Written in the Stars

by Divya Anand

Something warm trickled down my forehead. I mopped it with my hand and realized I had beer in my hair. Oh well, it would add shine. I began shaking my head to get rid of it, and in the process ended up sending some errant peanuts that were trapped in my thick curls flying out.

  ‘Oh,’ I heard someone exclaim from the side.

  Whoops! I may have mauled someone with the peanuts. I turned towards the person so I could apologize.

  ‘How is that every time we meet here you send refreshments flying my way?’ I heard him say.

  My brain froze.

  Of course, it was just my luck. There he was, grinning at me with that familiar half-smirk on his face, and some peanuts in his hand.

  Abhimanyu. How the man managed to always be around at my most embarrassing moments, I didn’t know.

  He flicked the peanuts into a dustbin by the side of the road and turned his back towards me again.

  With that, any hope of getting into the good books of Glam’s marketing head went right out the window.

  7

  The Zodiac Timekeeper Says the Clock Is Ticking

  ‘#MeTooGlam’, Dhruv announced with a wide grin, looking extremely pleased with himself.

  We were in our weekly ‘Innovation Exchange’ meeting, Ash’s brainchild to get the team to come up with new ideas. One of the rules of this meeting was that we were supposed to ‘diverge’, which was corporate speak for telling us we weren’t allowed to shoot down ideas. This generally meant that we had to maintain a straight face, irrespective of how absurd an idea may seem.

  Thanks to this ridiculous guideline, I was forced to stifle a groan when Dhruv mimed a hashtag with his hands. This was his big idea? A marketing campaign where beauty influencers would give makeovers to women who had spoken out against harassment? He claimed it would inspire our customers to be more comfortable in their own skin.

  ‘#JumpOnTheBandwagon,’ I saw Upasana scribble in her notebook.

  She’d doodled Dhruv looking smug and happy while riding a wagon. I tried not to laugh. Upasana’s doodles were classic and the only thing that helped us survive many of our long, meandering meetings that were a case of death by PowerPoint. This meeting was filled with people trying to prove how their projects would change the world. I hoped that Ash would see through Dhruv’s ridiculous plan.

  ‘#MeTooGlam. It’s got quite the ring to it,’ Ash said with a smile. My heart began to beat so fast, the valves made a ‘kerplunking’ sound. ‘Let’s roll this out!’

  Oh, crap.

  I couldn’t believe that Ash was in such a benevolent mood. Dhruv had chosen the perfect meeting. Ash wouldn’t refute anything while he was preaching to the rest of us that we needed to be open to new ideas. Dhruv’s idea was moving forward so smoothly. Meanwhile, Abhimanyu was refusing to even listen to me! It was infuriating. I tuned out wondering how I would manage to get ahead of Dhruv.

  Next, Aakash launched into a long spiel about some new way to improve the payment experience on Glam. I kept nodding to indicate I was paying attention, all the while weighing my options and wondering how to corner Abhimanyu. Aakash tended to go on once he started on a pitch, so it gave me time to drift off completely. Suddenly, my attention was yanked back into the room by Upasana stifling a giggle.

  ‘ . . . this is a must-must project,’ Aakash was saying.

  Must-must? Was he now coining new terms to make people take him seriously?

  My eyes were drawn towards Upasana’s sketchbook. True to form, she had now doodled a caricature of Aakash dressed in Akshay Kumar’s outfit from Mohra, with the black turban-like headgear and sunglasses. He was holding a mic and singing ‘yeh idea bada hai must-must’. I bit my lip to stop laughing as she quietly began humming the tune of ‘tu cheez badi hai mast mast’. I was so focused on her doodle, I stopped paying attention again. I was rudely jolted out of my thoughts when Harsh spoke.

  ‘Sitara, why don’t you go next?’

  What? I stared at Harsh, wondering what on earth he wanted me to share. I shook my head trying to get the ‘pa, ni, sa’ refrain from the song out so I could focus on Harsh.

  ‘Sitara,’ he repeated. ‘Share your idea.’

  ‘Sitara can’t share her idea,’ Abhimanyu cut in. ‘The beauty box concept isn’t ready.’

