We sat for breakfast at seven-thirty. Ananya’s father went to the temple room
to pray, and came back with the customary three grey stripes on his forehead. I
wondered if I should go pray too, but wasn’t sure how I’d explain the three stripes
in office along with my lateness.
We had idlis for breakfast, and Ananya’s mother put fifty of them in front of us.
We ate quietly. Ananya had told me they never spoke much anyway. The best way
to fit in was to never talk.
‘More chutney?’ Ananya’s mother’s question (and my shaking my head) was
the only insightful conversation we had during the meal.
Uncle reversed his Fiat from the garage. He peeked out to look at me several
times. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to avoid me or make a direct hit.
‘Sit,’ uncle said. I went around the car to sit next to him. Sitting with my
girlfriend’s father in a car brought traumatic memories. I took deep breaths. This
is not the same situation, play cool, I said to myself several times.
Uncle drove at a speed of ten an hour, and I wondered what reason I’d give my
boss for not coming to office two hours ago. Autos, scooters and even some
manual-powered vehicles like rickshaws came close to overtaking us.
I wanted to talk but couldn’t think of any trouble-free topic. I opened my office
bag with the dubious ‘Citi never sleeps’ logo and took out my research reports to
read. Dot com stocks had lost 25% last week. The analysts who had predicted
that these stocks would triple every hour now claimed the market had gone into
self-correct mode. Self-correct – it sounded so intelligent and clever it sort of
took out the pain away from people who had lost their life savings. It also made
you sound dumb if you’d ask why didn’t the market self-correct earlier? Or the
more basic, what the fuck do you mean by self-correct anyway?
I had two clients who had lost ten lakh each coming to visit me today. With my
IIMA degree I had to come up with a sleight of hand to make the losses disappear.
the car came to a halt near a red light.
‘You wrote those reports?’ uncle asked.
I shook my head. ‘It’s the research group,’ I said.
‘Then what you do at the bank?’ he was more rhetorical.
‘Customer service,’ I said, not sure how anything I did was service. Asking
people to give you their money and scraping away at it wasn’t service.
nora
(Nora)
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