Now That You're Rich: Let's fall in Love!

by Datta, Durjoy

  Silverman Financial

  ‘Excuse me. I am Saurav and …’

  ‘Good morning, Saurav. Here is your access card. Go straight and take a left. Swipe your card, this way up. Take the lift to the second floor. Go straight and take the third right. You will reach the training room.’

  He thought of asking for her number but she had gone back to staring at her computer screen and smiling at it. He crossed the waiting area which was more like a movie theatre, only that the seats were much better and the LCD screens were a shade smaller. He stood there, eyes fixed on the screen watching CNBC, just because the ambience was so riveting.

  Just as he was about to lose all sense of time, he was knocked right in by the hurried click-clocking of high-heeled women and Cuban-heeled men all around him. It was a sea of expensive fabric, banned leather and exotic perfumes. People glided across the floor in Hugo Bosses, Armanis and Versaces with Louis Vuitton either hanging from their shoulders or making their feet look beautiful.

  Of whatever Saurav knew about brands, he picked up the most expensive of clothes that Delhi had to offer. Yet, on him, they were made to look like tatters. Everyone was tall, insanely well built, immaculately dressed and most of them looked American or European with a tan gone wrong.

  Women had their hair tied tightly behind their heads, making their skin seem like taut membranes stretched over their cheekbones. This smoothed out their wrinkles. As for the men, their suits shone, their shoes glistened and their watches glimmered. Their heads shone. Some of them were half bald. The rest had theirs slicked with gel in trendy hairstyles. They had sacks full of money to spare and it looked like they spent it well.

  He cursed the men, and wished the women were naked. He smiled at them and they looked at him with disgusted expressions on their faces. He swiped his card, rotated the stiles and entered the lift lobby. Twelve lifts, six on each side, a few of them opened, a few closed. The whole floor was sparkling clean. Brown marble, golden plated lifts glistened in the neon lighting and huge mirrors covered the walls.

  He chose the lift with the fewest people in it. The lift was a room in itself, including a two-seater sofa. For what? For making out?

  While he waited restlessly for the lift to reach the third floor, people around him were busy digging into their BlackBerries and PDAs.

  The lift doors opened and he breathed easy.

  He left the lift lobby and saw the same figures he had seen on the ground floor. They were sitting amongst a sea of the same kind of people, with their eyes glued to their computer screens. Nothing moved, no one talked. Yoga sessions are louder. Saurav remembered the instructions. He walked straight towards the training room. What he was wearing on his wrist or on himself was no longer exclusive or above par. Everything was pedestrian, his phone was an embarrassment now. His shoes, a joke. His slight paunch, a calamity.

  He rushed across the floor, taking small but fast strides, eyes on his feet, trying to avoid attracting attention. A penguin among humans. He felt more eyes turning towards him, sighing and turning away.

  Saurav finally felt relieved when he saw in bold letters: Training Room

  6

  The second day of training had started on a very peaceful note, unlike the first, when a stern-looking female who stood three inches taller than Saurav, asked him to go back home, as being late was something which was not tolerated at Silverman Finance. He had to leave the room and the office building, and it was not quite the start he was looking for. That day, he was the only person sitting in the room, fifteen minutes early.

  A few minutes later, a few badly dressed men and women—boys and girls, more precisely—walked in, fidgeting with their hair and watches. Within the next fifteen minutes, the room was filled with twenty people selected from twenty elite colleges. All of them were overachievers.

  The conversation between them shifted swiftly from how much they had scored in their graduation to the bigger things they had achieved in their lives. The St. Stephen’s College girl had forgone a master’s at LSE to join Silverman Finance. The IIT Mumbai graduate was an IIM (A) dropout. One IITian had a patent to his name, something called a brain oximeter, and wanted to look for investors in the company. The girl from Delhi College of Engineering was a national badminton champion, apart from being a gold medallist in various Olympiads, both national and international. The girl from Presidency was super cute.

