This morning I woke up with a severe cramp in my hamstring. I
rolled over, hoping it would disappear soon and let me rest a little while
more. But I knew it wasn’t one of those things that would pass without me
getting up and hopping around for a bit. So I did just that. After all that
hopping, I was wide awake. Such a waste.
As you can probably tell, it’s not a new feeling. Every month for
a week, over the course of one year, my life stopped. It literally stopped. The
only things that moved were the hands of the clock (a metaphor since I use my
phone or the computer screen to tell time). Anyone who has ever had a deadline
anywhere in the world was better off than us. Or so we thought. We called it,
quite ominously, Production Week. For the uninitiated non-newsy folk, it’s when
an issue is put to bed. No, not all issues like wars or terrorism or money
swindling through Swiss accounts, but a magazine, which obliquely references
all the other issues I just mentioned. The first week I joined work, I joined
on Production Monday (notice how I sanctify the week by capitalising the
initials of every day). I waited from ten to one for my team to show up. I did
think it odd for people to start their work days in the afternoon but I kept
shut. It was, after all, my FIRST day at my FIRST job. Ever.
I sat leafing through the magazine that was going to soon put an
end to my social life, but I didn’t know it then. People began to arrive slowly
and a storm began to brew. No they weren’t mean or uppity. They were welcoming
and fun and it felt like college, apart from the fact that everything now had
real world consequences. Yet I couldn’t stop feeling uneasy. Like a storm was
brewing. By the end of that week I knew what it was. It wasn’t one single
moment of impact but a whole week’s worth of tireless, mind numbing work that
finally curled into a ball at the base of your spine by Friday morning. It’s a
feeling where you feel your mind closing in on itself and its walls collapsing.
When you are utterly rubbish.
On the metro back home that morning, I felt like the storm had
finally blown over and left an upturned tree in its wake. It felt like that
tree was an unlikely metaphor for the rest of my life. Quite simply, I was
upset that I’d joined in such a hurry. Upset that the first week itself wanted
to make me run for cover. That I couldn’t undo what I’d just done. I thought of
things like motivation, courage, stamina and where I could find them. The metro
ride went by swiftly.
Month after month we followed this routine, drove
ourselves insane over commas and full stops and indents and credits. And
widows. Oh the widows. (Incase you’re wondering,
this isn’t a widow. Or maybe,
well, not anymore. There.)
What’s changed in a year? Everything. Or maybe nothing at all. Maybe what I measure
as change is the batting of an eyelid in my editor’s life. Her career has
spanned an excess of 20 years. And judging by the number of fires she lights,
fans and puts out everyday, make my change time frame a micro granule of a
little bacterial life. For me however, in the current moment, a year’s worth of
fires is quite enough. No, I make it sound like a rubble of a career so far.
Maybe it’s not a career yet, but it’s not complete rubble either. I’ve been a
coffee/tea girl, a lousy sub, an average writer with bursts of inspiration, a
caption giver, a closet (then open) smoker, a conversation starter, the go-to person
and finally, a colleague. I had a wonderful team. Five eccentric people who
wouldn’t talk to each other in a party otherwise, thrown together to find
common ground. At first I was very worried about fitting in. None of them were
like anyone I’d known before. It didn’t help that talking was encouraged. We
always talked, all the time, about everything.
If it wasn’t for Production Week, especially Thursday nights, it
would’ve been five different people who went to five different parties. The
India Today office has a massive roof where we’ve sprawled ourselves on the
stone, seething with the night’s heat. It was such a feeling of camaraderie, of
common suffering that we bonded over, it made the experience very particular,
wholly applicable only to us. A part of me was always itching to go back to my
desk and finish the task at hand, but a part of me wanted to stay under the
stars and watch the sun come up. I wanted to see what happened if I didn’t
deliver, if we just left the building, like they do in Hollywood films, when
the super-able protagonist finds a ‘higher’ purpose in life. I’d rehearse it in
my head, a motley crew of five against the sun glazed white pillars of
Connaught Place, walking out with the first light of day.
But of course, like in all real lives, and in ours too, they all
left one by one, making each exit a bigger blow than the last. Chairs emptied
out and the ancient PCs stopped their whirring. All talk thinned down to
monosyllabic sentences, and became strictly perfunctory in nature. I miss the
fact that I can’t look over the fake-wood partition and find three beautiful
and self-assured women bang on about how grossly inappropriate their boyfriends
were being, or how the state of feminism in India was in shambles or even how
silly it was to have these conversations in at three in the morning when we had
a magazine to release. On a Production Thursday.
