Short Story: The Telephone Preference Service

‘I wish I could take a day off and take you somewhere, but ……….’ Adwait gave Nimisha a rueful grin.’

‘No, that’s fine. I’m absolutely alright. There are so many things to do here.’

‘It’s because I took two days off for the house hunting, then I was in India for 3 weeks…’

‘Two weeks and three days. You rejoined work on a Thursday, didn’t you?’

‘I did. But Ralph manages to make it sound as if I’ve been away for four weeks.’

‘I’m telling you, I really don’t like the sound of him.’

‘No, he isn’t nasty. Almost all audit partners are like him. They are workhorses. They work hard and they want their assistants to work just as hard. If not harder.’

‘You will kill yourself at this rate. You’ve worked on all weekends ever since we came back.’

‘Just a few hours each day. That’s nothing. There have been times when I’ve had to work ten or twelve hours each on Saturdays and Sundays.’ Adwait couldn’t help but sound like a martyr.

Nimisha glanced at the clock and said, ‘You’ll miss your Tube.’

Adwait drew Nimisha close to him and said, ‘so what? There’ll be another.’

Nimisha giggled.

Later that afternoon, Adwait called Nimisha from office and said, ‘I don’t know when I will get to leave this evening. It could be pretty late.’

‘That’s okay. I went for a walk after lunch.’

‘How was it?’

‘Did you know there’s a park just ten minutes away?’

‘No, I didn’t. Actually wait. I think the letting agent did mention something like that.’

‘And you didn’t bother to verify it.’ Adwait could see Nimisha’s smile at the other end of the line. Thank God she was not one of those typical Indian women who couldn’t take care of themselves when in a foreign land.

‘Listen, I’ve got to go.’ Someone was standing behind him. Was it Ralph? Adwait hung up without waiting for Nimisha’s response.

No, it was not Ralph. It was Darren, a fellow flunkey like him.

‘Checking if your missus is okay, are you?’

‘Just a quick call.’

‘I just can’t believe you married a girl you met only three times before.’

‘It isn’t as bad as it sounds.’ Wearily Adwait launched into a hesitant explanation of how ‘modern’ arranged marriages were these days.

‘There is no pressure to get married. My elder brother saw fifteen different girls before he agreed to marry one. And the one he married, they sort of went out four or five times before they decided to tie the knot.’

‘But you didn’t get to take out your wife before you married her, did you?’

‘That’s because I am here and she’s …’ Adwait knew that his response sounded very un-English, which made him angry. No one had the right to judge him.

‘It’s worked out well for me. Touchwood.’ Tap, tap, his knuckles rapped his desk.

‘That’s all that matters mate.’ Darren tried to sound sincere.

‘Aren’t we going for that seminar tomorrow?’

‘Yes, at four. It should get over by six. Six thirty, if a few idiots decide to ask questions at the end to show everyone how smart they are.’

‘There’ll always be at least one person who will have a question. Then someone else who was planning to be quiet until then will ask the second question, then a timid, balding man in the front row will overcome his inhibitions and ….’

Darren laughed at Adwait’s joke. ‘Ralph’s balding,’ he reminded Adwait. They both turned around guiltily to make sure Ralph wasn’t around.

‘Listen, the lads are planning to go out for a drink after that seminar. You game for it?’

‘Yes of course,’ Adwait replied with a sinking heart.

It was almost nine thirty as he got off the Tube and started to walk home. Wearily he dialled the home number. As soon as Nimisha said hello, he said, ‘I hope you’ve had dinner.’

‘No, I didn’t. But if you were late by another ten minutes, I would have.’

‘Atta girl, that’s the way to go!’ Adwait’s spirits rose. It would have been dreadful if Nimisha had turned out to be some one who couldn’t cope and sat around moping.

Later that night, he confessed to Nimisha. ‘I’m going to be very late tomorrow.’

‘Didn’t you say you would be home early because you were going to a seminar and you would come home straight after that?’

‘Yes, but we are supposed to go out for drinks after that. I just can’t get out of that. Most probably we’ll end up at Rhimjhim. That’s the curry house we always go to.’

‘So, you’ll have fun.’ Adwait anxiously searched Nimisha’s face for any signs of anger or sadness. There was none, thankfully.

‘I thought that everyone went out only on Fridays.’

‘These days they prefer to have office evenings on Thursdays. On Fridays, people tend to go home straight after work.’

