It had taken less than a month of twelve-hour-plus workdays for the euphoria to wear off: his enthusiasm was no different from a sweatshop garment that can only take a certain number of washes. When he returned home after midnight for the sixth day in a row, he decided that he did not like his new job very much after all.
The seed of doubt was planted the first time he presented his work before Raghu. They were about two weeks into the project when his boss asked to see what progress had been made. Kartik had stood before both partners and his whole team, and presented their first draft of fifteen slides. He was certain that it was an impressive amount, and calibre, of work.
“It’s only our first draft,” he said at the end, in a burst of fake modesty. ‘I understand,’ said Raghu. At once Kartik recognised that the afternoon was going to go spectacularly off script. ‘It’s only been two weeks and it’s an all-new team.’
Raghu cracked his knuckles. First one hand, then another.
“Can I ask you why you chose this colour scheme?”
“Colour scheme?”
“Do you have a strong reason for picking shades of green for your graphs? I don’t like that colour. So, unless you have a strong reason, could you redo them? How about blue? Or even purple? It’s a bold choice—it captures how ambitious our vision for the client is. What do you think?”
“Right, purple. Anuj, are you taking notes?” Three nods where one would have sufficed.
“Also, I don’t love pie charts,” Raghu continued. “To be honest, I hate them.” Kartik waited for Raghu to laugh, or at least grin, or convey in some other way that he was joking, but Raghu’s face remained steady, serious.
“But these are market share charts,” Kartik explained. “How else do we show relative sizes or parts of a whole?”
“Be creative, Kartik.” A half-smile. “How about doughnuts?”
“Doughnuts?” What on earth?
“Yeah, just put a hole at the centre of the pie. Make a regular pie chart and put a smaller white circle over it. Voila, a doughnut. It’s not a pie chart anymore.”
“Okay, we will do that.”
“Great.”
“So is that all? We are good?” he asked Raghu.
“No, of course not. We have to redo the whole thing. But a good start, team. Good start.”
Over the next fifteen minutes, Kartik saw the tidy slide deck he had printed get massacred with a red pen: Raghu severed slides into two, slashed whole paragraphs, flayed his dear graphs and disembowelled the poor pie charts. And he was handed the bloody remains to rebirth like Frankenstein’s monster.
“Let’s discuss the next draft tomorrow morning?” It was already eight in the evening.
“Sure, no problem.”
This was the first of many such evenings, the first time he had to stay in office past midnight. So Kartik had decided to chase the silver lining in the cloud looming over his life: airline miles, all the books he wanted to buy, a swish five-star gymnasium.
A little before three, the four analysts on his team left to conduct consumer interviews. Solitude brought relief, as if a part of him, cramped in the company, could spread out and be comfortable. He stood up and stretched his neck and back. He walked to the window and looked at the grey sea curving into a question mark, the city curled around it. And with fresh eyes, decided to look at the presentation again.
He thought it looked fine. And it told a clear story: there was a burgeoning demand for cheap cars in India because of the growing middle class, while competition in the sector was still limited. But Kartik had also thought that the presentation looked fine a week and six drafts ago. The changes his team had made in the past week had all been cosmetic. Some shuffling of the slides, a change of font here and a realignment of charts there, small pieces of the new analysis. They had done exactly what the boss had asked for.
His boss disagreed.
“This isn’t working, Kartik,” Raghu had said. Thankfully, when it was just the two of them. “Your presentations need to be more visual. There’s too much text. Put more graphs, more pictures.”
How about a visual of a man bending over while a sedan covered in stars and stripes hovered around his ass? Was there a clipart image for that, Kartik had thought acidly. He tinkered with the presentation till four, when it was time to walk down to the coffee shop. An anniversary, albeit a small one: a month since Ira said yes. Kartik had asked to steal Ira away from the newsroom for half an hour.
“The coffee shop in your hotel?” Ira had repeated on the phone, incredulous.
“One coffee, Rs 100.”
“Yes,” he replied with a laugh.
“Wow.”
Dark cloud, silver lining: swish gymnasium, airline miles, all the books he wanted to buy, hundred-rupee coffees. Stripped of cultural context and natural lighting, the five-star coffee shop could have been situated in any part of the world, at any time of the day. Yellow and purple lights embedded in the ivory walls lit up row after row of abstract art. Rattan chairs were packed cosily around marble table-tops, each table with a small bunch of fresh flowers. Kartik ordered two Ethiopian coffees. They arrived in bone china teacups with a plate of complimentary cookies.
He wanted Ira to say the coffee was excellent but she sipped it without comment. She was telling him about a special Independence Day series she was working on for her paper. The way her eyes lit up when she talked about her stories, both delighted him and made him feel small and sad.
To love your work, to tell yourself it mattered, how did that feel?