  An easy silence hung in the room. Everybody was trying to keep conversation to the minimum and I wouldn’t be telling you this story had Abhijeet not picked the seat next to Saurav that day.

  The whispers died down and everybody sat up in their chairs as a click-clocking sound approached the door. Saurav wanted to ask Abhijeet if the same female who had come the previous day would come in today, too, but pulled back, seeing him freeze.

  She walked in, the woman who was to haunt them for the time to come.

  Sumita Bhasin. Chief HR. Silverman Finance.

  Her perfume invaded their nostrils and violated their sense of smell. What Saurav hadn’t seen the day before, he could see then. Sumita was colossal, almost twice the size in every dimension of an average Indian woman. Or man. She leaned over the table they were sitting on and ran her eyes through the room.

  ‘Seems like everybody is present today,’ she said, smiled and showed her big teeth jutting out from blackened gums.

  Saurav momentarily made eye contact with her and found her repulsive.

  Sumita was approaching fifty and was fighting hard to keep it away. She had the familiar hairstyle that let her hide her wrinkles. Her wrinkles were not done in by the monthly Botox shots she took, which bloated her foot-long face and made it look even more sinister. She hardly smiled; the last plastic surgery which stretched her skin from nose downwards had left little scope to do that. She stood taller and was wider than most men around her, especially with four-inch pencil heels, which, over the years, had made her veins jut out from her feet and made them look even uglier.

  Sumita had been working in the firm since its inception and swore by the company rules. She was very uptight and tolerated no slip-ups and made life hell for whoever flouted the rules. She wielded almost absolute power and had to just go one level up to get anybody she wanted out of the company. Her voice was raspy, her words, harsh. There was not one girl who hadn’t been reduced to tears by her cutting words. The men had it no better.

  She called for an office boy who got twenty hundred-page manuals for them.

  Campus to Corporate, it said in bold letters.

  ‘I want you to go through it before we proceed,’ she said. Her voice, like a man’s baritone, grated. It sounded like she had a perennial cold. But that took nothing away from it, in terms of volume. When she whispered, the whole office could hear what she had to say.

  They started flipping through the pages. Most of them started underlining what they thought was important. Geeks!

  But no one dared to smile.

  It was a detailed account of how they were expected to behave at SF, how they were expected to dress up, how they were to address people and the like. It even had addresses of places they could buy their clothes from. Silverman had a design consultant for clothes right in their office.

  Saurav started nudging Abhijeet to show him something he found amusing and Abhijeet asked him to shut up a little more loudly than he would have liked to.

  ‘You think it is funny?’ Bhasin asked scornfully, pointing at them.

  ‘Who? Me?’ Abhijeet said, already sweating all over.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, hands on her waist, head leaning forward, her eyebrows making a hill on her forehead and anger writ large on her face.

  ‘I was reading it, ma’am.’

  ‘First lesson you learn at Silverman Finance,’ she leaned back and looked at all of us. ‘We are smarter than you. And every joke played here is on you. Not us.’ She reverted her stare back to Abhijeet and asked, ‘What did you find funny, Mr Abhijeet Gupta?’

  ‘Nothin
g, ma’am.’

  ‘What did you find difficult enough not to be understood on your own?’ she asked, and her voice rose with every sentence.

  ‘Nothing, ma’am.’

  ‘Out of the room.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Did you not hear me, Mr Gupta? You think we are all fools here to have made this manual? Look at yourself. Does anybody here think he looks like the people working outside? They are all professionals there and you have to be like them. And it is my job to get you there. There or out of here.’ She banged the manual on the table.

  ‘But—’

  ‘It was me, I was asking—’ Saurav butted in.

  ‘OUT!’ She pointed towards the door. ‘Leave the building. Right now. And that is for both of you.’

  ‘Okay,’ Saurav said and promptly collected his stuff to leave. Abhijeet had no choice but to follow him out of the room.

