Читать книгу Everything Happens for a Reason - Kavita Daswani - Страница 11

Those words wafted around in my head as I sat in my car in front of a gleaming chrome and steel building in Beverly Hills, about to go into my fifth job interview in ten days. The sun was glinting off the mirrored surface of the building with such brightness that the number on the top of the entrance was momentarily hidden, so I couldn’t be sure I was even in the right place. It looked, well, too nice. I had so far been turned down for salesgirls positions in three stores – the interviewers had each time surveyed my drab, shapeless Indian outfit and told me the position had already been filled. And the owner of the local 7–Eleven rejected my application because I had ‘no experience’, even though I reminded him that I had quite a way with a broom, and was pretty sure I could master the cash register in no time.

Apparently, in this country, having no job before the age of twenty-four isn’t the soundest recommendation, and the current flat economy didn’t help. Had I been in India, the only reason I would be out seeking work was because a search for a husband had, for whatever reason, been deferred. There, to be twenty-four and gainfully unemployed was a good thing.

I checked my watch. It was exactly nine o’clock. I was on time, and, as sophisticated as this place looked, it was the correct address. I took a deep breath, said the prayer invoking Laxmi, the Goddess of Prosperity, that I always said before one of these, and went in. Hopefully, today, She would listen to me.

‘Um, hello, I’m here to interview for the receptionist position,’ I said to the security guard in the cool marble foyer, pulling out the newspaper ad. He made a call, and then gave me a ‘Visitor’ tag, which I plastered on my tunic top. In the elevator, I checked myself in the mirror, smoothed down my waist-length hair, wiped off a bit of lip-gloss that had somehow landed on my chin, and hiked up my drawstring trousers so they no longer puddled around my ankles. The red powder that I wore in my hair parting to signify my status as a newlywed wife was still bright and intact. It always drew stares, and many times gasps of concern from strangers who thought that perhaps my scalp was bleeding. In the concentrated light of the elevator, it looked almost sinister. The pendant of the Hindu goddess Durga around my neck shone under the spotlights. The small heels of my slightly scuffed beige shoes added a bit of height to my frame, and I noticed that I still hadn’t regained the weight I’d lost since my wedding, which explained why my trousers – drawstring notwithstanding – couldn’t stay up.

When I got out, I saw the words Hollywood Insider scrawled in brilliant blue across a set of double glass doors leading to an office. Inside, two girls were sitting on a dark orange sofa in the reception area and on a corner table was a stack of job-application forms. I picked one up and started to fill it out. I had the contents of these almost memorized by now.

The girls, obviously friends, were fashionably dressed and lively, chatting to one another with confidence.

‘I’m sure one of us will slam-dunk this,’ said the first girl. ‘I have to admit, things are really looking up for me since I started on the Zoloft.’

‘Yeah,’ said the other one, chewing gum. ‘Can you imagine who we could meet? You know, Colin Farrell could come in through those doors any second.’ At that, they both giggled and pretended to swoon, while my only thought was: Colin who?

Sitting behind the reception desk was a woman who looked at least fifteen months pregnant, trying to get comfortable in her chair. I glanced around at the smooth, shiny marble floors, the glass-enclosed offices on either side of me, the huge framed magazine covers featuring famous people that lined the walls. The receptionist, who introduced herself as Dara, asked to speak to each of the other girls first, individually. They conversed quietly while I scribbled my details down on the form. Name: Priya Sohni. Age: 24. Languages: English, Hindi, Conversational French. I left blank the space next to ‘Experience’.

Before I knew it, it was my turn.

‘Hi,’ Dara said, barely able to move. ‘So, as you’ve probably guessed this is for my position, as I’ve got more pressing things to do,’ she said, pointing to her large, bulbous stomach. ‘I’ll chat with you first, and then send you off to human resources for a second interview. OK? Right, let’s have a look,’ she continued, scanning down my form.

‘You have all your papers? Legal?’ she asked, when she read that my place of birth was India.

‘Yes, miss, absolutely,’ I replied, nervously winding a handkerchief in and out of my fingers.

‘I love your accent,’ she said smiling. ‘Sounds real nice. So, are you familiar with computers?’ she asked, casting a curious glance towards the slim red streak down my hair parting.

‘I’m proficient with word processing,’ I said.

‘Good English, huh?’

‘Bachelor’s in literature.’

‘When do you think you can you start?’

‘Um, right away, if you would like,’ I replied hopefully.

‘That’s good to hear,’ she said, grimacing and looking down. ‘I think my water just broke.’

Five minutes later, as Dara called her husband to come to fetch her, yelling out to me, ‘Good luck with the rest of the interview!’, I was carted along to the head of human resources, an efficient-looking woman named Hilda. She had short black hair, was dressed in a business suit that seemed a bit heavy for this climate, and asked me to take a seat in her office. I tried not to get my hopes up, but this was the furthest I had ever been.

‘You know what the job is, yes?’ she asked. ‘We’re a celebrity magazine. There’s lots of answering of phones, taking deliveries, greeting visitors.’ As I nodded, she looked at my application from again.

