Arranged Love

by Mittal, Parul A

  I had nowhere to rush, so I sat down with a paper and pencil, and reflected on our conversation.

  ‘Ultimately, the decision depends on your risk appetite,’ Deep had said, summarizing his advice. If being adventurous and experimental counted for anything, then I had a helluva appetite for risk. However, to me, the risk was immaterial. I wasn’t here to make a career. I was only looking for a good experience while I was stranded in India. As I had no other claims on my time, the long hours only seemed like a blessing. I also figured that the crowd in the dotcom start-up would be younger and hence more fun.

  Unlike Deep, I was a numbers person and favoured a systematic, step-by-step approach. I made a table of all the pluses and minuses, and assigned my preference weight to each of them. Next I gave points to each company against each factor, and finally I computed the weighted score. The decision was done.

  I logged onto Facebook to check the latest news in my social circle. Jay was rooting ‘Go Blue’ for the UMich football team. Neha, my all-time best friend, had posted, ‘Coffee, Chocolate, Men … Some Things are Just Better Rich’. I commented, saying I prefer mine strong and hard. Neetu had posted some more pictures from her party. There was one of me kissing Jay on the mouth, to which Jay had commented ‘Sweet times’. I recalled how I had lost my head over that boobs-on-display Denise, and kissed Jay in public. I immediately messaged Neetu to remove the picture from FB. I then wrote a long mail to Jay telling him how lonely I was and how badly I longed to be in his arms, how I had gained love handles in the absence of any physical activity and how he was to be blamed for that, and how under all circumstances, he was to stay away from Denise.

  Before I logged out, I edited the employer section in my Facebook profile to ‘iTrot.com’. I had no idea that this seemingly professional and relatively insignificant change was going to decide how, when, where and with whom my children would spend weekends in the future.

  Deep Shit

  I was sitting with my legs crossed, tightening my thigh muscles to prevent my wastewater tank from leaking. Must be all the diet coke that I had guzzled last night to stay awake and chat with Jay. The cab driver relentlessly honked, zigzagged, bumped and cursed through the office hour rush. The couple of kilometres from IFFCO Chowk to the Udyog Vihar exit that usually takes five minutes had taken us more than an hour today. The reason, as always, was a car that had broken down in the middle of the road. Cursing the situation of Indian traffic, and following the directions printed from the company website, I finally saw the sign of iTrot.com gleam from the top of a building at the next crossing. As I paid the driver, I spotted a guy shamelessly taking a leak at the opposite wall grinning to himself, all the while. Lucky him! Applying moolbandh to keep the lid on my pee outlet, I somehow scrambled up the stairs, signed my name in the office register, and asked the reception lady if I could use the loo.

  She looked at me like I was some ill-bred, uncouth peasant, who had walked in from the nearby village, looking for an air-conditioned place to empty my bladder. For once, I wished I had dressed ostentatiously in showy, Dilli-type clothes rather than sporting the dignified Fab India look. Unwillingly, she swiped her smart card and showed me in, instructing me to be out as soon as I was done.

  As I came back, smoothing out the creases in my kurta and visibly relaxed, I approached the receptionist and showed her my entry ticket to the office loo. One look at the appointment letter and she immediately rewarded me with newfound respect and a professional smile. She checked my name in a list, called someone inside, and politely informed me that the new joinee induction programme had already begun, but I would have to wait for the HR manager before I could join the rest of the newbies. I knew I was late, but why waste time now. Dubious about whether I had chosen the right job, I took a seat in the lobby and started flipping through some travel magazines. An hour later, I was still lounging, but now I was an expert on all the beaches in South East Asia, places to shop in Bangkok, best sushi restaurants and the special Thai massage parlours. Two cups of coffee, and one more trip to the loo later, I was finally called in.

  Guided by a secretary, I walked through the maze of cubicles, watching young, energetic faces, planning and selling dream vacations. We stopped on reaching the glass door that said ‘HR Manager’. I peered through the glass, and sighted a smart-looking female in western formals. She was busy talking to someone on the phone. She motioned me to come in. I pulled open the door, when I read the sign that said ‘Push’.

  I pushed the door to enter the room and found the HR manager busy on a call.

