head of human resources, an efficient-looking woman named Hilda. She had short black hair, was dressed in a business suit that seemed a bit heavy for this climate, and asked me to take a seat in her office. I tried not to get my hopes up, but this was the furthest I had ever been.
‘You know what the job is, yes?’ she asked. ‘We’re a celebrity magazine. There’s lots of answering of phones, taking deliveries, greeting visitors.’ As I nodded, she looked at my application from again.
‘It says here you’re from India. What brought you to America?’
‘Marriage. My husband emigrated from India many years ago with his family,’ I replied.
She looked up, and put down her pen.
‘Was it, an, um, what-do-you-call-them, arranged marriage?’ she asked, suddenly interested. ‘And a joint family? Like on the Discovery channel? Do you all live together?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact we do,’ I said, my accent suddenly sounding thick and clumsy in this light-filled room with the modern art on its walls. ‘It’s quite traditional, how it all happened.’ I was conscious of my English, remembering Mrs Pereira from school, who would thwack my palm with a chipped wooden ruler if I slurred words together or dropped letters from their place. Even if I was living in America now, there would never be any ‘gonna’ or ‘wanna’ or ‘gotta’.
‘Yeah, I read something in Marie-Claire about brides moving in with their in-laws,’ Hilda continued. ‘Hafta say, don’t know how you folks do it. It’s hard enough living with just my husband, forget his parents.
‘I think you’ve forgotten to fill this in,’ she then said, suddenly changing the subject and pointing to the ‘Experience’ section. My heart sank. This was the part where I was always shown the door.
‘I didn’t forget,’ I said quietly. ‘I have not had a job before. This would be my first.’
Hilda looked stunned.
‘Not even while you were in college? Not even part time or summers? Well, that’s disappointing because the ad did say we needed someone with experience. I’m sorry, I know you came all the way in, but –’
‘Please, Miss Hilda,’ I stammered, trying not to cry, I couldn’t take another rejection, another day of going home empty-handed, and then having to start the search all over again. Already, my in-laws were complaining about how much petrol I was wasting on what they called ‘coming up and down’, as if it were my fault that nobody wanted to hire me.
‘I know I can do the job,’ I pleaded to Hilda. ‘I learn very quickly and am willing to work hard. Please, just give me a chance.’
Hilda leaned back in her chair. ‘You don’t want to become an actress, do you?’ she asked, narrowing her eyes.
‘Oh my, no!’ I replied, surprised at the question.
‘Then that’s about the only thing you have going for you. Everybody else who comes in here thinks that this will be their first step into the industry, as if they’ll be discovered by some super-agent as they’re sitting behind reception. Like the two girls who were in here before you. I knew they weren’t serious. It’s infuriating. We fill the position so often that it’s become a joke. Dara is the only one we’ve had that had a legitimate reason for leaving,’ Hilda said, shaking her head.
She looked me up and down, clearly not enamoured of my outfit and puzzled by what to her must have looked like a razor slit above my cranium. And I knew when I left the house that the waist pouch was a bad idea.
‘You’re very nice-looking, but you might want to invest in a few new clothes,’ she said. ‘You’re the first person anyone sees when they walk through those doors.’
I nodded eagerly, but was wondering how I was going to get around that one. My in-laws frowned on what they called ‘very bad and sexy American-style clothes for cheap girls’ – which to them was anything but a baggy sweat-suit. If it were up to them, I would be cruising through Los Angeles in a burkha.
‘You’re lucky that we need someone to start immediately, and that I can’t be bothered to interview any more this morning. So I hope I don’t regret this, but I’m going to give you a shot,’ she said. ‘Welcome to the Hollywood Insider.’
Within minutes, I was signing contracts and having my social security card photocopied and being shown around a glossy set of offices by a man called Lou, Hilda’s assistant.
‘This is where the Hollywood Insider is put together. That’s just one division of the company, the one you’ll be involved with. The rest of the building is ours as well,’ Lou said, as if he’d recited the same speech a million times before.
I couldn’t help hearing snippets of conversation coming through the glass-enclosed booths, the tops of the cluttered desks filled with flat-screen computers, brightly coloured in-trays, stacks of pens and mobile phones charging. Everywhere there were photographs of movie stars – a big black-and-white shot of Jackie Chan lay on the floor, a signed picture of Julia Roberts was pinned to a corkboard. People were chatting on their phones, scribbling notes, yelling over their desks things like, ‘Harrison Ford’s guy is on line two.’ I was in the same room as people who knew people who knew Harrison Ford, who, like Brad Pitt, was famous even in India.
From what I’d seen in the movies, I had thought I would be sitting in front of a large wall repeating ‘Hold, please’ every five seconds, switching little wires in and out of sockets. Isn’t that what a receptionist did?
Instead, I was installed behind a large circular desk that had a counter above it, making me feel even smaller and more hidden. Jerry, a young man from the IT department, had come along to ask me if I had any questions about how the phone system worked.
‘Everyone here has direct lines, so most of their calls come through on those,’ he instructed. ‘But sometimes people call the main line – that’s you – and you’ll need to direct them. So here’s a list of everyone’s names, what their job titles are, and their extensions. And this row of buttons – that’s for you if you need to buzz anyone in-house, like my department, or accounting, or security. Especially security,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you think you got that?’
As soon as Jerry had gone I called Sanjay to tell him that I had got the job, was starting right away, and wouldn’t be home until evening.
‘Congrats, honey!’ he said. He had started calling me ‘honey’ recently, leading me to believe that he had been watching too much Days of Our Lives on the television in his office. ‘I’ve been a bit worried, didn’t hear from you all morning,’ he said. ‘I left a couple of messages on your mobile. As long as everything is OK …’
‘Yes, fine. Better go now,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t want them to think I’m not doing anything on my first day. I’ll speak to you later, hah?’
Hollywood Insider, as I read from a company brochure I found in my desk, was a newcomer to the world of entertainment publishing. Its purpose was to ‘provide accurate, entertaining, informative and illuminating news and features on movie stars, their films, and the world they inhabit’. The parent company, Galaxy Holdings, also published a tabloid, called Weekly Buzz, which was located two floors down. Stardom, the cable television channel Galaxy owned, was an even more recent arrival on the scene.
In between taking and rerouteing calls, I leafed through a few recent issues of the magazine. There were long interviews with major movie stars, short items about production deals gone sour and a page devoted to who was wearing what at last week’s premieres. Everyone around me was beautiful and busy, and I gazed at them from behind my desk, where I was barely visible unless I stood up. They were the kind of people that my father, in his infinite cleverness, would describe as ‘the impression-making sort’.
In the middle of the morning, a smiling redhead came up to me with a trolley.
‘Hi, I’m Deanna from the mail