A break. From writing.

I found myself in Gujarat and amidst silence and trees. There's always work but this time around I found some time to think and unwind and find food that didn't go down quite well with my system. Like someone wise said, it's all an experience.

It inspired me to write a little bit. But more importantly, it inspired me to recognize how much work I need to put in my writing to get down something that is both pleasing and substantial.

I stumbled back into Bombay weak from the failing fight my stomach put up with the food and slept for ten hours straight only. The weekend is almost over but a hugely optimistic part of me is okay with it - because here's another week long scope to mess up in a completely unpredictable, new manner. 

This is the quietest that the floor at work gets.
There is a conspicuous hum of the air conditioning and faraway sounds of rustling papers and someone folding a plastic bag. There’s the occasional cough and sputter and muffled sound of someone on the phone.
It’s eerie yes, but also very calming. You have the printer to yourself. Granted that it may not necessarily work, but I’d rather deal with an angry printer than ten people jostling to use it. The sound of typing echoes a little and well I have always thought that it is a delightful sound, like stories being created or a tapestry being put together with wooden spindles. Very often, I shut my eyes and type, letting the sound fill me up to the brim.
There is no one else on the floor now. The people in the distance have left. When I crane my neck, I see rows and rows of empty desks, where their computers are still warm from being used all day.
The pantry feels squeaky clean, the smell of coffee replaced by the smell of medicinal flowers from the room freshener.
When I leave, the raw sound of my feet against the floor is magnified. It feels like a lot of people are clapping around me, cheering me on at the end of a long day.

It feels like a Monday and it’s not. But instead of being relieved, I am feeling as displeased as I would on a Monday.

The week, which is the unkind variety with a working Saturday, feels endless even though there are 3 days to go. There are so many wicked roads to run and mountain of work to summit before Sunday comes around and the week is behind us.

There is a sense of doom that has enveloped me, and a lot of other people by the look on their faces, but I think that comes from having to work while a lot of other people holiday in exotic places.

Or maybe it’s something else but it’s a whole lot simpler to assume that it is something silly and that it will pass.

All my things are packed. The work day is over. From where I sit, I see people leaving, carrying lunch boxes and tubed newspapers. There's just one more day to go. The weekend, in its bright tempting glory, waits on the other side.

I am waiting for my friends to wrap things up, so we can walk to the train station together. It's a short walk, but it feels trying to walk it alone. Sometimes, we don't even talk to each other, we just trudge along in silence. But it's so much nicer than being silent by yourself.

The street lights will come on and we'll leave the building soon, to eat buttered bread with tea, collectively looking forward to the end of the week.

We have to fill out a questionnaire at work. It is to ascertain our emotional tenacity in an office setting.

Everyone checks the option which is the most ideal. That is because the alternatives are so obviously tending towards assigning a score, that anyone cans see through them.

For a hypothetical situation wherein a superior yells at you and insults you in public, the chances of people marking the alternative “I will burst into tears in front of everyone because I am extremely sensitive” are low even if they are in fact perpetually on the verge of tears. Nobody is that honest. Or that naïve.

So naturally, everyone marks “I will take it in my stride and accept it in a mature fashion.”
A lot of the questions have these unrealistic alternatives that are packed away in water tight compartments. After answering about 4 questions, it becomes clear that if you mark “A” you will get the highest possible emotional tenacity score.

That’s exactly what happens. They hand out chocolates and fruit punch as prizes for being the most “emotionally competent” workplace. Everyone laughs and takes the little score cards handed out. After a day or two, the cards are used to scoop out dirt from the spaces in between the laptop keys.

The Monday caught me off guard.

It happens every week. I walk into office with my head hanging with dread. Then I check the work situation and I always come out feeling even more worried, despite my pessimism.

Everyone is sneezing or coughing or trying to control runny eyes. I think we got it from each other.

We also tried to blame it on someone, just to find some entertainment and vent some morning stress. Turns out people are very defensive and competitive on Monday mornings and someone managed to get their feathers ruffled. So we dropped that and went on to pursue our private stress busters –blogs, newspapers, matrimonial sites, you know the usual.

The dreaded Monday is gearing up to tear us down. It might seem exaggerated, but trust me it isn’t.

There’s the unfortunate time where your throat feels like sandpaper and your eyes begin to leak.

Then slowly, everything around you feels fuzzy and seems to move slower than it probably is. The voices of the people alternate between faint and loud and they seem to be all garbled.

Eventually, your head is too heavy to hold up and it begins to swivel around on your shoulders like a broken toy. That’s when you pack your things, trudge home and fall asleep right after having some chicken soup.

