Can Shah Rukh Khan make excel sheets?
by Himanjali Sankar
Anil was good at his work. Hardworking and diligent. He crouched over his computer screen all day in office. He hardly had the time to look up except when someone came to him with a bill or receipt. When one of the girls from the Marketing team on the other side of the four foot high partition came over he stammered a little. It wasn’t that he was attracted to them but their beautiful bodies, silky hair and the way they spoke fluently in English filled him with wonder. He could hear them laughing and joking on the other side of the partition during the day but when they appeared the physicality of them overwhelmed him. He sat up straighter and smiled what he hoped was a winning smile.
When Anil’s wife gave birth to their second child Anil distributed laddoos in office. He loved sweets himself. When the office boy returned the box there were still eight or ten pieces in it.
“Didn’t everyone take mithai?” Anil asked.
“Not everyone,” replied Ramesh. Gesturing to the other side of the partition with rounded eyes and dancing eyebrows he murmured, “Only Tanu ma’am took in that department.”
Anil nodded. In the course of the day he ate three or four of the remaining laddoos. He felt guilty but it was difficult to resist when the box was lying right there. He had been a skinny teenager, a slightly plump student during his post graduate diploma days and considerably fat by the time he got married. The weight gain had been gradual but he had no idea how he got this overweight.
Anil’s face was slightly large. But thankfully not fat, his cheeks were slack and his limp straight hair made his face look quite slim. When he washed his hands in the sink and looked at his face in the mirror he didn’t look bad at all. His fair smooth skin and brown hair had always won him admiration when he was younger. From relatives more than from his peers. Lately he was more accustomed to receiving unflattering comments about the weight he had put on. From just about everyone. Uncles, aunts, friends. Seemingly well-intentioned jokes. When his wife was due to deliver any day her stomach had been exactly as large as his.
“Who is going to have the baby, Anil Bhaiya or Bhabhi?” asked one of his cousins when he visited and though Anil had to laugh along with everyone else he felt awful. His wife covered her mouth with her dupatta to stop herself from laughing too loudly. Couldn’t contain her merriment from the look of it.
“Congratulations and thanks for the laddoo, Anil,” Tanu ma’am said when she came to hand him a form from a vendor.
“Everyone didn’t take…” Anil started saying but then stopped, thinking he should have just said thank you instead of blabbering.
“Oh they are all just watching their weight but I can never say no to a laddoo,” Tanu smiled.
Anil smiled and nodded. He wondered as he reached out for one more laddoo after she left why she had mentioned that the other girls were watching their weight. Was she making fun of him by saying that? He couldn’t be sure. All those girls were slim. Why would she say they were watching their weight if not to make fun of him?
As he entered the numbers into the excel sheet he was working on, he could hear the girls laughing on that side of the partition. He hoped they weren’t laughing at him and how fat he was.
The next day was Saturday. Officially it was a holiday but Anil and his colleagues in the Accounts department had to come into work on almost all Saturdays. Anil reported to the CFO of the company who was a good and fair boss but he worked his team hard. It was a small company with just twenty employees so everyone had to pull their weight — the Accounts team more than the rest it seemed to Anil.
On this Saturday Anil was really tired. The baby had woken up so many times in the night that he had hardly got any sleep. His wife didn’t wake him or ask him to help but she did put on the light every time the baby cried. Then she would feed the baby, change the nappy and pat it back to sleep. Sometimes Anil offered to help too but she would tell him to go back to sleep. Anil would turn to the other side so that he faced away from his wife, adjust his paunch which felt sweaty and heavy, and try to fall asleep again. The heat wave in Delhi this summer was particularly unrelenting. The fan at full speed just filled the room with hot moving air that was hardly cooling.
The only thing he really looked forward to in office was the air conditioning. After a breakfast of aloo parathas and tea he set out. He hated wearing a helmet in this weather but the cops were very vigilant these days and in a bad mood because of the weather.
Anil stopped at the petrol pump near his office to fill some fuel and put air in his scooter’s tyres. He took off his helmet. The boy who was filling air knew him well.
