Being Born

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.