Drama at the doorway

Every morning I play a game called ‘The 15 Minute Dash’. Let me explain how it works: you wake up an hour and a half late for work. You run to the bathroom as fast as your legs might allow. Run into a few objects on the way. You emerge clean, bruised and topless. Grab anything that may pass off as clothes. Gulp the milk. Swallow the bread. And dash out the door. All in under 15 minutes.

Panting, I finally make it to my car.

I have a few things I can’t do without: my wallet, my music system, my phone, work I might have carried back home, a jacket etc. In the flurry of activity, invariably, every morning, the moment I park my behind on the driver’s seat of my car I remember that I have forgotten one of these. And every time I dash back up I see my maid, hand outstretched, grinning like a madwoman, holding whatever it maybe I have forgotten (she doesn’t always get it right though, once she was holding my passport for some reason.) By now it probably wouldn’t seem impossible that on some days I make two trips of such sort. The second time around my maid’s grin seems to have assumed morbidly fascinating proportions. By now mom has joined her side to answer my question “Is there anything else?” She nods her head sideways with her eyes closed; the kind of a nod which says “Jao beta, tumhara kuchh nahi ho sakta.”

When I finally do make it to work, leaving in my wake a few upturned fruit carts, I wonder what I made all that effort for. Half of my colleagues haven’t turned up. The half that have turned up start chasing me for things that weren’t delivered the day before. Approaching deadlines. Unreal job-lists.

I move to my workstation switch on my computer. Put on my headphones. Drown them all out. And wish I could make another 15 Minute Dash out of here.