by Divya Anand
‘I had to be honest with my evaluation,’ he said, attempting to sound apologetic but coming off as insincere. ‘I still don’t think your idea will work.’
I resisted the impulse to roll my eyes at him.
‘We’ll soon find out,’ I replied, not wanting to engage with him further. ‘I hope you get some free time this weekend. I had to spend all of the last one working on a new marketing plan.’
‘Yes, I need a break. Sometimes, I dream I don’t have to check my emails before I fall asleep. That I’ll get out of bed and maybe even have breakfast before I check them again the next morning,’ he said, side-stepping the conversation around his failed attempt to sabotage me.
I didn’t reply. He raised his beer to his mouth and looked out at the Bangalore skyline, or what we could see of it from the terrace. The lights in the distance created a halo around his head. I squinted so it looked more like the devil’s horns that should emanate from his head.
‘Speaking of projects,’ he said, ‘how’s yours going? All set?’
As though you don’t already know what happened today, I thought. I shrugged and took a sip so I didn’t have to answer. The speed at which I was drinking to avoid speaking to him, it was like a bad drinking game.
‘OK, OK, you don’t have to give away your secrets,’ he said, raising his hands in submission.
I raised an eyebrow. I’d never seen Dhruv back away so easily. There was something weird going on here. I shivered slightly and rubbed my arms.
‘Tell me this though,’ he said and leaned forward. He was now standing really close to me. It was no longer an acceptable distance for two colleagues. I took a step to the side. I wondered what he was trying to pull. I did not want a repeat of his cold, clammy hands holding on to mine.
‘What will it take to convince you to go out with me?’ he whispered.
I nearly spit out the mouthful of alcohol I had glugged.
‘What?’ I coughed out.
‘Last week, you called our drinks conversation a date. But then you left before I could properly ask you out. I want to date you,’ he smiled again and moved closer to me, as though it was perfectly natural to declare that you liked someone you had deliberately torpedoed.
I took another step to the side. ‘Firstly, that wasn’t a date. And secondly, we work together. This is weird and inappropriate.’
‘There’s no rule that we can’t date,’ he grinned wolfishly. I felt like Little Red Riding Hood. Except being eaten by the Big Bad Wolf seemed like a preferable alternative when compared to being pursued by Dhruv.
‘We are competing for the same promotion . . . ’ I began, trying to think of more reasons to turn him down.
A few hours ago, this guy had been gossiping about me, and now he was claiming he liked me? It made no sense. He was definitely up to something, and I didn’t want to get involved.
‘If the promotion thing bothers you, we can date unofficially until they announce that I am getting the promotion,’ he cut in smoothly.
His arrogance was no longer attractive. I clenched my fists. At that moment, I desperately wanted to punch the smile off his smug face.
‘I’m sorry, Dhruv, but I don’t like you that way,’ I said.
Past Sitara was probably staring at me with her mouth open in shock, and yelling at me that I’d lost my mind. But I knew what I was doing.
‘You’re kidding,’ he said as he finally took a step back.
‘No, I’m not.’
‘But . . . but . . . ’ he stuttered, looking a little shaken for the first time in all the time I’d known him.
‘Well, I have to get going,’ I said, wondering what else I could say to end this conversation. Years of reading Cosmopolitan hadn’t really prepared me for this. How did you tell someone that there was a time you may have liked them but now you actually hated their guts? Or that you didn’t trust their motives one bit?
‘Fine, no hard feelings then,’ he replied. His voice was calm, but his face betrayed the fact that he was very pissed off. ‘Let’s keep things professional. It’ll help when you lose the promotion to me.’
There was nothing left to say.
He walked away and I stood at the balcony looking out at the city. A few minutes later, I walked back inside. It was time to claim the pretend migraine and leave.
I walked into the bar and blinked as my eyes adjusted to the light and smoke inside. Someone was doing a killer performance of ‘Raabta’. Whoever was singing was drawing crowds like a rock star. Every woman from office and a few of the pub’s other patrons were all crowded in front of the stage like groupies. Some people were doing the wave, others were holding up lighters. Had Arijit Singh himself decided to attend our office karaoke night? I had never heard such a good performance at a work event before. Typically, we always sought refuge in the balcony once our colleagues began singing because none of them could hold a tune.