“Uncle, you come for air more than anyone else,” he said, smiling. “Your weight must be deflating the tyres faster than for others.”
This was the problem of being nice and friendly with everyone. They felt they could say anything and get away with it. Anil was glad his wife wasn’t with him at least. She would have giggled for sure. He didn’t want the boy to know he minded so he laughed in a slightly strangulated way. He had been planning to give the boy a two rupee coin but changed his mind and put on his helmet and drove away.
Savita was very proud of how slim she was. After her delivery she had lost all the weight she had put on quickly and she kept mentioning it to him, especially when he was eating. She laughed about the way men too were into appearance these days — jogging, going to gyms, eating healthy. Anil laughed along with her, though he knew she was just pretending to be amused and was actually trying to tell him something.
When Anil reached office he had to go up three flights of stairs. There was no elevator but he didn’t mind. It was the only exercise he got every day and there was the air-conditioning to look forward to. But he was not greeted with the usual blast of cold air as he checked into the office with his fingerprint. He had noticed this often happened on a Saturday when only a couple of them came to office. Today the CFO was also not going to be there. There was no use complaining, no one would listen to him.
Anil was the only one in office today. Gagan called to say he had food poisoning. Anil had taken a week off when the baby was born. He wanted to make up for that now. He took off his shirt and hung it on a chair. He then took off his belt and opened the top button of his trousers. He was tempted to take off his vest too but it was a sleeveless one and the fabric was soft and smooth. It was damp with sweat but beginning to dry up with the spluttering mildly cool air that was coming from the air-conditioner.
Anil switched on his computer and opened the excel files he needed to work on. He was soon swamped in a mass of figures that he had to sort and order. After a couple of hours of intense work he felt good. He decided to allow himself to surf the net for ten minutes or so before moving to the next set of documents that he would have to look at.
He flexed his shoulders and rolled his head to ease the tautness in his neck and shoulder muscles. He didn’t want to surf porn because he had heard of an employee in another company getting sacked for doing that. Instead he checked out models walking the ramp, skinny bony women walking lithely with a swagger that made him envious. Their casual confidence, arrogant expressions, the way they posed for the camera, annoyed him — such soft easy lives. All they had to do was turn this way and that in bizarre outfits and high heels for people to swoon and drool. He didn’t find them beautiful at all, they appeared unfeminine and had the appearance of aggressive predators without the natural charms of the wild. His wife was a passive aggressive woman but at least she was feminine and didn’t have jagged sharp edges that affected his sense of manhood.
As Anil was deep in his thoughts and watching his screen avidly he heard a scraping sound and a giggle behind him that made him turn around. Since he was alone he hadn’t bothered to mute the volume. He had no idea when Tanu and Devina had come into the office. Now they were directly behind him, identical shocked expressions on their faces. Devina was holding out a sheet of paper which he took mechanically and then the two women turned and ran as if he was chasing them.
Anil was too stunned to move for a few minutes or to even mute the volume of the music and commentary that was playing as the women walked the ramp. The excited voice of the commentator, with its cultivated American twang, filled him with dismay. Anil hadn’t noticed till this moment how the empty office seemed to reverberate with the superficial, animated accents of the voice-over. He switched off the screen and in the sudden silence he could hear Tanu and Devina whispering on their side of the partition.
Anil looked down at himself. Since he had opened the top button of his trousers the fly had come down and was sitting in a strange sloping V over his crotch. Luckily he always tucked his vest into his trousers so his underwear wasn’t showing. The thickness of his thighs looked accentuated somehow and every roll of flesh on his hairy arms and around his armpits was so very gross as he sat there, ridiculously bulging and shirtless.
Anil reached out for his shirt. His face was flaming red and he could feel the heat radiate from his skin in a way he couldn’t remember happening before. He put on his shirt and buttoned his trousers and felt mortified afresh when he saw the way his belt was flung across his desk, right next to the invoice that Devina had handed to him.
