Settling Down

I got a place to live in. And quite a swanky place that is, let me tell you. For those who are a little too concerned with the details, it is a 2bhk without an expressive toilet and an open, even smaller kitchen. I got a sofa in my kitty, even as I stand to lose a seventh of my salary every month along with the three others I am sharing the flat with. The flipside is that I am not sharing the place with someone I have known well enough. Besides, methinks this joy, the kind that I am feeling after having finalized a place, robs me of the pleasure of enjoying the company of dearer people, and those who helped me put up with this unclean city for one seemingly unending month. You can’t have the best of both worlds, tells a fellow employee, and very rightly. On a second thought, I realized that there is a third angle involved, the one which now has assumed paramount importance: the employment that I have. A recent, random browse over the internet seemed to pull up a fascinating report in which they ranked my employer as the best people to start your career with. How many of us, fresh graduates, will agree is the question. But that is what reports are meant for, aren’t they? And what different work are we, as consultants (this is still a far-fetched euphemism for the labor we are entrusted with), providing to our clients, if not detailed reports on things they already acknowledge and the labyrinthine maze of details that stares in their face if otherwise. To account for the third angle, this place is closer to the office, theoretically.

I got a new job in one of my dreams. In fact, I was offered two jobs, one with QUALCOMM, and the other with ZS Associates. No sooner did I accept the ZS offer than I was shaken awake. Would I leave for zs? This was a moment was realization that my dreams are no longer the pleasure they used to be. What has become of the brain-box that was the source of a Bengali-British romance? Or a Russian, in the worst case? Instead, all I dream is about abandoning one clerical post for another, and even worse. The QUALCOMM thing was just the dream, one of those which you can attribute the “too good to be given a thought to” phrase to. The dwindling memories of the college days bring a cheer or two to the chapped lips. Ah! The days of glory! (I hereby announce the poetic liberty to concoct stories that render exuberance to an otherwise drab personality).

I will come back to the city and its attributes, and not just for the sake of it. Besides, there is a lot more to this city than meets the eye. Now this one is not a hateful ranting, but just another piece of observation and something that co-incidentally turns out to be not-so-pleasant for people who admire this city. This thing is about the fact that no matter how early I leave for home after work, there has not been a single day that I have reached within two hours. It so happens that I do not get a bus that goes to my place within half an hour. And when I do, the traffic here does not allow the vehicle to move. So, I am not at fault if I am left thinking that this whole city contrives against me, and wants me to be out. But I am a gutsy feller and I am still sweating it out here, ain’t I? Another incident that I now remember is a train journey and some help I thought could have done me some good. Never mind the details, but I was hurried into boarding the wrong train by none other than the station master. I was going to get the paperwork done for the new place I am going to be in. And the perfectionist that I am touted to be, I found flaws with the land-lady, the broker and almost everyone else involved with the handing over. (i am back to writing this after a span of 3 weeks or more and I can assure that this was not how it was going to be at the moment of inception).

Ok, so the place is somewhere in a locality called Chunabhatti, just of the eastern express highway. Does it ring familiar bells? Nopes, because the bell tolls for the four horsemen. Yeah, I am done improvising (fooling around).

Now, theoretically, it should take only thirty minutes to get to my workplace. But the place this city is, and Vivek Sharma, the perfectionist, does not want to try and find fault with it, makes it impossible to get back to my so called “home sweet home” after a boring day at work before an hour and a half. Do I give up? Nopes. I am still trying alternate routes, and discovering that travelling through slums, on a theoretically longer path makes your life easier. This is almost equivalent to saying that you want to catch your nose with your fingers, proverbially, and there is this “catch”. There is a plate full of palatable dishes, let’s make it sweets, and your hand cannot avoid them once you set your eyes upon it. Hence, whenever it gets an option of reaching for your nose directly, it first glides through the highly contaminated space to the plate, thrusts the delicacy into the ever small-ing mouth, and then “tries” to locate the sensory organ that was instrumental in causing the delay (can be both the eyes and the nose, and I would chose the nose here). Now, there is always an alternate. Life is a little too generous in a way that it always offers you a choice. You can restrict your hand to catching your nose from behind the neck. Not that the sense organ or your eyes would not get a whiff of the mouthwatering delight, but that since you hand is only as long, the prospect of pampering yourself first would seem a far-fetched idea. Consequently, after a bearable spell of disliking the process, it consummates. You have the tip of your nose in your finger tips and can award any punishment for causing the pain of missing out on your favorites. Need I say more?

Once upon a time Vivek Sharma was a student. Ah! Those days seem so far removed thoughts. Now Vivek Sharma is a salaried employee who cannot afford to miss a single day in office lest he should lose a valuable chunk of his monthly gross. The trouble is not about being regular or having been stuck into a routine life; that was anyway the case back in college. The issue here is that I “cannot” miss here whereas I did not “want” to miss there. Those were the days when I used to be a “potli baba” is you remember one from our childhood. For those who were sophisticated enough to watch Simpsons or any other cartoons for that matter, he had a lot of stories in his “potli”. Now, I fare no better than a grandma who keeps repeating the same stories. But then there is always a better way to repeat a story. I have some of them in my repository as well. How many of you think that as a writer, I need an apprentice? I don’t think; a friend here does. She asked me to employ her as my secretary who would keep giving me ideas on topics to exercise my writing skills on. Not a bad idea at all, if it is a she is it?

I get my bus from a stop named Priyadarshini, right on the Eastern Express Highway, and that is the busiest route in Mumbai, so far as I can tell. Anyone who has to move out of Mumbai to the central suburbs and the harbor line areas, has to go through this route and via Dadar. This causes an understandable amount of suffocation on this route. There are 15 buses to my destination. Only one can avoid this route, remember the catching-your-nose story. So I always have 15 choices. Yesterday, I took a bus which was vacant but with a swarm of people towards the back door. I thought of getting in through the front door, and I did. To my horror, the drover and the conductor, both, blocked my way, asked me to get down and board the bus from the back door and no sooner did I get down than they started the bus. I was aghast at this pompous behavior of those public servants. And they say Mumbai has the best people you find in India. I have yet to come to terms with this. To add to this, the bus dragged on a rather old man while he was trying to get on to it. I was more the more fortunate one to be able to set a foot on the stairs. Later inside, when a few sympathetic travellers raised the case of the poor fellow, the conductor simply shrugged off the responsibility by saying that every day, everyone boards the bus, there is no different treatment to any one, and that the driver was not at fault. There is a proverb saying that the boss is always right. Here, everyone, right from the bus driver and the conductor, let alone the boss, is always right it seems. This land of dreams gives me dreads.

One thing that I realized from my stay here in Mumbai is that overstaying your welcome is not the best of ideas. A fool that I was, I was already a bit late to realize it and even more late to act upon it. As they, if you do not make mistakes, you do not learn. I am a wiser man now.