‘So, will you come home straight after work on Friday?’

‘Yes, I will.’ The earnestness in Adwait’s voice made Nimisha smile.

‘By what time?’

‘Ahhhh! I just don’t know.’


The next evening, after the seminar, the reception after a seminar and a visit to a pub, they did end up eating dinner at Rhimjhim, as Adwait had predicted.

‘Ad-Wait Chop-Raa! How are you?’ Adwait couldn’t place the middle-aged man sitting opposite him, who addressed him by his full name, as he took the Metropolitan Line home.

‘Don’t you remember me Ad-Wait? Don’t you work for Stetson?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Adwait conceded. Was this one of their clients? Some one he had met during one of the audits.

‘All well with you?’

‘Yes. And how are you?’ Adwait was forced to ask.

‘Pretty good. Out with the guys?’

‘Well yes.’

‘How’s Chris doing?’

‘Chris?’ Adwait thought for a few seconds before he asked, ‘Which Chris?’

‘Chris Lambert of course.’

Adwait pursed his lips and thought hard. Finally he conceded, ‘I’m really sorry. I don’t know any Chris.’

‘Neither do I,’ his companion said gently as Adwait tried to shake off the effects of the two bottles of Cobra beer he had during dinner, the two pints of Carlings he had at the pub and the small glass of red wine he had at the reception after the seminar.

Adwait started at the man.

‘You know me, don’t you?’ he was asked.

‘Yes, I do.’ Adwait wanted to put his head between his legs and sleep.

The Tube pulled into Finchley Road Station. Another ten minutes and he would be home.

‘I’m getting off here Ad-Wait,’ the man said as he got up. ‘If I were you, I’d take that badge off.’ He gave the nametag pinned to Adwait’s suit a tap with his forefinger and walked off.

Adwait almost ripped off the plastic in his shame. After a furious minute, he started to laugh. He was just overwrought. Nimisha was coping well, much better than he had ever expected she would. They would soon settle into a routine. He would get used to life as a married man with a hectic workload.

He put the tag which said ‘Adwait Chopra, Audit Services, Stetson,’ into a pocket.

It was almost eleven thirty when he got home. Feeling very tired, he walked in on tiptoe and took off his shoes before peeping into the bedroom. Thankfully Nimisha had gone to sleep.

‘Please wake me up when you see this,’ the yellow post-it on the fridge said. Like hell, he would. Adwait quietly brushed his teeth and stealthily crept into bed. He must have been a bit clumsy after all that liquor since Nimisha woke up almost immediately. Adwait touched her face, more to reassure him, and said, ‘I’m back.’

The next day he was really busy in a series of meetings and didn’t have the time to even call Nimisha until eight that evening, when he was ready to leave for home.

‘I’ll see you in an hour. And I am not going to do any work over the weekend!’

After they finished dinner, Nimisha told Adwait, ‘I got a phone call today. Two calls actually.’

Adwait’s eyes furrowed in concentration. ‘Someone called you on this number?’

‘Guess?’ Nimisha teased him.

‘I don’t know.’ Adwait picked up the plates and took them to the kitchen to wash up.

‘You don’t have to,’ Nimisha said, but didn’t really stop Adwait from washing the plates.

As he rinsed the bone china, he said, ‘Was it Papa?’

‘No, it wasn’t him.’ Nimisha’s father had called them once so far, just to make sure Nimisha was doing okay. It couldn’t be Daddy and Mummy, no, his parents would never call.

‘Was it that woman? The one met at that Indian shop last Sunday. We gave her our number, didn’t we?’

‘And she gave us hers. I think she wants us to call her. No, it was not her. The calls were for you actually. The first call was a ‘He’. I told him that you weren’t here and later his colleague, a ‘She’, called back at seven hoping you’d be back. I had a long chat with the second caller.’

‘Shit! They were marketing calls!’

‘Yes. They wanted to sell us an insurance policy. They were very persistent. Wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

‘You ought to have slammed the phone down.’

‘I was irritated a bit. Especially with the woman who called second. She seemed to think I was a fool who would believe everything she said.’

‘Why didn’t you cut her off?

‘I should have,’ Nimisha said ruefully, but I just couldn’t be rude.’

‘For God’s sake, why can’t you be rude? I’m going to place our number on the TPS right away.’ Adwait went to the laptop and pulled up a chair.

