My Boss was very cross. Cross with me for
no reason at all. It was my first job – a sub-editor with a daily. Straight out
of college and still under the protection of parents, whose evening tea would
wait for me to return home from work. I worked the afternoon shift 12 to 5 for
the inside page – National –relatively less significant.
If you didn’t know, a
newspaper office is like a large classroom – only more noisy and disorderly. We
sat on both sides of large tables – groups together, editing what the various
news agencies sent. Every once in a bit, the Boss would point a finger at one
of us and say, ‘You go’ and obediently, mid-sentence, making then-than, it’s-
it is, the pointed-at would get up and go into the Printer Room to gather the spool of paper the machine was
constantly dispensing – quite like a toilet
paper roll running on the floor. Each news item was then torn and randomly
handed to us by the Boss. I got the boringest, the least important, the ones that
were fillers and at the end of the day would have to be discarded or I would
have to go around to snooty men on Business or Sports desks and ask if they had
any use of it – like selling news was my job too. I didn’t mind.
We sat and ‘subbed’ – copy edited with
pencil – each news item, then gave it a headline and presented it to the Boss.
The Boss looked at our work disdainfully, made some random corrections wearing
an annoyed expression, letting off some sighs and uffs. I didn’t mind.
The Boss made me sit across the table from
the rest, facing the large sunlit windows that stung my eyes. I didn’t mind.
On the Boss’ particularly bad days, at five
when I would be about to leave, I would be told, ‘You!’ ‘Stay back and get the
pasting done. No mistakes!’ I stayed behind waiting for the paan-chewing Paster
uncle to make an appearance. Slowly, like the chewing of his paan, he pasted
headline after headline, news items under headlines. That done, one had to
accompany Paster Uncle to the Chief Editor for approval. It would be past tea
and close to dinner time when I reached home. I didn’t mind.
I didn’t mind nothing because I was doing
what I wanted to; Papa looked at the paper each morning and his face beamed
with pride when I pointed out the headlines I had written; and the Chief Editor
encouraged me to write short pieces, by-line and all, and soon I had a column.
I did not mind anything because one day he had called me inside his cabin and
in front of his visitors, said, ‘Your piece on Coleridge was brilliant!’
Did I tell you my Boss was a woman? As
women bosses go, women have a tough time dealing with them. Kind of teenage
romances these are – dealing with quicksilver, irrational moods, unfounded
jealousy that is not professional alone.
The Boss became cross-er when the Chief
Editor’s praise wafted out of his cabin, when he started to walk up to thump me
on the back right at our National table that sat my Boss, a bearded, kurta-ed
young man who had lost his fingers in an accident in the press and was sent to
the news desk, some floating people like the whimsical, college girl who came
for five days a month including the payday and poor me who sat wiping her
sunshine tears all day.
Papa said I needed to give her more
respect. Call her ‘ma’am’, he was categorical.
Unwillingly, I ‘ma’am-ed’ her and we became
close in a problem-sharing way. The Boss had married an already married man and
was facing hell from his family and the man, her husband lived off her earnings.
I, poor little lapin, growing up secure in a close-knit family, knowing nothing
of the wild, bad ways of the world, asked my Boss, dear lady, to go back to her
home in Bombay to be with her parents and siblings, the protectors from all
things evil. That is when I heard the most heartbreaking thing ever. My Boss,
the cross, ignoring-me lady, said with more disdain than she had for me, ‘Do
you think the exploitation there is less?’
*Picture from the Internet.
