The Accidental Apprentice (7 page)

‘If only it were that simple. A man like Acharya must have thought about this very carefully before he approached you.'

Karan's morbid, unrelenting cynicism grows on me like a fungus. By the time I sit down with Ma and Neha for dinner, I am convinced that signing that contract with Acharya was the worst mistake of my life.

Whenever I am disturbed, I turn to poetry for solace. So, after dinner, I take out the secret black diary in which I have been jotting down my thoughts and feelings since I was nine. As I flick through its well-thumbed pages, my eyes settle on a short poem titled ‘Tomorrow'. It is dated 14 April 1999, when I was a callow, eleven-year-old schoolgirl. Perhaps because it was penned in a happier, simpler time, it is just the tonic I need. This is what I wrote:

Hope is a shining sun

That brightens every morrow.

Love is a mighty wind

That blows away the sorrow.

The future is an empty road

And I'm not afraid of tomorrow.

The First Test

Love in the Time of
Khap

‘Welcome, sir, would you like to take a look at our range of big-screen TVs? We have some fantastic offers at the moment.' I smile at the customer with all the ingratiating enthusiasm of a presenter on the Home Shop channel.

It is Saturday, 18 December. A week has passed since my rendezvous with Acharya and my mind has been full of worry. All my life I never feared examinations, but just thinking about Acharya's tests causes a weird roiling in the pit of my stomach. Mainly because I know nothing about them, and the uncertainty is stressing me out. On top of this, the showroom has become a madhouse. World Cup fervour is reaching fever pitch and our TV sales are going through the roof. This morning a frisson of excitement went through the employees when we were told that Bollywood actress Priya Capoorr will visit the store two weeks from now. She is the brand ambassador for Sinotron Corporation and will be promoting their latest TV models.

There have been some other developments as well. We have a new cashier called Arjun Soni, a fat slob who constantly flips peanuts into his mouth and answers questions with questions. Neelam, one of the salesgirls, is quitting next month to get married. The boy is a Nonresident Indian from Stockholm. She is excited about going to Sweden, a country about which I know next to nothing.

In the afternoon the manager calls me to his cubicle. ‘Sapna, I was just checking your sales figures. You are top of the list again,' he beams at me. His forced, yellow, toothy grin reminds me of an old Hindi film villain called Jeevan, putting me instantly on my guard. Madan smiles only when he wants to coax a favour out of an employee, like requiring us to stay overtime or come to work on a Sunday.

‘You remember Mr Kuldip Singh, the man who bought a truckload of goods last week?' he continues.

‘You mean that farmer from Haryana?'

‘Yes, yes.' Madan nods. ‘Well, he called today to say that no one in his household knows how to operate any of those appliances. Now he wants someone from the shop to come to his village and explain all the operating instructions. You understand?'

‘Yes, so why don't you send one of the sales boys?'

‘That's the problem,' Madan sighs. ‘He wants only you. Apparently you impressed him no end. So here's the deal. We want you to go to his village tomorrow, and show him how the TV and the washing machine and the music system and DVD player work. We'll bear all your travel costs and, on top, you'll receive five hundred rupees for expenses.'

‘I'm not wasting my Sunday just for five hundred rupees.'

‘Think of it as easy money. I've found out that it takes just three hours to Chandangarh village. You could easily go in the morning and return by evening. Is it okay with you?'

‘It's not okay. How can you ask a single woman to go all alone to a remote village?'

‘I understand, I understand.' Madan waggles his head. ‘But Gulati
sahib
will consider this a personal favour. Please, just this once,' he pleads.

‘I can't go this Sunday,' I say with a grave shake of the head. ‘It is Alka's birthday.'

‘Who is Alka?'

‘My sister, who died two years ago.'

‘Why do the dead have to interfere with the affairs of the living?' he mutters under his breath, before nodding resignedly. ‘
Theek hai.
Can you at least go on Monday?'

‘Yes, that should be possible. But I'll not stay longer than a few hours in that village. At what time will the taxi report to my house on Monday?'

‘Taxi? Who do you think you are? Priya Capoorr? You'll take a bus, understand?'