The marketing girls never came to office on Saturdays. From the glimpse he had caught of them he had seen they weren’t in office clothes. They were probably on their way to a fancy lunch or party. He could hear suppressed giggles now and felt a wave of anger. Scantily dressed as they were in short sleeveless cotton dresses they could hardly afford to laugh at him. If he had the body of a Shah Rukh Khan would they have laughed? Savita was an SRK fan. She had pointed out once that Shah Rukh was twenty years older than Anil but look at his toned body. Of course she had added that was Shah Rukh’s job, he got paid millions to look that way. He wasn’t an overworked overweight accountant in a PR firm that was struggling to meet its meagre targets.
The girls left in five minutes. He heard the main door shut. They must have been passing this way and decided to give him the invoice. He knew it was urgent. Anil did the transaction immediately, on autopilot. The air-con was still not working properly and he had started sweating again. He didn’t feel uncomfortable about the heat anymore. He only felt numb and dazed. He finished his work and as he was finishing his desk phone rang.
“What happened, Anil?” It was the CFO. His boss. His voice was slightly embarrassed. “Devina called … said something about office etiquette and I should talk to you.”
“Sir,” Anil’s voice was breathless with shame. He had known the girls would gossip and he would feel humiliated in office on Monday again. But he hadn’t expected them to call his boss. Not even once had such a thought come to his mind in the last couple of hours. “It won’t happen again. It was so hot. That is all.”
“Just be careful,” Anil wasn’t sure if his boss didn’t sound slightly amused. Perhaps he was visualizing how ugly Anil would have looked, sitting with half his clothes off. Like one of those cartoons in TV shows like Chota Bheem. “So many cases of sexual harassment these days. Not good to be caught with your pants down.”
Anil was bewildered and mortified. Sexual harassment. Caught with his pants down. He felt insulted and disgusted. Was this how the CFO spoke to his prized accountant? But more than anything else he felt nervous and scared.
“Sir, please tell me what is happening … pant was up only … I didn’t mean to … I have a family to support … my father has retired, we have two children … please take into consideration … I work hard for you …” Anil petered off pathetically. He was covered in sweat from head to foot now and he felt dizzy. He wondered if he was about to get a heart attack.
“Oh Anil relax,” The CFO’s voice was amused and exasperated. “I was just saying — Devina wasn’t complaining like that. All she said was I should speak to you because if some client were to come to office or something it would have looked really odd.”
Anil felt his panic subside but he didn’t feel any less mortified. No clients visited a hot empty office where only one fat accountant was desperately trying to catch up on backlog. But the CFO knew that.
Anil had gone over what had happened a million times in his head by the time he left the office to head home at 4 pm. Just outside the building a funeral procession was passing. Anil automatically muttered a prayer in his mind to keep away the evil spirits. The body was tightly covered with a white sheet. The body, thought Anil, wrily. The irony of becoming a “body” only when our body gives up on us. When the body stops mattering really. Whether it was a fat one like his or a gorgeous one like Shah Rukh’s. Anil knew he was essentially a loser, that he didn’t have it in him to take up a challenge. He could just slog and worry and worry and slog. Last week when he had felt unwell in office his boss had casually suggested he get some exercise, “try to lose some weight, Anil, you will feel lighter and better.” Anil was damned if he would. He had been humiliated enough but he really didn’t care. He went to office to work not to walk the ramp.
That evening when he reached home Anil avoided looking at himself in the mirror. That way he could imagine he had the body of Shah Rukh. He even put on a swagger that belonged to a hero. Whatever it took. He refused to allow everyone to reduce his sense of self to dust again and again.
“Won’t you come for dinner?” His wife came in to ask him for the second time.
“Why won’t I? You don’t think I should?” He asked in reply. Savita looked confused for a moment and then belligerent.
“What’s come over you? Just come. Mummy, Papa have started eating.” She didn’t wait for his reply and he meekly followed her out of the room.
Anil sat down at the table and took a chapatti and the cauliflower curry that Savita had cooked the way he liked it. But he had eaten only a few mouthfuls when he felt sick. He mumbled that he wasn’t feeling too well and quickly got up and left before his mother could start fussing.