‘It says here you’re from India. What brought you to America?’

‘Marriage. My husband emigrated from India many years ago with his family,’ I replied.

She looked up, and put down her pen.

‘Was it, an, um, what-do-you-call-them, arranged marriage?’ she asked, suddenly interested. ‘And a joint family? Like on the Discovery channel? Do you all live together?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact we do,’ I said, my accent suddenly sounding thick and clumsy in this light-filled room with the modern art on its walls. ‘It’s quite traditional, how it all happened.’ I was conscious of my English, remembering Mrs Pereira from school, who would thwack my palm with a chipped wooden ruler if I slurred words together or dropped letters from their place. Even if I was living in America now, there would never be any ‘gonna’ or ‘wanna’ or ‘gotta’.

‘Yeah, I read something in Marie-Claire about brides moving in with their in-laws,’ Hilda continued. ‘Hafta say, don’t know how you folks do it. It’s hard enough living with just my husband, forget his parents.

‘I think you’ve forgotten to fill this in,’ she then said, suddenly changing the subject and pointing to the ‘Experience’ section. My heart sank. This was the part where I was always shown the door.

‘I didn’t forget,’ I said quietly. ‘I have not had a job before. This would be my first.’

Hilda looked stunned.

‘Not even while you were in college? Not even part time or summers? Well, that’s disappointing because the ad did say we needed someone with experience. I’m sorry, I know you came all the way in, but –’

‘Please, Miss Hilda,’ I stammered, trying not to cry, I couldn’t take another rejection, another day of going home empty-handed, and then having to start the search all over again. Already, my in-laws were complaining about how much petrol I was wasting on what they called ‘coming up and down’, as if it were my fault that nobody wanted to hire me.

‘I know I can do the job,’ I pleaded to Hilda. ‘I learn very quickly and am willing to work hard. Please, just give me a chance.’

Hilda leaned back in her chair. ‘You don’t want to become an actress, do you?’ she asked, narrowing her eyes.

‘Oh my, no!’ I replied, surprised at the question.

‘Then that’s about the only thing you have going for you. Everybody else who comes in here thinks that this will be their first step into the industry, as if they’ll be discovered by some super-agent as they’re sitting behind reception. Like the two girls who were in here before you. I knew they weren’t serious. It’s infuriating. We fill the position so often that it’s become a joke. Dara is the only one we’ve had that had a legitimate reason for leaving,’ Hilda said, shaking her head.

She looked me up and down, clearly not enamoured of my outfit and puzzled by what to her must have looked like a razor slit above my cranium. And I knew when I left the house that the waist pouch was a bad idea.

‘You’re very nice-looking, but you might want to invest in a few new clothes,’ she said. ‘You’re the first person anyone sees when they walk through those doors.’

I nodded eagerly, but was wondering how I was going to get around that one. My in-laws frowned on what they called ‘very bad and sexy American-style clothes for cheap girls’ – which to them was anything but a baggy sweat-suit. If it were up to them, I would be cruising through Los Angeles in a burkha.

‘You’re lucky that we need someone to start immediately, and that I can’t be bothered to interview any more this morning. So I hope I don’t regret this, but I’m going to give you a shot,’ she said. ‘Welcome to the Hollywood Insider.’

Within minutes, I was signing contracts and having my social security card photocopied and being shown around a glossy set of offices by a man called Lou, Hilda’s assistant.

‘This is where the Hollywood Insider is put together. That’s just one division of the company, the one you’ll be involved with. The rest of the building is ours as well,’ Lou said, as if he’d recited the same speech a million times before.

I couldn’t help hearing snippets of conversation coming through the glass-enclosed booths, the tops of the cluttered desks filled with flat-screen computers, brightly coloured in-trays, stacks of pens and mobile phones charging. Everywhere there were photographs of movie stars – a big black-and-white shot of Jackie Chan lay on the floor, a signed picture of Julia Roberts was pinned to a corkboard. People were chatting on their phones, scribbling notes, yelling over their desks things like, ‘Harrison Ford’s guy is on line two.’ I was in the same room as people who knew people who knew Harrison Ford, who, like Brad Pitt, was famous even in India.

From what I’d seen in the movies, I had thought I would be sitting in front of a large wall repeating ‘Hold, please’ every five seconds, switching little wires in and out of sockets. Isn’t that what a receptionist did?

Instead, I was installed behind a large circular desk that had a counter above it, making me feel even smaller and more hidden. Jerry, a young man from the IT department, had come along to ask me if I had any questions about how the phone system worked.

‘Everyone here has direct lines, so most of their calls come through on those,’ he instructed. ‘But sometimes people call the main line – that’s you – and you’ll need to direct them. So here’s a list of everyone’s names, what their job titles are, and their extensions. And this row of buttons – that’s for you if you need to buzz anyone in-house, like my department, or accounting, or security. Especially security,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you think you got that?’

As soon as Jerry had gone I called Sanjay to tell him that I had got the job, was starting right away, and wouldn’t be home until evening.

