fourteen Pitch （Im）Perfect
fourteen
Pitch (Im)Perfect
I slipped into my flat as quietly as possible and caught sight of myself in the hallway mirror. My kurta was crumpled beyond recognition, my hair, which I’d tied in a knot on top of my head, was coming undone in messy wisps and the face staring back at me was begging to be buried in a pillow.
But my phone lit up again. Argh. I knew better than to ignore my mom’s call twice.
‘Good morning, beta!’ She chimed the moment I picked up. ‘Reached office?’
I blinked. ‘I … actually just got back from the office.’
I could hear her confusion through the phone. ‘What … why? Are you feeling okay?’
‘I’m fine, mom.’ I dropped my handbag by the shoe rack and resisted the urge to slide down to the floor next to it. ‘I mean I had to spend the night there.’
‘What?’
‘There was a rainstorm in the city … I got trapped.’ If I hadn’t been in such a zombie-like state, I would’ve known that this was not the kind of information my mom could absorb without a gazillion follow-up questions.
‘You got trapped? All night?’ Her voice shot up a notch. ‘So everyone had to sleep there?’
‘Well …’ Don’t say it. Please don’t. But it was too late. The words were already tumbling out. ‘Not everyone. Just me and … a colleague. We were working late.’ And just like that, I’d opened the floodgates.
‘A boy colleague?’
‘Yes, mom, but it wasn’t like that—’
‘WHY were you two the only ones there? Why didn’t you leave earlier? Why do you stay in office till such ridiculous hours? What did you eat? Did you eat? Kavya, did you even HAVE dinner?’
‘I … mom—’
‘And where did you sleep? How could they not send cabs? What kind of company …?’ Her voice trailed off.
When she spoke again, there was a wobble in it.
‘Honestly, this is too much. This city is too much. When are you coming home? Have you checked tickets? Because this is not safe, Kavya, this is just not—’
‘Mom, enough.’ The words came out sharper than I’d meant. ‘I’m fine. I was fine all night. Everything is okay. But I can’t do this right now.’
She stopped talking, but I could hear her panicked breathing on the other end.
I exhaled loudly and made an effort to soften my tone. ‘I’ve barely slept. It was a long night and I just … need a minute. I’ll call you later, okay? When I’ve slept. When I’m a human again.’
‘Can we at least book your—’
‘No, you can’t book my tickets!’ My voice cracked with frustration. ‘I don’t know if I can come back home right now, okay? There’s this important project and … I’ll know more soon. But I need you to please drop it for now.’
There was a pause, and when she did speak, her voice sounded so small that it made my chest hurt. ‘Okay, Kavu.’
When I finally crashed on my bed, there were tears threatening to spill onto the pillow. Not only from the guilt of snapping at my mom—whose panic spiral, this time, wasn’t entirely unreasonable—but also from the sheer exhaustion of having nothing left to give.
As much as I’d hoped otherwise, a few hours of sleep did nothing to shake that guilt. Just call her and apologize, my mind kept pleading with me. But with mine and Neil’s decision to change our entire deck one day before the pitch-off, we still had a lot of work to get through.
It was past one in the afternoon and I was sitting on my living room couch, cradling my laptop. I heard Nikita’s door open. She walked out in a loose t-shirt and men’s boxers, rubbing her eyes. ‘Oh, hey,’ she said when she clocked me. ‘Did you … not go to work today?’
‘HR declared work from home after last night’s storm.’
Her eyes widened as the realization hit her. ‘Oh shit! When did you even get back?’
I scooted over to make room for her. ‘This morning … It took me three hours to get home. The waterlogging was insane.’
She whistled through her teeth. ‘Shit, that’s intense.’
‘You’d think after decades of the same monsoon cycle, someone would’ve figured out how to prevent the city from flooding every year, but—’
‘Babe, as much as I’d love to hear you rant about Mumbai’s shitty urban planning … can we please talk about what happened last night first?’ She folded her legs under her and settled onto the couch like she was gearing up for a full debrief.
‘Nothing … we just stayed up late and talked.’ I rubbed my forehead in a feeble attempt to hide my face.
She leaned forward, a mischievous smile playing on her lips. ‘And … did you do it?’
‘Do what?’
She wriggled her eyebrows at me. ‘You know … it.’
I smacked her leg with a cushion. ‘Niks, no!’
‘Okay … so you kissed him?’
‘Of course not,’ I said, feeling weirdly flustered. ‘I’m not going to kiss my intern.’
‘Hot intern,’ Nikita added unhelpfully.
‘Besides the point.’
‘Um,’ she said, giving me a knowing look. ‘That’s exactly the point.’
