The Homing Pigeons... (19 page)

Radhika

I am pretty much back to square one.  The few feigned dates with Colonel Raghav Khanna have fizzled out. They continued until I understood that I was only a muse for him. Despite Shipra’s best efforts at helping me get hooked up, I am not being very successful at my social life.

The  school,  as  I  now  call  it,  has  over  fifteen students who come at various times of the day. I am amazed by them. They are resilient. They are courageous. They come from backgrounds that don’t allow them to pursue education but they are determined to defy their situation.

Their defiance gives me a courage that I didn’t know I possessed. I have converted the den into a school and have put up five benches and a blackboard to help them. As a child, I had a problem in speaking English and so, I make it a point to converse with these kids in English. They were hesitant at first, but are beginning to learn, like I had at Ms Kapoor’s residence.

Given my non-existent social life, it is a good thing that I have the children, or else I might have become a nut case by now. I wonder if I should enrol for a course or two in education; I think I have found my passion.

Even when I was working with Citibank, it had never been more than a job. It had never excited me enough to be passionate about it. With education, I can safely say that I am passionate. It isn’t so much about mathematics or science or English. It is about what a teacher can contribute for the overall development of the child. It gives me an indescribable pleasure.

Shipra is still worried about me. She still tries to make me meet some people: eligible bachelors who are broad minded enough to marry a woman who has had two marriages previously. Somehow, I have reconciled to the fact that I can live my life without a man. Yet, sometimes, I feel horny and crave for physical intimacy. Maybe, if I had been fifty, I would have survived without these cravings. Sometimes, I still fantasize about Aditya. Despite having been in bed with three men at different points in time, I crave for Aditya’s touch. The other two were only compromises.

The season has changed, it is February and the newspapers are still not thicker. They continue to be as thin as they were three months ago when I had moved here. Even today, the papers carry bad news. I wonder how it must feel to be laid off. The newspapers are so unemotional about these things. I wonder how people who are going through this ordeal are faring when I am sitting in the confines of my lavish house and sipping on cups of hot tea.

The phone rings and I half expect Shipra to be on the line, but it isn’t her.

It is my brother; my biological brother who is making a call from Chandigarh. “Papa passed away,” he says. Under normal circumstances, the passing of a parent would’ve left me crying inconsolably, but I wasn’t attached to him. After all, how much had I known him? Yes, he had provided me with a roof over my head after my foster father had abandoned me, but it was really only out of a sense of duty.

I think duty begets duty
.  You can’t expect affection if you’ve only done something out of a sense of duty. It is out of a sense of duty that I go back to Chandigarh for his cremation. Chandigarh has changed from what I had known it to be. It’s not that ghost town from the nineties. I wonder if I can meet Ms Kapoor while I am in town. I take directions to the cremation ground from a guy on a scooter. He’s trying to peer down my cleavage and I roll up the window. The rickshaw puller is poorer but he’s still more civilized than the guy on the scooter.

Laxman is tired; he’s driven a lot today. I tell him to have something to eat while I walk into the cremation ground. I find about three funeral groups who are burning their dead. Everyone  seems  unfamiliar  but  I  see  my  mother,  Sudha. She’s crying like she was on the day that she sent me away to Solan. I am tempted to go and console her like I had on that day. I don’t. There is so much that has happened between then and now that stops me. Perhaps, if she hadn’t said yes to Abhinav’s proposal, I may have forgiven her. There is howling all around. Everyone is around: my foster father, his wife,
and their children. My brothers, their wives that I don’t know and everyone else seem to be crying. I try to join in but not a tear rolls down. There is no sadness. It feels like I have lived my share of sadness in this lifetime.

I look at my foster father and he can’t see me in the eye. I have never met him since that Saturday when he dropped me to Chandigarh. His guilt refuses to let him look in my direction. I want to go and scratch his face. Maybe, that way, we’ll both be scarred.

We leave the cremation grounds and while everyone goes back home, I don’t. I will go to the hotel that I have booked for myself. Even at the sombre hour of his death, I can’t relate to them. I have hardly been in touch with them over the years and they haven’t made any attempts to bridge the distance. The one to have passed away could have been a stranger; it certainly doesn’t feel like he was my father.

My mind tells me to return to Delhi the same day, but for some reason, I stay. It is a welcome change from my drab routine and I think it might help me relive a few memories of the place that I have grown up in.

I check into the hotel in Sector 35 and flip through a few channels on TV; there is nothing interesting enough to hold my attention. It is only five o’clock and I decide to take a walk. Maybe, I can do in the evenings what I don’t do in the mornings. Sector 35 is a busy commercial area that doesn’t provide a lot of open space. Even though there is a park nearby, I think it would be better if I go to a more scenic place; maybe the lake or the rose garden.

I call Laxman to bring out the car. As he drives through the maze of Chandigarh, I can’t help noticing that it is busy. Almost all the roundabouts now have traffic signals that snarl the traffic. There had once been a time that you could cross Chandigarh diametrically within fifteen minutes; but today, I have barely been able to cross over into Sector 22. At this rate, the sunlight will fade before I reach my destination.

