Just not good
enough
It was yet another Monday morning, and Riya was
seated at the back of her chauffer driven car on the way to work. Her ironed
linen shirt had started to gather creases as she made herself comfortable for
the long drive, the driver adeptly maneuvering the car and wading through the
stream of slow moving traffic. Her shirt had become wet from her damp hair she
had let loose. It had acquired a transparent see-through mark at the place
where the tip of her layered hair met her back, slightly revealing the hem of
the white cotton slip she wore underneath. She had rolled down the windows
hoping the wind to blow dry her hair which she hadn’t found the time to set
before stepping out of the house. Instead, dust powdered the clear skin of her
flawless round face as cars and two-wheelers scurried over the unpaved sides of
the road. She amused herself by the unusual sights the road offered. Light
music played on the car stereo mostly muffled by the noise outside, except for
a few high notes which were feebly audible. Ladies clad in salwar-kameez, with dupattas
draped around their face leaving only a slit open for their eyes, wearing gloves
that went right up to where the sleeves of their dress ended and open slippers
that exposed their toes that hadn’t experienced a pedicure in a long time, had
their feet dangling by the side of their two-wheelers which showed the level of
confidence or rather the lack thereof while they rode on the uneven roads that
led them to their workplaces. Men stuck their cellular phones against their
ears inside their helmets and with great dexterity, as if it were some kind of
a circus act, rode on the road with their heads tilted to the left supporting
the phone. They passed by traffic cops who were too busy to notice them, either
fiddling with a gadget or adjusting their cowboy hats with one side upturned,
or just seemed oblivious to the dearth of law and order as unruly traffic
clogged the roads. She engaged herself in a silly game, observing those seated
in the rick and trying to guess what they looked like basis the shoes they
wore, the bags they carried, the color of their nail enamel, or the way they
had crossed their legs. As the car moved ahead of the ricks, she turned her
head casually or noticed them from the corner of her eye, keeping a mental score
of the hits and the misses. Despite the viscous flow of vehicles, occasional
brushes of metal against metal led many to exchange irate looks. The scratches
on the sides of cars signifying the lack of patience that the city had started
to inherit from the migrant population from up north to this Silicon Valley in
India.
It was in one such IT company that Riya worked as a
junior analyst, a job her father had secured for her through this high-profile
business contacts. With her low grades she wasn’t eligible for the aptitude
tests of most companies during placements, and the ones for which she was eligible
were all based outside of Bangalore. Her father had decided against sending her
outside of the city, for he had nestled her in the lap of luxury and knew that
she wouldn’t survive long in the absence of it given her levels of maturity. Her
father had worked hard all these years to fill up the void that her mother had
created when she left them for another man. As years passed by the lack of her
mother’s presence didn’t seem to affect Riya as much as the presence of her
father did at social gatherings when he always kept introducing her to
everyone, or when she was out with her friends and he called to check if she
was okay, or the time when she flunked her exams and he had offered her a
sermon when all she wanted to do was hide her face under the pillow and sleep
over it. However, that was three years back. And work, no matter how menial,
makes you grow as a person and come in terms with the realities of the world.
Her father now thought of her as more responsible individual, even if she
attended office in a chauffeur driven car and refused to go by public
transport, or blew her paltry salary over needless clothes, or still received
pocket money from her father which was more than her salary, or had forgotten
to wish her father on his birthday last year.
That day when she reached office, her manager called
her in. Overall the mood on the floor was grim, as if some sort of calamity had
just announced its arrival. She saw Sabrina, her friend from college days who
was working in the same company but with a different team. She was packing her
things clumsily in a brown cardboard carton, trying to hide her tears but doing
little to hide the phenolphthalein pink complexion she had acquired, like in
the experiments in the chemistry lab she had helped Riya in. Another girl was
crying in a corner and was being consoled by some of her teammates. “What the
hell is going on?” Riya murmured to herself, as she walked into the meeting room
and closed the door behind her. Her manager had called for a meeting with her,
something that had never happened in the past. There was nothing about the work
she did or the profile she held that ever demanded such a thing. Plus she also
felt it was too boring for someone to be called into a meeting to discuss
performance, too lame to discuss future plans and definitely a sheer waste of
time to discuss career growth.
