Chapter 32

‘Where are my brown-coloured socks?’ Akhil grunted the moment she picked her phone at work. ‘For heaven’s sake why can’t I find anything in this house?’

‘Why don’t you wear some other socks?’ she suggested. ‘Now, you are going to tell me what should I wear?’ he shouted.

‘I got the socks to office and I do that every morning,’ she said sarcastically and disconnected the line. Then she switched off her phone, so that he couldn’t contact her.

Her days were difficult. But today was miserable by her standards too. She woke up late and Rajul’s bus missed by a whisker. Then she drove her all the way to school. There was no point asking Akhil. He would have anyway refused. He got ready at leisure and disliked if he had to hurry up.  Sharp at 8, Laily honked to pick her up. She made her wait ten minutes before she emerged out. She was terribly embarrassed about it. The bio metric attendance recorded their thumb print every morning. Every week, Jain would get the printout of the attendance sheet and he would track the attendance graph of the employees at Epicure Exports. Being late by 15 minutes was not acceptable in his vocabulary.

When she reached, Jain had been in a nasty mood. And, unfortunately, Ashmi went to ask him, if he could give a quick look to the release that had to go in the media. Akshyata Sethi, the PR person from PR Speak was also going to meet her today. She needed a new story to feed the media. ‘How many times could you keep going to the media with the same story that you are expanding in the South?’ the grossly overweight, bubbly girl spoke to her.

‘If I have to give a quick look to everything, before they go out, then why have I hired people?’ Jain spoke at her request, but she felt that he cursed under her breath. ‘Everyone at Epicure Exports is in the habit of transferring monkeys on my back,’ he said.

‘No worries sir, I will check it,’ she said and beat a quick retreat. She had just reached her desk and her phone rang with Akhil on another end. He was in a nasty mood. The day had offered enough. She couldn’t take it and turned off her phone.

‘Today, I will not go home. I will board the bus to Manali, from Connaught Place. What she will do later, would be thought later.

‘Let them find me,’ she thought as she went through the emails of her day. She called Rajeev Bhatnagar, the domestic travel agent, who had been an Epicure Exports loyal for the last ten years,  and asked him to book a ticket in the Volvo to Manali for her. ‘Who is going?’ Rajeev enquired. He had this habit of digging information. Laily referred to him as drill machine.

‘Now, you started drilling,’ Ashmi said in a playful tone.

‘I am just enquiring, you know me,’ he said sheepishly.

‘I do,’ she admitted. ‘I want a ticket and please deliver it before 3 pm today. Of course, I will,’ he said.  ‘Tonight under no circumstance, I am going home,’ she said to Manjula. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she counseled her. But, today under no circumstance she was going to relent.

She dropped the conversation. She wanted to shock her family. So that they realize that she existed, as a human being too, who needed acknowledgement, affection and above all love. ‘Hey love, you are so switched off since morning,’ Laily said as she crossed her desk to go and ‘tumble-dry’ the administration head, over Jain’s coffee. It had reached luke warm. ‘Tumble-dry’ was the ‘office speak’ for dressing down.

‘I am terribly upset. No one loves me,’ she whined like her six-year-old daughter Rhea. When you don’t get love in real world then, it’s better to check it online. May be there is a surprise for you, she teased her and sauntered back to her desk.

‘This reminds me, I haven’t checked my Facebook for a while. Let me do it,’ she thought.  A friendship request awaited for her from Mathias