‘Do you know what the TPS is?’ he asked Nimisha

‘No. What’s it?’

‘The Telephone Preference Service. You go to the TPS website, enter your telephone number, email and house address and they will send you an email.’ Adwait’s stocky fingers quickly keyed the information in.

‘I had done this when I was at my Ealing studio flat. Not a single bastard could trouble me then.’

Adwait went to his Yahoo mailbox and a new email had arrived. ‘It’s pretty simple. I just need to click on this link and……Done! But it’ll take twenty eight days before it becomes effective.’

‘What happens now?’ Nimisha asked. ‘What’s it for?’

‘Those marketing bastards can’t make any unsolicited calls to this number once this becomes effective. They won’t pester you at all.’ Adwait took a deep satisfied breath and he turned around to look at Nimisha.

Nimisha’s face had turned red. Her eyes were welling up.

‘Hey! What’s the matter?’

Nimisha burst into tears. ‘Oh! You shouldn’t have blocked those calls. They are the only ones I spoke with all day today,’ she sobbed.

Book Review: A Nice Quiet Holiday

Lawyer turned detective novelist Aditya Sudarshan’s debut offering borrows at least one idea from Arthur Conan Doyle’s creations. A Nice Quiet Holiday has two men working in tandem not unlike Sherlock Holmes and Watson. The detective is a portly, courtly and old worldly Additional Sessions Judge from Delhi, Harish Shinde. Shinde’s law clerk Anant, the narrator of the story, is not unlike Watson doing most of the spadework for the Judge who prefers to be an armchair detective. No, Judge Shinde does not smoke a pipe or wear a bowler hat, he’s too Indian for that. However, just like Holmes, Judge Shinde is a student of human nature and does not hesitate to spout arguments and analyses at the drop of a hat (or turban if you will).

It was not just Arthur Conan Doyle’s creations that Sudarshan’s work reminded me of. The setting for the crime, a murder, is a family home in the foothills of the Himalayas where lots of friends, family and guests have gathered, smacks of something from an Agatha Christie, with a heavy Indian flavour of course. Except for the first chapter of the novel, the entire story is played out in that family home.

Sudarshan writes well, in simple English and in a manner that is both elegant and pleasing. In fact, his style of writing is good enough to iron over the few minor cracks in the story. For example, as Sudarshan explains, clerking for Judges is not a common practice in India, especially in the case of District Judges. However, Sudarshan’s style of delivery makes it look very natural.

One of Sudarshan’s achievements is that he treads the fine line between pulp fiction and literature very well. A Nice Quiet Holiday has all the ingredients needed for a best seller. It has a murder, exciting court proceedings, a tall and intelligent lawyer (the narrator), a damsel almost in distress, mob violence and a philosophising detective. Despite the presence of so much spice (or masala if you so prefer), Sudarshan’s fine writing makes it difficult to label ‘A Nice Quiet Holiday’ as pulp fiction. The best bit about this novel is that Sudarshan keeps us guessing till the end as to the identity of the murderer.

A Nice Quiet Holiday runs to 224 pages and the word count doesn’t exceed 50,000 (my own estimate). In other words, it is a fairly quick and light read and is ideal for train journeys. It wouldn’t surprise me if the judge and his clerk make many more appearances in Sudarshan’s future works and solve more crimes.

Book Review: Rivals by Bill Emmott

Bill Emmott, a former editor of the Economist, has written various books, most of them on Japan. In ‘Rivals’, Emmott examines and analyses Japan, China and India, the power struggle between these three powers, their relationships with the west and tries to predict how they will shape up in the future.

Emmott raises scores of issues and pokes around in the most unlikely of places as he surveys the huge Asian landmass for the benefit of his readers. Is India likely to overtake China? Which of the three countries – Japan, China and India - will come off best in the struggle for pole position in Asia? Twice Emmott quotes a senior official at India’s External Affairs Ministry who told him ‘both of us (India and China) think that the future belongs to us. We can’t both be right.’ Does Emmott agree with this faceless bureaucrat? Was the US right in giving nuclear technology to India, though India is not a signatory to the NPT? Why does Japan refuse to make a proper apology for its war crimes during the Second World War? Should it do so?

Emmott picks out five flash points and danger zones in Asia where trouble may erupt, leading to involvement of world powers and a massive shake up of the world order. Surprisingly Kashmir doesn’t figure in this list, though Pakistan and North Korea do. Emmott’s analysis of North Korea is especially excellent and one gets to know facts about North Korea that aren’t easily available in the public domain for a lay person.

