The Ghost Who Walks

How do you know if your Boss is in his cabin or not? Simple…get a skewer or seekh, eight to ten chunks  of the toughest un-marinated goat meat (no beef please lest we be troll bombed), open the cabin door slightly, put the seekh inside and count ten….one, two, three….eight, nine and ten. Now pull the seekh and close the door. If the meat comes out charred black and burnt, He’s definitely there inside. Such was the reputation of my First Boss. But how did I land there….

It was my first job and it started off with a residential training program. Just out of college, with no inclination to understand the boring world of insurance, I started getting into one trouble after another, from time to time, in order to bring joy to work. Of the many instances, one stands out most prominently. A very senior official from Head Office had come to address us but his talk was so uninspiring that the trainees took to playing games, talking and doing everything except listening to the gentleman. As was expected, he reported the same to the Principal of the training institute. The Principal was a person called A..K Ray better known among the trainees as AK47 for his temper and tenor. While the rest of the trainees and faculty went out of the classroom for tea and snacks before the next session on Accountancy was to start, I stayed behind and on the blackboard wrote an impromptu limerick on Why You Shouldn’t Study Accounts. The Principal was already fuming about the bad behavior of the trainees in the earlier session and the poem was the causa proxima non remota spectatur for him to blow his top. When he asked who had written the poem, the entire class stood up in unison but when threatened with batch suspension, I raised my hand. And he shouted,“Get out of here and go to my room immediately!”

The man came down, called the stenographer and dictated a letter to the Personnel Department (HR) stating that the trainee is rusticated from the hostel and suspended from training with immediate effect.  I was asked to go to my room and pack my bags, collect the letter after an hour and leave the campus. On reaching my room, I packed my bags but felt like taking some rest before being thrown out and as luck would have it went into deep slumber and was woken up by loud banging on my door.  A look at my watch showed it was almost 3.30 pm and I had slept for over two hours.

“Sir is calling you”, said the office peon.

 As I went from the residential block to the principal’s office, I saw all my sixty odd batch-mates standing outside and as soon as they saw me, they started clapping aloud. I was ushered into another room where two senior faculty members began pleading with me, “Please ask your batchmates to have their lunch. Boycotting it will make matters worse as this will get reported right up to the senior management.”  I realised that, while I was blissfully sleeping, my batchmates had done Gandhigiri act. First, was total Non-Cooperation Movement with the Accounts faculty member  who found the class so silent and non-participative, that he felt as if he was talking at a graveyard. The man even tried analysing the poem and explaining to the class why the logic of not studying accounts was incorrect though, at the same time, lauding the literary talent of the bard. Next, came Satyagraha where the whole lot had refused to eat a morsel of food during lunch hour unless the suspension order was withdrawn. The training institute and a fuming principal, finally, backed down and tore the suspension letter amidst a cheering roar from the trainees. The Principal , however, forgot this insult.

There were many more instances where I got on his wrong side and many a times he blamed me for anything that went wrong prompting me to get the tag, Princi’s Blue Eyed Boy. When the time of posting came, we all wanted to get it in our home towns or at least in its vicinity. AK 47, however, made sure that I was posted 1500 kiometres from Delhi reporting to a man whose name was more feared in insurance industry than Gabbar Singh’s in Ramgarh.

While my other colleagues began handling large claims, big underwriting proposals and even went for risk inspections to out station locations, in the first three months I was asked to go through old letters in order to learn how to write official communication, how to file papers, how to make photo copies, mastering the art of punching paper and read the Marine Tariff over and over again till I had mastered the same. My father spent a good amount of his fortune to send me to the best Christian Missionary school in Delhi in those days and here was this man making me read the Wren and Martin, Office 1988 Edition…such boring letters of which neither did I understand anything nor did I have any inclination of knowing for there were other distractions more fascinating and alluring.

Within a couple of months of joining work I fell head over heels in love with a colleague posted at another office. She often came to meet me near my office in the evenings but it was like love in times of cholera….I would visualise my fiery boss at every corner and try and hide myself. She wouldn’t understand why I was mortally afraid of this Ghost Who Walks whom I could see and she couldn’t.  Incidentally, the Ghost was so aptly named Ghosh and he, as luck would have it, refused the office vehicle and walked home from work. Whenever we would walk along Chowringhee in the evenings, if I saw a man less than five feet tall, weighing less than 50 kilos and a satchel in hand, it had to be him or so I believed. Forget holding hands and walking on the green grass of Maidan, we would slip into the nearest café or fast food joint for some light snacks and head back home. A major part of our romance was completely gutted by the omnipresence of this pocket dynamo that had entered my DNA and would pop out at every corner and every moment scaring the hell out of me.

My Civil Services Mains results were out and I got the good news of having cleared it for the second straight time. There was jubilation at home and I celebrated with friends as if Saala Main Toh Sahab Ban Gaya. I wanted to go home for a week or two to prepare for the interview of my life and went to the Boss for leave. The hour long lecture I got about putting my feet on two boats, how the civil servants were all corrupt…420 to be precise…how I was wasting the money of the company which was paying me salary and had spent a fortune in my training…the list was long and the gist was short…no more than 3 days leave was granted after many a pleading and even showing the original interview letter. His logic was clear, one day to go to Delhi, second to give the interview and on the third return to Kolkata. Those were the days of the Indian Railways and air travel was something out of reach. By the time leave was granted, even wait listed tickets were not available for any train to Delhi. Rajiv, a batchmate, came to my rescue by booking a train ticket to Patna where his father pulled a few strings to get me a connecting train to Delhi. After the interview returned to Kolkata by Kalka Mail in an unreserved compartment where I was told by the person who gave me the ticket at a premium to just lie down on the upper berth without getting up even once during the 24 hour journey which I did with the bladder almost bursting. When finally the Civil Services mark sheet came in my hand, realised a week or so of preparation would have surely got me a good rank and service. My Luck, My Boss.

