No good bones, only funny bones

Main aur meri tanhayi aksar yeh baatein karte hain…

 

The tanhayi in me is the voice in my head, a fiery, filter-less, chatty one. You’d think I am walking alone but I would be talking to that voice.

 

I wonder what is the big deal about a candle-lit dinner. You cannot even see your food, and what if you were eating fish with bones on Valentine’s Day? Maybe they have other sources of light too.  

 

I am seeing someone since the last two weeks. I did not anticipate it this early in life. A burly man with a paunch and the kind of laughter that makes you wonder if he ate a pair of Bose speakers for breakfast. I only knew of one Mody before I met him. I was destined to meet the second Mody the day I woke up and could not move my hips due to stiffness. The sleepy voice in my head wondered if I was already dead and this is rigor mortis setting in with my spirit talking to me.

 

A general physician had asked me to get an MRI before seeing Mody. Mody, a specialist, looked at the MRI reports, prescribed medicines, and asked me to see a physiotherapist who works next door (like literally the door next to his). I noticed that Mody’s name and his spouse’s name have four out of five letters in common. That’s an eighty percent match! Even sunshine and moonshine are not as close.  

 

I waited for a long time in the waiting room. I read about all the medical miracles he can do through the laminated cutouts of printed text he has put all over the walls. Many of them are written in grammatically wrong English. My inner vice scolds me for unconscious colonialism for noticing wrong English when English is neither of our native language. What a hypocrite I am!

 

I see Mody’s picture standing next to a tall, White doctor in scrubs. I see names of cities from Germany and the US printed on those laminated walls. I have no idea what he was doing in those places (getting trained, I suppose). I wonder if he would post a picture of himself standing next to a Black doctor.

 

Mody surely knows how to market himself.  

 

And when you have a lot of time to kill, you think of things that do not concern you.

 

And then the power goes off! It’s dark.

 

A power outage! I haven’t experienced one in a while. Suddenly I hear a lot of footsteps and shuffling around. A lot of hustle. People talking loudly in Gujarati, which, I can understand, not!

 

My eyes adjust to the darkness and I crane my neck from the waiting room to catch a glimpse of what is happening.

 

Mody is attending to his patients as the receptionist holds up the cell phone torch light. You’ve got to be kidding me!

 

I keep hoping that my turn never comes till power is back. And the woman loudly screams something that sounds like my name followed by, “Ben aaucho!” (sister, are you coming?)

 

I enter his room, half hoping that he will send me back. The woman is now holding two thin candles, looking like she is about to sing a haunted song from the 1950s by Lata Mangeshkar. Mody looks scary in the shadow. He asks me to touch my toes. He asks me to arch my back. He asks me to show a Bruce Lee kick in the air while facing away from him. He scribbles down the name of some medicines in illegible writing, prescribes more physiotherapy, and asks me to come back in a month.

 

On hearing that I work where I do, he tells me how impressed he is that I am a faculty at my age. I remind him that young people do not have orthopedic issues (although I want to remind him that being a faculty does not depend on age). He tells me the names of all my colleagues he has treated, possibly his way of making me comfortable through informal small talk. Patient confidentiality (and privacy) be darned! Those are subjective social constructs, some western society bee-ass anyway! I shudder thinking which colleague of mine will now learn about my creaking hips that are threatening to fall apart. Such a hypocrite I am, writing about my health and daily life on the blog but complaining about privacy.

 

G’s decade-old forecast that I may have my childbirth and hip replacement surgery on the same table still makes me shudder. I remember that line every time my hips creak. Mody tells me how intelligent both his sons are (also practicing medicine). He shares that he wanted his sons to study engineering but they did not listen. Good call, I say. Good riddance, I think!   

 

I ask him if he will show me the exercises. He says his physiotherapist will. Who knows, his paunch might have lashed out at me in the dark for asking him such a question.

 

I get up to leave. I tell him that this is my first candlelight consultation (I skip the Valentine’s Day reference). He laughs with an abandon that hurt my eardrums. As a child, I have studied for many an exam in candle light (especially during summers). I think that I have turned out to be fine, so this should be okay too.    

 

I walk up to the receptionist and show her my ID. I write down my name on a receipt book. I pay nothing. My employer and my insurance will sort it out and take care of the bills. I count my blessings. One of the many perks here include never paying for a doctor, medicines, blood work, tests, etc., if I see someone within a quite extensive healthcare network in India. They have my parents covered too. And here I am complaining about lack of patient confidentiality!