  ‘If you still behave like college kids, this is how we are going to treat you. The only difference is, you lose a job here and not some grades. It’s up to you.’ She stared at them, waiting for the fear to register. ‘To start with, let me tell you very honestly,’ she said and got up from her chair. ‘Each one of you today, here, is a disgrace to our company.’ She smiled to show all of her upper jaw, and rubbed her hands together. Her long red painted nails shone. ‘Every one of you may have topped your college, but that accounts for nothing. We are all toppers here and that’s our minimum criteria. You would not be here if you were not academically brilliant. Anyway, now that you are here, there are just a few simple rules that you need to follow. They are given in this manual.’

  ‘I assume that nobody gets these things now,’ she said and continued, ‘However, there is one advice that you could make good use of. Every slip costs us. We don’t tolerate that. We are giving you money that nobody else does. We expect that back. And more. That is business. The day you slip, it would be good for you to update your CVs and look for new jobs. We do not tolerate incompetence. Only the best stay. The best are very few. Thank you and have a great day ahead. And if Mr Abhijeet or Mr Saurav talks to anyone of you, tell them they have already taken a step in the wrong direction. Out of this place.’

  She picked up her handbag and left. The group stared at each other, red-faced as they thought about what she had just said.

  Soon after, the training lectures started.

  It was 10 a.m. then. They sat in the same damned position for the next sixteen hours, except for an hour each for lunch and dinner. It was getting tough even for people who were used to studying sixteen hours a day. These were people who were academically the most brilliant in the country, these were the most tireless and intelligent brains of the country and they were tired out by Silverman in a single day.

  By the time that day got over, it was 2 a.m. and their bodies were stiff and most of them wished that day was an exception, not the norm. They had heard about demanding schedules of investment banks, but they had no idea the rigour would start so soon.

  Silverman wasn’t going to pay them for doing a nine-to-five, cushy job. They wanted the last cell of their bodies to work for them till it died and decayed. The only good thing left about the job was the pay cheque, now that they knew they would be working their asses off for it.

  Apparently not.

  After they were thrown out, while Abhijeet was embarrassed and felt like sitting and brooding over it, Saurav was already in the lift lobby. He waved at Abhijeet like a mad man. Abhijeet walked up to him, head bowed as he thought about what had just happened. It wouldn’t do much good to his days there, he thought.

  ‘I am really sorry for that. That bitch,’ Saurav said as they both entered the lift.

  ‘It’s fine. Not entirely your fault.’

  ‘Saurav.’ He put his hand out.

  ‘Abhijeet.’ They shook hands.

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Madapur.’

  ‘Okay.’ A few more minutes of silence passed between them. ‘Is there a problem?’ Saurav asked him.

  ‘No,’ Abhijeet said, still not looking.

  ‘I am sorry for what happened in there.’

  ‘So am I,’ Abhijeet responded.

  ‘I tried to take you out. It didn’t work out. I said I am sorry, but you still look pissed off.’

  ‘So what do you want?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Saurav was a little taken back at the rudeness of the whole conversation.

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Do you drink?’ Saurav asked, almost mocking.

  ‘Occasionally,’ Abhijeet replied, looking up for the first time in the whole conversation.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘It’s on you,’ Abhijeet said, and for the first time Abhijeet smiled, albeit very slightly. They took a cab home to Saurav’s place, which wasn’t that far away now that the early morning office traffic had cleared up.

  ‘Your flat is HUGE!’ Abhijeet exclaimed as he spent five minutes gawking at just the living room. Abhijeet’s place opened with a washroom on the left and a kitchen on the right, and had two tiny rooms and three people shared it.

  Saurav had an ice box with two crates of beer in it, with every single beer in place.

  ‘Nice place,’ he said again, as Saurav showed him around his flat.

  ‘Thank you,’ Saurav beamed and they clinked their bottles and poured the beer down their throats. They started talking about their colleges, their friends, and found they had more than a few things in common. For one, Saurav couldn’t believe that Abhijeet was a shy, nerdy guy in college.

  ‘You have no idea how big a geek I was,’ Saurav said.

