BACK TO REALITY

SHIVAJI NAGAR METRO STATION

PUNE 2011

Zarah was Rohit's fiancee by then, and they were to be married soon. Zarah was in the US for studies, and Rohit had recently started working full-time. Since he and I had met many times, he knew me too. Somehow,

There was one thing I could do------Mission abort! I told the bouncy feeling in my heart, and it left me instantly. I quietly steeped into the next metro towards

Nagpur.

I got down at the metro station, which was close to my office, and took the office shuttle -----a free bus service provided to all the employees every half an hour. I dashed into the building as soon as the bus halted. Talking to Piyush was not in my fate, but I hoped that saving my job was. Quite a Few people were waiting for the elevator, so I took the stairs instead. Ten floors ---it is not a big deal for a fit young women like me! Or so I thought. The morale boost worked for the first three floors. By the time I reached the fifth floor, my tongue was hanging out of my mouth, and at the ninth floor it was sweeping the floor underneath. 'Only one more floor to go----you can do this!' I motivated myself loudly.

Just then, my phone buzzed. It was an unknown landline number from Nagpur. 'Hello,' I answered, panting.

'Adira Roy?' the male voice on the other end was stern.

'Yes, sir, who is this?'

'I am your manager, Rajbir. We are all in meeting room number five. Whenever you come to work, come in here,' he told me authoritatively

'Yes, sir I am almost . . . ' he disconnected the call before I could make up an excuse.

'Holy shit!' I mustered all the courage and moved towards meeting room number five.

The New Manager

Five well groomed girls and four formally dressed men sat with their heads bowed, around a wooden table in the room. The glass door was closed. A tall, lean man wearing a light- brown shirt and a pair of black trousers stood in one corner of the room. With a red marker, he was carefully writing on a whiteboard with his back towards the rest of the group as well as the door where I stood looking at them. I waited at the door, peeping in, trying to analyse the situation; he stopped writing and turned around, looking straight in the direction where I stood peeking in at the group. With his right hand, he signalled me to step into the room.

'Hello, sir, I am . . . ' before I could say more, he hushed me with the look in his eyes and a finger on his lips. The group sitting at the table turned to look at me; most of them were trying to suppress their smiles.

'Hello, do we have an addition to the group?' I heard a beautiful foreign voice ask. Looking in the direction of the sound, I figured out that the team was in the middle of a call with someone.

The company I worked for had clients in the US, the UK and Australia. My new team looked after the Australian clients. 'Our team benchmarks the salaries for its employees in Australia and looks after their employee satisfaction surveys as well as data analytics,' I was told later by a colleague. When I think of it, I cannot understand how a person of average intelligence like me ended up in a niche job like this. Rather than being happy about getting into the new team, I was always scared that I was not cut out for it, and that I might not be able to perform as well as expected.

'Yes, Cathy,' the guy in the brown shirt walked up to the table and addressed the voice on the other end. 'The newest team member has joined us late, very late,' he looked at me with penetrating eyes, and I immediately felt intimidated by him.

Cathy asked me to introduce myself to her. I was not prepared for this. I am never ready for introductions. 'Hi, my name is Adira. . . ' I began reluctantly.

'Isn't your name Adira?' the man interjected yet again.

'Yes . . . yes, madam, my name is Adira Roy, and I am new to this team,' I said sulkily and as quickly as I could. All the girls giggled but calmed down instantly as soon as the guy with the marker gave them a cold stare. I felt my ears become hot again. The unnecessary interruption from the stranger during my into had irked me. I kept my eyes down and stared at the carpet to calm myself down. I knew my anger would do me more harm than good, and I had never harmed anyone with my anger, so it was basically a useless emotions for me.

'Do not call me madam,. Please. Ad . . . Adira, is it?' Cathy asked politely.

'Yes, it is, Cathy. So, we were discussing the requirements. . . ' the man was getting on my nerves by answering all the questions in my place. He signalled me to take the lone empty seat. I walked towards it slowly and sank into the chair as low as I could, wishing to be invisible to the world.

Fifteen minutes later, Cathy and most of my new team members were still discussing the requirements for some projects.

'Cathy, I have a suggestion to make here . . .' the man in the brown shirt continued his conversation with Cathy, and my mind drifted into a sea of memories.