  ‘Finding a new maid is not easy,’ I heard her explain to the person on the phone, as she gestured me to take a seat. ‘Yes, I am in HR, but I recruit professionals, not house help,’ she said irritably. ‘Why don’t you call your son? My job is not just chatting with people, it requires thinking as well,’ she said, trying to defend herself, but the person on the line seemed persistent.

  Listening to her conversation, which I found to be rather entertaining, I detected a sense of familiarity in her voice. I felt like I had heard it before, although I was certain that this was the first time I was meeting her in person. It was hard to forget someone with that Audrey Hepburnish, mini-bouffant hairstyle. Interesting, but a trifle stiff and old-fashioned for my taste.

  ‘Okay, I will ask the office boy if he knows any full-time maid,’ she finally acceded, and hastily cut the line.

  ‘Mothers-in-law! I tell you. They are like these overpowering, hard-to-please bosses. You can never get along with them.’

  Coming from a nuclear family, I had little experience in the matter, but I nodded sympathetically.

  Having dealt with home relations, she greeted me warmly, introduced herself and inquired how I was ‘liking’ the training so far. Puzzled, I explained that I had gotten delayed, and had actually been waiting outside rather than attending any training. ‘Did you enjoy the wait?’ She asked with utmost sincerity.

  But for the kindness in her eyes, I would have assumed she was trying to humiliate me for being late. ‘Not particularly,’ I replied honestly.

  ‘Have you ever wondered how much time in our life is spent just waiting for things to happen?’ she grilled me further.

  I raised my eyebrows as if to ask what point she was trying to make.

  ‘Roughly sixty-two minutes a day,’ she answered. ‘Every day we wait in the bus lines, for the elevator, for the doctor’s appointment, at the traffic signals, at the supermarket cash counter, to be served at a restaurant, for files to download, friends to call, the other person to make the first move … and for the love of our life.’

  Only the last in the list seemed worthy of the time to me.

  ‘Never make customers wait. It’s the most important part of our customer sensitization module,’ she articulated. ‘I am sorry you were held up, but I hope it was a lesson well learnt.’

  ‘Wow! So every new employee gets to browse the magazines and while away their time?’

  She shook her head, and despite sensing the slight mockery in my tone, she replied with a smile, ‘Only the client-facing team.’ And then reading the confusion on my face she added, ‘I know you will not have direct customer interaction, but your immediate manager insisted you go through this experience.’

  Completely baffled by this unique training methodology, I pondered what in my resume could possibly have made my manager decide that I be honoured with this wisdom. My sex? Was he, assuming it was a he, anti-women? I felt a strange unease in my stomach, wondering what I had signed myself up for.

  As I followed her out of her office, I remarked that her push door shouldn’t have a pull handle. It was a bad user experience. Pleased with my observation, she gave me an all-knowing smile, but said nothing. We kept walking across the cubicles and climbing up the stairs. I observed that there were several customer service posters adorning the staircase walls. When she stopped, I looked around and realized that we had reached the centre cubicle on the second floor. ‘This is your
s,’ she said, pointing to the only empty seat in the cubicle. I put my purse down on the chair. She then called out to a guy, wearing a purple checked shirt, sitting diagonally across from my chair, with his back facing us. ‘Deep, here is your new joinee.’

  The purple-checked shirt swivelled around his blue, ergonomic chair, stood up and extended his right hand for a shake. Stunned, I stared at the familiar, square face with a big mouth, and the 10 mm lip brow. Unlike the hilltop photo however, his hair carelessly fell on his forehead, sort of like SRK. I was hallucinating. My mind had conjured up DeepAche’s image at the sound of the name ‘Deep’. Surely the random guy from my dad’s guitar class couldn’t be my manager.

  ‘Welcome to iTrot.com,’ I heard him say, in his deep, husky voice.

  Admittedly, I had been tempted to call Deep once or twice in the last couple of weeks. You know, just to have an intelligent conversation, and also to hear his rich, sexy voice. I had even visited his website dgblahblah.com and browsed through his photo gallery to confirm if he indeed looked as repelling as I remembered. This time, he had appeared agreeable for a casual acquaintance, though not cool enough to hang around with, and definitely undesirable as a boss.

