The Bestseller She Wrote (8 page)

But his lady turned him down before too long.

“
Let’s be friends” ahh the cliched curse,

He was left at the water tank, with a broken heart to nurse.

He was an HR genius from day one, for he understood

hierarchy and rank

Everyone agrees, that for Sanjay, there is glory in store

He’ll make us proud, he is an achiever to the core.

‘Still the same. Eh! Not changed one bit,’ Aditya said, shaking his head as he read through the passage describing Sanjay in the yearbook. Sanjay had always been like this. Never one to share his books, Sanjay took great care of them. Aditya had known him for fifteen years now, but had never even once seen him lend his books to anyone. Not even to someone as close as Aditya. He was beyond possessive when it came to his books.

‘But this reminds me,’ Aditya stopped. ‘Something I have never had the courage to ask you.’ Sanjay looked up at him wondering what was coming next.

‘Why did you choose a location as unimaginative as the place underneath the water tank to propose to her? Couldn’t think of a more romantic spot?’

Sanjay’s face went red. He was embarrassed and struggled to hide it. He managed a smile. ‘Fuck you, bastard,’ he exclaimed. ‘Be happy with what you have. Don’t ridicule someone who didn’t get what he wanted.’ He sat down on his chair. ‘Asshole.’

16

A
DITYA ENTERED HIS
cabin to find Shreya waiting for him.

‘When will you be giving us your next book, Aditya?’ she asked.

‘Well,’ Aditya replied, ‘I’m almost done with it.’

‘Almost?’

‘Yes, almost. I’m not getting enough time to finish it. I was hoping to complete it on my US trip.’

‘Oh wow! You are going to the US? When?’

‘In a couple of weeks. I wanted to go for a month. But now it seems like I won’t be able to go at all.’

‘Why?’

‘We are shutting a business,’ Aditya let slip. The moment he said it he wished he hadn’t. But it was too late. ‘Please don’t talk about it. At least for a few days.’

‘Oh! Is that why you were so dry when I met you?’

‘Shutting a business is always painful. I hate it when people lose jobs for no fault of theirs.’

‘So you can’t go?’ Shreya tried to change the topic.

‘No. The transition has to be managed here. If I go, my people will be pushed around. I don’t want that to happen. I want to save as many jobs as possible.’

‘How lucky they are to have you as their boss.’

Aditya looked pleased. Any bit of praise coming from her elated him.

‘I don’t mean to sound opportunistic, but do you think it will make for good reading? Writing about this?’

Aditya didn’t understand what she was trying to say. ‘As in?’ he asked her.

‘A story about a guy who loses his job,’ Shreya said. Before Aditya could respond, his phone started ringing. He picked it up as Shreya left the room.

‘Hi Maya, we have a small problem,’ he started off and then went on to tell her about the scaling down of the wealth management business and how his presence here was necessary.

‘So NASA is out?’ she asked.

‘I will have to skip it,’ he said, sounding sad. ‘If I go, these people will be tossed around. They have worked for me. I need to protect their interests and help them find jobs in other units within the bank.’

*

That night when they were in bed, she cuddled up to Aditya and said, ‘Don’t worry. We will miss you but we will not hate you for not coming.’ She hugged him tight. ‘On the contrary, had you come leaving those people to suffer, we would have hated you for it.’

This is what Aditya loved about her. She never put him under any pressure.

‘I am not worried about you, Maya. I know you would never ask me to leave them and come. I am worried about Aryan. He will surely be disappointed.’

‘Leave that to me. I will manage him,’ Maya assured him.

He smiled, kissed her on the forehead and switched off the light. Maya always made sure that he had fewer problems to handle at home.

A few miles away, curled up in bed, Shreya was re-reading one of Aditya’s earlier books. Over the last few months, she had read it so many times that she knew most of the lines by heart. She couldn’t help but admire the subtle subtext in his prose. As she turned the pages, she wondered if Aditya meant what he said—‘If instead of malls we built libraries, the future generations would be a lot smarter.’

In the dead of the night, Aditya’s sleep was disturbed by the beep of his phone. Turning towards the side table, he picked it up and looked at it. It was a message.

Aditya looked at it momentarily, smiled and kept the phone down. He turned towards Maya, hugged her and went back to sleep.

Beep! the message tone sounded on his phone.

This time Maya woke up. ‘Who is it?’ she asked him.

‘A reader.’

‘Reader? A fan? At this hour?’

‘How do they care?’ he mumbled with a sleepy drawl and turned towards her. Before turning however he quietly put his phone on silent.

Sleep had deserted Aditya. His mind was far, far away. What had made Shreya, a mere management trainee, message him so late at night?

But did he really mind her sending him those messages? Aditya knew the answer.

17

A
DITYA WAS ALWAYS
the first to reach office. The next day was no different and at 8.30 am, he stepped out of the lift and walked towards his cabin. The rest of his team would normally come in by 9.15 am, giving him time to clear out the pending work and plan out his entire day.

Surprisingly, the light at the far end of the hall was on. He walked towards the corner.

‘Shreya?’ he exclaimed the moment he saw her. ‘How come so early?’

‘Sanjay sir wanted me to sort out some data for him.’

‘On your second day at work?’ It was obvious that he didn’t believe what she said.

‘Some donkey work,’ she smiled. Her teeth were perfect. There was something irritatingly cute about her.

He just nodded and turned away. It took an effort to look away from her. He started walking towards his room.

‘Aditya sir,’ she called out after him.

‘Again “sir”?’

She didn’t reply but just extended her right hand towards him. It held two sheets of paper. He took it from her. ‘What is it?’ he said as he looked at her.