'. . . Adira should try it. What do you say? It will help her to understand the process and get absorbed into the system.' These words brought me back to the meeting room, and the transition was not as smooth as I would have wanted it to be.

What? What should Adira try? Why is he saying my name? Shit!

I looked at the man saying this with a questioning expression. I had no clue what was happening at the meeting. Frantically, I looked at the whiteboard. Some words were scribbled on it----charts, comparative analysis, data by Thursday ------a better plan. What has this bugger signed me up for?

'Yes, of course, Rajbir, we can do that. What do you think, Adira? Will you be able to manage it?' Cathy asked me.

So this is Rajbir? His interjections suddenly made sense, and I inspected the devil of a person who stood in front of me with his hands resting on his waist. I'd expected someone more mature, older maybe----like our college professor-----to be my manager. He looked so young, and I wondered how I would manage to take orders from him.

'Yes, madam . . . Oh, Cathy . . . Sorry,' the group laughed again.

'She says she will be happy to do it, Cathy!' for the first time since I had stepped into the room, Rajbir s interjection sounded like music to my ears. I listened to the rest of the call very attentively and pretended to take notes, not that it helped as I understood nothing. It had already been too late.

The meeting ended at 1.15 p.m. One after the other, the entire team left the room. It was only Rajbir and me who stayed back.

He said he wanted to talk to me since I had already defaulted on punctuality earlier in that morning and my performance at the meeting made my case worse. I was a bit scared, but there was nothing I could do. For the first time, he asked me something about me-----my expectations from him-----to be specific. Since I had nothing specific in my mind, I let him take the lead. Rajbir listed his expectations of me as a team member----the Frist being punctuality.

Later, he opened a big Excel sheet with lots and lots of data on it. I was sitting across from him, so he kept rotating the laptop every once in a while for me to be able to see the screen. Whatever he said for the next many minutes, went straight over my head, and I could not catch a thing. 'Move over and sit next to me so that you can see the screen. I will help you get your laptop as soon as we are done with this,' he told me, as if he was reading my mind.

'Of course!' I said enthusiastically, and pulled the chair next to him.

Meeting room number five was located at the centre of the tenth floor. All around the room were workstations. Next to the meeting room, was a pantry area with a couple of table and chairs.

Both of us were sitting facing the pantry door. I looked towards the bright laptop screen. Before I could begin again, there was a sudden commotion outside the pantry gate, and I looked in that direction to see what it was.

It was someone's birthday. A group of people was walking into the pantry with a big box of what appeared to be a cake and a few colourful birthday caps---a newly hired training batch. It was not difficult to guess; their mood was carefree, their body language relaxed ----they appeared to be the complete opposite of the kind of people who worked on the production floor.

While Rajbir crazily clicked on the folders, scanning them, I checked out the room which had nothing unusual in it-----a table, a few chairs, a dustbin, some markers. 'Here, got it!' my manager exclaimed, and my dull observation ended. He rubbed his hands together in excitement, as if a genie would appear out of them, and clicked on a file named Gordon & Son's Deck.

From the cornor of my eyes, I could still see the unusually happy bunch going in and out of the pantry creating a ruckus. 'Okay,' he said. As soon as the Deck flashed open on the screen, precisely at that moment, I saw someone familiar at the pantry door. My gaze darted in that direction ---it was him. He was standing at the door, with a little cake in his chick's.He was giggling like a child; his face lit up like a thousand candles, and when he laughed, his eyes sparkle brighter than stars. He was the same as I'd remembered him to be---- I felt the meeting room vanish into thin air, and the warmth of his smile and laughter filled my lungs. I inhaled deeply. His laughter had the same effect on me that the sunlight has on trees. I felt alive when he smiled. Just like that, my day was brighter than any other day at work because the unexpected had happened----Piyush Singh my one sided love for years was at my office

'The laptop has not walked out of the room yet! Rajbir made a sarcastic remark to bring me back, and I apologetically looked at the boring screen. He stared explaining something, but in my mind, I had lost track. I was now concentrating on what Piyush was doing. I sneakily glanced at the door again. He was not there. Instead, some other boy stood in the same spot. But I could see his shirt. It was the same shirt I'd seen in the morning. It was him! I could not have been mistaken in identifying Piyush. Maybe he works here too ---my heart swelled with hopes and dreams.