  ‘You? A geek? But you’re rich! Look at this flat, Saurav. If I were as rich as you, I wouldn’t pick up a single book in my life,’ Abhijeet conceded.

  They both finished their bottles and then another one and they were tispy because both of them weren’t regular drinkers.

  ‘Do you drink often? This crate and the ice box?’ Abhijeet asked, with bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Looks good to have an ice box and everything. Very occasional. Plus, the first girl I kissed was drunk when it happened, so it’s like a fail-safe, a lucky charm. So you tell me, why did you get so worked up today?’

  ‘Nothing. It was just …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It is just that I really want to make it big here. This is my chance to get rich and maybe have a house like this, you know. This job means everything to me,’ Abhijeet said with exaggerated hand movements.

  ‘C’mon Abhijeet, if not this then something else. There are a million jobs out there, man.’ Saurav took another swig at the bottle.

  ‘I am not an IITian like you. Nobody is dying to take us in. Jobs are few and far between. And ones like these? Once in a lifetime. I lose this, twenty years of slogging goes down the drain. I will be just like any other graduate.’

  Saurav smiled inside on hearing the IIT part and said, ‘What crap? You are good, you are intelligent. You would get through a good company in no time.’

  ‘My dad, college topper. What does he do? He works for the government for peanuts. Why? He didn’t take chances or lost them. I am not going to do that. I will make this work, come what may. I will have three cars in my driveway before thirty, have rings on all my fingers and have three servants serving me while my wife blows all my money up in a beauty parlour. When people look at me, I want them to crave for a life like mine. I want them to wish they were as rich as me.’

  ‘Whoa! Whoa! I think you’re drunk already!’ Saurav said and they both laughed. ‘I think I am too and this is the first time I am drinking in the morning.’

  ‘Me too,’ Abhi answered.

  ‘So you’re here for the money. People would call you greedy and materialistic,’ Saurav argued.

  ‘People who already have three cars would call me greedy.’

  ‘I have three cars,’ Saurav answered.

  ‘You do? Do you think I am greedy?’

  ‘Actually, I have four ca
rs and I don’t know whether I would call you greedy because I don’t know what it’s like to be you,’ Saurav said. ‘Oh. Wait. I should write that down, that’s borderline philosophical.’

  ‘Thanks, Saurav. But remember, some day I, too, will have four in my driveway.’

  ‘I am sure you will,’ Saurav said and they both lay down side by side on the floor.

  ‘And I will have three girlfriends when I have money,’ he said. ‘You know why? Because all girls love money. When I will be rich, they will all be flocking to date me!’

  ‘I have money and no one is lining up to date me,’ Saurav sighed. ‘Maybe we are just losers and we are meant to die alone and rich.’

  Both of them drifted off to sleep.

  The next day was a holiday. It was Guru Purnima but both of them kept hanging around at Saurav’s flat since they had not activated their official mail IDs because Sumita Bhasin had thrown them out of the office and they missed the orientation lectures given by the IT Department.

  The next day, they were called by Sumita to her cubicle and were given an earful for missing office the day before, without informing anyone. Apparently, the cab waited fifteen minutes for them. They were called irresponsible, unprofessional and everything that could be said in the limits of office decency and were reminded that their days might just be limited in Silverman. The first three days had gone horribly wrong for Saurav, but he was more sorry for Abhi and apologized profusely.

  The training classes only got more exhausting after the first few days. Going to office became a drag and the entire batch lived their lives from one Sunday to another. Their life was reduced to an unchanging back-breaking schedule. Get up at seven, reach office by eight, attend lectures till two in the morning, come back home and sleep. They had absolutely no time left for anything else. The two weekends that went past were consumed by sleep and exhaustion. Their frustrations crept up with each passing second, but they had no choice; this was the life they had chosen for themselves. It was two weeks to their first salary and that was the only thing they looked forward to. At least they were being paid amply for all the inhuman torture they were going through. It would all be worth it after they got the pay cheque, they’d thought.