Keep Off the Grass

by Karan Bajaj

  Keep Off the Grass

  KARAN BAJAJ

  To my parents, in health and happiness

  ‘These are the days that must happen to you:

  You shall not heap up what is called riches,

  You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you

  earn or achieve,

  You but arrive at the city to which you were

  destined—you hardly settle yourself to

  satisfaction, before you are called by an irresistible

  call to depart.’

  —Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road, Verse 11

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1 - An Irresistible Call to Depart

  2 - It’s All a Waste

  3 - Things Were Real Here

  4 - How Bad Could This Be?

  5 - Just a Stats Quiz

  6 - Getting a Job Is a Matter of Life or Death

  7 - The Larger, Incomprehensible Game

  8 - A Normal, Unregimented Life?

  9 - The Next Semester Had Better Be Worth It

  10 - Selling Soap to Raja Bhaiya in Benares

  11 - Everything Will Be Just Fine

  12 - The Queue Begins Where I Stand

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise for the Book

  Copyright

  1

  An Irresistible Call to Depart

  ‘Let me guess, you’re a Cancer, right?’ asked Christine, a look of frank curiosity in her hazel eyes.

  I gazed at her in incomprehension as I tried to recall the details of our encounter last night. I thought we had met at a bar in the Upper West Side, but it could well have been Chelsea. Damn, this was embarrassing. No, wait, got it. We met past midnight at the after-party in Peter’s apartment. She was a Broadway actress who had a thing for bankers, and we had had a glorious, phoney discussion about a new art gallery.

  I felt proud of myself. Despite being inebriated, I had probably succeeded in sounding pretentious enough to get an invitation back to her apartment. I felt even prouder to note that my performance hadn’t suffered because of the alcohol. Otherwise why would we be here, enjoying our morning-after, having sushi for brunch in this fancy new Asian-Latino fusion restaurant? But what was this ‘Cancer’ business? Gosh, had I been so pathetic as to call out for my doctor father or some other Freudian tripe like that? I was about to ask her for an explanation when I overheard snippets of conversation from the table next to ours.

  ‘Don’t you just love this place? It’s so… so ethnic,’ gushed a middle-aged platinum blonde to her identical-looking friend. ‘I thought I had outgrown sushi, but this place is just, like, so totally awesome.’

  ‘I’m breaking up with Richard,’ her friend replied, paying no attention to the sushi comment. ‘I think I love him, but I’m not, like, in love with him, if you know what I mean.’

  I pulled myself away from their profound exchange to observe Christine daintily sample her Kodako Nigiri.

  ‘Sushi got your tongue?’ smiled Christine, brushing a wisp of golden blonde hair away from her face with the back of her hand. I knew she thought she looked adorable when she did that. ‘If it isn’t Cancer, then it’s definitely Gemini,’ she said.

  All of a sudden, I was tired. I didn’t belong here. Zodiac signs, twenty-year-old ditzy actresses, fusion restaurants, baby octopus for lunch, miniature brioche buns for dinner, independent movies, art galleries, outgrowing sushi, breaking up with Richard—none of it was real. Rather, all of it was real. I was fake, the impostor who didn’t belong here. The same eerie feeling of living someone else’s life was haunting me again. I’m drowning, I wanted to shout, someone please throw me a fucking stick.

  ‘Did you say something, big boy?’ she asked.

  Oh Christine, I thought, the only sign I can think of right now is the Ram. I want us to get back to your apartment and go at it until I can’t think any more because thinking, you see, is dangerous; too much of it drives even sane people insane.

  ‘Cancer,’ I mumbled. ‘Right the first time.’

  ‘That’s what I told Richard. I really need to find out who I am first,’ floated the voice from the next table.

  That’s it, I thought, I’m done. I began thumbing down my BlackBerry. Sadly, one of the few benefits of being a banker was that everyone expected you to be an asshole.

  ‘I need to rush,’ I said. ‘Something’s come up. Do you mind if we do this some other time?’

