• Home

Love Potion Number…?

Posted on August 21, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

Her cellphone beeped. She wasn’t expecting to hear from anybody so she checked the message with a curious frown. The message was a phone number and a name, Madan Turakhia. It sounded like the name of a college professor or some guy who would be friends with her father. She really didn’t know what to make of it so she continued striding down the long corridor of the mall she was in, looking for some place she could buy coffee and forget what had just happened.

Her phone beeped again. It was a message from her friend Amrita. All it said was, ‘Call him.’ She pushed a couple of buttons and called Amrita instead. After nearly seven rings the connection cut off abruptly. She stopped dead and looked around. Had she hit a spot of bad connectivity? She took a few steps back and called again. This time the call cut off almost immediately and her cellphone beeped to indicate another new message. It was Amrita again, with the words, ‘Sorry babe, in a meeting. Call him, trust me.’

Her name was Neha and she was having the type of day most girls would run a mile in six-inch heels to avoid. The day had started innocuously enough but the shit had hit the fan almost as soon she hit the office. She was informed that the boss wanted to see her in his cabin. On most days Mr. Kapoor was content to examine her curves from near and afar and make comments about the way she was dressed or what he was reminded of from the way she smelled. He was a man with a glad eye, a wife and three kids so their conversations never went beyond his innuendo and her breathy laughter. He had once tried to cop a feel at the office party and she had needed a co-worker with an imagination for sudden emergencies to help extricate her from the spot she could have found herself in.

Mr. Kapoor was not wearing his glasses when she was summoned into his room, which immediately indicated that things were not alright. The dirty old man couldn’t see a thing without his glasses so there was no way to distract him with the visual appeal of her dark, fitted trousers or the cinched white shirt that accentuated the cleavage she had placed on display that morning. If she was in Finance such attire would have been frowned upon and she would have been billed loose and unfit for important work. Good thing for her, she was in Client Servicing, where a girl could get promoted for slutty behaviour. Not that it mattered to the spectacle-free Mr. Kapoor right then, who said, more haltingly than the times he was trying to think of something witty and inappropriate to say around her and others like her, “Neha…it has come to my attention that you have been spending too much time with a less important client…”

This did not sound good and her injured frown went wasted as the man droned on, “As you know, Spitz In Foods is only useful to us as an edgy mark on our client roster. You should really be spending more time with people from the bigger guys like UGG or F&S. I noticed…” and he picked up his glasses for this and placed them on his nose, “That you spent sixteen hours with Sophie Rinzen from SIF that we cannot bill them for. This is not good Neha, your time is money. For both of us.”

Unnoticed by Mr. Kapoor until that point Neha had been working her way up the blush charts. When he finally set eyes on her he had to steady himself by grabbing the table even though he was sitting down. Mr. Kapoor secretly harboured the fantasy that Neha would provide him with everything that his wife hadn’t been inclined to. Where Neha was slender with mouth-watering curves in all the right places, Mrs. Kapoor resembled the puffer fish when it got angry. Seeing Neha always caused Mr. Kapoor’s heart to beat very hard and very fast and he knew he would have to move several pieces on the corporate chess board very quickly so that he could actually lay his hands on her and not suffer any consequences as a result. At least not any consequences he minded suffering anyway.

He blinked from her cleavage to her flushed cheeks and said, “Apparently black and white agrees with you Neha. Though it is making me wonder how far that blush really extends.”

Neha’s spine went limp with relief. It was legendary around the office that the last time Mr. Kapoor had kept his glasses off during a ‘meeting’ with an employee the poor girl had lost her job. Any woman who was ever summoned into the big man’s office always checked the state of his glasses. Neha would have gladly flashed him right there and then if she didn’t feel overpowered to get away from him because of what he had brought up. She might have felt better if she knew that firing her was as far away as possible from Mr. Kapoor’s true intentions but all she really needed to do right then was distance herself from her boss.