When the baby started wailing at about 3am Anil woke up with a gasp, struggling but relieved to come out of the dream that he was caught in. A naked bulb was hanging from the ceiling in the empty, dark office. Anil was perched on his desk, in the spotlight like a superstar, wearing only his red underwear, thin yellow butter pouring out of every pore in his body. The face was Shah Rukh Khan’s but the body was his own, fat and unseemly. He knew Devina would come to office any minute now but he couldn’t move, he was stuck to the desk, sticky and hot, every fibre of his body wanted to leave but he sat there like a statue.
All of Sunday went by in a daze for Anil. He ate a little at every meal time so his family wouldn’t get anxious. He took his son to the neighbourhood shop to buy him the cricket bat which he had promised the week before. His family could tell he was not himself but he was never really talkative or cheerful so no one was unduly worried. He couldn’t decide about Monday — should he talk to the CFO and apologize? Or should he just keep quiet and hope the whole thing blew over.
Anil couldn’t believe how unlucky he had been. He had surfed the net for ten minutes out of the four hours he was in office and that is when the girls had to come. Of course, they would have caught him without his shirt on anyway but that wouldn’t have been as bad. It was hot. But undressed and watching models walk the ramp showed him up as a perverted slacker. Why had he been surprised that the girls had complained? He would have too in their place.
On Sunday night he had the same dream again. He woke up with a start at exactly the same point in the dream. The Shah Rukh head was laughing this time but the rest of his body was sticky and hot again, with the rolls of buttery fat jiggling and tingling to get away. The room was silent. The baby and his wife were both fast asleep. He couldn’t go back to sleep after that. He lay awake till the heavy darkness gave way to the bluish light of another night ending. Then he got up and went to the bathroom and got ready for office.
Anil reached office early. He went up the three flights of stairs. And then, without quite knowing why, he went down the stairs again and back to his scooter. He drove off without thinking where he was headed. It was the sort of thing Shah Rukh would have done. Anil felt light and floaty. Two hours later when his phone vibrated in his pocket he was sitting on the grass in front of India Gate, eating a strawberry ice cream. He took out his phone and saw that it was his boss calling.
Anil stared at his phone as if it was a time bomb that would go off the minute it stopped ringing. Surely his boss wasn’t going to sack him? Whatever else he was or wasn’t he was reasonably decent at his work and hardworking too. Anil waited for the phone to stop vibrating, let out the breath he had been holding and stood up to go. He got on to his scooter and drove to office. He had never done anything like this before, just driving off here and there for the heck of it, like a Bollywood hero. For a moment he had felt bold and reckless but who was he fooling? He needed to get back to that office and make sure he didn’t lose his job. Bold and reckless was for the fearless and the wealthy. He was neither.
Anil climbed those three flights of stairs for the second time that day. He didn’t care. The girls could laugh at him if they liked. He was the sole breadwinner in his family. He took a deep breath and put his index finger on the machine so it could pick his fingerprint. Towards his desk he would resolutely go, into the darkness, with the spotlight on his gross naked body. He would perch himself on his desk and while every fibre of his body would die to get away he would calmly open his computer and get to work. He had always liked excel sheets. The way they accommodated all kinds of figures without a fuss. The CFO could say what he felt like but he wouldn’t want Anil to leave. Anil was good at his work.
With that thought Anil felt lighter. How much time and energy he had wasted tormenting himself over nothing. Yes, nothing. He felt the weight lift from his mind. That was the weight he didn’t need. The hundred and ten kilos on his body he would live with. If Shah Rukh could get by without excel sheets, Anil could survive without pumping iron. He was not quite Shah Rukh and never would be. That was just fine with Anil and if it wasn’t enough for his boss, or for Savita, well, too bad, they would just have to learn to live with it.
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Himanjali Sankar is an editor and children’s writer. Her books, The Stupendous Timetelling Superdog and Talking of Muskaan, were shortlisted for The Crossword Award for Children’s Writing. Her first book for adults Mrs C Remembers is going to be out this summer.