” You will either become a wandering saint or go completely crazy”
He looks at me with kind eyes as he sits across his desk covered with marketing material.
I am sitting with Sarosh, my boss who I report to at Godrej. Godrej is a multi-product conglomerate manufacturing everything from condoms to carbon fiber, from ribbons to real estate.
We work in the home security division and my job is to sell home cameras to the ultra-wealthy in Bombay. It’s been a month now and I haven’t sold any. Every morning, I pick up a sample system from the office and carry that 30 lbs. monster around the city.
I have a modus operandi in mind. I walk around the cuff parade, an uber-rich area of Bombay, and find tall buildings in the area.
Sneaking past the watchmen half in a daze in their food coma, I climb the 20 floors evading the elevator operator, and make my way down each floor. Some just shut the door in my face while some threaten to call the building security. I tell them this is precisely what the system would help with — weeding out intruders who disturb your afternoon siesta and do it from the comfort of your air-conditioned bedroom.
A few are kind enough to invite me in and hand out a glass of water to this dark disheveled looking boy. A bored housewife even propositions me as I escape muttering vain excuses.
After a month, Sarosh sits me down to look at my sales numbers. It’s zero. Bull. Zilch. Nothing. He asks about upcoming prospects. I learn what prospects are that day. Possible client conversions. He looks at me and pulls out a piece of paper. It’s a sales form.
“Fill it”, he says as I dutifully scribble it out.
I learn later that he has transferred one of his sales under my name essentially extending my longevity in the company for another month.
The next day, I go to his office to thank him for his kind gesture. He waves me away, almost embarrassed at it. It’s just how some people are — Decent, generous, and quiet.
Now that I understand the consequences of not making my targets, I run around with added vigor. However, it has no bearing on the end results. I still have no sale. As I will learn later, I am not cut out to sell anything well, besides myself and my non-existent abilities.
It’s the end of the month again. As I report to the office in the morning, the peon comes up to my desk.
“Sarosh sir has asked for you”
I walk to his cabin. He is sitting there as usual among his raft of papers and marketing material. As I sit down, he asks the peon to get a cup of tea for me.
“You couldn’t make the sales numbers this month”, he says matter of fact. There is no admonition. Just a touch of sensibility.
“Do you enjoy what you are doing?”, he asks looking at me.
My hands are on his desk as I explain my strategy for the last month and walking him through some of my prospects. I look up to see him suddenly disinterested, his eyes fixated on my palm trying to look at something as I gesture wildly.
“Can I look at your hands if that’s ok?”, he asks as I stop talking.
As a managing director of the entire division, he has very limited time. I had been allotted 10 minutes in his schedule and they are almost over.
His secretary walks in.
“ Sir, your 9.15 is here”
“Cancel it Reena”, he says looking up at her from over his glasses, his white beard a tangle of hair. She stumbles for a bit and he nods again at her for emphasis. I fail to catch the tone of his voice. He has not just postponed it. He has canceled it. I am too young to make a distinction of that importance.
As I spread my palms in front of him, he opens his drawer and brings out a magnifying glass. The handle is rusted from use and time but the glass is immaculately clean. He hovers the glass over my right hand from different angles and scribbles out notes.
He asks me for my date and time of birth which he jots down on a piece of paper.
Taking a red ink pen from his desk he maps out a horoscope. Looking up in a thick book that has suddenly materialized on his desk, he jots in numbers and signs. There is complete silence in the room and I can smell the slightly damp odor of the stale air conditioning running behind him. The clock slowly marches forward.
After almost twenty minutes, he looks up at me brows furrowed, eyes squinting as he sighs and settles back into his seat and drops the pen as he stares alternately at me and then at the horoscope he has come up with.
I don’t know what to make of this so I sit silently, almost afraid to move. I need this job. It’s how I plan to collect enough money to repay my parents, give some to my younger sister, get married. My ego does come up with the thought that maybe he finds me amazing enough to keep me, for a long time.
“I am going to have to let you go, young man, but don’t worry, you really don’t need this job”, he says softly as I look at him with glazed eyes.
I don’t comprehend what he has just said but I understand the implications of his words.
I am in a slight shock as his words sink in. I have lost another job. This one especially hurts because my father had gone to some lengths to get a recommendation to land me this job.
What will I tell him? What will I tell myself?
As I wind through these thoughts, a sense of calm spreads over me. I have lost this one. He is no longer my boss. I don’t have to pretend anything anymore. I couldn’t have sold one even if I wanted to.
I relax slightly. I actually smile, just a little.
He tells me later that I protested a little, cajoled a bit, even asked the dreaded why. I don’t remember any of that. As usual, my mind glosses that over.
Sarosh’s fascination with hands is compelling. It may have reached a peak five years ago in a delivery room at Parsi General Hospital when the doctor brought his daughter Katy to him for the first time, a tiny bundle wrapped in white.
