Devil in Pinstripes

by Ravi Subramanian

  Chanda began to feel the heat. She was increasingly being cut off from everything that she used to do in the past. Gowri hired a junior MIS manager to work with Sangeeta and got all the work done through him. A lot of product management stuff which was done by Chanda earlier moved to the marketing team. Gowri did it so very smartly that no one could point a finger at him publicly. He couldn’t be seen to be publically antagonistic towards Chanda; else, he would fall flat on his face.

  In fact this was Sangeeta’s idea which was paying off. That day when Gowri had seen the mail announcing Ratnesh’s move on Amit’s laptop, he had called Sangeeta in to bitch to her.

  ‘Gowri, if Amit is cantankerous towards you, why should you be tolerant towards Chanda?’

  ‘Hmm . . .’ Gowri was still very pensive. He had just seen the mail from Chanda to Amit. Sangeeta was right.

  ‘Gowri, she is not aligned to you. You need to somehow push her on the back foot.’

  ‘That’s going to be difficult. We can’t be blatant about it. Let’s subtly move her out of her core responsibilities. Else they will go running to Aditya.’

  ‘You cannot because you have a stature to protect. I can.’

  Gowri’s eyes lit up with a wicked glint when Sangeeta said this. ‘Oh yes, of course. You can do whatever you want. No one can stop you.’

  ‘And of course, you will protect me if something goes wrong,’ confirmed Sangeeta.

  ‘Of course Sango, you know that.’

  ‘I will push her enough to put her on the defensive. We need her here. She is your trump card Gowri. As long as she is affected, Amit could be kept under check. The day she quits and goes, Amit will be a free bird. Let’s make use of her Gowri.’

  And the deal was done. Mind games with Chanda had begun. If Amit had to be kept in check, then Chanda was to be abused. Maybe Chanda’s frustration would make Amit mend his ways and fall in line with Gowri. That was the game plan. Poor Chanda had no clue that hell was going to break loose on her.

  December 2003

  The Frustration Piles

  NFS-Mumbai

  The drive back from the Nariman Point office to Bandra was a long one. Today it seemed longer, given the silence which prevailed inside the small confines of the Ford Ikon. Amit was at the wheel and Chanda was sitting next to him. Amit tried to get Chanda’s attention, but Chanda refused to be moved. She did not open her mouth to say anything.

  The year gone by was a painful one for her. She had taken enough of shit all through the year. She was ignored, treated shabbily, and not given her due in the organisation. Not once did she whine. She was left out of an offsite citing some stupid cost cutting as an excuse. Gowri had said that given the limited number of people they could take on an offsite, guys from the head office should stay back and only the sales guys from the branches should be going. She didn’t complain. When she got to know Suzzana was going and she had been left out, it hurt her badly, and yet she didn’t grumble.

  There were many points in time when she contemplated quitting. Amit also advocated this to her. ‘Why are you going through all this? Either you look for a different job or I will,’ he had said.

  But no, Chanda wouldn’t give up. ‘Amit, that’s what these guys want. They want me to succumb to their idiosyncrasies and quit. And why? Because they think that you will have an access into their camp only till I am there. The day I quit, you will lose all that and will become vulnerable. I don’t care about what they think but I will not quit and let them have their way. If you want to quit and go somewhere else, it’s your call.’ Her fierce competitive streak was surfacing. Independent and focused on her career, the desire to achieve things on her own was getting compromised, and she was not willing for that.

  But today she made no such claims. No such talk. She just didn’t open her mouth. Despite Amit’s best efforts at humouring her, nothing changed. They crossed Worli, passed Prabhadevi, went past the Siddhivinayak temple, past Dadar and reached the inevitable traffic jam in Mahim. Still Chanda didn’t respond to his overtures. The traffic was inching ahead very slowly. It gave Amit some time to take his eyes off the road and talk to Chanda. He turned and looked at her. She was sitting motionless, listening to the radio, mumbling nothings.

