My job is the most uninspiring, monotonous work in the history of economic periodicals. I work as a researcher for the publishers of one.
What I do most of the day is call up heads of Fortune 500 companies and ask them how they invest their money. This is done by a series of questions on derivatives, swaps and the foreign exchange. It sounds complicated but it’s pretty simple really as all the questions are written out on a script which I read through whilst ticking lots of boxes. This is then handed over to Stephen Kolinsky, a nerdy guy with glasses who’s our data analyst. And then I go down my contacts list and begin again. I often wonder how on earth I got into it – perhaps it was the wording on the job advertisement – ‘working with scripts’ – that lured me.
I’d always wanted to be an actress and my Auntie Sheila keeled over when I first told her. Her impressions of what it was to be an actress went something like this: images of an Indian woman with a wet sari clinging to her body in the rain, prancing around like a stunned fairy. In between some kind of sing-song, the protagonist, seeing her lover jumping from behind the trees like a flasher, runs off whimsically, refusing his advances. After a pursuit involving running round and round the same tree, a frenzied disco dance erupts between them. It was that ‘filthy’ love scene etched in her mind that summed up what an actress was, so, understandably, she was having none of it.
Instead, I tried to get her to take me to the theatre but she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to dress up and pretend to be someone else. My Auntie Sheila is firmly grounded in reality and the only flights of fancy she has is going to Tesco’s and picking up a deluxe chocolate gateaux, or ‘ga-tux’ as she pronounces it. So there was no persuading her to send me to stage school. Instead, she sent me to a private school and selected the appropriate course for me to study at university. It sounds weak now to say I just went along and did what she wanted, but I did it to keep the peace: it was a household fraught with tension.
Sometimes at work, to vary my script-reading technique, I read the questions with different accents. The American one seemed to go down quite well, as did the Italian. CEOs weren’t so hot on the Nigerian one as it seemed to take me forever to get through: I had to keep repeating things and eventually they lost their patience. But sometimes the heads of these corporations would flirt outrageously with these fictitious characters and I would create whole lives that didn’t exist – and that, sadly, is how I got through my days. That, and going to the cinema and theatre at every possible opportunity and envisaging myself on stage.
My boss caught me doing the accent thing last week. He reprimanded me in front of everyone, saying we were not running some sleazy call-service, and asked me to think very carefully about my career. He didn’t realise that thinking about my career was what I had been doing ever since I started three years ago. That very same lunchtime I caught my fiancé, Avinash Kavan, with his fingers in the locks of a curly headed brunette. It was time to face facts – hence my hasty retreat into bed and the sore throat that followed.
That Monday morning as I walked into work, I didn’t know what to believe. Confused, I sat at my desk and pulled out the script along with the list of contacts to call for the day. A few friends at work asked if I was feeling better. ‘Yes, a whole lot better,’ I replied, hoping not to give away any signs of mental instability.
What had happened to me? Was it real? I sat staring out of my window.
The office had two large windows. Sitting next to one of them was one of the perks of the job. I had bagsied it when my friend Elaine, who was sitting there previously, plucked up the courage to leave. My colleagues only let me have it because they fell about laughing at the word ‘bagsie’ – ‘bagsie the window’ to be precise, said just as her office stationery was being redistributed. However, the windows were kept firmly shut. I had tried to un-jam mine at various times but to no avail. As a result, all the tension collected during the day, and left with the staff at home-time when the doors were opened.
The primary source of this tension emanated from my boss, a bald-headed man who backcombed the four remaining strands of his dyed hair and who strapped himself into some ill-fitting trousers by using a pair of antiquated braces. He would pounce from behind us when we were on the telephone and do a post-mortem on the things we got wrong, never praising us for the things we got right. After I had put the telephone down last week he had begun swearing at me for pretending to be Onsawawa Bonumboto.
‘Feeling yourself again?’ he sneered when he saw me back at work.
‘Yes thank you. Everything is under control,’ I replied politely.
‘Back to it, then.’
I opened the script, switched on my computer and began gazing at my screensaver.
What if the coal thing was true; what if people were ignited and called to adventure by listening to their dreams? What did a burning flame inside you feel like? Did it get rid of all the doubts, the fears? Who was this little man who jumped out of my bedroom window? Why did the lady in magenta say she saw him? Did she mean him? What if I was going crazy? Was this covered under my medical protection plan?
The sounds of the fax machines and telephones seemed to get fainter and fainter. One resounding thought was beating like a drum in my head. Who was he? The sound of the drum grew louder and louder. I could no longer control it. The thought bounced out of my head and manifested itself in the shape of a dancer. It was the same African dancer from this morning. He ran along my keyboard and across the screen, unravelling himself before me.
A slight tremor of a rhythm took a hold of my fingers and I began to type out my resignation letter. It was almost as if my fingers worked automatically, requiring no thought from me. After I’d typed it, I reached for an envelope, stuffed the letter inside and walked over to my boss’s desk. The dancer followed beside me.
The tension which had knotted in my throat during the last three years diffused into the air as the letter landed on his desk. An enormous smile spread across my face. My boss stared at me; I looked at the dancer next to me but he was heading off towards my closed window.
‘No, don’t go,’ I wanted to scream.
But it was too late; he had somehow managed to jump out.
I grabbed my coat and ran out to find him but he had gone.
Frantically running up and down Marylebone High Street, I searched for him. He was nowhere to be found. It was insane; I’d left my job on the basis of a figment of my imagination. I sat in a doorway and began to cry. What was I thinking of? What was happening to me? As I held my head in my hands, I felt someone touch my shoulder. I saw sandals and toes with pink chipped nail-varnish. I did not dare look up.
‘Follow the African dancer, my child; take your heart in your hands and follow him. As you walk, tread firmly on fear, clear the path and let the African dancer dance; dance his way into reality.’
When I managed to glance up, she had disappeared.
Once the decision had been taken to follow the African dancer, the laws of nature somehow conspired and I found myself riding on the crest of a tidal wave that propelled me to a faraway land.
It was a similar sort of journey to the one that I had made as a small child, in the sense that I don’t quite remember the specifics of how I got there. All I know was that one moment I was living happily with my grandmother on her farm in rural India, playing with calves, chickens and goats. Then, suddenly, on a flip of a coin, I had to exchange all that for a battered merry-go-round, swings and slides, and this couple called the Vishavans whom I had never met before.
Twenty-two years later it was a similar scenario: one moment I was crying on the pavement in Marylebone High Street and the next I was on a beach, far off the beaten track.
I woke up confused and dazed, trying to find my bearings. The sun dazzled my eyes, my head was throbbing and my hair was covered in sand. As I hauled myself up, an old man approached me.
‘Ma’am, a watch for your beautiful wrist, or