Through out the book, one finds various mentions of the War Crimes Trial held in Tokyo after the Second World War. Emmott, very rightly in my opinion, calls the trials a farce since it was more to punish Japan for using war as an instrument of foreign policy (something that Britain and other western powers routinely did) and having the temerity to attack the west (and western colonies), rather than for actual war crimes by Japanese soldiers. Emmott quotes with approval in more than one place the dissenting judgement given by Justice Radhabinod Pal, India’s nominee Judge.

‘Rivals’ is written in a manner not much different from articles carried in the Economist. There is no hyperbole or rhetoric or melodrama and statistics pop out of every page. At times Emmott presents facts (the contrast between the elegant and modern interiors of Reliance’s office at Maker Chambers IV in Mumbai and its rather dirty surroundings) and talks of his experiences in Asia (having a champagne and caviar dinner with communist politicians in Kolkata) in order to buttress his arguments. I was reminded a lot of Paul Kennedy’s ‘Rise and Fall of Great Powers’ as I slowly made my way through ‘Rivals’.

What I liked most about Rivals is that Emmott is very sympathetic to the point of view of each of Japan, China and India, without losing his objectivity. For example, while explaining that India is aggrieved by China having a seat on the UN’s security council, he says that “it feels especially odd to India that China became a founding P5 member when its colonial invader, Japan, was defeated, but India did not, though it dispatched its own colonial master at the same time, peacefully, as the UN Charter would prefer, rather than in war.”

Towards the end of the book and in some cases, even before that, Emmott starts setting out his various conclusions to each of the issues he raised initially. Emmott also makes various recommendations, addressed to the US and to the rising powers of Japan, China and India. All of Emmott’s conclusions and recommendations made a lot of sense to me. I sincerely hope that the powers-be listen to all or at least some of them. Rather than disclose what the extremely knowledgeable Emmott’s conclusions are, I’ll leave it to you to read this excellent book to find out for yourself!

Short Story: The Trade Unionist’s Son

'I will have nothing to do with trade unions when I grow up,’ Bimal told his father with tears in his eyes.

The dramatic declaration only elicited a chuckle from Chittaranjan who fondly patted Bimal on the back and told him, ‘that’s fine. When you grow up, you can go into business and make more money than you know what to do with.’

‘And I won’t give you any!’ Bimal added in between his sobs.

‘My boy Bimal is going to be a big businessman and make a lot of money,’ Chittaranjan told his wife who was standing nearby. However, Chittaranjan’s wife shared her son’s resentment of his father and she refused to play along.

‘Don’t worry. He is only ten years old. Soon he will realise that there is no point in asking his father for anything. He might as well learn to fend for himself. Just like me.’ The last bit was added after a thoughtful phrase.

‘Come on. Don’t be so nasty. What do you lack?’ Chittaranjan asked his wife who gave a toss of her head and went back to her work. As for Bimal, he stalked out of the house, muttering curses about a father who could not buy him a bicycle, something which all his classmates seemed to have. Bimal knew exactly why his father could not afford to buy him the bicycle, despite being a supervisor at the jute factory. His mother’s railings against his father made it difficult for either Bimal or his younger sister to not know that Chittaranjan’s trade union activities had brought them all to the brink of destitution. If only his father had not been a unionist, he would not have been suspended from his job so many times, he would not have his salary withheld for such long stretches and he might even have managed a few promotions.

The worst sin committed by his father in his mother’s eyes was that he was agitating for the rights of workmen in his factory, even though he was a supervisor and was meant to keep the workmen in line.

Bimal never forgot how important it was to have nothing to do with trade unions. After he finished school and scored a very high rank in the IIT entrance exams, he opted for the IIT in Mumbai, rather than the equally good one at Kharagpur, just to make sure he was as far away from the corrupting influences of trade unions that permeated the state of West Bengal.

Every term break, he went home to be with his parents, more out of necessity than choice. He would have liked to travel around India rather than spend his vacations in Howrah, but he just didn’t have the money for it. However, he made it a point to behave like a tourist while he was with his parents. He pretended to not remember the names of any of his school friends, especially the ones who were around in Howrah, and whom he could have visited. When his father talked of his union activities which still took up a huge chunk of Chittaranjan’s waking hours, he listened with a very disinterested air, as though he were listening to a report on sub-Saharan Africa on the BBC.

