760 words
Excerpt from the novel
Modular Canada-imported make believe three and a half walls marked the boundaries of his kingdom. Almost everything about those walls was make believe: they were not four; they rose from a false flooring and ended midway towards a false ceiling; they could be shifted elsewhere by anybody armed with only a screwdriver; they were made of material that looked and sounded like metal but that got dented and deformed with a pliancy that made many doubt whether they indeed were imported from Canada.
Same was the case with the locker affixed overhead to one of those partition walls, and with the three-drawered chest below, made of materials that Jayant did not dare guess about. No longer could one classify them simply as iron, steel or aluminium—one attributed it to the marvels of ever advancing technology, and gave it up at that. Here too, the drawers and keys jammed with a frequency that contradicted their looks and finish.
A two feet wide wooden (not really wooden, again) platform ran along two of those walls to form an L-shaped divider at a height that helped in geographically distinguishing the locker overhead from the chest below. At and on the junction of this L-platform, reposed Jayant’s computer. He himself sat facing the computer on his ergonomically designed navy blue chair, which he could trundle, swivel, elevate, lower or lean back.
The colour theme of the cubicle was yellow, which, according to office legend, had been adopted to symbolise the vibrancy and dynamism of Indosoft Solutions Private Limited—the qualities that the company stood for, at least according to the vision statement framed and hung at the reception. The shades varied from the ecru of the carpeting and the dull beige of the partitions to the brighter lemon of the platform. In the original arrangement, the colour gradation had climaxed in the cadmium yellow of the chair, which Jayant had surreptitiously replaced long ago with the navy blue one from the conference room. The overall effect of the yellow theme, had been rather sickly instead of the intended rejuvenating one. But sitting in the same cubicle for the last eighteen months had inured him to its sallow furnishings.
Diagonally behind his back, the gap that the half-wall provided served as the entrance from the aisle into his 5-by-7-feet territory. Jayant preferred not having his back to the entrance. If not right in front of him, he wished it were at least somewhere to his side such that a darting glance could warn him of an impending visitor. That would give him a couple of seconds to close windows on his computer screen he did not want anyone else to see. Now, with the entrance behind him, and the wall-to-wall footfall-silencing synthetic carpet not helping matters any, he reacted too late to alter the contents of the screen unobserved. And when he did close the windows on someone’s arrival, it looked all the more suspicious than if he hadn’t.
Rohini was no threat: in fact it was only after she had caught him admiring Pamela Anderson-in-Baywatch wallpapers and laughed out loud seeing his stupefied expression, that he found he could talk smutty with her and she would retort with something smuttier. But Srilakshmi was as likely to pop in as Rohini, and the chances of her reacting the same way as Rohini were slim. Then there was the Sandman, who had the knack of bursting in only when he was browsing the internet, and seldom when he was working.
Eight-thirty a.m. on a Monday morning, however, was hardly the time to be working in earnest. Work would take some time to gather momentum, like a train pulling out of a station. To start with, he would have to turn on the computer, something he felt strangely reluctant to do today.
The dark lifeless screen showed his reflection whose detail lay somewhere in between that of a mirrored one and a silhouette. It was his bad hair day—the front sweep of hair had refused to lie flat and formed a little spike as if in rebellion against comb or gel. The flattened nose was disproportionately small on his face, as he tried to look askance at his profile. Displeased, he punched in the power-on button and resurrected the dead screen with an almost inaudible crackling of static.
He was logged into the Instant Messenger automatically but nobody else was online—he was too early to office trying to avoid the morning rush-hour traffic.