  ‘Frankly, I thought you would choose the VLSI firm, but I am glad you chose us,’ he said, his eyes twinkling with mischief behind his round glasses.

  Choose us! I had just chosen one of the many thousand dotcom companies in Delhi-NCR. Not you! I tried to clarify, but the words died in my throat. Someone had cast a body-binding spell on me.

  ‘You were damn right about selecting her for the special project,’ the HR manager commended. ‘She sure did comment on the pull handle.’

  ‘Thanks, Kavita. I am rarely wrong about people,’ Deep said, accepting the compliment as his birthright.

  I heard him tell me the name of a systems person who could help me with my PC, the secretary who would get my ID batch and the rest of the team. Well, to be precise, the special project team comprised of Deepak, me and an MCA final year trainee. I still said nothing. I was immobilized, my mind had temporarily switched off to sleep mode and my heart was pounding hard. If this was another of their novel training techniques on how to deal with unexpected events, I was certainly not doing well.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Deep asked, sounding genuinely concerned. I think he had a faint idea of the confusion and bewilderment I was experiencing.

  ‘Yeah, I am fine,’ I managed to utter this time. It was more of a reflex response than a thought-through answer.

  Assured, that I was going to survive the jolt, he turned his attention to the HR manager, and said, ‘Kavita, let’s finish where we left off the other day.’

  As I watched the duo leave, it dawned on me that Kavita was the same woman whose voice I had heard on the phone when I had called Deep to ask about the companies. At least, now I knew why she had sounded familiar.

  Shell-shocked, I let myself sink in the empty chair. What are the odds that I join a 250+ people company and land up in a team of three, with a prospective suitor I hadn’t bothered to respond to, as my manager.

  ‘Bade bade shehron mein aisi choti choti baatein hoti rahti hain, Senorita,’ mimed the girl sitting adjacent to me, as if reading my mind. She introduced herself as Madhuri Dikshit, a big Bollywood buff, and our third team member. Then she offered me a piece from her dairy milk chocolate which I promptly devoured. I was already beginning to like this girl.

  ‘Hi, I am Suhaani,’ I said, amused by her filmy name. I was too dumbfounded to decipher the relevance of the DDLJ dialogue yet.

  ‘It’s so good to meet you at last,’ said Madhuri, bubbling with excitement. ‘You look even more beautiful than your biodata picture.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, taken aback that Deep had told her about the marriage proposal.

  Thinking that she might have offended me, she quickly apologized, ‘I simply meant to say that the perm suits you very well.’

  ‘Sure. Thanks,’ I answered. I figured gossiping is a way of life when you are parked in the ‘Single, looking to mingle’ life slot. I had shared a laugh about Deep’s picture with my lab guys too.

  ‘Kammo was so upset to see your photo,’ she chirpily informed me.

  ‘Kammo?’

  ‘Kameeni Chopra,’ she elaborated, elongating the ‘i’ sound in the name to ‘ee’ on purpose.

  ‘She is in the content team and sits on the first floor. Everyone knows she has the hots for Deep sir,’ Madhuri divulged.

  Whoever this Kammo was, she was clearly not in Madhuri’s good books. However, for some reason, it appeared that all the females from Kavita to Kammo were enchanted by Mr DeepAche’s seductive voice. I wondered if he had used the nice and very nice girl joke on them.

  ‘Your Deep sir seems to be quite in demand,’ I remarked informally.

  ‘Oh! Wait till you hear him sing,’ she raved. ‘He can even yodel-ay, yodel-ay-ee-oo like Kishore Kumar.’

  I knew Deep’s voice could cause havoc, but comparing it with Kishore da was a little too much.

  The incredulous look must have been plain on my face, for she further added, ‘His deep, mesmerizing voice can make any girl’s,’ and started humming the number, ‘My dil goes mmm …’ from Salaam Namaste.

  ‘Does your dil go mmmmmmm?’ I asked teasingly, somewhat regaining my sense of humour.

  ‘No no no no no no no no,’ she said in rapid succession, her hands waving at superfast speed with every no. ‘I am just happy to be working under him.’

