The bricks had been painted over. In my time they were the rust-red brick goes when it has stood a long time; now they wore a flat municipal blue, the shade chosen by people who were not born when I first walked through that gate. Two floors had grown above the third. The plots on either side had been folded into the same address, the way a city quietly eats its own edges. Someone had told me once — a newspaper, a forwarded clipping, I no longer recall — that the new name, TSD, stood for Three Sixty Degrees. A full circle. I ought to have read the warning in it.
I had asked for the midnight slot on purpose. The reunion people thought it strange; the others wanted the buffet, the group photograph, the lanyard with their old designation printed under their name. I wanted the building the way it used to be at the dead centre of a Saturday night — emptied of everyone but the few of us foolish enough to stay. I told the committee that I remember best when no one is watching me remember. They laughed and gave me a visitor’s card on a blue ribbon. The watchman walked me to the lift, and left me there, as instructed, alone.
I swiped myself onto the work floor and the years came off me like a coat. The carpet was new, the monitors thin as wafers, the cabins rearranged into some open, friendly grid the brochures no doubt called collaborative. None of it mattered. I could still feel the older shape of the place beneath the renovation, the way you feel the original bone under a healed fracture. I had been a fresher here. I had been young here, and quick, and unkind.
Twenty-five years old, five years on this floor, and most of what I am was poured into me right here — more than any school, more than any college. And one memory, the one I had come at midnight to stand inside, was already climbing the stairs to meet me.
It was during my notice period. I had handed in my resignation and was carrying that lightness of a man with one foot already out of the door. On Saturday nights the company paid us overtime by the hour, and so the floor stayed lit past midnight, though most people slipped away by one. A rumour helped them leave that the ladies’ washroom in the basement was haunted. I did not start the rumour. I only watered it.
Shruti Sinha had a weak heart for such stories and a strong appetite for the overtime, and the two warred in her every Saturday. She stayed till four, sometimes alone on the whole floor, because the money was real and because staying late made the management think of her as sincere. I thought of her as entertainment.
That night I had stayed home, my shift forgiven during the notice period, and I learned by a phone call that she was upstairs by herself. I dialled her extension. I was good at voices then — I could do the wet, theatrical groan of those old Saturday-night horror films.
“Shruti,” I said.
“Yes? Who is this?”
“Don’t you know me.” I let the line breathe. “I have waited for you two hundred and fifty-six years, in the basement of this building. And tonight, at last, you have come.”
“Is this a joke?”
“Don’t wound me by calling it a joke, Jaan.”
She slammed the receiver down. I dialled again; no answer. So, I let three-zero-nine go and tried three-one-zero. She picked up, breathing hard. I told her we were made for each other, that she had been reborn, but I had only waited. She begged me to say my name. I would not. She hung up.
Then I did the patient, clerical thing. I worked through the extensions one after another — three-one-one, three-one-two, three-one-three — a courtship conducted through a switchboard, each ring a small nail. By the time I tired of it she had convinced herself there were footsteps below. On Monday she told me, white-faced, that she had seen someone step out of the ladies’ washroom and had nearly fainted. I confessed at once. The floor laughed. She laughed too, eventually — the way you laugh when the joke has been paid for out of your own sleep.
I had not thought about it in years. Standing there, I discovered memory had.
The phone on the nearest desk rang.
I picked it up out of an old reflex. “Yes?”
“Sir, security here. Please come down to facilities — we have the photographs from the TSD launch, you may like to see the old faces.”
“I’ll come,” I said, and set the receiver down, and turned to find the door.
The phone rang again.
I lifted it. Nobody. I said hello into the silence two or three times and replaced it, and it was only then, straightening, that I noticed every monitor on the floor wore the same screen. White letters on black, patient as a verdict.
What you do comes back to you.
I told myself it was a poster, a wellness slogan, the sort of thing companies hang now where they used to hang clocks. I went to the door and pressed my card to the reader, and the door did not open. I tried again. The card clung to the panel as if the glass had grown fond of it. I worked it loose with a fingernail, and the desk phone rang a third time.
