Exasperatedly, Ashmi tugged at the soft white fluffy towel pulling it closer to her petite frame and rummaged through her closet to pick her dress for the day. If only I could remember what day is today?
She struggled through the haze that enveloped her mind, her life too. Clarity had deserted her life. Groggy from the after effects of tranquilisers, she sat on the edge of the bed and began to deep breathe.
Should I call in sick at work? I haven't availed the sick leave even for a day and six months have already gone by. She discarded the idea, as quickly and promptly as it surfaced.
A red coloured heap on the floor distracted her thoughts. It was her yesterday’s attire for the day. A red cotton sari that was tossed carelessly by the owner in the night to earn reprieve from the summer heat that had refused to relent to air-conditioning.
Suddenly, the jumbled pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of her life fell in place. Her life had a pattern. Even her outfits followed it. white for Monday, red for Tuesday, green for Wednesday, yellow for Thursday, blue for Friday and black for Saturday. Sunday was left alone.
Mechanically, she chose an olive green silk shirt and paired it with black trousers for the day. Her dress was decided. Then onwards, life would trudge, usually with a bowl of papaya at work.
‘How could you eat this fruit, day after day?’ Akhil, her husband commented whenever he saw her mindlessly poking a fork in that hapless fruit sliced in cubes even on a Sunday morning, while he savoured the stuffed parathas.
‘For a change eat something different today,’ he suggested. Ashmi wasn’t comfortable with the idea. She found the whole exercise discomforting. The cocoon of routine was just perfect for her.
In less than ten minutes she was ready and began to wait for Laily, her colleague and her best friend. Absentmindedly, s he fished in her genuine croc leather purse and found her BlackBerry comfortably snuggled it. It was on silent.I did that yesterday while waiting at the hospital.
She pulled it out. There were two missed calls. Both from Laily. She called her.
‘I will reach your home in five minutes sharp,’ she answered in her crisp tone. The line immediately went dead. Ashmi pulled herself up from the bed. The linen was still crumpled. She had the time to set it, but the effort sounded too much. She gathered her stuff and banged on the bathroom door.
‘Akhil, I am leaving,’ she yelled at her husband of 15 years, who was locked inside the bathroom.
Earlier, none of us left home, without seeing each other. Now, it seemed like in some other lifetime.’ Tears threatened to sting her eyes as she thought about it. Wiping her unshed tears with vengeance, she stomped her way out and stood at the gate of Angan, her home waiting for Laily, who would be there any minute. Fondly, she looked at the potted plants of different shapes and sizes lining the porch. An errant stem of bougainvillea caught her attention. On the day of housewarming she and Akhil had planted it together, and now the plant had grown in a healthy shrub that had covered the gate completely.
Eight years is a long time. And in this period their marriage….
The impatient honking broke off her reverie of thoughts. ‘Is this plant coming to work today?’ Laily was sarcastic. Ashmi scurried inside the car.
‘All is well, you weren't answering the phone,’ she noted with concern taking in her somber attire and expression.
‘Do you have to go for a prayer meeting today?’ her queries began true to her gypsy spirit.
‘No, why should I,’ Ashmi defended the jibe.
‘Are you generally dressed like this?’ She wasn’t going to give up so fast.
'You forgot, today is Wednesday,' Ashmi ran her quickly through her dressing dictum.
Laily couldn’t suppress a smile that evaporated seconds later, when a fellow driver decided to overtake her. Rolling down the window pane, she spitted choicest abuses to him and pushed the accelerator simultaneously. In no time, they were zipping through the rickety road that led to Manesar, where Epicure Exports, their office was located.
Ashmi focused on her breathing while she drove. She clutched the side bar too.
‘Why don’t you trust me when I drive?’ Laily demanded furiously. They had been car-pooling for the last three years, still Ashmi didn’t have confidence on her motor driving skills.
I trust you, but a bit of divine intervention wouldn’t hurt, Ashmi answered with practiced coolness, which had become her second nature now.
‘Like in a state of car crash, it could work as a parachute and help you fly,’ Laily’s sharp tongue was on overdrive. Ashmi let the remark go by. She knew that behind the wheel Laily was gripped by road rage. All her past life demons morphed in vehicles. Now she could deal with them, by leaving all of them behind. Her Maruti Alto screeched to a halt, at the gate of Epicure Exports.
The office guard opened the gate for her to park in the driveway against the protocol. A crisp salute followed. She was Executive Assistant to Paras Jain, their boss. She strode off inside only to stop at the bio-metric attendance. They were late by fifteen minutes. With an impatient tug she yanked off the wire of the bio metric attendance that recorded their thumb impressions from the plug point. Once a week Jain would study the attendance sheet and note the defaulters.