I feel like telling him to go take a hike but there's only so far you can push Madan and I think I've pushed him close enough today.

If ever I get to become the CEO of the ABC Group, the first thing I'll do is buy up Gulati & Sons, and make Madan the office sweeper. For now, however, I simply nod and swallow my pride.

*   *   *

An air of deep unsettling gloom hangs over the house. The cruel and mocking stillness of fate. Today is Alka's birthday. She would have been seventeen today. Mother dabs at her eyes. I have a lump in my throat that refuses to go away. The mood of homage and penitence wraps me in its suffocating embrace.

There has not been a single day in the last two years when I have not thought of Alka. The dead don't die. They simply transform into phantoms, hovering about in the air, preying on our thoughts, invading our dreams. Alka's absence haunts me every day, but more so today. There's something particularly damning about being alive on your dead sister's birthday.

As I sit staring at her photograph, consumed by survivor's guilt, memories of our time in Nainital come rushing back to me.

We used to live in Number 17, a large, four-bedroom house on the campus of Windsor Academy, an all-boys residential school, where Papa was the senior teacher for mathematics. Built in the 1870s, the school is like a Victorian fortress sprawling over a hundred acres of land, complete with crenellated turrets, stone parapet spires and angels and gargoyles embedded in the Gothic façade of the main building. Perched atop a low green hill, it is surrounded by mist-clad mountains and oak, pine and deodar forests. From our house we could even see the eye-shaped Naini lake, glimmering darkly.

Papa had a long association with the Academy, beginning his teaching career in 1983 and working there continuously for more than twenty-five years. We were a middle-class family, leading a quiet, middle-class existence. The atmosphere in our house was one of discipline, responsibility and few extravagances. In many ways it was an idyllic life of peaceful solitude and diligent study, punctuated by summer storms, lazy boating trips on the lake and winter excursions to our ancestral home in Hardoi.

Though we grew up together in the same house, we three sisters had very different personalities and approaches to life. I was the shy, bookish nerd. Neha was the snobbish show-off. And Alka was the free spirit who marched to her own tune. She had a great sense of humour and found joy in even the smallest things. She was boisterous, vivacious, spontaneous, outrageous, even bordering on rash at times. But the moment she flashed her impish smile and said, ‘
Kamaal ho gaya!
' all was forgiven. She was the apple of my eye, the life of the party, the heart of our family.

We were schooled in an environment of regimented duty, where rules were more important than feelings. Alka, Neha and I attended St Theresa's Convent, an exclusive English-medium boarding school for girls run by Catholic nuns. We three were non-fee-paying day girls, a privilege afforded to us by virtue of Papa's employment at Windsor Academy, which had a reciprocal arrangement with the Convent. Sister Agnes, our tyrannical principal, had very clear ideas on the things we were allowed to do as girls, what we could not do and what we must never do. At home, our father enforced the same strict code of conduct, including an eight p.m. curfew. Without discipline, there is only anarchy, Papa used to say. Being a mathematics teacher, he had reduced his world to the binary of black and white, good and bad. There was no allowance for grey in his universe.

He had also mapped out the futures of all three of his daughters. I, the studious one, was to become a civil servant; Neha, the beautiful one, was to pursue a career as a TV journalist; and Alka, the compassionate one, was to be a doctor.

Like an obedient daughter, I did what Father expected of me. I excelled at school and then joined the BA course at Kumaun University. Even though my subject was English literature, I read up everything that I could lay my hands on. From the life cycle of a moth to the fuel cycle of a nuclear power plant, from black holes to brown clouds to cloud computing, I hoovered up every bit of arcane information to hone my general knowledge, which is essential for success in the civil services exam.

