When I was in college I remember being led to this office. I was part of a group of three who had been hired to hand out leaflets at malls and cinema halls. It was to pay us 150 rupees per day which at that time was damn good money. It still is, in some ways. So. The office.
It was an office for 8PM whisky. I remember standing there at eleven in the morning, waiting for someone to give us our leaflets so we could all go and pile into the Sumo waiting downstairs and take our cut from the main guy – the guy who had led us here and now sat on the battered sofa while we stood – and then get dropped at various malls and cinema halls across the city. Then she walked past me. This woman. This gorgeous angel of a woman. She was not too young, but definitely not too old. She walked past confidently, smiled at someone, broke my heart and went to a desk and sat down behind it. She was dressed in a saree and it was yellow with a red border. I remember it vividly. The office was in shades of sepia. Everything was brown and dusty and the curtains were drawn over the windows but the sunlight still poured in and the air shone with dust. Everything, as I said, was sepia.
And through it all she had walked, like a damsel of yore, and left behind her this very tangible sensuality amid swirls of dusty sepia motes. I remember her lips. They were vivid red. She had on some mascara. I do not think there has been another Indian woman who has created such turmoil in me.
She sat down, arranged herself, and flicked her fingers at the peon. He nodded and scurried away in the opposite direction. I looked. He returned with a tray, and on that tray was a glass. Full of whisky. And she took it and she drank it neat. I may not have known much, but I knew definitely that that glass was full of undiluted 8PM whisky. And she downed it. Sepia air, sensuous woman, and she swigged whisky neat.
I so wanted her job. And her, but that’s another thing altogether.
Since then, I have grown up. I have wanted many kinds of jobs. I have seen people with long hair who hang out all day at Koshy’s and whenever I hang out at Koshy’s all day the bill is in the multiple thousands, which means that these people can well afford it because they spend all day there most days of the week. At least, they are there every time I am. So they do something which gives them all this money, even though they spent most of their week at Koshy’s. I wanted that job.
Of course, they might simply have had extremely rich friends who had so much money and valued these long-haired people’s company so much that they paid every time. But I do not – and more importantly, did not – believe it.
I have seen people sitting and discussing the latest ads and how they played an important part in the story, the dialogues, the music or the tagline or the slogan. I was fascinated. I saw filmmakers discussing shots and I wanted to do that. I read Stephen King and Ray Bradbury on their writing habits and I wanted to do that.
And now, I have a job. A job that surprised no one – except probably my parents, who thought I would never get a job, ever. A job that - I thought – was very much in my element, baayen haath ka khel.
I enjoyed it. In the beginning.
Now I don’t any more. A friend told me that every job is like this. Sometime during the first 6 months this whole thing hits you and you wonder why you took it up in the first place. But I feel that this is deeper than that. Much deeper.
There is something else that my heart and soul want to do and that – unfortunately – is not this.
I think I am going to have to give in to my heart – and maybe my soul – otherwise, I am afraid that I will always stand there in the corridor and look at those people and want to be like them, want to do what they do, and never get to doing it.
Not that right now what I want to do is sit in a sepia room and drink amber whisky as dust motes swirl past billowing curtains –
Wait.
I didn’t say that.
Delete.
Ummm.
So. The main thing right now is:
How do I make my room sepia?
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