Page 26 of The Ex Factor

Except you lost Tara to Sameer, my errant mind prompted me, but I kept my mouth shut.

Up in my suite, I invited him to take a seat while I excused myself and returned with a bottle of his favorite single malt. I’d ordered the bottle that week, intending to send it as a gift, but hadn’t figured out a good excuse. This felt like a prime opportunity.

“Rampur!” Sujit’s eyes widened with a delight I hadn’t quite expected.

“Oh, you like it too?” I teased with a crooked grin.

“You know I do. This can’t be a coincidence.”

My grin only widened. “I was told this is a limited edition. I hope it’s to your liking.”

The beaming look on his face said he was more than impressed with it. My heart swelled, and my body warmed at the thought that I had not only managed to impress him but alsomade him happy. I knew it was wrong in every sense of the word, but I couldn’t help falling in love with his happiness.

“You are sly,” he said, bringing me from the ether back into my body. “Who did you bribe to get that information?”

“Bribe?” I grimaced. “You forget how connected I am. All I did was send an email from my personal account.”

“You are very different from what I expected,” he said as I poured the liquid gold into a glass and handed it to him.

“You said that once already today.” I took my glass of water and settled on a plush chair facing his seat on the couch.

“You’re not the hard-ass you portray to be. There’s a naughty, playful side you never let sneak out.”

I returned a rueful smile as I pulled my knees up in the comfortable chair. “You talked about linguistic code-switching at dinner. Slipping into English and Telugu as needed?”

“Yes.”

“Take your shoes off. Put your feet up.”

He slipped off his shoes and pulled the tufted hassock closer to him.

“Code-switching is also cultural and behavioral,” I said. “Do you know how old I was when I joined Dad’s business? Twenty-two. Fresh out of college and before I went for my MBA. I was a nice person. My mom ensured that. But I was also naïve and inexperienced. Neither my privileged upbringing nor college had prepared me for the real world. I assumed everyone was inherently nice and truthful. And if someone lied, it was on account of necessity, not malice or intrigue. In my first year of working for Dad, a staff member asked me for two days off to go see her sick mother in Kansas. Sympathetic to her situation, I gave her the entire week off. I allowed her to take as much time as she needed to care for her mother and passed along her work to her colleagues. Two nights later, I was at a club downtown,and I saw her on the dance floor, drunk and dancing without a care in the world.

“So there I was, sitting with a drink in my hand, in a glittery dress that barely covered my thighs, and I learned the first and most important lesson of my career: people lie. Humans are liars and cheats. That’s our true nature. That’s our real instinct. Those who don’t lie have either overcome their first nature or are efficient in covering up their lies. I let her take the week off because I’m a woman of my word. When she returned the next week, I called her into my office, told her what I saw, and when she denied having been to the club, I fired her on the spot. If she’d accepted that she lied, I would’ve let it pass. Because guess how old she was?”

“Twenty-two?” he said.

“That’s right. And just like me, she’d made an error in judgment. So I was ready to give her the benefit of the doubt, but instead of owning up to her mistake, she lied further to cover her first lie. I fired her and made sure she didn’t get another penny from us. When the loss of her job came down on her, she confessed that she had used her mother’s sickness as a ruse because her boyfriend was in town, and she wanted to spend time with him. The ironic part was that she did have a sick mother in Kansas who needed care, and she’d used up her allotted leave during the days her mother needed her. She was also the one paying her mother’s medical bills. I was terribly upset when I learned, so I made inquiries and sent money anonymously to the hospital where her mother got her monthly dialysis. I did that until she passed. But I didn’t hire the girl back. I could’ve made sure no one in the business hired her, but I didn’t do that either because, you see, I’m not cruel. I only hate liars. I may not be a bad person, but I won’t be a pushover.”

He held his glass close to his chest and looked at me with soft eyes.

“Thus, the Aarti for the people closest to her is different from the Aarti who runs SB Real Estate.”

“Completely different.”

“We all code-switch though, don’t we?”

“Yes. Some of it is benign, like when you adapt to a situation or show respect to the elders in a family or community. But when one is forced to code-switch, it becomes a burden. If you have to do it because you’re afraid what others might think of you, if you make it your way of life, if itbecomesyou, it is fundamentally deleterious. Projecting a false image of oneself can seem powerful at first, but the effort required to maintain the façade is…emotionally draining.”

Why was I spelling all this out to Sujit? What had prompted it, I wondered. Was it the resounding care in his voice, in his words? Or was I at such a fragile place in my life that I was holding on to the tiny twig in my grasp to prevent myself from drowning?

Sujit pulled the veil off my conundrum. “What are you afraid of, Aarti?” His voice, soft and vulnerable, shot through to my heart. My face heated up, and my eyes felt moist.

I readjusted myself in the chair to recalibrate my breath. “I’m afraid that if I am myself, I will never be taken seriously.” His eyes had steadied on me as I continued, “Every now and again, I want to be playful at work, laugh at a joke. But I can’t because a friendly woman, especially a young, friendly woman, isn’t seen as a strong woman. She’s seen as frivolous. Often mistaken for a pushover. My dad and brother can joke and laugh and be taken seriously because they are men in a men’s world. If I want to be in a position of power, I need to keep myself aloof from everyone…sometimes even from my own self.”

“So, who are you, Aarti? Who are you at your core?” he asked.

It was then I realized that I’d known him for two weeks, and I had shared more with him than I had shared with Sameer in ouryears-long relationship. Had Sameer even known the real me? Had he even tried to know the real me?

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