Chapter 16 #2
“I don’t know, but why was she there in the first place? She lives here, she works here, why does she have to leave this place?”
Amaal frowned. Iram was publishing her novel. She left the office before or after work hours to meet her editor, and always informed her. This threw those trips under suspicion.
“Why would she spy for them?” Amaal muttered. Samar looked like he knew something, but he only said, “Atharva is interrogating.”
“Interrogating?” Her eyes widened. “Are you both crazy? This is not your SFF!” Amaal began to turn around to open the door.
“Let him.” Samar’s words stopped her. “You know he will not cross any lines.”
“It’s still wrong on so many levels. And he is the CM candidate! We should have an HR here in this party. Now that I realise it, I have been doing half the things an HR does.” Amaal whirled around. “I can’t believe she can spy. She doesn’t have that in her…”
“How long have you known her to claim that?”
Amaal clamped her mouth shut.
“I am giving you a heads up. You will not have a speechwriter tomorrow morning.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You sound downright happy about it.”
“No.” He deadpanned.
“Tell me the whole story.”
“I do not answer to you.”
“You still came running to me.”
“I didn’t come running.”
“You are definitely happy today.”
He stopped sparring. She kept staring at him. In the years that they had spent circling around each other, this one thing she had adopted successfully and seamlessly from him. She wouldn’t break. Not now, not ever.
Turned out, he wouldn’t either.
“If you don’t tell me, I am going there and finding out.” She turned to leave again, and he broke.
“We were driving from there and saw her outside their office.”
“Who, we?”
“Atharva and I.”
“What was she doing there?”
“Talking to Mansoor Ali, one of their official spokespersons…”
“I know who Mansoor Ali is. Then?”
“I told you I do not answer to you, don’t push me.”
“Then why did you come to tell me?”
“So that you freeze all her access and passes. Immediately. All of you have made her a hero here without any reason.”
Amaal closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then let it out. “Ok, Samar.”
“Don’t use that tone with me.”
“What tone?”
“That condescending tone.”
“Ok, Samar.”
He stared at her. He was back to being the Samar from Jammu — not seething, not happy, not anything. And then he walked around her, opened the door and walked out. Completely back to Samar from Jammu.
Amaal caught the door before it fell shut and turned in the opposite direction, heading down the alley to Atharva’s office. If this were true, there were conversations to be had. If it wasn’t, this was going to get ugly.
“…neither do I want to give you one. But just so that I don’t look back at this moment and see you win, here’s why I was there… I go there to meet my publisher, whose office happens to be above Awaami Party’s. I hadn’t realised that but thanks to you, now I do.”
Amaal had never heard Iram’s voice at that octave.
She stood outside the closed door, checking the alley for any lingerers.
This party office was turning into a drama company lately.
The door pulled open, and there stood Iram, hassled, her hair flying with the wind of the door, bag in hand.
Atharva stood behind her, looking just as enraged as Samar had sounded happy. That was a rare sight.
“Hey,” she broke the tense air. “How was the meeting at the headquarters?” She asked him. “I heard you sanctioned my budget without cuts.”
He nodded. Amaal saw his rage disappear. She could rarely make out what was happening inside him either. With Samar, it was always a blank. With Atharva, it was clever, quiet smiles.
“Oh, Iram,” she turned to the woman hyperventilating at the door. “I need you to work from the media room in the first half tomorrow. Your insight for Twitter was good, but we need to turn it into strategy…”
Iram blinked. But did not respond. This was going to get so ugly.
“Blog hits are plummeting,” she told Atharva. “We need to start publishing Iram’s pieces. I’ve mailed the starters to your work ID. Let’s discuss it tomorrow. Maybe late evening?”
“Yeah, ok.”
This was definitely going to get ugly tomorrow. She would tackle it tomorrow. First with Atharva, then with Iram. She stepped back, waved, and walked away. Samar would not be very happy tomorrow.
————————————————————
The next morning, Amaal was not surprised when Iram submitted her resignation.
She was, however, surprised when Atharva clearly stated to her that he would like to retain Iram.
In that tight space, caught between her boss and an employee, a woman no less, with righteous indignation, Amaal climbed the stairs to the top floor. Atharva’s floor. Now, Iram’s too.
Iram was on the terrace, leaning on the parapet, her laptop open.
“Hello,” Amaal greeted, taking a seat on the ancient wooden swing left in one corner of the terrace. She sipped from her cup of kahwa and pushed her feet.
Iram straightened. “Amaal, thank you for this chance to write for your party, but I think I am happy to leave now.”
“Being a writer doesn’t mean you recite your resignation letter to me,” Amaal grinned. “Word for word.”
Iram’s lips curled abashedly. “Yes, actually, I have never done this before. The last job I had, many years ago… it was well, very informally taken. And left.”
“Hmm,” Amaal threw her head back on the swing’s backrest, taking another sip of her tea. She straightened and looked Iram straight in the eye — “Tell me everything. And tell me the truth. All of it.”
“Amaal there is nothing to tel…”
“I know what happened yesterday.”
“You… what?”
“Samar came and informed me as soon as he left Atharva’s office.”
“That’s why you came between me and Atharva?”
Amaal laughed. “I thought he was firing you left, right and centre. But when I got there, it was a different story.”
Iram looked down, silent.