‘’I didn’t know it was a girl until someone told me,’’ he says, ‘’because I was so busy studying her hands. My eyes were filled with tears, but I saw she had a short index finger, which is low self-esteem, and she had a short heartline. That meant to me we’d have to work extra hard giving her the support she needed even if it meant I’d stay home and spend more time with her.’’
“I never created her horoscope”, he says slightly tepidly.
I can understand a father’s perspective of not wanting to know anything untoward of his only child. I don’t fall into that category for him. My life, as it was, is and will be is in front of him on that chart inked in red, if things were to be believed.
As he let’s go of my palms, my natural curiosity of knowing the upcoming takes over. The truth is out there. I want to believe.
‘’You’re still independent, eccentric, not practical at all until things really go south. You are still battling between being responsible and wanting freedom. You have trouble letting things go, even when they’re not working.’’
‘’Tell me something I don’t know,’’ I say, dripping with slight sarcasm. I know how to read palms even though my knowledge is rudimentary. I however have never studied astrology or read horoscopes. That’s a different ball game altogether.
He doesn’t take this as a personal affront. Instead, he smiles and nods as he thinks about his words.
Hesitating ever so slightly, he starts to speak, then stops for a bit, looking at the clock on the sidewall, and then turns back to me.
“You will be in the USA by the end of next year. It will happen ever so suddenly. Don’t be afraid of it. It will turn out well for you even though you will have some hiccups initially. You will make money, more money in a single day than I will ever make in a year…”
There is a slight tinge of wistfulness, not jealousy.
I laugh openly. This is the most outrageous prediction I have ever heard, not that I have heard many. I don’t care to go to the USA. Don’t even have a passport or even any skillset that makes me eligible. I have a bunch of friends who would give an arm and leg to get there. As for me, I have long accepted that I am not so special. Always liked to sell myself short.
He is not done yet.
“You will reside in a very cold place, somewhere north”,
He says pointing upwards towards the ceiling as he laughs. I will end up living close to Boston — Northeast.
“Make sure you bring your father in to visit you as soon as you settle”.
He stresses the “As soon as” part again for emphasis. I don’t understand why; he never tells me and it doesn’t occur to me to ask. In some years as I settle down in the US, I will find out that my father has kidney failure and there would only be a short window when I can get him here before his kidneys fail completely. He would eventually visit, not once but twice, and absolutely fall in love with this country that I have grudgingly learned to love and admire.
“I have never seen someone as stubborn as you. Keep away from the stock market but if you ever get into it, persist. You will make some good money”.
It takes me 9 years of straight losses before I break even and then recoup back my losses quickly once I get the hang of it. Almost gave up on it.
“You will have experiences that probably takes another person 10–12 lifetimes to experience. You will live all over the world and get to know some very famously rich people. Richer than me at least”,
He says this with a laugh. I laugh with him and end up living all over the US, Toronto, Melbourne, London, Edinburgh, Singapore. The magnets on my refrigerator of the places visited keep adding up.
“You and your wife will never agree with each other — about anything. But you will both be amazingly tight”.
He interlocks his fingers for emphasis as we both laugh. I will marry some years later and learn how absolutely correct his words turn out to be over a number of years.
“You will either become a sanyasi or you will end up going crazy”, he finally says slightly portentously winding down his list.
I am young and have a whole life ahead of me. I don’t even believe him and his crazy predictions. They seem way out of the normal. Being the practical Virgo that I am, I need directions, pathways, and predictable outcomes but this is amusing even on a day when I just got fired 20 minutes ago.
We laugh. Talk a bit about the good days we had and the amazing food that the canteen serves up at Godrej. Lord, I am going to miss that, I say with mock ingenuity.
His time with me is coming to an end. The receptionist outside is getting edgy. It’s time to go. He walks out with me into the open. The wind is blowing ever so slightly.
I thank him for all his help and his kindness but I see him looking at me with a sense of awe, almost respectfully.
“I have never seen a hand that shifts fortunes so drastically for the better — Ever”, he says with emphasis. Then he stops short and adds — “But you have a hand of someone who has the potential to leap away from this cycle of life and death”, he says envy written all over him, even if it’s just for a second.
As I start to walk out, I feel a hand on my shoulder.
Turning around, I see him with a completely different look on his face. A look of a serious man. Almost remorseful. This man who runs the entire plant with a velvet glove and an iron fist is staring at me with eyes that have almost glossed over from overpowering emotion — I just don’t understand why.
As he turns to shake my hand, he pulls me in closer, ever so slightly, and makes the final prediction that stops me right there in my tracks –
Since that day, I have tried to ignore it but life as it is — has not reciprocated that favor. I refuse to acknowledge it yet have already known for years.
“You will never be able to take care of the women you love”,
He says this with finality, in almost a whisper as he turns around and heads back into the office leaving me standing out there in the bright sunlight.
