Chapter 2 - My name is Paasha

Chapter 2

My name is Paasha

The next day I came to office a bit later as the car that came to pick me up for work took an exceptionally long route through fields and cities and towns and eventually it managed to get us to office. I used to then live in a neighborhood called Karolbagh which was around the central business district of New Delhi more famously known as CP or Connaught Place. Now Karolbagh was a notorious place for shopping and some great bargains every other day. But I hated crowded places so I very seldom visited it. There’s a road here known as Ajmal Khan road and is believed to be a part of the larger shopping area which dates back to the 10th or the 11th century when the Mughals were here and was then too the shopping place for the citizens of the state of Delhi, so you’ll find a heady mix of modern and traditional shopping fares and throngs of people everyday seem to be shopping. Where do they come from, how much do they shop and where do they take them all is quite a mystery. You’ll find thousands and thousands of people everyday shopping and by evening you wouldn’t have space to even park your foot but people seem to be moving and shopping. Amazing!

Anyway; the ride took us close to 3 hours to get there and by the time we reached office we were tired, nauseated and ready to head back home if we’d got a chance. We traveled some 80 – 90 kilometers (about 50 – 55 in miles) to get to office and that distance seemed forever. The reason for this detour was for the fact that they were building a new highway on the National Highway 8 or more commonly known as NH8 in preparation for the commonwealth games and in accordance with the master plan set out for the ever growing city put forward for 2021 by the government of Delhi. The idea was initiated to connect the 4 major metropolitans with a multi-lane highway so that it makes commuting between them easy. Now since they didn’t have another built we had to use the same one they were building and you’d have traffic snarls everyday because they were doing it on a BOT or Build Operate and Transfer model. Anyway, with that underway our life was put into hell right from the day they started building that highway. I was lucky as I’d travel god knows where to get to office everyday and everyday seemed like a new route I was taking. Sometimes I complained but most of the times I just enjoyed the ride either sleeping or interested in the new route.

I got out of the car and pulled myself up to get upstairs and start another day of pushing those filthy promotions to whiteys who would not buzz and were neither kind to even take something even if they didn’t need it – now that was wishful thinking. I was lucky here for I never had to wish so much that they’d take it as I had my skills and language in place for I was one of them that whiteys left behind when they repatriated when India negotiated independence from the British in 1947. My kind of people are know as Anglo Indians or anglicized Indians or more offensively known among the then British domiciled population in India as WOGs (Westernized Oriental Gentleman). It was a term coined to originally style people who developed British cultural influences but later with time as these WOGs got into trouble with the law of land legally or illegally they weren’t much liked by the very people who molded them. Anyway, what once looked like a bad hangover of cultural disorientation now seemed to work in good stead for me.

I come from a place in India known as Bihar and I tell you it isn’t anything like the wild Wild West people know about. It’s twice worse and you could easily coin a term for it as the wild wild east. Lawlessness is a way of life here, and underdevelopment is the key performance indicator of this place. Poverty as its lowest best and illiteracy even lower to keep up with its cult status of being the worst place in India and by the state of things could well be the worst place on earth. But me and my folks we love it and call it home. I don’t feel safe anywhere and don’t feel more warm anywhere than when I am back home in the wild wild east. There is something about this place that drew my forefathers here and when the all the British were leaving they just gave in their British passports and stayed right where they’d stayed for the last 100 years or so from the day they first put foot on the land of Bihar. We all spoke English and we all observed very English traditions and customs. My mother was the only domiciled English woman who married outside the community to a Roman Catholic Bihari Gentleman who was himself a product of two communities brought together by the mercy of the church.

We had in total close to a 200 folks (the count from about when I started getting to know things) from about 15 families and they were all dispersed within 100 square kilometers. We mostly had people from Scotland and Ireland and few from England; most of them came to India to do business and were coaxed into a better life than the terrible one they were living there as they weren’t educated and were promised land and wealth. Well they got both and they also got a wonderful life. They liked it so much that most didn’t go back. My grandparents and their folks were primarily Scottish but got mixed with the Irish and the English along the way as there’d be few to choose to get married to and had to settle for what was there apart from a few who went back to England and Scotland and convinced the beautiful ladies there on India.

So with such a legacy and heritage it would have been difficult not to score on those cross sale items and if I couldn’t do it; it would further have been a shameful thing to have grown in the language and style and not being able to make them whiteys look like donkeys would have been a failure on my part and something that I wouldn’t have been able to digest. Garland and Josh too was my people and were from Shillong (a region in Megahalaya) and Ranchi (now the capital of a separate state known as Jharkhand but which was previously a part of the larger state of Bihar) respectively. Not that we hated them whiteys and duped them with the promotions we sold them everyday but just that we had to do it and we had to do it for many reasons.

Well we were now into our calling day and as usual we three folks got settled into our chairs and fixed the calling gear on and got started with our ritual. They were like thunder storm that day; it just kept coming and coming and we had no clue if it’d ever stop. God I tell you; we would have collapsed if we’d not sneaked out for a couple of minutes to grab a couple of energy bars. What a relief after those bars. We got our strength back and started pushing those calls again. Garland and Josh got some sales in all that confusion and actually raked up quite a bit. I was trying hard for I didn’t expect a bad day out of so many calls. Well, as I was getting tired of them whiteys I managed to sneak a couple of high value cross sales back to back and that got my day wagging again.

The calls finally relented and we got a chance to breathe and as I turned there she was right in front of me again waiting with her buddy jack to hook up with my phone set so that she could listen into my calls.

“Hi, my name is Paasha.”

Wow I thought to myself; that is such a wonderful name. Paasha! I must said it many times over mentally till I recollected from my daze and I said –

“Hello, my name is David, can I help you?”

And she said I certainly should; for she was waiting for me to take a breather so that I could allow her to buddy with me to listen into calls.

Wow – that was wonderful and my day was made and complete. I had the bomb of the floor close to my skin; I could almost feel her breathe into me!