‘You’re reading way too much into this.’
‘So you’re telling me,’ she leaned back against the sofa, pulling her knees into her chest, ‘that you got stuck in the office with your crush all night … talked for hours … and nothing happened?’
I didn’t even bother objecting to her usage of the term ‘crush’. It’s not like she would’ve magically forgotten how I had gushed about him like a horny teenager last night. There was no coming back from that.
‘What a waste of my favourite romcom trope.’ The acute disappointment on her face made me feel like I’d failed some kind of a test.
I pressed my lips together. ‘Well … we did fall asleep on the couch together.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘And?’
‘And we may have snuggled a little bit … or at least our legs did.’
Nikita let out a slow breath. ‘That’s a start … I guess.’
I used to think that Murphy’s Law, ‘anything that can go wrong will go wrong’, was unnecessarily pessimistic, but I’m beginning to reconsider my stance.
Because not only were Neil and I up last in a five-hour pitch-off where everyone pretty much checked out after the first fifteen minutes, we also had the pleasure of following a lineup that had individually decided to peak today.
Saloni had pitched a campaign that didn’t involve a single sale (even Rajat was shocked), Inayat had come back from the dead with a deck that looked like it had been made by a pro, Nitya’s idea was not as mediocre as we’d assumed and Tanya had knocked it out of the park with her ‘Wear Your Space’ concept. TL;DR: We were screwed.
And as if that hadn’t been enough, when it was finally time for our presentation, the projector screen died without any warning.
Neil and I tried everything we could to bring it back to life—reconnecting the HDMI cable, restarting the system, changing the remote batteries—but even the IT guy couldn’t resurrect it.
After a few more minutes of waiting patiently, Rajat cleared his throat. ‘Kavya, can you present without the deck?’
My eyes immediately shot to Neil, who was still fiddling with the wires. What the fuck do we do? I tried to communicate with him telepathically. He caught my eye and gave me an encouraging nod, abandoned the remote and joined me on the floor.
‘Um … yes, okay. We can try,’ I managed weakly.
Rajat glanced between the two of us, a smile spreading across his face. ‘I love that you’ve let Neil shadow you for the pitch … I’m sure it’ll be a great learning experience for him.’
‘Actually,’ I interjected, stealing a peek at Neil’s face. He seemed calm, like the comment hadn’t bothered him. ‘He didn’t shadow me. We worked on it together.’
‘Oh.’ Rajat blinked, recalibrating. Then his expression brightened again. ‘Two NYU grads teaming up, huh? I’m super pumped now.’
My nerves, which were already shot from crisis-managing the projector scenario, began to act up as soon as he mentioned NYU. You’re an imposter, Kavya. There’s no way you’re going to win this. I took a deep breath, trying to shove the anxiety monster back into its corner.
‘Okay, so, um … hi,’ I started, immediately regretting how shaky my voice sounded. Even though I had spent hours learning my slides, I couldn’t remember how to start this stupid presentation.
Beside me, Neil quietly rotated his laptop so the screen was facing me. A simple, thoughtful reminder that I did, in fact, know this pitch.
‘Right,’ I said, exhaling. ‘So … before we jump in, can I ask all of you something?’ The faces around the table were slowly beginning to come back into focus. A few heads lifted. ‘When you get home after a long day, what’s the very first thing you do?’
‘Take a shower.’ Varun was the first to speak up.
‘Change into my PJs.’ Jiya chimed in from the far end of the table. Others murmured in agreement.
I smiled at her. ‘Exactly. Most of us change into clothes that make us feel light and comfortable … like we can stop trying to impress the world and just be ourselves again. Because we’re home.’
Neil joined in. ‘What if you could take that feeling with you everywhere you go? Not just inside your house, but through your commute, your office, your entire day?’
I glanced at him, confidence warming up in my chest now that we were in sync. ‘Jiya, sadly HR won’t be too thrilled if we start wearing pyjamas to work … but what if we could show up in clothes that felt as comforting and grounding, while still making us look undeniably chic?’
‘For us, Jharokha’s new clothing line isn’t just about functionality, design, sustainability or all the other buzzwords the industry likes to throw around …’ Neil picked up where I’d left off. ‘It’s about a feeling.’
‘And that’s the heart of our idea.’ I picked up the laptop and turned it towards the room, zooming in on slide number five.
‘Clothes that feel like home,’ Neil and I said in unison.
Tanya’s gaze met mine from across the room. She shot me a thumbs-up and smiled, even though it didn’t quite reach her eyes. I tried to focus on Rajat instead, who was tapping his pen against his notebook, listening intently.