‘Why did you do this?’ Ashmi was taken aback at her audacity.
‘Because I don’t want to put in extra 15 minutes after five and neither should you,’ she reminded her.
Jain’s car was sprawled on the driveway. It’s going to be a bad day, Laily registered. Jain coming to work before her was not a good omen. She sprinted to her work desk. Ashmi trailed behind.
Laily’s intercom buzzed the moment she reached her work station. A glass door separated Jain and her. Still, he used intercom to bark orders.
‘Ask your friend to meet me.’ He banged the phone down.
In the next five minutes Ashmi was in his cabin.
‘In the yesterday’s conference call meeting the board has decided to bring out an employee connect initiative, for all the five thousand people who work here,’ Jain briefed her. She had to work on the technicalities.
Epicure Exports was by and large an export house that was moving in retailing. The company was on an expansion mode which made such initiatives indispensable. Ashmi had set up the MarCom department.
Tell me, by when the first issue will come out, Jain demanded timelines. Didn’t he tell me right now?
‘I should take three months,’ Ashmi croaked.’ You know, I have never done this before.
‘I know that and I trust you,’ Jain gave mock sympathy
But make the three months, two, he negotiated.
From his vantage point of negotiation Ashmi had to agree.
That afternoon, at lunch time, Laily and Ashmi discussed the latest developments.
‘How are you going to do it?’ Laily expressed her concern.
‘I don’t know, but I will find a way,' Ashmi was confident.
‘Why did you take the extra responsibility? You should have denied, the way others do,' Laily counselled.
'And risk getting fired. I have to come to work every day otherwise boredom will kill me at home,' Ashmi confessed candidly.
'May be, just may be Jain has an idea about your marital affairs,' Laily said.
'You think so,' Ashmi asked. Though she was herself convinced. In the evening, Jain shot an email, asking for an update.
‘The name is decided. It’s Epicureans,’ she was getting irritated now. Jain was a synonym for relentless follow-up.
Jain didn’t revert preferring to go in his silent mode. This wasn’t a good sign again.
‘Did he like the name?’ Ashmi spilled her worries to Laily while driving back
‘No news is good news,’ Laily his mood’s ready reckoner spoke from experience.
Ashmi wasn’t convinced. Now, she had to work on getting details. The next day, a few phone calls and Linked in messages later, she was able to track an agency that had commendable references in such projects.
‘You have to hear this,’ Ashmi whispered to Laily, It can’t wait till the lunch time.
‘Shoot off,’ Laily was busy sorting and filing papers of Jain’s personal buys: mattress, pillows, pressure cooker. Whatever the Jain clan bought was filed by Laily.
‘The man I am talking for Epicureans has a smooth, husky voice.’
‘Smooth like?’
‘Big B’s baritone’
‘Go and meet him in an informal surrounding,’ Laily commanded.
‘Why should I make the effort? I am the client and he should come over,’ she voiced her thoughts.
‘It may strike a conversation, Laily suggested. ‘A little harmless flirting is all you need at the moment.’
‘Are you sane? I don’t even know anything about him.’
Such dates have a name, they are called blind dates. Laily was getting excited now.
‘No way, I am going to fall for such eccentricities,’ Ashmi responded curtly.
The next day, she learned to bite her own words, in fact, chew and digest them too. TGIF had started on a terrible note. She woke up late and Rajul, her elder daughter missed the school bus 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. Being late was not acceptable in Jain’s terms of reference.
Jain had been acting insufferable. His Monday blues lasted the whole week. It aggravated when people came to work later than him.
They had been late. Unfortunately, Ashmi went to ask him, if he could give a quick look to the press release that had to go in the media.
‘If I have to give a quick look to everything, before they go out, then why have I hired people?’ Jain hissed. ‘Everyone at Epicure Exports is in the habit of transferring monkeys on my back,’ he spoke with practiced cynicism
‘No worries sir, I will check it,’ she swallowed and began to moon walk. Facing him, she uttered fragments of sentences interspersed with ‘okay’ and ‘sure’ and began to take steps backward, until she emerged out of his office.
In the safety of her work station, she gulped a chilled glass of water to soothe her frayed nerves.
Her phone rang.
‘Where are my brown coloured socks?’ Akhil screamed on the other side.
‘Why don’t you wear some other socks?’ She was too fatigued mentally to wrack her brains on the whereabouts of socks.
‘Now, you are going to tell me what should I wear?’ he yelled.
‘I got the socks to office and I do that every morning,’she spoke and switched off the phone. The day had offered enough. She needed a change and that too badly. A phone call later, she was off on Laily’s so called ‘blind date’ a business meeting at an up-market coffee shop in South Extension.
She called a cab and left all alone, something, she hadn’t done all her life.
No comments:
Post a Comment