  ‘Chanda,’ he touched her. She did not respond. Didn’t even turn and look at him. She was sitting there, seized like a zombie. Amit got worried. ‘Chanda! Are you fine?’ Chanda finally reacted. She looked straight into his eyes, tense and worked up.

  ‘Only if you let me be Amit. Only if you let me be.’ And then she collapsed,’ sobbing uncontrollably. Amit tried to hug her, but the signal turned to green and he couldn’t. He had to move on from where the car was standing. Traffic was bumper to bumper for over a mile from there and he was in the middle lane. He couldn’t stop the car on the side and console her. Helplessness took over. Finally he reached Bandra and turned over into the road leading to the reclamation area and stopped the car. The road was wider and with less traffic, and hence there was no one honking from behind, forcing him to move ahead.

  ‘Chanda. Chanda, what happened? Why are you crying?’ He was worried. Though Chanda was prone to shedding a few tears in the past, this was the first time he had seen her weep like this. Her entire body was shaking . . . it was a frustrated helpless cry.

  ‘You are screwing up my career. It’s only because of you that I am in this state!’ Amit was shocked. She had never spoken to him in this fashion. ‘You first killed my biotechnology career even before it took off and now you are bent on dooming my banking career too.’

  ‘What have I done Chanda?’ his first reaction was to defend himself. Immediately he realised that he should not have done that.

  ‘What have I done? Who asked you to come to NFS? Had you not come I would have been better off? Much better off.’

  ‘What happened Chanda? Tell me. Why are you behaving like this?’

  Chanda just lost it. Her sobbing intensified and she put her head between her knees and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

  Amit didn’t know what to do.

  A few hours earlier

  Amit had just returned from a trip to Delhi that afternoon. He walked into office and straight to his shared room. Chander had been retained in another role and hence his room did not get allotted to Amit. He continued sharing his room with Sangeeta.

  Sangeeta had gone out. As Amit settled down in his den, he glanced at the table in front of him. On the table was a sheet of paper with a grid on it. The grid had names of the people in the branch and their performance ratings. It was the end of the year and therefore appraisal time and performance rating time too. ‘Impressive. She is quite organised,’ he thought to himself as he casually flipped through the piece of paper. Ideally he should not have looked at it. It’s inappropriate to look at someone else’s documents without the person knowing about it. But all this protocol was damned in NFS.

  ‘Let’s see if she is a tough boss,’ he said to himself as he picked up her sheet to see how she had rated her people. He had heard that women made terrible bosses.

  What he saw shocked him no end. In that list were names of people from the mortgages business who operated out of the branches, people from the auto loans business, and people from the credit team among many others. What the hell are these names doing here? Who has rated them? Why was I not told? He had been working on those ratings himself.

  At that very moment Sangeeta walked in. ‘Hi Amit,’ she tried to be nice.

  ‘What’s this Sangeeta?’

  ‘Oh this? These are the performance ratings of people in my team.’

  ‘My team! Won’t you guys ever give up?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who gave you the authority to decide the performance ratings of these guys?’

  ‘I think you should ask Gowri that question. I will do what I am told to do.’ And she turned and walked away.

  A furious Amit charged into Gowri’s room. ‘Gowri, how many times have I told you to stay away from me
and my team?’

  Gowri looked at him and did not say anything.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘How do I know? It is in your hands.’ Gowri was cheeky.

  ‘Don’t try to be smart Gowri! You have asked Sangeeta to do the performance appraisals of all staff in the branches including those in my vertical.’

  ‘That’s the way it has been done so far.’

  ‘I thought we changed it.’

  ‘You wanted it to be changed. I didn’t change it. The guys have a reporting into the branch managers as per the approved organisation structure.’

  ‘Only for administrative purposes,’ retorted Amit. Since the business model of NFS involved doing business in remote locations, the branch manager had oversight only for administrative purposes and they were still controlled by Amit in his business vertical.

