The Zoya Factor (17 page)

He says she exceeded her brief but I think, by having her removed, that he exceeded his.

So we want her back, if she'll have us back.

And by the way, Sanks...

I think I smell a romance...

Hee hee hee

Vaishali

Honestly. This woman is a forty-year-old mother of two, a gold medallist from FMS and top Indian business person of the year, for the last three years in a row. Why is she talking like some
Stardust
junkie? (I was acting cool, but of course I was totally flattered, I thought Vaishali Paul didn't even know my
name.
)

And wasn't it decent of Khoda to call her and get me my job back? And he did it today, which meant he couldn't be mad at me about how the match turned out today. Which in turn could mean:

a) that he was nursing a grand passion for me in his extremely hunky chest and was trying to woo me back from Zahid (ha ha ha);

b) that he was a decent guy doing a decent thing and had, maybe, a certain tepid concern for lesser beings like myself (pretty possible);

c) that he was scared of angering me, the High Priestess of Indian Cricket (somehow I didn't think so).

Whatever the reason, I was pretty grateful to have my old job back! No more housewife research - yippee! And then a new and daring plan entered my brain, fuelled by Vaishali's crack about smelling a romance. (
Matlab,
she's so clever and all, maybe she's right!)

I thought it might be a good idea to phone Khoda and thank him personally.

Hello, it's not like I was making up excuses. I had a legit reason to call and everything. And his voice was so warm and deep, my toes curled just imagining him say
Hello....

Loathing 10%. Lust 90%.

'Hello?'

It wasn't Nikihil's deep drawl. It was a female voice. Husky and all. And it sounded familiar.

I said, my voice sounding high and unnatural even to my own ears, 'Uh, hello, can I speak to Nikhil-sir?'

'Can I take a message?'

And somehow, I was instantly convinced that the voice belonged to a certain supermodel from the Kingfisher calendar, whose legs the Bangladeshis had painted over, because they were too sexy to be seen. Not that I had any proof or anything. And I certainly didn't go,
Excuse me, you are April and October, na?
But I was just sure it was
her
.

'No,' I said. 'There's no message as such.'

And hung up.

And went home to my SEC D minus minus house in Karol Bagh.

***

9

Well, that was it for a bit really. I was a celebrity in the colony and at Tera Numbar but office life pretty much returned to normal. Zahid called me a couple of times but I felt too embarrassed to take his calls. Besides, I figured that if I didn't take his calls he'd understand I wasn't really in love with him after all and he could relax. A couple of days later, he messaged me saying he was off to Bombay to shoot for some bicycle he endorses. And that was the end of that.

A week later, Mon and I boarded an early morning flight and headed for Bombay. We took a cab to the Famous Studio at Mahalaxmi to check out the edit of her Shah Rukh film. (It was too long as usual, ninety seconds instead of seventy-five, and she was very worried about it.) As we inched by Worli Naka Monita screamed and pointed to a hoarding above us. I peered out of the window, almost bumping my head against the roof of the cab. It showed a chubby girl cartoon with wildly curling black hair standing nose to nose with a dark, scowling boy cartoon in India cricket blues. The girl was smilingly offering a slice of buttered bread to the boy. The line on top advised, 'Don't skip her breakfast, Skipper,' and underneath it a legend read, 'LUCKILY, BUTTERLY DELICIOUS - AMUL!'

I can't say I wasn't thrilled. Even though they'd painted me chubbier than I was, it sure beat obscurity, didn't it?

At Famous, Mon and I walked into the edit suite where PPK's boy, Kenny, was halfway through dubbing Shah Rukh.

'
Shhh,'
he said as we walked in, and from the darkness behind the mixer board Shah Rukh's trademark voice floated out: 'Heyy, Monita! Hey, Chubby Cheeks! Aren't you the new Lucky Charm, huh?'

'Shah Rukh's
here?' I squeaked, wildly excited, whipping my head round to look at Mon with such force that I almost snapped my neck off.

'Well, his
voice
is here,' she said wryly, throwing open the door to the dubbing room to reveal a large, brown, man-mountain with little twinkling eyes and a bristly moustache, a headphone perched like an absurd hairband upon his balding head. 'Hi, Sohan!'

'Good afternoon, Monitaji!' said Sohan in a ringing Amitabh Bachchan baritone. Then he turned to me and said in perfectly flat, nasal Saif Ali Khan accents, 'And how are you m'dear?'

I clapped my hands in delight. '
Awe
some! Who-who can you do?'

