ten Salt, Meet Wound
ten
Salt, Meet Wound
Watching Neil Desai try to act out trending Instagram reel transitions was easily the highlight of my morning.
‘That was better, but can you look like someone’s pushed you when you sit down on the sofa?’ Tanya was saying, holding the tripod in her hand.
We were in Rajat’s personal office, shooting an Instagram reel that Tanya had begged me to help with.
I’d been more than happy to oblige—by pawning it off to Neil.
So far, he’d managed to trip over a ring light, knock over the tripod twice and deliver the single most awkward hair flip I’d ever seen.
It was pure, unadulterated entertainment.
‘This is ridiculous,’ he muttered, running a hand over his Tom Ford polo shirt. ‘People get paid to do this?’
‘Not enough,’ Tanya said under her breath.
She pulled out the reference video again.
It looked simple enough: a guy walks into a dull, undecorated room, drops into a chair right as the beat hits and boom—suddenly he’s in a Pinterest-y version of the same space.
‘Maybe it’ll look more natural if we push you,’ she said, squinting at the phone. ‘Kavya, can you give him a nudge?’
‘With pleasure,’ I said, hopping off the wooden table and walking up to where Neil stood in front of the sofa.
He looked down at me with exasperation. ‘You’re a bully.’
I had to tilt my head to look up at him. We were close enough that his cologne caught on my breath. ‘And you’re a born influencer.’
‘Seriously, for someone who’s allergic to Instagram, you’re doing just fine,’ Tanya chimed in from behind us.
‘He’s full of surprises, isn’t he?’ I placed my hands on his chest and gave him a little shove. He fell back on the sofa with a groan. I dusted off my hands, gloating. Strangely, they tingled from where they’d met the soft fabric of his shirt and the solid muscles beneath it.
‘Yes, that was perfect!’ Tanya shrieked, jumping up and down. ‘Now do it again so I can get it on camera.’
After a few particularly therapeutic retakes, I helped Tanya set up the room for the transition shot.
I threw a knitted throw over the sofa, replaced the dull brown cushions with embroidered Jharokha ones and put up a pair of brass bookends on the wall behind it, which held a few smart-sounding books we’d stolen from different people in the office.
As a finishing touch, I added an earthy ceramic vase to the side table and adjusted it until it caught the light just right.
Tanya stepped back to look at the frame. ‘Thanks, Kavya, this looks so great.’
‘Happy to help,’ I told her, meaning it. Even though this shoot was turning out to be a three-hour detour in my workday, it was a welcome distraction.
‘All this effort for a seven-second video the internet will forget about in two days.’ She shook her head. ‘Sometimes I fantasize about a world where reels were never invented.’
‘You really deserve a lot more credit for the shit you pull off on a daily basis,’ I said, plonking down on the sofa beside Neil. Our knees touched for a nanosecond before I pulled away.
‘Screw credit, I’ll take a promotion instead.’ She adjusted the height of the tripod stand.
‘That makes two of us.’
‘Have you guys tried asking for it?’ Neil interjected, looking up from his phone.
Tanya and I broke into simultaneous laughter. ‘That’s cute,’ she said in between breaths.
He crossed his legs and shifted his glance between the two of us. There was an earnestness in his eyes. ‘I’m serious. Haven’t you heard of the phrase “Don’t ask, don’t get”?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Of course we’ve asked.’ I drew out the word for emphasis. ‘It’s not quite as simple as that.’
‘Well it can be.’ He shrugged. ‘If you know what you’re worth.’
‘I’m not about to take career advice from a guy who has climbed his way to becoming an intern by twenty-five.’ I snorted.
Tanya mouthed an ouch but Neil didn’t flinch. ‘I’ve sat through enough negotiations in my life to know one thing: You never get what you deserve unless you’re prepared to walk away.’
‘Easy for you to say, Mr Worli Sea Face,’ I said, unable to keep the bite out of my tone. ‘I can’t exactly afford to quit my job on principle. I’ve got rent to pay.’
‘And as I’ve discovered recently, Mumbai rent is insaneeeee,’ Tanya added, stretching her arms over her head.
‘Are you finally looking at houses?’ I shifted my weight on the sofa to face her.
Tanya had been talking about moving out of her parents’ place for over a year now, saying she wanted a taste of independent life. And it made sense—I knew by now that her parents weren’t the regular kind of strict, they were dictators in disguise.
I’d been thrilled when she’d first brought it up, and had even tried convincing her to move into my flat. But when weeks went by and she never followed through, I ended up signing the new lease with Nikita instead.