  ‘Actually . . . ’ I began, all ready to defend myself now that Abhimanyu had questioned my idea. I may not have been prepared, but I wasn’t going to lose a chance to bring it up with Ash when he was in his ‘all ideas are welcome’ mode.

  Ash frowned at Harsh and Abhimanyu who were staring at each other like two boxers in a ring. He cut in, ‘Harsh, Abhimanyu, Sitara, I’d like to talk this through with the three of you. The rest can leave.’

  The team shuffled out of the room as soon as the words were out of his mouth. I saw the entire group head towards the elevator and knew they were going to get their post-meeting coffee. Meanwhile, I was stuck in this freezing conference room with two of my least favourite people and Ash.

  Harsh stood up, wanting to take control as was his typical style when Ash was around. He loved to act like he was in charge. The minute Ash left the room, Harsh would immediately tune out since he was no longer trying to parade his ‘excellence’.

  ‘So,’ Harsh said, ‘if the concept isn’t ready, we should start by taking a step back.’

  I cringed. ‘Taking a step back’ was one of those typical corporate moves that Harsh adored. He liked to pretend that we were zooming out and looking at a problem from all perspectives, but all it meant was that he would write a bunch of random keywords on the whiteboard and take credit for anything that came out of anyone’s mouth.

  True to form, he went to the whiteboard and began writing in block letters—CORE CUSTOMER PERSONA. I groaned internally. Just last month, we had paid an external consulting firm a bomb and they had spent weeks telling us about Glam’s ‘core customer persona’—a woman in her mid to late twenties named Tania who worked at a corporate much like ours.

  The concept had struck Ash and ever since he kept asking us, ‘What would Tania do?’ Tania was now the mythical beast that roamed the halls, trying to get us to guess her whims and fancies.

  As soon as Harsh wrote ‘What would Tania want’ on the board, Ash nodded sagely. This encouraged Harsh. He began listing out Tania’s likes and dislikes, needs and wants and so on. I resisted the urge to ask him why he was listing this information out when all of it was listed out in a giant poster that was stuck on one of the walls of the conference room. The only thing the whiteboard was lacking was the photo of Tania herself, which was also on the poster in its grinning, stock photo glory.

  ‘The thing is, Sitara,’ Harsh said, turning around and looking pointedly at me, ‘you need to channel Tania. Think like a working professional, a woman around twenty-five to thirty years of age.’

  Ash nodded in agreement as if this were the wisest thing anyone had ever said. I bit my tongue to stop myself from reminding them that I literally was Tania. I was the same age, had the same demographic profile and was the real-life embodiment of that poster minus the toothy grin and shiny hair.

  I wondered how I’d got myself in this mess. Ash’s tacit approval seemed to embolden Harsh even more.

  ‘I think the key question here is what women really want,’ Harsh announced.

  Commissioning research at Glam isn’t going to solve your dating issues, I thought ungraciously.

  Harsh seemed to think that working on a woman-centric category would somehow make him magically attractive to women. I had to put a stop to this nonsense before this group of men told me what women like me wanted out of our app.

  ‘Harsh, a beauty box is exactly what the customer wants! It’ll help them discover new brands they can add to their beauty routine,’ I jumped in to stop the conversation from disintegrating.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve got into the mind, heart and soul of this customer,’ he dismissed me. ‘This is a woman who’s moved away from home and lives alone in a big city like Banga
lore. We need to understand what her key need is. For instance, if she were taking a cab, her key need would be safety.’

  I wanted to scream out in frustration. We had already identified all our key customer needs with our quarterly research, which Upasana had presented to both of them barely a month ago. I wondered if Harsh appreciated the irony of what he was saying.

  ‘I think we need more research,’ Ash announced. He leaned forward and helped himself to a cookie from a plate that was kept in the centre of the table.

  ‘We already have all the research,’ I tried again. ‘Our last insight study clearly suggested that customers are looking to discover new brands.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Abhimanyu said. I’d almost forgotten he was in the room, because he’d been so silent. ‘We have the research but we need to think beyond the same old ideas.’

  He looked at me meaningfully. I bristled. Was he saying my beauty box idea was old?

  ‘We need to consider the impact the project needs to deliver,’ I said. I stared, willing him to back down.

  ‘OK. We have twenty minutes left,’ Abhimanyu said. ‘Let’s hear your idea.’