Or you can sit at your desk and labour away, trying to make intelligent sounding reports or discerning conclusions. Then you can watch yourself fail at it all, misspelling every other word because your eyes are too watery to look at the screen.

There’s the underwater feeling.

Where I say things but it comes out all garbled. Where my head is swimming through all the conversations and the unanswered emails. My mind is asleep, all curled up under a thick blanket.

The floor at work is all dressed up and there are paper lanterns with shimmering tails. The tails tickle the heads of the tall variety of people. Everyone is chattering, in loud dramatic voices. I can hear them but I can’t comprehend too much. It’s like looking at the fogged mirror after a bath.

Atleast the week has ended. Small, but significant, mercies.

The week isn’t quite over.

The dread of a working Saturday starts to fill you up mid-week. It settles in the pit of your stomach like a bad meal and stays there until Saturday afternoon. Throw in a deadline and an early morning jog, and you’ll find yourself keeling over in bed on Friday night, and not from a hangover like the other normal people with Saturdays off.

On every Friday which precedes a working Saturday, the same thoughts cross my mind. I ask myself the same questions, run the same excuses through my head to try and get out of all the stuff I am supposed to do. It’s almost like it’s a biweekly event, where everyone here stands around with dull faces, whining like as if it’s never happened before, about this unfortunate event coming their way. It’s like a sore mass of despair lined with envy, a few hundred people’s envy all balled up in one dark cloud.

The Saturday comes and passes us by like any other day. It isn’t half bad given that people are busy making Sunday plans. The Working Saturday, like all impending doom, is never as worrying as the build-up to it.

The Monday has taken me apart.

It has thrown at me tasks that I was meant to do many days ago, but got buried under other tasks. Like the monster that it’s meant to me, it has blindsided me in meetings with questions that I didn’t expect. In the quiet lunch hour, I stayed back to finish work that suddenly is far more frightful than it seemed last week while I procrastinated. The table is cowering under a laptop that feels like it’s burning up and tottering piles of documents that appear to be conspiring to kill me or atleast pounce on me the next chance they get.

It isn’t ending, this Monday. It’s just stretching into the evening, oblivious to tired minds and pleading faces. The five days ahead, and I have no idea where they’ll take me, seem like a time so long that it’s hard to imagine the other side.

After you discount the drama, what remains is still pretty scary.

The people here are looking like Christmas trees. There are post-festival celebrations and everyone possibly got hit by a glitter gun on their way here. Our desks are lined with marigold flowers which are crumbling and making an orange-yellow mess on my clothes.

One such Christmas tree wrapped in gold brocade came by to invite me for some “fun time” in the cafeteria. I wasn’t fooled by the loose use of the word fun. I said I’d be there just to get out of any conversation but the tree kept looking at me with big, unblinking eyes. I started to smile but then it dawned on me that there were some monetary requests coming my way. “Have you made your contribution for the fun event?” The tree asked me; her tone lacked cheer all of a sudden. “No, I didn’t know it was happening today.” She said “200 rupees” as a passing remark and walked away.

I got called in for a meeting and was mercifully spared of what I hear was “lots and lots of enjoyable items” Then I spent the rest of the day telling people the specifics of the meeting, hoping to convince them that there really was one. Turns out the tree had told everyone that it was because I didn’t want to spend money. While it wasn’t completely untrue, I didn’t want to deal with any more sparkling people who are known to pursue a topic till tears run down your guilt ridden cheeks.

It’s like sitting in a drum. You can hear yourself whisper. Everything you say under your breath, something derogatory about someone or even something you’re really hoping for, everything comes back at you, louder and more aggressive.

My temples feel warm. The fluids inside my head are making guttural sounds. I have sneezed four times in the past hour. The people around me turn their heads in my direction every time I sneeze. I say, “Excuse me.” and then they look away. It’s an obligation.

The whole floor is cold. Not a regular air-conditioning-gone-crazy cold. It’s like being in a different country. I stick my hands under the laptop, hoping that the weird computer heat will help me regain some feeling in my fingers.

The drum feeling returns. The people here seem to hear my every move. If I tear open a toffee wrapper, heads swivel. If I unlock my phone, they turn to look. My phone doesn’t even make any sounds. It’s like sitting in the midst of very well trained dogs.

In the evening, I pack my things as quietly as one can. The person opposite my desk, who I can’t even see from my current position, says, “You’re leaving?” It’s begins to border on eerie.
I leave the building quickly. I sneeze a few more times and turn around and say “Excuse me.” I am pretty sure the people have heard me, even if they’re far away.

