Written in the Stars

by Divya Anand

  I poured out a cup of chai and handed it to Heena. I was still thinking of all the changes we’d made since yesterday and trying to figure out if I could come up with something that might help us figure out what went wrong. Suddenly, a thought struck me.

  ‘Heena, you remember that fix we made yesterday evening after Dhruv did his testing?’ I said, hoping I was on the right track. I continued to chew at my cuticles. At this point, I didn’t care if I drew blood. Maybe the pain would distract me from my skyrocketing stress levels.

  ‘Yeah . . . ’ she said, as she continued to peer at her screen.She began furiously switching between the numerous tabs, trying to locate what I was talking about.

  ‘Can you check if we moved it from the staging environment to the production site?’ The staging environment was our testing playground and changes made there wouldn’t reflect on the actual app. Moving a change once it had been tested from staging to production was a super obvious step and pretty much coding 101, but I knew the stress of launches sometimes resulted in people forgetting the basics.

  Heena began looking to see whether she had done everything that needed to be done. I held my breath. I looked up at the clock.

  11.57 p.m.

  We had exactly three minutes. I prayed to all the Gods I had ever heard of and hoped I wasn’t sending Heena on a wild goose chase.

  ‘Abhimanyu, can you check the segment now?’ she asked, finally looking up from her computer. I held my breath and crossed my fingers. At that moment, I would’ve crossed every possible body part if I could to give myself as much luck as possible.

  We stared at him with bated breath. The room was dead silent. Slowly, he looked up from this screen, smiled and gave her a thumbs up sign.

  I let out my breath in a long whoosh.

  11.59 p.m.

  We’d made it.

  ‘You were right, Sitara,’ Heena said.

  ‘OK, we’re ready to begin dialling up our launch,’ I said, as everyone in the room sat up straighter.

  We were a couple of minutes late, but thankfully we were going to complete the launch. I began going over the checklist one by one. After we had finalized everything, the experiment went live. I looked at the clock one last time.

  12.10 a.m.

  We had done it. We were ten minutes late, but we had pulled off the biggest launch Glam had seen in recent times.

  I let out the breath I’d been holding in a long whoosh.

  ‘Congrats, everybody,’ I said as the room broke out into whoops and cheers.

  Everyone began congratulating one another and there were a lot of high fives in the room. One by one, people began picking up their stuff and getting ready to leave. I went into my drafts folder and clicked ‘send’ on the launch email I had written earlier in the day. I knew Ash would call me if he didn’t see it as soon as the launch was completed. I did not want to have a conversation with him at this hour.

  The rest of the group packed up and left within half an hour, but I didn’t want to leave any loose ends, so I stayed back. I checked and re-checked each step multiple times. Abhimanyu offered to stay with me and give me a ride back since it was really late and he was the one closest to my place, but I refused. I didn’t want to spend any time alone with him. I told him I had arranged for an office cab and that I was OK with going home alone. At one in the morning, I sent out my last email. I was finally done.

  I looked at the large TV screen. Even though it was the middle of the night, we had already managed to get 100 subscribers. I cheered silently. It was time to go home.

  PING!

  Glam Office Messenger Chat

  [1.00 a.m.] Harsh: Good work on the launch.

  [1.00 a.m.] Sitara: Thanks, Harsh.

  [1.02 a.m.] Harsh: Just one thing. This marketing hiccup should’ve been identified sooner.

  [1.02 a.m.] Sitara: Agreed, Harsh. I’ll update our testing process to include checks so we don’t run into such problems in the future.

  [1.03 a.m.] Harsh: OK. But make sure marketing owns up to this.

  [1.04 a.m.] Sitara: Actually, in this case, it wasn’t entirely on marketing. It was a miss on the engineering side, and I also should’ve verified this sooner.

  [1.04 a.m.] Harsh: Everything is a team effort. But every item on the checklist has one owner. In this case, the owner was marketing. Remember that.

  Harsh has signed out.

  I rubbed my eyes and yawned. It was too late to process the political angle that Harsh was trying to bring in here. I decided it was time to go home.

  This could wait until tomorrow.

