Chapter 1

“Life never gives you a second chance,” I thought tidying the mess on my table. “What has my life come to? I hate my work, my office…entertaining the clients…giving presentations…documenting my work…and cleaning the cluttered drawers and heaps of papers on my table.”

“Hey da…when is tomorrow’s meeting scheduled?” Raghu enquired in his linguistic singsong diction. He is my colleague- hyperactive, competitive, and annoyingly talkative.

“10:30 sharp!” I always preferred keeping a low profile with all my peers because a lot of them have their own prejudices of a north Indian girl working in South.

“Thanks da! Did you finish the reports on RBS? I’m almost done, if you need any help let me know” (girls usually have the advantage of uninvited help)

“Thanks Raghu but I’ve already submitted it”

“What? …When? But the deadline is next Tuesday!”

“I know but I didn’t want to push it for next week.”

“Superrr da…you are very fast.” Sometimes I did not understand whether his sentences were intended to be a pun or was it just his poor choice of words.

“Now if you excuse me…may I finish my cleaning? I need to leave early today,” I said forcing a smile on my face.

“Early-aaa? Why?”

“raghuuuuuu…I’ll talk to you tomorrow…ok?”

“Ok ok see you then,” with a beaming smile which displayed his entire set of white teeth.

“Ya bye!”  I pity myself for going though it everyday.

Why do I have to fake so much? Why do I even need to please everyone? These pretences wont help me anyway! God, this is so not me!  Post-college everything changes. Professionalism becomes the new lease of life and we start giving more importance to our reasons than our moral judgments. What I am today seems like a lapse, a hiatus from what I used to be. Everyone goes through an emotional reformation but no one admits it. It creeps slowly into everybody’s life until it becomes mutual and adaptive.

“They are my colleagues not my friends,” I keep reminding myself everyday before striking a conversation or putting up jokes.