Page 56 of Not Safe for Work
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 wentby 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 hadlovedthe 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.’