As soon as he passed out of the IIT with a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering, he was snapped up by a Japanese car maker for its factory in south India. Bimal called up his parents to tell them the good news.

‘Son, I’m so happy,’ his father told him. ‘But I wish you had found a job in our state.’

‘Thanks to the unions, we Bengalis are forced to work else where,’ Bimal observed quietly.

Chittaranjan quickly changed the topic. ‘Who cares? Your starting salary is going to be much higher than what I earn after almost thirty years of service!’

‘I wouldn’t have achieved this if it hadn’t been for you and mother,’ Bimal had the grace to say, though he didn’t mean any of it. If his father hadn’t fooled around with unions, he would be earning a lot more than what he did now.

After working for three years in Chennai, Bimal persuaded his employer to sponsor him for an MBA at the Asian Institute of Management in Manila. Being an engineer was good fun, but management was where the big bucks lay. After his MBA, Bimal was given a two-year posting in Japan.

‘Why don’t you ask them to post you in India?’ his mother wondered over the phone.

‘Do you seriously expect me to prefer India to Japan?’ Bimal asked his mother incredulously. ‘In any event, I’ll visit you people once or twice a year, irrespective of whether I am in Japan or in Chennai.

Next time you come home, we’ll get you married,’ his mother told him gaily. Bimal promised himself that it would be a while before he went home.

Japan was a revelation to Bimal. Until he went to Tokyo, Bimal thought that Calcutta, Howrah and Mumbai were the most crowded places in the world. Tokyo showed him how even a clean and modern city could be so incredibly congested.

The people were unbelievably polite, but the food was horrible, so much different from what he was used to. Why can’t they cook the fish? Bimal wondered again and again when faced with a sushi or a sashimi.

The people were all law-abiding, but some of the rules seemed to be quite draconian to him. He was required to carry his passport with him at all times. This was a nuisance. Bimal knew how painful it would be if he were to lose his passport and had to approach the Indian embassy for a duplicate. He was relived when he found out that as a long term visitor, he was expected to register himself as an alien and obtain a Gaijin card. The Gaijin card too had to be carried with him always, but Bimal was sure that replacing the Gaijin card would be easier than obtaining a duplicate Indian passport.

Bimal made his way to the city hall, wondering how he would figure out where the foreigners’ registration desk was, since all the signs were in Japanese. He needn’t have bothered. A middle-aged man, most probably a bureaucrat, came up to him and asked him very politely in very bad English if wanted to register for the Gaijin card. It was plain sailing after that.

After a month in Tokyo, the trouble began. Bimal had another month to move out of the apartment arranged by his employer and find a place of his own. He was told by the first agency he rang that they had nothing suitable for him. They were very apologetic about it, the apology taking a few minutes of his time. The second agency was a little bit more curt, but they too did not have anything suitable for him. Could they take down his details and call him when they found something appropriate? Oh no! They could not. They were very unlikely to find anything suitable for someone like him. Bimal spoke to five agents with varying degrees of politeness before one agreed to find an apartment for him.

‘Why should I have so much trouble finding an apartment,’ Bimal asked a few Japanese colleagues who shrugged their shoulders.

‘You ain’t one of them man,’ an American in his department told him, when they were out of earshot of every one else.

Bimal was shocked. This was horrible. Why should Japanese landlords mind renting out to an Indian? There didn’t seem to be any answers on offer, until his agent told him very politely that all Asians, other than the Japanese, are very dirty. They cooked everything they ate in oil, didn’t they, which did not help keep the kitchen clean, did it? It took the agent almost three weeks to show Bimal an acceptable flat, though it was a basic affair with peeling paint in a predominantly Korean locality.

After his ordeal in finding a flat, Bimal tried to settle down in his job. He had to spend another twenty months in Japan before he could go back to Chennai and there was no point in moping about. He was learning so many things at his work place which more than compensated for the flat-hunting ordeal.

Even though Bimal’s neighbourhood was not at all posh, his ethnic Korean neighbours were very friendly towards him. Soon Bimal found himself reading up on the history of Koreans in Japan. Many of them had lived there for two or more generations, their parents and grandparents having migrated to Japan when Korea was a Japanese colony. A large chunk of the Koreans who came to work in Japan during the Second World War had actually been conscript labour. Even though they were all now eligible to become Japanese citizens, and many of them had accepted Japanese nationality and taken on Japanese names, they continued to face a lot of discrimination in all spheres.

