Chapter 9
She was going crazy in this heat.
What Samar Dixit managed, though, was to get his point across.
Amaal observed from her vantage, seated in the front row, how the rows behind her stood up and began to applaud, chant, borderline ready to rattle into battle. She started a new video recording and stood up, taking in the entire panoramic view.
She glanced at Samar, catching his eye. He didn’t even smile or open himself up to the crowd.
He just nodded and walked down the makeshift podium to come and stand down beside her as the drive material distribution started.
KDP scarves, house lists, stationery, caps, party badges.
Amaal hit pause on her recording and turned to him.
“Je baat![39]” She joked.
No smile. Not even a grunt.
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Her days in Jammu were long, spent managing local press coverage across tight lanes, tailing Varun Singh as he campaigned across the length and breadth of the city, making mobile phone videos for Twitter and Facebook, and coordinating with Srinagar if anything urgent cropped up on that side.
Her evenings were spent sorting, editing and polishing videos and photos for social media, giving herself foot-rubs after a dip in hot salted water, and reporting to Atharva about any shortcomings on the Jammu side.
She would eat dinner in the dining hall set up downstairs, and was heavily approving of the stupendous Jammu/ Dogri/ Punjabi food and the growing company of women members being added to the party.
The gender disparity continued to shrink as KDP recruited more and more women, with the campaign picking up speed.
Amaal even got a few of them running with her for press, creating her own little team of young interns.
They were college undergrads and would often help with recording, as well as talking to locals about issues in areas where she couldn’t be present all at once.
It was a first for her, being so hands-on and at the grassroots.
None of this was textbook knowledge. The base of core strategies, sure.
But she evolved her media strategy as she went.
Amaal did not know of a job where a 24-year-old would get to run an entire election’s press singlehandedly and make decisions at the drop of a hat.
She was blessed with a boss who let her.
Atharva, not Samar.
Her distance from Samar had resurrected with a vengeance.
She would see him when she needed anything specific from him — work-wise, or if she was touring with him, which was rare.
The only regular collisions they had were at the gym at 5.
30 every morning, or at dinner time if he came back for dinner.
His bag was stored in one of the half-finished rooms in the building, but Amaal had noted Samar barely came back at nights.
He was at the gym every morning, though. Maybe he came in very late to sleep.
She stopped herself from venturing into his thoughts. She had done good work in the last two months. Growing Jammu’s media team and shrinking any thoughts about Samar. He made it easier by being his gruff, silent self, away from her as if she carried the plague.
Amaal swung her gym bag as she pushed open the heavy, metallic garage door to the gym. As usual, at 5.30, the space was pumping with loud Punjabi pop and only one man on the machine. She could never figure this out about him. His music changed every day. What was he into, the schizophrenic.
Amaal found her eyes going to him as he held on to a dead hang on a protruding rusted beam of the ceiling.
The maniac. She tore her eyes off the skin pulled taut over his lower back muscles as his T-shirt rode up with him, and his shorts clung to his waist. She walked across to the other side and began her warmup on the treadmill.
There was no cycle or elliptical here to break the boredom.
Only the treadmill for cardio. She walked, jogged, then ran for ten minutes and decided to get some chest weights.
When she reached the bench, Samar was setting a 50 kg weight down. He did not even glance at her, just grabbed the napkin he had draped over the bench and moved away.
Amaal had never been petty. And yet she found herself reaching for the two 10 kg dumbbells in both her hands. She had ended her chest workout with 10 kg last time; surely she could start with it.
She lay down on the bench and positioned the dumbbells in front of her chest. The first push went perfectly.
She preened. The second went halfway and began to wobble.
She gritted her teeth and pushed for a third.
Her chest began to vibrate. The weights began to slip.
And then two fingers came and touched her elbows. “Grip tight.”
Now her dumbbells would fall off for sure.
“Tight.” He commanded.
“I can do it on my own,” she panted, even as she wrapped her sweaty fingers tighter around the metal. She pushed them, and the touch of his fingers under her elbow made her go fully up.
“Are you supporting or just giving a touch?” She pressed the dumbbells up and down.