“Hi Riya! Come have a seat” he said to her, his
voice dampened by the news he was about to give her. He pronounced her name and
addressed her as if it was the first time they had met. Of course there were no
occasions where they spoke before. She smiled awkwardly, not sure what led to
such a meeting. “You know we have been downsizing owing to the financial
turmoil in the west. We don’t have enough projects coming our way with the cuts
on technology spends. So the management has decided to layoff a few people…” he
took a deep breath before he spoke further as she stared at him closely, her
hands tucked under her thighs on the chair, shoulders hunched and a slight lean
of the body towards him. “Sorry to say Riya, you would need to leave. But am
sure you’d do well. I know it’s tough to be in a situation like this but…” he
continued for some time as she absorbed the words that had just fallen on her
ears. She had stopped listening after he let out the news. But he seemed to go
on with the ease of a rehearsed speech that tele-callers have.
She returned home in her car, this time the windows
rolled up. It wasn’t the first time she had failed. It wasn’t the first time
that she had been rejected, or that she was considered a second choice or not
considered as a choice at all. She had felt no shame in mediocrity which she
maintained consistently throughout her schooling and days of attending college.
Yet today, she felt something inside of her growing weak. She remembered the
day when her mother had walked out of the house never to return, with a man of
a hefty built and a thick beard who refused to look at Riya in her eyes. Her
mother did not seem to have any remorse in her eyes as she left, and left behind
a part of her as easily as leaving behind an abandoned piece of furniture in an
old house. She felt hurt even then, but was too proud to cry and she had fought
back her tears like bunds holding back rain waters on the streets. She had gone
back to her room and torn off all pages from the photo albums that pictured her
with her mom to erase all memories of her. It helped little at that age, but
time blurred the picture of her mother in her mind and she could barely
remember her face or the color of her skin or how she spoke. She remembered the
day when she had to leave behind her friends and shift to a different city. She
had cried the whole night, in the morning her eyes were swollen like buds of
pink roses that grew in the balcony of their old house. They hadn’t flowered
since her mom left. With the new city, came new surroundings, new people who
asked her new questions about her old past. Of where her mom was, of why she
never attended the open house at school, if she were dead.
She withdrew herself from the company of others and
had no friends. Not until she entered college, where she didn’t have
uncomfortable questions to confront. She discovered a new life, she found
happiness in the spells of SMS that beeped throughout the night, she found
freedom at movies and at malls with her buddies, she picked up new hobbies and
bunked classes to pursue them, she made friends wherever she went and instantly
added them on Facebook, her network of friends growing rapidly - the guy she
met at the book store and cracked up a conversation with, the girl who sang at
the concert, the old man who was playing the piano in the hotel lobby – she
spoke so much that her jaws ached at night. Amidst this frantic socializing she
drowned the fears of her past, her days of loneliness when she had sat alone in
her room watching the DVDs of her favorite sitcoms over and over again until
she grew sick of them and dumped them away and cried silently in her bed while
her father was away at work. Her grades lowered at school. Yet as she always
told her friends she was “high on life” and nothing else mattered. She had
fallen in love with life again. But today, as she held the pink slip in her
hands, seated in her car she felt she had crossed boundaries in her attempt to
embrace life again. That her ambitions were limited only to planning the next
movie outing, that her skills were recognized only in her circle of friends and
tags on Facebook – Style icon, fashion fiesta, chatterbox, Party Animal; that
she had lost a lot more than she had thought she had gained as she walked on
the path of wilderness. She wondered why her father never stopped her, why was
he always in agreement to her pettiest of all demands, why did he not ground
her like other dads did when she had failed the exam, why had he been so
complacent to her outrageous habits?
