27
‘So, this is almost done?’ I clicked through the slides. Uncle had given me a CD of
his work. I had uploaded it on my laptop. The unformatted slides had paragraphs
of text, no bullet points and font sizes ranging from eight to seventy-two.
‘Yes, I spent three weeks on it,’ he said.
We sat at a work-table in the living room. Manju studied inside. No one else
was at home. Ananya’s father and I hunched close together to see the laptop
screen.
‘These have no figures, no charts, no specific points even ...’ I said, trying to
be less critical but truthful as well.
‘Figures are here,’ uncle said as he opened his briefcase. ‘I still have to learn
that feature in PowerPoint.’
He took out three thick files with dirty brown covers and two hundred sheets
each inside.
‘What’s this?’
‘Our last year business data,’ he said.
‘You can’t put it all,’ I said. ‘When is this due?’
‘That rascal Verma wants it in a week,’ uncle said.
The rate at which Ananya’s dad was going, he couldn’t deliver it in a year.
‘One week? This is only past performance data. Don’t you have to make a plan
for next year?’
‘I was going to do that, soon.’ He swallowed hard.
I kept my left elbow on the table and my palm on my forehead. I flipped
through the slides in reverse to reach the front.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Anything wrong in what I’ve done?’
I turned to him and gave a slight smile. ‘No, a few finishing touches left,’ I said.
‘So, how do we do it?’