I ask Laxman to take a detour. I struggle to remember the ways that I had once known like the back of my hand. Laxman has never been to Chandigarh before and he thinks that it is a driver’s nightmare. It is probably the rush hour traffic that makes our progress so slow. We are now on a road parallel to the one that we have been travelling on where the traffic was a little lighter. We cross Sector 22 and are on the dividing road between Sector 16 and Sector 17. On the left, there is an abandoned cricket stadium. Instinctively, I ask Laxman to park the car where ever he can find a spot. I cross over the cycle track and go through the gate to an abandoned cricket stadium that no one really uses.

Aditya

The January of 2000 began a little precariously. I had made only one sale in the first ten days. Like most organizations and human beings, my boss too had a New Year resolution. In the first weekly meeting of the year, my boss had made it amply clear that he expected a less than unambitious, twenty- five per cent growth over last year’s figures and that too, at ten per cent lower cost. I was amazed at how greedy people can get.

In any case, the mathematics, when translated into the real world meant that the bottom ten
per cent of the ten-member team would be axed and the rest were expected to deliver twenty-five per cent higher sales. I looked around the room at the bunch of aspiring folks sitting in the meeting, hoping that I wasn’t the softest target. Yes, there was Deepika, who would never go above the fifth rank but would never fall below the seventh. Yes, there was Bakshi, the guy from Fore School, who had been at the bottom of the sales chart last month. But I was the most consistent. I was the poorest performer in the team for the last few months and so, was the prime candidate to accomplish my boss’ goal of reducing costs. In a company, where  you  look  as  good  or  as  bad  as  your  last  month’s performance, I was downright ugly. It was imperative that the salesman rise from the dead.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have leads, but they just hadn’t materialized yet. It wasn’t abnormal for the first few days of the New Year to be slow, but ten days with a single sale to my name had me in a state more gruesome than anxious. My fortunes turned on the eleventh, almost miraculously.

Rishi Prabhu was the head of finance at a BPO. The BPO was a new entity on the corporate landscape. As I delved deeper on what people did inside a BPO, I realized that it was hardly anything more than a call centre. It could’ve been a fad but India’s newest industry was taking India by storm. It was a guzzler of human capital and it already had a few hundred thousand people employed.

My meeting with Rishi had been planned a few weeks ago, when a regular client had given me his reference. While I waited for him at the reception of the plush office, a crowd of yuppies entered, wearing low-hanging jeans and talking amongst themselves in feigned, accented English. They were probably my age. I looked at their attire and then at the neck tie that was almost strangling me.

If I got fired, I could become one of them. I could give up the neck-tie and come to work in a T-shirt with the middle finger embossed on it. Maybe, I could also have a caption written below the middle finger that proudly proclaimed “Up Yours”. I wouldn’t be out of place for sure.

At that very precise moment, Rishi called me into his office. I was pretty sure that he had liked my sales pitch, but even more than that he loved the investment account that didn’t make him walk into a branch. He signed up for a Citi gold account, and promised to spread the word around.

I didn’t realize that his idea of spreading the word around was to get me the salary accounts of the entire organization. Rishi turned out to be the stroke of luck that had eluded me for so long.

Over the next three months, until 31 March, the day of my promotion review, I had opened two thousand salary and over five hundred investment accounts that had a combined net asset value of
over five crores. It was a record of sorts; it was the highest that any management trainee had ever achieved in the near hundred year history of the bank in India. Even though it left Rajat, my manager, a little red-faced for having given me a performance improvement letter, he was magnanimous in his adulation of my achievement.

That I would get promoted was expected but what I hadn’t expected was the award – The CEO’s award for being best in class. When the new cards got printed, they read:

Aditya Sharma

Assistant Manager.

It was one of my proudest moments as I admired the ink on the small piece of paper that proclaimed my new identity.

The moment was also my loneliest. The award and the promotion were a means to an end but that end had so ridiculously been snatched away from me. The improved salary didn’t mean anything, not without Radhika. Even now I was no closer to achieving her than I was a few weeks ago.

I had the goal of wooing her back, but needed a starting point. My first instinct was to go back to Chandigarh, and try to get an address, a phone number or a clue that may lead me to her. In that very moment, my mind replayed the events of the last time that I had seen her. She had walked out of the Human Resources room. Chances were that they might have a forwarding address or phone number for her.

I cursed myself for not having the common sense to explore this avenue for the past few months. Maybe, I was going senile at twenty-three.

I casually walked in to the HR room where Smriti, the friendly HR generalist sat. I didn’t waste too much time in the niceties, “I need Radhika Kapila’s number in the US, I lost it. Would you please pull up her file?” I said it in the most casual, matter-of-fact way, and the charm that had helped me bring in a few hundred clients last year, worked on her. Luckily, she had it. It had to be the stars and their astrological confluence that made me feel lucky these days.