“Count and finish your set.”
For just once in life, could she smash somebody’s head with a dumbbell?
She drank down the shot of anger and kept going, channeling the rage in finishing her reps.
The last five were dragged, but his single fingers became two each by the end.
And when she counted 15, the weights were taken off her hands.
Amaal immediately sat up straight, turning around and straddling the bench to face him.
“You didn't have to help.”
“You would have smashed your face,” he turned after setting her dumbbells down.
“Next time you can’t hold a weight up, leave it to the side.”
“It would crack the floor.” She pointed. The floor was rough and made of concrete, which was another matter altogether.
“Better than your face.”
“Better looking than my face?” She shot to her feet.
“Better the floor cracked than your face.” He turned around to resume his workout. She stared in horror as he stood with his feet apart, picked up a rock that looked like a mini mountain in the corner and began to lift it up and down.
“How heavy is that?”
“Over 100 kg.”
“Don’t you have a 100 kg weight?”
“No.”
“That must be rough on the palms.”
“Hmm.”
He wasn’t even grunting or panting or breaking a sweat.
“If that falls on the floor, will the floor crack or the rock, or both?”
“We will have to make you use it to test that.”
Her eyes widened.
“Did you make a joke or it slipped out like that?”
He did not respond, his breath swelling as he finished his reps and set the rock gently down. Samar went to the dock and grabbed his bottle of water when his eyes fell on her. She was just sitting there like a duck. His eyebrows rose.
“I am waiting for your answer.”
“What was your question?” He set the mouth of the bottle to his lips and tipped it. She did not want to look at his throat. She did not want to look at his throat. She did not want to look at his throat.
“If you can lift that, you can lift two of me,” she blurted, then immediately shut her mouth. Fuck! What was she doing? With her boss of all people?!
Amaal got to her feet and grabbed the 7.5 kg dumbbells. She lay down and started her reps, hoping he would either have not heard her last verbal vomit or just ignore it. Knowing Samar, it would be the latter.
When she finished her set and sat up, it was the latter. He had moved onto crunches on the rough floor.
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Her self-humiliating, mortifying verbal vomit with Samar at the gym could have become a thing of the past. But then, she went to work that morning and realised he had an interview coming up with a local news channel.
And she, obviously, had gone ahead and slotted an hour of sit-down with him to go over the questions, groom his answers and… maybe even him.
Amaal was sitting on her desk in the makeshift cabins of the headquarters when she heard his unmistakable voice outside. There were no doors here, just waist-high old-school dividers and glass partitions. Khatriji was old school. His interior choices were just as ancient as him.
“…I will take care of it this afternoon.” He was speaking on his mobile as he reached the edge of her space and stopped. His eyes met hers, but his mouth kept running. “Hmm… hmm. Ok. No.”
With that curt word, no goodbye, no see you, he cut his call. She wasn’t surprised. That was Samar Dixit.
“Hi,” she popped, feeling like a schoolgirl caught sitting on the teacher’s desk when this was her cabin, her desk and her… everything.
“Can we speed this up? I need to be elsewhere.”
Amaal jumped down from her desk. Then repeated his final word before he had cut his call.
“No.”
If she had excepted that would bring him out to yell, it didn’t.
He stepped into her cabin, and it shrank in space.
Amaal went behind the desk and sat down in her seat, straightening her white cotton shirt.
Her jeans were skinny, dark-wash. She did not want to slot herself into the black-and-white employee today.
As much as her boss was a black-on-black kind, looking like the mafia.
“Don’t you have another colour?”
“Sorry?” He looked up, settling himself in the lone visitor’s chair.
“Colour. Clothes. It’s always white or black. And either black jeans or cargo pants.”
“I don’t wear kurta-pyjama.”
“You wore them in Srinagar.”
“They weren’t mine.”
Whose were they?
“A shame. They looked good.”
“You requested one hour. Was it for this?”
“Among other things. I am styling so many of our candidates, too. Look at Varun, don’t you see a difference in his attire?”
“No.”
“Are you serious?” She sat up.
“Yes.”
“Yes you are serious or yes you noted a difference?”
“The former.”