her five-inch heels supplementing her five-foot frame, people still towered over Jenny and she preferred talking to them sitting down.
“Sorry, I got held up a bit,” Jenny pulled her chair and settled down. When she made eye contact with Aasha it was with a hint of apology, “I’m afraid I have bad news, Aasha.” Jenny had been dreading this conversation and watching the light leave Aasha’s eyes made it worse. As Aasha got up and walked towards the window, Jenny tried to salvage the situation, “You’ll have to wait a little longer, but it will happen.”
When Aasha didn’t relent, Jenny continued, “I’ll keep pushing for you, Aasha, but till then you have to manage South Asia Hour. You’re very good at it, and you might even just like this next assignment.” Jenny held out a pink-purple folder for Aasha.
Aasha reached for the file, her shoulders slumped in defeat, “The Edinburg Music Festival?”
“The next big story,” Jenny added as a peace offering, “you’ll be on it. Let’s talk again when you get back from Edinburg, right?” Jenny swivelled around in her chair, making a slight squeaky sound in the process. She extended a perfectly manicured nail to the intercom button and issued an order. “Listen, Ron,” she began while her eyes remained fixed on Aasha, “put me down for a breakfast meeting with Aasha next week Monday. At the Orangery.”
And that had been it. Even as Aasha settled back down in her cubicle she wondered if there was an argument she left out, if there was a line of thought that would have finally convinced Jenny. She wondered if she’d given in too quickly. She picked up the itinerary docket she had dropped on the table – Edinburg Music Festival, her next destination, not 10 Downing Street, or the Home Office, but Edinburg Music Festival. If Jenny wanted her there, she’d have to go there, there was no way around it.
Aasha had been fourteen when she decided she was going to be an investigative journalist. “Papa, I’m going to be a reporter,” she had announced one evening over dinner. “Shabash, beta!” had been her father’s response, while her mother beamed on, serving a large helping of aaloo-gobi and promising to make her kheer later. “My daughter. Reporter. I like it!”
And once it was agreed upon, Aasha had approached it like a mathematical equation. She went about assembling all the parts, and that too with honours, till she got the desired result. The day she’d graduated from the London School of Journalism, her family was present in the crowd, proud and beaming, and being very Punjabi. They had whistled when she got on stage and her father’s voice could be heard ringing around the hall, “Most well done, beta! Most well done!”
“You should have brought a dhol, na,” she had complained sarcastically over the celebratory family dinner at Bangalore Express, her favourite Indian restaurant in London.
“Hain! Pehele bola hota, beta, toh we would have arranged for a dhol. Dhol kya, we would have arranged for a whole band-baja!”
“Haan bhai. Why not, why not?” her mother had chipped in while digging into her crab curry. “Our daughter. Reporter! I like it!”
When the BBC came calling with a job offer, the high-pitched phone calls to Mumbai, Delhi, and Amritsar could be heard across half of London.
“Our Aasha, biji, our Aasha will be on BBC!”
Word had spread quickly from aunt to uncle to cousin to aunt-in-law to great grandmother to the family priest to the ayah who once took care of her during a family trip to India. With each retelling, the family distributed mithai: her parents ran up and down their apartment block, going door to door with a box of sweets in their hand, much to the amusement of the predominantly Nigerian and Korean families living in the building; her relatives in India reached out to every passerby, yelling, “Ye lo! Our daughter will soon be on BBC! Aap bhi lo ji.”
Even though Aasha tried to downplay it all, she had been incredibly excited; she had secretly enjoyed the family’s excitement. Soon she’d be trudging through trenches, uncovering conspiracies and cover-ups; soon she’d change the world in her own little way as an investigative journalist.
Now when she thought back to those first few months, she realized her mistake. She should have held out for the right profile instead of signing up with the first option presented to her. If she had held back then, she’d be where she wanted to be now.
“Aasha, we’re thinking of putting your community knowledge to use on one of our new shows, South Asia Hour. Is that something you’d be interested in?”
“Yeah, why not? It’ll be a good learning curve. A good stepping stone.”
She figured this was the ‘paying her dues’ play. Once she proved her worth, they’d move her to the real news. Instead she proved to be so good at her role, she found herself running the entire segment in no time.
Her show aired every Thursday. Every week her parents rushed through their chores, particularly her mother, leaving enough time to dress up smart for the show. As soon as the title track of South Asia Hour – a typically dated composition of tablas and a sitar, started, Mr. and Mrs. Singh would pull the armchairs towards the TV, dragging them noisily against the flooring, leaving faint scratch marks resembling tiny razor nicks, and plant themselves in front of the box for the next hour, including the breaks.
This was the only time Mrs. Singh let go of the housework. Usually she’d watch movies or her TV shows (mostly on Zee TV) while shelling peas, or cleaning herbs, or cutting vegetables, but not during South Asia Hour. Similarly, her father would put on his reading glasses, fold away all distractions, including his cell phone – which he didn’t fold away but he did turn down the ringer to silent, to watch the show. No one was allowed to talk during the show – her brother bore many a thwacks for breaking that sacred rule; it was second only to the one where you got things thrown at you if you ‘made a ruckus’ when Tendulkar was in the 90s.
It always amused her how they’d insist on sitting right in front of the TV. “Arre, it is so that I can concentrate fully,” her father argued each time she bought it up. No amount of coaxing could get them to alter the arrangement. This is how they did it come rain or sun or Karva Chauth.
Each show received the same feedback, “It was too good, beta. First class show tha.” A little down the line as Aasha began to tire of her profile, she mentioned her frustrations to her parents. They were baffled.
“But, beta, you are working for the community. You are on TV and that too on BBC every week, what more do we need?”
Except it was always ‘camunity’ – they uttered the word as if in an incredible rush, each syllable meshed into the preceding one. Like if they didn’t get it out soon enough, a part of it would be left behind. It bothered her no end. When she was in school, she’d try to correct their diction, partly out of embarrassment and partly out of duty, but it never did any good. If anything their accent simply got worse with age. She figured it was time to give up.
“Why you want to work in a war zone, with bombs and terrorists, and all those terrible things when you can work right here, being so comfortable and so very safe?” her mother asked, a deep-set frown swallowing her entire forehead. “Besides,” she’d add, “This way all those eligible Punjabi boys and their mothers get to see you every week, looking so beautiful, and so smart; it’s so much better than a matrimonial agency ad or one of those marriage websites. This way they will come to us. And we will choose hain.”
Unfortunately for Aasha, and much to her mother’s joy, there were many of those Punjabi boys – more so Punjabi mothers, calling for Aasha. In those first six to eight months there was a flood of profiles awaiting their weekly Sunday lunches. Jia, her sister, always laughed the hardest; she loved ripping open the letters, reading them out loud around the table and dissolving into fits midway through. Aasha found the letters, some dabbed with a bit of attar, others carrying a hint of rose water, equally ridiculous.