That night after many months she was home for dinner
and sat across the table while her father occupied his usual seat on the cherry
wood table on which there was always space for four, and three chairs were
always empty. She could notice he had a smile on his face and talked with the
food in his mouth, maybe out of excitement. She listened to him silently,
playing listlessly with the food in her plate avoiding him in the eye. She knew
the news of her unemployment wouldn’t affect him, or at least not in a way that
would wipe the smile off his face. Yet she felt guilty of proving to be a child
that had only learnt to fail. As her father was describing an incident at work
today, she cut him short and said “Dad, I am fired.” She grew red out of anger,
grief and shame that seemed to have gripped her at the same time. She started
crying incessantly not wanting to look up. This time she did not run back to her
room to hide. Instead she sat at the table, head lowered, and her face hidden
by a veil of her layered hair. Teardrops ran like rivulets across her face and
toppled over her prominent cheek bone to land on the dinner table like rain
drops from the tips of tree leaves once the thunderstorm is over. Her father
was not prepared for such a situation. He had never seen her cry; he had never
seen her disappointed at failure. He gently put his fork down, chewed the food
in his mouth, gulped down half a glass of water, dabbed the sides of his mouth
with the table napkin and placed it messily at the side of his plate. He
crossed his fingers to create a mesh and then gently supported his chin on it,
his elbows placed firmly on the table. “Did they tell you why?”he questioned.
“Downsizing because the west is so messed up”, she replied. He sensed
helplessness in her voice, as if she had tried to defend herself against
failure and had not succeeded. “It’s happening everywhere. You know it right?
There is news about layoffs everyday in the newspaper”, he said trying to make
it look like an ordinary happening. “But why me, Dad? There are about a hundred
other employees in that company! Maybe I know why…because I was never good
enough for anything. Neither good enough to give mom a reason to stay back, nor
good enough to answer back to those kids who questioned me about her, nor good
enough to secure good grades at college, nor good enough to get a job on my
own, and now not good enough for the company when it decided to clean its floor
and throw all the rubbish out. I am just not good enough. And you knew it all
along Dad. You knew it, didn’t you! Why didn’t you ever stop me? Why did my
poor grades never bother you, even when you knew I could do much better, way
much better so much so that I could have been at that guy’s place who handed
over that letter to me?” He nodded in agreement and began to speak, “I thought
she had left you miserable. I couldn’t see you being alone. I wanted you to
have friends, to be in the company of people who admire you and want to be by
your side, and not give up on you the way… she
did. I guess I let it stretch far enough. You’d become the sole purpose of my
life and in your happiness rested mine. All this while I was surely
disappointed to see your low grades, to see how you had let them slip away so
easily, how you had adopted a casual life of existence. Yet, I was afraid. So
afraid to say to you anything that would hurt you. I am sorry. I really am…for
being a bad father” Tears welled up in his eyes and he couldn’t talk anymore.
The maid came in and cleared the dishes on the table while they were still
seated, ignoring them as if they were invisible. They showed no signs of
embarrassment in return. She had grown to understand them over the years, and
also their vulnerabilities. She placed two mugs of hot coffee and left. Riya
walked up to her father and hugged him, patted him gently, rubbing her petite
hand over his broad shoulders trying to comfort him as he looked crestfallen by
the weight of what he had just said. She knew she had pushed him too far to
admit things that were better left unsaid.
The next morning she was awake while he was still
watering the plants in the garden. She left a “Thank You Dad”, card for him on
the coffee table along with a form for a CAT coaching class and left for the
gym in her usual style. He smiled as he sat down to have his coffee. He picked
up the card. It had no wordings inside, just a ‘Thank You’ in a Lucida
handwriting font and her name she had scribbled messily at the bottom with a
big heart. She had forgotten to put the date at the top. He was convinced that
it was the reason why she forgot to wish him yet again on his birthday. He
picked up the newspaper; the smile had dawned back on his face with the morning
sun. The headlines read “Why 2008 is the best time to enter B-schools.”
0 comments: