Fashionably Yours

“Whatever it is, let’s go,” I screamed. I agreed to pay the small fortune he quoted and with a heavy heart slid into the passenger seat.

As the cab made its way through bumpy Mumbai roads, I managed to comb my hair, put on mascara, dab lip gloss and fret about the office where by now everyone must have been in the conference room with their bright eyes and shining ideas for the next issue.

Damn!

Thirty minutes later as the cabbie pulled over in front of the Style office, I quickly hopped out, gave him a part of my hard-earned money and barged through the large glass doors. With wobbly legs and a sinking heart I walked towards the lift and with trembling hands jabbed the buttons. As the doors pinged opened on the third floor right in front of the large neon pink sign board of Style, I braced myself for one more lecture on work ethics from my editor. As I made my way towards the conference room, my heart beat faster and faster with every step. I was thirty minutes late.

Bollocks!

Outside the conference room I stopped for a minute, instructed my thudding heart to calm down, forced a wide smile on my face and without wasting another second barged into the room. The entire room went silent as though they hadn’t been talking in the first place. All the e-magazine staff was there, looking at me as if I had a clown nose on my face. Without muttering a word and ignoring twenty pairs of eyes, I walked towards the only empty chair in the whole room which, of course, was right next to Natasha.

Brilliant.

While walking towards the chair I heard people whispering and giggling behind my back. I wondered what was so funny about being late. Gingerly I took my seat, rummaged into my handbag for a notepad and a pen and sat there quietly, ignoring Natasha’s gaze. I couldn’t bring myself to look at anyone or anywhere so I fixed my eyes on the table as if the plain glass was the most fascinating thing I had ever seen in my life.

“Welcome aboard,” said Natasha in a tone which was a synonym for who-the-hell-do-you-think-you-are-to-interrupt-the-meeting-and-not-even-bother-to-beg-for-mercy-from-your-boss.

“I am sorry, Natasha,” I croaked.

“Why are you sorry? I think that we all should be sorry that we started this stupid editorial meeting without you. I reckon we all could have waited for you, Style could have waited for you.”

As I looked up at her, I could see the horns on her head and fangs emerging from her mouth.

Gosh!

“You are embarrassing me.”

She always did that. I could bet that humiliating me was her favorite pastime on earth. There were more occasions than I could count on my fingers and toes when she had humiliated me in front of zillions of people, more often than not for no solid reason. I mean, come on spending five minutes waiting for new life on Candy Crush before starting a tough workday was hardly reason for her to insult me in front of the entire office. I swear later that day I heard people whispering about my inability to clear level 33 on Candy Crush.

“You are not going to understand the ethics of the fashion business, are you? We are running not just a magazine, but a fashion magazine. Thousands of girls read this magazine every day, carry it with them in their bags no matter where they go, keep it under their pillows, read it on trains, worship it and want to be associated with it in any way possible. And you have a chance to be a part of this and you just don’t respect your chance,” she thundered with the latest issue of Style in her hands.

Really? I wondered how many girls were insane enough to buy this trash.

“Girls like you …”

Before she could continue her speech, Anu jumped in to stop her from embarrassing me any more.

“Natasha, can we please resume this meeting? After this we also have a meeting with the print staff.”

I loved this girl. Anu wasn’t just the fashion features director at Style but was also my soul sister and confidant.

One hour later the meeting was over and as I was about to get up from my chair, Natasha got hold of my hand.

“If you don’t stop acting this irresponsible, I will take down your online column and your chances to write for the print version will be finished forever,” she said icily.

“I am so …” before I could plead an apology she let go of my hand, got up from the chair and walked out of the room as fast as humanly possible.

“Maya. Why do you do this all the time?” while everyone followed Natasha out of the room, Anu stayed back, just to make sure Natasha didn’t rip my head off and chop it into tiny pieces.

“I know it’s my fault,” I let out a deep sigh. “It was that stupid dream which didn’t let me wake up.”

“Again?” Anu knew about my dream only too well.

It all started when I was sixteen. It was the first time I accidentally flipped through the glossy pages of Glamorous which my aunt from New York had left behind at our place by mistake. Those pages changed my life forever. Two days later I bought the five-year subscription of the magazine and after that I spent every single day marvelling at the awe-inspiring photos, making notes of the amazing fashion tips and religiously reading fashion literature. In those moments of pure pleasure, I promised myself that one day I’d be part of this fashion bible. Hence straight after school, I enrolled into a fashion journalism course, much to the disappointment of my parents who always wanted me to be a CA. I remembered what Mom said the day I accepted the job at Style.

You have ruined your life.

“When will you stop it?” Anu questioned tiredly.

“Trust me that’s what I ask myself all the time. But I don’t think that I am strong enough to let go of this dream.”

Years of trying to get into Glamorous and I had failed each time. Result, every night for six months I used to cry till dawn at the thought that there was someone, somewhere, under the same sky who was living the life which I wanted.

Looking at my humiliated face, she inched towards me and flung her arms around my shoulders.

“Oh sweetie! One day you’ll get there,” she gave me a tight hug. Just when I was beginning to relax in her arms she abruptly pushed me away and turned me round to have a look at my back side.

“What happened?”

“The back of your dress is tucked under your purple knickers. You came all the way from your apartment to this room flashing them for the whole world to see?” her eyes popped out of her perfectly sculpted face.

“I did what?” I ran towards the washroom tucked away in the far corner of the conference room, turned around, craned my neck to have a look at my derriere in the floor-to-ceiling mirror pinned against the wall and prayed for death at the sight of my not-so-attractive and cellulite-loaded bum cheeks.

OH. MY. GOD.

Back in my cubicle I told myself, “This is it.” I had had enough humiliation for one day and I wasn’t going to do another stupid thing. I was going to show Natasha that I was not some floosy. I deserved something more than an online column, something better and bigger than Style — something like Glamorous. Yes, I deserved to be there and one day I would and that day she would realize what a brilliant writer she had lost and would curse herself for underestimating my talent. She would be on the floor on all fours begging me to forgive her and then I would tell her to go and put her magazine where the sun doesn’t shine.

Determined to pen a groundbreaking feature, I switched on the computer but nothing came on the screen. The computer was dead and even after slapping it a million times, I still couldn’t bring it back to life.

This day was rapidly rising on the list of the worst days of my life. First, I flashed my knickers shamelessly to the entire city, then made total arse of myself in front of Natasha and the whole office, and now my computer had crashed and my feature for the next issue was on it. Forget about the bloody humiliation, Natasha would sack me if I didn’t submit my feature before the deadline. I felt my heart falling all the way to the pit of my stomach. I had worked so hard to collect information about the best wedding destination venues in the country. It had taken me an entire month. A month.

When the rest of the writing staff was furiously typing away on their computers and was probably giving the final touches to their nearly finished stories, I was standing just next to my cubicle while the sickly-looking IT guy was trying to do some tricks on my dead computer.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him while repeatedly telling myself, don’t cry, not now, not here.

“What have you done to this? There are five thousand viruses on it,” he shot daggers at me.

“I have done nothing. I swear,” I croacked.

Oh my god! I knew I shouldn’t have downloaded pirated movies and songs on this computer.

“It is taking forever to reboot,” he said.

“Err … Will it ever work again? Can you do this?” I heard myself asking him questions in a voice I didn’t recognize.

“I am an IT guy. I can do anything,” he said, glaring at me.

“I would really appreciate if you could fix this whole mess, please. And quickly,” I said stiffly.

***

Later that evening walking into my flat, I dumped my old battered handbag by the door, kicked off my heels and crashed onto the sofa. The day had been horrible and what was more horrible was the thought of writing the feature all over again, especially when I had planned to watch recorded episodes of Gossip Girls while eating delicious Dominos pizza.

My office computer didn’t get repaired and would take another two days to be back in running condition. But as the submission deadline was tomorrow, I was left with no choice but to re-write the article. It had taken one whole month to research the story but now I had only one night to do it over again.

Pushing the horrific thoughts of doing so much work in a single night out of my mind, I got off the sofa, walked towards the bathroom and ran a cold bath. Dressed in cotton pyjamas and a decade-old UCB T-shirt, I planted myself on the sofa armed with two boxes of Hägaan Dazs, balanced my beloved laptop on my knees and prayed to the Gods that this night be the longest.

2

May 29

Last night I worked my arse off and I think it was around three in the morning when I typed the last word. More than once I felt a strong, sleepy wind wash over me but I wasn’t prepared for any more trouble. So I kept my eyes wide open, took a back-up of the article on a flash drive, just in case, put it safely in my handbag (oh my! I so needed a new one) and only then tumbled off the sofa, found my way through the ever-so-dirty apartment towards the bed and fell asleep. It was just past seven a.m. when I curled onto my side under the warm duvet blissfully unaware of the fact that how boiling hot it was outside my air-conditioned apartment. Since it was only yesterday that I had to listen to the long work ethic lecture from Natasha, I was not ready to give her the opportunity today. So resisting the temptation to stay in bed for just a few more minutes, I decided to get ready and reach office on time, just for a change.

Thirty minutes and a quick shower later I was dressed in an emerald green jumpsuit and Blue Parrot bellies with my hair tied in a chic ponytail and the right amount of makeup to give the perfect illusionary effect of high cheekbones. Just the way I like it. Being ready this early left me with plenty of time to cook an actual breakfast for the first time in weeks. The idea of crispy, hot toast with a dollop of Nutella was just irresistible.

Beaming with pride at my achievement, I walked towards the refrigerator and in just forty seconds managed to find the handle of the door under zillions of post-it notes. Not bad, Kapoor. As I pulled opened the door, I nearly fainted at the odor wafting from it. It smelled like a gutter and as I looked closely (I warn you the sight was not for the fainthearted) I saw green bread which when I bought was a healthy brown. There was also a take away box of half-eaten noodles which I had ordered a couple of weeks ago from a new Chinese food van, but hadn’t liked. With trembling hands I pulled open the vegetable basket at the bottom of the refrigerator and nearly died at the sight of rotten tomatoes with some crawling creatures running around them. Before I could puke inside my one and only refrigerator, I hastily closed the door.

Goodness! What was that?

You see this wasn’t my fault. Not entirely at least. After driving myself insane at work, I hardly had the time to think about cooking something, let alone peering inside the refrigerator or keeping track of the stock in there. Home, kitchen, refrigerator were not my forte. When I was back home in Shimla, Mom had tried to dupe me into learning some cooking and sometimes dragged me to the kitchen to show me how to make mattar paneer but she never understood that it was just not the place for me. But when I landed a job in Mumbai she gave me the recipe of the most basic breakfast item — omelete — which of course I had never attempted to try because I neither had the time nor the energy to do any actual cooking. Sometimes I truly wished that I could hire someone to do all this cooking-cleaning-washing stuff for me, but was such a shame that my salary didn’t even allow me to buy a new vacuum cleaner, let alone hire a helping hand.

Pulling out a pen from my purse, I added, ‘buy freshly baked bread, healthy looking tomatoes or maybe even a box of eggs’ on the list which was pinned on the refrigerator door with a gorgeous pink tiara-shaped magnet. I winched at the length of the list which was overflowing with so many other things like, ‘clean the apartment at least once a week’, ‘vacuum the sofa at least once a month’, ‘put dirty laundry in the machine before it starts resembling the leaning tower of Pisa’, ‘lose ten pounds’, ‘increase alcohol tolerance level’. The list was just too long to read and sadly it seemed I never got around to accomplishing many of the targets on it. But I was sure that one day I would have enough time, stamina and hopefully motivation to accomplish at least some of them.

***

As I strode past Veena with a steaming vanilla latte, she covered the phone receiver with her hand and said in her singsong voice, “Good Morning, Maya.”

“Morning, darling,” I said without bothering to stop.

I was in no mood to waste my precious time with this walking-talking-bitching woman. This girl might be just a receptionist at Style but she had more gossip than the top gossip mags.

“There’s a letter for you. It’s on your desk,” she smirked.

I never liked this girl and trust me it wasn’t because of her piercing voice.

Once, when everyone was pretending to be fully involved in a brainstorming session for the theme of the upcoming issue under the watchful eyes of Natasha, I excused myself to the bathroom where I overheard Vicious Veena saying to some skinny bitch that I was probably the biggest loser she had ever seen in her life because, a) I was the kind who could tempt anyone to humiliate me any time, anywhere; b) she had no idea how any girl could live with such a bulging tummy; and c) she strongly felt that I would end up being an unlucky spinster who was capable of jinxing any happy couple by merely casting the glance at them.

As if I was some witch.

I swear for a moment I considered dragging her to the toilet seat by her hair and shoving her head into the urinated water. Bloody tramp! I never felt more humiliated by anyone in my entire life, except maybe Natasha. It was beyond me why she called me fat when I was just size a 8? Fine, size 12. But this was a perfectly healthy size. And last but definitely not the least, I was not an unlucky spinster. I refused to fall into the arms of any man. Finding true love was not that easy. I had decided to wait for that someone instead of taking whatever whoring opportunity came my way. I knew it would be no use to explaining anything to that bitch, so I pretended that I hadn’t heard anything and continued passing her desk everyday without throwing a hot latte at her.

“Thank you, Veena. I’ll have a look,” I retorted. I was about to step through the glass doors when the elevator slid open and I found myself smiling with relief.

“Hey gorgeous,” Anu gave me a quick peck as we walked towards our desks.

“Morning!” I beamed.

“By the way, what are you doing here at this time? You’re breaking your thou shalt always be late oath?” she chided.

“Oh yeah,” I rolled my eyes. “Well you should sometimes do things for change,” I gushed. Suddenly I noticed her perefectly manicured nails, “Are you heading somewhere after office?”

This girl was the laziest person who ever worked in a fashion magazine. Sometimes she would go through the entire week with the mass of greasy hair on her head. But no matter how hard she tried to be careless or look like a normal girl without a fancy blow dry or makeup, she always ended up looking effortlessly glamorous and her hair despite being greasy, always appears beautifully tangled and glorious. She was world opposite to me. Five feet four inchs, tiny waist despite of all the big bowls of cheese nachos she gorged on, colored hair, visible collar bones, all fair and fragile. And then there was me. Five feet six inches, broader than any average girl on the globe, little more than generous curves, hard to manage hair, unexisting collar bones, slightly tanned and not the very least fragile. How were we even friends?

“Yes! I am going to a club with Sameer,” she beamed.

“Ahhh! Have fun,” I winked.

Hearing club and Sameer in one sentence brought back some memories, some not-so-pleasant memories. Not so long ago, on a particularly horrendous day Natasha rejected Anu’s highly researched story about budget fashion outright which made Anu fume with anger. Unable to bear the sight of her sad and angry face I decided to cheer her up and took her to a club on Marine Drive. On our way to the club Anu kept swearing, screaming and crying about the injustice and that was when I realized that I was not prepared to handle her on my own. So I speed dialled Sameer and begged him to join us. Once in the club, I perched on a sofa in a far corner as they set the dance floor on fire under the influence of tons of alcohol and totally forgot about me. After gulping down one too many shots of tequila and spending an hour on my own looking at the blissfully happy couples making out in every corner of the club and repetitively questioning myself when my someone would come around, finally I decided to end the torture. Pushing through the crowd I headed for the spot where my one and only best friend in the whole world and her (im)perfect boyfriend were showing off some awfully drunken dance moves.

“I have to go,” I shouted over the music as I caught her gaze.