  ‘Year after year, I have been doing this. What’s different now?’ That was a fact. Every year, Gowri had bulldozed the business managers and used his overbearing personality to brow beat them into agreeing with his rating. Ratings drove increments and decided bonuses for every individual. Over time people realised that it was Gowri who was their ‘annadaata’ and not the business managers themselves. That’s how he managed to build an aura around himself. He was called the king for nothing.

  ‘Enough! I will speak with HR. Let’s see what they say.’

  Amit walked across to Sunil, the head of HR. He was furious. Gowri was a guy who was known to be a wheeler dealer. What about HR? HR should have been unbiased in the entire show. They couldn’t be seen as taking sides. Something like this would never happen in NYB. But NFS was like a banana republic. Anything could happen here as long as Gowri willed it.

  Sunil had no explanation for what had happened. All he said was that it was incorrect on the part of HR to have asked Gowri for the ratings. Someone in HR at the lowest rank had just followed last year’s process. The earlier business managers didn’t have an issue with this process. The fact that Amit wanted it differently was not communicated down the line in HR.

  The head of HR tried to talk Amit into letting it be. ‘Why don’t you give your inputs to Gowri and let him incorporate the feedback in his ratings?’

  ‘Fuck no! Sunil, I manage my team my way. He cannot decide who gets what in my team. I can bet my ass the guy would have screwed around with the mortgage guys in the performance ratings.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Sunil was vociferous in his defence. ‘He is quite fair in his approach.’

  ‘Fair my foot!’ Amit was furious. ‘Why don’t you check?’

  Sunil and Amit then got down to checking the ratings of the individuals in the mortgage team. NFS operated on a performance rating scale of one to ten. If an individual was given a performance rating of one, it indicated a stellar performance and a performance rating of ten was indicative of a horrible performance – a performance which meant the person was no longer required in the organisation. They did some analysis of the ratings given by Gowri for the personal loan guys in the branch network and compared them with the mortgage guys.

  It took them approximately thirty minutes to come up with the analysis on an excel spreadsheet.

  * * *

  Ratings Branch personal loans Mortgages

  * * *

  1–2 26 % 8 %

  3–5 65 % 52 %

  6 and above 9 % 40 %

  * * *

  The numbers were staring at them.

  ‘Do I need to say anything more Sunil? Ninety-one percent of the personal loans guys have got a rating better than five and only sixty percent of the people in mortgages have got a performance rating higher than five. Even in the top performer’s bracket, twenty-six percent of personal loans are top performers while only eight percent of the staff in mortgages are rated as top performers. Is this the right way to do things? No wonder you have glamorised personal loans, Mr Gowri Shankar’s product, in this organisation. Everyone wants to get out of mortgages and move to personal loans. To the branch business. Isn’t it time to set it right? You have the responsibility, Sunil, to ensure that such shit doesn’t happen.’ And then he paused. Sunil didn’t say anything. ‘Please correct this. I will send you my ratings by this evening.’ And he walked away. He stopped outside his cabin and stretched his neck to look back into the room and added, ‘Sunil, if I complain about this, you could lose your job.’

  This worried Sunil. He had never looked at the performance ratings in this manner. This could seriously land him in trouble if Amit went ahead and executed his threat.

  ‘Let me fix this for you,’ he said.

  ‘You better!’ muttered Amit as he walked away.

  Within the next fifteen minutes, Sunil was in Gowri’s room. They were closeted for over thirty minutes. Sangeeta was called in a couple of times. Amit could imagine what was going on.

  Within moments of Sunil exiting the room, Amit got a mail from Sangeeta who was sitting three feet away from him.

  Dear Amit,

  Please find enclosed the ratings which have been recommended by the branch managers for the Mortgages team. Please go through them and provide your team’s ratings directly to HR by today EOD.