My father's most important rule inevitably had to do with boys. A few years ago, a fellow teacher, Mr Ghildayal, had been singed by his eighteen-year-old daughter Mamta's secret romance with the school head boy, which had resulted in an unexpected pregnancy, and Papa was petrified by the prospect of a similar scandal attaching itself to his family. ‘If I catch any of my daughters even so much as looking at a boy on campus, I'll take off her hide,' he would threaten us. But he couldn't prevent the boys from looking at us, or, rather, at Neha and Alka. They were the prettiest girls on a hormone-filled campus, where every day brought a new sexual awakening to some tormented soul. The boys were mostly spoilt rich kids from places like Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata who had been banished by their parents, and were intent on making full use of their new freedom. Windsor Academy prided itself on being an academic utopia. In actual fact, it was a den of corruption and degradation. All kinds of pornographic materials and alcoholic drinks circulated freely on campus. There were even dark whispers of drug abuse and prostitute visits.

I was too engrossed in my studies to notice boys. Neha treated them with utter contempt. She had concluded quite early on that Nainital was not the place where she wanted to spend the rest of her life, and avoided the locals like the plague. That left our youngest sister Alka. She was an adolescent schoolgirl, trying to deal with the changes in her body. Even though she was growing up physically, emotionally she was just a kid who still believed in the tooth fairy. For me, boys were an avoidable distraction; for Neha, they were a passing amusement; but for Alka they were a seductive puzzle viewed through the rose-tinted glasses of the Mills & Boon romances she was addicted to. Papa's stern admonitions did little to wean her away from her fascination with the bubblegum fantasy world of dashing heroes and damsels in distress. Given her innocent, carefree manner and utter disdain for authority, it was only a question of time before some predatory Romeo swept her off her feet.

It happened sooner than I expected. I had my first inkling that something was cooking on the occasion of Alka's fifteenth birthday.

Papa didn't believe in birthday celebrations, considering them to be on a par with Valentine's Day, a Western import to promote crass commercialism. The one allowance he made to our generation was permitting Neha and me to distribute candies to the class on our birthdays. Only Alka, being the pampered one, was allowed to host her own birthday parties. They were also modest affairs consisting of cake, a few of her school friends and an inexpensive gift, usually a book.

Alka's fifteenth birthday had the obligatory cake and cookies, the usual fun and games. But, besides her typical exuberance, this time she exuded an earthy sexuality heretofore hidden. That night, while inspecting her presents, I found a bottle of Poison perfume by Christian Dior tossed casually among her clothes.

‘Wow! Lucky girl!' I rolled my eyes. ‘Now who in Nainital can afford a gift like this?'

With a disarming smile and a shrug, Alka tried to make light of it. ‘
Kamaal ho gaya, didi!
Rakhi the miser suddenly became generous.'

I knew she was lying. Rakhi Rawat was her classmate in St Theresa's. Last year she had given Alka a plastic treasure chest costing fifty rupees on her birthday. There was no way she would gift her an imported perfume costing three thousand.

There were other signals, too. Throughout the two-week Christmas holiday, when the Academy was closed, I caught Alka writing furtive letters, which she would drop stealthily into the red postbox that stood just outside the school's main gate. When I confronted her, she said they were for a pen friend in Brazil. Even more worryingly, her grades dropped a little. She began suffering from insomnia, lost her appetite.

I got conclusive proof the day the Academy reopened. Returning from the library in the evening, I heard muffled sounds coming from behind the deserted school gym. As I edged closer, I saw a girl and a boy locked in a passionate embrace under an oak tree. The girl had her hands on the boy's shoulders and he was kissing her on the lips. They broke up the moment they detected my presence. The boy turned and sprinted down the hill, disappearing into a thicket of pine trees. I couldn't catch his face, but his green blazer and grey trousers were a dead giveaway: it was the school uniform. The girl tried to avert her face and scramble past me, but I caught her hand. It was Alka.

We went for a long walk that night. She refused to tell me the boy's name or any other detail about him, other than that he was the coolest guy on the planet and the son of a very rich Delhi-based businessman. ‘I am in love,
didi,
' she kept harping, even breaking into a corny love song.

‘You don't fall in love when you're fifteen, Alka,' I counselled her. ‘This is simply infatuation. The boy is trying to take advantage of you.'

‘Love doesn't have an age limit,
didi,
' she retorted. ‘It happens when it happens. And it lasts a lifetime. You'll see when I marry him.'