Beaming with pride at my achievement, I walked towards the refrigerator and in just forty seconds managed to find the handle of the door under zillions of post-it notes. Not bad, Kapoor. As I pulled opened the door, I nearly fainted at the odor wafting from it. It smelled like a gutter and as I looked closely (I warn you the sight was not for the fainthearted) I saw green bread which when I bought was a healthy brown. There was also a take away box of half-eaten noodles which I had ordered a couple of weeks ago from a new Chinese food van, but hadn’t liked. With trembling hands I pulled open the vegetable basket at the bottom of the refrigerator and nearly died at the sight of rotten tomatoes with some crawling creatures running around them. Before I could puke inside my one and only refrigerator, I hastily closed the door.
Goodness! What was that?
You see this wasn’t my fault. Not entirely at least. After driving myself insane at work, I hardly had the time to think about cooking something, let alone peering inside the refrigerator or keeping track of the stock in there. Home, kitchen, refrigerator were not my forte. When I was back home in Shimla, Mom had tried to dupe me into learning some cooking and sometimes dragged me to the kitchen to show me how to make mattar paneer but she never understood that it was just not the place for me. But when I landed a job in Mumbai she gave me the recipe of the most basic breakfast item — omelete — which of course I had never attempted to try because I neither had the time nor the energy to do any actual cooking. Sometimes I truly wished that I could hire someone to do all this cooking-cleaning-washing stuff for me, but was such a shame that my salary didn’t even allow me to buy a new vacuum cleaner, let alone hire a helping hand.
Pulling out a pen from my purse, I added, ‘buy freshly baked bread, healthy looking tomatoes or maybe even a box of eggs’ on the list which was pinned on the refrigerator door with a gorgeous pink tiara-shaped magnet. I winched at the length of the list which was overflowing with so many other things like, ‘clean the apartment at least once a week’, ‘vacuum the sofa at least once a month’, ‘put dirty laundry in the machine before it starts resembling the leaning tower of Pisa’, ‘lose ten pounds’, ‘increase alcohol tolerance level’. The list was just too long to read and sadly it seemed I never got around to accomplishing many of the targets on it. But I was sure that one day I would have enough time, stamina and hopefully motivation to accomplish at least some of them.
***
As I strode past Veena with a steaming vanilla latte, she covered the phone receiver with her hand and said in her singsong voice, “Good Morning, Maya.”
“Morning, darling,” I said without bothering to stop.
I was in no mood to waste my precious time with this walking-talking-bitching woman. This girl might be just a receptionist at Style but she had more gossip than the top gossip mags.
“There’s a letter for you. It’s on your desk,” she smirked.
I never liked this girl and trust me it wasn’t because of her piercing voice.
Once, when everyone was pretending to be fully involved in a brainstorming session for the theme of the upcoming issue under the watchful eyes of Natasha, I excused myself to the bathroom where I overheard Vicious Veena saying to some skinny bitch that I was probably the biggest loser she had ever seen in her life because, a) I was the kind who could tempt anyone to humiliate me any time, anywhere; b) she had no idea how any girl could live with such a bulging tummy; and c) she strongly felt that I would end up being an unlucky spinster who was capable of jinxing any happy couple by merely casting the glance at them.
As if I was some witch.
I swear for a moment I considered dragging her to the toilet seat by her hair and shoving her head into the urinated water. Bloody tramp! I never felt more humiliated by anyone in my entire life, except maybe Natasha. It was beyond me why she called me fat when I was just size a 8? Fine, size 12. But this was a perfectly healthy size. And last but definitely not the least, I was not an unlucky spinster. I refused to fall into the arms of any man. Finding true love was not that easy. I had decided to wait for that someone instead of taking whatever whoring opportunity came my way. I knew it would be no use to explaining anything to that bitch, so I pretended that I hadn’t heard anything and continued passing her desk everyday without throwing a hot latte at her.
“Thank you, Veena. I’ll have a look,” I retorted. I was about to step through the glass doors when the elevator slid open and I found myself smiling with relief.
“Hey gorgeous,” Anu gave me a quick peck as we walked towards our desks.
“Morning!” I beamed.
“By the way, what are you doing here at this time? You’re breaking your thou shalt always be late oath?” she chided.
“Oh yeah,” I rolled my eyes. “Well you should sometimes do things for change,” I gushed. Suddenly I noticed her perefectly manicured nails, “Are you heading somewhere after office?”
This girl was the laziest person who ever worked in a fashion magazine. Sometimes she would go through the entire week with the mass of greasy hair on her head. But no matter how hard she tried to be careless or look like a normal girl without a fancy blow dry or makeup, she always ended up looking effortlessly glamorous and her hair despite being greasy, always appears beautifully tangled and glorious. She was world opposite to me. Five feet four inchs, tiny waist despite of all the big bowls of cheese nachos she gorged on, colored hair, visible collar bones, all fair and fragile. And then there was me. Five feet six inches, broader than any average girl on the globe, little more than generous curves, hard to manage hair, unexisting collar bones, slightly tanned and not the very least fragile. How were we even friends?
“Yes! I am going to a club with Sameer,” she beamed.
“Ahhh! Have fun,” I winked.
Hearing club and Sameer in one sentence brought back some memories, some not-so-pleasant memories. Not so long ago, on a particularly horrendous day Natasha rejected Anu’s highly researched story about budget fashion outright which made Anu fume with anger. Unable to bear the sight of her sad and angry face I decided to cheer her up and took her to a club on Marine Drive. On our way to the club Anu kept swearing, screaming and crying about the injustice and that was when I realized that I was not prepared to handle her on my own. So I speed dialled Sameer and begged him to join us. Once in the club, I perched on a sofa in a far corner as they set the dance floor on fire under the influence of tons of alcohol and totally forgot about me. After gulping down one too many shots of tequila and spending an hour on my own looking at the blissfully happy couples making out in every corner of the club and repetitively questioning myself when my someone would come around, finally I decided to end the torture. Pushing through the crowd I headed for the spot where my one and only best friend in the whole world and her (im)perfect boyfriend were showing off some awfully drunken dance moves.
“I have to go,” I shouted over the music as I caught her gaze.
“What?” she frowned.
“I am tired. I am leaving,” I screamed.
“What? I can’t hear you.”
“I am going home, you fuckhead,” and this time not just her, the entire club heard me loud and clear because God had conspired against me and the asshole DJ suddenly switched to Celine Dion straight from Lady Gaga.
What a disaster that night had been!
This day however, was turning out better than I could have expected. For starters when I re-read my article in the morning before taking printouts, I realized it turned out even better than the one I lost in the computer crash and second (this was the highlight of my day) Natasha wasn’t in the office for the whole day. This meant that I technically had the entire day to myself.
I fished out the stack of old issues of Glamorous from the drawer in my cubicle, got myself a large cup of coffee from the coffeemaker which was installed only for Natasha’s use who liked to drink freshly brewed coffee, unlike the rest of