‘A love letter,’ she said and burst out laughing at her own joke.

‘You could have professed it verbally and saved yourself the trouble of typing this out,’ he retorted, even as he took the paper from her hand and looked at it.

He started reading it with full concentration. As he turned the page, Shreya muttered, ‘I wrote it down last night.’

He laboured to raise his eyelashes and look at her. ‘Last night? I thought you were reading my book last night.’

‘I was. After I finished your book, I penned this.’

He looked at her a bit aghast. ‘You wrote all of this last night?’

‘Hmm . . . You only told me about it yesterday evening. It couldn’t have been before that, right?’

His phone rang. ‘Damn,’ he muttered as he pulled it out of his pocket. It was Maya.

‘Yes, Maya,’ he said even as he indicated to Shreya that she could stay, while he was on the call. ‘Hmm . . . okay. I will have to call you back. Hmm . . . No, not today evening. I’ll be home late. I told you that . . . hmm . . . Tell them we will come some other day. Love you. Bye.’ He disconnected the call.

‘Come on in,’ he said to Shreya and led her back to his room.

Once inside, he started reading what she had given him. Shreya quietly sat down on the chair in front of him. Her eyes betrayed the anticipation of a child.

Aditya didn’t speak a word. He read the entire document from end to end. His eyes didn’t move from the paper for even a fleeting second. His intercom rang in between. He didn’t pick it up, just flicked it to silent mode without even looking at the telephone instrument.

‘What prompted you to write this?’ he asked when he was done.

‘I told you. Our discussion about the shutting down of a business and sacking of people got me thinking. I felt that it would be a good idea to write about the life of someone who gets sacked for no fault of his. And after I finished your book yesterday, I again thought about it. An idea for a plotline crossed my mind and I just wrote it down. I didn’t think too much. Just, whatever thoughts came to my head, I penned them down.’

‘How long did it take you?’

‘Four hours.’

Aditya was stunned. ‘You texted me at 1.30. Four hours after that would mean 5.30 am. You were already here at 8.30 when I came in. Did you sleep at all?’

‘Sleep is a waste of time, Aditya. I came in here at 7 and was refining this to get it in presentable shape. I didn’t want my first submission to you to be horrible,’ she said. There wasn’t an iota of evidence on her face to show that she hadn’t slept the whole night. ‘If you like it, you can use it for your next book.’

‘Plotting of a story overnight . . . Wow! Now I know what makes you special,’ Aditya said. He was genuinely impressed at her ability to conceive a story and pen it down in such a short time. Shreya secretly blushed at his compliment.

Aditya paused to think for just about a second and continued, ‘Great start. If this is the first plotline that you have written, it shows enormous potential. There are a few gaps, but then even after months of effort, authors leave gaps in their plots. In four hours, you can’t be expected to plug everything.’

‘Can this be converted into a book?’ she asked excitedly.

Aditya thought for some time. ‘Yes, for sure, but it needs one change in the plotline if it has to work for the Indian market.’

‘This won’t work?’ The let-down was evident in her voice.

‘Don’t be disappointed,’ he said even as he placed his hand on top of hers on the table. It was a subconscious move. She didn’t move her hand away. He realised what he had done and hurriedly pulled it back.

‘I am sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’

She decided to ease the awkwardness by bringing the conversation back to her plot. ‘Tell me why it wouldn’t make a good story in India.’

‘Because you have romanticised the loss of a job. There is nothing romantic about a job loss. Losing one’s job is tragic. In the plot you have turned the guy into a hero. You have shown how he fights his way out of a job loss and turns an adversity in his favour.’

‘But isn’t that what one is supposed to do?’

‘Sweetheart,’ he began to explain with a drag. She loved the way he called her sweetheart, though she tried not to show it. But the blood rushed to her cheeks, which was something she couldn’t hide.

He continued, ‘That’s not the way it works when you write a book. Rags to riches works for non-fiction books and true stories—at times even for films. But for fiction, in India specifically, tragedy rules. Reading about someone else’s woes and crying bucketfuls is a national pastime. Unrelated people dying for no fault of theirs, tears, sob stories . . . These are all formulae for success. And after writing about all this, if you give the story a twist and a happy ending, you will end up a winner. It’s about the journey. As long as the journey is tragic and the ending happy, you will end up with a bestseller.’

‘Tragic journey . . . happy ending,’ she rolled her eyes. ‘Is that possible?’

‘That’s where creativity comes in,’ Aditya spoke patronizingly, a pro explaining the rules to a rookie.

‘Got it,’ she said. Shreya was not sure if she completely understood what Aditya was saying, but was confident that she would figure it out.

‘Let me tell you one last thing which comes to mind. You are better than most of the people whose work I have seen. The clarity of thought that reflects in this synopsis is amazingly brilliant. You have it in you to make it big.’

‘Really? You think I will be able to become a big author, an author like you?’

‘Hehe . . . I am not a benchmark. I have a long way to go.’

‘But for me you are a role model. I want to learn from you. Will you help me, Aditya?’

‘Of course I will. Whatever I can do, I will do. You have it in you to make it big. And to top it all you are extremely good-looking,’ Aditya said, making Shreya blush again. ‘You start with an advantage. Glamorous, sexy authors tend to sell more. You will be the darling of the media. A pretty author gets away with a lot.’

‘Now I know you are pulling my leg. Let me disappear from here before you make more fun of me,’ she said and left the room.

Aditya stood there holding the synopsis in his hand, wondering what had come over him.

He opened his laptop. Time to get back to work.