CHAPTER 21 - 1998: A Personal History

Love, Loss, Loneliness and Longing, part 5

* The Memory of love

For the entire period of my association with Satyam as an employee, I had never - not even for a day - missed sticking my pen into the top front pocket of my shirt. My romantic crush Una had gifted me a pen - a silver Parker - and since then it became a much-loved, well-cared-for badge of love that I had, admittedly, loved to show off to my office associates, especially to Savitha Tandavi, Una’s close buddy-pal from college days, who blew a gasket and never recuperated from her inward fuming when she found out that Una had gifted me a pen!

Una Artoran, like her other friends Monami Roy and Padmashri Raoh, had worked for a financial company dealing with credits, foreign exchange, accounts and sales, and the lot. Her job required her to keep browsing loads of forex and securities files daily; deal with money coming in and going out; files of individual account holders and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and the whole nine yards. Just the kind of job I would emphatically avoid! Just kidding!

1998: A Personal History

My name is Arinvan… Arinvan Maliek and my courtship with Una literally began on the telephone. The romantic year of 1998 bears testimony to that fact. Una used to call our office to speak with Savitha Tandavi, who was one of her mutual friends (snooty at best), on the direct line.

Savitha joined Satyam at Tesser Towers along with me and Manpreet 'Heartlove' Singh. I, Manpreet, and Savitha shared an enlarged open-to-one-side cabin with three computers inside it - two at the front and one at the back. Most often, whenever someone called on the phone, Manpreet’s hands always rose first to get it. His quick reflexes were seen to be believed! If his ‘Hello’ is quickly boomed into the phone it only meant the conversation from the other side of the line better be clear and to the point! Everybody knew Manpreet’s hard-boiled booming yowl, compared to my yell or Savitha’s foxy howl, his yowl was the best yowl. On occasions when he passed on the phone to me smiling his trademark cheesy smile it only implied that Una Artoran, my chui-mui (shy princess) girl, was on the line for me. Manpreet, a blue-blooded sophisticate that he is, would never eavesdrop on our coochie-cooing, nope! And this way began one of the loveliest chapters written on the storybook of my life.

Ms. Tandavi was also believed to be friends with fish sketching artist Monami ‘Fishsketcher’ Roy, who worked with Una at her financial securities company situated on SD Road. Both Monami and Una, apart from Savitha, were thick-as-thieves, always together, conjoined colleagues; only Savitha (with her self-centered American dreams) remained as a detached feather of the same flock. Savitha, I presume, couldn’t possibly dare to handle a ‘Finance’ job and so scampered off to join a desi IT organization instead. To me, this very fact was no less than a God’s blessing (actually Savitha’s accidental irony!) as it made it possible for me to know Una in the first place. But, thankfully, it stops there.

Strangely, my office colleague Savitha, a tall and ghostly predator, flinched outright at the idea of Una and me getting romantically involved, and this was completely unlike her chubbier and far more cheerful friend Monami who was absolutely cool about it. To me, Monami came across as a frank, candid, and amazingly fun-loving human being. Her sense of self-esteem was pretty impressive to get appreciative of, but she was highly pompous in her everyday life! That personal characteristic of Pom's - if you wear your thinking cap on and give it a second longer to think about it - will at first come across to be as crass, but, in course of time, you will get appreciative about her sonorous pompousness!

She had an exuberant beehive of a soul in her that basically throbbed with fun and vivacious cleverness; she’s delightfully pompous, solipsistic, socially gregarious, well-cushioned in appearance, forcefully animated, follows what her conscience says, and a little too chirpy in nature. At other times, Monami seemed like a plus-size Mother Superior who took it all on herself to toss in bits of good-humoured “advice” (amiable exhortation) at our way - never mind whether they were really required or not! Her voice had a tonal groan that carries into your ears an echoing, squirming intensity that can easily make you feel as if someone is orating away in all glory at Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds. Such was this original Delhi/Jamshedpur belle’s prodigious reputation. Without a doubt, such select cognoscenti go on to become genuine companions, inverse to what Savitha had been to anyone ever.

