That initial conversation lasted about an hour.
For someone who described herself as “mai bhi aapke jaise bohot silent thi”, she spoke a lot. I think she chose well when she said “thi” instead of “hoon”. What caught me by surprise though was that, near the end of the call, she said, “I thought you’d be very reserved but you do talk a lot!”
The broad contours of her story are interesting at least for someone like me who has only known city-bred women. She came from a town not too small to warrant a 1970s Ilayaraja background score but not too big or modern either. In those few glimpses of her, you could feel the rural vibe only marginally affected by the postmodern urbanism. She went on and on about her brief life in Hyderabad, about her parents living in the town, about her brother and about her sister, and about her being the youngest and “naturally” the most pampered. When it was time for me to describe my family, her first assumption was that I was also the pampered kid (by virtue of being the only child to my parents). Somehow, I’ve never seen proof of that stereotype as much as I’d like to: almost all the single children I’ve known have had some of the strictest parents I’ve known too.
Nothing quirky came out of the first call.
It was the second that had a whiff of something dubious. On the second call, which came perhaps a week or so later, the initial courtesies were about dinner. Her work hours ended by late afternoon so I asked her what occupied her after-work time. She said, almost casually, that she “did business”. My first thought was to probe but it was not my first reaction so I let it slide.
But to an aggressive marketer the ice was broken.
In the next fifteen minutes, “business” was dropped half a dozen times and it was promoted — from her perspective, organically / slyly but for someone who read between the lines, very brazenly — in the brightest, greenest of lights possible in the spectrum. She spoke of how it did not feel like work because it was that interesting, waxed lyrical about the people she got to interact with, sang glories of some of the other partners who had attained high-end material wealth thanks to this and so on. Eventually we did get around to the elephant in the room. So tell me about your business. What do you do?
You know, Chandru, business ke baare me bolu to poora din chala jayega.
And with that, she effortlessly delayed the pitch for another episode and, after the call, I wondered if she had misinterpreted, in her relative inexperience, my courtesy as an insatiable craving to know about her “business”.
Elsewhere, all the world including me had figured out what business is.