Outsourced

The sun seemed to slither away at the edge of the screen, sinking into the deep abyss of the Grand Canyon like a thief put to shame. There was none of that blazing glory Pranay was looking for. Just as much. After all, it’s a football going into a giant pothole, he grumbled irritatingly. He checked the time on his watch. The late sunsets in summer always upset his dinner schedule. The brightness of the light outside sent the wrong signals to his stomach, one accustomed to sipping tea at sunset followed by a meal cooked by his mother. He extinguished the sinking sun on his second hand TV and carried the remote with him to the kitchen. He missed his mother. More importantly, he missed her cooking. Twenty two thousand miles away from her, he stared at a can of Bush’s chick peas, his savior. His roommate would be back in a while, he thought. He’d better have his cooking turn over and done with. The punishment endured every two days, for all concerned. He spent a moment wishing he could have learnt how to cook better. But he hadn’t been prepared for it. After all, Wipro never did train him on the skills of cooking up a mean malai kofta. They packed knowledge worth terabytes into his rather untested brain and sent him off to Chicago, to work on a project involving code no one wanted to touch, and what most people wished was never written. He was serving time, away from his mother, away from his city, away from Mrudula. As he mixed the spices in the vessel less washed, he used his limited poetic license to liken Mrudula to the red pepper and himself to the chick peas. The spice in my life, he exclaimed. (At the same moment, a lyricist in a chawl in Koliwada had an epiphany about a song with the same ingredients).

In walked his roommate Bhaskar, a daily voyeur of Pranay’s reveries. What an idiot, he thought to himself. He has seen nothing but this apartment and the office, in all of three weeks. This is the land of the free, the city of the windy, where life is a breeze and you could ride the coattails of freedom. There’s strip joints and beer sold in grocery stores. There’s bowling and pool and football. There are good looking blondes on the street and everyone smiles at you because they like you so much. There is the searing effect of the wind and the dominant protrusion of the Sears tower. What’s not to like in this place? What’s there to mope about a girl who’s waiting for you back home? All I need is to do my work well, and get a job with the company. Then I don’t have to go back at all. The independence of being, and with Pranay’s departure, freedom from chick peas. What more can someone ask for in life?

The evening continued its merry ways as the two roommates entered into their daily discussion on whether or not they enjoyed life in America. Pranay’s melanchony ways were met with contempt by Bhaskar’s pragmatic arguments. They parried on till the sun sank through behind the towel Pranay was drying on the balcony and settled to eat dinner. As Bhaskar negated the taste of the chick peas with a big helping of chips, Pranay munched on the food without much concern for its taste. The evening passed the baton onto the night and the channels flipped from Lou Dobbs’s latest rancor on outsourcing to Jon Stewart’s latest joke on call centers. It seemed like the TV was speaking about them and to them. As they ended the dinner reaching for a bowl of Dreyer’s Rocky Road, the night firmly settled outside their apartment with crickets beginning their operatic solos on the trees below. Bound together by sense of origin, but separated by a sense of purpose, they sat in the balcony in quite contemplation. Bhaskar eventually looked at his watch and silently moved inside to be followed by his compatriot as both reached for their laptops. It was time to chat with their teams in India. The day had just begun, again.

P.S> I woke up this morning feeling discontent about this post. I think the characterizations are inaccurate, juvenile and shallow. Since I have typed it up, I'll leave it here.