Bimal found a Korean maid to clean his apartment and wash his dishes every morning. Soo was always cheerful and friendly and soon Bimal found himself looking forward to her visits in the mornings before he went to work. All said and done, Soo was the only local person other than a colleague whom Bimal had befriended in the last two months. Soo’s English was very rudimentary, but eventually Bimal worked out that she was taking classes in English in the hope of eventually working for a good hotel.

‘What sort of job will you get in a hotel?’

‘Oh! I be maid.’ Soo giggled.

‘Is it easy to get such a job once you learn enough English?’

‘No. Not easy. And I, Korean.’

Bimal was incensed. ‘You Koreans ought to form a union and fight this sort of discrimination you know,’ he said.

Soo was silent.

‘I could show you people how to start a union,’ Bimal added.

Short Story: He and She

Everyone said he was the best creative brain Agya Anderson had. No one ever called him handsome or even good looking, but when a jealous colleague suggested that he was the most eligible bachelor within the Indian advertising world, there were no sniggers. He was of less than medium height, his beard always unkempt, the grey hairs in them prominent and visible, his glasses always dirty and his hair always slightly longer than it ought to be. However, his clients ate out of his hands, the big bosses respected and trusted him and all the women in Agya Anderson’s Mumbai office had a crush on him. He was a loner and did not have a single close friend in the office. He had a past, they all knew that, but he never talked about his divorce even after a couple of pints with the boys after work.

Only once a month when his secretary placed the alimony cheque under his nose did he grumble and ask, ‘Is there any way I can avoid sending this cheque?’

And his secretary would soothingly reply, ‘we don’t want another contempt of court case against us, do we? It’s not really worth the trouble, is it? You won’t go broke if you sign this, will you?’

‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ he would say. His secretary would then sympathetically nod her head, but stand right next to him till he signed the cheque.

He would then moan, clench his jaw and finally sign the cheque, after which he would sit back as though he had just signed away half his wealth.

He was aware of her existence, but he ignored her as he did so many other people. She smiled at him a couple of times, once near the photocopier and another time near the coffee machine, but he refused to smile back. Finally she had managed to almost collide with him at a cocktail reception, the glass of Bloody Mary in her hand, mere inches from his dinner jacket. Instead of showing some gratitude for having spared him from a disaster, he bared his fangs and snarled, ‘you ought to be more careful.’ Which was very rude since that almost collision was so obviously contrived and nobody would have failed to notice that it was just a pass and nothing more.

That incident had the effect of hardening her resolve. A week later when they were all standing around the silver trolley, drinks in their hands, celebrating the scooping up of India’s second biggest toothpaste manufacturer, she went up to him and asked, ‘have you already put your very intelligent brain to work for these bastards?’

This time he had no excuse to be rude. ‘No, I haven’t,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’

She drooled over him. ‘I so wish I had a little bit of creativity in me. I would give an arm and a leg to be in your team.’ Conversation around them died. People were openly staring at them. Agya Anderson was a very liberal place by Mumbai standards, but such an open pursuit was definitely unheard of.

‘I guess I had a very narrow escape,’ he told her with a wry smile and ignored her for the rest of the evening.

She did not lose heart. She smiled at him whenever she could. If there was anyone else present, she made it a point to ask him a question, even though his replies were curt and snappish.

A month later, he came up with a brilliant campaign for the new client, one that had a three-year old girl walking around with a smile that made passers by blind. The client was delighted and the production team, in which she was a lowly assistant, went to work.

One evening after they had wrapped up a shoot at a local school, she went up to him and said, I’m likely to go broke in a month’s time.’ He looked at her with irritation, but didn’t say a word. ‘I’ve told the gang that I’ll get you to take me out on a date in a month’s time. If I fail, I have to take five of those good-for-nothings to the Dum Pukht for lunch.’ He continued to be silent. ‘That’s a month from yesterday,’ she added wistfully.

‘Why don’t you take them to lunch right away?’ he asked her and walked off.

Two weeks later, she had made no progress. The whole office was watching her lack of success with merriment. Unlike him, she had many friends in office since she always had a kind word for everybody. None of her friends understood why she was behaving thus. She merely smiled when they demanded an explanation. ‘But you are so very different from him, as different as chalk and cheese,’ they told her. ‘Even if you are successful, you will not be happy.’ She merely tossed out one of her warm and generous smiles in reply.