 

I walk back to the campus clinic and hand over the prescription. The receptionist makes a copy and notes my secretary’s number. Tomorrow, my secretary will collect the medicines and leave them at my office even before I am there. That was, in a nutshell, my Valentine’s Day this year. January was all about experiencing COVID-19 and February has been about getting orthopedic spas. What else will keep me busy this year, I wonder as I walk back home.   

 

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Virtual wars

I passed the daabwaala (the guy selling green coconuts) this evening to get a haircut. He was oblivious to the world, busy playing PUBG. I stopped and stared at him for a good 10 seconds. He had no idea!

You know how hair salons in India are (or maybe you don't). You go for a simple haircut. They take a fistful of your hair and assess it with the seriousness of a physician examining a patient. People and places change, but the narrative remains the same. I have extremely dry hair, I need to apply serum and a variety of other things, I need to do certain treatments, need to color my graying hair, blah blah blah. The way he was diagnosing me, it felt like I would be the next popular choice for the movie Bala. He looked at me through the mirror with a thoughtful expression, giving me a multitude of haircut options, asking if I wanted curls and spikes and what not!

I have seen this too many times. People with straight hair wanting curls and people with curls and waves getting their hair ninety degrees straight.

I was running out of patience. I told the guy, “Look! I am a 50-year-old teacher. My job requires that students take me seriously. I have not come here to get a "chokri-look" and I have about 40 minutes to spare. Hair health comes from good food and sleep, not from serum. I need a simple haircut. Remember, I need to look my age and not like some 20-year-old!

The guy was too stunned to say anything after that. He said I am the first person who asked him not to give a chokri-look. Then he talked about his home in Darjeeling, how he landed up here, that Shontu Pal was the previous guy who cut my hair and has now moved to the Kolkata branch, how their landlord has banned cooking meat and fish at home, how he craves for his native food, that he gets one month off every year, etc. He asked me if as a Bengali, I miss eating Bengali "non-veg" food. After all the small talk about dry hair, there was something we both connected over, not having access to our native food. I didn't have the heart to tell him that due to my privileges, I was less alienated from my food. That I did not have a landlord and I could order Bengali food from a restaurant whenever I wanted.

He forgot to take my "before" shot but took some "after" shots after getting on a stool. He was barely five feet tall. The great thing is that he showed me his Instagram page and asked if he has permission to post my "after" pics. Given that a lot of people have no idea about consent, it was a very nice gesture. The guy refused a tip.

I stopped at the daabwaala's on my way back. His head was still bowed subserviently to PUBG. I asked if he ever fears that his neck will fall off his shoulders. He laughed. I asked what if someone steals a few green coconuts while he is distracted? He looked up at the sky and said rather philosophically, "God is watching everyone. He will punish."

"God is watching you too, that you are distracted and not giving full attention to your work," I said rather unceremoniously.

He shrugged, scraped off the flesh from the coconut for me and went back to fighting virtual wars.

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Daably distracted

I went off for an evening stroll and enjoy daab (green coconut). Found a daabwaala (seller).

"I want a young coconut with moderate flesh," I said. I didn't want a ripe daab that has now become a coconut, nor did I want one with no flesh at all.

The guy barely looked up. On auto-pilot mode, he tapped and picked a coconut, cut it, and gave it to me. He had his earphones on, and his eyes were glued to his cellphone. He was smiling, lost in his own world.

I found it rather odd. I finished off the water and asked him to take out the flesh. He did so rather reluctantly, on auto-pilot mode. I finished it and asked for one more. I was pretty sure he looked mildly annoyed.

"What are you watching so intently?" I asked, curious.

"PUBG," he said. And I needed to hear no more. We have a PUBG-addict in our family too. My brother-in-law.

"Sabzi?" I asked knowingly. The dirty look he gave me, you should have seen his face.

I gave him a 500 rupee note. He showed me by hand gesture that he may not have change and he doesn't want to get distracted looking for change. I gave him a 100 rupee note. He barely managed to return me a twenty.

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Pune

I am reminded of the breakfast we had at Vohuman Café three weekends ago. Some of us had taken an early morning flight to Pune. We got really excited about the chicken sandwich they offered in Spice Jet, which is way better than the Chicken Junglee Sandwich in Indigo. Once we landed, we learnt that the hotel was full and could not accommodate an early check-in (wedding season and all). It was 8 am and we had about four hours to kill!