  Whoops. I wasn’t expecting him to put me on the spot! I chewed on my fingernail, wondering how I could buy time.

  ‘As we’ve discussed, our objective is to drive new user growth,’ I began. Abhimanyu leaned forward, picked up a cookie and stared at it as if it were the one talking.

  ‘We need an idea that will bring in users to Glam and keep them hooked so they wouldn’t want to shop anywhere else.’

  Harsh smiled encouragingly. Ash began making circling motions with his forefinger in the air, signalling me to get on. Apparently, Harsh had used up all our time for ‘stepping back’, ‘setting context’ and going on about the fictional Tania. I would now have to come up with solid ideas because Ash was impatient.

  ‘So one idea I’d like to discuss is . . . ’ I looked at Abhimanyu and saw that he was giving me a blank stare. He wasn’t moving, just staring directly at me with a poker face. ‘One idea would be that we create a “Shazam” for make-up. You scan a photo and it pulls up the product.’

  Abhimanyu made a face. ‘Isn’t this an extension of your lipstick shade picker? What else?’

  So much for ‘divergent thinking’!

  I looked at Harsh and Ash. Neither of them was willing to comment now that Abhimanyu had summarily dismissed the idea. I had to buy time and come up with ideas to save face. I took a deep breath and opened my notebook pretending to evaluate from the promising list of potential ideas I had written down, when in reality I was staring at the grocery list Kavya had given me that morning.

  ‘We could create a universal shopping cart. Let customers add and purchase products from any app, not just ours . . . ’

  Ash choked on his coffee, and quite rightly so. Even someone with the most ‘open-minded’ approach to ideas couldn’t digest sending customers to shop on someone else’s app.

  ‘Next,’ Harsh snapped.

  ‘I still think we should explore the idea of a beauty box,’ I began.

  Immediately, Abhimanyu fixed me with a cool glare. ‘Do you have any other ideas? We’ve agreed the beauty box isn’t worth pursuing. And your other ideas are just as bad.’ He looked down pointedly at his watch. I realized we had only ten minutes to go.

  I looked at my notebook again, hoping an idea would magically emerge out of the shopping list. All I could see was dosa batter, eggs, kasoori methi and curd. Unless my idea involved creating a face pack with those ingredients that would become the next beauty trend, I needed to move on fast. I took a quick flip through my notebook, hoping to find something else—there were a ton of scribbles from my doomed attempts to come up with ideas and multiple doodles by Upasana as we came up with combined jokes. A cold sense of dread gripped me. I could not afford to let them think I didn’t have a plan. Dhruv was ahead and I was very close to making a fool of myself.

  ‘Sitara,’ Harsh’s voice cut through the tension like a knife slicing through a slab of butter.

  ‘OK, so the beauty box in itself will not drive someone to become a regular customer. But what if we create a subscription programme?’ I blurted out.

  Abhimanyu leaned forward and raised his eyebrows.

  I ploughed on. ‘We can price it so customers pay a subscription fee, monthly or yearly to be part of this programme. In return, they get a range of benefits—samples of new products, additional discounts, faster delivery . . . ’

  ‘Free makeovers, maybe a personal stylist . . . ’ Abhimanyu jumped in, looking mildly interested.

  I held my breath. Was the man finally coming around?

  ‘We can come up with a list of benefits. The key is to ensure that you can’t easily put a price on them so the customer always feels that our programme is giving them more value than the price they’ve paid,’ I said.

  ‘So this is basically Glam Prime,’ Abhimanyu smiled.

  Harsh gasped. It was difficult to figure out if it was in joy or despair.

  Ash sat up straight and grinned. ‘Now that’s the kind of concept we need.’

  Immediately, Harsh rearranged his expression to look interested and involved. With Ash sounding interested, he knew what reaction he needed to give me. The man had no mind of his own! I struggled to stop rolling my eyes.

  ‘It’s a good concept, but it needs work,’ Abhimanyu cut in, ever ready to bring my hopes crashing. ‘I’ll need details to decide if we should pursue this. Put together a deck and let’s review it.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about the roadmap. I’ve evaluated tech feasibility with Sridhar and we can do it . . . ’ Harsh said grandly.

  I stared at him. How did he evaluate the feasibility of an idea I pulled out of my backside barely five minutes ago? He could go to any extent to pretend he was calling the shots!