  Regards,

  Sangeeta

  The mail was marked to Sunil and Gowri. Amit saw the mail and smiled. This could have been done earlier. Why did they have to get into a confrontation?

  Oblivious to all this, Chanda was going about doing her work as usual. She had just come out of a training session on personal loan products for new joinees. This part of her job was something she liked. Training came naturally to her. It helped her escape the stress, the tension, and the worry of her strained relationship with her boss. When she was inside the room with all the new joinees, she would go into a different world. A world of make believe . . . a world where everything was hunky-dory. Where people tried to be nice and build harmonious relationships with each other. It took her away from the compulsions of reality.

  After the training, she walked to her desk. Someone from the branches had sent her an approval request for the payment to be made to a sales agent. It was nearing 7.30 p.m. In the normal course, she would have logged off and left for home. She tried calling Amit on his extension. No one picked up. Maybe he had gone to the loo. She decided to wait.

  ‘If I have to wait, might as well finish the pending work. Less work for tomorrow,’ she thought and opened her email. A few sales agency payment requests were responded to. Some approved and a few rejected. A job had to be done with diligence irrespective of motivation levels, and she was not the ones who would allow her state of mind to impact her work. Amit had also taught her to lay down ground rules and processes for everything at work so that they don’t need to revisit requests again and again. ‘If someone sends you an approval request, he must know with a reasonable degree of certainty if it will go through or not.’ She smiled to herself when she thought of that. After sending out the approvals, she normally printed a copy of every approval given and filed them separately. She did the same today and walked towards the printer on her floor. Its toner had run out and hence it couldn’t print. She then decided to spool it to Suzanna’s printer on the corporate floor, which was just a floor above hers. ‘I will anyway have to go to that floor to check on Amit,’ she thought as she fired the prints.

  She collected her bags, logged off her system and walked up. ‘I will collect the printouts and file them tomorrow,’ she said to herself as she climbed the stairs.

  Amit was there talking to Manish Kakkar who was also ready to leave. When he saw her, Amit reacted, ‘Chalen . . . let’s go?’

  ‘I am waiting,’ she said as she walked up to the printer. She picked up her lot of printouts and stood at the door waiting for Amit to come.

  ‘Amit . . . Amit . . . are you there?’ It was Karen who came running out of the MD’s cabin to speak with Amit.

  ‘Karen? You haven’t gone home? It’s well past your bed time,’

  Amit smiled at her.
r />   ‘I am just leaving baba. Your boss wants you for a minute.’

  Amit looked at Chanda and she smiled partly in desperation, partly in irritation. She walked to the nearest sofa and plunked herself. Looking around, she saw that all the cabins were empty, except Amit’s and Manish’s. Everyone had left for the day. The clock above the board room door was pushing 8.30 p.m. She was hoping Amit would come out fast. Casually, she ruffled through the papers that she was carrying, the ones she picked up from the printer. There were six sheets in all that she had printed and she started counting them in her mind as she went through them. Two sheets of payment computations, one blank sheet from somewhere unknown – probably a problem in the page setup, an email to Suzanna, an order for a print . . . wait a sec. Email to Suzanna? She didn’t print it. Probably picked by mistake. She needed to put it back. It was not hers. She got up and removed the email from the lot of papers she was carrying. As she was taking it back to the printer she saw her name in the email and her curiosity was aroused. After all, she too was human. A quick glance told her that there was nobody on the floor who was observing her. Except for Manish, there was nobody there. Period. Amit and Karen were the only others and they were in Hari’s room. Satisfying herself that she would not be caught infringing into someone else’s space, she started reading the mail. After she read the mail, she glanced up, looked round the room, quietly folded the mail, put it into her bag and went and sat down on the sofa. The smile had been wiped off from her face.

  Quietly, she waited for Amit to come back. Fifteen minutes later they were driving on Marine Drive, on their way back to Bandra. Initially Amit thought that she was upset about his making her wait for him. However, after a few miles of driving, he realised that was not the case.