‘Hey, that’s IIT?’ I said out aloud as I noticed the board for IIT Chennai.
‘Guindy, guindy,’ the auto driver said a word which would have led to trouble if he had spoken it in Delhi.
I looked at the campus wall that lasted for over a kilometre. The driver recited the names of neighbourhoods as we passed them – Adyar, Saidapet, Mambalam and other unpronounceable names so long they wouldn’t fit on an entire row of Scrabble. I felt bad for residents of these areas as they’d waste so much of their time filling the address columns in forms.
We passed a giant, fifty-feet-tall film poster as we entered Nungambakkam. The driver stopped the auto. He craned his neck out of the auto and folded his hands.
‘What?’ I gestured.
‘Thalaivar,’ he said, pointing to the poster.
I looked out. The poster was for a movie called Padayappa. I saw the actors and recognised only one. ‘Rajnikant?’
The auto driver broke into a huge grin. I had recognised at least one landmark in this city.
He drove into the leafy lanes of Nungambakkam till we reached Loyola College. I asked a few local residents for Chinappa Towers and they pointed us to the right building.
I stepped out of the auto and gave the driver a hundred-rupee note. I wondered if I should give him a ten-rupee tip for his friendliness.
‘Anju,’ the driver said and opened his palm again.
I remained puzzled and realised it when he gestured three times.
‘You want five hundred? Are you mad?’
‘Illa mad,’ the driver said, blocking the auto to prevent me from taking out the luggage.
I looked at the desolate street. It was only nine but felt like two in the morning in the quiet lane. Two autos passed us by. My driver stopped them. One of the autos had two drivers, both sitting in front. The four of them spoke to each other in Tamil, their voices turning louder.
‘Five hundred,’ one driver who spoke a bit of English turned to me.
‘No five hundred. Fifty,’ I said.
‘Ai,’ another driver screamed. The four of them surrounded me like baddies from a low-budget Kollywood film.
‘What? Just give me my luggage and let me go,’ I said.
‘Illa luggage. Payment . . . make . . . you,’ the Shakespeare among them spoke to me.
They started moving around me slowly. I wondered why on earth didn’t I choose to work in an air-conditioned office in Delhi when I had the chance.
‘Let’s go to the police station,’ I said, mustering up my Punjabi blood to be defiant.
‘Illa police,’ screamed my driver, who had shaken hands with me just twenty minutes ago.
‘This Chennai . . . here police is my police . . . this no North India . . . illa police, ennoda poola oombuda,’ the English-speaking driver said.
Their white teeth glistened in the night. Any impressions of Tamil men being timid (influenced by Ananya’s father) evaporated as I felt a driver tap my back.
‘Fuck,’ I said as I noticed one of the drivers take out something from his pocket. Luckily, it wasn’t a knife but a pack of matches and cigarettes. He lit one in style, influenced by too many Tamil movies. I looked down the street, for anybody, anyone who would get me out of this mess.
One man came out of the next building. I saw him and couldn’t believe it. He had a turban – a Sardar-ji in Chennai was akin to spotting a polar bear in Delhi. He had come out to place a cover on his car. Tingles of relief ran down my spine. Krishna had come to save Draupadi.
‘Uncle!’ I shouted as loudly as I could.
Uncle looked at me. He saw me surrounded by the autos and understood the situation. He came towards us.
The drivers turned, ready to take him on as well.
‘Enna?’ the uncle said.
The drivers gave their version of the story to him. Uncle spoke to them in fluent Tamil. It is fascinating to see a Sardar-ji speak in Tamil. Like Sun TV’s merger with Alpha TV.
‘Where are you coming from?’ he said.
‘Airport.’
‘Airport cannot be five hundred rupees. Hundred maximum,’ he said.
The four drivers started speaking simultaneously with lots of ‘illas’. However, they had softened a little due to uncle’s Tamil. After five minutes, we settled for a hundred bucks and disgusted glances from the drivers. My driver took out my luggage and dumped it on the street as he sped off.
‘Thanks, uncle,’ I said. ‘You’ve lived in Chennai long?’
‘Too long. Please don’t stay as long as me,’ Uncle said as he helped me with my luggage to the lift. ‘Punjabi?’
I nodded.
‘Come home if you need a drink or chicken. Be careful, your building is vegetarian. No alcohol also.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, people here are like that. For them, anything fun comes with guilt,’ he said as the lift doors shut.
I rang the chummery doorbell. It was ten o’clock. A sleepy guy opened the door. The apartment was completely dark.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Krish from Delhi. I am in consumer finance.’
‘Huh?’ the guy said. ‘Oh, you are that guy. The only North Indian trainee in Citibank Chennai. Come in, you are so late.’
‘Flight delay,’ I said as I came into the room.
He switched on the drawing-room light. ‘I am Ramanujan, from IIMB,’ he said. I looked at him. Even just out of bed, his hair was oiled and combed. He looked like someone who would do well at a bank. With my harried look after the scuffle with the auto drivers, I looked like someone who couldn’t even open a bank account.
‘That’s Sendil’s room, and that’s Appalingam’s.’
He pointed me to my room.
‘Anything to eat in the house?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ he said and opened the fridge. ‘There is some curd rice.’ He took out the bowl. It didn’t look like a dish. It looked like rice had accidentally fallen into the curd.
‘Anything else? Any restaurant open nearby?’
He shook his head as he picked up two envelopes and passed them to me. ‘Here, some letters for you. The servant said a girl had come to see you.’
I looked at the letter. One was the welcome letter from Citibank. The second envelope had Ananya’s handwriting on it. I looked at the curd rice again and tried to imagine it as something yummy but I couldn’t gather the courage to eat it.
I came to my room and lay down on the bed. Ramanujan shut the lights in the rest of the house and went back to sleep.
‘Should we wake you up?’ he had asked before going to his room.
‘What time is office?’
‘Nine, but trainees are expected to be there by eight. We target seven-thirty. We wake up at five.’
I thought about my last two months in Delhi, when waking up at nine was an early start. ‘Is there even daylight at five?’
‘Almost. We’ll wake you up. Good night.’
I closed my door and opened Ananya’s letter.
Hey Chennai boy,
I came to see you, but you hadn’t arrived in the afternoon as you told me. Anyway, I can’t wait any longer as mom thinks I am with friends at the Radha Silks Shop. I have to be back. Anyway there is a bit of drama at home but I don’t want to get into that now.
Don’t worry, we shall meet soon. Your office is in Anna Salai, not far from mine. However, HLL is making me travel a lot all over the state. I have to sell tomato ketchup. Hard, considering it has no tamarind or coconut in it!
I’ll leave now. Guess what, I am wearing jasmine flowers in my hair today! It helps to have a traditional look in the interiors. I broke a few petals and have included them in this letter. Hope they remind you of me.
Love and kisses,
Ananya.
I opened the folds of the letter. Jasmine petals fell into my lap. They felt soft and smelt wonderful. It was the only thing about this day that made me happy. It reminded me why I was here.
16
It is bad
news when you hate your job in the first hour of the first day of office. It isn’t like Citibank did anything to piss me off. In fact, they tried their best to make me feel at home. I already had an assigned cubicle and computer. My first stint involved working in a group that served ‘priority banking’ clients, a politically correct term to address ‘stinking rich’ customers. There is little a customer needed to do to become priority except wave bundles of cash at us. Priority customers received special service, which included sofas for waiting areas instead of chairs, free tea while the bank representative discussed new ways to nibble . . . oops sorry, invest clients’ money. And the biggest touted perk was you would get direct access to your Customer Services Managers. These were supposed to be financial wizards from top MBA schools who would take your financial strategy to a whole new level. Yes, that would be me. Of course, we never mentioned that your customer service manager could hate his job, do it only for the money and would have come to the city only because his girlfriend was here.