  24

  Daggers Are Drawn

  ‘So, what was the hiccup?’ Ash asked, as he looked at Abhimanyu pointedly in the team meeting.

  Like everyone involved with the launch, I had come in late that morning. As soon as I entered, Kanika told me Ash wanted to meet the entire launch team. At the time, I thought Ash wanted to congratulate us for a successful launch. When I walked in and saw how the counter for new subscribers was climbing on the screen, I was even more convinced it was a congratulatory meeting. And so I had settled into my seat without thinking too much. But now, I realized there was a different agenda. I may have got too complacent too quickly. I started to feel a sense of foreboding.

  ‘When we were five minutes away from the launch, the targeting didn’t work. It could have been a launch blocker, but we were able to fix the issue,’ Abhimanyu replied. ‘The team is updating our processes so it doesn’t happen again.’

  I wondered why this glitch required a meeting. A post-mortem would’ve been understandable if the glitch had actually stopped the launch or delayed it significantly. Since it had been fixed in all of ten minutes, it didn’t really warrant a meeting. And yet, there was something on Ash’s mind. I watched as Ash continued to stare at Abhimanyu without saying a word. I had a slight pang as I remembered Abhimanyu’s horoscope—‘Uranus in opposition to the sun will cause tensions in your work relationships.’ I still didn’t believe in living life by a horoscope, but I knew Abhimanyu would link this meeting to it. Even though I wasn’t talking to him right now, I had an inexplicable urge to tell him not to interpret the events of the day as a sign from the stars.

  ‘We should do a detailed post-mortem. This is marketing 101 and we messed up,’ Harsh jumped in. He looked around the room at each person, before finally settling on Abhimanyu, making it evident that the buck stopped there.

  The penny started to drop. Harsh was up to something. I wondered what he was getting at, and what he had planned for Abhimanyu in this meeting.

  ‘That targeting mistake could have stopped the launch,’ Ash said. ‘If it wasn’t for Sitara and Heena, we would be having an entirely different conversation today.’

  That’s when I realized I wasn’t the only one that Harsh had pinged last night.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  This meeting was a well-planned attack on Abhimanyu. And it had been cleverly orchestrated by Harsh. I suspected he wasn’t happy he hadn’t been able to claim credit for this project, and this was his way of discrediting Abhimanyu so that he could hog the limelight.

  ‘Ash, we’re already making sure this never happens again . . . ’ Abhimanyu began, but Ash was in no mood to listen. He launched into a lecture on the importance of testing protocols, mechanisms, responsibility and what not. He wouldn’t let Abhimanyu get a word in edgewise. I saw Abhimanyu get flustered for the first time in all the time I had known him. He was raking his fingers through his hair repeatedly, and his face was flushed.

  As Ash began talking about the worst case scenarios, I couldn’t hold back. I knew this was one of those times when I needed to keep quiet, especially since it was evident Harsh had something up his sleeve, but something within me urged me to do the right thing.

  ‘Ash, it’s my fault,’ I burst out as ten pairs of eyes turned to bore holes into my skull.

  There was stunned silence.

  Even the AC stopped humming. Every single person was
staring at me slack-jawed and open-mouthed. Harsh looked like he wanted to kill me or worse. I could almost see the smoke emanating from his ears.

  Ash especially looked shocked I had jumped into the conversation. For the first time ever, he had lost his train of thought and was staring at me with his mouth hanging open. I mustered up all my courage to speak.

  ‘Once Dhruv had finished testing and we had completed the bug fixes, Heena and I should have checked to confirm that all the fixes had moved to production. We missed that. And analytics also didn’t pick up on this when they did a round of monitoring . . . ’

  I looked around the room. Every single person was watching this exchange, waiting to see how this would end. As always, Basit and Abhijit were leaning in their chairs, making it clear that sales had nothing to do with this. Shirin was looking me straight in the eye for the first time in weeks. She had an inscrutable expression. Harsh looked like he was about to have a fit; a vein was pulsing angrily in his forehead and his fists were clenched.

  ‘I think everyone will agree we each missed picking up a cue that could’ve helped us address this sooner,’ I finished.