‘Tera nazaara mila,’ the voice rang out as clear as a bell, and I finally looked at the stage to realize that the singer was Abhimanyu.
‘Roshan sitara mila . . . ’ My heart began hammering in my chest. I wanted to look away, but our gazes were now locked and I couldn’t tear my eyes off him.
Oh, shit.
I’d been judging everyone else, but in a span of a few seconds, I had also transformed into a groupie. Who knew that the man could sing like that? Screeching out 1990s Bollywood numbers in the car had not prepared me for this level of talent. Goosebumps erupted on my arms. Much as I tried, I couldn’t look away. I was drowning in those soulful eyes as he kept singing. He looked like a perfect rock star with his floppy hair, faint stubble and that killer build. As he finished the song, people began asking for an encore.
I took a step forward, wanting to speak with him. It felt like there was an invisible string that was drawing me towards him.
But then, Meghna jumped on stage and grabbed his hand. I watched as she dragged him on to the dance floor and began grinding against him as the next singer began a screechy rendition of Shut up and Dance. He looked extremely uncomfortable but didn’t extricate himself from her grip. The posse had definitely planned its attack. One by one, each of the women tried to, not so subtly, push away whoever was dancing with him and take her place. When Parul finally managed to wrangle her way up to him, she was rewarded with the track changing to a slow, romantic rendition of Wonderful Tonight, albeit one being sung by someone so drunk that the words were all blending into one another. She was hanging off his neck, without leaving an inch of space between them. She had definitely strategized her moves before tonight.
As I watched her whisper into his ear, I couldn’t take it any more.
I ran out of the pub, stopping only to collect my things from the corner I’d dumped them in. As I stood outside waiting for my Uber, I pulled out my phone to text Kavya. And then realized I didn’t know how to explain what I was feeling. To distract myself, I called my sister instead.
‘It’s Chak’s bedtime, what do you want,’ Sahana said as she answered the phone. As if on cue, Chak wailed in the background, showing off his lungs’ power.
‘I . . . I . . . ’ I gulped, not knowing how to explain my emotions. ‘I’m confused . . . ’
Sahana sighed and then called out to Ram.
‘Can you put Chak to bed?’ I heard her say. ‘The other baby seems to be in the middle of a crisis.’
‘Hi, Sitara,’ Ram called out.
I huffed. Wasn’t Inaya their other baby?
‘What’s going on?’ Sahana said. I heard her walking towards the balcony and settling into her favourite swing.
‘I don’t know . . . ’ I began.
‘Sitara, I’ve had a long day. My plan was to put the kids to bed, break out my new bar of Lindt orange chocolate and catch up on Made in Heaven. Instead, I’m talking to you. What’s going on?’
‘Ooh, is the show good?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been hearing about it, but I haven’t had the time to begin watching it.’
‘If you want to discuss OTT shows, we can do that when we meet,’ she said pointedly. ‘What’s confusing you? Something at work or something to do with a man?’
I pouted as I checked to see if the Uber was anywhere nearby. It wasn’t.
‘Why can’t it be something else?’
‘It’s always one of the two,’ she said. ‘Going by how you are avoiding the subject, I think it’s something to do with a man.’
‘Somewhat.’
‘Does it have to do with Inaya’s new friend Manyu?’ she asked. I cursed my niece and her newfound obsession with kindred spirits. She’d trained my sister’s eagle eye right on to him by drawing attention to him.
‘Kind of . . . ’
‘Finally,’ she said in a tone that indicated she had been waiting for me to bring this up. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know,’ I wailed as the words came out in a rush. ‘I had a crush on Dhruv but he’s a bastard and he got everyone at work to hate me, and tonight he claims he likes me but I turned him down. And Abhimanyu has been really nice and we’re supposed to be colleagues, but I feel so weird when I’m with him. Like he’s being nicer than he should be . . . ’
‘So, you like him,’ she pronounced.
‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘We’re friends. We hang out after trivia sometimes and he’s nice . . . ’
‘That wasn’t a question,’ she said. ‘You like him. I could see it from the way you were looking at him at Appa’s party.’
A strange feeling washed over me.
‘You’re available. It sounds like he is too. You’re just too scared to ask him out because you don’t want to be rejected.’
‘No,’ I muttered. ‘We’re just friends.’
‘You can lie to me, and you can lie to Kavya,’ she said, making me wonder when she’d spoken to Kavya. That traitor!
‘But you’re wasting your time lying to yourself. Anyway, don’t say anything to him. It doesn’t sound like you’re ready for a relationship, and I don’t want you to get hurt.’
‘I don’t like him,’ I insisted, sounding completely unconvincing even to myself.
‘Hello Cleopatra, Queen of Denial,’ she said and yawned. ‘I’m going now. Call me when you’ve stopped being delusional!’
With that, she hung up on me.
20
Mars Brings Conflict to Projects
Ten pairs of eyes were boring into me. I felt like I had fallen into a pit of poisonous snakes hissing at me. Or into a cage of hungry hyenas. Or a well of crocodiles biding their time. Irrespective of how I chose to look at it, I was cornered. And not in a good way. I had set up an ‘Execution Workshop’ to bring everyone on the team together and ensure they were committed to finish their parts of the project on time. I had also invited Abhimanyu, so I’d have leadership support. Plus, his horoscope said ‘put more time into long-term projects, they will be game-changers.’
I looked around the room, trying to find one sympathetic face and found none. I wondered if I should’ve tried a different approach, maybe one that involved rebuilding bridges before I dragged everyone into the meeting. One by one, I had somehow managed to alienate the entire team. Upasana had managed to drop off the project so I was stuck with Dhruv, the founder of the ‘We Hate Sitara’ club, who had been taking great joy in spreading rumours about me. Shirin, who avoided my eyes even when I directly addressed her, was still holding a grudge. Without her and Upasana, I didn’t even attend trivia last week. The sales team was always anti new projects, so they were never going to be on my side. The engineering team didn’t hate me, but calling any of them into a long meeting was enough to get on their hit list.
And now, I’d forced this group of disgruntled people into a two-hour long meeting. There was nothing the team hated more than an extended meeting. I had also ordered snacks and chai from Chai Point, a team favourite, as an incentive for putting them through this. Unfortunately, it wasn’t helping, and I suspected it had less to do with the length of the meeting and more to do with the fact that they hated me.
‘Basit, this list of partners isn’t good enough,’ I said. Basit was on Abhijit’s team and had been tasked to find partner offers. ‘We need bigger brands and more exciting offers.’
‘Let’s be realistic,’ he said, almost rolling his eyes at me. He took a bite of the banana cake in front of him. ‘Why will a big brand offer freebies? What are we giving them in return? You haven’t given me anything worthy of a pitch!’
Oh please, I thought. I knew Basit’s problem was that this wasn’t adding to his revenue targets. He would probably refuse to sleep with his wife if it wasn’t linked to a sales incentive!
‘They’re getting a base of new customers,’ I argued. ‘We can work on a revenue-share in the initial phase, and once we’ve proved that they’re getting new customers through this, we can work on a barter deal.’
‘As if money grows on trees,’ Dhruv cut in.
Now that Abhimanyu had brought Dhruv back on the project, Dhruv was being most unhelpful and had spent the entire meeting jumping in to give his opinion on things that had nothing to do with marketing. He was convincing every single person in the room not to do their job. Either he was extra miffed by my rejection earlier this week or he was making sure he put in all efforts to sabotage my project, so he would get the promotion. Or both. I stared at him balefully as I began putting up my hair into a bun. This meeting room, normally a replica of the Tundra, was feeling exceptionally warm.
‘Sitara has a point,’ Abhimanyu jumped in. He took a sip of his chai and leaned forward. ‘We cannot start with this list, Basit. I’m happy to get involved in partnership conversations with the bigger brands. I think we can offer them marketing exposure, which they’ll appreciate.’