 

So my colleague and I went to Vohuman Café. The maska bun was laden with butter, the cheesy omelette was out of the world, and so was the Irani tea. After waking up at 3 am and catching a flight at 6 am, I needed this. I wish I had not been so impressed with my Spice Jet sandwich earlier.

After that, we walked the length and breadth and climbing the heights of Shaniwar Wada. We also went to Shreemant Dagdusheth Halwai Ganpati Mandir. The driver said that a first timer in Pune should not miss this, and it was not too far from my hotel in Koregaon Park either.

 

I did end up meeting a friend as well. I had last met her in 2006, at her wedding. Back in the day, getting parental permission to go to events post dusk used to be as difficult as getting a US visa. There would be thorough background checks, you had to answer hundreds of questions like kothaye jaabi? Keno jaabi? Na gele ki hobe? Koto bhalo bondhu? Kokhon firbi? Aar ke ke jaabe? Ki guarantee je timely firbi? There is no telling you what would happen if you were late. I think the curfew time for me was 10pm, which was more generous than what other friends had. Another friend and I had miraculously managed to get permission, so we slapped some makeup, borrowed a sari, took the afternoon metro with full makeup and people staring at us, and travelled all the way to Behala. We never got to meet the groom because we had strict parents who set stricter curfew times, and we were dependent on public transport which could take forever.

 

We never met after that. Fast forward life to 2022. Parental permissions are a thing of the past. I don’t even attend weddings anymore, all my friends who wanted to be married are married. I am in Pune and I am looking up the map for some odd-sounding place called Pimpri. I have no idea what it means, but I see that it will take a good hour to get there from my hotel. I must be there by 7:30 am. So, I message my friend, letting her know that I am in town and apologizing that I will not be able to meet. By some divine intervention, she tells me that she lives in Pimpri too, not too far from my work location.

 

So off I went there, literally gate crashing on a Sunday morning, finally meeting the groom from 2006 and the entire family. It was a gorgeous morning. I had my fill of adda, ginger tea, koraishuti'r kochuri aar alu'r dum, and we talked about good old times. We called up the other friend and gossiped some more! I even made her pack me some kochuri and alu’r dum for the rest of the day, so shameless I am. It turned out to be the best two hours I had spent in Pune!

 

And just like that, life continues to surprise. I love that my work takes me to different places, and I have reconnected with many school and college friends over the years. I loved Pune as a city too for many reasons and cannot wait for a re-reunion (or tri-union), hopefully with other friends as well!

 

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Miss-understandings

The delivery person calls my phone, telling me that he has a package for me at the campus main gate and will come over in two minutes to deliver it. I open my main door and wait outside on the porch. While doing so, I notice some dead insects and dried leaves on the porch. As I wait, I pick up a broom from inside and start sweeping the front entrance. The man shows up as I am sweeping. He hands me over the package and says, "Ask madam to go online and fill out the short survey." I nod my head. But wait, madam? Who is madam? Apparently, I got mistaken as the domestic help while sweeping my own home.

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I usually stay back in the office till late night, working as well as indulging in non-essential work sometimes such as watching movies. More than once, a security guard makes a round at around 2 am to make sure all offices are locked. He taps on my office door; I open the door and tell him that I will be working some more. He nods, looks at the name plate outside my office door and asks me my name. I point to the nameplate and tell him that is my name. Confused, he asks me which professor I work for. I tell him the name of the professor (my name again). He asks me what my name is. I repeat my name. Suddenly, realization dawns on him and he says, "Sorry sir, sorry sir, I thought that you are the research assistant!" (In Indian English, you say things twice or more for extra emphasis, yes yes, sorry sorry, ya ya, no no, aiyyo aiyyo). When I work late at night in my office, I frequently get mistaken to be a research assistant. And on realizing that I am the faculty, I magically become a sir.

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Sometimes, I keep a straight face and play along. Like when a cleaning staff had once asked me why I don't have children, I made a face and said, "Babu doesn't show interest!" Her expression was priceless. I find these episodes hilarious!

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And just like that, while enjoying my anonymity (many staff on campus still do not know who I am) and in between playing kaajer mashi (domestic help), the disinterested professor's childless wife and a nocturnal research assistant, I completed three years here recently!

 

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Some gossip a day keeps the doctor awake

There’s something very nostalgic about sisters staying up late at night, giggling and gossiping, that brings back memories of growing up. I think it’s a sister-sister thing; only sisters with sisters will get it. The last many nights have seen us indulging in decadent gossip, from the whereabouts of the paara’r jethima-pishimas to eccentric friends and relatives we are better off not knowing (in life) but knowing (on social media).