‘Congrats, honey!’ he said. He had started calling me ‘honey’ recently, leading me to believe that he had been watching too much Days of Our Lives on the television in his office. ‘I’ve been a bit worried, didn’t hear from you all morning,’ he said. ‘I left a couple of messages on your mobile. As long as everything is OK …’

‘Yes, fine. Better go now,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t want them to think I’m not doing anything on my first day. I’ll speak to you later, hah?’

Hollywood Insider, as I read from a company brochure I found in my desk, was a newcomer to the world of entertainment publishing. Its purpose was to ‘provide accurate, entertaining, informative and illuminating news and features on movie stars, their films, and the world they inhabit’. The parent company, Galaxy Holdings, also published a tabloid, called Weekly Buzz, which was located two floors down. Stardom, the cable television channel Galaxy owned, was an even more recent arrival on the scene.

In between taking and rerouteing calls, I leafed through a few recent issues of the magazine. There were long interviews with major movie stars, short items about production deals gone sour and a page devoted to who was wearing what at last week’s premieres. Everyone around me was beautiful and busy, and I gazed at them from behind my desk, where I was barely visible unless I stood up. They were the kind of people that my father, in his infinite cleverness, would describe as ‘the impression-making sort’.

In the middle of the morning, a smiling redhead came up to me with a trolley.

‘Hi, I’m Deanna from the mail room,’ she said. ‘You’re new here, right? Every few weeks, there seems like there’s someone new here. Not that it’s a bad job – in fact I think it’s a great job, but people don’t seem to stick around that long. What’s your name?’ she asked, finally stopping for breath.

‘Priya,’ I said, standing up. ‘Very nice to meet you.’

‘Anything to send out?’ she asked, scanning the top of the counter above my desk. ‘I’ll be coming by a few times a day, but this is the first call.’

‘Um, nothing yet. Is there anything else I should know?’ I asked.

‘Well, let’s see. For the most part, everyone is supernice. But,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘there’s a couple of people down there,’ and she motioned with her thumb to the corridor where all the writers sat, ‘that can be really mean. Just, what’s that word, terrestrial?’

‘I think you mean territorial,’ I said.

‘Yeah, that, whatever,’ she continued, flicking my words away with her hand. ‘Some of them down there get really snippety about newcomers, think that everyone is after their jobs. I mean, so paranoid!’ she said, rolling her eyes, and fingering one of the six silver rings that lined her left ear.

‘So where you from, anyway?’ she asked, cupping her chin in her hand and leaning against the counter on an elbow. ‘You got a real unusual accent. What is it, like, Toledo?’

‘Um, India, actually,’ I said. ‘Not Toledo. Delhi.

‘Are we allowed to be talking like this?’ I asked, looking around nervously. ‘I don’t want to get caught.’

Deanna looked at me disbelievingly and giggled.

‘Where do you think you are – boarding school? It’s just an office, for God’s sake. Sure we’re allowed to talk. It’s not like we’re in some lock-up, although I guess sometimes it might feel that way!’

Lou came by, and I shuffled some papers, lowered my eyes, and said goodbye to Deanna, who shook her head, rolled her eyes and walked away.

‘You can take an hour off for lunch, between one and two,’ Lou said. ‘Just don’t forget to turn the system to voicemail, and check any messages when you get back.’

I was suddenly hungry – I hadn’t had any breakfast this morning, convinced I’d be back home in no time – so at exactly one, I made my way back down in the lift, which stopped on each floor until it was filled. I kept my eyes lowered as I heard these people in their relaxed, slurry accents talking about what had happened this morning or debating between Chinese and a sandwich. I was the last to emerge when we reached the lobby, stepped out through the big glass doors, and wasn’t sure where to go next. Everyone else had gone off in pairs and groups, leaving me standing there alone. The sun was beating down strong and hard, causing me to squint to find my bearings. Cars whizzed back and forth as I stood in the parking lot, looking out across the wide, busy boulevard. There were dozens of places to eat, and I just had to choose somewhere to go. In a way, it felt lovely to be this free; that the next hour was mine to do with exactly as I wanted, instead of having to cut short my shower, which I often had to do at home, because the aubergine might be burning.

I opened my wallet and found that I still had the twenty dollars that was left over from last week’s housekeeping money, which would buy me just about anything, food-wise. A bright yellow awning down the block beckoned me, and I found that it was a little Italian café. I went in, said the radical words ‘for one’, and was escorted to a small table against a wall. A slim novel was tucked into my handbag – one of my sisters had taught me never to leave home without one – and I ordered a dish of vegetable pasta and some water. I was the only person in the restaurant dining alone, and while I recognized some of the other people there from the office, I know that they didn’t recognize me. I kept my eyes on my book the whole time, as if raising them and looking around would mean that I was opening myself up to the humiliation, surely, that women feel eating by themselves. And when these people around me laughed, as they did often while in conversation, I was certain that they were laughing at me.

As awkward as I felt, however, this was so much better than standing in the kitchen with my mother-in-law, grinding cumin seeds.

Even if I would still have to do that later.