  There was an ominous silence.

  ‘We cannot have multiple owners for every step, things will fall apart,’ Harsh jumped in. He shot me a venomous look. I knew I would pay for this transgression soon. ‘In this case, the single owner and point of failure was marketing.’

  He looked at Abhimanyu. Dhruv slowly edged his chair away from Abhimanyu and closer to the sales team, acting as though he had nothing to do with marketing. If he could’ve, he would’ve probably sat on Basit’s lap and pretended they were one person with two heads. I had already set myself up for an earful from Harsh, but somehow, I just couldn’t keep quiet. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. Or maybe it was the guilt.

  I couldn’t stop myself from adding, ‘Harsh, I will put together a new checklist for future launches and ensure that a single person is responsible for every step, including checks to make sure fixes have been moved. However, this time, we didn’t have this step and so we can’t blame a single team.’

  I held my breath, waiting for the axe to fall. Every single person was now looking at Ash to gauge his reaction. I began chewing on my cuticle.

  As Ash looked around the room thoughtfully, my heart began hammering and I could hear the blood pounding in my ears.

  ‘Fine,’ said Ash. ‘No harm done. Just make sure you put a process in place so this doesn’t happen again.’

  I held back a sigh of relief. Obviously, none of us would dare point out that the very first thing Abhimanyu had said was that we had put a process in place already. Like most meetings in the corporate world, this could’ve been an email.

  Ash swept out of the room grandly, followed closely by Harsh who was angrily whispering something to him. I was convinced this entire situation had been orchestrated by Harsh just to make Abhimanyu look bad. I wondered what kind of larger political game he was trying to play here. I knew Harsh, and this was likely the first step in a well-planned effort to cause Abhimanyu’s downfall.

  Slowly, everyone else began shuffling. I was the last to leave, because I sat back and drank three full glasses of water to bring my heart rate back to normal. I couldn’t believe what I had just done. More importantly, I couldn’t stop thinking of what Harsh would do to me for getting in the way of his best laid plans. He wasn’t going to let this go easily. Even the increasing tally of subscriber numbers on the screen weren’t calming me one bit.

  I slowly walked out of the room and went to my desk. My cheeks were flushed and I was sure my blood pressure was through the roof. Almost immediately, Shirin materialized by my side. It was the first time in days she was anywhere near my desk.

  ‘What were you thinking!’ I thought her eyes would fall out of her head.

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘You didn’t have to say a word,’ she continued. ‘Ash would’ve yelled at marketing, and Abhimanyu would’ve sorted it out. Why did you defend them when Harsh wanted them to get into trouble? Didn’t you see his face?’

  She placed her laptop on my desk and looked directly at me.

  I took a deep breath. ‘It wasn’t their fault,’ I said softly.

  ‘Sitara, you committed career suicide,’ she said, looking at me with a weird expression on her face. ‘What if Harsh doesn’t clear your promotion because you went against him so publicly?’

  At that, the guilt came back. But it was also mixed with the knowledge that I had effectively skewered my own promotion. The one thing that I had worked so hard for.

  ‘I had no choice,’ I said hotly as Shirin gaped at me. ‘I’m not the promotion hungry, back-stabbing bitch you think I am. Besides, no matter how badly I want it, I cannot let it come at the cost of someone’s reputation. Especially when he’s been my only friend this past month!’

  I suddenly realized what had driven my outburst in that meeting room. I no longer wanted the promotion at the cost of everything else. For the first time in my life, I realized what Sahana kept trying to tell me. Winning was important, but there were some things that were more important than winning. Like friendship and loyalty. Or even . . . but I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, bring myself to complete that thought. My cheeks grew warmer as my heart desperately tried to send a message that my brain was working overtime to reject.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Shirin, her eyes widening in realization.She had sensed the unsaid in my rant. She waved at Upasana who slowly walked over to where we were standing.

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Before we talk about anything else, let me just say I’m sorry. I’ve been a self-obsessed jerk. I was so focused on my promotion, I forgot to be a friend . . . ’

  ‘Yes, you were a terrible friend,’ Shirin said bluntly. ‘There was a lot of shit going on with both of us too but you didn’t even try to find out!’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, appalled at how thoughtless I’d been.

