A DIFFERENT LIFE

I waited as my cousin Sonali fished for the keys to her flat in her purse. I was just dying to drop my bags and enter the shower – the Mumbai climate was already taking its toll on me and my senses; I was going mad! Our college had organised an industrial visit which had brought us to Mumbai. I decided to stay back and spend a day with my cousin while my friends went back with the class. I had been wanting to see my cousin’s place since a long time – since she got married to an IIT Professor in fact. They obviously lived on campus, and from her descriptions, her place sounded like a small bit of heaven on Earth.

She opened the door and we stepped into the place – and I immediately fell in love with it. It was a nice cosy little house that had a very welcoming feel to it. And just as she had mentioned time and again in our chats – it was windy. Very windy.

‘Wow!’ I said, as I heard all the earthen wind chimes around the place resonating in the wind. I remembered her picking them up from Pune before she shifted to Powai. ‘The chimes sound so lovely!’

‘Don’t they?’ Sonali said. I smiled.

‘Okay, I’m making a straight dash for your bathroom now! Where can I dump my stuff?’ I asked.

Sonali showed me to a little bedroom – this one had the wind chime that was shaped like the sun – and helped me with my bags.

‘I’ll make us cold coffee till you have a shower. Thike?’

I gave her the thumbs-up.

About half an hour later we were sitting in her balcony, enjoying cold coffee and chocolate sponge cake and Chitale bakhar-vadi that she loved and that I had got for her from Pune. It was a very different experience. I had never even dreamt I would ever be at Sonali-tai’s place, gobbling, gossiping and doing all girly stuff – we were both not like that. But then, here I was – and I was enjoying it.

‘So how was your visit?’ she asked.

‘Boh-ring!’ I said, munching on the cake. Boy was I hungry!

‘I toh just can’t figure out how you can study so much! That itself is so boh-ring! And hell, you stand first in class and college and all… really, you are disrespecting us all!’ se mocked. Apparently I was the youngest and most studious of all us cousins.

I laughed as I heard Sonali-tai bash me up a little more; though of course in a very sisterly and ‘I’m-proud-of-you-but-this-is-still-too-much’ kind of way. Just then the doorbell rang.

‘Hey! What happened?’ Sonali-tai said as she opened the door for my Sanjay-jiju.

‘Forgot some of my stuff,’ he said.

‘Hi jiju!’ I called out.

‘Oh hi! When did you get here?’

‘Just a while ago. How are you doing?’

‘Running late for a lecture as of now! We’ll catch up over beer and eats in the evening, ok?’ he said, as he headed for the door carrying a file in his hand.

‘Sure!’

He kissed Sonali on her cheek and looked at her, into her eyes. He whispered something softly that made her laugh and hit him playfully. I looked away, just out of respect.

Sonali shut the door and came back where I was sitting. I smiled at her.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘It’s so nice to see you and jiju like this,’ I said.

‘Oh Sanjay is very cool,’ Sonali added.

‘Waise, if I may ask, what happened with that other guy you were dating when you were working for that call centre in Pune?’

‘Oh him – well, it just didn’t work out.’

‘But I thought you were doing really well together…’

‘Yes; but things changed after I started going for the night shifts.’

I kept staring at her, a little at loss.

‘I don’t understand…’

She sighed. ‘It’s very difficult to maintain a relationship when you can’t even see each other. And then night shifts hardly leave you any time to do anything else.’ She paused. ‘It’s like; you just don’t have a social life anymore. No festivals, no get-togethers. You come home and sleep while your world is awake and going about their usual day to day life, and you wake up and go to work when everybody else is sleeping. It’s very frustrating.’

I waited for her to go on.

‘After a while you even stop being used to having people around you. You have issues having a normal conversation with your friends, your parents even sometimes. You become a recluse.’

I tried to imagine a life like that – it was a scary thought. I looked at Sonali-tai and I could see it was difficult for her to share all this. But she still kept going on.

‘I was very depressed for a long time. It’s too much of pressure. People only see the money; and I admit that is what even I looked at for a long time. I wanted to quit well before I actually did, but I kept working looking at the money that I needed to earn at that time. Easy money they say? It’s not easy at all. And then I couldn’t give him enough time either. So he called it quits. Rather we called it quits. He was not willing to wait, and I needed that job at that time.’

I looked at my cousin. She seemed such a different person as she was talking to me.

‘There are certain things that you just have to do in life,’ she went on. ‘Doing a job you don’t like, leaving a guy you don’t want to… No one makes or forces you to do them, but you know you have to do them for your growth, for your development. You need that experience at that point of time and it teaches you a lot of things that you may not learn otherwise. I am glad I kept the job rather than the relationship. Today when I look back, I am happy with the decision I made, cos now I am a little stronger than I was before; I can handle being alone a lot better, it’s helping me work out my relationship with Sanjay too. I am also a lot less judgemental about people who work in call centres. So all in all, I am glad it happened to me.’