Sreekumar is a nice,
brilliant chap. I have no doubts about that, not about him being my best mate
either. But, I would not have recruited him in my department given a choice.
The new venture is
exciting and challenging. That could be the high of early days speaking. As in
most pioneering stuff, life and work will surely be great once we get through
the initial drudge. It is for that I hired two lieutenants to guide the dozen
overconfident not-so-exceptional flunkies who think they should not be doing
donkey-work.
I was lucky to get
Girija, a quiet lady with an amazing academic and professional track record who
could have reached greater heights if she had focused on her career instead of
trying to balance that with a marriage, and that too a troublesome marriage. As
for Sreekumar, I know that he can do a great job as the second lieutenant, as
long as he is not backed up against the wall and pressed for an explanation.
It is tough to
explain the problem with him. My first encounter with his ways might shed some
light. We were in grade six. Our class-teacher that year was a martial
middle-aged lady with the manner and countenance of a bull dog, the kind of
stuff that’s called fearsome force of nature. In the middle of her tough
regimen to turn cherubic angels into battle-ready men, Sreekumar went AWOL for
a week. He returned and presented a crazy nonchalance when the class-teacher
demanded an explanation. He offered the succinct, ‘Bus miss.’ The bull dog
thought its tail was being pulled and attacked viciously. The ensuing fracas in
that school, in those dark ages, followed the predictable punishing plot.
Sreekumar barely managed to avoid expulsion.
With him, such
incidents turned out to be the rule rather than the exception and, as his best
friend, I had the misfortune to be in the neighbourhood.
In college, my
love-interest of those days confronted him and she enquired why he frowned upon
our relationship. He replied, ‘Stupid stupider.’
In graduate school, a
bunch of bellicose right-wingers felt reasonably aggrieved when Sreekumar
described their views as, ‘Constipated wit.’ We escaped with cracked lips and
swollen knuckles.
Every day in office,
I expect some big honcho to forward a message or mail from Sreekumar explaining
our work as, ‘Syphilitic fuck.’ True but troublesome that would be.
Strangely, nothing of
that sort happened, crossed-fingers knocked-wood et al. Girija and Sreekumar
divided the empire and ruled effectively. They rarely crossed boundaries and
avoided each other like the plague. I did not try to educate those two about
teamwork. Life was ambling along nicely.
One quiet evening, at
a bar, I tried to tell Sreekumar about Girija’s marital troubles which she had
confided to me during a one-on-one session of performance appraisal. He
concentrated on his drink and told me to ‘Shut up.’
Last week, we faced
our first major crisis. We had a few big projects to complete. Girija called in
sick. I wondered if it was caused by illness or abuse. I stepped in to cover for
Girija.
I should not have
been surprised when Sreekumar went AWOL that same day leaving me in deep muck.
Didn’t Yogi Berra say it was déjà vu all over again? My calls and messages to
him went unanswered. If I was not confined in office, with the dozen imbeciles,
I would have gone to his place and dragged him to work.
On the third day of
absence, he sent a message, ‘Love sick.’
I nearly blew my top
and readied myself for a final confrontation. I cursed him for leaving me with
the tremendous load and that too for love.
On the fourth day, I
got a call from Girija’s house. Her father informed me that she had died of an
aneurysm that morning. I informed the
team of the loss and arranged for taxis to take us to her place. We planned to
return to office after paying our respects. We still had lots of work to
complete. I did not bother to inform the still absent Sreekumar.
We went to her
parents’ place. Her father took us in. Her mother sat alone near the head,
staring blankly at the face, weeping silently. We tried to leave unobtrusively
after doing the rounds, but Girija’s younger brother requested us to wait for
thirty minutes, till the body was taken for cremation. He found seats for us in
the small courtyard and filled us in on the details of her death. I studied the
crowd. The scene was the usual. Relatives looked busy or sad. Neighbours and
friends waited patiently, silently, like us. I noticed a bored fidgety man standing
with his own group near the front gate. I guessed that that impatient one was
her husband. The ambulance backed up into the compound. The driver and his
companion carried a rusty metal stretcher into the house.
Her mother stood up
and beckoned her son. Girija’s brother nodded at her instructions. He went
outside the compound. A minutes or two later, he returned with a man who must
have been standing in the street, a little away from the house. The man went up
to her mother. They hugged, supported each other. The man looked at Girija’s
body one last time. Sreekumar’s face was expressionless. He looked haggard. I
heard her mother tell him that Girija would never leave them. He nodded. Then, without
a word, he left the place, his head down. He did not notice us. Before leaving
with the body for the cremation, her father came up to me and told me to take
care of Sreekumar. He told me that my friend had been in the hospital all the
time, keeping watch outside the ICU. Her father was scared that he might do
something silly. We waited for the ambulance to leave, and then returned to
office.
