, except that now it was a major arterial road, and her business had expanded into a string of small shops, wooden boxes perched on stilts where she sold enormous garlands of roses and marigolds, tuberoses and lilies—fat, multicoloured snakes shot through with silver threads—for funerals and weddings, and for political rallies, where they were piled around the spongy neck of some overfed minister. The shops were manned by her six daughters, each a carbon copy of the mother—buxom young women with gleaming oiled hair neatly wound into buns that snuggled against the napes of their necks like dark birds, their foreheads hued as richly as cinnamon, decorated with enormous red bindis, their hands knotting the flowers into strings while they laughed and chattered with customers.
“Saar, Mr. Iyer is asking you to go to his office with your work, saar,” said Kumar. He had come back without his tea paraphernalia. “Immediately, he is saying.”
Sripathi nodded and gathered up the sheets of paper with the scribbled jingles.
“Saar, he is not in a good mood,” said Kumar.
Sripathi nodded and hurried to Kashyap’s office, glad that he had something ready to show him. The secretary, Jayaram, who guarded the office like a dragon, smiled grimly at Sripathi. He was a faded man with delicate features, thinning hair, a high voice and a haughty air. There was some debate about whether he was a man or a woman, because of his arching eyebrows that appeared to have been plucked, heavily scented powder that lay in patches on his face and his predilection for strawberry-pink polyester shirts. He was also ferociously efficient and deeply loyal to Kashyap.
He gave Sripathi an ominous look and raised one eyebrow. “He is waiting for you. Please to go in.”
Kashyap was seated at his enormous glass-topped desk.
“Good morning, sir,” said Sripathi, stooping a little more than usual, as he always did when he was uncomfortable. “I have finished the work you asked for.”
“Fine, fine,” said Kashyap. “Sit down, please, Sripathi. I want to talk to you.”
A feeling of dread gathered in Sripathi’s mind as he took a seat. He is going to kick me out, he thought. I am going to be bankrupt. How will we manage?
“Something wrong, sir?” he asked, forcing himself to remain calm. He was amazed at how even his voice sounded.
“I am thinking of moving this business to Madras next year,” said Kashyap without any preliminaries. “More work is available there. And my children are growing up. They need better schools. I might have to let some of you go.”
Sripathi swallowed with difficulty. He couldn’t say anything. Thirty-four years I have worked here, he thought. More than half my life.
“Of course, I am still thinking about it,” continued Kashyap, twirling a pen on his desk, round and round, faster each time until it was a blue and red blur. “So no need to worry yet. Bu
t I am just letting you know, since you have been here the longest.”
How very kind of you. Sripathi couldn’t bring himself to look at Kashyap. He nodded, placed the sheets of paper that he still clutched on the gleaming table that separated the two of them, and left the room. He walked straight to his desk, not responding to friendly greetings from colleagues in cubicles much like his own, and sat there for what seemed like hours, unable to write anything. He picked up his keys from the small bowl that held erasers, clips, staples and other odds and ends. It had the logo of some long-forgotten company on the side. And then, as if in a dream, he left the office, even though it was only three-thirty. He was vaguely conscious of people staring curiously at him, of Jalaja, the receptionist, asking if he was ill, and then he was out of the stale green building.
He stood outside for a few moments, gulping down the warm air that tasted like flat cola. He wanted to cry. He wanted to laugh. This must be how a long-time prisoner feels on being released, he thought: relieved to see the open gates, yet terrified of what lies on the other side. Sripathi had been waiting so long for Kashyap to throw him out, that this was almost anticlimactic. And even then, it wasn’t certain that he had lost his job. For a panicked second, he wondered whether he ought to return to his desk, pretend he had only gone to the toilet. Why should he? he thought defiantly. He was always doing his duty, and where had it taken him? He saw two college students waiting at the bus stop in front of the building—young women clad in summery saris with flowers in their hair. They looked to him like Maya—their laughing faces, their smooth skin, their alive-ness. As if in a dream, he approached the students and gazed at them like a thirsty man. One of the girls noticed him and nudged the other. They stopped laughing and moved away. Sripathi followed and the girls started to look annoyed.
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