After a moment or two, Mr. Kapoor sighed and said, “Please see to it that your hours are more profitable for us Neha.” She nodded and smiled and mumbled, “Yes sir. Thank you sir.” and rushed out of the office as quickly as she could. So intent was she on getting away that she didn’t even flash him the customary unobstructed view of her ass she always afforded him before she left his cabin. Mr. Kapoor sighed again and wondered how he could ease whatever was troubling her.

She had considered hiding out in the bathroom until her skin stopped betraying herself and decided instead to head out and buy herself a coffee to still her nerves. Because Neha was ashamed to admit, even to herself, that the man in charge of the SIF account on the client’s end, the biggest boss himself, was exactly the type of man she imagined spending the rest of her life with. Actually, she had never given any thought to the type of man she wanted to spend any part of her life with, until she met Gaurav Meklai.

The first time she set eyes on him was the first time she felt that flutter most girls were always talking about. Up until that point, Neha had considered herself a practical career-oriented woman who did what it took to ensure that there was food on the table and enough money left over for the accessories of the good life. She believed in saving but she also believed in spoiling herself with the fruits of her labour. Far from being a girl who got by on the perkiness of her tits or the pertness of her ass, she knew her way around a room, be it a boardroom or a conference call and she had impressed people on three continents with her initiative and drive. Which was why she was particularly embarrassed by having turned into a girl with a crush for a guy whose company did not figure as a big dot on her quarterly earnings chart.

Against her better judgment she called the number Amrita had sent her. Madan Turakhia answered her call on the very second ring and said, “Hi Neha, my name is Madan but you can call me MT.”

“Sorry, empty?”

“No, M dot T dot. My initials.”

“Oh, okay. Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Amrita told me to call you, I don’t know why.”

“How well do you know Gaurav Meklai?”

Her heart did three backwards cartwheels between the time he started with Gaurav and ended with Meklai. What is it with everybody today, she wondered. And what the hell is wrong with me!

“We work together? Why?”

“How well would you like to get to know him?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Amrita said he might be the love of your life.”

“What! I never said that! Did I…?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. This is what she told me.”

Neha flashed back to a drunken night in a club. Amrita was moaning about how there weren’t any good men left in the city and normally Neha would have agreed with her. When she remained unusually silent Amrita had pushed her into spilling the beans and as far as her sober memory could recollect she might have said something praiseworthy about her client. Still she didn’t see how Amrita had got ‘love of her life’ from whatever she had told her in a drunken haze.

“And how does this affect you?”

“If you are interested in making him fall for you like you have fallen for him, I can make it happen.”

Injured shock was her first reaction, “What?”

Curiosity was her second, “How?”

“We need to meet. This will cost you five thousand rupees. I do not accept credit cards.”

She arrived at the appointed place at the appointed time the following day with a head-full of skepticism and five grand in her purse. He was nothing to look at, exactly the kind of man who would be an acquaintance of her father. She was already losing interest in him until he pressed a soft pouch into her palm and said, “The next time you meet him, sprinkle some of this in the air around you. it is non-toxic and even has a nice smell. Do it every time you are near him for your next seven meetings. You will have what your heart desires.”

She looked at the pouch suspiciously, “What is it?”

“Our forefathers from several generations ago used this to find love and happiness. In these trying times, a person needs all the help she can get.”

“For five thousand rupees.”

He shrugged, “Everybody has to eat.”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

He smiled, accepted the envelope she handed him and started to walk away.

She called after him, “Aren’t you going to count it?”

He stopped and met her eyes, “Women in love don’t cheat.”

When she arrived at the SIF office she asked to use the bathroom when Meklai’s secretary said he would see her. She tossed some powder into the air and stepped into the sweet-smelling cloud. After one quick glance at her cleavage in the mirror she strode into Meklai’s office with the confident stride she had employed to great success with other men before. Meklai turned at the sound of the clicking of her heels on the marble floor and said, “Neha, this is my wife Shruti. Shruti, Neha-aaah…”

While Neha struggled with her composure, Gaurav Meklai’s eyes went glassy at the sight of her. In the background, she saw the quizzical look on his wife’s face and realised that MT was not lying.

Oh Shit!

Comments