  ‘You haven’t been there for any of us,’ Upasana chimed in. ‘You didn’t once think of how your actions would affect either of us.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, distraught at how hurt they seemed. ‘But I have learnt what’s most important to me.’

  ‘You mean who,’ said Shirin with a wicked grin, as she proceeded to tell Upasana just what I’d done in the meeting.

  Upasana’s expression softened. ‘Wow,’ she let out a soft whistle. ‘So the old Sitara is finally back?’

  ‘She is. I don’t know if I deserve it, but will you two forgive me?’ I held my breath, waiting to see what they’d say. They were my best friends and I didn’t know what I’d do without them.

  They smiled.

  ‘We’ve been waiting for you to re-emerge,’ said Shirin. ‘And what I just saw was an improved version of the Sitara we love!’

  Upasana held out her arms, her eyes shimmering. Shirin grabbed my arms and drew me into a three-way group hug. I didn’t know until that very moment just how badly I had needed that hug.

  ‘Thank you for being there for me,’ I said, my voice muffled with my face buried into Shirin’s hair.

  We stepped back, and I was gratified to see them both smiling at me.

  ‘Of course we’re there for you,’ said Upasana in a tone that brooked no argument. ‘You’re there for us too!’

  ‘And now, it’s time for coffee,’ said Shirin. ‘I think there was something in that rant about Abhimanyu being your only friend that we need to talk about.’ She made sure to use air quotes for the word ‘friend’.

  Abhimanyu. I stood there mutely as all the emotions from the meeting washed over me.

  What had I got myself into?

  25

  The Tide Turns in Your Favour

  WhatsApp Chat

  [9:00 a.m.] Inaya: Can you ask Manyu if he needs help KonMari-ing his house?

  [9:00 a.m.] Sitara: You told him to KonMari his house?

  [9:02 a.m.] Inaya: Of course. At the party, he said he was working on many t
hings at the same time, so I told him that decluttering his house will help him declutter his mind. Do you know if he’s done it?

  [9:02 a.m.] Sitara: You can’t just show up at someone’s house and KonMari it.

  [9:03 a.m.] Inaya: That’s what Amma said too :( When I grow up, I am going to be a professional KonMari person. And I will clean people’s houses. OK, can you give him the lavender oil I gave you? I’ll give you another one.

  Inaya is offline.

  I placed my phone on the desk and looked at my laptop. My office messenger was lighting up again now that my friends had started speaking to me. I opened the window.

  Glam Office Messenger Group Chat

  [#Best-Buds@Glam—9:05 a.m.] Upasana: Aakash said Harsh yelled at you this morning?

  [#Best-Buds@Glam—9:05 a.m.] Shirin: In front of the entire team? He’s still really ticked off!

  [#Best-Buds@Glam—9:06 a.m.] Sitara: You don’t know the half of it. He refuses to talk to me except to yell at me. It’s terrible.

  [#Best-Buds@Glam—9:06 a.m.] Shirin: Also known as career suicide. You ruined his plan to get Abhimanyu fired . . .

  [#Best-Buds@Glam—9:07 a.m.] Sitara: I told you, I couldn’t let the marketing team take the heat for something that wasn’t their fault. Anyway, at least you guys started talking to me again.

  [#Best-Buds@Glam—9:08 a.m.] Upasana: It was the first time in months you were regular Sitara and not toxic Sitara. We missed you!

  [#Best-Buds@Glam—9:08 a.m.] Shirin: Too bad Dhruv is still as toxic as ever!

  [#Best-Buds@Glam—9:09 a.m.] Sitara: And yet, you believed him when he said I purposely moved up review dates. You didn’t even think to check with me!

  [#Best-Buds@Glam—9:10 a.m.] Shirin: You know we’re sorry. I even got you coffee.

  [#Best-Buds@Glam—9:11 a.m.] Upasana: And I swear, we gave the barista the right spelling. We didn’t know he’d write ‘Shitara’!