AnS - Part IV

When Sayanee got home - the apartment she shared with a woman she had met by chance in her early working days in Mumbai - she was in high spirits. She had dropped by Oxford Book Shop on her way back and picked up a couple of PG Wodehouses and a book of plays by Oscar Wilde.

Reading was a passion, ever since childhood. From the Famous Five she had picked up at the age of 8, to The Joke she had recently finished with; reading gave her an alternate world inhabited with characters - some strangely abnormal, some abnormally familiar - but nonetheless, all of them holding a special place in her fictional universe.

When she entered her two-bedroom flat in Andheri East, it was in complete darkness; Khyati, her flat mate must have got late at work. Khyati was a marketing executive at a consumer goods company and sometimes her work-hours, unlike Sayanee’s own, were inexplicable. She switched on the lights, happily dreaming about the books she had picked up, when the door to Khyati’s room opened and she came out -

“Hey! I thought you were at work. Why have you been sitting in the dark?”

Closer examination led her to ask, “Have you been sleeping?” as she realized that Khyati was wearing pyjamas and looking decidedly disheveled.

Khyati just stood there and it suddenly struck Sayanee that Khyati’s eyes were red and puffed-up.

“O my God! You have been crying? What happened?!” Sayanee exclaimed as Khyati started crying again, softly at first, apparently not for the first time that night.

A little bit of background here. Khyati’s father was a retired Major-General and hence she had spent most of her young life traipsing across the country. After such an unsettling childhood; at 18, she had found herself in a state of complete confusion regarding what she wanted to do, quite unlike her father. Out of a lack of any major passions she had done a Bachelor’s course in Arts with Media and Communication as specializations, from Mumbai. During the course she had realized that she had an eye for art, a sense of reading-between-lines, and somewhat of a head for numbers. She got into an advertising agency and after having worked there for six years, the last of which were as Account Executive, she crossed over to the other side of the table and joined her client firm as the Manager of a brand.

She had found her calling in life, and even though Major-General Khurana didn’t understand what his youngest daughter exactly did for a living, he was relieved that she had found it.

“What the hell happened Khyati? Did Ashutosh say something again?” Sayanee was wracking her brain for things that could have gone wrong. Work? Naah, everything seemed to be in control there. Family? Hmm, she would have told her immediately had something gone wrong on that front, no need for melodrama there. It had to be him. That Ashutosh. He was the only part of her life that stuck out like a sore thumb. That Ashutosh.