“The card,” I said before the line could speak, “the card is stuck, I can’t —”
“We’ll send someone, sir.” A woman’s voice, level and kind.
I knew it. Not the words — the voice. I had dialled it through a switchboard a lifetime ago.
“Who is this?” I spoke.
The line was already dead.
The door opened from the other side. A guard stood there, young, smiling, ordinary as bread. The relief that went through me was almost shameful.
“Sorry, sir. You can go down now. Mr. Awasthi is waiting in facilities.”
I thanked him and started for the stairs.
“Are you also afraid of the washrooms, sir?”
I stopped on the second step. “What did you say?”
He looked at me without expression. “I didn’t say anything, sir.”
I did not argue. I went down.
The basement had been remodelled like the rest, but the chill in it was the same chill, the underground cools no renovation reaches. I passed the row of ATMs, the cafeteria with its chairs stacked for the night, the training rooms behind their dark glass. Outside the washrooms I stopped, because my face in the corridor’s reflection looked older than I was prepared for, and I went in and ran the cold tap and washed it and came out a little steadier.
“Excuse me.”
She had come out of the ladies’ washroom across the corridor. An old woman, spectacles on a fine chain, a stillness about her that age sometimes gives and sometimes only lends.
“Are you Azam?”
“You are —” Her face arrived in me slowly, the way a word arrives once you have stopped reaching for it. “I know you.”
“You’re guessing right, you idiot.” A smile cracked her formality. “I’m Shruti.”
“Ya Allah.” I laughed, foolish with relief. “I was just thinking of you. Upstairs. Just now.”
“Of me,” she said, “or of your little joke?”
The relief cooled. “I’m sorry. I was always sorry.”
“It’s all right.” She sat, and I sat across from her in the stacked-up cafeteria, the two of us the only warm things in it. “Where did the years take you?”
“London. I edit a magazine there now. Words, mostly. I make my living from words.” I heard how that sounded only after I had said it.
“Good,” she said. “It suits you. You always knew what a voice could do.”
“And you?”
The light went out of her. “After that night I never trusted this floor again. I left, joined another firm. But the washroom followed me everywhere — every building I ever worked in. My grandson worries. He says I check behind doors.” She wiped one eye with the side of a finger, precisely, the way you do a thing you have done many times. “It was a small thing for you. It was not a small thing for me.”
There is a particular shame that has waited so long it has learned manners, and it sat down in me then and would not get up.
At the far end of the corridor a man in a TSD jacket lifted his hand. Mr. Awasthi.
“Go,” Shruti said. “I’ll wash my face and follow you. One minute.”
Awasthi walked me along a wall of framed photographs — every reunion the company had ever held, the faces growing younger as we went, or older; I could no longer tell which direction was which. I knew so many of them. Once, I had looked the same.
I stopped at one frame without deciding to.
“Why is this one here?” I asked. “On its own. Set apart.”
Awasthi’s voice softened into the register people keep for such things. “She came back for a reunion, some years ago. Like you, sir. Wanted to see the old place at night.” He glanced, almost without meaning to, at the corridor I had just walked out of. “She had an attack. In the basement. They found her by the washroom.”
My eyes went below the photograph. I knew the face. I knew the smile. Then I saw the brass plate.
Late Shruti Sinha.
The wall tilted. The floor came up to meet me with a sound I felt more than heard, and then a pain that was the whole of my body at once, and somewhere very far above me Awasthi was calling — sir, sir, excuse me, sir —
I got my eyes open. The cafeteria lights were stuttering, on, off, on, throwing the stacked chairs into a flickering crowd. And she was standing in the middle of it, unbothered by the dark, her spectacles catching what little light there was, looking down at me with something that was not cruelty and was not quite forgiveness.
“The night shift,” she said, “is over.”
© Amit Choudhary, 2008 (Post 25S)