  Christine must have been shocked by my rudeness. Later, I felt bad that I didn’t give her enough time to clean up the Uni-Tama on her plate. After all, she was the unlikely silicone angel who had compelled me, the Yale-educated, American-born, pampered son of immigrant Indian parents to quit my cushy Wall Street investment-banking job and leave Manhattan. But I was in a hurry that day. Soon there would be significant departures from the neat, tight script of my life and some scenes needed to be rewritten immediately.

  *

  Monday morning. As usual, my alarm went off at 5 a.m., the same time it had buzzed every weekday in the past twenty-odd years of my existence. Mornings were always busy: In high school, I woke up early to attend violin classes because Dad was convinced you needed something ‘extra’ for admission to Yale or Harvard; in Yale, I got up to maintain my place in the athletics squad because investment banks viewed participation in competitive sports favourably in their interviews; now, waking up early ensured that I was the first analyst to reach the bank.

  I switched off the alarm, picked up my BlackBerry and scrolled down the messages sleepily. The usual Monday morning ‘Urgent’ e-mails about pitch books and client meetings; today though, my attention drifted to the Zen footers at the bottom of the e-mails.

  Carpe diem. Seize the day.

  Life is too short to not smell the flowers that bloom at your feet.

  Life isn’t complicated, you make it so.

  Jesus, did people really believe this smack? I got a surprise for you, buster: it is complicated. You hurt those you love the most; the bigger an asshole you are, the better you do in life; you strive for all the things that don’t matter and let go of things that matter the most. Try telling the Chinese sweatshop worker, who is going blind from sewing Nikes, to seize the day, or the gutter cleaners in India to smell the roses. It is simple, isn’t it? I put the BlackBerry down. But I couldn’t make myself get up from the bed. I lolled around for a couple of hours, smoking a smooth Dunhill and staring blankly at the Monet and Warhol replicas on the walls of my studio apartment. Soft music from an acoustic guitar instrumental played in the background on the Bang and Olufsen music system.

  The cell phone beeped. A message from Christine: ‘Had fun stallion. The opera this weekend?’

  I smiled. I had created an elaborate sham of a life. Fake Monets, acoustic guitar instrumentals, SMS invites to the New York opera—none of these belonged here, the same way I didn’t belong. I pulled the soft, luxurious cover to my chin, staring at the ceiling as the random idea that had struck me over lunch with Christine began to take shape. By the time I finally made my way to my office on Wall Street, it was 8 a.m.

  The fiftieth floor of the tallest building on Wall Street, plush furniture in the lobby, a gorgeous receptionist with a Brit accent and a plunging neckline, the latest Fazzino on the walls. It had all seemed so impressive two years ago, I thought as I walked over to my cubicle. Just what had happened?

  ‘Here he comes,’ exclaimed Peter as I switched on my computer. Peter was my closest friend from Yale and partly by fortitude and partly by intent, we had ended up in the same firm—he after taking a couple of years off to back-pack across Thailand, Vietnam and
Cambodia, me after abandoning my PhD in physics halfway at Yale.

  ‘Dude, are you all right? ’Coz this is the first time I’ve beaten you to work or class since we’ve known each other. I was worried maybe the actress showed you a different movie, or should I say move, from the one you expected.’ He winked.

  ‘I’m fine, I’ll fill you in later, okay? Has Ruth asked for me yet?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Peter. ‘Her star protégé, her shining diamond has never showed up at work later than seven in the a.m., so yeah, she has been hopping around for a while. She’s worried you might develop a life outside work. Of course, she doesn’t know about your weekend adventures yet. Speak of the devil…’

  I turned around to see Ruth, my tall, blonde, hard-driven Australian manager, arriving with a sheaf of important-looking papers in her hand. It was business as usual. Banks didn’t know or care about crises of the soul.