  ‘Even so, we need a detailed plan,’ Ash said. ‘Ms Srinivasan, you have your work cut out. I look forward to seeing what comes out of this.’

  With that, he stood up and swept out of the room. Abhimanyu followed.

  ‘Good work,’ said Harsh, his chest puffed out like a peacock. ‘A subscription programme. All you need is a name with a good ring to it! That’s all these marketing folks look for. Come up with a good hashtag too.’

  ‘Thanks, Harsh,’ I said through gritted teeth. I wasn’t ready to forgive him for putting me under so much pressure by bringing up the beauty box in the team meeting. It had ended well now that I’d hit upon an idea that Abhimanyu seemed mildly interested in, but it could easily have backfired.

  ‘Don’t worry about approvals,’ he continued. ‘I can intervene if you need it.’

  Yeah, right, I thought. Try ‘intervening’ with Abhimanyu, I’d like to see how that ends!

  I was going to do this myself. After all, this could be my ticket to the promotion.

  8

  The Full Moon Is a Tough Cookie

  Every time I stepped into the bylanes of Malleshwaram, it felt like I had stepped away from real life into the pages of an R.K. Narayan novel. I was walking to my sister’s place after being dropped off nearby just so that I could enjoy the Saturday morning weather. I studiously avoided making eye contact with the long line of people bingeing on vadas and pongal from Veena Stores as my stomach growled rebelliously. Sahana would murder me if I said I had already eaten.

  I wondered how our roles had got reversed over time. As teenagers, Sahana had been the rebellious one while I was the strait-laced one. She’d got tattoos (including a misguided butterfly on her hip), stolen alcohol from our father’s stash, had an inappropriate boyfriend and barely attended college. She’d even got a tongue piercing which lasted an entire week before my mother noticed and promptly made her get rid of it. And yet, here I was outside her two-storeyed house in a residential street in Malleshwaram. The house was next to a temple, a school and even a yoga class that took place in a refurbished cowshed. She had managed to achieve all my mother’s dreams in one fell swoop—a h
usband, a job in an ‘acceptable’ profession and two children. Meanwhile, I was still floundering around with nothing to show for myself.

  I went up to the front door and realized it was slightly open. As soon as I pushed it open, Ram, Sahana’s husband, materialized in the doorway. He gestured that I should walk inside silently, by pressing his fingers to his lips and looking mildly panicked.

  ‘The baby is asleep,’ he whispered hoarsely, as I stepped in and removed my chappals. I adjusted my dupatta, thanking my lucky stars that I hadn’t worn the jhumkas with bells on them. They wouldn’t have been received favourably. ‘Sahana is with Amma* and Appa** in the living room.’

  Ugh! I thought I was early, but of course, they had been expecting me to show up earlier. My parents had taken the Shatabdi from Chennai the previous evening. Sahana had suggested I should come for breakfast, but I had convinced her I would stop by for lunch. I was sure that my father would hold me responsible for delaying his meal, and I would have to endure a lecture on discipline.

  ‘Look who’s finally here,’ my father said as soon as I entered. He peered at his watch and added, ‘you’re just in time for lunch.’

  ‘Actually, I’m early,’ I said, as I leaned forward to give him a hug, followed by my mother. Now that he’d pointed out I was late, he disappeared behind the pages of The Hindu.

  ‘We said we’d eat at twelve thirty,’ Sahana said. ‘I thought you’d be here an hour earlier.’ I didn’t allow the polite smile on my face to fade, even though my cheeks were beginning to hurt.

  ‘Did you really want my help with cooking?’ I asked, as I entered the kitchen and deposited the box of kaju katli I’d bought on her pristine kitchen counter. I wasn’t known for my cooking skills and besides, my sister hated having anyone else cook in her kitchen.

  Sahana frowned, as she tucked her curly hair back into the severe bun she wore. The time she’d spent in a hot kitchen had left it completely frizzy and there was a halo of stray curls sticking up around her head. I wondered if this was a good time to suggest she used the bottle of curl cream I’d given her two months ago. Just as I was wondering why I was putting myself through this, Inaya, my kooky niece and the reason I couldn’t stay away, stuck her head into the kitchen and gave me a wide grin.