“What?” she frowned.

“I am tired. I am leaving,” I screamed.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“I am going home, you fuckhead,” and this time not just her, the entire club heard me loud and clear because God had conspired against me and the asshole DJ suddenly switched to Celine Dion straight from Lady Gaga.

What a disaster that night had been!

This day however, was turning out better than I could have expected. For starters when I re-read my article in the morning before taking printouts, I realized it turned out even better than the one I lost in the computer crash and second (this was the highlight of my day) Natasha wasn’t in the office for the whole day. This meant that I technically had the entire day to myself.

I fished out the stack of old issues of Glamorous from the drawer in my cubicle, got myself a large cup of coffee from the coffeemaker which was installed only for Natasha’s use who liked to drink freshly brewed coffee, unlike the rest of the staff who were forced to survive on the tasteless vending machine coffee, and propped my legs up on the desk. Leafing through the glossy pages of my fashion bible over my cuppa, I thanked my fairy godmother.

“Holy Moly, is it even for real,” I was running my sweaty palm over a picture of a stunning Eli Saab gown with a mind-numbing price tag when the phone on my desk started ringing and made me jump out of my skin. Getting a hold of myself I picked up the receiver.

“Hello.”

“Do you have a pen with you?” Natasha said in a steely voice.

“Err … yes,” I squinted at the phone.

Why was she asking me about a pen? Did she get security cameras installed in the office and connected to her phone so that she could keep an eye on the staff even when she was away? Did she see me chilling out in my cubicle? Was she going to fire me? Why was she asking about the pen?

“Jot down this email address,” she dictated and before I could ask who’s email it was or what I was supposed to do with it, she added, “This is Aryan Malik’s email, he is a photographer and he is going to do a photo shoot for us. He is waiting for some details regarding the same. Talk to Anu, take all details from her and shoot him an email. And for God’s sake, be quick about it!” she snapped and cut the phone.

What a bitch? First she interrupted my near-perfect day without any warning, then she didn’t even bother to acknowledge my greeting, and on top of that she assigned me a task which technically should have been done by her secretary or at least by some intern. If I hadn’t needed this job so bad I would have kicked her arse with especially designed iron-spiked stilettos.

It was ten past six when I and Anu went to Starbucks. While I bought myself a double shot latte, she headed into the washroom and changed into her beautiful, georgette shift dress. Armed with coffee I joined her as she finished zipping herself up, closed the lid of the toilet and sat on it.

“That’s one hell of a dress,” I said before greedily guzzling the steaming hot coffee and burning my tongue. Ouch!

“Thanks! Mom got it for me from Italy. My parents went there last year to celebrate their 27th wedding anniversary. My mom is one big shopaholic,” she rolled her eyes.

Was she kidding me? Moms don’t do that. They kill you with their eyes when you even think of buying more than one pair of skinny jeans at a time. They don’t buy you stunning georgette dresses; they buy the most horrendous looking, over-the-top embellished suit in the shop. At least my mom did that.

I looked at her in disbelief.

“What that look is all about?” her eyes darted to me.

“You must have incredible karma to get a mom like that,” I retorted.

“That has to be true,” she beamed before finger combing her gorgeous hair. “I am good to go. How do I look?” she clasped her hands together and looked at me curiously.

“What? No makeup?” I asked out of habit.

Anu was probably the only girl I knew who hadn’t warmed to makeup. She believed in being au natural and the worst part was that she actually didn’t really need makeup to look au natural. Her skin was that flawless.

“I don’t do makeup, sweetie,” she batted her eyelashes.

“I know but no matter how wonderful your skin is, you have got to have some makeup on,” I said in a very poised manner.

“Says who?” she crossed her arms across her chest.

“Says me. Now don’t waste time and let me help you with it,” I said and before she could stop me I produced the emergency vanity kit from my bag and started working my way through blushers and mascaras. After finishing the task I stepped back to admire my work. “Perfect” I purred. I was genuinely pleased with my craft.