The month she had under the wager slipped away and she took her friends to the Dum Pukht for lunch.

‘You lost, didn’t you?’ he asked her when he met her at the coffee machine a day later.

‘Hmm,’ she said, her face downcast. Then she looked at him and said sweetly, ‘at least I tried.’

He turned his back to her and started to gulp down water from the Styrofoam cup.

‘You always drink some water before you drink coffee or tea, don’t you?’

‘Yes, do you mind?’

‘But why do you do that?’

‘Why don’t you do it?’

‘Because it’s not done. Just not done.’

‘And who says so?’

‘You Maharashtrians always drink some water before you drink coffee or tea, don’t you?

‘You’re well informed.’

‘Is it because it’s bad for the teeth to drink cold water after a hot drink?’

‘If you knew this, why did you have to ask me?’

‘Oh! Just polite conversation.’

‘Why can’t you leave me alone?’ he lashed out, the sudden burst of fury distorting his face. ‘We don’t have a thing in common,’ he added, a trifle gently.

‘Okay, I won’t trouble you ever again,’ she told him with very sad eyes.

‘Try not to forget your promise,’ he told her as he walked away with a cup of cappuccino.

She stayed away from him for a week, followed by another week. She looked away with sad eyes as he walked past. And then, he started to miss those conversations, those flirty comments, the obvious come-ons. It took him a few more days to realise that he had been a fool.

‘Listen, I’m sorry,’ he finally managed to tell her.

‘For what?’

‘I’ve been a nasty bastard.’

‘You don’t have to feel sorry. You owe me nothing.’

‘Like hell, I don’t. Listen, let’s go out for dinner today.’

She pursued her lips and pulled a face. ‘You’re kidding me.’

The whole office soon got to know that he and she were going around. She received numerous pats on the back and even more warnings. He is too selfish. He is not a one-woman man. He is too cold blooded for someone like you.

‘Oh, let me be,’ she always responded in her usual good natured way. No one had the guts to rib him about it though.

They maintained a professional relationship at work.

‘When will you tell your parents?’ they asked her.

‘Why should I tell them anything?’

‘What happens when they want you to get married?’

‘That’s a long way off. Why worry now?’ She could afford to make light of such questions since she was only twenty-six and her parents had given her two more years.

One day she told him, ‘why don’t you shave off your beard. You’ll look a lot better without it.’

‘Like hell I will.’

‘And you could cut your hair shorter.’

‘Go to hell.’

She never repeated those suggestions, but when he suggested that she move out of the flat she shared with a friend and move in with him, she refused. ‘Let’s carry on the way we are doing now.’

‘I’d rather have you with me all the time. I love you.’

‘So do I.’

‘So move in with me. And we should get married as well.’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘Move in now. We can get married later.’

‘I doubt it. I like you a lot. But I don’t think I can live with you forever.’

‘You mean, this is temporary?’

‘Well yes.’

‘But it was you who …’

‘I who chased you? Hmm, yes. I did do that.’

‘Why?’

‘I liked you. I was curious. And hey! I did give you a chance.’

‘What chance?’

‘Never mind. We are bound to break up. Eventually, that is….’

‘You mean you want to break up?’

‘Well, now that we’ve started to talk about it, we might …. we might just as well.’

‘So, if hadn’t asked you to move in with me, we would not be breaking up?’

‘Well, yes. Not immediately. But eventually we would have…’

‘What the heck do you want?’

‘Nothing. Not from you. Not any more.’

He walked away.

Two days later he cornered her alone. He had shaved off his beard and cut his hair short. ‘Let’s do dinner,’ he said.

‘What’s the point?’ she asked.

‘The only two things you ever asked me to do, I’ve done.’ He gave her the best smile he had in his armoury. ‘People are already laughing at me,’ he added grimly.

‘There are a lot of other things which I didn’t ask you to do.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like not dropping cigarette ash all over the floor in your flat. Like brushing your teeth in the morning rather than using mouth wash, like taking a shower more often rather than relying on a deo, like …’

‘I can do all that for you.’

‘Can you stop being so arrogant?’

‘You were just checking me out?’ he accused her.

‘Well, yes’ she agreed, giving him her usual warm, generous and good natured smile.