  I spent the rest of the day (and most of the night) filling in spreadsheet after spreadsheet for a meeting with an important client, a major apparel manufacturer that earned a majority of its profits from its underwear collection. During the course of the next fifteen hours, I became an expert on what different types of underwear cost, which US retailers sold half-priced underwear, what size underwear was the most profitable to produce, how economic recession impacted underwear consumption, which colour underwear were the most popular at Christmas and other such important, fascinating facts. At two in the morning, I finally sent the analyses to Ruth, swearing I would set my plan in motion immediately. I never had lofty ambitions for myself, and I didn’t care if there was a different destiny waiting for me somewhere else. All I knew was that becoming a connoisseur of the underwear industry hadn’t figured in my list of childhood ambitions.

  My phone rang just as I was about to head off to Peter’s cubicle.

  ‘Good work, Samrat,’ said Ruth. A kid yelled in the background. ‘Take fifty prints for tomorrow’s alignment meeting at seven, will you? Spiral bound.’

  The kid squealed louder as if it was being sacrificed at the altar. ‘Mommy is on the phone, honey,’ said Ruth in the same voice she used to speak to Peter.

  Suddenly, I didn’t want to end up like her. President of a white-collar sweatshop, hundred-hour work weeks, pre-meetings for alignment meetings for pre-meetings to the client meetings, spiral-bound pitch books at two in the morning, squealing kids, indifferent spouse, demanding clients.

  ‘And let’s squeeze ten minutes out of my calendar tomorrow to talk about your business school application,’ she said.

  I could accurately predict every day of the next twenty years of my life, I thought as I fired the prints. From associate to analyst to Harvard Business School to vice-president to managing director; a wife, two kids, a nanny and a housekeeper; a summer house in the Hampton’s; a vacation home in Colorado; sell off the summer house in a financial crisis, buy two in a boom. Variation would mean being promoted six months earlier or later; and going to Wharton instead of Harvard.

  I wasn’t meant for this, I thought as I began spiral binding the pitch book. This isn’t the life I chose, I am living someone else’s reality.

  ‘Fancy a smoke?’ I asked Peter as I stepped into his cubicle after leaving the pitch books in a neat pile on Ruth’s table. He was surfing porn, short, thickset body bent over the keyboard, one hand on his bald pate, the other typing on the keyboard furiously. He looked more like a skinhead than a banker, I thought, and he definitely did behave like one. Who else would be up at 2 a.m., not for a noble cause like tracking a client’s financial position, but to follow Jenna Jameson’s favourite positions?

  ‘Just a minute,’ he said, turning to me. His blue eyes sparkled with excitement. ‘I’m on the verge of a breakthrough. Check out this site.’

  I nodded appreciatively, wondering for the millionth time since meeting him six years back at Yale just how he managed to get by.

  ‘Done,’ he said, getting up from his chair. ‘Let’s pack up. Another busy day.’

  We made our way out of the quiet building, shivering in the crisp winter air. The neon sign of the Chinese take-out place flashed at the corner of the quiet street.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ I said as we lit our cigarettes.

  A bum was shivering outside the unlit Starbucks. Fancy telling him, I thought, that I was about to quit my quarter-million-dollar-paying investment banking job because I was feeling ‘empty’. He’d probably stick the needle he had in his hand into my eyes.

  ‘Bad day, eh?’ said Peter.

  ‘No. I’m serious. I’m quitting,’ I said.

  ‘Dude, don’t give me that. Not you,’ said Peter. ‘You’re meant for this. Straight As in high school, perfect SAT, 4.0 in Yale, athlete of the year, Ruth’s darling errand boy, this place runs on screwed-up folks like you.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘I’m done.’

  Big stoned eyes narrowed in disbelief. ‘And where are you heading? Private equity?’ he said.

  ‘No, definitely not. I think I’ll probably go back to completing my PhD. I kind of liked it. Maybe get back in academia after that, become a professor or something,’ I said.

  ‘Bull,’ Peter said. ‘You aren’t interested in the PhD, you just want to get back to the old life. Look, get over it. No one does their first job forever.’