 

There’s little Maya trying to sleep, flanked by two gossip mongers incessantly chatting. Our chats are occasionally punctuated by a restless group of birds outside, or Maya’s shrill cries when her chomping spree has been prematurely interrupted because the overworked teat has unceremoniously slipped out of her mouth since her mom and aunt were giggling uncontrollably. This is usually followed by our mom’s sharp rebuke from the other room for being the careless Ma and mashi that we are, up and chatting in the middle of the night. “Tora ghumo ebaar! Bachcha jege jachche!” I sometimes wonder if she says these things out of decades of habit of disciplining us, or simply because she is experiencing FOMO.

 

Maya goes back to sleep peacefully once she has found her chomping device again, hanging like a half-monkey, half-kangaroo from her mom’s pouch, occasionally getting restless, turning on the other side to punch my chest with her little fist. She sidles up to her mom, a tiny human with simple, non-gossipy needs.

 

We go back to looking at social media profiles of people we consider as “odd.” Kamalika from Keshtopur who is Kami(nee) from Kansas now. I am looking at people and I have no idea who they are, what they do, or how did they come to occupy my attention. The nyaka boudi from Gurugram with baggy arms, Mampi and Tampi posing in front of the temples of Hampi, the new mom posting a dozen baby pics everyday with an emoji stuck on the baby’s face (why show when you don’t want to show?), the ex of the ex’s ex whose spouse is currently friends with some other ex (it’s a small world!), the crush from school who is a bald-headed, pot-bellied catch (me not) from New Jersey, Ranga mashima’r meye being married to Poltu kaku’r bou er bhaipo, and the more recent scary Halloween costumes of more Putanas from Durga pujo.

 

“Ei dekh Ei chobi ta. The caption says, ‘Dressed to kill!’”— my sister remarks.

 

I look at a woman I do not know, dressed in tight hunting clothes, her hair making her look like a cross between Sheeba and Kimi Katkar.

 

“Dressed to kill what? Mosquitoes?” I observed wryly.

 

We giggled in spasms. The baby got startled again. This time, she rightly turned around to kick my lower abdomen. I gasped audibly. The voice from the other room with the impending threat was back!

 

Ghumoshna tora. Oshobhyota kor. Bachcha ta keo ghumote dish na!! Kalke dekhchi toder!

 

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Starting 2022 with (COVID) positivity

2022 started with new experiences. I should have known something is terribly wrong when I started to crave watching Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. I sat through the over-the-top, misogynistic, problematic 3.5-hour movie, crying through every moment, even more than the very gaal-fola-Gobindor-Ma Jaya Bachchan did. I was feeling pretty down by then and decided to order biryani. I must be the only person in the world who got the news of being tested COVID positive and went back to eating biryani, now somewhat relieved that the sudden, inexplicable urge to watch a crappy movie might have had a medical reason.