‘But, Abhimanyu, we’ve already committed our best marketing slots for the month,’ Dhruv began, grasping at yet another reason to shut down my project.
‘Our current inventory doesn’t match the scale of our ambitions,’ Abhimanyu said. ‘We need to be more creative. As a senior member of the marketing team, I’d like to see you come up with solutions, not problems!’
Dhruv shut up. He glared at me, as though it was my fault that Abhimanyu had yelled at him. He began typing furiously, giving the impression he was sincerely taking notes. But I knew he was sending updates on the Glaminions group. Or whatever new group the team had created that didn’t include me. I hadn’t seen a single message since the day we presented to Ash. I looked around the room, spotting telltale signs of their chat. Shirin was biting her lip, a sure shot sign she was trying to hide her smile. Bhargavi was twirling her hair, something she did when she was throwing out one of her zinger lines. And Dhruv couldn’t keep the smarmy look off his face.
‘Sitara, we need to update the marketing plan,’ Abhimanyu broke into my thoughts.
Great. I’d be stuck with Dhruv again. I stifled a groan. I loved my job, but on days like this, I hated the fact that it required me to work with people I couldn’t stand.
‘I’ll work with you,’ Abhimanyu continued and I looked up in surprise.
‘Boss, I can do it,’ Dhruv looked up from his laptop, looking equally surprised at being excluded. It was as though the past hour had never happened. He was the one who had insisted it would be impossible for us to launch this programme in a month. And now, he wanted to be a wet blanket through every stage of the process!
Abhimanyu glared at him. He leaned forward and poured himself more chai as Dhruv looked at him expectantly. The longer Abhimanyu took to respond, the more rattled Dhruv got. Just as he opened his mouth to say something, Ash suddenly entered.
‘Why so serious, team?’ he drawled as he walked in and headed straight towards the container filled with banana cake. It was his favourite, and one of the few things that he indulged in. I realized he must have spotted the delivery bags and had come in to grab a slice. I wondered why he was taking the trouble. Everyone knew it was Ranjani’s job to make sure he didn’t miss out on
banana cake.
‘We’re hashing out the execution details to launch the subscription programme,’ Harsh jumped in. Now that Ash was here, he was pretending he was super involved in the conversation. Up until now, he had been staring at his phone as though he was busy saving the world one tap at a time. Knowing him, he was probably playing Candy Crush. Or ogling at the lingerie section on Glam under the guise of ‘testing new features’.
‘Ready to go live on the twenty-fifth?’ Ash said.
The colour drained from my face. The entire room grew ominously silent. He wanted us to launch in two weeks? I’d just spent the past hour trying to convince everyone we needed to launch in a month, and they’d acted like we needed to bring in Tom Cruise as this was the latest instalment of Mission Impossible. How on earth would we get this done in two weeks? Before I could argue, Ash walked up to the whiteboard. He scrawled out ‘25 September and 4 October’ on the board in bold.
‘These are the dates we need to hit. We will launch the experiment on 25 September. This group will present the final findings on 4 October. If all looks good, I will take it to the board meeting on 9 October,’ he announced. He looked around with a big smile, as though he was expecting a standing ovation for his impeccable planning skills.
‘Definitely, Ash! We will absolutely make those dates. Team, let’s hustle. Let’s list out all the conflicting projects so we can make sure folks in this room have enough bandwidth to execute,’ said Harsh, immediately taking the role of the leader who was in charge. He was puffing his chest out, looking like a proud peacock in heat. To make it clear that he was in charge, he walked up to the whiteboard and began writing random interim milestones on it.
If he had paid one smidge of attention, he would know he had missed out at least five steps, I thought angrily.
‘Ugh, I can’t believe we’re stuck working on this,’ I overheard Basit whisper to Dhruv.
Bhargavi rolled her eyes, as she muttered ‘roz hi kuch naya aa jata hai yahan’.* Meanwhile, Shirin was biting her lip so hard I was worried she was going to draw blood.