Author's Notes:
*"Chakkar" is a multipurpose colloquial Hindi word, in the present context meaning "affair".
My chakkar with SC started almost 25 years ago. While the intensity of our passions has long since abated, the affair has not ended. Some of the memorable times we spent together are recorded here in a roughly chronological order.
I counsel patience to readers who are keen to quickly get to the juicy, "action packed" parts of my story. While I will eventually get there, my main purpose is to tell what I hope is an interesting story.
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I was a dashing young executive in my early thirties, rising rapidly in the company. I had been married for about 4 years. My wife was bright, beautiful and sexy, and we had two gorgeous little kids. I was totally immersed in my career and my family. Dalliance with another female was the last thing on my mind.
SC had just joined as an office assistant along with a few other girls. She had recently arrived in Mumbai, soon after marriage. Her husband worked in a large factory. She had grown up in a small town in a remote district of the southern state of Karnataka. She had done some training in typing & stenography before marriage (there were no personal computers in existence those days) responded to a job ad for a lark and was surprised when she got a job in our prestigious company.
She was of medium height, healthily plump and had a well-scrubbed, glowing, unblemished deep brown complexion. She had regular features, a nice nose and deep dimples when she smiled. She was always conservatively dressed (long hair oiled, braided and worn in a tight bun, saris with large, bright floral prints, conservatively cut three quarter sleeved blouses with sari pallu neatly pinned at the shoulder). She wore big glasses that made her look older than her age. She wore hardly any makeup other than a bindi on her forehead. She liked to wear ornaments (mangalsutra**, lots of glass bangles interspersed with a few gold kangans on her forearms, big earrings and a nose stud). In other words, she dressed like a typical, conservative middle-class Kannadiga lady.
Her command of the English language was just so-so when she joined. However, she was quick to learn and soon became passably fluent. In the cosmopolitan ambience of our office, she also acquired a becoming polish and poise. However, her manner and accent continued to testify to her mofussil upbringing and vernacular education. Somewhat surprisingly for a person of her background, she was very self-assured and knew her mind. She was a dignified person, rather formal and occasionally brusque in her interactions with male colleagues, modestly averting her gaze while talking to them. Soon, she acquired a perhaps well-deserved reputation for being a bit snooty and standoffish.
Those days, SC's attitude to her work was typical of a junior office worker basking in the protection of a powerful Union. She was rather casual and laid back, doing just enough work so as to avoid drawing unfavorable attention to herself, while devoting a good amount of her time to socialize and gossip. While she was by no means a shirker, she was in no danger of dying of overwork either. The colloquial Hindi word bindaas exactly summed up her attitude. Her job clearly came way down in her list of priorities. It was only much later that the career bug bit her, but then I am getting a bit ahead of my story.
I did not really notice her for many months after she joined. After all, ours was a large office, and I was a busy executive. In any case she was not an obviously attractive woman, just nice looking in a plain, sisterly way. We were on polite, formal good terms, nodding and smiling whenever we happened to pass by each other.
One day, my boss gave me an important assignment – I had to prepare a presentation about our department that our boss had to make to the company's board of directors. SC was assigned to work with me, to provide secretarial support. I spared no efforts to do a really good job of the assignment.
As I worked my way through the special assignment there were several occasions when I found grammatical and spelling errors in SC's English and a less than acceptable level of neatness and presentability in her typing. Those were the pre-PC days and use of masking fluid for correction of mistakes was not an option, since the report was to be presented to the directors. So, very often there was no other way but to carefully retype entire pages on account of a few careless mistakes. This naturally led to delays and frazzled nerves.
Finally, one day I decided to take the bull by the horns. I called SC to my cabin and ticked her off, politely and without raising my voice. I concluded my pep talk by appealing to her pride, pointing out how awful it would be if I were to ask the boss for another person in her place and expressing my confidence that she had it in her to do the job if she really put her heart into it.
After trying to argue a bit, she lapsed into silence, listening to me impassively, her eyes downcast. There was a long silence after I finished. Then she took a deep breath, looked up and whispered that she would not give me any cause for complaint from then on. Was it a flash of anger, a glint of determination or a hint of tears that I saw in her eyes? Anyway, after that there was a dramatic improvement in her attitude as well as the quality of her work. Soon, the tension between us evaporated and the assignment was back on track.
I often worked late on that assignment, after attending to my normal work. Sometimes, although I did not want to inconvenience her, I had no option but to ask SC to stay late too. Like other junior employees, she was normally reluctant to stay late. However, after my recent run-in with her, she had become respectful towards me. Moreover, she had also come to realize the importance of the assignment. So, she would agree to stay back without cribbing whenever I asked. To save her some time and hassles, I would drop her off close to her residence in my car whenever we worked late, since I anyway drove past it on my way home.
As we worked together, we became friendly and started to share tidbits about our families, hometowns, college days etc. Over the course of the next few weeks, almost imperceptibly, I became aware that she was taking a bit more than casual interest in me. I would some times look up from my work and catch her staring intently at me and she would quickly look away when she was caught out.