When Savitha happened to know the previous day that Una and I are meeting up at a coffee shop, she turned a beetroot red in her face and at once reprised her over the phone with her ill-bred caution. She chided Una: “Kya karr rahi hai Una tu...!”, only to be met with a burst of bemused laughter from the other end. For once, Una didn’t take Savitha’s uncivil remarks seriously. I never knew Savitha being so wary of my friendship with Una until her undercover phone call that ominous evening when I came in to relieve her from her morning stretch ending at 3pm. She had made it all so rudely obvious for me to figure. It seemed that Savitha had an acute attitudinal malfunction that was most akin to the sly characteristics of a well-known, modern-day Lalita Pawar.

Ever since that day, I couldn’t help but think of her as a wretched human being. I distanced myself from her – just on the off chance, it pricks me to a needless confrontation with her, which I wanted to avoid by all means (in light of the fact she wasn’t worth to be dealing with in the first place). Her Lalita Pawareque droopy left eyelid, which flutters ominously at you, surely is indicative of a mentality typically Machiavellian in nature. If one ruminates further on her aforementioned personality characteristics one would obviously find that she is an undisputed drama-queen of chugalkhori (sycophancy). Not having anything to do with questions of morality even when sometimes finding herself in judgmental positions (with her pal Una) is crushingly depressing of her as a person. One finds her a crafty old slithering eel, and bitterly distasteful is her cunning appetite for indulging in unabashed sycophancy.

Why was she hell-bent on a misunderstanding/misjudging me on some headless account or the other? Why was it so inordinately necessary for her to be so fiercely 'vampish' about my affair with her buddy Una? Is it in her nature to live her life the way she lived – in accordance with her kind of social class and background she happens to represent? Is it the disheveled kind of upbringing that kicked in? I never have got around to answering these ugly questions in my limited feel of things. At first, it was not quite apparent why she was being vainly jealous of me - she gradually was beginning to come across as a little cantankerous individual - but what I figured is that it triggered a vapid botheration in me with regard to her crude conduct.

Afterward, when I was still none the wiser as to what her “issues” were with me, I dropped it like hot coals and drew comfort from the age-old premonition that: Time will take its own course. Foxy Savithas of the world do not bring the luxury of friendly encouragement nor do they appreciate the thought of love and its reassuring finality in Providence. They simply have villainous appetites for sycophancy - may be a genetic defect, a hereditary deformity, carried on from millions of years of female evolution - that makes one cringe in revulsion. To think of such people as mind-numbing pain and a big turn-off definitely rings true. I got wizened a bit and conclusively realized that it’s none of my business to put it all out with this tall and snaky colleague of mine, when, on that ominous evening, she was, in her own touchy-feely way, striving hard to forbid Una to have anything to do with me forthwith. But that day, it could have been a day of frank pejorative outburst in full discourse for her to see had she wanted to get candid with me then and there.

END OF PART 5 OF ‘LOVE, LOSS, LONELINESS AND LONGING, part 5’

(To be continued...)

By Arindam Moulick

*Note: The above story Chapter 21 – 1998: A Personal History is reproduced here verbatim from the original story titled "The Memory of Love, a short story" (web link: http://arindammoulick.blogspot.in/2011/07/memory-of-love-short-story.html) published here in my blog Pebbles On The Beach. "The Memory of Love, a short story" was written in the year 2011 with different character names (but same storyline) has found its way here as part of the chapter-wise presentation of my memoir "Lost Days of Glory, a Memoir". I have merely changed the character names of the original story with new names and additionally made some small changes (basically some words/sentences are put in a different way) in the overall narrative to suit the present storyline under the new title “Chapter 21 – 1998: A Personal History”. This is for the reader’s information only.

Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. All incidences, places, and characters portrayed in the story are fictional and entirely imaginary. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental. No similarity to any person either living or dead is intended or should be inferred.