I had to supervise eight bank representatives. The bank representatives were younger, typically graduates or MBAs from non-blue-blooded institutions. And I, being from an IIM and therefore injected with a sense of entitlement for life, would obviously be above them. I didn’t speak Tamil or know anything about banking. But I had to pretend I knew what I was doing. At least to my boss Balakrishnan or Bala.
‘Welcome to the family,’ he said as we shook hands.
I wondered if he was related to Ananya. ‘Family?’
‘The Citibank family. And of course, the Priority Banking family. You are so lucky. New MBAs would die to get a chance to start straight in this group.’
I smiled.
‘Are you excited, young man?’ Bala asked in a high-pitched voice.
‘Super-excited,’ I said, wondering if they’d let me leave early as it was my first day.
He took me to the priority banking area. Eight reps, four guys and four girls read research reports and tips from various departments on what they could sell today. I met everyone though I forgot their similar sounding South Indian names the minute I heard them.
‘Customers start coming in at ten, two hours from now,’ Bala said. ‘And that is when the battle begins. We believe trainees learn best by facing action. Ready for war?’
I looked at him. I could tell he was a Citibank lifer. At forty, he had probably spent twenty years already in the bank.
‘Ready? Any questions, champ?’ Bala asked again.
‘Yeah, what exactly am I supposed to do?’
Bala threw me the first of his many disappointed looks at me. He asked a rep for the daily research reports. ‘Two things you need to do, actually three,’ Bala said as he took me to my desk. ‘One, read these reports everyday and see if you can recommend any investments to the clients. Like look at this.’ He pulled out a report from the equities group. It recommended shares of Internet companies as their values had dropped by half.
‘But isn’t the dot com bubble bursting?’ I asked. ‘These companies would never make money.’
Bala looked at me like I had spoken to him in pure Punjabi.
‘See, our research has given a buy here. This is Citibank’s official research,’ Bala spoke like he was quoting from the Bible. Official research was probably written by a hung-over MBA three years out of business school.
‘Fine, what else?’
‘The second important job is to develop a relationship. Tamilians love educated people. You, being from IIT and IIM, must develop a relationship with them.’
I nodded. I was the endangered species in the priority-banking zoo that customers could come throw bananas at.
‘Now, it is going to be hard for you as you are a. . . .’ Bala paused as if he came to a swear word in the conversation.
‘Punjabi?’
‘Yes, but can you befriend Tamilians?’
‘I am trying to. I have to,’ I said, wondering where I could call Ananya apart from her home number. If only these damn cell-phone prices would drop fast.
‘Good. And the last thing is,’ Bala moved forward to whisper, ‘these reps are quite lazy. Keep an eye on them. Anyone not doing their job, tell me.’ He winked at me and stood up to leave. ‘And come to office early.’
‘I came at seven-thirty. Isn’t the official time nine?’
‘Yes, but when I was your level, I came at seven. If you want to be like me, wake up, soldier,’ Bala said and laughed at his own joke. The Tamil sense of humour, if there is any, is really an acquired taste.
I didn’t want to be like him. I didn’t even want to be here. I took a deep breath after he left and meditated on my salary package. You are doing it for the money, I told myself. Four lakh a year, that is thirty-three thousand a month, I chanted the mantra in my head. My father had worked in the army for thirty years and still never earned half as much. I had to push bubble stocks and the cash would be mine. Life isn’t so bad, I said to myself.
‘Sir, can I go to the toilet?’ one female rep came to me.
‘What?’
She looked at me, waiting for permission.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Sri.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Coimbatore,’ she said, adjusting her oversized spectacles with cockroach-coloured borders. Fashion is not a Chennai hallmark.
‘You went to college?’
‘Yes sir. Coimbatore University, distinction, sir.’
‘Good. Then why are you asking me for permission?’
‘Just like that, sir,’ she said.
‘No one needs to ask me permission for going to the toilet,’ I said.
‘Thank you, sir.’