I made a phone call that I had been yearning to make for the last eight months that she had been away from me.

After the phone call, I realized that she had changed. The Radhika I knew would have jumped with joy. The Radhika I knew would’ve asked a million questions. This wasn’t her. This was an alter ego, an impostor who had taken on her voice. Perhaps I had been stranded in my love of her while she had moved on. She didn’t love me anymore. I was her past that she had been able to bury, and I had stubbornly clung onto.

I still had the receiver in my hand when I sank down to the floor. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. I didn’t know why the stars that had made me feel so lucky earlier this morning, refused to make me feel lucky in this instance.

I cried. Unashamedly, I cried. Not so much for her loss or her refusal to be with me, but for my own foolishness. I cried for being a romantic. I cried for not being a realist. I cried because it hurt. I cried because I wasn’t born a few years earlier. I cried because I hadn’t been well-settled when she had married someone else. I cried because she didn’t love me. I cried until I howled. I howled until the neighbours came to check on me. I drank until I could stop howling. I slept when I couldn’t drink anymore.

When the alcohol wore off, I could think straight again. In a way, I was happy that I had made the phone call. Although, the result wasn’t as expected, it told me where I stood. At least, I knew that beyond the realms of fantasy there was a bitter, realistic world that existed and it existed without her. I forced myself to come to terms with living my life without her. She had been the rope of hope that I had clung on to; the rope that had for so long threatened to fray and give away. And today, it had finally done so.

I fell hard and it hurt. I looked at myself in the mirror as I shaved; that time of the day when I would introspect. I asked myself, “What don’t you have today?”

I was young, good-looking and had a great career ahead of me. I was making good money, at least enough to satisfy my needs and occasionally, even my greed.
Everything that I should have at twenty-three years of age, with only one exception, Radhika. Then, hadn’t I survived without her for over  eight  months? And  why  couldn’t  those  eight  months become a year or two, even a few? I consoled myself as best as I could. I put the aftershave on. It stung on my face as did the bitter reality that I would need to move on.

Maybe, I would find another girl, someone I could love,
and someone I could marry and live with, like how Radhika was doing with her husband, the mouse.

I vowed to myself that whatever happened, I wouldn’t let the next one get away; at least not for being poor.

In my new role as an Assistant Manager, I was responsible for selling credit cards. The profitable business line was Citibank’s focus and already over two hundred of their best people had been given roles within the cards organization. The middle class citizens of India that had been so averse to living a debt-ridden life were being teased into tasting the forbidden fruit. About eight thousand people were earning a living out of cranking phone calls and making field visits to potential customers, to get them hooked onto the narcotic-like debt instrument.

It was a change away from selling investment accounts but then there were so many other changes underway at home. First, Bhatoliya moved when his office relocated to Noida, a suburb, where the rentals were far cheaper. He chose to relocate to Noida into an apartment closer to his office. Kunal chose to marry – he found himself a nurse from Kerela who worked in the gulf. It seemed like the best thing for him to do, given that he was stagnating in his job. Stagnating, although he had worked for less than a year. That left the expenses of the apartment to be shared between Sameer and me. Sameer
buckled first; his salary couldn’t afford him the luxury of having a room to himself. He decided to move in with his maternal uncle, until he could find something more affordable. I was just plain lucky that Citibank moved its main offices from Connaught Place to Gurgaon, for the same reason that had made Bhatoliya’s company move. We gave up the apartment that had seen us through from college, until we had found jobs and until now, when we were growing.

The swanky new office
of Citibank was spread across five floors of a fancy office complex. It was in stark contrast to the crumbling office in Connaught Place. It even boasted of  a  coffee shop  in  the  lobby  from  where  you  could  buy real coffee. Real coffee, that is not to be confused with the muck that the vending machine throws up into a glass. I moved with the office to Gurgaon. The suburb was cheaper than Delhi but even then it took a lot to fit an apartment into my budget. Finally, after two complete weekends spent with brokers, I finally had a place. I signed a year’s lease on a two- bedroom apartment which was roughly ten kilometres from my office, but the distance didn’t worry me. The first thing that I had done after I had received my promotion letter was to encash a soft loan that Citibank offered as a perquisite. The cash had then been exchanged for a shiny, second hand Maruti 800 that seemed like a bargain. The car was a milestone: it was the first asset that I had ever acquired.

On the silent drive to work, I would look at the vacant passenger seat and wish that there was someone sitting beside me. A nameless, faceless person who would love me and I could love in return and marry. I roved the deepest realms of my mind to have a face that would fit this character. It would turn out to be Radhika’s face and then I would clinically, surgically, intentionally give the face a cosmetic surgery so that it didn’t resemble her any more.

Life was moving at a frantic pace. All this had happened in less than thirty days of that fateful phone call. I was beginning to feel that I could live my life without her. Beginning to feel that we were never meant to be. Beginning to understand that not all love stories have a happy end, when a random e-mail changed my life, again.