Sohan grinned. 'The question is
not
who-who I can do,' he said suavely, Pierce Brosnan's Bond voice sounding completely bizarre coming out of his benign Ravana face, 'but who-who I
cannot
do!' Then he took off his headphone, thrust out one meaty paw and said, in a completely ordinary slightly Marathi voice: 'Hello, I'm Sohan. You're Zoya, no?'

I nodded.

He grinned again. 'Very good, very good, like me, you have been blessed with a God-given gift!' Then he switched to an eerie Darth-Vader-talking-through-a-metal-box voice and bent almost double to rasp into my ear, 'Make sure you use it for evil, not good!'

'Uh...okay,' I said, somewhat bemusedly as he winked and said, 'Keep it up!' Then he turned to Kenny and started discussing how much he was planning to charge to dub the Shah Rukh voice.

Leaving Mon and Kenny to haggle with Sohan, I wandered out and skulked around in the seedy corridor, hoping to bang into people I knew.

Because that's the beauty of Famous Studio.

If you hang around there long enough, you will meet every possible person in the advertising industry in India. Its three dingy floors are lined with dirt-encrusted, paan-streaked corridors - with not
one
non-fused bulb in their AC-exhaust-filled passageways - that lead into swanky edit suites, designer animation houses, music studios and film production units. The permanent residents here are the post-production types: editors, sound engineers, animators. These unkempt insomniacs live on an unhealthy diet of Britannia Jimjam and Bourbon biscuits and cigarettes bummed off each other. They discuss the music of Led Zeppelin, the poetry of Rumi and the films of Tarantino - even as they cut thirty-second spots for Nirma detergent, Nestle Funbar and Tobu cycles. Occasionally they swap horror stories about insane deadlines, moron clients, turncoat agency types and tragically butchered would've-been-a-Cannes-finalist-if-they'd-let-it-alone films. When they're really bored, they even hit on visitors in a halfhearted kind of way. Because everybody else is, basically, only visiting. Film-makers, musicians, singers, agency people (and sometimes movie stars) come to Famous to direct/record/ approve/dub on a project-to-project basis.

There are tonnes of studios all over Bombay now, Monita had told me, really fancy, plush ones where you don't need to ask for the key before going to the loo, but Famous is Famous! 'It's the mother ship of Indian advertising,' Mon had declared.

I met nobody I knew in the corridors, so I came down to the ground floor and sat in the cafe (not as hip as it sounds, it's really a plants nursery that serves coffee and a lousy pizza) where I finally spotted a famliar face. Vishaal, our photographer from Dhaka, smoking a cigarette and managing to look intellectual as he gazed pensively upon a plate of rapidly congealing omelette-toast.

I waved at him through the smoke and he came alive, 'Farishta Sabun!' he went, sweeping me a bow, 'Zoya! Good to see you, yaar!'

'What you up to, Vishaal?' I asked after he'd made all the usual noises about my talisman status and so on.

'New Nike film,' he grinned. 'You're the brief for it, you know! It features Nikhil Khoda.'

'Oh?' I said. 'Cool. Big one for you, no? Celebrity film and all! Can I see it?'

'Sure!' he went. 'We're in Galactica B. C'mon, tell me what you think!'

So I went with him to Galactica B and saw the Nike film.

It was pretty cool.

He'd shot Nikhil against surreal backdrops. Burning, battlefield-like cricket pitches that dissolved into janam-patri parchment, that sort of thing. Nikhil looked totally hot, in a grey, distressed-fabric sweatshirt, very Neo from the
Matrix
, and was playing some big dramatic shots, wielding his bat like a broadsword. There was this voice-over, all echo-ey they'd made it, and what it was saying was:

You can believe in Lucky charms

A Goddess to keep you from harm.

A lucky number on your shirt.

Some extra vowels in your name.

You can believe in luck...

Or you can believe in yourself.

And just play your game.

Nike.

Just do it.

It was really goosebumpy. And I don't think it was just because I'm fully Lustful and Loathing-ful about the guy.

'I got it from that NDTV interview Khoda gave recently. We're going to run it after they win their next big match. I thought it would be pretty topical,' said Vishaal.

'It's cool,' I said. 'Only the voice....Who's done it?'

'Ignore the voice,' Vishaal said quickly. 'It's mine. I wanted Sohan, but the bugger's too expensive. He makes a fortune dubbing for stars who're too busy to show up for recordings.'

'Can't you get Nikhil?' I asked and added, a little snidely, it must be admitted, 'this film should be really close to his heart!'