Next was my sister’s wedding…my only sister’s wedding at Kolkata. While the marriage was on a weekend, the reception given by the groom’s family was to be held at Chinsurah on a Tuesday evening. I worked full day on Monday and on Tuesday I went to my Boss requesting him half a day’s leave to go for the reception along with my family. He looked angrily me and said, “Receptions are held in the evening so why do you need to go in the afternoon. Your half day leave is not sanctioned. Here take this file and complete it before you leave office today.” Somehow, I got the word across to my parents to go directly to the reception and carry a set of kurta pyjama for me. At 6.30 pm I left office, went to Howrah, took a train and then a rickshaw to reach the reception around 9 pm when almost a majority had finished eating and were on their way home...no need was felt to change into fancy clothes even on this day.

It was my own wedding next…leave sanctioned a  measly three days while my wife had taken a month’s leave hoping her Prince Charming would take her out on a honeymoon.…Great Expectations as Dickens put it then and in our times it was the Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd! So we got married in a jiffy and I was back at work as if nothing had happened while my wife would wait at home till late in the evening when I would return completely drenched in sweat travelling in Kolkata mini busses and trams. CK, another friend, took pity on us and one evening asked us to accompany him to Cuttack from where we could go to Bhubaneswar, Puri and Chilika. See how happy my wife looks, out alone together at the beautiful Chilka Lake… All we got was one weekend of three nights and two days…it is surprising that we have stuck on for so long despite this…ofcourse I have been reminded many a time in these many years of this unpardonable cruelty and lack of romance…Biwiji, blame it on the Boss.

Then came the birth of my baby girl which was the single biggest day in my life. Happy at the coming home of the lovely angel, I bought some of the best mishti and took it to office. The first person I offered the sweets had to be His Lordship, after all he was a senior and my Boss. “What is there to be so happy about on the birth of a child, just adding to the country’s problems?” I don’t know how I kept calm in the face of such a reaction but later realized he would say similar and even worse things to others on such happy occasions. On the birth of a son to another colleague he remarked, “What’s so great about a son’s birth, remember Dhritarashtra had a hundred sons and what happened to all of them?”

Even at work he made life hell for me and often made me do pretty lowly chores like taking files from one building to another even though there were a retinue of peons at his service.  He would fire me left right and centre for trivial things and, that too, in public. He made me feel like the scum on the face of the earth who should be obliterated at every step he took. He took great pleasure in correcting drafts of letters and notes and made sure every word other than the ‘is’, ‘as’, ‘were’, ‘was’ that remained of the draft prepared by me. He would correct it with his red pen making it look like the Math exam answer sheets of school in which I flunked regularly…but this was English and I wasn’t too at it and yet this man would make me feel like someone who had just passed out of a school where they start teaching English after class 6. One day, out of the sheer audacity to get back at him, I wrote down a corrected draft letter of his and took it to him as a fresh draft once again and he used his red pen, like a trained sabre professional, cutting every word, slicing every sentence written there….you should have seen his face when I showed him that he had in fact corrected his own letter. I proved my point but he could not care less. One day, early in the morning, I was working on a claim note and he walked past me sneering and saying, “Keep writing you idiot! After all I will have to delete everything you are writing now.”

After five long years serving my sentence in this suffocating captivity of Auschwitz under the hawk eye and iron hand of the Nazi SS General, I was happily deported to Delhi. He hated me and I hated him even more. In this harsh prison I learnt a few things…reach office before your boss…he will notice it. Reaching office very early, much before anyone else, has now become a matter of routine for me and has over the years paid rich dividends. These five years of getting into the basics of the subject and interacting with the best minds in the industry ensured that I got the tag of Marine Specialist, something that has stayed with me even though I have done multiple varied roles. The man was possibly among the best trainers I’ve ever encountered and I too worked over the years to ensure no one slept in my class. Finally, on the human side, I said to myself, if ever I have anyone working under me, I shall treat him right and never the way I was insulted and made to grovel for everything. All these traits made me a better person and a better professional and a better boss. I owe all of that to The Boss.

I had lost touch with him for about five odd years when suddenly I heard that he had broken his leg after falling down on the road while waiting for the office car. By now, he had started using one. When I saw him next, he was using a walking stick and had put on some weight. He would meet me and my wife whenever he would come to Delhi. Slowly this man started getting close to us as a family and now if he is ever at Mumbai, he visits us, goes out for dinner with us, and if I don’t call him up once in two to three months, he feels upset and conveys his displeasure through common friends. Most importantly, the man loves my daughter and follows her progress like a pucca grandfather. Now that I know him closely I can say the man has many a quality, which many are unaware of, like his knowledge is not limited to insurance, it is truly vast. He is a voracious reader and reads everything from Tolkien to Tolstoy and from history to medicine. He can engage almost on any subject with a great deal of depth. He is a connoisseur of music and was overwhelmed when I invited him for a classical concert on the banks of River Hooghly to raise funds for Tata Memorial Hospital. Here you can see The Boss with Dr. Mamen Chandy, Director of TMC.

He never got married and lives alone. He himself admits that had he got married he would have made life hell for the poor woman. There is only one person who can put him in place and he is mortally scared of- his elder sister whose children he adores. He looks forward to people like us to greet him and longs for love and company. Today, I don’t feel angry for what he did to me in the past, I only feel sad for this solitary teacher who most believe to be eccentric and evil and even mock him without knowing the real man.

Only time unravels a true human being.

SS