‘I am,’ she admitted, looking at me through the phone screen. ‘Though I can’t realistically move out unless I get a proper raise.’
‘God, this is somehow even more depressing than the shoot,’ Neil said with a yawn, leaning back to stretch his body.
‘You’re such an entitled prick.’ I smacked him square in the chest with a cushion.
‘Hey!’ Tanya yelped. ‘No messing with the props.’
I held my hands up in surrender. ‘Okay, okay.’
‘But she’s right,’ she said, shooting Neil a mock glare before breaking into a grin. ‘It’s a good thing you’re pretty, otherwise that attitude of yours would get you into a lot of trouble.’
We went back to the final shot, saving the conversation about raises and rent for another time, preferably without a certain entitled prick in the room.
As a kid, my dad always encouraged my brother and me to excel at whatever we did.
The word ‘average’ should not exist in your vocabulary, he used to say.
Clearly, my business-owner father had never worked in a corporate setup.
If he had, he’d have known that being good at your job is most definitely a curse.
That the reward for competence is nothing but more work.
Being average, as it turned out, was far more beneficial.
I saw it around me all the time—colleagues who did the bare minimum, keeping their head down and never taking initiative, thrived.
No one gave them high-stakes tasks, they got to clock out on time and they certainly weren’t the ones waking up at the crack of dawn to prep for a shoot that wasn’t even a part of their KRA.
Varun had loved the reel Neil and I had helped Tanya with. He had called us into his office and gushed about it for the better part of an hour. ‘Great idea, brilliant execution, and Neil? I won’t be surprised if you start getting modelling offers after this.’
The three of us had stood there like schoolchildren, smiling politely and waiting to see where this would lead. We didn’t have to wait long. ‘You guys make such a great team. I have an idea.’
Uh oh. We’d exchanged silent looks.
‘Let’s book a studio for Monday. Tanya, think of a few more video ideas to shoot. Kavya, you can handle sourcing and creative direction. And Neil can star in them!’
There was no point arguing. Varun had already decided that a batch of potentially viral content was exactly what would impress Rajat at Tuesday’s team meeting—never mind that no one knew why the meeting had been called in the first place.
And so, here I was, standing in the narrow lane outside Dadar flower market at 6 a.m. on Monday morning, waiting for Neil to bless me with his presence.
I pulled out my phone from my tote bag and texted him a string of question marks.
A cab pulled up a few minutes later, and the window rolled down to reveal Neil’s face in black wayfarer shades, a very expensive look for where we were.
‘When I said I was a morning person, this is not what I meant,’ he said from inside the car.
‘You’re late.’ I motioned for him to hurry up.
‘What is this place?’ he asked, looking around. ‘Remind me why we couldn’t just buy flowers from a regular florist?’
You would’ve never guessed how early it was judging by the buzz inside the market.
Pavements on both sides of the lane were packed with vendors selling flowers of every kind, cycles and rickshaws were being loaded with marigolds and packets of rose petals, and men were weaving through the crowd with baskets bigger than my torso.
‘Because shoots have a budget,’ I said, shaking my head at him. ‘A concept I’m sure you’re not familiar with.’
‘Time is money too, you know.’ He stepped aside to let an auto pass.
‘That is literally something only rich people say.’
We bickered back and forth as we walked along, sounding less like coworkers and more like an old married couple.
‘What exactly are we looking for?’ Neil wanted to know after we’d spent fifteen minutes walking up and down the place.
‘That.’ I pointed to a corner stall tucked inside a bylane. It had the brightest stock of marigolds I’d seen all morning, dumped in a pile on a sheet of old newspaper spread out on the pavement.
Neil followed as I made my way over. ‘How much for two bags of orange and yellow marigolds each?’ I asked the potbellied man behind the stall.
He glanced at Neil and me for a brief second before quoting a price at least three times the going rate.
I scoffed, half-offended, half-flattered to be mistaken for the kind of person who wouldn’t know (or care) about the difference.
It took ten minutes to bring him down to a price that was still one and a half times too much.
‘Is he giving us a good deal?’ Neil leaned down to whisper in my ear.
I clicked my tongue in response. ‘We’ve got your designer clothes to blame.’
‘Let’s go somewhere else then.’ He grabbed my wrist and started tugging me away.
The vendor called out after us. ‘What happened, madam?’
Neil looked back over his shoulder and shouted, ‘Too expensive.’
We’d barely taken a few steps when the man came running. ‘Okay, okay! How much do you want it for?’