There is a new coffee machine in the pantry.

The buttons are a fierce blue and they blink, like what I imagine is that back of a robot. The sides no longer have a picture of a pretty girl with long flowing hair. Now, there’s Pac-Man consuming cups of coffee instead of whatever else he otherwise consumes. One can’t tell if he’s happy or sad by the caffeine intake, because well it’s hard to tell with a face that geometric.

They took the old coffee machine out in a big blue polythene and from a distance it looked like a person. A dead body, possibly mangled, being taken away to be appropriately disposed. The place where the machine was kept was caked with old coffee remnants and half crushed beans. There was a distinct smell of sour milk.

In the afternoon, we went with our ceramic mugs to partake of some new coffee. The machine sputtered and sighed and a rich brown stream of coffee slid into my mug. I drank it with unnatural amounts of relish. There is something very comforting about coffee that doesn’t taste like metal scrap.

We are surrounded by tottering piles of papers. I have lost track of the number of sheets I have looked at and number of staple pins I have torn apart to be able to read the document easily. The back of my neck is burning up; a feverish reaction to both the stress and the heat. We have been in this storehouse since morning, but we haven’t found the document we came for.

The storehouse is a square shaped building with a tin roof. There are hundred of shelves, going all the way up to the ceiling. A scrawny boy with the agility of a monkey goes up and down a ladder if you point to some document you’d want to see but is beyond your reach.

The enthusiasm we showed when we started petered off within the first hour of entering this dungeon like place. After a couple of hours, I began to lose judgement. Everything seemed like the right document. The letters formed one large mass, like ants attacking a sticky toffee, and the papers started crumbling under my sweaty palms.

Now, I felt like I was caged in and I could never leave. It had been five hours and the document was still on the loose. There was one last box of papers left on the top shelf and I asked the boy to get it for me. He went up the ladder, breathing heavily, and tried to come down holding the cardboard box. He fell off the ladder at the same moment that I started to warn him that he would.

After we picked him up from between the boxes and their contents, we realized that the little accident had brought on a graver one. The piles had all collapsed and there was no way of now differentiating the papers we had gone through from the ones we hadn’t.

I walked out of the storehouse, into the blinding sunlight, and kept walking until the urge to shoot someone had passed. Behind me, somewhere in the storehouse, the monkey child continued to swing from shelf to shelf without a care in the world.

Shuttling.

It's a stuffy jeep like vehicle that carts employees from one branch office to another. I am sitting in it now, with the side of my head pressed against the warm glass of the window.

The man next to me has his hands clasped together in prayer. This is confusing me because the journey isn't dangerous or anything. He then looks up at me and looks away, as though he read my thoughts and couldn't care less about my presence.

The vehicle is playing folk songs mainly about miracles and divine interventions. The rearview mirror supports a hanging, and alive looking, Buddha figurine. It sways back and forth, and jumps every now and then at a pot hole. It's ever smiling, of course, through smooth and bumpy rides.

The glass gets fogged, as it rains, and everything looks suddenly a lot less irritable on the outside. The insides, mildly devout but admittedly agreeable, fall into a comfortable lull.

Free!

Tomorrow, as the country will be draped in saffron and green and little children will run around holding little paper flags, we will roll over and be grateful for the holiday. And grateful for freedom of course.

The people here have been chirpier and gleeful. They looked thrilled yesterday, even though it was a Monday. Today, the cafeteria had an Independence Day special menu which involved tri-coloured food – most of which gave me a bad throat from the artificial food colouring. The walls of the cafeteria were plastered with tiny flags which, because of the table fans and AC vents, made a harsh flapping sound. The people who served us food were wearing little badges saying “I love India.”

After lunch, when we stepped out, they handed us little fliers about the country’s independence movement. The little write up was extracted from some History text book. They said “Happy Independence Day” to us, in a practised, bored voice.

The holiday feeling is delicious, like two Sundays in a week. You know, because we don’t get Saturdays off. This is the closest we’ll come to experiencing a 5 day week.

Then there are days when you keep your head low and work all day and when you look up, the sun is setting and the sky is glowing with the dying light.

Long days are vaguely satisfying, because  although things don’t necessarily work out but you feel like if you’ve worked all day, something is bound to come out of it. The paper cup with my tea from earlier today has gone limp, the sides are soggy and a thin, unpleasant film has formed over the liquid. It sat there all day, while I typed away furiously or ran across the floor looking for print-outs or paper clips.

Right now, I have ten minutes before something else comes up and demands a thousand word report off me. There is an interesting rhythm  of the people around me shutting their things or locking drawers. There is an amusing enthusiasm at the thought of the day coming to an end. People are looking cheerful, making small talk about small things.

