This story can be read as a stand-alone piece, or in conjunction with some other stories set in the same setting:
1. Winning, a short satire on corporate awards
2. The Importance of being well-dressed, a poignantly unfunny look at romantic cliches
3. Freedom's Just Another Word... one of my favourite pieces of writing. It just is.
A Holiday for Kalpana Kinnarkar
"I say, Rocky, who's Kalpana
Kinnarkar?"
Roxanne "Rocky" Colabewala,
Secretary to Bhaskar Shrivastav, the Head of Private Banking at DCTMR Bank, and
also, incidentally, the most beautiful woman in the entire G-block of
Bandra-Kurla Complex, looked up, turning her lovely dark eyes upon Mandar Kale,
Manager, who was leaning over her cubicle wall on a warm April morning, and had
just asked the question.
"Let me see," she said,
clicking her mouse. "Ah, there she is. Clerk, sits in the Thane office,
lives in Dombivali, one year and two months with DCTMR, reports to...to you,
actually."
"Ah yes, I thought so, I mean,
but the whole bunch of them sitting in Private Banking Operations reports to me
and half the time I don't know who's leaving and who's just joined. Year and
two months, you say? I really ought to visit the place sometime and meet the
new folks."
Rocky, who approved local conveyance
bills on Shrivastav's behalf, knew that Mandar had not been to Thane in four
years, but said nothing.
"She's applied for leave, you
know," he went on.
"She's eligible for it. What's
the issue? Do you need me to tell you how to approve a leave application or
something?" she asked.
"What? No, of course I know how
to approve a leave. I have forty people in my team, you know, Rocky.
Forty!" Mandar puffed up a little.
"Forty? I'd never have
guessed," said Rocky, smiling, "since you don't seem to know the
names of more than five."
"Uh. Yes. I mean, anyway, that's
not the point. I mean she wants the leave right smack bang in the middle of
May."
"Oh. The whole
no-leave-for-childless-employees-in-May rule."
"So that's what I meant to ask -
is she...does she?"
Rocky pursed her lips.
"It says 'Miss Kinnarkar' on her
employee records, so I suppose she's single. HR will have further
details."
"I'll go see Dedhia,"
muttered Mandar, referring to his immediate superior and walked away.
Rocky shrugged, clicked her mouse
again and returned to planning Shrivastav's Hong Kong trip the following week.
#
"This is
so good," said Dedhia as he put a piece of garlic-fried chicken into his
mouth. "So, so good. There's nothing like chicken. Nothing!"
They were sitting in the expensive
Chinese Restaurant opposite the road from DCTMR Bank, along with some people
from Dedhia's team and Ardy Cowasjee, another Chief Manager, who also happened
to be Rocky’s boyfriend. Dedhia was one of those people who is pure vegetarian
at home, eats only chicken outside, and makes a great fuss about the fact that
he 'loves non-veg food'. He was giving a treat to his team to celebrate his
son's birthday, and had invited Ardy (since he occupied the cabin adjoining to
his) and Rocky (because any gathering became far more pleasant when she graced
it) along.
"It's all right," said
Ardy, who preferred to get his Chinese food from hole-in-the-wall restaurants.
"So, amazing thing happened
today," continued Dedhia, discarding a chicken leg with half the flesh
still on it. Rocky shuddered at the egregious wastage.
"Shrivastav noticed you?"
asked Rocky with a perfectly straight face.
"No, no. I mean...some girl in
Mandar's team - she asked to go on leave in May."
"Ah," said Ardy.
"Like come on, only employees
with children are allowed to take leave at that time. She's not even
married!"
"Do we know that?" asked
Ardy.
"Yes yes, I checked with HR.
This is ridiculous. It's well-known in the Bank - those who have school-going
children take their holidays during the summer vacations, and everyone else is
supposed to be at their posts."
"Would her absence hamper the
functioning of your team?" asked Ardy, mildly.
"Well, not really, she's just a
clerk, but still. It's the principle of the thing. Summer vacations are for
employees with kids in school. These other people can take an off anytime
during the rest of the year."
"But Mandar here has forty
people in his team, you know. Forty!" said Rocky, a cool, clear gaze
directed at Mandy, who had the decency to squirm.
"It's the principle of the thing. No
children, no summer vacation." said Dedhia. "That's when all the NRI
clients come to India and stuff. Very critical time for our business, the month
of May.”
"Very true," agreed Ardy.