“Ok, back to the issue at hand,” Amaal asserted. “Here are the facts, Iram — Atharva and Samar saw you in the wrong place at the wrong time, they didn’t know about your publishing, you didn’t want to reveal much because that’s just your nature. They jumped to conclusions and scared you…”
“I wasn’t scared. They accused me wrongly.”
“And at the same time,” Amaal continued, “you were borderline unethical in not informing me that your publisher’s office is near Awaami Party’s.”
“I didn’t know myself! I never noticed.”
“That’s a little impossible, but I’ll still give it to you. Did you go inside their office?”
“No.”
“Did you speak to any of their members?”
“Just a salam. I don’t even know his name. He asked me that he hadn’t seen me in the building before and I mentioned that I was visiting the publisher’s office. That’s it.”
“Did he know you? Know your name?”
“No… as I said, it was just a salam. I was standing on the street waiting for a rickshaw and he was going inside the building.”
“Ok. Now, tell me, why do you want to leave?”
“I can’t work in such a place. I haven’t done teamwork before so this was way out of my zone anyway. But the way they… would you work somewhere they don’t trust you?”
“No.”
Iram nodded.
“But yesterday wasn’t about mistrust,” Amaal softened. “It was about misunderstanding and lack of communication. I should have informed Atharva about your book publishing.”
“Atharva Singh Kaul and Samar Dixit don’t want me to stay.”
“I have on good authority here that Atharva Singh Kaul wants you to stay.”
“He said that to you?”
Amaal blinked her assent.
“If you still wish to leave, Iram, I am nobody to stop you. But, on a personal level,” she got to her feet and crossed the terrace to her.
“This is a good place. A happy place. I have seen you happy working with us. Your work so far has made me hopeful, and a lot saner after the last string of writers that came and went. You have the potential of becoming so much better here. Stay. I want you to stay.”
Iram turned away, towards the horizon, the neighbouring house in the distance.
A long minute passed in silence. And just when Amaal thought she was losing the most promising writer she had possessed in KDP so far, Iram turned to her and gave a nod.
They stared at each other, that kindred spirit renewed.
And Amaal smiled. Iram returned it with a small, tentative one of her own, and Amaal broke into a grin.
“I don’t understand how you do it.”
“Do what?” Amaal asked.
“Be this logical, hard-to-please media head one minute and this cute gardener the next.”
“Talent, my friend, talent. And experience.”
“You look so young…”
“28.”
“What?” Her eyes widened. “I thought… well, the way you are… you… look 28 but you act 48.”
“Ooh you haven’t seen me act 8,” she winked, then turned around to grab her cup.
“Amaal.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
“For?”
“You’re the only person who believed that I am not a spy here, without any proof.”
Amaal shook her head. “Don’t take it to heart. They are ex-military. And badly burned at that. I am not defending anybody’s actions here, not yours nor theirs. But in work, as in any home or relationship, you have to take the good with the bad. Hmm?”
“Hmm.”
————————————————————
“You made her stay back?!” Samar came barreling again to her. Not to her Media Room this time, but to Atharva’s office.
“Slow down.” Atharva warned. Samar ignored him and came to her — “You convinced her to stay?”
“Yes.”
“I told you last night to revoke her access.”
“I had a conversation with Atharva this morning. He wants to retain her, and so do I.”
“She is a spy!” Samar turned to Atharva, his voice setting into a cold, low snarl. Atharva glanced from him to her. And Amaal got her cue.
“We can finish this later.” She scooped up her laptop and walked out of the room, the door falling shut just as she heard the words — “Aamir Haider…”
Samar did not even wait for the door to fall fully close.
“Aamir Haider.” He clipped. “Aamir Haider killed four people from our platoon and you open our party to his daughter? Aamir Haider had Chaturvedi massacred. I was there, in front of her when they tore her arm out of her socket. I was there when she cried hugging the wall because she was bleeding and there was nothing to stop it or keep the baby…” he choked.
His eyes began to blur. Slow down, he told himself.
If the floodgates opened, he wouldn’t be able to stop anything.
“Samar.”
“No. Don’t give me that look. Don’t gaslight me into thinking that I am the only crazy man here among the four of us who can see right through her.”
“She is not her father. She is not a spy either.” Atharva said softly, like he was talking to a wild animal. “Her publisher’s office is in that building. The story corroborates.”
“Why does every story of hers need to be corroborated? Why is she getting into these controversies from the get-go? Think, Atharva. Think. She is fooling everybody here. Nobody is this naive. Nobody is this innocent. She is too good to be true.”
Atharva sighed. “What do you want me to do?”
“Throw her out.”
“On what grounds?”
“Are you kidding me? This is our party. What we say goes.”
“So close to the election, you want me to throw out a good speechwriter who just joined the party and has already seen so much, heard so much. If it does not become a whistleblower campaign, it is sure to damage our reputation if she tells on how we treated her.”
Samar scoffed — “Bullshit reasoning.”
“Let’s do this. She will work solely and directly with me. Unless required, you won’t have to interact with her.”
Samar stared at Atharva, losing him. He was so blinded and so far gone that nothing was getting him back now. Everyone around them was the same. Samar felt helpless. He was rattling the cage here and there was nobody to listen. So he shut the floodgates. And decided to wait.
“As you wish.”
He turned, opened the door and walked out. An opportunity would come. Sooner or later, it would.