  I couldn’t stop my wild imagination from visualizing her ‘working happily’ under him. I bit my lips to stop a naughty smile from creeping on my face, but I think she caught the amusement dancing in my eyes nonetheless. Assuming that I doubted her, and in a bid to convince me of her chaste intentions, she reiterated, ‘JEE 2 and a gold medallist from IIT, Deep sir is like GOD to me.’

  It was quite clear to me that she was completely awestruck by his IIT stamp. It’s ridiculous that people give unnecessary weightage to a chosen few three-letter combinations like IIT, IIM and IAS.

  ‘I personally find IITians to be too full of themselves,’ I objected.

  ‘Deep sir is different,’ vouched Madhuri. ‘He has been awarded the iTrot best innovator award for three consecutive years.’ Her voice was filled with deepest admiration and utmost respect.

  I gave her a whatever shrug, which she misunderstood to be my defeat.

  ‘Any girl would be lucky to get a guy like him,’ she said, smiling enthusiastically and looking eagerly at me. Clearly, she expected me to be thrilled at being the chosen one.

  ‘Deep and I … err … we are barely friends,’ I said hesitantly, to straighten things out.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, almost too abruptly, her face breaking into a silly, wide grin.

  It was evident that she so did not believe me.

  ‘I had no idea that he works here,’ I emphasized, glad to have someone to discuss the absurdity of the entire situation with.

  This time, she seemed to believe me. ‘Deep sir didn’t know either that you were joining iTrot. Kavita ma’am informed him only two days back.’

  ‘Sheer coincidence, don’t you think?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Kismat Konnection!’ she replied excitedly.

  I was about to tell her that I had little faith in fate, when a fat, fair guy walked in, snapping the fingers of both his hands alternately to produce a sort of musical tune.

  He squeezed his bulky frame into the chair next to me. I could smell the coconut oil in his hair even from a distance.

  ‘Namaste bhabhiji. Myself Sanjeev Sharma,’ he introduced himself, in a typical dehati style.

  Bhabhiji! Was he living in the black and white era? I gaped at him in disbelief. Sporting a tilak on his forehead and a partially unbuttoned, orange shirt, he looked like an avatar from Govinda’s Coolie No. 1.

  Seeing the perplexed expression on my face, he reasoned, ‘IIT Brotherhood, bhabhiji. Deep is my brother from another IIT.�
�� He paused to laugh at his own joke, before adding, ‘To, aap bhabhiji huin na?’

  It was obvious that he, too, was aware of my matrimonial goings-on. ‘How many people exactly do you think know?’ I inquired, shifting uncomfortably in my chair.

  I saw Sanjeev carefully survey the people in the neighbouring cubicles, take his hands out from his shiny black pant pockets, and start counting in binary finger notation. (You can count up to 1023 using base 2 notations on 10 fingers). He stopped at 8. With 2 to the power of 8 being 256, this meant that the entire office knew about my arranged marriage proposal to Deep.

  ‘Deep sir is an open book, you know, like Saifu in the movie Dil Chahta Hai,’ Madhuri offered, trying to salvage the situation.

  Immediately the image of a friendly, funny and flirtatious guy popped into my mind. I had quite liked that character, but I just could not see the connection now.

  ‘Suhaani ji, we have all been eagerly waiting to meet you, following every move of yours ever since you stepped out of the taxi,’ explained Sanjeev. ‘First you paid the taxi, then you signed the register, then you talked to the receptionist, then you went to the ladies’ room, then you had a coffee, then you looked at the Travel Times, had another coffee …’

  Flabbergasted, I looked at him blankly, as he narrated a minute-by-minute account of my entire day since I had arrived at iTrot. com. Discernibly, the entire office had been spying on me.

  ‘What kind of rumour-mongering happens in this office?’ I blurted out in exasperation. In general, like most people, I enjoy surprises. They add spice to day-to-day life. But too much spice can be difficult to digest, and today was turning out to be three red chillies’ hot spicy.

  ‘It’s not what it seems like,’ said Sanjeev calmly. ‘Deep had just showed us the biodata long time back, but when Kavita got to know that you were joining our company, all of us started teasing him,’ he justified.

  ‘Sharma ji,’ I replied respectfully, ‘I think there is a slight problem.’