"I hear you're travelling to Dalhousie next month, by the way?"
"Me? Oh, yes," said Dedhia,
his tone a little defensive. "It will be a working vacation for me,
though, really. I'll be checking in from the Dalhousie branch, and..."
"We don't have a branch in
Dalhousie," smiled Ardy. "But maybe some other bank will let you sit
in theirs.”
“What? No, you can’t connect to our
server sitting in…” began Mandar.
“My, my, look at the time,”Ardy consulted his
watch. “We should be back before Shrivastav notices.”
"He never notices us,"
pointed out Mandar gloomily.
"No, but he'll notice that I'm not there," pointed out Rocky.
Dedhia called for the bill, and they
shuffled to their feet.
"So I'll reject her leave
application then, boss?" asked Mandar.
"Of course, no exceptions, no
exceptions," said Dedhia, handing his credit card over to the waiter.
"Why don't you wait till Friday
to reject the application?" suggested Rocky, looking at Mandar. "Do
it today and the girl will get upset and call you in office - or worse, she
will want to meet you and ask to come here. Friday, late in the evening is
always the best time to screw over a subordinate."
"Brilliant idea! You're so
smart, Rocky," beamed Mandar, even as Ardy cast a surprised look at her.
As they were crossing the road back
to their office, Ardy pulled Rocky aside at the divider.
"What was that about?"
"Tell ya later," she said.
"Very well, then. Join me for TT
at the Parsi Gymkhana later?"
"Not today, Ardy. Going to
Dombivali."
It was only through an extraordinary
exercise of will that Ardy Cowasjee managed not to reel at the thought of his
beloved Rocky going to a place like Dombivali. Which was just as well, for he
would have fallen into traffic and gotten killed, and that would have broken
Rocky's heart.
#
"Rocky, can I have a word?"
She sighed as she heard Mandar's
voice drift over the cubicle wall.
"Good afternoon, Mandar. Hot
outside, isn't it?"
"Like a pressure cooker. But
that isn't the point. I sent out a mail to my team's group ID just now."
"I'm sure you do that a lot,
since you don't actually know their individual names," she could not
resist the taunt.
"In a few minutes, I got the
'out of office' responses from those who are, well, out of office."
"Very efficient of our mail
server to do that, I'm sure."
"And one of them was from Kalpana."
"So?"
"I never approved that leave
request, Rocky. So how has she gone on leave?"
Rocky took a deep breath before
replying.
"No, you forgot to, as I was
sure you would, because on Friday evenings all you can think about is going
home. Then the approval mail was triggered to Dedhia, who, of course, doesn't
read mails unless they are sent by someone higher-up the hierarchy than he is.
After three days of that, it bounced up to Shrivastav, and since he was in Hong
Kong, I approved the request."
"But, Rocky, the policy..."
"No one's going to question an
approval by Shrivastav, Mandar," Rocky pointed out.
"They will, if it comes out that
you gave it."
"I spoke to him first," she
said.
"You lied to Shrivastav that
Kalpana has children, did you?" he asked, narrowing his eyes.
"I said she had a family member
who goes to school, in the seventh standard," replied Rocky.
"So you did lie," Mandar
pointed out.
"Nope," she replied,
motioning to him to come to her side. "See this."
Another deft click and she was logged
in to Facebook, shushing his quite understandable objections regarding how she,
a mere secretary, could have access to social media when he did not. She
navigated her way to the profile of the girl they were discussing. Mandar
looked at the profile photo - a dark girl with a snub nose and a bright, wide
smile in a purple salwar-kameez,
a face he himself had never seen till that moment. Rocky scrolled down rapidly, going through
posts with inspirational quotes, terrible English and laughing faces to a photo
that Kalpana had posted in April of the previous year.
My mamma in the papers! It said, underneath a clipping from a newspaper with a photo
of a woman whose face was almost identical to the girl in the profile, except
maybe twenty years older.
45 YEAR OLD GOES BACK TO SCHOOL, it
read, and below, Sujata Kinnarkar, who
had to drop out of school at age ten, enrolls again to complete her education
in New English School, Dombivali East. The resident of Gograswada, who worked
as a maidservant until recently, says her college-graduate daughter encouraged
her to take the leap...
"It isn't only children who have
summer vacations, Mandar," Rocky said softly.
"No," he agreed, looking at
the smiling face on the profile photo again. "No, it isn't."
THE END
An excellent story! loved it
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