I read reports for the next two hours. Each one had financial models done by overenthusiastic MBAs who were more keen to solve equations than to question what they were doing. One table compared value of Internet companies with the number of visitors to the site. The recommended company had the lowest value to eyeball ratio, a trendy term invented by the analyst. Hence, BUY! screamed the report. Of course, the analyst never questioned that none of the site visitors ever paid any money to the Internet company. ‘It is trading cheap on every multiple conceivable!’ the report said, complete with the exclamation mark.
‘Sir, my customer is here. Can I bring them to you?’ Sri requested well after her return from the toilet.
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘Sir, this is Ms Sreenivas,’ Sri said. A fifty-year-old lady with gold bangles thicker than handcuffs came to my cubicle. We moved to the sofa area, to give a more personal, living room feel as we robbed the customer.
‘You are from IIT?’ she peered at me.
‘Yes,’ I said even as I readied my pitch about which loss-making company to buy.
‘Even my grandson is preparing for it,’ she said. She had dark hair, with oil that made it shine more.
‘You don’t look old enough to have a grandson preparing for IIT,’ I said.
Ms Sreenivas smiled. Sri smiled back at her. Yes, we had laid the mousetrap and the cheese. Walk in, baby.
‘Oh no, I am an old lady. He is only in class six though.’
‘How much is madam’s balance?’ I asked.
‘One crore and twenty lakh, sir,’ Sri supplied.
I imagined the number in my head; I’d need to work in this job for thirty years to get there. It almost felt right to part her from her money. ‘Madam, have you invested in any stocks? Internet stocks are cheap these days,’ I said.
Ms Sreenivas gave me a worried look. ‘Stocks? Never. And my son works in an Internet company abroad. He said they might close down.’
‘That’s USA, madam. This is India, we have one billion population, or two billion eyeballs. Imagine the potential of the Internet. And we have a mutual fund, so you don’t have to invest in any one company.’
We cajoled Ms Sreenivas for five minutes. I threw in a lot of MBA terms like strategic advantage, bottom-line vs. top line, top down vs. bottom up and
it made me sound very intelligent. Ms Sreenivas and Sri nodded at whatever I said. Ultimately, Ms Sreenivas agreed to nibble at the toxic waste.
‘Let’s start with ten lakh,’ I said to close the case.
‘Five. Please, five,’ Ms Sreenivas pleaded with us on how to use her own money.
I settled at five and Sri was ecstatic. I had become their favourite customer service manager.
Bala took me out for lunch at Sangeetha’s, a dosa restaurant.
‘What dosas do you have?’ I asked the waiter.
‘We have eighty-five kinds,’ the waiter pointed to the board. Every stuffing imaginable to man was available in dosa form.
‘Try the spinach dosa. And the sweet banana dosa,’ Bala said as he smiled at me like the father I never had. ‘So, how does it feel, to get your first investment? Heart pumping?’
My heart didn’t pump. It only ached. I’d been in Chennai for fifteen hours and had not spoken to Ananya yet. I wanted to buy a cell-phone as soon as possible. Wait, I’d need two.
‘I see myself in you. You are like me,’ Bala said as he dunked his first piece of dosa in sambhar. I had no clue how he reached that conclusion.
I had Ananya’s home landline number. But she didn’t reach home until seven. She had a sales field job so no fixed office number as well. I remembered how we’d finish lunch in campus and snuggle up for our afternoon nap. It is official, life after college sucks.
‘Isn’t this fun?’ Bala said. ‘I get a rush every time I come to the bank. And it is twenty years. Wow, I still remember the day my boss first took me out for lunch. Hey, what are you thinking? Stop work thoughts now. It is lunch-time.’
‘Of course,’ I said and collected myself. ‘How far is HLL office from here?’
‘Why? You have a potential client?’ Bala asked as if the only reason people existed was to become priority banking customers.
‘Possibly,’ I said. One good thing about banking is you don’t feel bad about lying at all.
‘It is in Nungambakkam. Apex Plaza,’ he said.
The waiter reloaded our sambhar and delivered the banana dosa. The latter tasted like a pancake, and I have to say, wasn’t bad at all. ‘Oh, that’s where I am staying, right?’