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I’ve been thinking a lot ever since, lying in bed and asking, why me? I’m doubly vaccinated and always doubly masked up. I live the life of a recluse. I don’t party. I’ve said no to most people wanting to meet in person. All my friendships and relationships have been relegated to WhatsApp. I haven’t attended a wedding since 2012. I have never had domestic help. I haven’t traveled internationally. I mostly cook my food and order room service when in a hotel. I teach online. I never whine on social media about how I don’t have a social life anymore. Why me?
I got plenty of time to mull over these questions but found no answers. I spent the whole of January coughing and sleeping out of sheer weakness. That is what COVID does to you. Everyone who has survived it will have their own story to tell. My story involves a quarantine room I fell in love with, some brain fog, and a former US president.
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I am glad that I quarantined myself within an hour of showing symptoms, even before my RT-PCR could be scheduled the next day. I had taken a flight to Kolkata a week ago, just like I had done a few times in the past year, doubly masked and fully vaccinated. I had managed to evade COVID for almost two years since its outbreak. Yet, I shivered uncontrollably that evening, so much so that I had to wear a few sweaters and don double socks, getting on my haunches horizontally and hugging the bed. It also brought a sense of deep fear that pushed me to message a few close friends and let them know that I was very ill and I might be dying. I did not know what had afflicted me to bring about those chills and shivers (I still did not believe that it could be COVID), but if this is what dying looked like, I wondered if my financial savings would sink down the bank’s floor remaining unclaimed for life.
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It was my sister’s father-in-law, Malay Babu, who took most of the brunt of my illness. Within minutes, he had to vacate the bachelor pad where he lived, cooked, watched television, and enjoyed his life. It is a small, cozy room on the mezzanine floor I passed on the way to the rooftop. The doors were usually partially closed, so I never really got a good peek into the room. That would be my quarantine room at least till my test results were out. The sheets were quickly changed, fresh pillows were brought from downstairs, and Malay Babu barely got ten minutes to collect his essentials and move. I somehow limped up the stairs, holding on to the handrails, entered the room, and collapsed on the bed. I do not remember much from the rest of that night.
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I opened my eyes the next morning and looked around to get my first close look at the room. There was a fan atop my head and an air conditioner on the wall in front of me. There was a monitor. On the corner was a table with an assortment of medicines, a bottle of hair oil, and shaving paraphernalia. On the right wall were two windows, now closed. On the left wall were a series of pictures, some in black and white and some framed. First, there were Maya's ancestors staring back at me with stern eyes, I could tell the resemblance with little Maya. Maya is my eight-month-old niece. In one picture, Maya looked like an old man wearing dhuti and sitting on a chair. The resemblance of the forehead was striking. In another picture, Maya sat in a white sari, her head partially covered, with a striking resemblance of the cheek bones. Wait, was I hallucinating? How could both her great grandparents look like Maya unless they both looked like each other? My eyes drifted to the other pictures, a wall calendar (the tell-tale sign of a Bengali household), gods and goddesses, Thakur Ramkrishnadeb, Sarada Ma, and Swami Vivekananda. Then there was Sai Baba, Radha Krishna, and wait, a framed picture of George W. Bush smiling back at me. How did I forget about this picture?
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My sister got married many years ago. It was during the wedding that I met Malay Babu for the first time. He seemed like a traditional, nice person who spoke in Bangal and lauded me for doing a PhD (I was a PhD student at that time). He had also made an unusual request, asking me if I could bring him a picture of President Bush the next time. It would be one of the more unusual things someone had asked me to do. Obama was already the president then, I wonder if he knew it. I wondered what connection a gentleman from Kolkata who has only left the country for three trips to Bangladesh and has never boarded an airplane ever could have with President Bush. I told myself that it was none of my business. The next time I visited Kolkata, I gave him a rolled and laminated, 19” by 13” poster of President Bush, bought from Amazon for $10 (including $3.99 for shipping), that has gone out of stock since then. He was thrilled and thanked me many times. He never asked me for anything again. I heard that he took the poster to three shops in Rashbehari Avenue and all of them refused to frame it after looking at the poster. He finally found a shop where the person, after much coaxing and cajoling, framed the poster for him.
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And now, I was trapped in Malay Babu’s room, watching George Bush smile back at me from the very poster that I had bought many Januarys ago.
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I tested positive. I postponed my tickets. I called my parents and told them that I am not coming back to spend time with them for a while. There were tears. There was pep talk. There were dozens of medicines—cough syrups, nasal sprays, and multivitamins that replaced Malay Babu’s medicines. And there was a lot of brain fog. I was too weak to sit or walk or spend time on my phone, so I spent the next many days looking out of the window to see darkened algae stains on the walls of the adjoining homes on the right and President Bush smiling back at me on the left. I do not know if one was more interesting than the other.
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I fell in love with the room. It had a calm, restorative energy to it. I would doze off by 8:30 pm and wake up by 6 am, opening the windows and waiting for the first rays of the sun. With winter sunlight streaming in, this became the window to the world I was temporarily quarantined from. I suddenly had the gift of time and started taking note of the small things. An old woman, now blinded and possibly in her 90s, sang devotional songs praising Ram and Krishna every morning. I learnt that she has been abandoned in that house with a servant, her children having moved out long back and now waiting for her passing so that they can sell off the house to a promoter and build a high-rise apartment. On the other side, I heard loud voices of a child and a rather overbearing mother that left little to the imagination. “Why aren’t you eating breakfast? Why aren’t you doing your homework? How much water have you been drinking since morning? Have you emptied your bladder? Come, it’s time for a bath. It’s time for your drawing classes.” At night, the mother cooked and the child sat in the kitchen doing homework, the mother constantly nagging and asking him to frame sentences in English with perfect grammar. “Make a sentence with the word boy. What is the opposite of a boy? Make a sentence with the word girl.” One mistake in sentence construction, and the mother would be very upset. I wondered what all the fuss was about perfecting a language, a foreign language that too.
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I listened to many such conversations throughout the day, all while in bed, that I eventually discovered was raised on a platform using bricks and discarded blocks of wood to increase under-the-bed storage space. I sometimes wondered what would happen if the bed collapsed under my weight. The sunlight continued to give me hope every morning while President Bush kept smiling at me. Time had slowed down, and with nothing much to do, I thought a lot. I thought about my childhood and the winter of fourth grade when I had contracted chicken pox. We used to live in a really big house, and I was sent to the farthest room to quarantine. I lay there on a folding bed all day and watched the Telugu neighbors erect a grand pandal for a family wedding. They played loud music very early in the morning and with the absence of television or phone, that was my source of entertainment. Thirty years later, I still remember some of the songs of Kumar Sanu they played; those songs still remind me of chicken pox.
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My symptoms changed for the next few days. The chills were gone, but then came high fever. Then one day, there was sneezing. And coughing. The night when I threw up my dinner, I had an elevated heartbeat. My body had no clue how to respond to COVID. I went downstairs only a few times every day, for bathing and for using the restroom, my head reeling as I climbed up and down the stairs. My sister and her husband sanitized everything I touched with gusto. They gave me delicious home-cooked meals, peeled pomegranates, washed my dishes (so that I do not touch more things), and refilled my hot water flask, being at my beck and call 24/7. After living on my own for 16 years, I was glad that I was not left to recover on my own. On days when I felt a little better, I sat on a chair atop the stairs. From there, I watched little Maya play or watch “Gaiyya meri gaiyya” (Oh cow, my dear cow) on television.
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Malay Babu, the fantastic story teller that he is, regaled me with hundreds of stories from his life in Bangal bhasha. He enunciates Corona as Koruna (sympathy), and told me stories from the time when he served in the army, how he ran away from home once, how he drove jeeps during war, lifted weights, and ran miles every day to stay fit, how he went to Bangladesh to meet his extended family decades after his parents had moved to India, how he went bargaining for Ilish maach (fish) from Podda when the person selling fish told him that he has two begums (wives) and 18 children to take care at home, and how he got on a cruise ship near Barishal (might have been a large boat) with no money when a Muslim don who wore “jaali genji” (a vest designed like fishnet) rescued him. I relished all his stories from my vista point atop the stairs till I had no more energy left. Then I would go back to my room and stare at President Bush till I fell asleep. I am not sure if I was hallucinating, but I sometimes thought that he was moving his lips to talk to me.
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Eventually, my quarantine ended. I slowly started spending more time downstairs. Wearing a mask all the time became a habit. We celebrated the end of quarantine with biryani from Nusrat’s, just like the day when I had tested positive and spent the evening watching a crappy movie and eating mutton biryani. I booked my tickets. My parents visited. I packed my bags and put the sheets and pillow covers for washing. I hung my blankets in the sun. I picked up my things and took one last look at the room that had become my safe haven for the past two weeks. And I was awash with sadness. Sunlight was streaming through the windows just like it did every day. The mother was asking the child if he needed help separating the bones of the fish on his own. Maya’s ancestors started back at me. And on the far end, President Bush smiled back at me, wishing me health and waving me goodbye. 
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Managing the career