Vishaal nodded. 'Oh, he loved it,' he said. 'In fact,' he pushed his hair off his face and cleared his throat modestly, 'I'm waiting for him to come dub it right now.'

I froze. 'Now?' I squeaked. 'He's coming here?'

'Yeah.'

I turned to flee Galactica B but it was too late. Nikhil Khoda, casual in worn jeans and a navy blue tee had just strolled in.

His eyes lit up when he saw me (
they did! they did!
) and he went: 'Zoya!'

'Hi,' I said, wishing wretchedly that I'd had time to primp before banging into him. I was all bedraggled from my morning flight, dressed in a baggy red shirt of my dad's and loose unflattering jeans. I fluffed out my hair self-consciously with one hand and tried not to think about the fact that he'd probably spent the night with a Kingfisher calendar model.

'Hey, man!' Khoda was saying to Vishaal as they slapped hands. 'How's everything?'

Vishaal smiled a little nervously, 'Great! Why don't you go right in?'

Nikhil went in, slipped on a pair of headphones and started skimming through his lines. I decided to slink away and was heading for the door when Khoda's voice, sounding deep and growly and amplified by the dubbing mikes, said: 'Zoya? Don't go too far. I have to talk to you.'

I nodded, muttered something, and fled.

He found me.

And why wouldn't he? After all, I wanted to be found.

I was sitting in the Famous cafe, freshly moisturized and kajal-ed, hair all bright and black. Of course my clothes still sucked but there wasn't much I could do about that. He waved to me and I waved back, pretty casually too. 'Are you free for a bit?' he asked.

'Sure,' I shrugged casually.

'Then let's go out somewhere nice and grab a coffee.'

I nodded and hitched my red rucksack a little higher onto my shoulder, trying not to look too overwhelmed.

He took the bag from me, ignoring my protests and said, 'Come on, let's go.'

He drove us to Gallops, at the race course, which was just a short distance away. We didn't talk much. A little street urchin peered into the car at a red light, recognized Khoda and did a double take. Face splitting into a large grin, he mimed hitting a big six into the air with an imaginary bat. Then he shaded his eyes with his hand and pretended to be looking for the ball in the sky, scratching his head in a puzzled sort of way. I laughed, and Khoda looked at me and laughed too.

Lust 98%. Loathing 2%.

Actually, who am I kidding? Lust 100%.

At Gallops, we ordered coffee and then smiled across the table at each other. 'Hi,' he said.

'Hi,' I replied and then quickly added, 'Thank you for speaking to Vaishali. It meant a lot to me.'

'You're welcome.' He looked embarrassed. A silence followed, where he just looked at me. Then, he asked abruptly, 'How are
you?
I mean,
really
. With this whole lucky charm thing hanging over your head?'

'Uh, okay, I guess,' I said with a shrug.

'You're looking thinner.'

I beamed, 'That's good, isn't it?'

'Not really,' he said slowly. 'You look stressed.' He frowned, 'That's why I wanted you to stay out of this whole damn cricket circus.'

'What d'you mean?'

'I mean, now you're in. Say hello to uncertainty, pressure, fear, and insecurity.'

'What d'you mean I'm
in
?'

He looked at me, amused. 'Don't you know, Zoya? Jogpal Lohia was at the IPL match. He was really impressed by the way Harry's lot played with you around. I think he was even more impressed by the way my team crumbled. He's convinced you're going to give us a major psychological edge. He's found some legal loophole that allows him to give you some kind of official status. You're going with us to the World Cup.'

'What?'

'I didn't want to break your friend Vishaal's heart in there, but the chances of his Nike film running are zero. The Board's made me bite the Lucky Charm bullet.' Khoda stopped and smiled at me. 'Close your mouth, Zoya,' he said, not unkindly.

I couldn't. I just stared at him round-eyed and horrified. I could totally see the gobar on my hoardings, I
totally
could!

Khoda grinned. 'Should've thought of that before you smooched Zahid on the mouth,' he said mockingly. 'Just to piss me off.'

That really
was
a cocky thing to say, wasn't it? I decided to be a little cocky myself. 'Oh, were you there? Did you see us?' I said demurely. 'I couldn't help myself. I'm so fond of Zahid.'

'Really?' Khoda remarked. 'And if you're so fond of him, how come you've been dodging his phone calls?'

(I had no answer to that, though, of course, I noticed - and filed away for later gloating over the fact - that Nikhil Khoda was keeping track of whom I was
not
talking to on the phone.)