short story by Ravikumar Pillai
Ganesh checked in to the five-star hotel in Grosvenor Place, Central London on a Sunday evening. It was one of his routine stopovers on his way to Dublin. He loved spending a day in London, to take a break from his hectic inter-city transits and serial meetings. Driving a collection of diverse young talent, with a fair sprinkling of hyper-creative millennials, on innovative product development was quite taxing for someone on the wrong side of midlife blues.
The company was setting up its latest Global Development Centre at the Silicon Docks, the hotspot technology hub in the Irish capital. He had always taken professional challenges head-on and earned a name as the company's key troubleshooter and man of all seasons. His selection to lead the European foray, a strategic push for the company beyond the Brexit disruptions, was a recognition and a challenge. He brushed aside the snipes of jealous peers about his being too chummy with the big bosses at the corner office.
He had been making frequent trips to Dublin for the past months and the schedule would only get tighter, he knew. Ganesh felt quite at home in the hotel.
With his conservative upbringing, he had come to believe that if he halted at the Peninsula Hotel, on a business trip, the outcome of his mission was assured to be positive. A free-hanging belief, quite irrational at that! Indians are wired for blind irrationalities which many imagine, or even wish, to be prognostic.
He took a hot shower, made a strong coffee for himself and sank onto the plush, leather sofa. On the other side of the wall-to-wall glass window, the dimming daylight and the hastening veneer of mist painted the city skyline in a silhouette hue. Sipping the coffee, he walked across to the mirror; he wondered how far removed he was from the handsome, lean youngster he was when his career started nearly two decades ago. His receding forehead, the thick glasses he wore, the salt and pepper hair and a rather too obvious bulge at the middle made him out to be yet another pedantic professional, with neither the will nor the discipline to be fit and smart.
It was half past eight, time to go to the bar and savour his favourite single malt. The bar had a classic look with a carved mahogany bar table, conventional chairs and a stock of top-end liquor. He filled his glass and moved to a scantly lit corner. A beautiful, slim, tall girl, seemingly from the Mediterranean coast, with blonde hair, served him hot steak and a plate of cashew nuts. He smiled at her and thanked her. He asked her in a near-whispering tone, “Hi, What's your name? Where are you from?”
She replied, “Hi, How do you do? I am Sonia and I am from Croatia.
The next day morning, Ganesh got up leisurely. He had booked for the outbound flight to Dublin on Wednesday morning. He had two full days to chill out!
The knock was gentle. He opened the door. “Housekeeping, Sir. Shall I change the liveries and make the bed for you?”
Ganesh was surprised to find Sonia, the girl who served him at the bar the previous night. She too recognized him and smiled. “I am doing my extended shift and helping out in housekeeping. Extra money for my studies!”
As she made the bed, Ganesh sat on the window-side chair and aimlessly looked at the refreshed reenergized skyline. It has shed the melancholic dusky tint and was rearing to go!
“After my duty time, I get free by 10 in the morning. Do you need someone to escort you around in your sightseeing, in case you are here for leisure?
Ganesh thought that she was trying a googly to gain some extra bucks by going around with a ‘safe zone’ tourist with greying hair and pompous refinement for a few hours. He quickly concluded that he did not mind it. In an anonymous setting, accompanied by a young beauty, doing a bit of shopping, hopping around, possibly downing a few pegs and savouring a sumptuous supper seemed a tempting detour from his charted-out itinerary which, anyway, was too routine and predictable. So, he was out in Piccadilly, weaving past Soho and its by-lanes with a petite companion, hand in hand. A ‘fantasy’ feeling that he could never afford to have in his workplace or hometown!
By the evening, the girl had recounted her journey through the challenges and poverty encountered, surviving a hawkish stepfather’s lustrous looks and impromptu advances and landing up in London, ostensibly as a Language School student but essentially to explore and find her moorings in the city of dreams and hopes. She was a good student and had passed out her school graduation creditably. She told him how desperate she was to do a proper college program in accounting. That was why she was gathering each penny she could by stretching and straining herself, overworking on multiple workplaces and shifts while pursuing her language course.
She took the next day off from work and spent it with Ganesh, going around and providing tantalising proximity to him. Post dinner, as he kissed her goodbye, they had already exchanged contacts and he had all but promised to fund her for the accounting degree.
Over the next few years, Ganesh’s frequency and enthusiasm to travel to Dublin via London grew consistently. So did the affection, concern and financial support he bestowed on Sonia. The girl went the extra mile to provide visible intimacy to Ganesh, sometimes accompanying him on brief sojourns to beaches and resorts around.
At odd moments of introspection, alone, in remote locales, in the dead of the night, Ganesh used to wonder if he was like the Moon. Didn’t he reveal only his soft, curated face and behaviours to the outside whereas the darker, mean and base side of his self was hidden from the larger view, just the same way the Moon’s cliched face, cool, serene and modest, was imprinted in our psyche?
Five years have passed since Ganesh and Sonia met on that Sunday night at the dim-lit London bar for the first time. He felt fulfilled and overwhelmed with emotions as Sonia called in last week to say that she had passed out from the college accounting program and that she landed placement as an intern at a large retail company. She wanted him to attend her graduation ceremony if he could.
Ganesh saw the coincidence as providential. He had to fly down to Dublin for the opening of their new Development Centre next week too! He felt like having made a dual accomplishment – making an institution and making an individual!
The schedules worked out in tandem and Ganesh was on his way to the University Hall for Sonia’s graduation. She looked like an angel in the ceremonial dark gown as she proudly displayed her Degree Certificate and posed for the photo moment of her life. She hugged Ganesh and said, “A Big Thank You for everything”. He kissed on her forehead.
“Let us have our graduation dinner. Today, it is on me,” she said.
As they sat across at the University’s Pub and Dinner spot, she blushed with ecstasy, “Today is very special for me. I want to introduce my fiancé to you”.
She gestured and a handsome young man with overflowing locks fluttering over his ear lobes, with Christ-like calm and grace came over with a spontaneous smile.
“Here’s William, the man in my life”, she said with the confidence of a university skipper displaying the hard-won trophy.
“William, this is Ganesh, my friend, philosopher and mentor”, she said with a meaningful smile, “My Sugar Daddy”
As Ganesh rode the cab through the midnight embers of another London Day, he patted himself for lending his shoulders to Sonia in the pursuit of her dream. In the eerie silence, alone in the car, unmindful of the driver, who might have been lost in his own trail of missed out or unfulfilled stories, he took on his conscience for a discreet, direct and intensely personal self-talk. “Do you think Sonia tricked you into spending your resources and time to realise her selfish goals?”
“Now, that is called smartness”, replied his sensible self to his emotional half, “Life is like that. No place for regrets or rancour”!
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