While checking in, the hotel receptionist asks me, “Ma’am, can I see your id?”

The concierge looks at my id, looks up information about my booking, looks at my id again, and asks me the most unusual question.

“Professor, can you give me tips to prepare for the CAT interview?”

The next morning, I wait for my taxi to get to the interview center. I call the driver and hear a sweet, pre-recorded voice speaking to me in Telugu. I understand nothing but understand enough to know that the line is busy and Driver Garu is speaking to someone else. He shows up eventually, wearing pottu, a circular dot on his forehead. I pay him and am about to leave when he says, “Madam, please give 5 rating before you get down.” He ensures I gave him five stars before I leave.

 At the center, I meet those who are organizing the interviews. My job was merely to see that everything looks good, and everything does look good. I didn’t have to do anything but watch.

The head of the center hurries to meet me. “Welcome madam. Welcome madam.” He assured me that everything is taken care of. Then, he lowers his voice a few decibels and asks me— Professor, may I ask my daughter to come meet you so that she can get tips on how to prepare for the CAT? She is in the tenth right now. She will need the time to prepare.

A helicopter parent! He asks me if I got my MBA from the same institution where I work. I tell him that I do not have an MBA. He never summoned his tenth grader after that, so I hope that this signaled to him that I am not worthy of giving career advice. What a relief!

The MBA obsession is everywhere!

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