The outside world, atleast from where I can see it, is dark and fierce despite its determined glow. The street lights are beginning to come on and I can imagine the elevators beginning to get crowded with people attempting to put on their raincoats or find their umbrellas.

Then they will step out, while I try and look intelligent  in some meeting, with their fancy shoes splattering water on others like them.

Daze.

There is a sheath of lethargy pulling over the entire day. I have stared at the computer and the open Word Doc for an hour or so, all while a distant marching band tune filled my head. Not in a determined sort of way, but more in a vague manner – as if I am standing at the window of a tall building and far away I can see the marching band.

The pins on my soft-board, in all their annoyingly bright colours, have moved themselves around to form lines and circles to amuse me. Perhaps, I moved them myself but it’s hard to tell. It’s as though my hands belong to someone else and I am watching them move with the same intrigue as you’d bestow on a talking bird. The lists on the board are precise, all written out in my unwavering handwriting. I seem to have lost the motivation towards these tasks that I possibly felt when I made those lists. I now disregard their presence with great ease.

My phone rings several times. The sound is harsh and alien. I don’t answer it because that will require speaking with people and I can’t trust my foggy mind to formulate acceptable responses. I continue to stare at the computer and write disconnected lines – Green feet at the museum, Herring and canned juice.

I skip lunch and drink lots of water instead. It makes my stomach feel like it’s floating away, like a piece of shiny plastic caught in the waves. If I close my eyes, I am sure I’ll see the ocean and the gurgling sound it makes.

The day is dark now, but hardly in a frightening way. I am pleased with this place, where there isn’t too much light but there is lots of room to mentally stretch.

Rusty beverages.

There is a broken coffee machine in the pantry. On one of side of its metal body, there is a blown up picture of a laughing girl in a flowery dress on a bicycle. She isn’t riding it, she is sitting with a man, her lover I’d presume, and is concentrating on not falling off. He appears to be steering the cycle with unnatural ease all while looking extremely gleeful.

The dark brown decoction sputters out of the machine every time an ambitious person attempts to make himself a decent cup of coffee. The milk gurgles from tubes into the paper cup which sometimes quivers a little, unable to stand its own. The two foam together into a seemingly agreeable manner which hoodwinks the person into tasting this frothy liquid.
Then he gags, and drinks cold water in a hurry, his face twisted in disgust.

The coffee concentrate is the bitterest thing you’d have the misfortune of tasting. It’s vile, like drinking medicine but without the healing properties. It’s unclear whether the proportion of the liquids has gone wrong or if it’s simply just really bad coffee.

A man, with a torn gym bag full of tools, is a regular in the pantry. He tinkers with hammers and screwdrivers, attempting to fix the machine almost every other day. But somehow hasn’t, so far, managed to fix the problem permanently.

The days in between, some people make trips there, despite having been burnt by the proverbial fire before. They make themselves a cup, childishly hoping that the coffee has magically become suitable for human consumption. The rest of us, who aren’t as brave but definitely more bored, observe this and take notes.

There is a belated mid-week crisis that people here seem to be facing. They are stuck in a weird place, where Friday is not so far that it doesn’t matter, but not close enough to start bringing out the party hats. They are making sour comments about how they are hungry and cold and can’t wait for the weekend. I don’t even think some of them are hungry, because I have seen them eating banana chips from a noisy plastic packet. I think it’s just cathartic to whine. They are putting it out there, they could be hungry or cold or sad or hormonal.

In an attempt to cheer themselves up, I saw a couple of people opening up weekend guides on online magazines, slyly texting potential plans to their friends. One of them abandoned all subtlety and started making calls to people asking them if they wanted to go to Pune on the weekend to attend some house party which, and the whole floor heard and sat up, will have free flowing alcohol and the best pork chops one will ever taste.

Saturday being a non-working day is a bit of a big deal here. People plan. People tie their hopes around that glorious span of time where for once you also have a holiday, like the rest of the world.
As I was writing this, one of the enthusiastic people from another floor stopped by to ask me if I was interested in planning a weekend beach outing with some other colleagues. When I smiled and turned it down citing prior engagements, he raised his eyebrows and said, “You have plans?” I am not sure what shocked him more; that people here can have plans too or that I was cool enough to make weekend plans that didn’t depend on the people I work with.

He walked away, a little annoyed, with a parting remark that I’d “better atleast make it for the team lunch”. Team lunches usually involve great amounts of cribbing about having to work on Saturdays. I wonder what we’ll do with all our free time at tomorrow’s lunch.