  ‘See, this is what I’m tired of. This whole… whole Truman show,’ I said. ‘Everybody has an opinion on my life. Play the violin, score As in school, participate in athletics, go to Yale, become a doctor or a banker, apply to Harvard Business School, don’t stick to your first job—everyone seems to be living my life except me.’

  ‘You are Asian, man, this is your destiny.’ He laughed.

  I didn’t laugh.

  ‘Dude,’ said Peter. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great to quit, this is the crappiest job in the world. Both you and I know that I’m gonna get thrown out soon as well. I just don’t think leaving for that PhD is wise, though. You didn’t like the course. You didn’t even like physics at Yale for that matter. Being good at something doesn’t mean you like it. And you’re good at this banking bullshit.’

  I stared at him. Sometimes he made sense.

  ‘Take some time off. See the world, backpack, hike, travel, find yourself,’ he continued. ‘Join me. It will give me a reason as well. I am getting restless again.’

  Most times, though, he didn’t make any sense.

  A couple of hours later, I made my way back to my apartment. Talking with Peter hadn’t helped much. With a few logical words, he had destroyed the one fantasy that had kept me afloat for the past few months. If I wasn’t going back to complete my PhD, what would I do?

  ‘How long have you been here?’ asked the bearded Sikh cab driver in Hindi.

  This was the last thing I needed. I debated whether to pretend I didn’t understand, but I began to feel bad for him. If there was one thing worse than banking, it was probably driving a cab through the lonely streets at three in the morning.

  ‘Just a few years,’ I said.

  ‘Do you plan to go back?’ he said.

  He had touched a raw nerve. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t think so much. You should go back,’ he said forcefully. ‘If I was your age, I would go back.’

  Now, what was this about? I felt like I was in a bad CIA movie. How did he know about the conversation I’d just had with Peter?

  ‘It’s lonely out here,’ he continued. ‘The older you get, the lonelier it gets. Go back now while you’re still young.’

  ‘It’s lonely everywhere,’ I said.

  He turned around and stared at me in disbelief. ‘Not at home, boss, not at home. Even if you have no one, you will find friends and family like this in India.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘No one is lonely in India. You should go back.’

  Of course, he had mistaken me for an Indian. I didn’t feel like giving an explanation, so I kept quiet.

  ‘Everything is not tho
ught from the head,’ he said, thumping his chest with one hand and swerving dangerously with the other. ‘Sometimes, think from the heart as well.’

  *

  Three weeks later, I braced myself for a painful discussion and called my father at work.

  ‘Is everything okay, beta?’ he asked, sounding very concerned. ‘What happened?’

  Ours was not a relationship given to sudden, unplanned expressions of love. Like everything else in my strictly ordered life, my weekly phone call to my parents happened on schedule every Sunday evening. A phone call outside that timing usually signified a crisis, and I knew my father would have probably pulled himself out of a surgery to take my call. Heck, I thought, he was Kentucky’s best damned cardiac surgeon, after all. He could fix any arterial damage my phone call had caused.

  ‘Everything is fine, Dad. I’m going to… going to India, actually,’ I replied hesitantly.

  I could almost hear him relax, and my heart warmed to him. He was a simple, uncomplicated man, full of goodness. He wanted nothing more than my happiness. Happiness, I thought to myself, fleeting, elusive happiness, that’s all I want too.

  ‘That’s great, beta. You haven’t been there in so many years, and it’s always fun to travel to India on business. Have you told Ma about it yet? She will be overjoyed. Listen, I’m in the middle of something. Why don’t I call you in the evening?’ he said.

  ‘This isn’t a business trip, actually. I’m quitting Goldman and going to India for a couple of years,’ I said.

  Deafening silence.

  I rushed to fill the gap. ‘I’m not becoming a hippie, Dad. I’m planning to go to business school there. I’ve already applied and been accepted.’

  Still no response.

  ‘It isn’t that bad,’ I continued, trying to believe it myself, ‘with India becoming an economic superpower and stuff. And an international business degree would probably help my banking career when I’m back… Are you still there?’

  ‘But why would you do that?’ he said finally.