The morning after

Jairaj Singh

What comes usually after an office party is a hangover. It’s purely scientific to say this because you would least expect to have one. After all, anyone in their right sense would want to be at their best at a congregation that easily likes to confuse the lightweights among the heavyweights in the environs of a dimly-lit watering hole.
However, drinking for journalists tends to be one cheerful late-evening exercise that occasionally brings about ambiguity, incoherence and mindless happiness to an otherwise world that’s filled with trite sentences, bogus reports and unfortunate complexities of human nature. It is among those stern faces, of pragmatic nature and bitter smiles, to who you raise your first drink to and accept, for a fair moment or so, that you share a common ground.
The morning after the office party you realize you’re late for work. In one of those bitter moments of a working professional’s life, you also grasp how life can quickly revert to being boring after a long night of serendipity, adventure and debauchery. All this while you lie in bed clutching your head in despair when all the reserved energies in you have been drained the night before focusing on the ceramic texture of pots that deserve a good scrub.
When you finally make it to work, your sobering thoughts and your aching head offers an unconditional compromise that all events of recent undoing must be resolved in order to resume work like an ordinary day.
Fortunately, the conversation between the receptionist and the guard isn’t as off-putting, as you might expect it to be, but mildly uplifting, as they stand next to the medicine box. They muse over the increasing requests of Disprin and hand you on when they look at you.
Inside, the same partly-milky, partly-watery coffee that your colleagues had so often fashionably raised objections to, today have sent out scouts of peons with trays of plastic cups to get their morning fix. They are lined in front the coffee-machine table, sniggering at the irony of how expensive alcohol too give hangovers.
You casually avoid the glares of those who sit on their respective places and look naturally cheerful, well-nourished and well-slept. Somewhere in those eyes you feel a sense of contempt and disapproval being sentenced upon you.
And you, in your little ways, scorn their attitude in your haggard gait as you walk towards your cubicle to meet those familiar faces who will not only piece all your memories of folly together but will also wager how the last evening unfolded. It is of that you precisely dread.
Meanwhile, somewhere inside of you, you feel your brains are squirming, which are sending help signals in the forms of terrible quakes and icy shivers down your spine. For a brief moment, there is even clarity, and you almost make that promise to never drink again.
You rearrange and clear your desk a little, sorting piles of press releases from event invitations, to pages of layout printouts to the occasional postcard to the editor. Somewhere in the distance, you see the head of your editor bobbling from one cubicle to another, towards your direction.
Now, while on any other day you would have casually waved to him, talked to him at length about the stories you planned to do, and then lightly added to the list the ones you hadn’t been able to do. Today you pray you successfully avoid him.
This premonition comes to you with some vivid images that are less colorful, and which are accompanied by resonating Bollywood beats from last night. Your unanimous decision of having turned to whisky after downing four vodkas straight, in the course of a few stray minutes, surfaces on your conscience and creates conflict.
So you counter this conflict, in your mind and say, what was there to regret? After all, you had only played a sport to everyone’s amusement and frolic when they pulled you on to the dance floor, while the drink in your hand danced in the glass.
You feel a noose of compromise tightening around the neck of your moral system. You feel bad and then a lamp in the shape of an imp lights inside of you. You start to remember the smiling faces of a group of girls in office, who you never had the nerve before to talk or even mildly remark about the weather, dancing with you.
You also remember spinning around them – the way you had always wanted to spin – when someone had entered the magical circle and tapped you on your shoulder. But you were too lost in an outrageous tragic dance move that the remnants of your drink splattered against that man’s favorite blue shirt.
Yes, that man, your editor. You sheepishly remember you had seemed apologetic at first but then on an impulsive frog-moment you rushed to a dark corner hoping he might not have seen you. How could your judgment be so impaired?
As you slip further back in your chair, with feeble thoughts and momentary flashes of sadness reflected on your face. Two colleagues, Priya and Sonia, of the features team, you wouldn’t want to meet today or too often, invite themselves to review with you the rating of this year’s office party with the one last year. They forget you’re a few months old.
As you sit there listening to them, you remember how excited they had been about the party. So much so, that they had finished their pages so early that they had an hour for themselves inside the women’s loo to lift their faces, change out of their day clothes and plan in detail how late they could make the night, before the party.
Two minutes into, what seems to be a conversation of three, you wake up to realize that they aren’t talking about you. In fact they are talking about all those things that had happened while someone was helping you reach the loo of the lounge bar, after you had puked near the sofas, where everyone had left their bags.
In slow hushed voices Priya and Sonia talk about Ms Mehta, the sly quiet one, who had capitalized the most the previous evening. Allegedly she had made some extreme and suggestive hints, as she had helped the editor clean his shirt, by asking him if he went to the gym. Your editor, according to their sources, even sanctioned her leave.
By which time, Mr Sachdev and Gaurav, your local city correspondents, grinning like hyenas, pull their respective chairs to this small circle of your conversation.
‘I think she’s sleeping with him,’ chips in Mr Sachdev, speaking the unthinkable, taking a sip from the coffee.
Parul in order to change conversation points out that the dress Preeti Sharma, the fashion reporter, was wearing last evening was more revealing than necessary. To which Sonia adds quietly, ‘There’s more to her than meet’s the eye. She was only an intern a month ago.’
Then the conversation swiftly drifts to the music last night and how trashy the DJ Donny was but there is nothing like dancing to old Bollywood numbers. But the conversation is cut short by Gaurav who confesses that he saw Mrs Goyal from the desk leave with Mr Nanda from the sports section. It seems highly suspicious because Mrs Goyal lives in Rohini and Mr Nanda drives a white Maruti car to Patparganj.
‘They definitely have something going on,’ adds Mr Sachdev insightfully again. You look up again to see your editor laughing at his own jokes a few cubicles away. Meanwhile the mood of the conversation lifts and falls like waves in the sea, while your head feels as though it’s stuck in sand.
You bitterly realize how valid you felt your points were about the fate of journalism, while you chased beers with the editor-in-chief.
Meanwhile, Sonia turns to Mr Sachdev and asks him point blank, ‘You too were having a bloody good time Sanjay. You too were seen dancing close to that bubbly education reporter Priya?’ To which he gushes and smiles, but shakes his head to say no. ‘I am old, I have done my years in disco bars.’
Then you hear the hollow voice you the fear the most. It’s your editor. ‘Don’t you have any work today?’ he shouts well naturedly, while settling his eyes only at you. While everyone scatters around or turns to face the computers, he walks right up to you.
‘So, how are you feeling today?’ he asks, in a way a bully would ask after punching you in the stomach. You nod, smile and then end up not caring. Make plans in your head to join a magazine and never work in a newspaper office again.
‘I saw you had a hell of a time last evening.’ You are dead sure this is a trap. ‘You ruined my favorite shirt you know.’ You think you know he’s going to ask you to pay for it. ‘But that’s all right,’ he says, with a crooked smile. ‘I had actually come over to tell you that your internship ends next week, but if you like you can stick around.’ He then turns to walk to his office but stops.
‘You guys really don’t know how to drink and have a good time. Nor do any of these guys,’ he points his hand around. Somewhere deep inside of you a hundred men wish to die.